The Eroding Partnership Between Higher Education and the Public

This is Future youe with Jeff Salingo and Michael Horn.

And welcome to the latest episode of Future youe. I'm Jeff Salingo along with my co host Michael Horn. And we're thrilled to have with us today the authors of a new book called Our Higher Rebuilding the Partnership between America and Its Colleges and Universities, which was published just recently by UNC Press. And we have with us today Holden Thorpe, who's the provost and Executive Vice Chancellor for Academic affairs at Washington University in St. Louis and the former chancellor at UNC Chapel Hill. And also with us is his co author, Buck Goldstein, who's a professor of economics and entrepreneur in residence at UNC Chapel Hill. And it's great to have you both here today.

Thank you.

Great to be here.

So, Holden, curious about how you and Buck started working together. This is now your second effort around entrepreneurship, your first being Engines of innovation. So tell us a little bit about how you two start started working together.

Yes. Well, quite some time ago now, UNC was gearing up a number of things in entrepreneurship as a lot of universities were around the same time. And my colleagues had this futuristic idea of getting something called an entrepreneur in residence, which is now a very common thing in higher education, but was pretty new idea at the time. And Buck had a lot of experience in entrepreneurship and venture capital and was attracted to UNC to serve as the first entrepreneur in residence. And he and I started working together on a number of things. And as a result of that, we wrote our first book, which was Engines of Innovation, which was about entrepreneurship and universities. And when that ended, we after a time decided that we needed to write another book because some people interpreted our first book as saying that the university should be run like a business. And that's not what we intended to convey. And so that started us down a journey of really thinking deeply about American higher education, how it got to where it is and what the important attributes of it are going forward.

So in this book, Buck, I'm curious in higher calling, I actually didn't realize that it was so much a response to the book of Engines of Innovation that led you all to talk about this eroding partnership, if you will, between academia and the public. And I'd love you just to go deep on as you all analyze this, what did you see that was causing this erosion and what do you see as the fundamental in your diagnosis, if you will, of the challenges facing American higher education?

Well, I would say the first thing is that about halfway through the book, we discovered the partnership. I'd like to say that we had that all nailed at the beginning, in large part thanks to Jonathan Cole's exhaustive work on higher ed. He called it an implicit pact. But we discovered that it had begun actually in 1550 with Harvard getting a tax exemption. And as we look further and further, we realize that tax exemption is probably the biggest subsidy the government or the public gives higher ed anywhere across the board. So, having discovered it, and then Holden had a course that he worked on where they went very, very deep on the relationship back to Franklin Roosevelt, and then the GI Bill and later a variety of other initiatives that essentially created an informal relationship that said if you higher ed, if you teach, and if you are willing to do research that matters and create an educated workforce, then in exchange we'll provide, allow you the independence, shared governance and tenure and economic support. And once we understood the relationship, we realized how tenuous it was and how much it was under attack from sort of all places and how politicized higher ed had become. So that's really where we started from. What we also realized is that neither side has a clear understanding of that partnership. And I know Holden has some clear ideas about how people essentially talk out of two sides of their mouths about the partnership itself.

Yeah, I think one of the things that we really want to see happen is for leaders and people who talk about higher education to try to tell the same story to every audience. I mean, we have a habit, and this has happened over the last 70 years or so, of going to Washington or to our state legislative house and saying, don't worry, we'll get you an educated workforce. We'll drive the economy with startups, we'll provide world class academic medicine. And then we go to the faculty senate meeting and say, don't worry, we got you covered on tenure and academic freedom and shared governance. And we're really not explaining to each of these audiences the fact that there's another side to what we're saying.

So that's actually a great point into the book itself because you actually have a few points where you're really explaining and breaking down your perspective of what is higher education. You have a whole section on how students are not customers. You have a whole section on how faculty aren't even to be thought of as employees. And then toward the end of the book, you have a fictional scene you even created to depict how this conversation might occur with everyone at the table. Can you shed a little bit more light on how you see each of those stakeholders in their roles, but also coming together in this Venture known as American Higher Education.

