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Stanford just selected the son of former Yale President Richard Levin as the university’s next President. Harvard, Yale and UPenn are still in the process of selecting their next President, for Harvard and UPenn it’s about the disastrous performance in the questioning by Congress on whether calls for genocide against Jews went against the institutions code of conduct on bullying and harassment, to which they gave a lawyerly answer that it was “context dependent”. The President of Harvard then, Claudine Gay, had another allegation against her, that she plagiarized huge swathes of her Harvard PhD thesis. Actually, four black woman professors at Harvard have been accused of plagiarism, and the fact that all of them study race is something that is thought to be an anti-DEI effort by right wing conservative groups.

The first quality of course that a modern university President needs to have is a commitment to knowledge, research, and scholarship. Even as many an elite American University tries to throw in a chess player here, a class President here, a football player here, the universities are first and foremost academic institutions. Therefore, the top quality for these universities conducting Presidential searches around this time is the President must be of known scholarship repute that will guide the next generation of scholars for America and the world. Coming at a time when conservatives are pushing hard against higher education for spreading wokeness and being liberal indoctrination centers, there never has been a better time for a university to champion change and help solve some of the world’s toughest challenges.

Then, the other quality that a University President today needs to have is to be able to fundraise. Today’s universities need to be self sufficient financially no matter what. Even for state universities, public funding through the taxpayer is dwindling, what with the push that universities trim or even cut off whole arts and humanities departments? Today’s university President must be able to have a way to raise funds. That means tapping into alumni and donors in ways they might not have done in the past. This is especially more so as today’s universities have become more of industrial corporations rather than academic institutions, especially for elite private colleges such as Harvard, Yale, Princeton, MIT and Stanford. The way for an elite university is that the university has a huge endowment fund which helps attract the best and brightest brains from across the world, the students go on to get lucrative jobs, become country Presidents, billionaire entrepreneurs and hedge fund managers and then they donate back to the university, the university endowment increases and the cycle repeats itself again by the university attracting ever more brighter students. Therefore a modern American University President must manage donations as well as external relations, given a lot of conservatives are pushing hard against DEI efforts of the nation’s top universities.