Op-Ed: The Presidency and the Public Promise

Purpose

AASCU presidencies have long focused on access, and the leaders I interview return to it often. Nearly half of the 60 leaders on my podcast spoke about first-generation identity and access, often from personal experience. For example, AASCU's current president, Chuck Welch, is one of them. When we spoke, he told me how his parents, neither of whom had the opportunity to attend college, made it a priority for him. An advisor later helped him see that the work he had found most meaningful as a student-helping other students succeed-could become his life's work. His story shows how opportunity changes what a family can imagine, and how graduates carry what they have learned into the communities they serve. That is the public value AASCU presidents have always been called on to explain and protect.

I heard a similar story from Millie García, former AASCU president and now chancellor of the California State University system. Her family's influence, together with what she saw higher education make possible, became her North Star. " It's about knowing who you are and why you decide to be a leader in whatever institution you feel you match, " she told me. " It's about loving that mission and that institution so dearly. "

A president's North Star is personal, but it points toward an institutional mission, and that mission is inseparable from the communities these institutions serve. Consider a president whose college sits in a rural region where the population has declined, and prospective students have moved toward larger cities. Enrollment may come under pressure even as the college's importance to the surrounding community grows. I think of Chadron State College in Nebraska, which was my family's gateway to higher education, and the regional universities of Pennsylvania, including Commonwealth University in Lock Haven and Mansfield, where I lived for the past 25 years. When such a college struggles, the community has more at stake than the loss of a campus employer, and its president feels that in every decision.

The picture looks a little different in our cities and metropolitan areas, but the stakes are the same. Cal State LA, in the nation's second-largest city, and Sam Houston State University , on the edge of the Houston metroplex, are helping drive thriving regional economies, opening doors for students and preparing the graduates that local employers, schools, and hospitals depend on. Whether in a rural county or a major metropolitan area, presidents must help students succeed today while securing the institution's ability to serve the next generation. That is a responsibility shared by many college leaders, but it is especially visible for presidents at regional public universities.