Well, we actually have had several of those symposiums or roundtables that we made up in the book have now actually happened. And we're hoping many, many more will. I would say, at the most basic level, faculty, many, many faculty don't really. No one has really told them that there are responsibilities to the public that are essentially required in exchange for the great opportunity to have an academic life. And on the other hand, we're finding boards of trustees, especially, have frankly, no real clue about how any of these processes really work. And there's a quote in the book that said when we asked them about one trustee, about learning about them, and he said, I hope I live that

long,

because they literally, more often than not, assume their role, assuming they're going to run this like everything else they have run during their lives, and find out that it is a very strange duck that is not like any other institution they're used to. So the issue becomes, first, how do people meet the other halfway? For the most part, we believe trustees believe in higher ed or they wouldn't actually be on the board of trustees to begin with. And we find faculty across the board, across the ideological spectrum, who, for instance, are willing to sign up for the fact that part of their responsibility is help students get a good job. Things like everyone should teach, students should have a good job. Economics shouldn't be driving whether people can go to college or not. Those are common ground issues that we find most everyone can accept. But then there are these other issues that seem to be hot buttons that come to the forefront and seem to divide people.

Yeah, And I think the other thing is just the work that each side needs to do to understand the language of the other. I mean, one of the things we've seen in response to the book is a lot of people who were opposed to tenure. You know, trustees and alumni. We were not going to sell everybody. But we've had people who said, okay, I read your chapter on tenure, and now I understand why we have it, and it makes sense. And I think for those people, no one had ever gone to the trouble to explain to them how it works. And it's a different language if you're a corporate person who's an alumnus or a trustee. And, you know, we just have to do the hard work of slogging through these conversations.

The interesting thing that I found about the book was that you talked about this partnership and universities being part of this partnership. It seems to me, in covering higher education, particularly over the last couple of years, that there's this blame game, right, that the institutional, whether it's the leaders, whether it's the faculty, whether it's the students, are always saying, well, only if the state would do this, if only the trustees would do this, if only businesses would do this, it was always somebody else's fault. Right. For the. For the ills of higher education. And you. And you talk about how universities have also been falling down a little bit on their role in this partnership as well. So, Holden, if you could talk a little bit about that and also a little bit about the public, private aspect of this, because you've been both at a private, public university now at a private university, and sometimes I feel like people at private universities don't think they play a role kind of in this. In this larger narrative around higher education. But it's clear to me that this book is meant for both public and private universities.

Yeah. So I think some of the things that we talk about, you know, number one, is this thing we've already said, which is trying to bring into resonance the narratives that we're using. And part of that is doing the hard work of going to a lot of stakeholders on the inside of the university and saying, hey, I know when you were hired, we didn't tell you that the public is expecting us to produce graduates who can get jobs, or the public is expecting us to do all this tech transfer stuff that's going to drive the economy. And the public is expecting to understand more about the university and how it works. And we need to work on that if we want to enjoy the support that we've been given. And on the other side, I think it's a matter of just slogging through, like I said, a lot of the sort of didactic material about higher education and how it works, rather than, you know, when I was a chancellor, I used to go give a talk to the alumni, and when things were going well, I would say all the great things that were happening. And then I'd play the piano and some student would sing a song and get everybody all teary about all the great things we're doing. And, you know, then I would say good night. And the truth is that during that time, you know, there are all kinds of problems that we now see. Sexual assault, anxiety and depression among the students, you know, student debt, a lot of things that, you know, we weren't talking about because administrators like to spread good news, and that's understandable, but it's kind of catching up with us as far as the public and private part is concerned. I mean, the big advantage at a private university is that you have trustees for a lot longer, and you play a role, the administration plays a role in who they are. And so you have more opportunity to bring the trustees along in terms of how all of this works on the public side. I mean, I can remember getting told that I had a trustee that was somebody I never met, and I'd call him up and say, hi, welcome to my board. I'm the chancellor. I'd like to come to your office and get to know you. And that is a pretty big burden to carry. Just, you know, it's hard to imagine another governance system where the CEO wouldn't know who's on their board until after they've been appointed and they serve for a short time. And so you don't have as much time to bring them along. And they try to make their mark during the short term that they have to be on the board.

