From Disciplinarians to Diploma Salesmen
How higher education’s presidents surface from the shallow end of the pool.
In our last posts, we discussed how postmodernism and political correctness can hollow out the academy’s intellectual integrity, discouraging inquiry and replacing rigor with moral posturing. But these are only two of the forces responsible for higher education’s retreat from its mission to pursue and preserve Truth. Another threat comes from within: the kinds of people we have installed to lead our universities — and the kinds of passions and priorities they bring with them.
Over the past few decades, boards of trustees have chosen presidents not for their academic standing or moral authority, but for their ability to manage, to market, and to keep the doors open. The result is a new kind of university president — not a disciplinarian entrusted to guard the integrity of the institution, but a professional manager whose main skill is selling diplomas and cultivating donors. The scholar‑leader has been replaced by the diploma salesman.
This shift didn’t happen all at once. But with each generation of presidents, the old idea of the university as a house of discipline and Truth has receded further, replaced by market‑oriented thinking and managerial priorities. In this post, we trace that decline through three case studies: Joe B. Wyatt at Vanderbilt, Graham Spanier at Penn State, and Elizabeth Davis at Furman — each of them a signpost in higher education’s long slide from disciplinarians to diploma salesmen.
This shift was evident at Vanderbilt when Joe B. Wyatt became chancellor in 1982. He embodied the new type of university president: an MBA with a background in computer science and administration, hired as a manager more than a scholar. His predecessor, Alexander Heard, was a well-published historian — a true disciplinarian who had propelled Vanderbilt forward by securing prestigious NSF “Center” status for research and strengthening the intellectual reputation of the faculty. Heard’s leadership was rooted in his scholarly standing and his vision for the university as a house of inquiry. Wyatt, by contrast, focused on growth and modernization — priorities that reflected the rising influence of market thinking in higher education. In any case, his tenure signaled the beginning of the CEO‑style presidency in the South.
By the mid‑1990s, the model was mainstream. Graham Spanier, appointed president of Penn State in 1995, perfectly embodied the new order: a skilled administrator and public figurehead known more for his ability to fundraise and grow the institution than for his intellectual depth. Spanier presided over a period of explosive growth in enrollment, branding, and visibility, but his administration was marred by the institution’s moral failures — most notoriously the Sandusky scandal — which revealed how thoroughly managerial priorities had overtaken moral and intellectual ones. Protecting the brand and maintaining revenue streams took precedence over doing what was right. Spanier’s career is a cautionary tale of how the university president became less a steward of Truth and more a steward of the institution’s image.
Appointed president of Furman University in 2014, Elizabeth Davis brought a PhD in accounting and a career in finance and administration — and epitomized the “professional manager” model, showing little regard for student development or moral leadership in the leadership priorities she models and the cancel‑culture “victories” she claims (for example, in reports which highlight buildings renamed and statues erected and little more). Hallmarks of her tenure include terminating the university’s baseball team on financial grounds — a program whose student‑athletes were well integrated into campus life — while stubbornly clinging to Division I football, even as the team suffered humiliating routs, including a 76–0 loss to Ole Miss in 2023. Despite appeals to compete in Division III conferences that prioritize academics and character development, Davis continued to justify staying in Division I football on symbolic grounds — showing no apparent concern that the football program runs a multi‑million‑dollar annual deficit, covered largely by student tuition and a handful of donors who make million‑dollar contributions to keep the program afloat. Her decisions illustrate the mindset of a manager fixated on optics rather than the traditional positions of higher education such as academic integrity. It all betrays an absence of academic passion.
The presidencies of Wyatt, Spanier, and Davis trace a story of how higher education traded disciplinarians for managers — and in so doing, hollowed out moral and intellectual core. The presidents of the past understood that a university’s authority rested on its commitment to Truth and its willingness to form students in disciplines of character and intellect. Today’s manager‑presidents, by contrast, inherit only the trappings of greatness while serving market forces and branding campaigns. In their hands, the university has become like leavened bread — puffed up in size and more vulnerable to rigor-rotting spoilage.
Yet even these highly respected institutions remain strong. They still fill classrooms, boast rankings, and display prestige. But students graduate without ever knowing what they don’t know: research loses its rigor, academic integrity is watered down, and intellectual humility is nowhere taught. In their hands, the university has become like leavened bread — puffed up in size but vulnerable to rigor‑rotting spoilage.
And this is perhaps the most dangerous consequence of all: colleges now graduate students who feel self‑satisfied, who believe they know enough, who think they have acquired the mental disciplines and habits of the heart required of citizens and thinkers — and who see no reason to doubt it.
In our next post, we’ll explore why this illusion of readiness is so dangerous — and what happens when our most educated don’t know what they don’t know.