
Intermezzo: Reflections on an Interim Presidency
The 2024-2025 academic year began with continued demand for interim presidents on campuses across the country. According to the Wall Street Journal, more than three...
The 2024-2025 academic year began with continued demand for interim presidents on campuses across the country. According to the Wall Street Journal, more than three dozen higher education institutions had such leaders in place, including several Ivy League universities in the aftermath of last year’s contentious Congressional hearings.
Boards of trustees turn to interim presidents in a variety of situations. Some universities and colleges tap internal leaders, such as sitting chief academic officers, for such roles. Many others select an expert from the outside, often with the assistance of a search firm with expertise placing interim leaders.
The benefits of employing interim presidents are well known. With an experienced leader at the helm, a board need not hurry through a critical search process. Instead, trustees may take the time required to examine and understand current needs and then to select the right new leader. An interim leader also may draw upon years of experience to address issues or initiatives remaining from the prior administration or tasks that will not wait for the arrival of a new president. They have the capacity to make difficult decisions, relatively free from the political pressures placed upon a permanent president, and to ensure smooth transition.
A presidential transition requires board members to add new search-related duties to their traditional fiduciary obligations. Trustees become accountable for overseeing the departure of one chief executive officer and the selection, arrival, and inauguration of a successor.
Meanwhile, life on campus continues. The 2023-2024 academic year, for instance, saw protests over the war in Gaza erupt on some campuses as other colleges and universities contended with mounting enrollment concerns triggered by problems with the revision of the federal student aid application. There will always be a need for someone to occupy the presidential office to address unexpected challenges. With the right interim leader in place, an organization may conduct a successful search, mitigate risk, and ensure stability, purposes that clearly justify an investment in interim leadership.
The purpose of this article, shaped by my own recent experience, is to advance yet another rationale for hiring an interim president. It argues against understanding a transition in the president’s office as a series of sequential tasks and suggests instead a holistic perspective. In this instance, the interim period serves as the intermezzo, the interlude that connects to both the prior and subsequent chapters of the larger institutional story in intentional and meaningful ways. Symbolic leadership plays a particularly valuable role in such a transition, especially after a difficult or traumatic time on campus. By embracing such a concept, an institution has the capacity to nurture an important cultural reset and to stimulate the momentum necessary to carry the college or university forward into a new chapter.
Insights
After serving for over two decades as president of Aurora University, a private institution on the western edge of Chicagoland, I began an appointment as interim president of a similar university whose president recently had taken another job. Portions of the story at the new university already were familiar. The college boasted a long, distinguished history and a record of noteworthy achievements. However, recent years had been tumultuous. When ambitious expansion efforts fell short, the university was plunged into financial jeopardy and experienced a protracted and public labor dispute.
University trustees responded to the vacancy by conducting an accelerated search for an interim president and planned next to conduct a comprehensive search for a permanent hire. The interim search process touched upon institutional challenges and revealed also the substantive agenda awaiting the successful candidate, including refinancing of debt, two professional accreditation visits, a focused visit on shared governance by the Higher Learning Commission, and an interim review by the religious order. Trustees hoped also for a major revision to the Faculty Handbook. Meanwhile, voices within the campus community called for a reconsideration of recent program deletions, renewed fundraising, and stronger ties to alumni and the surrounding community. I was offered the position and accepted it knowing that much was expected.
Shortly after my interim service began, the university suffered a major cybersecurity breach. While hardly welcome, the experience did provide an opportunity to learn about the culture of the institution, both its strengths and weaknesses, through the lens of the crisis. For example, the willingness of information technology colleagues to welcome external assistance was impressive as was the alacrity with which administrators and support staff embraced time-intensive workarounds to maintain operations. The rapport between the chief information officer and her team was noteworthy. Within three days, many functions were restored. Yet, palpable also was fear about how blame would be allocated for the breach, a worry voiced beyond the technology staff itself. The fear lingered into the fall semester, manifested by a reluctance to talk about the breach and frequent requests for reassurance.
