Ohio State Is Not Alone: How University Presidents Keep Getting Too Close to Outside Interests

When Ohio State University President Ted Carter resigned on Monday after admitting he had allowed a podcaster and entrepreneur "inappropriate access to Ohio State leadership" to advance her private business interests, the reaction across higher education was familiar: shock, disappointment, and a rush to frame the episode as an isolated failure of personal judgment.

It wasn't isolated. It rarely is.

Carter's departure — the third Ohio State presidential resignation since 2020 — is the latest in a sustained pattern of university leaders whose professional boundaries have blurred in ways that ultimately cost them their positions and damaged the institutions they led. The presidents of Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania dramatically resigned in late 2023 amid widespread criticism over their responses to campus protests. The presidents of Columbia University and the University of Virginia followed in 2024 and 2025, respectively. Each case carried its own specific facts. But together they point to something structural — a governance architecture that consistently fails to catch, or prevent, the ethical drift that happens when the most powerful person in an institution operates without adequate checks.

The Particular Vulnerability of University Presidents

University presidents occupy an unusual position in American institutional life. They hold sweeping authority over billion-dollar budgets, vast real estate portfolios, and the livelihoods of thousands of employees. They serve as the public face of their institutions to donors, legislators, and the media. And they are, by the nature of the role, expected to be relationship-builders — cultivating connections with outside leaders, advocacy organizations, philanthropists, and community partners as a core part of their job.

That combination — enormous institutional power plus a professional mandate to build outside relationships — creates fertile conditions for conflicts of interest to develop and go undetected.

As researchers at the National Institutes of Health have noted, conflicts of interest can become particularly intractable when the respondent is a president, chancellor, or other senior leader — because of the pervasive financial, personal, and professional relationships that may compromise, or appear to compromise, their decision-making. The close connection between the interests of the institution and its leaders may even create a climate in which leaders interfere with institutional oversight or turn a blind eye toward ethical problems.

The Ohio State case illustrates this dynamic with unusual clarity. Carter is a retired U.S. Navy vice admiral who arrived at the university with a genuine and longstanding commitment to veteran advocacy. Krisanthe Vlachos operated in the same veteran support ecosystem, running a podcast and a small business focused on helping former military personnel transition to civilian careers. Their shared professional mission created an entirely plausible foundation for a relationship that, according to Carter's own acknowledgment, eventually crossed into territory where university resources were improperly placed at the service of her private interests.

No policy document can fully prevent a president from developing a relationship with someone they admire. What policy structures are supposed to do is create friction — disclosure requirements, oversight mechanisms, and clear lines between institutional resources and personal relationships — that makes it harder for those relationships to drift into impropriety undetected. At Ohio State, those safeguards apparently weren't sufficient. The situation only came to light when someone from outside the university approached the board of trustees directly.

A Governance Structure Not Built for Self-Policing

The key problem in university governance is this: the board selects the president, and thereafter board action is typically limited to periodic meetings that are largely informational in nature. In practice, this means that a university president, once installed, operates with substantial day-to-day autonomy.

According to the Center for American Progress, university governing boards are the ultimate legal and strategic authorities for higher education institutions. Their primary purpose is to ensure that colleges and universities fulfill their educational missions, act as responsible stewards of public and private resources, and uphold legal and ethical standards. As fiduciaries, they are responsible for overseeing finances, approving strategic plans, and appointing and evaluating university presidents. But only about 12 percent of trustees at American colleges and universities have professional experience in higher education — and the vast majority of public institution board members are appointed through political processes, often by governors or legislators.

The Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges (AGB) has long emphasized that effective boards should engage in high-level policy, planning, and oversight — approaching the president and senior leadership as partners, while still maintaining rigorous independent scrutiny. But too many boards, in practice, have been overly passive or ceremonial — better at responding to ethical failures than preventing them.

As AGB has noted in its most recent governance assessments, boards are increasingly consumed by demands for immediate compliance with outside mandates and political directives, losing sight of their core mission. Leadership instability compounds the issue — with presidents averaging five-year tenures and state governors cycling through office every few years, institutions remain in a constant state of adjustment, and meaningful sustained oversight becomes harder to achieve.

