A New Era of Collaboration in Higher Education

This is Future youe with Jeff Salingo and Michael Horn.

Welcome to this episode of Future youe. We have with us today Bridget Burns, who's the executive director of the University Innovation alliance and actually in some ways is partly responsible for this podcast because a couple of years ago she encouraged me, Michael, to start a podcast. And it just took me a few years to get this going and find

a great co host. I'll say thank you, Bridget, because I'm glad you suggested it to Jeff.

Oh, good. Well, I'm happy that you followed through. You know, I've actually recommended that to a couple folks who I thought had an interesting perspective and frankly, we need more unearthing of wisdom in this space and put in a. Just in a format that can be useful to people. So I listen to podcasts all the time and I was just like, why is there really. Like there's like four.

Yeah, there was not a lot a couple years ago, but it's exploded since. And so obviously you've started a pretty neat organization, University Innovation alliance, bringing together several public institutions to share practices, think about how to innovate, to pilot things, and then spread and so forth. Can you describe what it is you actually, before we go there, the question we always like to ask, Gee, I'm out of sync. Is just actually take us back. How did you get into this crazy field of higher education to begin with? Just from the starting point.

So I was one of those kids who had my life changed by higher education. So every administrator I meet, every faculty member, it's like they all have the same story that I do, which is, you know, I grew up in poverty in rural Montana. I wasn't really supposed to make it to college. When I managed to get there, I was. I had some basic expectations. I really thought that the grown ups would keep an eye out for me and that, you know, I would. If they were going to tell me to take out student loans, that was clearly going to be the right decision. And I found that nobody was really watching. I found that it was a space of really trying to figure it out on your own. And through a lot of meandering turns, I randomly got appointed to the State Board of Higher Education in Oregon. And I was on my very first presidential hiring committee when I was 22 years old. And shortly after, I was involved in the non renewal of a college president. Multiple college presidents have sat on lots of hiring committees, have evaluated presidents, helped organize them, coordinate them. I ended up taking on government relations for seven institutions in Oregon at one point became the chief of staff and the senior policy advisor for the system. And I just had seen campuses making the same mistakes over and over. And I really saw that there were some questions that I had that I needed to unpack. I needed to understand why are some of these people seem like leaders and some just seem like managers or administrators that climb the ranks? And why is it that higher ed is literally chock full of the smartest people in the world and yet we have some very basic problems that we never put our own energy toward and why our campuses always throwing elbows when it doesn't actually seem like it serves students or the greater good. So I wanted to understand those things. And so I had the fortunate opportunity to become an Ace fellow. And I spent a year really kind of looking at different college presidents, different institutions. I wanted to understand, you know, there's a lot of hype around innovation. And I coming in a space that nobody was talking about that very much. I wanted to understand was that real or was that just great pr? And in many cases it was great pr, But I found that there was actually some substance behind the places that were more innovative. There were things they did different. There were things about the leaders of those institutions that was really different and how they structured their days, how they structured their interactions with their teams. And I realized that the big problem facing all of us was diffusion. Ideas just don't spread. We think that writing a paper that nobody's. That four people are gonna read.

We're going to a conference, right?

We're going to a conference where you're exhausted at the end of the day and you don't even, you have no idea what to do next. And you come here and you know, maybe you have, you've become, if you know you can evangelize about something, but you have to go back home and nobody's on the same page as you. I just feel like we're really smart people and we have very basic problems. And if we just put more heads together and created a space where we actually allowed for national leadership to come forward, I actually think we could do this. I think we could close the achievement gap. So that's my background.

So you created this thing or helped to create this thing called the University Innovation Alliance. 11 public universities that cooperate primarily to help serve low income students around student success. So talk a little bit about how did the 11 universities kind of come together and more importantly, how did you persuade them and how do you continue to persuade them to work together? Because in higher education, most people, it's very Competitive, right. And most people like to compete with each other, not necessarily cooperate with each other.

So I didn't actually come. So this is something that's really important, is that it was actually not my idea. This was the idea of 11 presidents and chancellors who united around a shared problem. And they were all equally frustrated about the fact that ideas were not scary scaling, that our achievement gaps were growing. And gosh, you're doing that program. Gosh, I didn't even know anything about that. Well, we're doing something kind of similar. Oh my gosh, we repeated the exact same experiment as you, like this. Again, the diffusion problem. And so it was the idea of these presidents and chancellors, most of whom were former first generation, low income or students of color. And I was free labor as an ACE fellow. And so while I was the only FTE for a couple years. So it's really been a collective effort of tapping into the leadership of those leaders, figuring out exactly why they were committed to this and figuring out the challenges on their campuses, building teams, mobilizing teams on their campuses, and then creating different experiences for those campuses to come together where they could actually see each other as human beings struggling with the exact same problem. Because that's what I see over and over is people do not realize every single financial aid director has that problem. Every single director of institutional research has that problem. And it's the fact that we are obsessed with the boundaries of our institution that we never end up solving those problems.

