A Global Headhunt

When next year's crop of high-school graduates arrive at Oxford University in the fall of 2009, they'll be joined by a new face: Andrew Hamilton, the 55-year-old Yale provost who will become Oxford's vice chancellor—a position equivalent to university president in the United States, with responsibility for the day-to-day running of the august institution.

Hamilton, a distinguished chemist who took on a senior administrative post at Yale in 2003, isn't the only educator crossing the pond. Others include Louise Richardson, who was executive dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard before her appointment as principal of St. Andrews, Scotland's oldest university (and Prince William's alma mater). Schools in France, Egypt, Singapore and elsewhere have also recently made top-level hires from abroad.

As the trend suggests, higher education is big business these days, and like many businesses it's gone global. Until recently, few schools recruited across borders: "you really had to pick through the evidence to find examples," says Ken Kring, head of the education practice at Korn/Ferry International, the world's largest corporate recruiter. And the talent flow isn't quite universal. High-level personnel tend to head in one direction only: outward from the United States.

One reason is that American schools still tend not to look abroad. When the board of the University of Colorado searched for a new president to oversee its three campuses and 52,000 students, for example, it wanted a leader familiar with the state government, the source of a hefty chunk of the school's yearly budget. "We didn't do any sort of global consideration," says Patricia Hayes, the board's chair. They ultimately picked Bruce Benson, a 69-year-old Colorado businessman and well-connected political activist who is likely to excel at the main task of modern university presidents: fund-raising.

It turns out that Yankees have a virtual lock on that skill set. When the University of Pennsylvania needed a new dean for its prestigious Wharton business school, it invited Korn/Ferry to include candidates from outside the United States, especially from Europe and East Asia. But "there were fewer [global options] than we would have liked," says Kring. The school ended up picking an American.

"Fund-raising is a distinctively American thing," says John Isaacson of Isaacson, Miller, an executive-search firm that works mostly with universities and nonprofits. This strength is largely a product of experience and necessity, since U.S. schools rely heavily on philanthropy. At Harvard last year, philanthropy made up 40 percent of the total budget. (About 33 percent of that came from endowment payouts.) At Cambridge the comparable figure was 10 percent, and at the University of Melbourne it was just 6 percent. Many European universities, meanwhile, are still almost wholly dependent on government funding.