The technology crisis, which unfolded just weeks prior to the beginning of the fall semester, was instrumental to shaping my view that the most important work of the interim period would be symbolic. This understanding led to my formulation of three strategies or intentions: to prioritize transparent and frequent communication, to accomplish the year’s agenda through established governance processes, and to seek opportunities for substantive engagement and dialog with members of key constituencies. The fall opening faculty and staff workshop provided me with a first chance to share these intentions, to describe the year’s agenda, and to respond to questions. The gathering also provided an opportunity to connect the “transitional era” to the chapter just concluded by acknowledging recent conflicts and the feelings and concerns remaining from these disputes. These comments elicited a few dramatic responses but overall generated widespread appreciation, perhaps relieving the burden of telling and retelling the familiar stories of the past that so often triggered anger and division. Then, as would be my custom over the months ahead, I closed our discussion with a reflection on the institutional story. In this instance, the theme was the resilience demonstrated so frequently during the initial years of the organization as disease thinned the ranks of founders, fire swept through a first building, and the turbulence of the Civil War threatened the tiny school.
Symbolic leadership strives to nurture a shared sense of purpose and identity through intentional actions that convey deeper meaning. Language and gestures take on special significance within the symbolic frame as do recovered traditions, stories, messages, and the example set by the leader. It can be as simple as inviting all to a holiday event or as profound as gathering student members of different faiths to compose a shared liturgy for peace in the aftermath of the Hamas attack on Israel and the ensuing war in Gaza. It may also take the form of rekindling relationships through restoration of regular communication with friends and alumni of the organization. The interim leader enjoys a distinctive opportunity to embrace this work without the obligation of justifying the past. In fact, one of her or his most important symbolic messages is that one era has ended, and another is about to begin.
Through the experience of the cybersecurity breach, I developed a firsthand impression of campus culture and a heightened understanding of the deep toll that recent disputes had exacted. Some of this tension was evident during my interview process, but it was the technology incident that revealed the full extent of the damage within the campus community, even within the organization’s high-functioning information technology staff. Without attending first to these feelings and issues, the year’s robust agenda likely would not have been completed. Preparations for the mid-year focused visit on shared governance by regional accreditors might as easily have stalled with the visit itself coming another occasion for airing grievances and exposing deep rifts around decision-making. Instead, both the pre-visit report and the dialog that took place during the visit emphasized the import of recent efforts to restore a positive and productive environment on campus. Likewise, important discussions with representatives of the institution’s founding order might have widened, rather than narrowed, the gulf that threatened the bond between the two. Fortunately, both processes unfolded without problems, creating new opportunities for collaboration and success in the years ahead.
Conclusion
Now, as I reflect upon my experience of serving as an interim president, I find significant merit in understanding a leadership transition at a college or university as a holistic process with significant strategic potential beyond the recruitment of a new president. With a strong interim president in place on campus, it may well be possible to do even more to advance the institutional agenda. Such an effort might begin by engaging key stakeholders, including the interim president, in a thoughtful pre-search discussion of strengths to be amplified and weaknesses to be ameliorated over the course of the transition. Such an assessment then might guide development of one or two strategic goals for the transition process itself.
In the institution where I served as interim president, for example, a beneficial goal might have focused on facilitating productive conversations among the trustee, campus, and alumni communities about hopes for the future. Symbolic efforts to affirm the importance of such stakeholder groups likely would have been well-received and empowering for the next president. As this narrative suggests, a college or university that invests in hiring an interim president may do more than mitigate risk and solve immediate problems. It gains an opportunity to create an intentional interlude within the larger story.
Composers of operas or authors of plays that rely upon intermezzos do so for clear purposes that are relevant here. They place a short piece of music between acts of their productions to provide a change of pace, mood, or setting within a larger performance. With the curtain closed, such moments may be a chance to move scenery or to allow the audience to rest, reflect, and to anticipate what is to come next. Such an interlude frequently is lighter or perhaps softer, differing in significant ways from the preceding act and the one about to unfold. However distinctive, it nonetheless is connected to both in an intentional and meaningful way. A college or university that chooses to approach its leadership transition as a holistic process that includes a substantial interim period gains an opportunity to do even more than hire the right new leader. It creates the potential to emerge from the transition process with the renewed sense of mission, culture, and purpose that will help nurture success in the chapter to come.