Dr. Ian McNeely
So the motivation really was to say hey, no one has really attempted to write like a sober, dispassionate, objective, evidence-based story of how these institutions run there are gazillions of books out there about how they’re not doing this right or they need to do that better, or if they only did this they would be even better than they are now or, conversely, defending them against attackers by saying we stand for ideals, we value academic freedom. So my motivation in the first instance was just to say let’s get beyond the diatribes on the one hand, and the apologia on the other. And what I found was in some ways surprising, because when I dug into the machinery, looked at how the engine room works, how the sausage is made, it was surprisingly reassuring that we do do our best to live up high-minded these ideals, whether you work for a corporation or a nonprofit. Yeah, there’s going to be flaws, there’s going to be warts.
Joe Gottlieb
There’s going to be things that don’t live up to the ideal but that still come pretty close. That’s Ian F McNeely, professor of History and Senior Associate Dean for Undergraduate Education at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, sharing what motivated him to write the book entitled the University Unfettered Public Higher Education in an Age of Disruption. We used my questions about his book to talk about how a public flagship, R1 overcame reduced state-level funding and evolved its business model through a series of difficult but ultimately successful transformations over the last 20 years. I hope you enjoy our conversation.
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 and thanks for joining us for another episode of TRTTTT.
Joe Gottlieb
My name is Joe Gottlieb, President and CTO of Higher Digital, and today I am joined by Dr Ian F McNeely, professor of History and Senior Associate Dean for Undergraduate Education at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and, importantly, author of the University Unfettered Public Higher Education in an Age of Disruption.
Dr. Ian McNeely
Thanks, Joe, I’m happy to be here. What do you want to talk about?
Joe Gottlieb
Glad you asked. I want to talk about this book you published, but first I’d love for you to share a bit about your background, on your personal journey, how you got connected into the world of higher ed.
Dr. Ian McNeely
Yeah, so let me begin at the beginning, which was that I was literally born in a university hospital and in a sense I’ve never left universities for that moment. So I grew up in a university town, I’ve taught in university towns, I live in one now. I have always been a creature of higher ed, but in some ways also outside of it. So a lot of my growing up as a child was looking at the local university, in this case the University of Florida, kind of wondering what it was all about, wondering what gave it this mystique, what made it such a powerful symbol of American progress, and kind of wanting to get into it. But also again, partly because my family came from a relatively disadvantaged background, also a bit suspicious of what was going on there. So long story short, I went to college, went to graduate school, became an historian, became an historian of knowledge, in fact, not coincidentally wanting to look at the history of higher education institutions. And then after that I got into university administration. When it became sort of necessary for my promotion to full professor, I thought, well, I got into university administration. When it became sort of necessary for my promotion to full professor, I thought, well, I should get some service, figure out some committees to join and just figure out how this thing worked. That corresponded more or less with the onset of the Great Recession in 2008, 2009. And it was clear to me then that there was going to be a lot of change in higher education because of that event. So the intersection of my personal story and then literally the global financial crisis really got me into university administration at a really unique moment.
Dr. Ian McNeely
I went on to do several jobs at administration at my former institution, during which time we saw lots of budgetary ups and downs. We saw the first election of Donald Trump, we saw protests against George Floyd’s murder, we saw the pandemic. It was a very dramatic decade between the Great Recession and COVID-19. And when I got out of administration, as it so happened, after COVID-19, I wanted to look back on this very disruptive time during the 2010s that I lived through and, really going back again to the beginning, kind of processing what is this institution that we call the university? What does it do, how does it work, what did I experience and how can I translate that on a broader canvas to look at the larger trends in society and in higher ed that concretize themselves in my own personal experience of helping to run a university, in this case a similar role to the one I have now overseeing undergraduate education.
Dr. Ian McNeely
I wrote the book in six months. It just kind of came right out of my fingertips and it was the most fun I’ve ever had writing. I sent it off to the publisher. I thought I was done with administration. I go back to the faculty and, lo and behold, a job came up at the University of North Carolina, chapel Hill, which is where I am now. And if you really want to know my motivation, what my personal story is, chapel Hill is where my parents first met, in the dining hall in 1965, which is where I go to buy sushi today. So if I really want to take it back to the beginning, it wasn’t that I was born in a university hospital. The idea of me was only brought about because the institution brought in this case two poor kids who had never had a chance of going to college, made doctors out of both of them and allowed me and my family to grow up in very enviable conditions. So it really comes back full circle to literally the existential debt that I owe to universities, and to public universities in particular.
Joe Gottlieb
What a fitting story. As we get into this, I think it’ll become more clear to our listeners that that’s just a great, great platform and underpinning that you have. So let’s dive in. I want to start with something that you wrote in the introduction and it really caught my attention. You make a claim and a pledge, both of which attracted me.
Joe Gottlieb
The claim is no one, to my knowledge, has written about a university’s inner workings in this way before, with deep empirical grounding in real-world conundrums and strategies framed in historical and comparative contexts and combining insider knowledge with a disinterested perspective. And then the pledge is I aim to demystify a campus world shrouded in high-minded ideals. I speak to any reader who has ever worked in a large, imperfect organization, navigated its complex politics and struggled with how it both does and does not live up to its principles. So I just love both of those things because they just are. They speak volumes about reality, of what’s going on, and so when you look back on your authorship, you know like how else would you describe your motivation to write this book? Double click on that, the claim and pledge there. I just think that’s a you getting a chance to say that would be useful.
Dr. Ian McNeely
Yeah, well, part of it. Again it goes back to my personal biography just growing up surrounded by higher ed in all of institutions, wondering what makes them tick. The bit of the career that I left out was how I became trained to be an historian, which is what I spent a good 25, 30 years perfecting that craft, and, in particular, an historian of German bureaucracy, of all things, which trained me to understand complex organizations, trained me to understand knowledge-based organizations, trained me to be dispassionate where I could about something that I do confess I feel passionately about, as I just said. And so the motivation really was to say, hey, no one is really attempted to write like a sober, dispassionate, objective, evidenced-based story of how these institutions run. There are gazillions of books out there about how they’re not doing this right, or they need to do that better, or if they only did this they would be even better than they are now. Or, conversely, defending them against attackers by saying we stand for ideals, we value academic freedom. So my motivation in the first instance was just to say let’s get beyond the diatribes on the one hand, on the apologia on the other, and what I found was in some ways surprising, because when I dug into the machinery, looked at how the engine room works, how the sausage is made whatever metaphor you want to adopt it was surprisingly reassuring that we do do our best to live up to these high-minded ideals. And when we don’t, it’s like anyone in any organization, whether you work for a corporation or a nonprofit. Yeah, there’s going to be flaws, there’s going to be warts, there’s going to be things that don’t live up to the ideal, but that still come pretty close. So the lesson at least one of the lessons I want people to come away with is like don’t beat up on us.
