I was a college president for 17 years — at Las Positas College (California), at Montgomery College (Maryland) and at Nevada State University. Before I go further, let me say the thing the rest of this essay might otherwise obscure: this is the best work there is.
The community college presidency is among the most fulfilling lives a person can be handed. It is not a role you hold at arm’s length. You come to know a place with an intimacy almost no other executive position allows — its industries and its grudges, its city council and its church basements, the hospital shift schedule that sets your nursing clinicals. In exchange for that knowing, a community asks you to be something more than an administrator. You become its interpreter, its protector and on the days that matter most, its conscience — the person who can say out loud what this collection of people who live and learn and work together is actually for.
The returns are not abstract. They are: A grandmother in a graduation gown. The first person in a family to earn a credential, and the family in the fourth row who came to watch. A plant manager who calls because she needs 40 welders and knows you are the only one who can find them. The faculty member who stops you in a hallway because he has to tell someone what just happened in his classroom.
I have watched presidents achieve victories in impossible circumstances with acts of leadership no one had any right to expect. This is noble work, and it calls for people of high character, a durable commitment to people and to place, and an unreasonable passion for a mission that is more relevant now than at any point in my career.
I would not trade those 17 years for anything. And I also know what they cost. I know the weight of the chair. I know the Sunday nights. I know what it is to be the last person on the campus who cannot say “I don’t know” out loud.
So, when I sat down last year with a room full of CEOs at the American Association of Community Colleges’ (AACC) Leadership Design Lab, a gathering of current and former presidents to assess what is most needed in presidents’ formation for the future, I expected to hear about enrollment, funding, workforce alignment. I heard something else. Across three days, across geography and institution size, and years of service, presidents said different versions of the same thing:
“The job is harder than we tell aspiring leaders.”
“We need a place where we can say out loud what we’re actually facing.”
“The presidency is becoming unsustainable without new structures of support.”
I have not stopped thinking about the first one — especially as I have heard these refrains constantly in listening to hundreds of CEOs across this country over the past year. Because it is not a complaint. It is an accusation — and the people it indicts are us. We are the ones telling the stories. We recruit people into this role with pictures we know to be incomplete, and then we are surprised when they arrive unprepared for what we did not say.
I want to be direct about what this moment is costing the field and about what AACC is doing in response.
The numbers are not ambiguous
According to the American Council on Education, the tenure of an American college president has fallen from an average of 8.5 years in 2006 to 6.5 years in 2016 to 5.9 years today. This is a 31% decline in a single professional generation. In the same period, the complexity of the role has gone in the opposite direction. Fifty-five percent of sitting presidents say they plan to step down within five years. One in four says they will step down within one to two years. Many of them are not retiring but are intentionally leaving the presidency for something else. This is not a predictable decline that will rebound with the next wave of candidates. It is an exodus.
Our own sector’s numbers are sharper still. AACC’s “State of Community College Leadership” found the median sitting community college CEO had been in the chair 4.1 years, and that two-thirds were in their first presidency. Writing in Community College Daily this summer, Dr. Mordecai Brownlee noted that 36.5% of respondents planned to retire within five years, with another 11.8% within nine years.
Hold two of those figures next to each other. Practitioners generally estimate it takes close to a decade to genuinely transform an institution. The median community college CEO has been in the seat for four years. We are asking people to do 10-year work on four-year clocks, in a role two-thirds of them have never held before, and then we wonder why institutional change feels so hard to sustain.
Six things we should be willing to say out loud
We are preparing people for a job that no longer exists, oftentimes ignoring context, environment and the realities of leading colleges now, not five or 10 years ago. The traditional leadership program teaches budgets, accreditation, enrollment management, shared governance — all necessary, while other programs advance aggressive student success reform models — again, necessary as well. None of these is what breaks presidents. What breaks presidents is the political ambush, the board member with a private agenda, the 2 a.m. cyberattack, the community meeting that turns personal, the decision where every available option is wrong. We have been handing people a competency checklist or redesign toolkit and sending them into a public crucible.
The criticism has changed character, and we have not named it honestly. As Rachel Toor observed in Inside Higher Ed, the climate around the presidency “has shifted from principled disagreement to something that looks and feels like bullying,” and the criticisms “aren’t just sharp; they’re personal. And that’s new.” When we call that leadership pressure, we launder it. It is not pressure. In many cases it is harassment, and some of our colleagues are absorbing it alone because there is no structure that permits them to say so.
The pipeline is not weakening because the next generation lacks ambition. It is weakening because they are paying attention. Our deans and vice presidents can see what happens to the people above them. They have done the math — on the scrutiny, the instability, the personal cost — and a meaningful number of the most capable among them have decided the arithmetic does not work. That is not a failure of aspiration. It is a rational read of conditions we built.
