Utah State’s president lasted less than 2 years, but she’s not alone. Why university leaders here have much shorter tenures.

Deneece Huftalin was president of Salt Lake Community College for 10 years — an impressive tenure for a school leader in Utah.

And it might’ve been longer, too, if not for the last two years of it, she said, with the increasing scrutiny, constant complaints, legislative micromanaging and pressure “coming from all angles.” That made her realize it was time to step down from her dream job.

“It was horrible,” she said, reflecting back. “That’s why I retired.”

Huftalin left the job in June 2024, near the end of what’s been a period of massive upheaval for the leadership of the state’s eight public colleges and universities.

Including SLCC, six of those schools — or 75% — have had new leaders appointed within the past four years. That’s roughly the same time it takes students to complete a bachelor’s degree, meaning for most who graduate this spring, the president of their school is a different person from when they started in fall 2021.

Adding in the most recent departure of Elizabeth “Betsy” Cantwell at Utah State University, who steps down this month after less than two years as president, the Logan school will have had two new leaders in that same short stretch.

The revolving door for university and college presidents in the state appears to be well-greased.

The disruption has made the rate of turnover for presidents here worse than what’s going on nationally — even with headlines on the departures of Harvard’s Claudine Gay and the University of Pennsylvania’s Elizabeth Magill.

The average tenure for current sitting presidents in Utah is 3.3 years, not counting time for leaders who served in the interim before being officially named to the position. Even with that included, data calculated by The Salt Lake Tribune shows it only bumps the rate up slightly, to 3.5 years.

The national average is 5.9 years, according to the most recent survey from the American Council on Education, and that’s also declining. Still, Utah is hitting about half that time. So what’s going on with college presidents?

Huftalin, who is an anomaly with how long she served, believes the job has become close to impossible. Not mincing words, she said, a big part of that is the state Legislature, which has been increasingly critical of and involved in the day-to-day operations of public higher education in Utah — a shift that she says lines up with the timeline of the college leadership exodus.

“It’s clear there’s some disdain for higher ed,” she said. “And that’s not serving our state at all, in my opinion.”

As Huftalin was leaving office, lawmakers started to discuss budget cuts for the state’s colleges and universities; that was approved this year, with a $60 million reduction across the system, which schools can earn back only if they prove the funds are being reinvested in high-demand, high-wage programs.

Before that, state legislators last year attacked diversity, equity and inclusion efforts in Utah higher education. They’ve also set new requirements for restroom use and dorm assignments for transgender students.

Utah’s House speaker has suggested, as well, that schools here have gotten too progressive. And he came out strongly against faculty and students who joined pro-Palestine protests in the state last spring.

That’s on top of state leaders challenging the cost of degrees and rising tuition; whether students are getting the right jobs after graduation; if they’re graduating at high enough rates; and if they’re learning what they should in their first years in college.

“They’ve been questioning if there’s even value in a degree,” Huftalin said. “It’s really disheartening.”

And the legislative demands, she said, were on top of everything else, with students calling for X, parents wanting Y, professors needing Z — and donors and trustees and alumni and community members asking for A, B, C and D.

There weren’t enough letters in the alphabet for her to keep up.

“I loved my career. I had a fabulous career,” she said. “But the last two years were kind of sad.”

Utah’s problems: 7 leaders at 6 schools in 4 years

Utah has had a uniquely tumultuous era for college presidents — and that’s the assessment of someone who weathered a lot of turbulence during his own time as leader, overseeing the University of California, Berkeley, for four years ending in 2017.

Nicholas Dirks, former chancellor at the prestigious West Coast-school, said he sees Utah as having “an extreme version of what is becoming a norm” with president turnover.

“Some presidents can stay out of the fray,” he said, mentioning Henry Yang, who is stepping down from the University of California, Santa Barbara, this spring after leading for 31 years. But, Dirks said, that’s “just so unusual.” And it certainly hasn’t been the case here.

In Utah, the last four years have knocked school leaders down like bowling pins, leaving few to spare.

Cantwell at USU, who started in August 2023, is the most recent to leave under chaos. She also served the shortest term of any recent leader in the state. The Tribune compiled data looking at the tenures for the last three presidents at each of the state’s eight public schools.

Cantwell will have stayed at Utah State for 1.7 years when she leaves at the end this month for a new job as president of Washington State University. A USU spokesperson declined to comment for this story.

Geoff Landward, the commissioner over higher education for Utah, expressed some frustration at the shortness of her term.