Dr. Ian McNeely
My motivation was the sense, already in the 2010s and especially now that there were a lot of both internal and external critics of the university and before you beat up on us, take some time to study how the thing works so that if you do want to change it, you’ll know what’s possible and what isn’t. To be honest, when I wrote the book, even after the decade in question, the 2010s, my main motivation was to talk to fellow faculty members or fellow administrators who were internal critics of the university. Every time they close a language department, every time they hire a new football coach and pay him an outrageous amount of money. The internal critics say we’ve lost our mission, our values, we’ve lost our conscience, we’ve abandoned the public, we’re abandoning the humanities, and I wanted to say, well, yeah, I mean sort of, but no, if you look at the decisions that are made within the constraints that we have to make them, we do a remarkably good job of adhering to our ancient ideals under very modern circumstances. We still have a lot of those internal critics.
Dr. Ian McNeely
Now, in the 2020s, we have a lot of external critics and I would say even enemies. We can all read the newspapers and see that the federal government has begun to attack universities in ways that verge on extortion and that manipulate the truth in order to make very ideological claims against universities. I’m not sure that I fully prepared for that when I wrote the book and that’s something we can come back to or not but part of the motivation was to say yeah, if you think we have problems, come and look, we’re opening the books. I got nothing to hide here. It ends up being what I would call a comedy rather than a tragedy rather than you know. A bunch of terrible things happen, there’s a bunch of goofy missteps, but it all ends happily. I would like to hope that we’re still on track for this to be a comedy. The jury is out as to whether that’s going to be true in the 2020s.
Joe Gottlieb
But I do think that if you read the book, you quick reaction to this. That it’s so hard to look at organizations dispassionately, especially when you’re in them, I believe, tends to produce dysfunction because of complexity, because of each person having the need to add value in their own domain that takes away from the whole, and a lack of apparatus to remind the whole about its holistic objectives. And how do we compromise together? Well, guess what? Scaling a large organization doesn’t beget compromise without external forces, and so, I think, is that also part of your finding that? And have you found it, you know, challenging inside even this organization, when you were in it, to grapple with this tendency?
Dr. Ian McNeely
Definitely. I think that you know this is probably true of every institution, but especially university. You have lots of competing goods rather than an attack of good versus evil. It would be one thing if you could sit around in these rooms and hear people saying ridiculous things and shoot them down, because the solution is obvious. Most of this organizational complexity and getting tangled up in knots comes from everyone in the room having a good mission but finding it difficult to all get on the same page.
Dr. Ian McNeely
And what I try to do is, I mean, I provide an argument or an answer to people who think that universities are dysfunctional by making the claim that what disciplines them is the same thing that disciplines other organizations, including especially businesses, which is competition, and we can get into some examples of that later on.
Dr. Ian McNeely
But what focuses the mind when you are in an organization that is performing so optimally is to say what are our peers and competitors doing and what do we need to copy and, ideally, improve upon in order to be doing that thing? Because we have to recruit our students, we have to recruit faculty, we have to provide a product that the public wants, and there’s nothing sordid about applying that logic to a university. If anything. I say that during the golden age of the 20th century public university, when we could rely on enormous amounts of state support, we didn’t have as much of a need to compete. And now, with a lot of that state support taken away, it’s all too clear that if you don’t up your game, you’re going to fall behind your peers. It’s the same thing that happens on a football field every Saturday afternoon. You go up against state and you’ve got to learn to be better so that you’re going to beat them. It’s a friendly rivalry, but it’s what keeps us all on our toes on the academic and not just the athletic side.
Joe Gottlieb
Yeah, Just to be clear, I use the word dysfunction, um, as a polar extreme, not. I think organizations are not terminally dysfunctional, but they have, must contend with this, this tendency and in the case of higher ed, I would agree with you competing goods is more than usually the the culprit, uh, which is much better than the alternatives that you cited. Okay, I have a series of questions that will help us look at and emphasize key takeaways from the book and, hopefully, some useful reflections on the future of higher ed. But before we get into those, I’d like you to summarize the arc of the story of this university unfettered, as you call it so that the points of emphasis that we discuss can show up in context and we can help our listeners consider them. So go ahead and just take us through the answer, if you will, the finding and how you got there.
Dr. Ian McNeely
Yeah. So first of all, maybe I haven’t made this clear yet, but I should it’s a case study. It’s a single anonymized public flagship institution that is not UNC Chapel Hill, but it is exemplary of many public flagships and even sub-flagship public universities. It’s the one I used to teach at, it’s the one I knew from the inside, and I wanted to adopt anonymity, a to protect the innocent, but B to force myself to tell the story in a way that was generalizable, beyond my own experience. And so the story of that was extreme by comparative standards, but also indicative of pressures that most, if not all, public flagships face. So, long story short, the state where it is located had, for decades, disinvested in its universities and forced the institution to raise tuition in order to compensate for the loss, especially by recruiting students from out of state, who paid much higher tuition, and this, for various reasons, provoked a standoff between the institution and the State Board of Higher Education, which wanted the university to maintain its focus on in-state residents and also keep tuition low, and, on top of that, had a lot of other constraints and fetters, bureaucratically speaking, that kept the university from being as dynamic as it could be. In response to these opportunities, it had to recruit students from elsewhere. Long story short, the president floated a scheme to dissolve the university from the state university system and to pledge that the university would still fulfill its mission to the state in other ways. That provoked his firing and that triggered a whole set of domino events throughout the rest of the decade.
Dr. Ian McNeely
So, building on that dramatic incident, which happened in 2011, 2012, each chapter in the book looks at what happened next, but ties that narrative to a series of eight questions about how any public university operates. So the first question is have we lost our public mission in serving private interests, in this case tuition-paying students from out of state? And the answer is no. We do a remarkably good job of serving those interests. The second question well, why is tuition going up then? If you say you’re fulfilling your public mission, why is that the case?
Dr. Ian McNeely
I go through several sets of stakeholders students, faculty administrators, the public itself. I then turn to the missions of the university the research mission, the teaching mission, the diversity mission, the social impact mission. And as I go through it and I swear this was the way I wrote the book when I answered each question, I answered it as empirically and as objectively as I possibly could. And when I first workshopped the book, my colleagues said you know, this is too bland, you’re not saying anything, you’re just being too objective. What does it all add up to?