We have built an accountability architecture that has shifted in the past two years and our field has not discussed this candidly enough. A new regime of quality assurance and return-on-investment metrics federal and state, now evaluate what we do, largely through what our graduates earn. The U.S. Department of Education’s Student Tuition and Transparency System, taking effect next year, tests whether a program’s completers out-earn the median high school graduate in their state. Miss the threshold in two of three years and the program loses access to federal student loans; miss it three years running and Title IV eligibility itself is at risk. Workforce Pell — which our field fought for, and which I support — arrives with its own completion and job-placement conditions and a gubernatorial approval gate. States have layered outcomes-based funding formulas and ROI mandates on top of all of it.
Let me be careful, because I am not arguing against accountability. Community colleges should be able to say plainly where a credential leads, and parts of our field have been evasive about that for a long time. Transparency is a commitment I believe we should make and keep.
But notice what this architecture can and cannot see. It can see a wage; it cannot see a labor market. A college in a rural county, where the dominant employers pay what their labor market allows, is measured on the same yardstick as a college sited beside a semiconductor fabrication plant. It can see a median; it cannot see the 43-year-old who enrolled while working nights, or the fact that we serve — deliberately, as a matter of mission — the students other institutions reject. It can see a program; it cannot see a purpose. The instrument is blind to culture, content and context, and it was built that way not out of malice but because earnings are what the available data can count.
Every one of these measures resolves, in the end, to one accountable person. The president is answerable for wage outcomes produced by a regional economy they did not design and cannot control, judged on a cycle shorter than their average tenure, using data that arrives years after the decisions that generated it. That is not accountability. That is exposure. We should say so plainly — and keep doing the honest work of proving our value, because the answer to a blunt instrument is a better instrument, not a refusal to be measured.
The field has been complicit in its own diminishment, and community college presidents have been absorbing the gap personally. We have accepted a narrow framing of who we are — the workforce option, the remedial option, the affordable option — rather than asserting the full civic and economic claim the Truman Commission made for us in 1947: these institutions exist to educate citizens as well as workers. When an institution fails to convey its own true worth, the person at the top spends their tenure making up the difference with their body. I have watched colleagues do it. I have done it myself.
No one holds more power over whether a presidency survives than the governing board — and no group in this system has been asked to prepare less. That deserves more explanation, so let me talk about it directly.
To trustees: you are both the injury and the remedy
I want to say this with respect, because I have served brilliant boards and I have seen trusteeship done at the highest level. I have also observed and experienced profoundly dysfunctional boards that have damaged students, institutions and communities. I need to say it plainly, because the field has been too polite about this for too long.
Presidents in our Design Lab and beyond name boards repeatedly: misaligned expectations; political and labor interference; trustees arriving with little to no preparation for the complexity they were being asked to govern pathways; to trusteeships that have become political footballs. Our own analysis named “increasing political divisiveness impacting board relations” as one of the conditions any credible response to this crisis must address. One trustee recently lamented to me frustration with new members of his board who dismissed necessary board work and engagement because “that was not why they were there.” This is not a handful of bad actors. It is a structural gap. We have spent decades developing presidents and comparatively insufficient effort in developing the bodies that hire, evaluate, support and sometimes end them.
Here is what complicity looks like in practice, and none of it requires bad intent:
- Hiring for the job that existed five years ago. Position profiles still emphasize enrollment management and fundraising. The presidencies that fail rarely fail on either. They fail on political navigation, crisis judgment and board relationship — and we screen minimally for those.
- Evaluating on metrics that ignore what actually consumes the president. A president can spend 60% of a year on political defense, community mediation and crisis response, and have none of it appear in the annual review. What does not get counted does not get resourced.
- Treating the new accountability measures as the president’s problem rather than the board’s. When an earnings threshold or a funding formula puts a program at risk, the question in the boardroom is usually what the president is going to do about it. The better question is what the board is prepared to defend publicly, and to whom — because the political work of explaining a regional labor market to a legislature is governance work, not management work.
- Reaching for an interim to buy time. Boards have increasingly used interim appointments to wait out a volatile environment. It is a rational choice for a board and a corrosive one for a college. Every year a campus spends in an interim posture is a year its hardest decisions get deferred to someone who will not be there to live with them.
- Going quiet. One of the questions we need to put to board chairs and CEOs in our governance work is this: “What is something you have stopped saying to your president — or to your board chair — that you used to say freely?” In my experience almost everyone has an answer. The honest relationship erodes first, and everything else follows.
- Never asking the question about yourselves. In August, AACC’s own board of directors ran a foresight exercise in which directors named the questions the board should be asking a year from now that it is not asking today. Thirty-six questions came back. Roughly two-thirds turned inward. One of them was this: “Has the board set the necessary expectations and provided the conditions for the CEO to flourish?”
