First Lawyer President in the Country Noted for Legal Acumen, Integrity, Vigor and Devotion

Founded in 1636, when Harvard College appointed John Leverett (1662-1724) as President in 1707 he became the first lawyer and first jurist to occupy the leadership position at Harvard.

Harvard’s 29th President, also a lawyer, Lawrence S. Bacow, announced he will be stepping down in June 2023. Other lawyer presidents who served at Harvard include: Josiah Quincy III (1829-1845); Lawrence Lowell (1909-1933) and Derek Bok (1971-1999; 2006-2007).

Prior to his presidency, Leverett had been appointed as a Harvard Tutor in 1685. He was also an attorney, a judge (justice of the peace, judge in the Court of Admiralty, justice of the Superior Court, Judge of the Probate Court for Middlesex County) and he served for six years in the Massachusetts House of Representatives, the last of which he was the Speaker of the House. According to his papers on file with the Harvard archives, Leverett acted as an Indian commissioner from Massachusetts and attended a 1704 conference to try to persuade the Iroquois to join the Queen Anne’s War (1701-1713) on the side of the British (he was not successful). He served a lieutenant in the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company, and later as an emissary of Governor Joseph Dudley (MA) to negotiate with Governor John Lovelace (NY) to establish military cooperation on the frontier and for an invasion of Canada.

A published account of the 1707 inauguration of Leverett states:

Mr. John Leverett was Installed in his President’s Office at Cambridge January 14, 1707/8. The Governour and Council and Ministers of the six neighbouring Towns were in the Library; there were the Colledge Charter, Records, Laws, with a seal standing upon them; also the Colledge Keys. Many people were in the Hall below, in the middle of the Hall a Table was set for the Governour and Council to sit at; things being thus prepared, the Governour ordered the Library Keeper to carry down (under his right arm) the Colledge Charter, Books of Record and Laws and the Seal upon them; he ordered the Butler to carry down the Keys in his left hand: then the Governour took Mr. Leveret by the hand, led him out of the Library, after the Books and Keys down into the Hall, where the Books, seal, Keys were laid on the table in the middle of the Hall. The Governour sat down on one side of the Table, and Mr. Leverett over against him; the Council and Mr. Hubbard of New Cambridge also sat at the Table. Then Mr. Hubbard began with a very serious suitable prayer, he being ended, Sir Sewal made an oration in Latin; nextly the Governour made a Speech in Latin, to Mr. Leveret more especially, declaring how the Corporation had chosen him, the Governour and Council approved him, the General Court voted him a salary; so he invested him in his office, pointing to the Books, Seal, Keys on the Table, which he delivered to him as ensigns of his office power. After this, Mr.Leveret made a short speech in Latin to the Governour, then Sir Holyoke made an oration in Latin. In the next place, Mr. Danforth Minister of Dorchester went to prayer; in the last place, part of the 132 psalme was sung, and then the affair was ended. After the business was thus over, they went to dinner in the Hall, and then every one went his way.

According to the Harvard archives: His major accomplishment as president was to help transform Harvard from a divinity school to a more secular institution. When he assumed responsibility together with William Brattle for management of the school when Preisdent Increase Mather left for England in 1688, Leverett and Brattle added the reading of Anglican authors to the curriculum. “As a leader in the Congregational Church, Leverett opposed Increase and Cotton Mather's attempts to impose a new charter containing a loyalty oath which would require faculty members to acknowledge the primacy of scripture. His secular direction prompted Thomas Hollis (1659-1731), a London merchant and devout Baptist to make several generous donations to Harvard. Under Leverett's stewardship, school enrollment expanded, bequests were collected, and Massachusetts Hall was erected (1720). Leverett's autocratic governing style created conflict with College Tutors in the late 1710s and early 1720s that expanded into larger difficulties with conservative members of the Harvard Board of Overseers and the Massachusetts General Court.” Leverett also added the study of Hebrew and French into the curriculum. Leverett died in office in 1724.

With respect to his leadership, the Harvard archives concludes, “John Leverett was noted for being a widely cultivated and broad-minded person. His experience as lawyer, jurist, and politician helped maintain Harvard College's standing during his critical years as president. Leverett brought vigor, integrity, and devotion to the Harvard presidency.” He was the first lawyer president of any institution of higher education dating back to the Colonial Era, and although he was not the first president, Harvard recognized the valuable legal acumen that he brought to the office. Other descriptors, vigor, integrity, and devotion, while certainly not unique to lawyer presidents, are indeed all critically important attributes of a campus leader.

Lawyer Presidencies Derailed – Poor Judgement, Ethical Lapses, and Football

In his book, Presidencies Derailed: Why University Leaders Fail and How to Prevent It, two-time lawyer president Stephen Joel Trachtenberg (along with Gerald B. Kauvar and E. Grady Bogue), discusses why first-term presidencies have failed and what can be learned from these experiences. The book points out that between 2009 and 2010, fifty presidents of higher education institutions either resigned, retired prematurely, or were fired. While there are many reasons for unsuccessful tenures including but not limited to controversial search and appointment processes (often related to political appointments that still occur with some level of frequency in this decade), poor decisions on the part of the presidents (e.g., ethical and judgmental lapses) subpar interpersonal skills, lack of professionalism, and difficulty in acclimating to the culture of the campus, the presidents whose terms are cut short includes non-lawyers and lawyers alike.

