Path to the ‘Oval’ Office: is Carter qualified?
As Walter “Ted” Carter Jr.’s time as Ohio State’s president quickly approaches, The Lantern takes a deep dive into his previous experience at the University of Nebraska system and in the Navy, paired with his lack of an advanced degree. This culmination of factors presents one question: is Carter qualified?
Phoebe Helms
Patricia B. Miller Special Projects Reporter
Josie Stewart
Campus Editor
Carter, who is set to leave his role as president of the University of Nebraska system and take over at Ohio State Jan. 1, 2024, matches up well with other university leaders in terms of demographic statistics showing their likelihood to be male, caucasian and over the age of 60.
Carter is more unique in one category: he doesn’t hold an advanced degree.
In the 2023 edition of the American college presidents survey by the American Council on Education, just six, or 0.6 percent of the 950 university presidents interviewed, hold only a bachelor’s degree. While the university has mentioned his time at Top Gun, Carter’s academic education ended with a bachelor of physics and oceanography earned from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1981.
Of 950 university presidents surveyed, only 0.6 percent hold just a bachelor’s degree, while 83.6 percent hold a doctorate.
Credit: Molly Goheen | Managing Editor for Digital Content
“He’s not going to be on the same wavelength because people that have Ph.D.s are distinguished academics,” Cox said. “This person is not a distinguished academic.”
Judith Wilde, a professor who researches university leadership at George Mason University’s Schar School of Policy and Government, said this could pose issues when Carter handles internal university matters, especially with faculty who dedicate much of their career to time in academics.
“They’ve gone through and gotten a degree and worked hard to get where they are as faculty members and to become tenured and all of that,” Wilde said. “Someone with a bachelor’s degree doesn’t have that same background, has not been at or with universities as long as faculty members are.”
Kevin Cox, professor emeritus in Ohio State’s Departments of Political Science and Geography, echoes such sentiment, voicing concern with Carter’s background in interviews and an opinion piece in the Columbus Dispatch.
“He’s not going to be on the same wavelength because people that have Ph.D.s are distinguished academics,” Cox said. “This person is not a distinguished academic.”
That’s not to say Carter isn’t distinguished.
After earning his degree in 1981, Carter graduated from the Navy Fighter Weapons School, or Top Gun, in 1985, a highlight of a 38-year career in the Navy in which he flew 125 missions. In 2014, he returned to the U.S. Naval Academy as its 62nd superintendent after a yearlong stint as the 54th president of the U.S. Naval War College.
Ohio State’s 17th President Ted Carter flew for the Navy in the 1980s.
Courtesy of Ted Carter on X, formerly known as Twitter, @UofNE_President
Judith Wilde, a research professor at George Mason University, weighed in on Carter’s educational and professional background.
Courtesy of Judith Wilde
In 2020, he became president of the University of Nebraska system, leading four university campuses, and is known for his efforts to reduce university and student debt. Unlike Ohio State and its branches, each branch of the Nebraska system has its own chancellor.
Though Wilde believes this background might be detrimental to relationships with faculty, she said it could be a benefit for the rest of the president’s roles. According to her research, the provost — who also typically acts as vice president — and the president work together, but with a non-traditional president like Carter, the situation might be different.
“What we’re seeing more often — I would not call it typical yet — is a real differentiation between the two roles where the provost is really the one who works with the deans and watching the academic side of the house,” Wilde said. “The president is more externally facing and is meeting with donors, meeting with legislators — certainly still the leader of the university but in a different way.”
Even so, some faculty, including Cox, don’t see a positive side to this possibility, especially when matched with other university leaders who have extensive experience in academics.
“They’re not going to take him seriously,” Cox said. “That means they’re not going to take Ohio State seriously. Their attitude is going to be, ‘What’s Ohio State doing hiring a person like this, whose only academic credential is a B.A.?’”
Cox is not alone among faculty in his concerns, but he was the only one willing to speak on the record. In a brief statement, Carter declined an interview to discuss the concerns until he becomes president.