You spend a lot of time in the book talking about academic medicine and the role that plays in this compact with regards to building support. It used to be that academic medicine was seen as a headache, I think, by many college leaders. What role, though, do you think that this plays in terms of building support for this. For this compact?

Wow. And I've learned a lot about this from Holden, but it's astonishing how the concerns about higher ed, the politicization, all the issues go away when somebody gets sick. It's astonishing. And Holden and I know about a particular donor at UNC who is probably our biggest critic, just gave the lineberger Cancer Center $12 million and is one of our greatest people who sings our praises because he's in remission. No one seems to ask if the doctor is a Republican or a Democrat or what his research is or what his teaching load is or her teaching load is when they get sick. So it's some very basic elemental level. Academic medicine is frankly, one of our aces in the whole, I think.

Yeah, I agree. And I think that it doesn't get enough attention because if you pick up most of the books in our genre, most of them would not have a chapter about academic medicine. And we debated whether to include it, but we're really glad we did because we think this is a great way to build support. And it's also an extraordinary responsibility of the university. And between those two things, you know, it's very important for leaders to appreciate academic medicine. There's a. UNC announced this, and so it's not a confidential gift, but it didn't get the Attention that maybe a lot of people could have put on it. When I was a chancellor, I was actually able to get a endowed chair from Pat Robertson. And the reason was because he had been cared for by one of our physicians. And when I went to ask him for it, we didn't talk about the values of the university or anything like that. He was grateful to us and he made a gift, which UNC announced. And so, you know, if you can get Pat Robertson to give a gift to the university through academic medicine, then it's something that we really need to put a lot of emphasis on.

So, curious question. And last, unfortunately, last question we have time for. But Buck, I'm curious, as you see, this role of academic medicine on one side being an asset, but on the other side, it does cost a lot of money to continue to maintain these centers, the hospitals, the different missions that they have, from research to teaching to actually treating patients and so forth. And this sort of gets to the bigger question that I think your book starts to dig into, which is public financing of higher education and the fact that, you know, we are in an aging society with more people needing medical care and so forth, and that's sucking up more budgets and pensions and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Right. And so I guess I'm curious, do you think that a deeper understanding of this partnership can somehow reset that or is more needed ultimately than just hoping for public funds to come back in this?

So I'm very optimistic about the long term direction of financing in general of higher ed, in particular, the amount that students have to pay as a percent of the total cost of education. And I think the Michael Bloomberg gift of $1.8 billion is going to be a watershed. I know Jeff has just written a piece on the arms race, and in general, we believe that one school copying another is not really the strategy for being different and surviving in this world of higher ed. But I would say that in one case, I hope the Bloomberg gifts ignites an arms race and that many schools now understand that students should be able to come to their school and graduate in four years with no more debt than, say, it cost to buy a car. And I believe that we're headed that way. I think every indication is we are not withstanding some tough years in the past. And I think the Bloomberg gift will be a watershed gift that will. We'll look back and say that was the moment when the perception changed and the tide started flowing in a different direction.

Holden, any thoughts on that gift besides the fact that you probably would have liked to have it yourself.

Well, we would have loved to have it ourselves. It's about exactly the amount that we would need to be need blind. And we compete hard with Hopkins. So it's, as Buck said, in the big picture, it's a great thing. But for the schools that compete with Johns Hopkins, it's kind of upping the ante.

So does that widen it, does that widen the divide though? Holden?

Yeah, I mean, look, there's an interesting problem with private financial aid, as you have written about the schools at the tippy top that are meeting 100% of the need or even more and are need blind. There's not very many of those. Hopkins wasn't one of those, and it is now. And there are lots of other private universities that are, they might be need blind, but they're not meeting all of the need. And there, that's what we call gapping students. And as Buck just alluded to, that's leading to a lot of student debt. And so we really need a revolution in how we talk about admissions. And we need to move from need blind to promoting educational equity. And if you promote educational equity, I believe it's more important to put an emphasis on meeting the needs of their, of your students than it is on admitting the most students as you can. And that is going to be a tough turn to make for private higher education. I think for public higher education, there really isn't any alternative to rebuilding financial support from the government. We, you know, we built up these endowments and we went to the endowment model, we collateralized our debt. We, they, you know, a lot of schools admitted out of state students that paid a lot, international students that paid a lot. They're running out of tricks. And we know that the high tuition, high aid thing didn't work because the high tuition, high aid schools are having the least educational equity now. And so that's why we think rebuilding the partnership is so important, because both for private and public, increasing government support is really the only way to make everything that we're doing sustainable. And in order to do that, there's got to be a lot more listening and adapting to what each side is expecting out of this partnership.

