Joe Gottlieb:

Welcome to Transformed, a higher digital podcast focused on the new whys, the new whats, and the new hows in higher ed. In each episode, you will experience hosts and guests pulling for the resurgence of higher ed, while identifying and discussing the best practices needed to accomplish that resurgence. Culture, strategy and tactics, planning and execution, people, process, and technology. It’s all on the menu because that’s what’s required to truly transform. Hello, welcome and thanks for joining us for another presidential series episode of Transformed. My name is Joe Gottlieb, president and CTO of Higher Digital, and today I’m joined by Pardis Mahdavi, who has been chosen as the 19th president of the University of Laverne. Pardis, Welcome to Transformed.

Pardis Mahdavi:

Thanks, Joe. I’m happy to be here. What do you wanna talk about?

Joe Gottlieb:

Glad you asked. I want to talk about how you are leveraging network effects for higher ed reform, but first, tell me a bit about your personal journey and how it has shaped the passion for the work that you do in higher ed.

Pardis Mahdavi:

Thanks, Joe. Well, as you can probably tell from my name, I am a proudly hyphenated Iranian American. My parents came to this country during the Iranian Revolution in the late 1970s. And we initially were settled in Minnesota, and then one day when I was about six years old, it was right in the middle of, you know, Iran Contra, you know, following the hostage crisis. And I came home from school one day and there was a sign posted in front of my door of my home, and the sign said, burn this house, terrorists live here. And that prompted my parents to make the very difficult decision to leave our Minnesota home and move to Southern California, where we had a lot of friends and family and, and where we heard there were a lot more Iranians in, in the neighborhood. But I, I tell this to you because my father said something to me during that move, which really has shaped and informed my life truly.

Pardis Mahdavi:

He said, you know, Pardis, people, they can take everything from you. They can take your belongings, they can take your home, they can even take your country. But the one thing no one can ever take from you is your education. And that’s why I went into higher education, because I wanted to help other people get that, which can never be taken away from them. And, you know, our lives in, in this country have been transformed by having access to education. And so, you know, access and education to me, have always been an important part of, of my core values.

Joe Gottlieb:

Well, that background explains a lot for the way that you’ve been very motivated and the things you’ve been doing in this space for quite some time. And I know you’re really excited about starting your new post as president of the University of Laverne, but this story that I wanna cover today starts a bit earlier than that. You were hired by the University of Montana to lead an academic renewal cycle as provost and chief academic officer driven by President Seth Bonner’s observation that Montana was suffering a labor shortage that had been exacerbated by covid. So what key changes did that cycle produce, and what did it help you understand about the needs for education reform in this case in the rural west?

Pardis Mahdavi:

One of the things that President Bodner and I quickly learned was that, a world emerging from triple pandemic, you know, very real viral pandemic of covid and that rearing of social pandemics of racism and inequality combined with climate emergencies really had placed our world in a time of uncertainty. In addition to that we started looking a little bit more closely at, you know, labor shortages and, and workforce, and talking to employers who would tell us, you know, Hey, across the state of Montana, it is really hard for us to find a vet tech, you know, or we can’t fill a certain number of jobs, we just can’t, and we need to do workforce development. And that led us to really look more deeply at patterns across the country, not only in Montana, but you know, kind of where higher education was and, and how, you know how we might address this very real challenge that was facing us in terms of work workforce development.

Pardis Mahdavi:

And as we, as we dove into the data, and Joe, you already know this and, and likely many of your listeners do, but it certainly bears repeating because to me, it’s quite staggering. You know, not only are we looking at a demographic decline coming up ahead, right? Less number of folks, you know, eligible to be college educated from a demographic decline. Studies like the Gallup Poll and the Hecker report released, you know, last year, show that you know, the number of Americans who believe that college is not a good use of time, let alone money is, is on the sharp increase, right? So what we’re looking at is for the first time in American history this generation would be less educated than generations that came before. That is the first time in American history. Up, up until now in this country’s history, every subsequent generation has been more educated.