Dr. Ian McNeely
I said well, actually, now that I think about it, if you look at the answer to every question, it’s some version of competition solves every problem. It’s a bit of an extreme way of putting it, but as the university that I studied, and in tandem with universities of a similar type nationwide, struggled to make its way through this tumultuous decade, they did in fact look at what their rivals were doing, tried to adapt, tried to compete, tried to up their game, and collectively. That continent-wide competition among 50 states was proof that what came out was pretty darn good in the end. And so, for each of these questions, the answer tends to be let’s trust the free market, let’s unfetter universities, and let’s look at this one case study as a kind of proof of concept for what could be, and to some extent already is, the new normal for the way public universities behave in a world in which public disinvestment has been going on for decades.
Joe Gottlieb
Awesome. I just love that. I mean so thanks for setting that up. That is the ultimate finding of the book, and now we’re going to have some fun pinpointing some really, really interesting aspects of what you found when you brought that empirical, objective view. So, starting with, in the stakeholders chapter, focused on the public, you state that quote one of the main reasons, probably the principal reason, universities engage in elaborate multi-year strategic planning exercises is precisely to avoid being led around by mercurial donors with eccentric interests. That way they can instead anticipate large-scale needs, commit them formally to writing and rely on these plans to nudge eager benefactors toward the most effective and appropriate uses of their generosity. Well, I can appreciate the practicality of this window dressing, you know. So I wonder, as a bit of a strategist, as a career strategist, honestly, and perhaps a recovering one, perhaps not do you think that the window dressing has impeded institutions’ ability to actually plan, budget, execute and measure strategic progress in line with mission?
Dr. Ian McNeely
The short answer is no, I don’t think it has. But let me back up and kind of justify that answer and start by providing some context even behind the question. So one of the big critiques of public universities, especially during this era of public disinvestment, is that they become privatized because the states are no longer paying the bills they have to go out and they have to suck up to big donors. And whatever those donors want, they’re pulling the strings behind the scenes and this is yet another way that we’ve sold out. And indeed it’s the case that this is another big highlight of the book. In fact the other book end of it, the university that I study got what at the time was the single largest private donation to a public university in the history of the United States, up behind the public mission of the university. It did not distort it or drag it in the direction of this particular donor’s eccentric interests. And there’s a couple reasons for that. One is that when universities do engage in strategic planning, they make an attempt to inventory all their needs, to do an environment scan on their challenges and opportunities and to be ready with talking points so that when they are lucky enough to have a well-heeled donor or pray to come their way, whether they have a brilliant idea or a kooky idea. They can work with those donors to say you know what this maps onto, something we’ve been wanting to do anyway, and here’s how you can plug in.
Dr. Ian McNeely
And most of these donors are savvy themselves, Whether they come from the corporate world or not. They’ve usually had enough success to know that a coherent strategic plan is better than flitting off in search of the next big thing or shiny penny or whatever, and so it can be very constructive. To have this exercise when it falls short is also a good thing, because universities are so anarchic that not even the best laid plans can be fully executed. Guide institutions’ ability to plan, to budget, to measure, to execute At every institution I’ve seen the strategic plan is almost obviated the moment it’s launched because some new challenge comes along that throws a monkey wrench or, conversely, opens up a new opportunity, and you have to ditch your best laid plans to deal with whatever the issue is that you confront.
Dr. Ian McNeely
Hopefully you’re not just in reactive crisis mode. Hopefully you can go back to the strategic plan and say wait, what was it that we were trying to do before we got derailed? But again, one of the other findings of the book was that even when universities are reacting like amoebas, kind of mindlessly putting out feelers in whatever direction things happen to be going, that’s a productive enough exercise. It makes them nimble, it makes them responsive. It belies the notion that universities are these lumbering, conservative, unresponsive, bureaucratically hindered organizations, because if you look at what’s happening on the ground, they’re often quite able to pivot in response to emerging, dynamic market needs.
Joe Gottlieb
We’ll be right back.
Colleen Baker
Higher Digital, a proud sponsor of the TRANSFORMED podcast, is a full-service, product-agnostic consulting company providing strategic, functional and technical expertise to help colleges and universities navigate digital transformation successfully. We believe true transformation isn’t about forcing change. It’s about unlocking the potential already within your institution. Within your institution, our expert teams specialize in creating tailored solutions for your unique challenges, enabling meaningful and measurable progress. Higher education is evolving faster than ever. How is your institution adapting? Let’s start the conversation today. Visit higher. digital to learn more.
Joe Gottlieb
And now back to our program.
Joe Gottlieb
I appreciate your answer. It does a nice job of forcing me to ask a better question or maybe offer a more precise observation, and that is this that, in my view, first of all, higher ed is not the only vertical that wrestles, or even struggles, with strategic planning. Strategic planning is hard In a world that’s changing more rapidly than ever and that has always increased, right? Strategic planning is therefore harder and harder and harder with time, and I think a lot of the apparatus and methods employed in strategic planning writ large, not just in higher ed, um hasn’t yet adapted to this pace of change, and it basically the need to be more agile, to be to do agile strategic execution in a more clear but necessarily vague strategic plan. Right.
Joe Gottlieb
I think the hard part happens when strategic plans articulate very specific things that may not fit with the future of how they go about achieving a high level objective that’s maybe tied to a undeniable principle or mission or what have you, and that sets up the institution for this recurring experience of failure, right Of like, oh, we’re not getting to the thing exactly as we thought of it. All right, so we’re not. We can’t cross that one off, right? So I think maybe it ends up being a smaller tweak, albeit a foundational tweak, in the way we grapple with this yeah, and I would say I.
Dr. Ian McNeely
One of the whole points of writing this book for me was to engage the reader and, ideally, educate the reader in strategic thinking as an alternative to strategic planning, so that when they’re in the trenches, they can see what are the factors that impinge on their day-to-day lives, so that they can operate strategically because they know the big picture. Teaching, research, students, faculty, I mean. I’ll give an example I was in a meeting the other day and people kept talking about smart goals and I’m like this went over an example. I was in a meeting the other day and people kept talking about SMART goals and I’m like this went over my head. I’m like what do you mean as an alternative to stupid goals? And everyone laughed. But I was being honest. Smart apparently stands, it’s an acronym for something, and it’s a strategic planning gimmick. And please don’t miss it.
Joe Gottlieb
Strategic, measurable, actionable, Whatever man.
