At dozens of colleges this month, graduates will get diplomas, hug their parents, toss their caps in the air. But it's not just students who are starting anew this commencement season: Many of the schools are, too.

There has been lots of turnover in leadership at Washington universities recently, shaking up schools that have had the same presidents for many years. [It's true there's been quite a bit of turnover, but I'm not sure this means much of a shake-up in most of these places.]

That means new leaders for the city's largest private employer (George Washington University), one of the country's most elite historically black universities (Howard), and the only liberal arts college for deaf people (Gallaudet) -- leaders who will make decisions that affect not only students and research, but neighborhoods, jobs, hospitals, real estate and the intellectual life of the place.

And "they may be a precursor for a major shift in higher education," said David L. Warren, president of the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities.

Some longtime presidents remain in the area -- at George Mason University, the University of Maryland Baltimore County and elsewhere. [Note that the article says nothing about the stable and successful presidency of the most important Maryland campus: College Park.] But after years of stability, with many local presidents long outlasting the eight-year national average, the higher education terrain is shifting -- at some schools, dramatically.

Last month, William J. Frawley, the new president of the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, was fired soon after he was charged with driving while intoxicated on two consecutive days. [The Frawley case is the only one that fits the Post's scenario, though even that one doesn't fit it very well. Frawley was not long- but short-serving. And he presided over a school that can't have been much of a pressure-cooker. Small, set in its ways, genteel... I suspect the problem with Mary Washington for someone like Frawley, who'd just been at GW for a few years, was the opposite: It was probably pretty dull.]

At Gallaudet University, protests set off by the choice of a new president paralyzed the school and brought international attention during the fall, ending with the board yanking the appointment. [This says nothing about the capacity of the chosen president to stand up to pressure. Indeed, far as I can tell, she stood up to it extremely well.]

And when Benjamin Ladner was forced out of American University a year and a half ago in a spending scandal that reverberated nationally, it made some trustees more aggressive about oversight. [Again, the Ladner thing had nothing to do with a pressure-cooker presidency. He seems to have loped happily along through his years at AU. The Ladner thing was about his outrageous money-grubbing.]

"The climate in boardrooms has changed, and not for the better," said Patricia McGuire, president of Trinity University in Washington, who soon will find herself, with 18 years in the job, the longest-serving leader in the 15-member Consortium of Universities of the Washington Metropolitan Area. "There's a fine line between asking tough questions, probing, holding leaders accountable -- and making it so unpleasant to hold the executive office that people just can't do it anymore." [See how confused the article is? The prior paragraph has talked about Ladner. McGuire was one of Ladner's loudest and most eloquent attackers. Thus, at least in terms of the just-discussed case, McGuire had no trouble at all with a university making it so unpleasant for a president to continue to serve that he leaves. That's exactly what AU rightly did.]

Some presidents have told her, "I don't need this." [Who in the DC area has said this? If it was Ladner, the complete sentence, presumably, would be, "I don't need this possibility of jail time, and the university is clearly on its way toward discovering things about my pillaging that might send me there..."]

Frank Wu, a trustee at Gallaudet, said, "The increasing complexity of colleges and universities, heavy regulation, intense public scrutiny, demands for fundraising, relentless pursuit of rankings -- each has dramatically increased the pressure, and together they've transformed the college presidency." [Wu makes it sound way pressured, to be sure. But take away words like intense and relentless, which just lard things up, and the reality is that this describes what university presidents have long done. When you add to his list an extensive administrative staff and, for more and more presidents, personal compensation worth millions, most of them seem to be holding up quite well.... And I don't want to lay it on too thick here, but presidents of Wu's university, Gallaudet, have come and gone for decades while presiding over a scandalous graduation rate, and there's been, far as I can tell, virtually no pressure on them about this.]

Warren said he could sum it up in a single word, all caps: MORE. More of everything is expected from presidents. [And immensely more by way of salary and compensation and perks is given to them. No doubt there's a connection between a real trend -- the insane growth in university presidential compensation -- and the language of crisis to which the Post is contributing.]

There's other pressure, too: Colleges are among the last true democracies, Wu said; people lower in rank can band together to force the chief out. [This can sometimes happen, but it hardly makes colleges -- notorious for the secrecy, for instance, of their decision-making -- true democracies. As in national presidencies, constant instability at the top is more likely to be a result of lack of democracy.]

Can and do, as faculty and students in Washington showed recently. The board makes the decision on hiring and firing presidents. But the campus community sure can ratchet up things.

There are new presidents at the Corcoran College of Art and Design and Montgomery College, and new ones coming this summer to George Washington University and Prince George's Community College. Howard University's president has announced he's stepping down next year.

Some said the local turnover is a sign of a growing national trend. A study by the American Council on Education found that half of college presidents are older than 60. "When you have half of your entire workforce in that retirement category, that implies huge change" coming, said Ray Cotton, a lawyer with expertise in higher education and presidential contracts. "I would call it a tsunami of change of presidential leadership in the U.S."

It's really a time when boards will be challenged to find new leadership," he added.

Some said it's easier to recruit someone to Washington, with all the opportunities it affords. Others think it's particularly tough, because city and national politics get layered onto the normal stresses of the job.

"It's a pressure cooker here," Cotton said. "When you're the president of a university in D.C., you're in the national limelight." [But see, that's a good thing. The president of GW grooved on White House dinner invitations and general power-proximity. Other local university presidents do too. Yes, Ladner should have known that ripping off an institution down the street from Congress was liable to earn him more notice than someone ripping off a university in Idaho; but that's not about his pressure-cooker job. That's about his stupidity.]