Gordon Gee

This is Future youe with Jeff Salingo and Michael Horn.

I'm Jeff Salingo and author of several books on higher education and contributor at the Washington Post and Atlantic. I'm also a special advisor at Arizona State University, where I lead the Academy for Innovative Higher Education Leadership. And that's where we're recording this episode of Future youe today at ASU's new Washington D.C. center. And thanks to the ASU Academy for supporting this podcast.

Hi, everyone. Michael Horn here. I'm the chief strategy officer at the Entangled Group, an education studio, and the co founder and distinguished fellow at the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation. And like you, Jeff, and author of a few books on the future of education and excited that Entangled helped sponsor this as well alongside Arizona State. And this episode, I think, is going to be a really fun one. We've got the man who has been the president of more institutions than any other American. Is that right, Josh?

That is right. And I'm not quite sure anybody will ever break that record of Gordon Gee.

Gordon Gee, how many presidencies is it?

It's a good question. I think he's will have to tell us. So I think it's like seven, right? I don't know. He's been president of West Virginia University, where he is now, twice Ohio State, twice Brown, Vanderbilt. Right.

So we got some numbers in there, but he's going to be able to talk to us about the future of an important conversation in this country, which is the future of public higher education. And that's where we get to start, which is what is the environment right now, Jeff, and the outlook for public higher education. It's something you obviously covered at the Chronicle and thought a lot about. Where are we today?

Well, you know, it's interesting, Michael, when I first got to the Chronicle, I didn't realize just how big of a sector public higher ed is. You know, most of the many of the I went to a private college. A lot of people I know went to a private college. But, you know, 80% of Americans go to public universities. These places are incredibly important, not only for students, but for the economies of their of their towns, their states and their regions. You know, I spent a lot of time in North Carolina as a young reporter, and I'll never forget that, you know, they had a constitutional piece of their constitution that says, you know, tuition there will be basically close to free as possible. When I lived in North Carolina about 15, 20 years ago, you could go to the University of North Carolina at Chapel hill for like $1,500 a semester.

When I remember applying, everyone said, you know what, if you want to go to UNC Chapel H. Hill from out of state, good luck, because that's way harder than going into any Ivy League at the time.

Yeah, and it's amazing that until the last couple of years in many of these states, students paid less than half the cost of education, and now in most states, they pay more than half of the cost of education. It's really been quite a flip in terms of tuition at public colleges and universities. We know that states have been cutting back in the last couple of years. And indeed, you know, the amount that states spend on higher education really hasn't budged much since 1980. Despite inflation and enrollment increases. On average, state and local support per student remains about 17% lower than in 2008. And the big one, I think is tuition at four year public colleges has risen more than 100% since 2001 after taking inflation into account. So I think we're really kind of at a, at a tipping point here around the future of public universities. Who are they going to serve? What's their mission going to be? You know, when I sit on panels or attend conferences and talk to public university presidents, some of them, not all of them say, well, if we just had as much money as we, you know, as back in the day, you know, in the 60s, 70s, 80s, all would be good. Well, the fact of the matter is we're not going back to those days. So I think the conversation really, and the question we should be asking now is what is a public university in the 21st century? It's something that I know Gordon Gee at the end of his career now, has been thinking about, about how do you support these institutions? Not only who pays for them, because somebody has to pay for them at the end of the day, but also what should their mission be in terms of research and teaching? You know, should they serve in state students or out of state students and international students, which many of them have been relying on to help their bottom line. So we have a lot of these issues that have to be taken care of. And you know, and I'm mostly focused right now on flagships. And you know, Gordon Gee has been president of flagships, but I know you've been doing a lot of writing on the regional public universities. These are the state normal schools and teachers colleges that turned into universities in the 1960s, usually. And in some cases they're in even more trouble than the flagships because they're really dependent on State money, Sure.