Dr. Ian McNeely
Yeah, yeah. And so a lot of strategic planning. Understandably, you know you don’t. You need some kind of template, you need some acronyms. You got to have some processes. You got to do a, you know, you got to do a SWOT analysis. There’s plenty of these acronyms kicking around, but if you don’t penetrate down to the level of how the levers in the machine work, all the planning is not going to get you anywhere. And my proposition is that, well, I may not be able to give a strategic plan, but I can tell you how this button that’s hooked to that lever is hooked up to that gear, and that means when you’re making a decision, you can be strategic about it.
Joe Gottlieb
Yeah, I totally agree. I love the notion of strategic thinking. That’s been actually a recurring theme on the podcast. Couldn’t agree with you more that that becomes the way we start to simultaneously articulate vision, mission goals in forms that are pretty timeless, while allowing ourselves the latitude to execute along a variety of hows that our circumstance informs. All right. So let’s shift now to the section on college completion. So in the chapter on teaching under missions, you talk about the significant role played by non-governmental organizations such as, at the time, bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, now the Gates Foundation, to push the college completion agenda via grants, now the Gates Foundation to push the college completion agenda via grants. How did organizations such as these reoriented this very supplier-friendly market toward the current obsession I’ll call it with student?
Dr. Ian McNeely
success, yeah, so let me start by saying that these organizations are all well-intentioned and that in critiquing their activities and their collective influence on higher ed, I don’t mean to point any fingers. A lot of bigger factors in the economy, starting with the dismantling of the welfare state, the deindustrialization of the Rust Belt, the shift toward knowledge work, the realization that tomorrow’s workers do need to be educated, and we, rather than address that at a societal level, we said, okay, we just got to get everyone to go to college, and it started out. We got to get everyone to admit maybe community college, maybe vocational training. By the end of the decade, it was the bachelor’s degree, the four-year degree, that had become the entry ticket to the middle class. So much so and I’m citing some well-known economists here that in the 2020s, if you don’t have a bachelor’s degree, your life expectancy is eight years lower than if you do so I think the pressures that universities were under in this between time, the 2010s were like literally a matter of life and death for lots of people, and a lot of non-governmental organizations again with the best intentions and the Gates Foundation has saved millions of lives worldwide were motivated by saying, yeah, we’re moving toward a knowledge economy.
Dr. Ian McNeely
We’ve got to get people educated and there are lots of reasons that students stall out, particularly in an era in which tuition is going up and we can’t just do like we used to, where you’d pay a few hundred dollars to go to state, whatever state university was, and if you washed out you could get a pretty good job as a salesperson. So the stakes are enormously high financially and in terms of life success, and yet there was no coherent agenda to try to address this problem at a university level, much less a societal level. So what happens basically is there are lots of white papers and blue ribbon reports that come out with some of the ways in which college was failing to help students move along. Some of those led to beneficial reforms and others really kind of interfered with ability universities own ability to react to what was going on.
Dr. Ian McNeely
So one of my pet peeves in the book is it’s very down on the weed subject called assessment, whereby a lot of the accreditors that certify higher ed institutions to receive federal loan money come to us and say well, you know, you can’t just give people degrees without proving that they’ve learned something and, by the way, you need to give as many people a degree as possible, because otherwise they’re going to wind up on welfare.
Dr. Ian McNeely
And so we’re in this push-pull where we’re being asked to perform a societal service and yet at the same time, document that we’re not degrading the quality of that service. And, long story short, we end up chasing our tails trying to prove that what we’ve done for decades actually works, and my contention is that that results in a lot of bureaucratic, cumbersome paperwork that takes our eye off the ball of what we should be doing. And once again, the way to do it right is to be as responsive as possible to the market forces that are impinging upon us, whatever type of institution it is that you’re at. So for public flagships, it really is serving the middle class, populating the middle class with liberally, widely, broadly well-educated people, and that is one area in which I think we’ve because we’ve been pressured by these outside organizations to measure certain things we haven’t had the time left over in the day to be as innovative in the teaching and curriculum side as we could have been.
Joe Gottlieb
That’s fascinating Just to and so clear, and when you say it it sounds more simple than it tends to feel right Like, and because all this is mired in a lot of that organizational tension and competing goods and ways to get it done, right, that are popping up everywhere in an organization such as the university.
Joe Gottlieb
State it it would it would. It immediately belies what you would know is the external force, which is okay. We should commit to making the method better and better so we can increase our success rate, while also doing what we need to do to increase the total number. I mean, this is just like what happens in primary school, right, the notion of do I fail this child and hold them back and begin a process of their life being more challenging, or do I pass them along without holding the standard and that’s a really, really difficult problem. And higher ed just has the higher ed version of that right. So somehow dispassionately making progress on both and accepting the results? Right, this is where sometimes the process is better to focus on than the outcome. Right, you pay attention to the outcome, but you keep working the process and improving the process in the hopes that the outcome can improve. Does that make sense?
Dr. Ian McNeely
It does, and I think you touch on another point there, which is that it’s the insufficiencies of our K-12 education system, that’s the underfunding of our community colleges.
Dr. Ian McNeely
It’s treating our community colleges as a stepstone to a four-year university rather than a credential in its own right. And I go into a long section of the book where the case study was located. They did a strategic pl37:10anning process. They came up with a legislatively mandated plan to improve everything from pre-K all the way up to graduate school, with different amounts of money for community colleges and, you know, other vocational training and like a lot of strategic plans.
Dr. Ian McNeely
It just wasn’t well enough thought out, well enough funded and the country as a whole moved toward the four-year degree as the end-all, be-all and more or less left K-12 and community colleges in the dust. And I would say that that’s where we are now as a result of this well-intentioned but misguided push on degree rates. So, yeah, if you look at the outcome, like you know, don’t just look at the four-year, you know the four-year graduation rate at a four-year institution. Look at the four-year graduation rate at a four-year institution and, as you say, don’t just look at the outcome, look at the process. That leads you to prioritize certain things over others.
Joe Gottlieb
Makes sense.
Joe Gottlieb
Okay, in the stakeholders chapter, focused on administrators, you present data that supports a more sympathetic perspective on the quote administrative bloat, unquote that has been so widely decried in the media, perhaps most notably by Benjamin Ginsberg in his book the Fall of Faculty, the Rise of the All-Administrative University and why it Matters.
Joe Gottlieb
Now, just for the sake of acknowledgement, I have not read that book, but I’ve read about it a fair amount and it is cited by even guests that I’ve had on this podcast that have said you know what it was harsh, but there’s some kernels of truth in it, as with many things.