No one made them ask it. I did not write it. A member of my board — most of whom are community college or organizational CEOs — did. I would challenge every community college governing board to put that question on an agenda this year and answer it with evidence rather than sentiment.
Here is the other half, which I believe deeply: there is no faster lever in this entire system than a board that decides to get good at this. Not a new funding formula, not a federal reauthorization, not a redesigned search process. A board that prepares itself is worth its weight in gold: it protects its president’s ability to tell the truth, has a crisis escalation path before the crisis, and treats succession as a standing responsibility rather than an emergency. Such a board can change the trajectory of a presidency faster than anything AACC can build.
So, we are building for you, too. This January in San Diego, AACC will convene “Leading Together: Governance in a Turbulent Era,” a prototype work session for presidents and board chairs in pairs — not two separate audiences in two separate rooms, which is how our field has handled this for far too long. The day is built around one provocation: is your board built for this environment, or for the one that existed five years ago? Pairs will run a governance stress test across six pressure points — political pressure response, decision speed, public communication protocol, board–CEO information flow, crisis escalation path and succession readiness — and leave with one commitment to bring to their full board within 30 days.
While this trustee development work complements the governance training provided by the Association of Community College Trustees (ACCT), it is distinctive in purpose because governance extends beyond the work of governing boards; it encompasses how an institution is led, held accountable and kept to mission. Governance is where the presidency succeeds or fails. AACC develops presidents — so AACC must be in the governance conversation, working alongside ACCT, not waiting outside it. The president is not a subject of governance but a central actor in it. That is why this initiative matters to AACC-member presidents who have asked AACC to engage in this work. Robust and intentional trustee development is not adjacent to presidential sustainability. Trustee development is a direct driver of presidential success. In fact, a well-functioning board-president relationship clarifies accountability roles, prevents inappropriate political intrusions, and empowers both parties to bring their complementary strengths to the table.
Naming the toll
Before I get to what we are building, I want to name what this is costing, because I think the euphemisms have done real damage.
Presidents are isolated in ways their job descriptions do not disclose. They lead institutions of thousands of people and have almost no one to whom they can speak candidly — not the cabinet they supervise, not the board that evaluates them, often not the family that bears the overflow. The single most requested thing in our Design Lab was not a curriculum. It was a confidential room.
Presidents are carrying crisis as a permanent condition rather than an episode. Cyberattacks, fiscal emergencies, community tragedies, campus controversies, ideological conflict, threats against them personally. The recovery window between events has closed. Presidents are doing the exhausting labor of cultural brokering — mediating between polarized internal factions, between the institution and a fragmented community, among stakeholders whose demands cannot all be satisfied — and that labor is largely invisible, always high stakes and impossible to put in a board report.
Some of our colleagues are leaving this work damaged. Not retired. Not promoted. Damaged — in their health, their marriages, their sense of vocation, their professional reputations. We hold receptions for them and we do not say what happened. That silence is a choice, and it is deeply disingenuous.
None of this is episodic. The Design Lab was unequivocal: these conditions are structural. And structural problems are not solved by resilient individuals. They are solved by better design.
What AACC is building
If the crisis is structural, the response cannot be another conference session. So, we are rebuilding AACC’s leadership portfolio. I want to be transparent with the field about what that means.
We start from a distinction the sector has blurred for too long: formation is not training. Training develops skills, competencies, toolkits and techniques. Formation shapes identity, character, judgment, wisdom and purpose. The presidency demands both, and we have been selling almost exclusively the first. Formation is the work of becoming a president, not only doing the work of one. It is an interior shift from managing to stewarding.
The redesign stands on four pillars: Leadership Formation (introspection on character and identity), Skills Development (leadership competencies), Experiential Learning and Mentorship (real-world application) and System Implementation (aligning teams, culture and goals). All four pillars operate at every stage of a career: what changes is the weighting. This new leadership vision lives in the “Strategic Compass 2035.” Strategic Bet 4 will “Reframe Leadership Formation for a Resilient Democracy,” with two flagship actions: (1) a cohort-based, multi-year Leadership Formation Institute covering democratic stewardship, institutional transformation, political navigation, crisis leadership, and moral and civic responsibility; and (2) a Presidential Strategy Network of small peer groups doing confidential problem-solving and rapid response — a national brain trust for the presidency.
Operationally, this becomes a Presidents’ Academy built around career stages rather than one-size-fits-all experiences: a New Presidents’ Residency (years 0–4) on sociopolitical acumen, crisis navigation, cabinet building, board relations and identity formation; a Mid-Career Intensive (years 5–10) on resilience, political voice, resource diversification and wellness; a Senior Leaders Renewal Retreat (years 10+) on succession, legacy and institutional resilience; a Crisis Advisory Network — the confidential room presidents asked for, staffed in part by retired presidents who are trained coaches and can tell the truth behind the scenes; plus a 100-Day Toolkit, micro-credentials for aspiring leaders, and a practitioner-authored “Top 10 Presidential Crises” library. The first residency launches in 2027.