I mean, you go into places like Pennsylvania with 14 of these regional state comprehensive universities that as you said, had their traditions in a very often normal school, but meaning a teacher college, and then evolved to really serving the community and the region economically. And then over time in the boom of the 50s and 60s and 70s of higher ed, really came to look like not quite the flagship university. Meaning it's something for everyone here, one size fits all institution. The athletics, the research. They'll say, we don't really have research, but we do the teaching of all students from all walks of life. Really complicated missions layered on top of something that originally started is quite simple. And now in places like Pennsylvania, places like Georgia, et cetera, these for the demographic reasons that we heard about from Nathan Groff, for the reasons of the economy that we've heard about in your books, just these institutions are having trouble attracting both the same caliber of student that they used to, the same numbers of that they used to, and the state funding has dried up considerably. What's interesting about the state funding, just to give a little more nuance to the picture you painted, it's absolutely true that funding has in aggregate has not declined, but on a per pupil basis it has. And for those who sit there and say, well, gee, why couldn't we get back to those 1980s days or 1970s, 1960s, the reality is with the retirees coming on, public pensions, health care costs, et cetera, those are eating a lot more of the budget. And K12 education has priority before higher education.

Right. So higher education has always been called the balance wheel of state of state budgets.

Right.

It's always the last thing essentially funded. And whatever's left over is funded, which is not great from a public policy standpoint because it's very hard to plan from, from state universities. Okay, so revenue. So we need more revenue or public universities need more revenue. What are the, what are the options

out there for them, by the way? You know, I think Arizona State is a great example and we can talk. Maybe you can talk a little bit more about that since we're on the campus of Arizona state in Washington, D.C. and they're helping us record this. But what's interesting is that online learning has obviously been a huge way for these institutions to create new program revenue streams. Extension schools and continuing education has been another, basically tapping into the adult lifelong learning market, creating new niches of programs that are very specialized in terms of the regions and economies in which they serve, has generated revenue in many cases. The other source that you've seen a lot of institutions do is go for the international student because they might be full paying, they might be outside of the, of the higher ed funding system and therefore actually represent full tuition. And the value of that US degree has significant weight back in their countries. And so that was the clear value proposition for many years. To be honest with you, Jeff though, as I look at it, I think a lot of these situations are becoming more and more saturated. You covered in behind the beyond the Horizon, excuse me, the decline in the number of international students coming to the United States market. I think online still has lift to give us, but so many institutions are competing in that market. I think those with big brand names in the regions will win. Those who carve out very specific specialties in particular programs of interest in the job market will win. But it's not going to be just this feeding ground where I start an online program and if you build it, they will come. I think those days are over.

Right. And not every state university has the brand name, especially outside of their borders, to do that. You know, you mentioned asu. I mean online has been obviously part of their revenue strategy. Research has been a big part of their revenue strategy and also research in the public good.

Right.

So they're not just doing research for research sake.

It's actually interesting on Arizona State just to interrupt there, which, which is to say they're one of the few institutions that has both become less elite and more prestigious from a research perspective at the same time in that they take in many, many more students from all walks of life. Not exclusive really. An open access institution more and more that judges itself by how far it can take students and simultaneously doing more and more cutting edge research, getting more and more accolades in that space. They've been able to build up on both accounts.

Right. They believe this idea. You know, in the US we somehow believe that you have to be small to be of high quality in colleges and universities. And ASU believes you should be measured by not the people you exclude from admissions, but the people you include and you take to graduation. And so they've been really focused on scale, they've been focused on research. They also do a lot of work with external partners. So a lot of they've been able to leverage a lot of the experiments have been able to do because they are there at the beginning. Right. We're going to be broadcasting from the ASU GSV conference in April and it's a conference that they co sponsor with GSV Global Silicon Valley. And there's a lot of Startup companies there in the education space. And ASU wanted to have access to those companies from very early on so then they could partner with them and figure out how to try to scale this, this university.

