The largest study on presidential partners, with 461 partners participating, including 77 who identified as male, was conducted in 2016, when I joined with Darwin D. Hendel, PhD, and Gwendolyn H. Freed, PhD, to conduct a survey. We published a research paper titled “The Lives of Presidential Partners in Higher Education Institutions.” The paper can be downloaded here, or at https://conservancy.umn.edu/handle/11299/183467 .
The following graphs are from “The Lives of Presidential Partners in Higher Education Institutions.”
Official residences for leaders of higher education institutions are of particular interest for me. In addition to the 2016 research, in 2022 I participated in an informal survey of the 66 member institutions of the Association of American Universities (AAU), an association of North America’s leading research universities.
We discovered that over ninety percent of the AAU institutions have official residences for their leaders. Some institutions have more than one house, with houses, for example, for both campus heads and system heads, or one house for entertaining and a newer home where the leader lives. Of the fourteen major research universities in the Big 10 conference (which is both an academic and athletic conference), all of the institutions have presidential residences, some have more than one house. (The University of Illinois currently has a home for the president in Urbana-Champaign, and is building a new home for the chancellor. The University of Wisconsin has homes for both the president and the chancellor in Madison.)
A post with photos of official residences can also be found on this website.