So collaboration obviously is nothing new in higher education, but your collaborative effort in the UIA has actually produced real results just in a couple of years. How have you been able to do what? How is this collaboration? What are some of the one or two keys of success about this collaboration that is produced? And maybe you could even reference the results that you've seen in just the last couple of years.

So we have now increased our low income degrees by 29% in three years or four years.

Across the 11.

Across the 11. And that's important because we have 400,000 students, 120,000 low income. So we're talking big numbers because we have large public research intensives and we've set ambitious goals, we're exceeding those goals, but we have not closed our achievement gap. So it's really important for me to say that because I think that people are trying to replicate the alliance without looking closely enough at the core pillars of our success. So first formed by the institutions, not by some foundation, not by some entity that has an idea and wants to just use Institutions to get what they

want as a conduit for their idea,

which I've seen those fail. We have multiple funders instead of one funder, we have nine. That's really important because you need the balance so that it actually can be something that is led by the institutions, but the institutions are actually challenged by the foundations. But the foundations are also asked to step up. The other critical piece is every dollar we raise. The campuses match.

So they have skin in the game

then skin in the game. And that is missing in most cases. We also have a very focused team, team approach. So you're not allowed to come to anything we do as an individual, you come as a team and we give the teams like a chief of staff essentially, which is our fellows program. So we're actually trying to seed future leaders by giving them project management, change management support for these teams which would otherwise not get anywhere because they always just borrow someone's executive assistance like one hour of the week. And we also highlight and elevate the great stories of progress and help each other really unpack what the steps were. Instead of just being kind of a PR engine, we are actually focused on understanding what are the first steps, the first five steps, if you, you know, if you. We're interested in creating a shared space of vulnerability and trust so people will actually share the hard stories of failure. And so that's a core piece of our culture. I would say the last piece is focus on failure and building real connection and community, which people are always like, why don't you get bigger? Well, it's actually hard to have a thousand friends.

If you're gonna be that honest.

Trip yourself bare and be, you know what? We've had a million dollar failure on our campus, which is true of every campus. And so we're interested in creating a culture that allows people to be honest with each other and actually help each other move faster.

So my mind is ping ponging all over the place with questions out of that. But I guess let's start with this. So in terms of replicating, you could create other collaboratives that have those same dynamics, but not add to this particular group of institutions because that would enlarge it too much. Is that. Am I hearing you right on that?

I don't know. I mean, honestly, we're in the space of, I don't know. We're in the space of everything we've done hadn't existed prior. And we try it out and we test it and we see what happens. So we just held our first national summit to see if we could scale, scale our model from 100 people to 400 people and actually lead to outcomes. So more than 75 universities from around the world came. And I believe that we created a fundamentally different experience than any higher education conference. And I believe that we are helping to raise the standards of higher education to expect better, to expect that pedagogy actually be used in how we share ideas in, in higher education. And so that's a test. So we're going to see did that actually lead to anything. And then, you know, there are other people think it's the network. And I, you know, I think we're teasing out whether or not there are different modalities, that you can be part of this, that you don't need to be a quote unquote member, that actually maybe it's that you are. You know, for me, I think about what has been transformative for hard things and what's an avatar for me is Weight Watchers, which is, I think, the most effective improvement community of science or improvement science community in the world, which is very basic. And any human being can walk in off the street and feel like they're a part of something. They have trust, they have a network to rely upon. There's metrics and accountability, data sharing, rewarding when you make progress, not when you're not shaming. Like I think there are some cultural elements, there are other modes that people can drive change. And I think we're trying to take inspiration from those and not just be rigid and think, oh, it's the network. I think that we need to test this out further and see kind of what other ideas we can pursue and how we can make this a national community of practice instead of little silos of communities.

So the question I want to then go deep on seems to be a critical piece of it, which is how do you create that comfort with exposing and talking about your failures and being deep about, not just sort of at a surface level, but tactically, what happened and why did it happen? And unearthing that. How do you get presidents and their teams who have egos to be comfortable in that setting?

So I don't let presidents or provosts come to our events. That's really important. Second, we lead, we purposefully curate who is going to share first. And we set the table from Brene Brown's work that you share your story with people who've earned the right to hear them. You're not allowed, you know, Chatham House rules, you're not allowed to repeat individual stories of, you know, who said that. But you can share the learning from that story. It's a. It's, you know, we've screwed up, we've made mistakes. There are. People have shared things they weren't supposed to. That's happened. And part of it is it's such a part of our culture that even that I share. I start by sharing the things that haven't worked right. Like, it's really about. You have to be serious about this. This can't be just like window dressing. And so I talk about all the things that went wrong and how messy and hard it was and. And try and give that stuff away and help other people learn. And at the end of the day, though, I have fantastic people. The people who are running the alliance on their campuses, it's not like a casual thing. They really believe in this and they model it, and they are fantastic. And they really share. And they've also seen the fruits of. When people share their failures with you, you can actually move so fast and you can actually do great things.