Joe Gottlieb
Right. But I want to give you an opportunity to speak to this more sympathetic and, I think, more data-driven. So, at a minimum, my sense is that you’re making the case that investments in student success drove most of the shift in spending, which is maybe more acceptable or more digestible, tolerable, what have you than just pure administrative bloat, even though sometimes you need an apparatus to grow, to do new things and to work as a whole. Right. So my sense is you’ve highlighted that academic operations did not suffer materially as a result of the shift, and any shift of power away from faculty and toward administration was necessary to truly accomplish the mission of effectively educating and preparing students. So I want to give you a chance to react to all that. I just I think this was the point in the book where I believe you shared the data that was most related to maybe this biggest question.
Dr. Ian McNeely
Yeah, and I’ll say that it was one of the chapters where I started out myself as a cranky faculty member who had spent years, you know, watching people get hired for six-figure salaries and you know well into the six figures with.
Dr. Ian McNeely
You know, fancy titles like associate vice sub-deputy president for strategic communications, brainstorming and blue sky thinking and just like where this is nuts, this is out of control, and you know, yes, there are some, there is some of that, but if you look at the dollar amount and the headcount of where this quote unquote administrative bloat comes from, it’s in a lot of functions that are eminently defensible, particularly in the large number of advisors, counselors, mental health professionals, coaches by which I mean academic coaches, not football coaches.
Dr. Ian McNeely
To support the student success agenda, given that, as I just said in the prior question, we committed to letting in more students than ever before who had, you know, not only challenges academically, based on the schools they may have come from, but financially, because of rising tuition, socially, mental health, otherwise, given that universities themselves proliferate new degree programs and new opportunities so successfully, they create a very confusing cafeteria of things to study, we actually needed to invest in a whole range of student success professionals who individually make very modest middle-class salaries. You know we’re talking like $40,000, $50,000, $60,000 a year. But collectively, when you hire up as many of those as you need, they outstrip the salary of whoever that associate vice president for blue sky strategizing that you resent.
Joe Gottlieb
I’m not going to take that personally.
Dr. Ian McNeely
I want one of those jobs myself, I mean.
Dr. Ian McNeely
And the other part of the book, or the chapter I should say, is that those functions are also defensible.
Dr. Ian McNeely
So when universities are competing in a marketplace, as they have to do, when they can’t rely on states to prop them up and an in-state captive population who wants to go there, they have to be aggressive about marketing, they have to be aggressive about communications, they have to be aggressive about strategy, and those skills do not come cheap.
Dr. Ian McNeely
But I try to demonstrate that in purely dollar amounts and in terms of risk management, those investments pay off and that they were done very conservatively, considering all the rival interests in the academic. Core piece of that argument is that, whatever you think of administrative bloat, whether it’s going to student success, you know, middle class professionals or high paid strategists the university I studied maximized the amount of money that went directly into the pockets of the people who teach the classes and do the research and help the students learn. And that’s as it should have been, because that is the mission of the university and that, again, is hoping. You know, without denying that waste, fraud and abuse exists, it’s remarkable how disciplined that university and most universities are when it comes to prioritizing that core mission.
Joe Gottlieb: 43:48
Very useful perspective. So, shifting now to in the chapter on research, you referenced several false starts before. The university orchestrated a revolution in strategic planning to augment the prior revolution in academic budgeting. I know the book begins and introduces the sort of the new budgetary approach or what have you, and so they later got to a new approach to strategic planning. So this turning point seems to represent a new level of I’ll call it enterprise maturity that spanned planning, budgeting operations and measurement, or at least the humble but advancing origin of that. Have I overstated this?
Dr. Ian McNeely
No, I think that’s exactly what happened. It’s a learning process that occurred over the 2010s at this university that I studied, and I think enterprise maturity is the word for it, and I’ll go back. I would say that it illustrates the value of strategic thinking, either over and above, or at least as a complement to strategic planning. So let me back up and tell the story, because I think it’ll help our listeners make sense of it. Early 2010s was because the public the state, had disinvested. The university saw a strategic imperative to recruit out-of-state high-tuition-paying students and to capitalize on the Great Recession, which, as we know, recessions are counter-cyclical. They push students out of the job market and into education, and so there was lots of capacity and demand to take in those students, and a budget model was set up to ensure that their tuition money went into the coffers of the departments that taught them the courses. That’s what I noted in the last question. What that meant, though, was that we kind of overcorrected, and, in particular, we starved the research enterprise of the university of the funds that it needed, because all the new tuition money was going to the teaching, and that triggered another crisis, which was that the university wanted to maintain its standing among R1 high research active universities in the Association of American Universities, the AAU, which, to be honest, is just a badge of prestige you just get it around, it’s like bragging that you’re in the Ivy League. But it was important to donors, to leaders, to faculty members themselves, and so staying in the AAU, not getting kicked out for not having enough research, became the new strategic goal, led into a lot of planning, led into a lot of budgeting, but really it was at the middle levels where lots of different gears and knobs were being adjusted to not only just talk the talk but walk the walk. And it’s that maturation at every level.
Dr. Ian McNeely
And I was an undergrad at the time and I experienced this kind of painfully because I saw monies being withdrawn from what I was doing and invested in and sent over to the build, the new chemistry labs. But I had to concede that that was what the strategic priority of the university was. And in these everyday meetings where I saw, you know, decisions being made, I saw that strategic thinking being enacted and used to make painful decisions that, in my case, led to some things I liked being cut, but that I had to concede. This makes sense, and it was that learning process rather than an abstract strategic thinking exercise or a set of new mandates coming from accreditors or non-governmental organizations or enthusiasts about college completion. It was the internal responsiveness to externally changing forces that caused the university to grow and adapt, and they’ll probably have to pivot back before too long to other missions, but that’s just part of the iterative process of running any university.
Joe Gottlieb
You know, this is the second time I’ve thought about the fact that you and we started with this. You have a, it seems, a gift for dispassionate observation and when, as you tell that story and you reflect on your personal journey whereby you, you sense the encroachment, you felt the threat, you, you know selfishly, you saw some a loss and yet you conceded you used that word a couple of times. I think it’s very instructive you conceded that this was for the greater good and that the institution had aligned itself behind this objective. It wanted to achieve this, and you saw how it made sense to make these adjustments, even though they didn’t serve your selfish interests in the moment. And what I’m wondering about is how did your colleagues grapple with this and how truly different are you? Because I think that’s the answer to that question seems to be, seems to maybe help illuminate some path forward, Like, because this is an organizational culture challenge.