Ohio State spokesperson Chris Booker said in an email that Carter will bring an “unparalleled combination of strategic leadership, experience in higher education and service” to Ohio State, mentioning Carter’s extensive time in the military from credentials in the Navy Nuclear Power School, the U.S. Air Force Air War College, Naval War College, Armed Forces Staff College and Top Gun.
“Currently, Carter leads the University of Nebraska System where he oversees four campuses of almost 70,000 students, faculty and staff, including an academic medical center,” Booker said. “Prior to leading Nebraska, he served as superintendent of the Naval Academy, a top ranked liberal arts college, and president of the U.S. Naval War College, where 1,600 residents and 100,000 distance education students pursue graduate-level education.”
“President Carter has decades of experience leading complex organizations. His unique leadership experience encompasses the skills needed to keep Ohio State at the forefront of research, innovation and creative expression, student success, workforce development, patient care, college affordability and athletic excellence,” he continued.
“President Carter has decades of experience leading complex organizations. His unique leadership experience encompasses the skills needed to keep Ohio State at the forefront of research, innovation and creative expression, student success, workforce development, patient care, college affordability and athletic excellence,” Booker said.
In a Nov. 3 interview with interim university President Peter Mohler, he agreed Carter’s military background will offer a unique and well-suited set of skills for Ohio State.
“What’s been really fun to learn about President Carter is how he has been a continuous learner,” Mohler said. “And to the point of looking at his training and his retraining and his retraining and reeducation, if you follow this career, how he began in one area of the service and then evolve that into a completely new area, where he went from a naval aviator to getting into things in nuclear, and so the complexity of some of the things that he’s dealt with in his is world in the military and how applying a lot of those complex mechanisms for solving problems.”
About 70 percent of all university presidents are men. Forty-five percent are white men, and the average age of those holding office is 60, according to data from the American Council on Education, an organization dedicated to policy and research for institutions of higher education.
Analysis of the current university presidents in the 13 other Big Ten schools shows all of them have an advanced degree, 11 of which are a doctorate and two of which are a Juris Doctor degree. Two presidents are white men, and the others are all white women or men of color, with the exception of Penn State’s president Neeli Bendapudi, an Indian woman.
In the Buckeye lineage, there have been two white women who served as president since 1870, 12 white men and one man of color.
Most university presidents have a background in academia, educationally and professionally.
Credit: Molly Goheen | Managing Editor for Digital Content
Wilde said that being nontraditional in lacking an advanced degree poses a major disadvantage for Carter.
“I would hope that the board of directors would actually bring in someone to work with him for a while as an executive coach, because that may help him,” Wilde said. “Because right now, coming in as very nontraditional with only a bachelor’s, no real experience with a major university before, he’s gonna have a lot of distrust from the faculty.”
Kevin Cox has been outspoken about his opinion on Carter’s background, writing an op-ed in the Columbus Dispatch Sept. 5.
Courtesy of Kevin Cox
“He needs to have some sense of how science goes about things, some sense of the humanities and what they’re up to, what their goals are, and the social sciences likewise, but he doesn’t speak these languages,” Cox said. “What I mean to say is, he’s not aware. I can’t believe he’s aware with just a [bachelor’s degree]. I can’t believe he’s aware of how these different disciplines, how these different subject areas go about their tasks.”
Ohio State ranked 11th among national universities in research and development expenditures for the 2022 fiscal year, according to the National Science Foundation’s annual Higher Education and Research Development survey.
Cox said a limited background in academia will create a schism between faculty and university leadership.
“Distrust is part of it but also a degree of contempt,” Cox said. “Who is this person who’s going to pronounce on university policy and he hasn’t had experience in the academic world?”
As Booker mentioned, “Carter [led] a four-campus university system that enrolls nearly 50,000 students and employs 16,000 faculty and staff on campuses in Lincoln, Omaha and Kearney, plus academic divisions and research and extension centers across the state.”
Wilde said there is an important distinction between a university president and the president of a university system.
“Being president of a system means that you’re doing the overview work here — you’re supervising the president to make sure that they’re meeting their goals and so on,” Wilde said. “But you’re not so much looking at how they meet those goals, they don’t have the in-depth view of the individual universities that you would if you were president of the university.”
