More than five years ago, when I embarked on my doctoral dissertation journey, I tirelessly researched presidents and each one’s path to the presidency at one specific college. What I concluded, after several interviews, and much research and writing, is that the path at that specific college was and is certainly a nontraditional one. There has never been a president who came from outside the institution. The presidents whom I interviewed for my research all had other careers prior to embarking on the presidency.
Beyond the Credential Factory: Why Higher Education Must Shift from Management to Flourishing
For decades, higher education leadership has obsessed over “student success” as a purely operational metric. We track retention and graduation rates and postgraduation outcomes with the same linear precision that
Yoshitaka Iwasaki
August 3, 2026