Well, Holden and Buck, thank you so much for joining us today. And to our listeners, the book is Our Higher Rebuilding the Partnership Between America and Its Colleges and Universities by Holden Thorpe and Buck Goldstein. And it's great to have you both on the podcast today.

Thanks for having me.

Great being with you.

And we'll be right back.

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. This episode was also made possible with support from Entangled Solutions. If you want to shape the future of education, Entangled Solutions would like to hear from you. Entangled Solutions is hiring smart, mission driven team members interested in helping world class institutions solve their most vexing challenges in learning and education. Learn more at Entangled Solutions.

And we're back on Future.

You coming off a great conversation with Holden Thorpe and Buck Goldstein who just wrote this really, really, I thought it was a terrific book. Our Higher Calling, Rebuilding the Partnership Between America and Its Colleges and Universities. And Jeff, you actually wrote a piece a few weeks back for the Washington Post where you brought this in and they referenced your piece during. During our conversation about a topic that we didn't get as much into perhaps as we should have, which is that they make a few really insightful points about strategy on college campuses. What was your takeaway as you wrote the column and the piece that you wrote about their book?

Yeah, I mean, you know, a lot of this book is around the future and they talk about the primary approach that most colleges use to set that course for that future, which are strategic plans. Right. And they basically said, you know, absent a major crisis in higher education, which we tend to see, you know, right before a school tends to close or has a major crisis with leadership, is that, you know, the typical strategic plans, as they wrote, are non controversial. They really look like the strategic plans that most other schools write that are similarly situated. And it basically is meant to keep the institution in line with its peers without creating waves among the institution's various constituencies, whether that's alums, lawmakers and students. And really what's needed now and as they talk about this in the book, is that, you know, you really need to rebuild higher education for the 21st century. And that's going to require new ideas and new plans that might be controversial in some cases and might sometimes offend the various constituencies. You know, so they taught they in the book, at the very end, they lay out kind of what the various stakeholders in higher education need to do. And they talk, you know, call on trustees to stop micromanaging for presidents to spend more time with students and less money on administration. Yep. And teaching. And they talk about professors spending more time on, on teaching they even say students have a role in this and to get engaged, you know. So I like the way they set up the, the latter half of that book, particularly the end, where they, where they talk about the role that everybody plays to rebuild this, this partnership.

Yeah. And it was interesting to me that strategy is in, in essence, it's, how are we going to be different from other organizations? And the irony of higher education is exactly as you said, that as we create strategic plans, how do we be the same? And we're benchmarking. And if our peer institutions, following three programs, we feel obligated to do the same thing and constantly benchmarking and so forth. And the irony of that, I think is, is pretty steep. The other thing that I was taken by, I suppose though, was that even in midst, you know, they do a good job of laying out the pessimistic story up front in the book. But Buck is fundamentally optimistic about financing and higher education. Did that surprise you?

It did surprise me, especially given that they came from, you know, both came from a, a public institution. But I think both of them see the long term view of higher education here. I mean, I think it's very easy for all of us to kind of get mirrored down in the, in the, in the details every day of what's happening in Washington and in the states and in higher ed. You know, we talk a lot about these various polls which are just a snapshot in time of what people think about higher education. And I, you know, I met Holden Thorpe when he first became chancellor at UNC Chapel Hill. And I'll never forget him walking into my office when I was at the Chronicle of Higher Education at the time and him talking about if he were to have an entire career as chancellor at Chapel Hill, which obviously didn't work out for no reasons of his own fault, but he could be there for 30 plus years. Right. Given he was in his 40s when he was appointed Chancellor. And I think that's the problem now is that we don't necessarily think about higher education and its long term view. These are institutions that have been around for hundreds of years in many cases, and for now we're just talking about five year plans, one year plans in some cases. And I think the thing again they bring up around strategy is that you need the time and the money to do what's right. And I think Holden has that view and so does Buck.