Pardis Mahdavi:

We are in this sort of tipping point, if you will where, you know, faith in, in higher ed is at an all time low. So, you know, that, that, that presents a problem. President Bodner has described that as a national security threat. And, and I definitely agree. It also presents an opportunity for us in higher education to take a look at what we can do to address that. And so one of the things that we started looking at in Montana was, you know, okay, well there, there are changing needs for the learners today, and the workforce has also changed, right? Jobs that may have been needed in the past, aren’t there. We have a whole new set of jobs coming out. Let’s even take a look at cybersecurity. Let’s look at artificial intelligence, right? A whole new set of jobs coming out that we, you know, we need to develop programs for.

Pardis Mahdavi:

And yet, you know, with the demographic decline, with the enrollment decline in colleges across the country, resources are limited. And, and with faith in higher ed, you know, kind of decreasing, certainly institutions like the University of Montana that are, are dependent on, you know, tuition dollars, but also state dollars, you know, resources are shrinking, right? So what can we do in, in this situation? And, you know, for me, my, my academic career, you know, after, after completing my PhD at Columbia, I actually, my first professor job was at Pomona College at the Claremont Colleges. And one of the things that I had observed through 11 years at the Claremont Colleges was the benefits of a shared services model, right? So, you know Pomona College, you know, very strong in, in the liberal arts you know, a five minute walk across the street was Harvey Mud College, very strong in engineering, right?

Pardis Mahdavi:

In in math and engineering. You know, just across the street was Claremont mc, Claremont McKenna College, huge strength in government politics policy, right? And so I saw the benefits of this shared services, and, and for those who don’t know, the Claremont Colleges have have an arrangement where you can take, you know, you may be a Pomona student, but you can take classes at, at all five colleges. And so I saw in, in a microcosm how well a shared services model could work in addition to the fact that, you know we could share things like costs for the library, we could share other types of costs, and also build an ecosystem where faculty were able to collaborate interdisciplinarily with colleagues across colleges. So I thought, well, gosh, that works so well, you know, in that microcosm level, how do we think about applying that at, at scale, at a place like the University of Montana? What are the kinds of things we need to do? We have an opportunity for, for pooling resources and, and thinking about a shared services model with kind of a network across that Rocky Mountain West that, that, that you, you asked me about. But we also have an opportunity to think about what are the types of knowledge that learners need today, specifically the interdisciplinary types of knowledge that not only learners need, but that the workforce needs for us to provide. So that’s kind of where this, this all, all started to, to come together for me.

Joe Gottlieb:

That’s fascinating. And, and it’s really emerging. I’m, I’m hearing this pattern in more and more places, which is great, right? The fact that you saw it down at the Claremont McKenna college’s system and and could start to apply it. So this led to, you know, you are thinking about how to balance availability, leverage availability of courses from different institutions that might be able to take their finite resources and deliver them, and therefore start to share services across a broader, albeit more complex collection of, of, of institutions. So what are some of the programs and maybe some of the student success stories that, that you are starting to see reflect this new balance of, of specialization and partnership for maybe some of the generics?

Pardis Mahdavi:

Yeah, that’s a great question. You know, Joe, and, and I think, you know, one of the things to, to note is, you know, no one university can be all things to all people, right? And, and yet, there, there, there are demands, right? A across states. So let me give you kind of a concrete example of, of a problem we needed to solve. In the state of Montana, there are no medical schools, right? And yet we, we need doctors in Montana, right? And we need doctors everywhere. But it just, it wasn’t you know, it wasn’t feasible for us to build a medical school, right? In a resource constrained environment. Could we build a medical school? Was that the best use of resources? Or was it a better use of resources for us to leverage the unique strengths we have? So for instance, we have tremendous strengths in the areas of environment, sustainability, conservation.

Pardis Mahdavi:

You know we have, at the University of Montana, we had, we have thing, you know, access to things that no amount of money. You know, Harvard could have all the money in the world. They still can’t buy lure experimental forest, right? No matter how, you know innovative, you know, an institution in Arizona might be, they can’t buy Flathead Lake biological field stations. So being in Montana, we had access to certain things and that those were our strengths, right? So we decided to partner with the state of Washington and with the University of Washington UDub, where we would send our students, you know, to, to, to, to Washington to go to medical school. And also we would be able to offer some of the more specialized tracks. So for instance, we offer wilderness medicine. That’s something that we can do that maybe other places can’t do. And so again, leveraging our strengths to create interdisciplinary shared services learning where we sort of share faculty expertise, share research, share resources so their faculty can come, you know, to to, to Montana and, you know, have their students come and, and have our students there. And we do a controlled burn, right? Leveraging the resources we have and the expertise we have to meet the very real needs of the learner today.

