Wanted: Community College Presidents

The impending retirement of nearly half the nation’s community college presidents over the next four to six years could leave hundreds of campuses rudderless because of a dearth of worthy successors, particularly in Southern California, experts say.

“It’s a crisis,” said David Wolf, executive director of the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges. “The [applicant] pools are drying up.”

The Los Angeles Community College District, the largest in the nation with 110,000 students, knows that better than anyone. For all but three of the past 10 years, the district has had at least two temporary campus presidents at a given time. When a new administrator is chosen for West Los Angeles College later this year, five of the city’s nine colleges will have brought in new leaders in the past 12 months.

More and more talented educators are avoiding administrative careers because the jobs are all-consuming, recruitment officials say. Many campuses are old and falling apart, there never seems to be enough money, and presidents find themselves spending long hours appeasing unions, politicians and interest groups, the officials add. They also note that some out-of-state prospects are hesitant to give up tenure to move to California, where presidents can be fired at will.

Add the increasingly complicated issues of diversity, changing technology and legal battles, recruiters say, and it’s no wonder the average college president is burned out after five years. The result is a leadership vacuum that filters down through the ranks, leaving department heads and instructors without direction and endangering a college’s accreditation, the officials say.

“When that leadership suffers, so do the students,” said Wolf, a former president of Pierce College in Woodland Hills.

A recent survey conducted by the American Assn. of Community Colleges in Washington shows that about 500 of the nation’s 1,100 campus heads will retire by 2007. The study shows there is no pipeline of would-be administrators.

In California, 20 or so presidential searches are under way at any time among the 108 campuses, said state Community College Chancellor Tom Nussbaum.

Southwest College in South-Central Los Angeles has not had a permanent president for more than five years. The district started and stopped searches without finding a good match for several reasons, including a high turnover among district chancellors, few applicants and a shortage of recruiters who are busy hiring for other campuses.

West Los Angeles College has not even begun the search to hire its fourth president in three years. Trade-Tech College near downtown is expected to seat a new president within a month. Both jobs, which pay about $120,000 a year, have been open for about a year.

Because the nine-campus Los Angeles district is so large, it is experiencing the crunch sooner than others across the state, officials say. “We’re getting in a situation where people staying in their positions only three to five years is not unusual,” said Nussbaum. “Sometimes they’re leaving to better positions. Sometimes they’ve worn out their welcomes or the conditions are too stressful locally.”

Two of the recent hires in Los Angeles came from neighboring districts and a third was a self-employed educational consultant who formerly headed El Paso Community College in Texas.

The Los Angeles district once was dominated by presidents who were trained locally, primarily in graduate programs at UCLA, USC and Pepperdine. The flow of candidates from those programs has slowed to a trickle, in part because of funding cuts. Now, the University of Texas supplies more college presidents to California than any institution, according to the community college survey.

A bill sponsored by state Sen. Jack Scott (D-Altadena) would provide $1.5 million to help pay for a college president training program at Claremont Graduate University. The bill has just come out of committee.

Nussbaum said educators throughout the nation have neglected to prepare the next generation of leadership.

“Now we’re trying to make sure we’re prepared when the heaviest need comes,” Nussbaum said. “These are very challenging positions, and they’re getting harder to fill.”

The Los Angeles district lost five presidents in 1999 and 2000 through forced or voluntary resignation. Its board of trustees also had to hire its fourth chancellor in 10 years.

“My sense was the district was in such poor shape with recession and huge enrollment losses that there was a general fiscal crisis,” said board member Mona Fields.

“Somewhere during those years, it became a holding pattern of people retiring, and the district kept putting interim people in,” she said. “They couldn’t find the right presidents.”

The board is trying to hire presidents who will stay at least five years, though there are no guarantees, Fields said. Nationwide, the average president holds the job about seven years; for California, the tenure is little more than four years, and for the Los Angeles district it is barely 2 1/2 years.

“All this begs for leadership training and support systems, which are in very poor shape right now,” said Wolf of the accrediting commission.

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A Decade of Musical Chairs

Over the past decade, it appears that college presidents have been playing musical chairs in the L.A. Community College District, with some switching from one school to another or returning to previous locations. School-by-school profile:

Source: Los Angeles Community Colleges