I think it goes a long way to answering the question you asked, which is in the future, what will these institutions look like? What will their missions be? Who will they serve? How will they be sustainable? If public financing is going to stay flat, let's say it actually increases a little bit as there's fewer students for maybe the same dollars, maybe marginally. Right. Even still, there's a huge question, with costs continuing to rise of institutions to serve students, what will these look like? And I think it's going to look different for different places. If I'm a regional state comprehensive university. One of the conclusions that I drew on the book that you collaborated on as well, we wrote chapters in, it's called the University Next Door. Michelle Wise and I wrote a chapter together about innovation for regional state comprehensives. And our conclusion was, even though you see a lot of national programs online right now, so everything from ASU to Coursera to Udacity and so forth, the real opportunity for a regional state comprehensive would be to cut trying to be all things to all people and just say, hey, our regional economy is about X. We're going to go really deep on X and just be the best at it and really tailor made for this economic cluster and stop trying to extend our operations and our costs as a result of things that are. You hate using this word in higher ed, but not profitable, both from a return perspective for students as well as frankly, access to the leaders in those fields from a research perspective.

Well, and I think also there's a danger in many ways public universities are becoming much more privatized and private universities, especially the flagships. And I do think there's a little bit of a danger in moving down that direction. We've seen public perceptions of higher ed really take a big hit. A poll from Pew Research center last year found that a large majority of Republicans, for example, think that higher ed is bad for the nation. And even among Democrats, it's not really scoring pretty well. And we've seen other public polls in the last couple of months say much of the same thing. And you know, when I so I covered higher education in North Carolina back In the late 1990s, I mentioned earlier, North Carolina is a state that really invested in public higher education back in the day. And it used to be that you would go maybe to the eastern part of North Carolina where It's mostly agricultural and farming communities and people there thought very highly of the University of North Carolina system. They had an extension service where the farmers felt like their researchers were helping them. They felt that even if they didn't go to school that their kids would have a chance to go even to places like NC State and in Chapel Hill and you know, and where I grew up in Pennsylvania, the same way around Penn State. And I think one things I want to talk to Gordon Gee about is especially around these land grant colleges, is that in many ways they've lost that mission. Right. They lost this idea. Now in many of these states, the public flagship and the land grant flagship seem so far away for the average citizen. You know, they've cut back on their extension services. So they're not helping people in the communities, whether it's in farming or economic development. And for the most part they don't think their kids can either get in to these places because they're taking more out of state students or they can afford it even if they get in.

Yeah, I mean, this is the other thing, I guess I would say, which is from a new revenue creation standpoint. I think they also need to be thinking about as they launch new programs, how do we do lower cost business models that can actually make those things attainable on the public dollar and really serve our communities. But it's a critical question and I think if I'm being blunt and I'm curious, your take. I think we will see some consolidation in the state comprehensive part of the public realm of higher education. I don't think we're going to see it of flagships. I think they'll be fine. They'll look different, but I think they'll be fine. But I do think we're going to see some consolidation. If I'm looking at Pennsylvania, they keep putting off consolidation of those 14 regional institutions in the Penn State system. I would be nervous though, 10 years from now that all of 14 of those will be standalone institutions. What's your take?

Well, I think, you know, being from the state of Pennsylvania, many of those institutions are in the smallest state towns. We talked a little bit about this with Nathan Gras in a previous episode of Future you. I mean, they really are the employment centers of the state. And I'll be curious when we have Gordon Gee in here. You know, he was in Ohio and West Virginia where the economies are really suffering and higher education is seen kind of as a, as the light that gets you out of those dark days of the economy. So really looking forward to having Gordon Gee with us, and we'll have him when we get back from this break.

This episode of Future youe was made possible with support from the Academy for Innovative Higher Education Leadership. 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.

Welcome back to Future You. I'm Michael Horne and really excited about the guests that we have coming on right now. Jeff?

Yeah. Gordon Gee, who I've known through a couple of presidencies, iterations. Right. You've held more university presence than any other American, supposedly a record that is probably unlikely to be beat. You've been president twice at both West Virginia and Ohio State, another record that I doubt anybody will beat. So is this your last presidency?

