“If you are a public college president, getting on the wrong side of a governor or state legislature can be a career-ending action,” said Terry W. Hartle, senior vice president at the American Council on Education.
Even so, Michael A. McRobbie, the president of Indiana University, whose flagship campus is in Bloomington, said he did not feel pressure to decide either way.
“Less than 50 percent of the university population has been vaccinated,” he said. “The medical advisers who were involved in this don’t see how we can return to a normal state of affairs without the mandate.”
Long before any university had announced its plans for the fall, Nancy Cantor, the chancellor of Rutgers’s campus in Newark, remembers getting a weekend call from the university’s chief operating officer, who wanted to know if she would support a vaccine requirement.