Joe Gottlieb:

Great example. But that now has led to something bigger than that, right? While you started partnering with University of Washington this has now led to something that you refer to as the Networked University Initiative. So why don’t you spend a little time talking about that, and then we’ll, we’ll delve into what it’s sort of offering.

Pardis Mahdavi:

Yeah. So, you know, we, what we noticed with the, the Whammy program, right, which is is, was the program that we kinda came together, you know, Montana and, and, you know, and, and a couple of other states with, with Washington for the medical school, we realized that that could be applied to other types of learning as well. And we realized that not only did we wanna send students, you know, to, to Washington for let’s say medical training, but we wanted students to also be able to come to Montana for, for the unique strengths that we offered. And so that led to, you know, us talking about and thinking about, okay, well, how do we scale this? Right? And, and so, you know, I come very much from the school of, of Michael Crow at Arizona State University size, speed, and scale, right?

Pardis Mahdavi:

How, you know, if we’ve come up with a solution that’s a workable solution, how do we scale it? And what are the other kinds of learning that we could do? You know? Another area that we started, you know, building strength in was around, you know, horse, you know, and then this was really our partners down in Dillon, the University of Montana Western, which is down in Dillon, and they have the first degree in horsemanship, in natural horsemanship. And so we started looking at, you know, we have classes in sustainable ranching. We at Montana have classes in things like sustainable hunting, hunting for sustainability. I mean, this is something that someone who grew up in California, like me, I mean, I could have never thought, right? That, that there would be expertise in this. And there is, and it’s strong, and it’s robust, and it’s in demand.

Pardis Mahdavi:

And so how can we pool what, you know, what we offer, and then have access to the unique strengths of, you know other institutions, let’s say, you know, in Idaho or in in Wyoming. And really throughout the region. And, and we started asking ourselves, you know, well, why would we be, you know, why would we need to limit it to the Rocky Mountain West? When, when we could expand this further and, and basically empower students, empower the learner to be able to get the kinds of specialization the, both, the breadth and the depth that they’re looking for, which by the way, is what employers are looking for a a and be able to, you know, move between institutions, especially in this post Covid era where we have all, you know, leaned into online modalities even more. How can we leverage that? How do we leverage technology to provide solution at that level and at that altitude for the demands of the learner and the demands of the workforce today? And so that’s what led to it.

Joe Gottlieb:

So it’s really exciting to see that synergy coming together and, and to you, you know, to, to hear the story of how it, it started reasonably small, but, but reasonably quickly has, has grown into something that reflects the the need, right? Reflects the, the enlightened self-interest of these institutions working together to produce a greater good. But let’s turn it around now. So now, talk about how that could then be harnessed to not just address the labor shortage per se, but to then be put into motion towards solving another really pressing problem, which is addressing the needs of the underserved in education.

Pardis Mahdavi:

Yeah. And you know, that, that I think is, again, at, at its core what I, what I wanted to do, right? Because for me, one of the things I’ve always said is I’ve always been uncomfortable with a false bifurcation or creating a false dichotomy between access and excellence when it comes to education. I don’t think it’s, it’s, it’s correct to say that the less accessible something is, the more excellent it must be, and vice versa. I don’t think we should say that just because we have something excellent, let’s say specialization in wilderness medicine, right? Something really excellent that we should cut off access. And so the idea was, okay, well look, if we have something great, why don’t we make it accessible? Right? Why don’t we make it so that if you’re a learner in Arizona, if you’re a learner in, in, in Arizona, and you want to study ranching, sustainable ranching, you should be able to do that.

