The job of college presidents has become one of high turnover. According to the most recent survey by the American Council on Education, a college president will last on average less than six years in the job before being fired, resigning or retiring. That’s down from 8.5 years in 2006.
That ACE survey was done two years ago. Chances are the average length has shrunk even more in the interim, as a result of the government backlash against diversity, equity and inclusion programs in higher education, the divisive campus protests about the war in Gaza, and the immigration crackdown that has targeted foreign students.
As difficult and as tenuous as a college president’s job has become, though, the turnover in the president’s office at Jackson State University is abnormally high. Something is clearly amiss at Mississippi’s largest historically Black university. Whatever the problems are, though, they are being obscured by the secrecy under which the state’s College Board operates.
Last week, the College Board announced that it had accepted the resignation of Marcus Thompson, JSU’s president for less than a year and a half. Since 2010, the university has had nine different presidents, including four interims who served while the College Board searched for a more “permanent” head. Thompson has become the third such permanent president to depart since 2017.
As usual, there was no explanation as to why Thompson was leaving, just as there was no explanation why he was given the job in late 2023, even though he didn’t initially apply for it while almost 80 candidates did. It was a gamble to put Thompson, who worked at the time as a top executive for the agency that oversees the state’s public universities, into the president’s post. His relatively short tenure suggests it was a bad gamble.
Such instability in the president’s office cannot be good for a university. Each president takes the job with his or her own ideas and leadership team. When the direction and the personnel change so frequently, it impacts the faculty, staff and even the students. Everything feels unsettled, initiatives die before they can be implemented, and a general sense of dysfunction sets in.
The secrecy under which the College Board conducts presidential searches does not foster respect for the result. Thompson started the job under difficult circumstances, with critics assuming there were better options and one disappointed candidate suing over the choice, alleging gender discrimination.
A more open process, as Mississippi once used and several other states still use, would help foster the buy-in that can be indispensable to a new college president. It might also reduce the possibility of a bad hire, as it would allow the faculty, the news media and others interested in the selection to help vet the leading candidates.
The College Board should give greater transparency a try with this next Jackson State hire. That university is begging for some stability. Secrecy has not produced it. Maybe openness can.
