When a new university president arrives on campus, they inherit more than a title and a set of obligations. They inherit a political ecosystem, a financial tangle, an entrenched culture of silence, and a long list of unresolved failures handed down like family heirlooms. Academic folklore captures this reality in the famous story of the three envelopes, a darkly humorous parable that has circulated for decades. But the contemporary landscape of higher education—with its billionaire trustees, private-equity logic, political interference, and donor-driven governance—demands an updated version. In 2025, the story no longer ends with three envelopes.
It begins the usual way. On the new president’s first day, they find a note from their predecessor and three envelopes in the top drawer. A few months later, enrollment stumbles, faculty grow restless, and trustees begin asking pointed questions. The president opens the first envelope. It reads: “Blame your predecessor.” And so they do, invoking inherited deficits, outdated practices, and “a period of transition.” Everyone relaxes. Nothing changes.
The second crisis comes with even less warning. Budget gaps widen. Donors back away. A scandal simmers. Morale erodes. The president remembers the drawer and opens the second envelope. It says: “Reorganize.” Suddenly the campus is flooded with restructuring proposals, new committees, new vice provosts, and flowcharts that signal movement rather than direction. The sense of activity buys time, which is all the president really needed.Eventually comes the kind of crisis that neither blame nor reshuffling can contain: a revolt among faculty, a public scandal, a collapse in confidence from every constituency that actually keeps the university functioning. The president reaches for the third envelope. It contains the classic message: “Prepare three envelopes.” Leadership in higher education is cyclical, and presidents come and go with the expensive inevitability of presidential searches and golden-parachute departures.
But that is where the old story ends, and where the modern one begins.
The symbolism is blunt. In an era when billionaire donors treat universities like portfolio companies and ideological battlegrounds, presidential tenures can end not because of institutional failure but because the wrong donor was displeased. Rowan, the financier who helped drive leadership changes at the University of Pennsylvania, represents a broader shift in American higher education: presidents are increasingly accountable not to faculty, staff, students, or the public, but to wealthy benefactors whose money exerts gravitational pull over governance itself. When those benefactors want a president removed, the departure is not a matter of process or principle but of power.
The fourth envelope reveals the new architecture of control. It tells incoming presidents that their exit was negotiated before their first decision, that donor influence can override shared governance, and that golden severance packages can help smooth over conflicts between public mission and private interest. It is a warning to campus communities that transparency is not a value but an obstacle, and that leadership stability is fragile when tied to the preferences of a handful of financiers.
The revised story ends not with resignation but with a question: what happens to the public mission of a university when private wealth dictates its leadership? And how long will faculty, students, and staff tolerate a structure in which the highest office is subject not to democratic accountability but to donor impatience?
The four envelopes are no longer folklore. They are a mirror.
Sources
Chronicle of Higher Education reporting on donor-driven leadership pressure at Penn
Inside Higher Ed coverage on presidential turnover and governance conflicts
Public reporting on Marc Rowan’s influence in university decision-making
Research literature on billionaire philanthropy and power in higher education
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