I hope so. You know, it's been a real privilege to be a university of president. And, you know, I love what I'm doing. And the fact that they would invite me to come back to West Virginia is highly unusual. They forgot that I left them entangled in a mess, I guess. I have no idea. But no, it's been a real experience. You know, this is my 38th year as university president, so half my life.

Well, you're following, I think, in the footsteps of Michael and I and being an author. Right. You're working on a book about land grant universities. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Yes.

Well, we have one coming out right now this Steve Trachtenberger and I have done on the perils of the presidency, on the good side of it, as a matter of fact. And then on the land grant book, which is also a Johns Hopkins press, which will come out in the fall. My colleague and I, who was with me at Ohio State, and I had always been talking about the fact that land grant institutions are very unique institutions in this country. But in some way or other, they had lost their, their way. In my view, they had become much more like any other institution. There are only 70 plus of them. And my view is the fact that they need to be returning to their original mission, to their land grant mission, which is to be community centered, to be focused on building relationships with people around the state, be certain that they're creating jobs and opportunity. And I think, unfortunately, that many of the institutions that we call land grant institutions have tried to follow the step of other kinds of institutions. You know, it's the same way I feel about anyone. I mean, you know, I'm a devout Mormon. I would be very upset if Brigham Young tried to become like Ohio State or West Virginia. The point to me is the fact that one of the great strengths of American higher education is the fact that we have differentiation. We have large and small, black and white, you know, Mormon and Catholic. We have every kind of institution. So what we need to do is we really do need to think about the world in which we're living.

So, Gordon, is that because, you know, once somebody once said that prestige in higher education is like profit in the corporate world, right? People go at it at all cost. Is part of that about this prestige race in higher ed that people who led land grant institutions and their. And their trustees didn't quite like where they were?

Oh, you know, I went from a land grant institutions institute, institution at Ivy League.

Yes, you did.

From Ohio State to Brown. You know what I tell everyone right now? If you want to have prestige, don't come to our institution. If you want to have purpose, come to where we are. I think land grant institutions are places of purpose and that. And I think, by the way, just as an aside, I think that one of the most destructive things that ever happened to higher education were these rankings. I think, particularly US News and World Report, not to be negative, but I think that it. What it has done, it has had people driving towards strange and odd kinds of relationships. So, yes, I think everyone wants to be someone else. My view is the fact that the best institutions are the ones who say, I want to be me. I want to be West Virginia University. I want to be a grant land grant institution. I'm in a very small state with every possible problem. And my role as an institution is have the purpose to solve the problems of the people of that state. It is not to win the Nobel Prize, although I'd love to do that too.

So I'm curious. It raises sort of two questions if I'm an institution. One is, generally speaking, what are the steps that land grant universities should be taking to return to that mission? And second, in your context at West Virginia, what are you actually doing to move toward that?

Well, yeah, two things One is, I think that the first step is the fact that we need to recognize we have a very special mission. We need to take a look at, at what we're doing with extension, what we're doing with 4H, what we're doing with the community building projects, a variety of other things. We need to. And we need to also make certain as an institution that we take advantage of being a land grant institution, which means that we have physicians and we have philosophers. We need to figure out how to make them lay down like lambs instead of like lions. We need to move from vertical universities to horizontal institutions. And the land grant institution, but particularly can do that so that they are using every asset to solve problems. Instead of being isolated, arrogant and in a different place. I want the land grant institution to move from being the ivory tower to the helping hand. Then the second question, remind me of that.

What are you doing in your own context of West Virginia?

Well, we're transforming the institution in many ways. We hired McKinsey, we asked McKinsey to come in. Now, the truth of the matter is I've worked with McKinsey a lot and I could write a McKinsey report and put on the blank. But I asked a different question. I said, how do we reform the university in order to reform the state? A much different notion, because that's the land grant mission. That's what we're about. And so they came up with a great report. We now have it moving very aggressively through the state legislature with, with a number of.