“Being president of a system means that you’re doing the overview work here — you’re supervising the president to make sure that they’re meeting their goals and so on,” Wilde said. “But you’re not so much looking at how they meet those goals, they don’t have the in-depth view of the individual universities that you would if you were president of the university.”
Cox worries Carter’s role at the University of Nebraska hasn’t prepared him for becoming a university president, and that he views Ohio State as a business rather than an institution.
“I worry about what his view of the university is,” Cox said. “Does he see it as a business or does he see it as a serious place of learning? As a business to be managed using all the usual brute, bureaucratic means, or does it mean that he’s a person with a knowledge of academics — the academy, the academics — that allows him to show some sympathy for what their goals are.”
He released a “five-point plan” to address the University of Nebraska’s $58 million budget shortfall that was projected by the end of the 2024-25 academic year as a result of declining enrollment, inflation and other economic factors, according to a press release from the University of Nebraska.
Carter planned to address these issues primarily through a hiring freeze on staff and by decreasing the budget of all university departments by 2.5 percent. He also implemented a plan to increase tuition by 3.5 percent and decrease university spending by $27 million as a whole in order to balance the budget within two years, according to the Nebraska Examiner.
Cox emphasized his view that Ohio State, a university with an endowment of $7.4 billion versus Nebraska’s $1.7 billion, needs a president with more than a financial outlook.
The University of Nebraska is also vastly different from Ohio State’s Columbus campus in terms of size. The size of the student body across the entire Nebraska system is nearly 50,000 with the Nebraska-Lincoln campus having the most students at 24,000, according to statistics from Nebraska. Ohio State’s Columbus campus alone has over 60,000 students.
The U.S. Naval War College at Newport has an enrollment of about 600 students according to its website. With Carter’s transition to Ohio State, he’ll serve at the fourth-largest university in the country.
“He presents himself in his own words, he sees himself as a chief executive officer,” Cox said. “In other words, that suggests that the university is a business corporation.”
Carter will make the transition from the University of Nebraska system, with an enrollment of about 50,000 students, to Ohio State, with 60,000 students at the Columbus campus.
Credit: Caleb Blake | Photo Editor
Thoughts on whether or not Carter will see his presidency as a business and if he has enough prior experience in academia have raised concerns as to whether or not he can rise to the challenges a school like Ohio State presents.
Prior to Carter, former university President Kristina M. Johnson began implementing policies to eradicate student debt and turn Ohio State into a zero-waste university.
At Nebraska, Carter proposed the “Nebraska Promise,” which covered tuition for low-income families in Nebraska, and is comparable to Johnson’s “Scarlet and Gray Advantage.” However, in terms of sustainability policies, Johnson’s background for the United States Department of Energy in her role for Energy and Environment meant her knowledge and background were extensive and positioned sustainability as a priority for her.
Johnson taught a course titled “Pathways to Net Zero Emissions” and was outspoken on the importance of clean energy initiatives at Ohio State and decreasing university carbon emissions. Carter, as a system president, released a set of sustainability measures as a goal for the system.
“Nebraskans entrust their university with their most precious resources—natural, human, and capital—and expect us to operate with common sense and prudence. We won’t spend money we don’t have; we will take care of the resources we do have; and we will continually look for opportunities to become more effective and efficient,” according to the University of Nebraska System sustainability website.
Johnson was also key in the development of Carmenton, a new innovation district on Ohio State’s West Campus. The ambitious project aims to bring together technology, business, government and medicine to create a competitive and cutting-edge Ohio State asset.
Of course, Carter and Johnson faced many similar issues that will likely affect many past Carter.
Thus far, Ohio State has paid out over $60 million to 296 individuals in settlements. Carter will have to learn how to navigate talking about Strauss and working with the university and survivors throughout legal proceedings.
Student protests from both sides have increased tensions on Ohio State’s campus. Carter and his administration will have to balance demands from both sides.
All of these factors present significant challenges for any new president.
When asked for a statement, Carter said he “look[ed] forward to connecting more, especially once [he] gets in the seat on [Jan. 1, 2024],” in an email.
Words by Phoebe Helms and Josie Stewart
Cover Art by Abby Fricke
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