Pardis Mahdavi:

And, and that shouldn’t be that shouldn’t be predicated on, you know, a, an institution in Arizona creating a sustainable ranching degree program that it shouldn’t require the university to do that with, with online. And, you know, with the ability to switch modalities, you, you can, you know, kind of create these different pathways of learning in, in different places. And so, you know, the other, the other issue for me too, I mean, going back to the medical school example, was, you know, if you’re, if you’re a student, if, you know, if you’re a young person growing up in Montana and you wanna be a doctor, w why should you have to go out of state? Right? Because that then also, I mean, another very real problem that people in Montana would talk about was brain drain. They said, okay, you know, our, our, our kids, they leave Montana to go to medical school, and then they’re gone.

Pardis Mahdavi:

They don’t come back. Right? Or, you know, they have to make the very difficult decision to leave families behind. I mean, I you know, one of the greatest gifts of working in Montana was the opportunity to work with a large population of Native American students. And, you know, I can’t tell you the number of students that I met who ha you know, would, and Montana is the fourth largest geographical state in America. And, you know, would have to make the very difficult decision to leave, you know, the reservation if, let’s say they were, you know, part of the Fort Peck tribes, which is kind of closer to the Dakotas and come all the way over to Missoula to, to complete their degree. When, you know, somebody back home got sick or needed them, they would, you know, had to make the decision between dropping out, you know, to, to meet the needs of their family or, or, you know, you know, leaving their families in the lurch. And I think access is, is a really important thing for students today. And so what we wanted to do is figure out a way where students didn’t have to leave home. They didn’t have to leave the communities that they were part of building and, and had supported them in order to get educa the education that they wanted to be able to then pour back into their communities. So, so that’s, that’s another issue, another

Joe Gottlieb:

Great story about that the tension of that problem as you said it, and it, and it’s, it’s worse. It’s very typical, but very unfortunate potential outcome is choosing, helping my family, putting food on the table versus education. You know, these, these choices are unfortunately too prevalent particularly amongst those that are, are underserved by education, and we’re trying to rectify that. I love, love the way you just talked about also this notion of excellence should be about merit and value, not about exclusivity, right? So to your point, there’s no reason to, to lean on exclusivity as a proxy for value or excellence. And I adapt to say, in some cases we’ve had some of that. But we digress. Let’s shift gears and now talk about how did you choose Laverne <laugh> given that you’d gotten this thing rolling and, and were experiencing all the emergent benefits of that concept and that vision and now you’re headed to Laverne. Tell me about what you plan to do there.

Pardis Mahdavi:

Yeah. Well, you know, the Laverne position, it was one of those which spoke so deeply to who I am on the inside, right? And I, and I love that, you know, that, that you resonated with that point about access and excellence. Hmm. That is at the core of the University of Laverne, right? The University of Laverne has always been about meeting learners where they’re at and serving all different types of learners. They have always been about serving the underserved with high quality, right? High quality, highly excellent education that is accessible, right? And that is supported as you probably know, the University of Laverne is an H S I, it’s a Hispanic serving institution, deep, deep commitment to, to place and to community. There’s a very robust service mission embedded in the University of Laverne. And these, all these have all spoken to me you know, as a leader, these are all part of my core values.

Pardis Mahdavi:

So that was a big piece of it. The other piece, as you heard me say in our opening statement, you know, when, when it, when it came time for, for my family to, to figure out where we wanted to put down Roots, California is what we chose Southern California in particular. Because, and so that was, that was the community that raised me. And so this is an opportunity for me to walk the walk of the talk that I just spoke two minutes ago of pouring back into my community, right? You know, for me, moving back to tes as we affectionately call Los Angeles <laugh> you know, for me, moving back to tes, this is a coming home, right? This is a coming home for me. And it’s an opportunity to be a part of, of the bright future of an institution that is getting it right in higher education that doesn’t bifurcate access and excellent, that is about service that doesn’t shy away from workforce development, that doesn’t shy away from the populations that typically aren’t necessarily at the top, you know, at the top of, you know, what other institutions kind of in the area who, who others are focusing on, right?

Pardis Mahdavi:

So the University of La Verne is decidedly not Pomona College, right? They’re about serving the underserved, and they’re about access and excellence. And that really spoke to me. So it was, it was, it was pretty hard to, to say no to an opportunity to go home and to give back.

