When C. Michael Smith interviewed to be president of the American University of Afghanistan, he faced his toughest questions from an unexpected source: a group of 30 students in Kabul. “They really grilled me,” he says.

The students wanted to know how long Mr. Smith would stick around if he got the job. The university, which bills itself as Afghanistan’s “only independent, private, nonprofit, nonsectarian, coeducational institution of higher learning,” had already suffered from turnover at the top. The former minister of higher education who founded it, in 2004, was its first acting head. Its only previous president, Thomas M. Stauffer, resigned in September 2008, after less than two years of a controversy-marred tenure.

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