University Presidents Should be Rock Stars

Time this week compiled a list of the top 10 university presidents. Gordon Gee, an education law alum, was the feature story and the list also included another alum, Mark Yudof. 

I loved the story, I loved the list, and I hope they keep it up. Picking a top 10 of anything, of course, is going to be mostly arbitrary. But I love the national attention that these people should be getting anyway. These university presidents, especially R1 presidents, should be rockstars. We should compete for them the way we compete for basketball coaches. It is the rare combination of innovative ideology, bureaucratic understanding, political tact, financial sense and, yes, legal competence, that can make a top notch university president. In fact, great university presidents are a much more rare commodity than great basketball coaches and, of course, they have a much larger impact on the state. I follow both @presidentgee (5,137 followers) and @mark_yudof (1,187 followers). I do not follow @UKCoachCalipari
 even though he has nearly a million followers. I look forward to the day, although it will probably never come, when our university president rock stars outshine our athletic coach rockstars.