So what did they say? What are some of the highlights of it?

You know, changing the tax structure, changing a number of processes that are the bureaucratic processes in the state of developing a way to make certain that we keep our young people there. And the university itself has to change its structure. We just simply cannot reside in Morgantown. One of the things we did is the coal fields, which is where a number of our major deficits are. We took a university based campus, I closed the campus and took a university based campus to Beckley, West Virginia. And the notion is the Appalachian family, of which we are fiercely Appalachian in West Virginia, they have two characteristics. One, they love being families. And secondly of all, they don't want their families to go anywhere else but to stay right where they are. And so therefore, if you're going to change the educational profile of those folks, you have to go to be part of their culture rather than the other way around. And so that is precisely what we're doing. Medicine, we have three tent poles. One is education Reform the education. This is all part of what we're doing. Reform the educational structure of the state. Number two is move from sickness to wellness, really focusing on health care. And of course, we have the largest health care system in the state. We are the largest employer in the state through our health care system. And then the third thing is to create jobs. You know, I'm one of the few university presidents in this country that said my job is to create jobs. I mean, you know, it's all this other kind of stuff, but my job is to create jobs. I tell everyone we're going to, you know, we're going to, and we're going to keep our young people there. We have to make certain that we keep our talent in the state. If we don't, then we lose the war from the very beginning.

So, Gordon, who pays for all this? I mean, part of the problem is that in public higher ed, especially even going back to the 1860s and the land grant act, is that the state had a huge role back then, the federal government. But since then, the state had a huge role in paying for higher education. But we've seen in many states now where students pay the bulk of the cost of higher education. You know, you're in a state that is not known as wealthy. You just got off a statewide teacher strike, which they're now going to have to put even more money into K12 education. So who's going to pay for this?

Well, the answer is that universities need to reform themselves. I had this thing I call the Freedom Agenda. If you can't give us money, give us freedom so that we can be entrepreneurial, so that we can create our own resources. It doesn't mean to say that we want to privatize. I think that those institutions that have said they want to privatize have lost the support of the people are saying. And so the number. I'll talk about this again today. The number one issue facing higher education is this, how do we increase quality and decrease costs? And no one in higher education wants to talk about decreasing costs. Everyone wants to say, go to the. Let's go to the trough. We are worth investing in. And I believe that. And we don't tell anyone how to do it. And so therefore, that's what we have to do. That's number one. Number two is the fact that we have to make the case for stabilization of support in higher education. And we have to do that through the good deeds and the good work. We can't just simply say it. And so I think that public Higher education has brought about its own demise in many ways in terms of state funding, because we have not made our case. The third thing is this is. Higher education in general is in deep trouble because of public perception. And I think the land grant universities are the ones that can really turn that around. You know, I was just in an ACE meeting and I said, let's just do one thing. Let's all agree that the First Amendment is not. Is not just an amendment, that it is a. You know, that is. It is what it is. And let's all say we're going to subscribe to the First Amendment, that we have good ideas, bad ideas, ugly ideas, a variety of other things, and let's live with that. And, you know, I went around, I thought people were going to.

Nobody got up and started cheering.

Not only that, I felt like I was the College of Cardinals and had to get the hell out of there. So, you know, I mean, that's the point. The point is, is the fact that we're mushy. Mush creates a mediocrity and creates lack of support.

Well, that's because most of those presidents are looking for their next job. Maybe sometimes that's why they're afraid.

Yeah, well, you know, as someone who has changed jobs more than most, you

said maybe being afraid is the wrong way to go.

I think, yeah, I think being fearful is good. If you're fearful of people. If you're fearful of people trying to do your job for you. On the other hand, being fearful because of the fact that you're afraid that by making a decision you might offend someone. Look, you know, your friends come and go and your enemies accumulate. Just accept that and after about seven years, get the hell out of there.

So if you're a state institute institution, I'm curious, you know, you've been taking in more international students to deal with the budget declines. You've been stealing more students from other states. Would you stop that activity altogether and say, no, our focus is within the state or how would you balance?