“We hire presidents to develop a vision and plan to advance the institution’s mission …,” he said in an email to The Tribune. “These are massive endeavors and they require years of labor and commitment. Presidents cannot effect transformational change in two; it’s an unreasonable expectation.”

Cantwell’s departure was a surprise, but it also came as the Logan school has continued to be dogged by allegations of a toxic culture within its football program — which includes renewed monitoring from the federal government and led Cantwell to fire a well-liked football coach. The president faced heat, too, for a conflict involving a transgender resident advisor in the dorms, which led to a new statewide law.

Her short tenure led a lawmaker to also propose making the hiring process for university presidents more secretive to try to attract better candidates — which he said USU didn’t have when it picked Cantwell.

“The last search we did two and half years ago for Utah State was a failure,” said the measure’s sponsor, Sen. Chris Wilson, R-Logan, who represents the region around the school, during a committee hearing.

The USU leader before Cantwell, Noelle Cockett, faced similar concerns, and emails later suggested she was pushed out in July 2023 due to turmoil that involved sexual assaults not being taken seriously when reported to the institution.

The list of controversies is similar at other schools.

Facing concerns about student safety after the murder of student-athlete Lauren McCluskey, former University of Utah President Ruth Watkins stepped down from her post in spring 2021 after 3.3 years. Taylor Randall is now leading the flagship school, having taken the helm that following fall.

He’s already been in the position longer than Watkins, hitting 3.6 years this month — or three months longer than Watkins’ tenure.

In St. George, Utah Tech University just hired a new president last month after a 14-month-long vacancy that came after the previous leader, Richard “Biff” Williams, resigned in January 2024. He was under investigation at the time for alleged misconduct that involved giving a phallic gag gift to another administrator. The school is now being sued.

Those more high-profile departures account for three of the six public institutions in Utah that have seen leadership changes since 2021.

Outside of those, Mindy Benson was officially named president of Southern Utah University in 2022, after a year serving in the interim before that. Snow College got a new president, Stacee McIff, in 2023. And Salt Lake Community College picked Greg Peterson to take the helm there last year, taking over from Huftalin; Peterson has been in his position for less than a year, the shortest amount of time for all new leaders.

And it doesn’t end there.

While all of that was going on, Utah’s previous higher education commissioner, Dave Woolstenhulme, also left his post abruptly in September 2023.

According to a document obtained by The Tribune through a public records request, Woolstenhulme was being investigated for alleged sexual misconduct after at least two Utah State University employees came forward to report him. The Utah System of Higher Education has declined to release further details, and The Tribune is fighting that in an ongoing court case.

Landward stepped in to replace Woolstenhulme in the interim, and was officially named to the post in March 2024.

At that same time, the Utah Board of Higher Education was completely overturned by a new law passed in 2023 that allowed Gov. Spencer Cox to name an entirely new 10-member body; he chose not to reappoint any of the previous members. It was believed to be the first time the state has ever replaced an entire sitting board.

Overall, it’s been a lot of leadership change for Utah higher education in a short amount of time. Dirks summarized it shortly and directly: “It is genuinely crazy.”

What presidents are dealing with

Huftalin chose a date to leave the mayhem behind her. But she ended up staying at SLCC longer. She said she didn’t want to contribute to the overwhelming leadership churn, which is hard on students.

After extending her retirement, though, she said with a laugh: “It certainly made me count the days faster.”

Some of the challenges she and other Utah presidents have faced are specific to the state. It wasn’t a situation where there were too many cooks in the kitchen; it was too many people who weren’t cooks, trying to tell Huftalin that if she just held the spatula differently it would solve every crisis — from declining student enrollment at community colleges like hers to campus safety — even though with 40 years of experience in higher education by the end of her career, she was a top chef.

But experts say many of the issues here are also shared by presidents across the country. It’s led to the same kind of school leadership turnover nationwide.

Last May, The New York Times published an article titled, “Anyone Want to Be a College President? There Are (Many) Openings.” Forbes also ran commentary in February 2024 with the headline, “Why It’s Arguably The Toughest Time Ever To Be A University President.”

Before that, in December 2023, Daniel Drezner wrote a piece titled, “You Could Not Pay Me Enough to Be a College President” for The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Drezner is a distinguished professor of international politics and associate dean of research at Tufts University, a private school in Massachusetts. And in the time since he wrote his column, he said, “the situation has gotten unbelievably worse.”

“The political polarization that universities are dealing with has certainly gotten worse. And the level of trust has gone down,” Drezner said. “These jobs are not incredibly appetizing.”

(One professor at Columbia University, which had its own leadership shakeup, recently called the role of president a “toxic hellhole.”)