So, Bridget, two questions. One is, I think one of the most important, important things in higher education is momentum. So how do you keep the momentum going? Especially in maybe in the next couple years, you're going to have leadership changes on the campuses within the alliance. And then kind of a related question to that. Is the alliance something that goes on forever, or do you feel like at some point you'll achieve some of your goals and then higher education is very good about starting things but not stopping them. So do you feel that there's an end to this life at some point?

I mean, I hope so. I actually think that we should achieve our objective. We should close our achievement gaps. We should close up shop. We should give away everything we learn. But we haven't done that. And I'm not going to give up until we actually close the achievement gaps on these campuses. So I'm very transparent about. You know, it hasn't worked yet. It's worked on a lot of things that people are very like that are great signs of success. But we need to still keep going. I've already lost almost all my presidents. I have four of my founding presidents. I've lost almost every liaison I had.

But even when those new people come in, they kind of drink the Kool Aid.

Well, it's their Kool Aid, right? You let people mix the Kool Aid. You let them decide what the flavor profile is, right? The bouquet. And so it's their culture, it's not mine. And, you know, I'm very fortunate. I've had some strong, good leaders who have really set, set very public examples. But I only have four of the original presidents that are going to be around after this, and they've all come on. And it's hard to say that this is not something that t become easily passionate about. Like, I've lost almost every program officer for every foundation. I've only been at this, like, five years. I'm like, where is everyone going? Is this a sign? Should I be, should I be worried about this? But honestly, if you meet the fellows, if you meet the liaisons, like, I mean, it gives me such life to do this work with these people that I don't know. I can't imagine not, I can't imagine something that's more challenging and exciting and terrifying at the exact same time. And so until I find something more terrifying, we're gonna just keep doing this until it works.

And you've made, maybe have not met your goal yet, but you've made terrific progress. So listen, great work so far, and we're gonna be keen watchers of what's to come out of the institutions you work with. And thanks so much for joining us on Future youe.

Thanks for having me.

And we'll be back right after this.

This episode of Future youe was made possible with support from the Academy for Innovative Higher. The Academy is a partnership between Arizona State University and Georgetown University and is the premier training ground for those who aspire to senior leadership positions in higher education and those who want to lead organizational change at colleges and universities in the future. For more information and to apply to our next cohort, go to Georgetown ASU Edu. This episode was also made possible with support from the Entangled Group, where innovation meets operations. Entangled is a venture studio focused on helping the education ecosystem transition to support the knowledge economy. We build companies and nonprofits that support higher education institutions as they innovate to carry out their critical missions for society in the 21st century.

And welcome back to Future. You coming off that great conversation with Bridget Burns of the university here, Innovation Alliance. And Jeff, we're obviously here live at ASU GSV with the crowd noise swelling behind us at the GSV Marketplace. But great conversation with Bridget talking about how the universities have crafted an opportunity for them to learn from each other and diffuse the knowledge that is going on at each of their campuses. You, of course, have covered many other groups that are cooperating within higher ed over the years and written about this notion of radical collaboration and things of that nature. How does what she's built in your mind, compare to some of the other efforts that you've seen out there.

Right.

So, Michael, I wrote a paper last year called the Networked University. And in that I identified that the University Innovation alliance is really part of this new wave of collaboration in higher education, which as we noted in the conversation with her, is really nothing new. You know, you could go back to the 1950s when the Big Ten Academic alliance started, usually about a year after they started the athletic conference. But mostly throughout history, a collaboration in higher education has been defined by geography. You know, colleges and universities were located near each other. It's been defined by mission. So, you know, all the privates got together or publics because they were in the same system or you know, all the Catholic universities got together or they've been even defined by athletic conferences. So actually a lot of the current athletic conferences have tried to copy with the Big Ten Academic alliance has had. And they haven't been that successful in doing that because the Big Ten Academic alliance to me is the most successful one because many of the institutions are alike. They're, you know, all except for Northwestern are public. They tend from.

Isn't that why they call it the Big Ten plus Northwestern?