And this is not just talking about West Virginia, but if you. In terms of public universities, general.

Look, I believe very clearly in the issue of a diverse institution, okay? And I don't, I don't mean that just in terms of racial or ethnic diversity. I believe in terms of ideas, in terms of people exposing. You know, at our institution in small West Virginia, we have. We have students from 55 counties, 50 states, 110 countries, and we speak 100 different languages. And by the way, for the West Virginian from A small town to all of a sudden have a Muslim roommate. Give me a break. It's a positive thing, but also the world. In my instance, the world comes to West Virginia through the university. So we tell a great story. We just signed an $83.9 billion contract with the Chinese to build energy programs that would not have happened if the university hadn't been very involved in China. By the way. Let me say that again. $83.9 billion. Someone said, well, are you going to get all of that said, even if you only get half of it? I'll take it.

You'll be happy.

So, Gordon, we're going to wrap up with this. We were joking earlier about how many presidencies you've had, but we're seeing the pathway to the presidency change. We're seeing a lot of presidents not last very long. We're seeing presidents who can't move on to multiple institutions like you've had. Where do you think the next generation of college presidents is going to come from? Or where she. And what's the best training for the president?

You know, I'm a lawyer by training, and I think that that is good training, but I think that there's no. There's no second to having some experience. But the other thing is, I think that we have to really start hiring people who are very. Who are not fearful. We just used that word earlier. The truth of the matter is, if you visit a university president's conference, you look around and it's a lot of many good friends of mine. I love them dearly, but they become very gray very quickly. That is, they have no sense of speaking up and speaking out. You know, the university presidents in the, in the early 1900s were the leaders in terms of intellectual conversation. They were the Clark Kerr.

Right, Clark Kerr during the Vietnam War, you know.

Absolutely. And I, and I visited with him and he said, you know, one of the first things you have to do is speak out. The other said other thing. He said, if you love it, you know, university won't love you back. I still remember him saying that. But the point is, as university presidents, we need to get people who are brave, who are not simply hunting for a sinecure, but who are really bravely speaking up and speaking out, both for the internal audience. You can't be fearful of folks who are going to vote no confidence in you. Maybe that's a sign of courage. Sometimes you gotta be able to make the decisions and then move toward those decisions.

So we had Doug Lederman here from Inside Higher Ed earlier And we were ending on because he got his start in athletics reporting. We were talking about athletics. We're kind of in the middle of March Madness right now. And it seems like every year we hearing more scandals about college athletics. Do you see any reforms coming? You know, Doug thinks it's not going to happen from the inside. After covering this for more than 20 years, he thinks it's going to have to come from the outside. You've been at a lot of places with big time athletics. What are your thoughts on what's the next step for college out there?

I think we're at a tipping point with intercollegiate athletics. You know, interestingly enough, I chaired the first presidential reform commission when I was president of the University of Colorado in 1989. The guy who sat next to me in my office and worked very closely with me is Mark Emmert, who's now the president. And Mark and I are great friends, but we both agree that what we have, we have a massive problem and we can't get our arms around it. And I think that, I think that we're going to have to rewrite the whole thing. By that I mean we have created so many pathways to problems that we've got to really think of the NCAA as a membership organization in which we make it very simple and very clear. Because without doing that, then we're going to continue to create, create these kinds of subterranean problems that we have right now.

Gordon, thanks for joining us on Future youe and painting a picture of public universities playing a bright role in the state's future. Really appreciate the time and thank you to all the listeners for joining us on Future youe as well. I'm Michael Horn. You can follow me on Twitter @michaelbhorn and on the web at michaelbhorn.com and

I'm Jeff Salingo and you can follow me on Twitter at jsalingo or on the web web@jeffselingo.com and you can download, subscribe and rate Future you on itunes and Google Play and you can follow us on Facebook at Future you podcast. Thanks again for listening and see you soon.