Presidents, Drezner added, have a dizzying amount of stakeholders to answer to: Students, parents, athletes, campus police, community members, alumni, faculty, staff, other administrators, donors, trustees, state board members, local lawmakers and the federal government. Even just listing them, Drezner said, is exhausting.

State legislators, in particular, Drezner added, can have an outsized impact on presidential turnover, based on the amount of control they exert — which Huftalin said was her experience. Some of the ideas from lawmakers were fair, she added, but most didn’t start from a place of respect or understanding.

Drezner, whose first job was at the University of Colorado, Boulder, said the state Legislature there provided about 9% of the higher education budget (in Utah, it’s 15%), but had veto power over almost everything. Any campus decision could be overturned at any time.

“That creates all sorts of additional complications,” he said.

And nearly all of the “most self-entitled lobbies” who presidents hear from, as Drezner calls them, have competing wants that can be impossible to appease.

There’s the push from researchers for more funding at the same time U.S. President Donald Trump is attacking those budgets. People want more athletics but less spending on sports. Lower tuition — and don’t forget to construct new buildings. Host fewer controversial speakers but provide better protections for free speech. Divest endowments, as pro-Palestine protesters demand, without alienating lawmakers and donors who fund the school.

It was those latter protests, in particular, and the response from university leaders that toppled several administrations over the past year. Magill at Penn stepped down in December 2023, days after testifying before Congress and being skewered for answers that some said were antisemitic.

The fervent calls for her resignation came from politicians, donors and alumni. Minouche Shafik of Columbia University was also pushed out for not calling police soon enough to disrupt protesters; at the same time, others said she was cracking down on student rights by calling them at all.

And the Trump administration has now canceled millions in federal grants to Columbia, in a seemingly retaliatory act, leaving many presidents afraid to say anything, Drezner said, for fear of losing money.

Higher education leaders have also been dealing with the recent anti-DEI, push, too, but before that, they were directed to have more sensitivity and representation after police brutality riots took a national main stage in 2020.

Brad Mortensen, the president of Weber State University here in Ogden, described that as “the pendulum swinging back entirely the other way” on the issue in a four-year period. And presidents have to react quickly and correctly “on these really heavy issues.”

Mortensen noted that Magill testified for six hours, but her term as president was largely determined by what she said in a 90-second soundbite. That “weighs on leaders,” he said.

‘A complex and challenging role’

It begs the question: Who would want to be president with all of that?

Even the administrator picked to serve in the interim for Cantwell at USU said he wouldn’t be applying to take the post permanently.

Hironao Okahana runs the national study on presidential tenure every five years through the American Council on Education, or ACE, where he’s the vice president and executive director of the Education Futures Lab. And the data indicates that the amplified stress of the job has led to higher turnover.

The most recent results from 2022 found that sitting university and college presidents across the U.S. had been in office for the shortest time on record since the survey began: 5.9 years, on average.

That’s down from 8.5 years in 2006; 7 years in 2011; and 6.5 years in 2016. There was a short delay in conducting the most recent survey because of the COVID-19 pandemic — which half of university presidents also later said impacted how long they wanted to stay in the job.

“We’ve certainly seen some big turnover, big hiring decisions that have happened,” Okahana said. “The job of college president is a complex and challenging role.”

The 2022 survey found, too, that of the presidents asked, 55% planned to step down in the next five years.

Dirks, the former Berkeley chancellor, said he’s also heard that the number of candidates applying for president jobs is shrinking. The ACE study doesn’t capture that. And Utah doesn’t reveal how many applicants throw their names in, outside of listing three to five finalists — which will soon be just one after the new law legislators passed.

It’s hard to say if that’s happening here, but Dirks said he wouldn’t be surprised if the impact is being felt at every school.

He recently published a book about his time at Berkeley and general issues in higher education, called “City of Intellect: The Uses and Abuses of the University.”

When he was chancellor, he faced pressure over raising tuition. The state of California, reeling from the recession, was contributing less to the school. And he didn’t feel like he had a choice. But students and community members raked him for not being more austere with the budget.

“I felt caught between those two forces,” Dirks said. “I didn’t take this job for anything other than believing in the university. But it’s really hard to sit in that place and do anything at all meaningful if you’re going to get resistance from every level.”

He also dealt with controversial speakers, protests and issues with athletics. “It was a lot of fun,” he added with a laugh.

It’s not like presidents aren’t being compensated for the demands. Most across the country — and all eight public school leaders in Utah — make six-figure salaries.