Dr. Ian McNeely
Yeah, Doing this, I think I experienced it a lot more viscerally than many of my colleagues, and I’ll go back to my origin story. I mean like, literally, I have known nothing else in my life besides the high ideals of a university ideals of a university and as I saw things threatened throughout this decade, it did not come easy to me. This dispassionate analysis, it was really the outcome of the process. It’s not something that I’m wired to do or reacted to with detached amusement at the time. So a lot of the people that I work with had, through whatever, other abilities or life experiences. It came a little more easily to them to react to these, and in some ways, that meant that it was difficult to see at the time what was happening, because they were more used to making the compromises that I saw on every occasion as a threat or a diversion from the purity that I had grown up with.
Dr. Ian McNeely
Looking, however I’m talking mainly about my administrative colleagues to my faculty colleagues. I think they experienced things viscerally as well, because everything impinged upon their domains, what they taught, what they researched. If it wasn’t going well, it was a sign that the sky was falling, that we have abandoned the mission, and so I wanted to reassure them. I have been down this road myself. I have had these same concerns. I have been down this road myself. I have had these same concerns. I worked my way through it through very difficult times, personally and professionally, and without trying to put a Pollyanna-ish spin on it in retrospect to say like in the end yeah, it was a comedy, not a tragedy. There was a lot of setbacks and mistakes, but we all came out more or less intact at the end. Did that answer your question?
Joe Gottlieb
I think so. It sounds to me like A maybe your ability to be dispassionate is related to your ability to be sensitive, and that can be both cause troubling experiences when you feel threatened but also maybe accelerate your ability to see the broader picture when you turn your attention to it. And I think that probably it seems that that may be what you’re about, and you found your colleagues to be less sensitive on average in the case of faculty different from administration. Yes, the trend here was and I think this was the big point of Ginsburg’s book right, if you know, looked at it, the macro.
Joe Gottlieb
This felt like, you know, encroachment on the faculty of you know, on a relative basis. Right, something else had to be invested in. Why not all being about us, right? So that just felt like a relative threat. But my takeaway and you can correct me if I’m wrong is that and maybe it was in the presence of effective leadership and or communications, or at least the effort to just do the best possible job to move it on forward. But it sounds like those other folks that felt that threat came around and were able to, for the most part, roll with the evolution.
Dr. Ian McNeely
Yes and no. I mean, I think you put your finger on it when you said that leadership matters. So, without pointing any fingers, there’s a rotating cast of presidents in this book, some of whom were effective communicators and others weren’t, and one of the lessons is that, no matter who’s in charge, the machine rolls forward. But what makes the difference between a disaffected university community and one that’s on board is the ability to articulate values at the top. To articulate values at the top and, whether you agree with them or not, to say I can see where we’re going and I can see why that translates into this or that decision made in my daily life.
Dr. Ian McNeely
But even in the absence of leadership, one of the takeaways of the book is that we keep rolling along. It’s a clash of rival goods. In the absence of a unifying vision, things still managed to move forward, but there is this sense that the old ways, the old public universe, the old world of faculty, the old purity of knowledge, the things that we either romanticize as a bygone golden age or actually did, used to exist and don’t anymore. Those things are being lost, and that’s what I think Ginsburg’s book registers. Uh, it’s. There is something that has changed, that feels different.
Joe Gottlieb
This romanticized bygone era of sort of the purity of knowledge and the way it’s dispensed and the hard work needed to obtain it, and all that right, ai is turning all that on its ear and we’re all having to reimagine, rethink, recreate the wonders of education in this newly supercharged universe of AI, right.
Dr. Ian McNeely
Yeah and then yeah, I didn’t get into this in the book, but it’s the background to it. We had a similar panic when online education was going to replace everything. We’re all going to go to MOOCs, massive open online courses and here we are, 15 years later and the internet has dramatically reshaped what we do, but we’re still here. I have the same faith that that’s going to happen with AI. You know, maybe on a bigger scale, maybe in a more disruptive way, but we will figure out a way to harness and leverage AI rather than, you know, all have to. You know, give up our day jobs because it’s being done by the computer now up our day jobs because it’s being done by the computer now.
Joe Gottlieb
Yeah, I mean, I think at a minimum it does throw a new gauntlet down for higher ed, I think, which is we need to be thinking about what can people do with this power and how can we help them field careers and lifetimes in this society and with employment that occupy these roles that this power can that really creates? Right, but that’s a big, that’s a big statement, right. That’s because it’s moving very rapidly. At a minimum, it means I always get a little excited about the prospects when I hear about increased commitment to employer partnerships, really setting up, at the like, even the departmental level advisory boards with employer partners on them that help keep the dialogue flowing about what is needed, because that those are the requirements for graduates. Like it’s just like building a product right. If, if education is a product product, staying close to those requirements is really key and AI is churning it at a high rate of speed.
Dr. Ian McNeely
Yeah Well, and that’s another issue where faculty, you know, in my experience, are threatened by the prospect that employers will dictate our curricula, employers will dictate our curricula, and that one thing, the very first thing, when you sit down with employers and you ask them what they want, they say communication, critical thinking, teamwork, the stuff that we are already teaching in a liberal arts curriculum. And so part of my job is to say to faculty and to employers like you guys are already speaking the same language and AI is just going to heighten the stakes and making sure that we they do a better job of what we have long done, so that we can both satisfy the ideals of the academy and serve the workforce at the same time.
Joe Gottlieb
Well, let me ask you this though it. Would you agree, though, that the notion of applied knowledge has become more necessarily important than pure academic knowledge? I’ll even use the term academic right. It carries that connotation for a reason in our use of the term right, and so if I’m a quote academic, if I’m a faculty member, at any level, the requirement that the market dictates the value, the relevance, the usefulness is increasingly applied versus theoretical. The usefulness is increasingly applied versus theoretical. There still needs for some advancement of theoretical. There’s a theoretical horizon there, but the volume of work required is to help students apply this. So that is an unavoidable reality, if I would submit and I’m just curious to get your reaction to it- yeah.
Dr. Ian McNeely
So in the last chapter of the book I talk about what I call the new instrumentalism, which is, I do believe, a sea change in the way we approach knowledge. It’s applied knowledge that builds on but is no longer segregated from theoretical knowledge, and so we’ve never been innocent of this. We’ve never been purely ivory tower heads in the clouds. But the old model used to be that you developed theoretical knowledge in the laboratory and then you applied it in the industry or military or whatever, Classic example being the study of the structure of the atom in the 20s and 30s and the development of the nuclear bomb in the 40s, and that was, in some ways, the template for science research from the 40s down until today.
