At the Pleasure of the President
A chief of staff is an essential source of personal and professional support to campus leaders
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It’s no secret: Leading a college is a difficult job. To lead in higher education in the current moment is exhausting and risky, with potentially high personal and professional stakes. Recent headlines have described the college presidency as lonely, toxic, and impossible. Individual leaders have been skewered at congressional hearings, publicly dismissed by governing boards, and subjected to a flurry of no-confidence votes by faculty. The average tenure of a college president is now less than six years, according to the 2023 American Council on Education (ACE) survey of presidents at US college and universities. Presidents are on the ropes.
Amid these challenges, higher education leaders increasingly need a dedicated thought partner in their corner: a chief of staff. Common in the government and military, this role is newer to higher education, emerging within the past fifteen years. The chief of staff—in higher education, private industry, or government—handles work requiring the same broad skills and expertise as the CEO, or, in the case of higher education, the president. The position supports the CEO behind the scenes, completes tasks on behalf of the CEO, and increases the ability of the CEO to meet responsibilities. The chief of staff might meet with students, parents, alumni, donors, or trustees to discuss concerns; plan campus events hosted by the president; draft presidential speeches and correspondence; ghostwrite policy and strategic planning documents; and document presidential actions for an institution’s archives.
While the research on chiefs of staff in higher education is slim, the National Association of Presidential Assistants in Higher Education (NAPAHE) routinely collects demographic information about the professionals who support higher education’s leaders. These assistants have a variety of titles, including chief of staff, and nearly 90 percent are women, according to NAPAHE’s 2021 survey. Nearly 60 percent are part of the president’s cabinet, indicating they are involved in making decisions and shaping policy. And, nearly 60 percent have been at the institution for more than ten years, in contrast to the shorter tenure of many recent college and university presidents.
For more than a decade, I served as a chief of staff to three successful presidents at the College of Saint Benedict in Minnesota. I previously chaired the NAPAHE Board of Directors, designing and participating in professional development activities for chiefs of staff. In these roles, I witnessed the increasing demands of presidential leadership and the fruitful ways a chief of staff can contribute to leadership success. Here’s a look at the different supporting roles a successful chief of staff plays.
The Gatekeeper
Amid competing demands for the president’s attention, a chief of staff can be a gatekeeper. A gatekeeper doesn’t really keep people away from a leader. Gatekeeping is about ensuring issues rise to the appropriate point of contact: the person empowered to do something about the issue. Sometimes, that is the president. Other times, it is another member of the leadership team. A gatekeeper also ensures the right information is gathered and the right people are included for a conversation scheduled with the president.
A gatekeeper guards the president’s time to allow the leader to bring good thinking and good health to the role. Sometimes, this involves saving presidents from themselves and their own keen desires to serve the many constituencies of the college, explains Wesley R. Fugate, president of Wilson College. His presidential assistant helps keep his schedule from being so packed that it affects his ability to perform at his peak. “She knows what will or will not be good for my body and my mind,” Fugate says. “She pushes back on vice presidents to say, ‘I know he may say yes to this, but I am concerned.’ And she does not hesitate to come to me to say, ‘I am worried about what this will do to you. When will you eat? When will you sleep? When will you think?’ ”
The gatekeeper is also essential to inclusive leadership, selecting a range of issues and perspectives to bring to the president’s attention, including voices that may have been silenced or ignored through formal decision-making processes. The gatekeeper helps students, faculty, and staff nurture and troubleshoot ideas to make the best possible case to the president. And, the gatekeeper can amplify previously underrepresented voices in leadership conversations, so that the loudest or most established voices aren’t the only ones that get attention.
As gatekeepers, chiefs of staff must hold power and authority as leaders in their own right so people don’t feel undervalued or put off when asked to discuss their ideas with them. Presidents need to convey that they have empowered their chief of staff to shepherd the most important and impactful conversations and to ensure that the best ideas don’t get lost in chaos. In my own experience, the president would personally walk groups and individuals to my office and introduce me as her chief of staff and proxy, empowering me to take next steps on her behalf.
The Communicator
When the president is away, a chief of staff can make decisions in their stead and manage presidential communications with students, faculty, staff, and members of the governing board. A chief of staff has access to all the systems that get a message out quickly: email, social media, the institutional website, and emergency alert systems. A chief of staff can also advise which relationships and streams of communication take precedence when time is short.