Now this work has an association governance home. Under AACC’s restructuring, the Presidents Academy Executive Committee and the Commission on Professional Learning and Leadership Capacity carry this portfolio — chartered to develop the substance of the leadership formation bet and to support the board’s own work on governance impact and the conditions we set for chief executives and the leadership pipeline. This pairing is deliberate. This commission is where the field’s members, not AACC staff, will shape what gets built, engaging with planning and content from day one.
We are also building connective tissue with the community college doctoral and professional leadership programs preparing community college leaders, so formation begins long before appointment rather than after it. Last month we convened those program leaders for the first time as a standing coalition — and the learning experience and shared commitment was profound. Participants shared observations about students, learning pathways and alumni, developing a map of pipeline gaps for the articulation of a common data and research agenda. The goal: design and pilot experiences, supports and pathways that no single program could build alone. Recognizing the sector faces a leadership transition of historic scale, these programs partnered with AACC to create The Community College Leadership Pathway Coalition to strengthen and protect the leadership pipeline for every administrative role at community colleges, by connecting the doctoral and leadership development programs that nurture those leaders.
Finally, I will say the uncomfortable part: AACC has not always been the field’s strongest provider of leadership development. Participants told us so directly — inconsistent quality, crowded landscape, cost barriers, too little crisis and political training. We heard it. This redesign is our answer, and we expect to fulfill it.
The assignment we were given in 1947
I want to place all of this where I have placed it in my own mind since the day I arrived one year ago at AACC.
On December 15, 1947, President Truman released the report of his Commission on Higher Education, “Higher Education for American Democracy.” It gave this country the phrase “community college.” It proposed a national network of free, locally governed, two-year public institutions. And it made an argument we have since allowed to thin: that the reason to expand access to higher education was, in Truman’s own words, to “strengthen democracy at home.” Not only to staff an economy. To sustain a republic.
When I came into this role, I went back to that report — not out of nostalgia, but because it is the most complete statement anyone has made of what this sector is for. Our Resilient by Design work and the Strategic Compass 2035 were both built from it. I keep returning to it because measuring ourselves only against part of the assignment (students’ earnings) is precisely how a field forgets its own purpose and then wonders why no one defends it.
The commission was also incomplete in ways we should name, rather than inherit. Writing in 1947, it said little that seriously confronted segregation; its equity commitments were partial even by the standards of its own day. A field that wants to invoke Truman honestly has to say that, too.
December 2027 marks 80 years. AACC will open Truman@80, a national inquiry that will ask the field, and the country, what America now requires of its community colleges — and what it owes them in return. It will produce an “American Community College Compact,” built with the field rather than handed to it.
I raise it here, in an essay about the presidency, because the two questions are one and the same. You cannot ask what America should require of community colleges without asking who will be standing in front of them when the requirement arrives. A compact is a promise, and promises are kept by people. Right now, those people are leaving faster than we are forming them.
What I am asking of you
If you are a trustee: ask yourself, “Have we created the conditions for our president to flourish?” I invite you to put this question on a board agenda this year and answer it with evidence. Budget for your own development the way I hope you budget for your president’s. Run the stress test before you need it. And engage with both ACCT and AACC in your professional learning.
If you are a sitting president: stop performing invulnerability. It is costing you, and it is teaching everyone beneath you that the price of leadership is silence. Invest in your professional learning through AACC. Join a peer network. Take the sabbatical. Share your vulnerability with one person who understands.
If you lead a state system or a doctoral program: build the on-ramps such as acting-president assignments, board-facing practica, sponsorship rather than mentorship alone. The vice presidency is where we are losing people, and it is where intervention can build resilience, capacity and begin formation.
If you are considering the presidency: I am not going to tell you it is easier than it looks. It isn’t. But it remains the most consequential work in American education, and we are — finally — building the scaffolding that should have been there all along. Come. Come prepared.
And if you are a policymaker or funder: leadership capacity is infrastructure. You would not fund a building and decline to fund its foundation. Every dollar of workforce investment you make in community colleges runs through a president. That job is currently designed to consume them in under five years. And if you are writing the accountability rules: measure us. We can take it. But build instruments that can tell the difference between a college failing its students and a region that pays what their market allows — because the people you are holding accountable cannot move the labor market by themselves, and the ones who try are the ones we are burying.
The leadership crisis and the leadership opportunity are the same thing. We know what the presidency is costing. We now know, with some precision, what it requires. The only remaining question is whether the field — presidents and trustees together, because it cannot be one without the other — is willing to build for reality rather than for what it has historically told itself. Eighty years ago, this country was told that these institutions were worth building. They still are. But they are only as durable as the people willing and able to lead them.
I intend for AACC to build. I invite you to join me.