Dr. Ian McNeely
The new instrumentalism, whether it’s about teaching or research, is about saying you know, we can’t give up on the search for basic or pure knowledge and just be led around by what’s going to make the newest iPhone update sell next month. But we need, when we educate students, when we finance research projects, to be more attentive to what’s going to make human lives better, what’s going to make companies more profitable, what’s going to make civic engagement more satisfying, and that’s yet another thing that feels threatening to those like me who grew up, frankly, in an ivory tower world. But I’ve come to see as an opportunity more than as a threat.
Joe Gottlieb
I’m glad you brought that up about the new instrumentalism. I was going to head there, but let’s jump then to the section entitled what Students Should Learn. It describes a core curriculum that became unwieldy in the wake of I think you alluded to this earlier departmental revenue interests. Right, as the revenue was flowing according to students adopting majors and taking courses, that was driving some evolution of the curricula. It was followed by a period of poking and prodding by accreditors and assessment champions, which you’ve also alluded to, only to wind up in a place that caused you to provide a pretty bleak outlook on progress, pursuing these objectives of improving completion rate, improving job placement rate and ultimately enabling students to have success in society.
Dr. Ian McNeely
Yeah. So maybe here I’ll step outside the frame of the book and talk a bit about my day job, which is overseeing undergraduate education at UNC Chapel Hill. And our experiences here are the same as many institutions nationwide the flagship level, non-flagship level and otherwise and I think it’s a classic example of yet another learning process that we need to go through as a sector. So, internally, the way universities work, specifically with respect to core curricula, is that every discipline, every department, wants to get its share of the cafeteria. You know, you tell the students you got to walk in the cafeteria, you need a protein, a starch, you need a dessert, you need a vegetable, you need to drink, and in each of these categories there are 697 options.
Dr. Ian McNeely
Every department wants as many of its options to be featured as possible, because the amount of money they get to run their programs depends on it.
Dr. Ian McNeely
That’s, in many ways, a beautiful way to organize a free market of ideas in a university curriculum, but it keeps students very much internally focused and it keeps departments also internally focused, because that’s where the tuition money flows.
Dr. Ian McNeely
Without abandoning that, while still making the cafeteria a place that’s well-run and clean and has a nutritious, balanced meal for everyone, I think we need to pivot from that type of strategy toward educating undergraduates, to bridging college, to careers, to investing in things that we know form decades of experience already going to pivot and position students to be successful in the job market Internships, undergraduate research opportunities, community-based learning, study abroad and that’s what we’re doing at Carolina and a lot of other places as well.
Dr. Ian McNeely
Because, even though we can’t and shouldn’t presume to train students for every job, because we don’t know what the jobs are going to be hot next year, much less 10, 20 years down the line, we know that if we can begin to get students to translate what they learn in the classroom to things that happen outside the classroom, or even if they do happen inside the classroom, revolve around active learning and projects and collaboration and solving problems that haven’t been solved yet, as opposed to just digesting the material and mastering it and passing the exam, they’re going to be provided with the skills that employers are looking for and that just you know, beyond careers, that life will require of them. You know, dealing with their in-laws, coaching their little league baseball team, being a citizen in other ways, but preeminently, having a satisfying, meaningful career that allows you to earn a decent living while doing something that you’re passionate about.
Joe Gottlieb
The employer partnerships is one form of that. I like the way you framed not just then actual involvement in internships and say, community activities, but then even just simulating problem solving. Critical thinking looming, and here I think a very, very active dialogue is how can we use ai to do more critical thinking versus how can we let ai take over our critical thinking for us? You know there are there’s lots of folks that are very concerned right now and they have a point about, and it’s backed with data. I’ve heard some interesting you know pieces of data on this that for many, ai showing up is now causing them to outsource some portions of thinking. It doesn’t mean it has to be that way, but we are, if nothing else, also slaves to convenience. Society has taught us that, and managing that, dealing with that, attacking that head-on, seems to be part of the challenge.
Dr. Ian McNeely
Yeah, I don’t know about you, but every time I use AI, I can see right through what it doesn’t, is not able to do, and as much as it helps me get 60% of the way there, it’s that differential that matters the most and you know I’ve been heartened. There’s been recent op-eds that you know we shouldn’t aim for artificial general intelligence anytime soon and hope that the robots take us over and enslave us. It’s really we should hope for a decent AI that we still have to use our critical thinking skills in order to interpret, and I think that’s what we need to be training students to do going forward.
Joe Gottlieb
Yeah, well, I think that’s a whole other topic. We’ll park it there for now. It’ll be interesting to see how it plays out. Yeah, before we get to a concluding question, I want to ask a question that is undoubtedly sensitive for many and it pertains to DEI. I want to ask you did institutions over-rotate towards DEI via references in vision, mission, values and their strategic imperatives? Did their soft spot for inclusiveness, given their history and role, did that cause them to assume a responsibility to right a social wrong whose scope exceeded their sphere of control?
Dr. Ian McNeely
Yeah, there’s a whole chapter on diversity now in the book that feels like it was written in another era, because we are in a new era today. I’ll say, in a way I agree that the institutions over-rotated toward DEI by just being so aggressive in their marketing, their presentation of self. That began to become a little bit cliched and cloying and over-bureaucratized. Cliched and cloying and over-bureaucratized. And it was indeed because it’s historically the mission of higher ed, particularly public institutions, to serve the entire public and because we see all these disparities in our social lives. As I said earlier, just as college completion became the one-stop shop for every social problem, that problem grew to include gender discrimination and racism in ways that in retrospect left universities very vulnerable to what I think are very unjust attacks happening right now. So what I try to show in the book is that, despite all the rhetoric, a not only were the intentions good, but B the success of these initiatives was highly limited in the first place. That you know just. You know using my own experience, but generalizable in the book with empirical evidence. You know just because you’re required to take a diversity training and write a statement for promotion, touting your credentials and diversity does not mean that if you’re a white straight man, you suffer any disability or disadvantage at all, period, full stop.
Dr. Ian McNeely
And so the idea now that this was we engineered a system of reverse discrimination, that two wrongs don’t make a right, that we’re, you know, actively abandoning equality in the way we teach and the way we administer universities, I just think is far-fetched.
Dr. Ian McNeely
And, in particular, DEI in the 2010s was mainly an administrative initiative rather than an academic one, and that when we try to monkey around with what faculty do in the classroom to impinge on their academic freedom, that is a very serious problem that we’re tackling now, just as much in the research area as in the teaching and curriculum area, because that’s where the federal government has, for whatever reason, decided to weaponize this set of words in ways that are just, I think, very deeply troubling, because they’re not even defined.