Joe Gottlieb:

I understand. So, so then, now that you’re headed to Laverne, how do you see the opportunity there reflecting similar network effects around leveraging the, the collective? And Laverne has its own share of diversity and, and and scale. So leveraging it within Laverne University, proper University of Laverne Proper, as well as beyond more broadly, in fact will, will they be active in the network university initiative to, to participate in that ecosystem as well?

Pardis Mahdavi:

I mean, absolutely. Right. And, and what’s great about the University of La Verne is it’s kind of this, it, it’s kinda this microcosm, right? Like you just said. So, you know, six different regional and online campuses, right? So, you know, the University of La Verne certainly kind of the, the home base is right there in the town of La Verne. But we have campuses in Oxnard, we have campuses in Burbank. We have a, a very well known law school in Ontario, and we’ve just broken ground on building our new college of community health and wellbeing. Which, which is an, it’s going to be in Ontario, is where we’re building it. Burbank, as I mentioned, Oxnard Orange. So, you know, we have campuses throughout the Southern California area that, that e that both provide access and different touch points for people throughout that geographic region and also seek to leverage the expertise of, of the, you know, the different areas.

Pardis Mahdavi:

So in a way, it’s kind of a microcosm of this Networked University’s initiative in particular with you know, university of La Verne was in the online game pretty early on, right? Because that was how they were serving all of these different learners. And so because of that, you know, and having the regional hubs that gave wraparound services, and this to me is, is, is a fantastic model of what we can do. And, and to scale that, right? Is having these sort of regional touchpoints where online students can come, receive wraparound services, advising, et cetera, maybe do some group projects, get career advice get placed in their communities for internships and other types of experiential learning while then it’s that sort of, that that really powerful hub and spoke model. So to me, it, it’s, it’s really a microcosm of, of what I’m talking about. And, and I think that it will play a great and I hope important role at the Network University’s initiative because, you know, within the Southern California area I would say the University of La Verne is intentionally trying to serve communities like, such as the Inland Empire that are not, that don’t have the benefit of as many institutions of higher education as let’s say the coastline does. So, so I’m excited for the possibilities, honestly.

Joe Gottlieb:

That’s very exciting. We’ll, we’ll be watching you and rooting for you. So let’s let’s summarize what are, what are three takeaways we can offer our listeners on this big topic of leveraging network effects for higher ed reform?

Pardis Mahdavi:

Yeah. You know, it’s, it’s always, always fun to distill it down to the three, but I’d say the three main takeaways, you know, sort of where we started, Joe, you know, higher education is experiencing a moment of crisis, right? Both in terms of the demographic cliff that that’s coming, but also in terms of perceptions about value, you know, and, and so we would be looking at, you know, an overall less educated America, which as President Bodner has said, is a national security crisis. Mm-Hmm. So second, you know, we are at a tipping point. And, and that tipping point demands a robust response from all of US leaders in higher education. And, and some creative thinking about what is our role? What is the role of higher education emerging you know, from post pandemic and, and emerging in a time of uncertainty.

Pardis Mahdavi:

What is the role that we can play, you know, both in creating new bodies of knowledge and, and interdisciplinarity, but also in helping with workforce development. So, you know, we’re at this tipping point and we have an opportunity to, to step up and respond. And then finally I would say, you know one response is to, to create a network. And to, to really think about these shared services possibilities to really meet all different types of learners where they are at by leveraging e each institution’s strengths, the different strengths of place of specialty to, to really create kind of a win-win win scenario where students are able to access the learning that they want. Faculty are able to engage in the kinds of interdisciplinary research that our world needs and, and that they want to solve these unscripted problems. And as higher education as a system, we can start to prepare this generation and, and sort of all generations of learners for the needs of our world today.

Joe Gottlieb:

Fantastic. Pardis, thank you so much for joining me today, and we will be really looking forward to seeing the work you do at the University of Laverne. I hope you really enjoy it.

Pardis Mahdavi:

Thanks so much for having me, Joe. It’s been a pleasure to be here. And, and, and really just, just such an honor. Thank you.

Joe Gottlieb:

And thanks to our guests for joining us as well. I hope you have a great day and look, we’ll look forward to hosting you again on the next episode of Transformed.