A key role of a chief of staff is to take care of figurative sparking fires, preserving the president’s time, energy, and authority for focusing on large-vision and long-term strategies. If a chief of staff handles complaints first, the president can sweep in to let the complainant know that they have been heard at the highest levels of the institution.
Increasingly, presidents are called on to make institutional statements on a wide range of issues. Under these conditions, having a second voice empowered to speak for the office of the president—and to provide care and support for the campus community—is essential. For example, in the weeks and months following the October 7, 2023, attack on Israel, Bett Schumacher, chief of staff at Mount Holyoke College, communicated with many different campus constituents. The college followed the current president’s policy of not issuing statements on national or international issues unless the issue was directly connected to the college or its mission. Previous presidents, however, often made such statements, and in the aftermath of the attacks, many community members were upset the college had not condemned one side or the other. Mount Holyoke instead devoted resources to caring for its community, educating students on the issues, and facilitating discussions that included different perspectives. Schumacher explained Holyoke’s approach to parents and listened to their concerns. “As a college,” Schumacher says, “we were able to repair many strained relationships by having presidential surrogates such as myself keep lines of communications open with our constituents and by communicating directly versus through a blanket statement.”
The President’s Right Hand
Presidents arrive at the corner office because they are already good at getting things done. But the skills that get them to the top job will not necessarily help them succeed at it. They need to accomplish more work than is humanly possible for one person. Effective leaders catalyze their teams to achieve more than they can on their own. Taking on a leadership role often requires shifting one’s perspective of oneself as someone who gets things done to someone who empowers others to get things done.
This is where a chief of staff comes in. Leaders who have forged a trusting relationship with a capable “right hand” are likely to be confident about delegating projects to them. A chief of staff can also help a president delegate to other members of the campus leadership team, tracking timelines, sending reminders about expectations, and providing regular updates to give the president confidence that the tasks given to others aren’t getting lost.
This can sometimes be challenging, especially when the president enjoys responsibilities that fall under someone else’s job, explains a former chief of staff at a public university in the Midwest. Gentle reminders about the president’s most-pressing items for the day can be helpful, as can pointing out that part of the president’s role is to provide others with professional development opportunities. “Sometimes, you have to be blunt and say, ‘President Smith, your schedule just does not allow you to chair this meeting—I think that the vice president of student affairs will do a fine job,’ ” the chief of staff in the Midwest explains.
A chief of staff can also boost the effectiveness of the office support staff: the professionals who manage the president’s home, keep the president’s calendar, book the president’s travel, plan the president’s interactions with donors and trustees, and write the president’s speeches. Most presidents’ offices, NAPAHE’s 2021 survey data shows, have four or more staff members working together to support a single leader.
In my role as senior advisor for leadership, strategy, and governance at the American Association of Colleges and Universities, I routinely hear from presidents who are frustrated with the inability of their support staff to anticipate their scheduling and traveling needs fully. Chiefs of staff can mitigate this issue by acting as essential translators between presidents (who are on the road most of the time) and their support staff (who are usually making travel and scheduling decisions without leaving the office). A good chief of staff is almost as good at prioritizing competing requests for the president’s time as the president is, with one key advantage: the chief of staff can say no to a request for the president without damaging the president’s personal reputation as accessible.
The Thought Partner
Presidents may have many thought partners in their cabinet. Most of those thought partners—such as provosts, student affairs leaders, institutional advancement professionals, and chief financial officers—manage substantial divisions of the college or university. But unlike these other thought partners, the chief of staff does not have a division to represent or an agenda separate from the president’s. Like a president, a chief of staff has a perspective from the center of the enterprise and is well positioned to work across organizational silos.
A chief of staff is also well positioned to constructively challenge the president’s assumptions and biases. People tend to affirm the ideas of those in authority—at least, to the leader’s face. But who questions the president? Extends their ideas? Leads them in new and productive directions of thought? A good thought partner doesn’t think exactly like the decision-maker. Thought partners provide affirmation alongside probing questions. They can offer “deep care, keen eyes, and honest feedback,” as Hollins University President Mary Dana Hinton, in the acknowledgments of her recent book, thanked me for providing her as her former chief of staff, noting that my input was “indispensable in getting [her] book published.”