Dr. Ian McNeely
I mean, I find it almost hard to believe that this set of words, or whatever 67 synonyms are out there, has provoked such a moral panic. That really goes far beyond what I think is a legitimate set of critiques. So, once again, you know, I make the argument in the book that if we let the marketplace of ideas have its way, the system will self-correct. Have its way. The system will self-correct. A lot of the excessive over-corrections that were done in order to be more diverse and equitable and inclusive would probably have spent themselves and we would have reverted to something more toward the center before it was all over. We just are in the middle of this very unfortunate set of interventions from the outside that, if you trust the argument of the book, are likely to be more counterproductive in the long run than productive.
Joe Gottlieb
Given that you’ve said, this chapter felt like it was written in a different era, and yet it was only written earlier this year, right?
Dr. Ian McNeely
Actually, I wrote a chapter two years ago. I wrote the conclusion which picks up on this theme during the first round of congressional hearings around the Gaza war. Okay, and a lot of those dynamics have now played out on a much bigger canvas.
Joe Gottlieb
Yeah, I think that I hope and I think you hope but I’ll give you a chance to react that that first over-rotation and now what feels like an over-rotation in the opposite direction. I hope we don’t over-rotate again. Hopefully we can find a sustainable equilibrium on this point because it’s important and making things better is important.
Dr. Ian McNeely
That’s easy to say hard to do. Uh, I do. I agree it is easier to say hard to do. I think people are doing the work on a day-to-day level and and by that I want to be as clear as possible they’re not doing the work by skirting or circumventing federal or state mandates. You know, because I know people get in trouble or at least are suspected of doing that. They’re doing the work because our society is diverse, period, full stop, and that includes minorities who don’t fit into the traditional categories of DEI.
Dr. Ian McNeely
You know, rural students, evangelical Christians, people who feel that their political and religious beliefs are being marginalized, and we have to take that seriously by rotating back to whatever midpoint gets everyone in the room together, acting productively. I have, in the long run, a great deal of faith in universities that they’re able to self-correct, because that is the marketplace of ideas and that it’s, you know, whether it’s well-intentioned or not, coming from the outside. Most mandates of any kind tend to backfire when they dig down into the nitty-gritty of teaching and research. They just cannot help but backfire when that happens.
Joe Gottlieb
It’s a great setup for my last question for you. So in the book’s conclusion you emphasize that the structure of public universities is suited to their missions and that their recent track record backs this up. I want to read four sentences from the end of the book, because I just love them. I love them all, and then I’m going to let you elaborate on them, so I won’t bother with quotes. These are all quotes, right? So one. By contrast with the elite private schools that preoccupy the nation’s attention, public universities educate millions of students and conduct more than half of the nation’s research. Important, interesting factoid Treating them forthrightly as semi-autonomous actors is our best hope for navigating a political landscape that will remain fractured and polarized for the foreseeable future. Third, the career of public universities during the last decade offers ample reassurance that they can be trusted to chart their own paths.
Dr. Ian McNeely
Their recent track record robustly disproves the left’s claim that higher education has been captured by private patrons and corporate interests, as well as the right’s claim that it has been captured by political correctness and ivory tower elitism Great.
Joe Gottlieb
Where should I begin?
Dr. Ian McNeely
Not to rehash it all, but no, thank you for pulling those four sentences out, because they really do summarize a lot. So, number one I mean, if you read the papers, you could be forgiven for not knowing that the entire country doesn’t try to get into Harvard, columbia, penn, stanford, you know, and maybe UCLA and maybe Chapel Hill as well. I mean the vast majority of students and the clear majority of research happens at these public universities and and we, just we, we so completely distort the reality of higher education by focusing on these marquee institutions, and I know because I went to one of them. But secondly, you know, just because they’re public doesn’t mean that they don’t also operate in this market in which the private universities set the pace for excellence, and that, when you look at the research and teaching accomplishments of the entire sector taken together, public and private, the argument of the book, which I hope to have demonstrated empirically, is that, yes, we can trust them to react to their opportunities without compromising their mission, and that mission should not be influenced one way or the other by political ideologies, by the two political parties that we happen to have and you know, parenthetically, I don’t think either of those two parties does a decent job of representing the political, much less the academic or intellectual spectrum and diversity of opinions among the American population.
Dr. Ian McNeely
So I want to shield public universities from ideological capture one way or the other, by showing the ways in which they actually behave in response to real-life demands by students for education, by patrons of research, for scientific and scholarly innovation, by donors who only want to help and want to make the best use of their philanthropy, by non-governmental organizations who, to be fair, have the best intention but sometimes intrude a little bit too much.
Dr. Ian McNeely
But, above all, to get beyond this view that our universities, public or private, have become these battlegrounds of, you know, vicious anti-Semitism or discrimination against this, that or the other group. My live reality, every institution I’ve ever worked at or been a part of again going back to the one that I was born in is that they are factories of goodness. That they are factories of goodness that if there’s any criticism to be leveled over them, it’s that we deny so many of the advantages of a caring, supportive community to those who, for whatever reason, don’t want to go to college for four years. That’s the real societal injustice that we need to address, not that the universities themselves are doing something wrong.
Joe Gottlieb
All right, I’d like you to close this podcast with three recommendations to higher education leaders that might find themselves in some part of the transformational journey described in your book.
Dr. Ian McNeely
Three simple phrases. Number one live in truth. You don’t have to blurt it out all the time, but you need to live in that truth. Number two do the work. Wherever you find yourself, do what you can to help people learn, pursue knowledge, get a decent meal, whatever the case may be. Number three serve the mission Figuring out how, whatever job you find yourself in, whatever your ambitions are for your own professional advancement, how those fit into the larger picture of what a university does and that’s why I wrote the book, so that you can see what the whole spectrum of missions is. So, live in truth, do the work, serve the mission.
Joe Gottlieb
Great summary, Ian. Thank you so much for joining me today.
Dr. Ian McNeely
Thank you, I really appreciate it.
Joe Gottlieb
And thanks to our listeners for joining us as well. I hope you have a great day and we’ll look forward to hosting you again on the next episode of TRANSFORMED. Hey, listeners of TRANSFORMED, and if it made you stop and think, perhaps you would be willing to share your thoughts, suggestions, alternative perspectives or even criticisms related to this or any other episode. I would love to hear from you, so send me an email at info at higher. digital or joe at higher. digital, and if you have friends or colleagues that you think might enjoy it, please share our podcast with them, as you and they can easily find. TRANSFORMED is available wherever you get your podcasts.