Meanwhile, a BoardEffect analysis of AGB data found that about a third of college and university board trustees lack financial training, and more than a fourth admit they do little to oversee the college's budget or finances. If boards can't meaningfully oversee institutional finances, it's difficult to imagine them proactively monitoring the full range of a president's external relationships.

The Disclosure Gap

Even where conflict-of-interest policies exist, their effectiveness depends entirely on disclosure — and disclosure depends on the person with the potential conflict voluntarily reporting it.

ProPublica's landmark "Dollars for Profs" investigation found that even as universities have stepped up their internal reporting requirements over the past two decades, many public institutions have codified faculty disclosures as private information, making it nearly impossible for the public to access the records. More than a third of the nearly 30 state universities that rejected ProPublica's public records requests cited personnel privacy laws. If this transparency problem applies to faculty — who operate under more direct day-to-day oversight than a president — the opacity problem is likely even more acute at the presidential level.

University presidents typically disclose outside business relationships in annual conflict-of-interest filings, but those filings are reviewed by the very board that the president helped select. The circularity of that accountability structure is difficult to overstate.

The Ohio State case adds another layer: the inappropriate relationship did not involve a formal business partnership or financial interest that would have appeared on a standard disclosure form. It involved informal access — introductions, use of institutional credibility, facilitation of relationships with other Ohio State leaders. That category of benefit is inherently harder to capture in any disclosure framework, yet it can be enormously valuable to a private business and enormously damaging to an institution's integrity.

The Influence Peddling Problem in Higher Education

What makes university leadership particularly susceptible to access-based influence is the sheer value of institutional credibility. A university president's endorsement, attendance at an event, guest appearance on a podcast, or facilitation of a meeting with other institutional leaders can be worth more to an outside party than any direct financial transfer. And because none of these activities require money to change hands, they often fall outside the formal conflict-of-interest frameworks that focus on financial relationships.

As Springer Nature research on university presidents as boundary spanners has documented, the boundaries of higher education organizations are becoming increasingly porous, with university presidents establishing growing webs of connections between their institutions and external organizations — connections that have implications for governance, decision-making, and conflict-of-interest policy. The study found significant growth in these external presidential connections between 2005 and 2020, with three distinct patterns emerging across institutions, suggesting the risk is not uniform but is widespread.

What Reform Looks Like

What would meaningful reform look like? A governance crisis analysis from Changing Higher Ed recommends that presidents be evaluated annually by an objective outside party — not by a board that may be too close to the president to offer independent assessment. That same analysis underscores that boards must set clear goals and metrics for the president's performance and hold themselves to the same standard through regular self-review.

More concretely, institutions that want to prevent the next Ted Carter situation might consider several practical steps: independent ethics officers reporting to the board rather than the president; mandatory disclosure of all significant outside relationships including non-financial access arrangements; and regular independent audits of the president's external engagement calendar.

The American Council of Trustees and Alumni puts it plainly: "Don't be shy. Don't feel you shouldn't ask questions, that you shouldn't do appropriate investigation. The worst possible thing is embarrassment for the school because of failures that oversight could prevent."

The American Association of University Professors, noting this is Ohio State's third president since 2020, has called for a transparent hiring process that honors shared governance. That institutional instability is itself a governance failure — a signal that the structures for selecting, overseeing, and if necessary removing university presidents are not working as intended.

The Cost to Students and the Public

The ethical failures of university presidents are not abstract governance problems. At public universities in particular, where tuition dollars and state appropriations fund operations, the misuse of institutional resources for private benefit is a misuse of public money. Students who pay tuition at Ohio State have a legitimate stake in how that institution's resources and credibility are deployed.

More broadly, every high-profile ethics failure at a major university erodes the public trust that institutions of higher education depend on to attract students, donors, and legislative support. At a moment when public confidence in universities is already under strain — from debates over campus speech, federal funding cuts, and rising tuition costs — self-inflicted governance failures are a luxury no institution can afford.

Ted Carter made a mistake, and he resigned for it. But if Ohio State — and the dozens of institutions watching this story unfold — treats his departure as the end of the story rather than the beginning of a serious structural reckoning, the conditions for the next presidential ethics scandal are already in place.