Drezner added that one way to show more support for the difficult job — and get more interest in open positions — could be to further increase that pay. But he acknowledged that could backfire by causing more resentment among faculty, staff and the public.

The higher education landscape has just changed so much, Dirks said, while the support for presidents has waned. School presidents now are more like the mayors of micromanaged cities, where every resident is mad if their ideas aren’t acted upon. They have massive budgets and thousands of employees , with some overseeing academic health care systems, too.

It’s no longer simply about supporting students to succeed. Leaders now have to be scholars and diplomats and fundraisers. And most don’t have the skills to do what each of those hats requires, Dirks said.

“It’s really this kind of big storm,” added Michael T. Miller, a professor of higher and adult education at the University of Memphis. “The result is that people get into the job, and it’s not sustainable.”

Dirks specifically feels that the boards of trustees for schools no longer support presidents like they used to.

Boards now, he said, feel vulnerable and are quick to retract their favor. And any president who wants to try something bold, he added, is “almost immediately in trouble.”

The relationship with faculty has deteriorated, too. He said he’s seen more votes of no confidence, and the tipping point for disapproval has lowered. The University of Utah has seen some of that, as professors have pushed back against President Randall’s administration. Utah Tech’s faculty senate also recently took a vote of no confidence against leadership there.

“It’s a symptom of what is really a growing chasm between the administration and the faculty,” he said.

Dirks doesn’t see a clear fix. The attitudes and perceptions around higher education and how it benefits a community have to change. And he doesn’t know if that will happen any time soon.

How do you get presidents to stay?

Even the longest-serving sitting university president in Utah right now has been in office just barely longer than the national average.

That’s Astrid Tuminez, the president of Utah Valley University, who took the helm at the Orem school in September 2018. She’s served for 6.5 years.

She’s followed closely by Mortensen, who started at Weber State a few months later in January 2019, landing him at 6.2 years.

UVU and Weber also have had the most steady leadership over the years, with their past three presidents spending the longest average time in office than other schools in the system. Snow College has seen the shortest terms.

Echoing Dirks, Mortensen said the success of college presidents “depends on the team around you.” For him, his board of trustees, in particular, has been active and engaged in pushing him to serve students first, he said.

He’s had support from his close administrators, too, and met other college presidents across the country to build up a network. Ann Millner, a former Weber president and now a state lawmaker who co-sponsored the budget cut legislation this session, has also been a mentor to him, he said. And he was at the school for 15 years before becoming president, which helped him develop relationships and understand the community.

That doesn’t mean the job hasn’t been without challenges. COVID-19, he said, was particularly hard and came one year into his leadership. He had attended a national academy for new university leaders when he took the job; he jokes now: “It would have been really nice to have a pandemic section in that.”

The new federal mandates have also been a flurry. And Mortensen has been one of the most vocal Utah presidents in pushing back against the potential for pending budget cuts to adversely impact the liberal arts. He’s defended the value of the humanities and social sciences in shaping students and society at-large.

For the most part, he said, he understands the pressures from the Legislature and said lawmakers have been willing to “engage in the conversation with us along the way.” He sees that oversight as just part of being a public institution.

Moving forward, Commissioner Landward said, the Utah System of Higher Education wants to better support presidents so they stay in their jobs longer and more adequately maneuver through the obstacle course. It’s the same advice that Okahana at ACE suggests, including making sure presidents are given clear directions on the expectations of their role when they start.

Utah’s higher education board recently approved funding to pay for training and executive coaching for school leaders — when they begin in their job and throughout their tenure.

“To excel, presidents need ongoing support and resources,” Landward said. “We’d much rather have presidents stay long term.”

For Mortensen, his focus is on making sure Weber State stays flexible, particularly as enrollment is expected to nosedive in the next decade. His focus is on creating opportunities for students — from the traditional to the returning to those who never thought higher education was their path.

“I don’t want to become like Blockbuster Video and miss the innovation cycle, where we’re no longer relevant for our students and community,” he said.

Mortensen said being a president can be a “really cool job, whether it’s seeing the transformation that happens with students or traveling around the country and talking to alumni about how the institution changed their lives.”

But leaders need to have the backing, he added, to be able to remain in office as long as he has — or longer, like Huftalin.

Huftalin wants people to see colleges as a public service again, instead of the recent shift to operating them like businesses. She believes in education and training and the potential for that to change lives. She says most leaders choose to lead a university for the same reasons.

“They’re really smart people, and so are the faculty and the staff that are there,” she said. “They need support and trust. You can scrutinize them, but trust them.”

Without that, she said, she might be the last college president in Utah who makes it a decade in office.

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