Over the last four decades, the number of universities in Chile has increased dramatically (from eight to more than 50), along with the total enrollment of students (from 100,000 to 670,000 approximately). University presidents have played an increasingly important and complex role in this process. Meanwhile, understanding what happens at the very top of universities and who governs them is long overdue. Thus far, no study has attempted to understand what drives university presidents’ survival in Chile. Drawing on scholarship on university presidents’ turnover and on presidential survival from political science, we approach universities as political entities in which actors compete for power and office. Using an original dataset, we quantitatively analyze 236 presidents from 60 different Chilean universities between 1990 and 2019 to determine why some presidents stay in office while other involuntarily steps down. Our results show that survival is chiefly explained by the university’s level of institutionalization (accreditation and year of foundation), whether it is public (state-owned) or private, and the frequency of street protests against presidents.

在过去的四十年中，智利的大学数量急剧增加（从八所增加到50多家），并且学生的总入学人数（从100,000人增加到670,000人）。大学校长在这一过程中扮演着越来越重要和复杂的角色。同时，很早就应该知道在大学的最高层发生什么以及由谁来管理大学。到目前为止，还没有研究试图了解是什么因素导致了智利大学校长的生存。利用有关大学校长离职率的奖学金和政治学上的总统生存奖学金，我们将大学视为政治实体，参与者在其中竞争权力和职务。使用原始数据集，我们对1990年至2019年智利60所不同大学的236位校长进行了定量分析，以确定为什么有些校长继续任职而另一些校长自愿辞职。我们的结果表明，生存的主要原因是大学的制度化水平（资格和成立年份），是公立（国有）还是私立，以及街头抗议总统的频率。