Yeah, so I think that that has been helpful to me, to them. And so one of the things that I think defines the University Innovation alliance as something different is that it's focused on trying to solve a problem rather than just say we're going to come together to cooperate, right? It's saying we're going to bring these universities together. They all happen to be public, but we're going to bring them together about solving a problem. And that to me is the difference that we're now seeing. She talked about the American Talent Initiative, ati, Unison. All these new kinds of collaborations we've seen in higher education over the last couple of years have been around trying to solve a specific problem. Most of the time around student success, most of the time around low income students. So to me, that is this new wave of collaboration in higher education. And why I think actually these might be different, right? Because it's not just a bunch of presidents getting together saying how can we cooperate on back office operations and things like that. This is something that's at the top of their list. And as a result the issues they're trying to fix, and as a result of that, they tend to take these more seriously and they want to actually do something about them. The other thing, and she mentioned what she had, seven, eight, nine funders. The other thing is that I think Philanthropies and money that's trying to fix problems in higher education. They have kind of a systems theory now of change and they don't want to necessarily fund one or two institutions here. They want to fund these networks of institutions.

Yeah, and she's done a good job. I was struck by. She's done a good job of building several funders investing in it, which makes it. She didn't say this, but it makes it sort of impervious to one funder changing their strategic mindset or all of a sudden whipsawing and saying, no, we're now interested in this, or it's all about that. It gives it a certain durability and focus from, I suspect, from meeting to meeting and keeping the work stream really around that problem, as you say. And you know, we're all working on our different interventions and then trying to scale them across these different institutions. And for those that don't know, we didn't get to get into this as much, but you can probably talk about it more. They've done a lot, for example, with predictive engineering analytics to help drive graduation and success, improvements among low income and minority and first gen students, things like that, that, you know, Georgia State will pioneer something and they'll say, holy cow, did you see how many students that is allowed to persist and grow and complete? And then other institutions will start to look at the nitty gritty of that and actually implement it.

Yeah. And I think two of the things that she pointed out in our conversation with us that I think has made made the University Innovation alliance successful and where I think others should copy from it, one was they have skin in the game, right? So the institutions have to put money on the table to match the money coming from the foundations. And the other thing is they have these University Innovation Fellows, right? They have essentially, as she called them, chiefs of staffs on each of the campuses that are responsible for putting these things in place. Because what's happening with a lot of these collaborations in higher education that, you know, it's people doing this work on the side of their desk, right.

If it's not your full time job, it's nobody's job, right.

It falls to the bottom of your list every, every week. And so, yeah, you might have a meeting or two a year where you gather with these other presidents, you talk about great ideas or you know, your other colleagues, you talk about these great ideas and then you go home and then, you know, 12 other things come up.

Yeah, and she talked also about that a lot of the Other alliances that have been out there historically bring people together. It's one person from the campus, and so then they go back into their own school and they maybe have a new language to talk about something, a new idea, but no one else has that shared knowledge and understanding or time to learn from that person. And so really bringing a team and having that team commitment, I think makes a big difference. And then I was struck by one other thing, which was this being willing to talk about failure and sort of being nakedly honest about struggles. And it seemed very ypo, or Young Presidents Organization, like around being able to share what's actually giving you problems or headaches. You know, of course, in ypo, it's not just professionally, it's personally as well. But. But that honesty and that safe space struck me as something that's really important to allowing this to thrive.

Well, and she's been able to create that, right? She mentioned that they had their recent, you know, national gathering, which was more public, where they can share their stories, but most of the time they're just sharing it internally and they're able to talk about those failures. And I think that's really critical in higher education. One of the other things that she talked about is they're really focused on change internally. And so again, it goes back to theories of change that we've talked on this program many times. Is this going to happen from the inside or is it going to happen from the outside?

Yes. Am I the broken record, disruptive innovation guy that always says, hey, the outside has something to contribute to? Well, so here's my take, I guess, Jeff, which is, I think she's onto something that if you want to change existing institutions, having someone who understands the culture of those places can create teams and present them with new problems, to build new culture is critically important. At the same time, I wouldn't be dismissive of those outside of higher editions who are able to see things in a totally novel way. We know if we want to get, you know, geek out on innovation, the biggest innovations occur when someone from an orthogonal viewpoint looks at a problem, has enough perspective and knowledge of that domain, but can look at it very differently and create something brand new because they're just looking at it from a totally different lens. And so I think we should just be careful, the black and white nature of either way of looking, looking at this and say, hey, we've all got a lot to contribute. But it's clearly the case that if we want to move these big public institutions where the bulk of the students attend in American higher education. We need buy in from internal if that's going to change. Well, so I think that's and she

talked about that scale. Right. You know, they represent 400,000 undergraduates among their 11 members. Right.

Which is no joke.

That's no joke. I mean, that's how you move things. And, you know, and we talked with Michael Crow recently around scale. I mean, that's how you're going to move the needle in big ways when we talk about when we talk about graduation rates in the U.S. so yet

another part of the piece of the future you puzzle coming to light here. Thanks for listening. Of course. And if you enjoyed the podcast, if you enjoyed all the podcasts, please subscribe wherever you are listening and rate us. And we hope we'll see you next week for more conversations on future you.