A chief of staff can also be another pair of eyes. Leaders spend most of their time in meeting rooms, not in the classroom or on the quad. They may forget how hard it is for others to park on campus without a dedicated parking spot. They may not know how much or how little information is being shared with faculty and staff members who don’t sit on committees. A chief of staff can offer observations about the campus that presidents may not make themselves. They can help presidents understand the perspectives of others across campus who don’t have access to the C-suite.
The Figure of Stability
A chief of staff supports the institutional mission through transition. Presidents are building a team that will likely outlast their own tenure. This team will carry forward the institutional mission through transition, crisis, conflict, failure, and achievement.
Hiring a qualified chief of staff is an important part of planning for transition and succession. A chief of staff can provide stability for the leadership team, the governing board, and the campus through a transition. Across short presidential tenures, chiefs of staff often hold vital institutional knowledge and are essential to the transition from one president to another. A chief of staff can also fill interim leadership appointments themselves during times of transition. This is especially important for presidents from underrepresented groups. Women presidents, and especially women presidents of color, are less likely than men, the ACE survey found, to report receiving “realistic, accurate, or clear disclosures” about the expectations of the role and challenges facing the college or university. This is problematic because it does not equip women and presidents of color to begin presidencies with all the information needed to enable their leadership success. Involving a chief of staff in a presidential search and the onboarding process can help address this gap in transparency.
The Rock of Support
To enable effective leadership in difficult times and over a period of years, presidents also need a team of friends, mentors, sponsors, and cheerleaders who support their humanity.
Chiefs of staff (and other presidential assistants) often have a unique professional/personal relationship with a leader. They draft a speech for the president outlining a strategic plan for the college and check to see if the president has spinach in her teeth before delivering that speech. The line between the personal and professional can sometimes get blurry, explains Melissa Canady Wargo, chief of staff at Western Carolina University, who previously served a chancellor who was diagnosed with an illness that eventually claimed his life. Because he was an incredibly prominent figure in a small community that wished to express its support, Wargo often became the guardian of his and his family’s privacy, as well as “the surrogate for the grief that many in our campus community were feeling and needing to express.”
Even in more ordinary circumstances, presidents often struggle to care for themselves alongside their robust job responsibilities. This is especially difficult for presidents who don’t look like the traditional leaders of history: White, male, heterosexual, married. Women presidents are less likely to be married or partnered, according to the ACE survey, meaning that they are less likely to have a helpmate in their home. A chief of staff can help a president manage tasks a wife historically handled, such as care of the president’s home, which the college often owns. They can also schedule time for the president to fulfill essential personal care and childcare responsibilities.
I recently heard a president speak about the mistakes she made when she was new on the job. One of those mistakes was declining help with house cleaning and meal preparation. She found herself returning home after one hundred–hour work weeks to an empty refrigerator. And, as the president of the local college, she didn’t feel comfortable shuffling to the grocery store in the middle of the night.
As the presidency diversifies, chiefs of staff can also be allies to leaders who face sexism, racism, or other discrimination in the role. They will hear comments about the president that would never be made to the president’s face. They can deflect and defend the president in ways that refocus attention to the president’s qualifications and excellence. Chiefs of staff can also remind governing board members and others that they, too, have the important role of being an ally to the president. One chief of staff at a small liberal arts college in the Northeast notes that she regularly hears questions from alumni about the president’s fitness and stamina, given that the president is a woman of size. In her answers to these remarks, the chief of staff focuses on the many accomplishments of the president, showing others who hear similar remarks how to respond.
For all presidents, and especially presidents from underrepresented groups, hiring a chief of staff as an aspect of self-care is not self-indulgence; it is self-preservation. Absent personal support alongside professional support, the job of leading a college or university is nearly impossible.
In a world where college presidents are being held publicly accountable for foreign policy and public health, where government intervention in higher education is constraining freedom of inquiry and expression, and where changing enrollment landscapes and decreased public support are creating budget challenges for colleges and universities, a campus leader’s attention is constantly being pulled from the institutional mission. With this expanding role of the college presidency comes the need for a more nuanced view of presidential support. A chief of staff can help a beleaguered president refocus on the core purposes of higher education: teaching and learning, generating new knowledge and creative work, and meeting the complex needs of communities and society. A chief of staff can also be essential to helping presidents amplify their leadership impact and manage the intense pace of their work. No matter the institutional size or type, contemporary college and university leaders need someone to stand alongside them in the role. Chiefs of staff can help prepare all presidents for success.
Illustrations by Tavis Coburn
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