Trachtenberg’s book identifies and examines the following six derailment themes: ethical lapses, poor interpersonal skills, inability to lead key constituencies, difficulty adapting, failure to meet business objectives, and board shortcomings. Chapter six recounts the personal experiences of two people whose presidencies were derailed, and one of them is lawyer Michael Garrison, who served as President of West Virginia University for one year from 2007-2008. Like many other lawyer presidents, Garrison had significant government experience having served as chief of staff to Governor Bob Wise and as a cabinet secretary in the W. Va. Department of Tax and Revenue. At the time he was recruited for the presidency, he was serving as chair of the W. VA. Higher Education Policy Commission. By self- admission, he was a non-traditional candidate who had no experience working in higher education, yet the Board of Governors voted 15-1 to appoint him to the presidency. While he experienced many successes in the early days of his presidency, despite reservation expressed by faculty and students about his lack of higher education experience, two crises cut short his tenure: a legal battle with the football coach and a controversy surrounding the awarding of a degree to the Governor’s daughter where the program suffered from lack of paperwork to provide meaningful evidence as to whether or not the degree was earned. As Garrison explains his version of the events in the book, he did what he believed was legally accurate to protect the University, yet in the end he had a faculty vote of no confidence and he felt that the Board was no longer publicly supportive of his leadership so he decided to step-down.

In the last year, a number of lawyer campus presidents have ended their terms early. For example, in June 2002, Colorado State University president Joyce McConnell and the Board decided to part ways before her contract term ended. There were several high-profile incidents during her tenure where her judgment was called into question. For example, like Michael Garrison, she made a controversial decision over football, “when she put a temporary stop to the football program over reports of racial insensitivity and a scandal over coaches encouraging players not to report COVID symptoms.” She then fired the head football coach after a dismal two-season 4-12 record.

Lawyer Luis Sanchez, President of Oxnard College (and former president of Moorpark College), announced his early retirement in October, effective in January 2023 amid an investigation involving two complaints – one of “unlawful but not criminal ‘harassment, including on the basis of sex and gender’ and one complaint of ‘misconduct pertaining to the Oxnard College Foundation.’” He had been put on leave pending the investigation. President Sanchez’s dispute with the College Foundation centered upon policies that prevented the primarily Hispanic serving institution from providing scholarship funds to needy students.

Leadership requires good judgment, a high ethical compass, a consultive style, and a sense of campus culture to help guide difficult decision making. In some cases, presidents may be derailed because they made appropriate decisions and took appropriate actions but either the governing board or other campus leadership disagreed or swayed public perception. In other cases, lapses in judgment can simply be unforgiving given the highly public and visible nature of the campus presidency.

Lawyer Provosts Increasingly Appointed as Campus Presidents

Serving as a provost is often a pathway to the presidency for those interested, yet the data shows that most lawyer presidents did not previously serve as provosts or chief academic officers. Although there is little published research about the backgrounds of provosts, it is fair to state that the typical provost does not possess a JD degree. A 2010 Study of Chief Academic Officers of Independent Colleges and Universities published by the Council of Independent Colleges (CIC) indicated that among provosts (of chief academic officers) at four-year colleges and universities, at least 90% indicated that they held a terminal degree. The study reported that 86% of chief academic officers at independent institutions had earned a PhD and 10% had earned an EdD. Of the remaining 4%, the survey reported the provosts possessed theology degrees, JDs (less than 1%) and MDs.

Through an examination of the backgrounds of lawyer presidents in May it Please the Campus: Lawyers Leading Higher Education (Touro University Press 2022), data about how many of these individuals had previously served as [law] professors, [law] deans, and provosts is discussed. Data collected for the 2017 American College President Study published by the American Council on Education (ACE) revealed that of the number of lawyer presidents in for the 2017 survey year, roughly 28% had previously served as a chief academic officer or provost/dean/other senior executive in academic affairs. This percentage is lower than what was reported in the 2002 survey which showed 34% had had previous chief academic officer or provost/dean/other academic affairs experience.

The new study shares that from the 1940s to present, of the provosts with JDs, 51 of them have been appointed to 68 presidencies. The 1940s and 1950s saw the appointment of just 1 lawyer provost to the campus C-Suite – Albert C. Jacobs. Jacobs was first appointed as Chancellor at the University of Colorado (Denver) in 1949 where he stayed until 1953 when he was appointed as president of Trinity College. Two more lawyer provosts were appointed as presidents in the 1960s – Kingman Brewster at Yale in 1963 and Edward H. Levi at the University of Chicago in 1968.

Two more were appointed in the 1970s and then the number started to climb with 5 in the 1980s, 9 in the 1990s, 12 in the 2000s and 28 in the 2010s. So far, only two years in to the 2020s, with 8 appointments of lawyer provosts to the presidency, by extrapolation we might expect the number to hit 40 by the end of the decade. In 2022 the following four lawyer presidents had previously served as a provost - Jennifer Collins (Rhodes College; former vice provost); Elizabeth Magill (University of Pennsylvania); Wendell Pritchett (Interim President at University of Pennsylvania); and Darren Reisberg (Hartwick College; former deputy provost).

For a listing of all known lawyer provosts who were appointed to lead a campus, see the ACAO blog here: Lawyer Provosts Increasingly Appointed as Campus Presidents (acao.org)