Yeah. And I took away deeply that they really reflected on what's your purpose as an institution, what separates you from other institutions out there. I, I think that's a good starting point, right? What, what makes us distinct? Who are we and who not? Who do we want to be five years from now, but who do we want to be in a long, long, long time ago? Serving future generations, literally generations.

And they're also at institutions that are, are doing very well right in the, in the grand scheme of things. And so, Michael, I'm kind of curious. You know, you spend a lot of time with institutions that need strategy work that sometimes are in different situation. Does that tend to lead to pessimism or do they feel like if we just land on the right strategy, we're going to turn this around?

Well, you know, I think to their point, they, the comment that they both made that no one has ever explained to the faculty that they have a public obligation. I think often the same is true of the dire straits that some of these colleges and universities are in that no one has explained to the faculty the real situation and the creative thinking that is required. And I agree with, with a point that they make in the book, just sort of cutting your way out of a crisis. It's something you can do to tide the wave, but it's probably not the big idea that you want if you're actually focused on rebuilding this partnership. And so the, the, the thing that we often push people to do is think, not just on relying on, on the Michael Bloomberg gift coming along, which most institutions don't have access to, or thinking that public financing in the next, I mean, I'll go further than five years. I don't think it's going to come back in the next generation because the demographics, you know, beyond that, who knows? But you know, with, with retirees and pension costs and health care and so forth. And quite frankly, higher ed has done a lot on the research side around miracles of medicine, but it hasn't lowered cost. And so I think to think that cost or that there's going to be revenue there that wasn't is a bit of a pipe dream. And so we try to shift people though, from that sort of, oh my God, all these threats to how can you start seeing this as an opportunity to do something truly new and different? Because fundamentally, I believe anyway, you're not going to get ourselves out of the affordability crisis and the like by allowing people to afford what is an expensive higher education. I think we're going to have to help make models that themselves are fundamentally affordable. And that's going to require some deep creativity is my take.

I was also interested in their take on Unacademic medicine, which as I mentioned in the interview, you know, you know, 10, 20 years ago, most college leaders were kind of running away from academic medicine. But now, and I think over the last 20 years, they've seen it more from the research enterprise piece of it and how much money you could bring in on that side of things. But I was kind of curious on how they saw it as the front door to colleges and universities and people giving gifts who otherwise would not have given gifts. And you know, we tend to see athletics as the front door. Right. That helps institutions, buoys you when you're

down and you have a few wins and you get a lot of gifts.

Right. You get a lot of gifts and people see you in a different light as a result. Academic medicine being another one, and perhaps maybe colleges and universities, in order to turn around these kind of negative attitudes about higher education, need to create more of those openings to the public at large. Right. So when the public goes to a game and they feel good about it, or they go to the hospital and they're cured and they feel good about higher education, what are some of the other things that higher education can do in terms of thinking about those front doors into, into higher education?

Yeah, I think it's a great way to say it and it's a great way to think about value proposition. Right. What are we really contributing from a societal perspective that's part of that compact and that partnership. And that doesn't get into the what I thought was refreshing about this book. It was, it wasn't just the transactional did I get a job narrative. It was a broader thinking of that. And I'm personally quite optimist, as I think about the governmental piece of this, of academic medicine from a research perspective, continuing to be able to get dollars. I'm not sure how spread that's going to be among higher ed, though. That's the other side of this, is that in some ways that's a conversation that probably impacts a couple hundred institutions and helps them for the other institutions out there, the, the many thousands, they're going to have to think of different front doors. I think, to your point.

Right. And at the very end, we obviously talked about the Michael Bloomberg gift, which has gotten a lot of news in recent weeks in higher education. And it's clear maybe that Buck thinks that this could encourage other philanthropists to give money. That's to be seen and we'll find that out in the coming months. But for now, thanks for joining us on Future youe continue to subscribe to us. Tell your friends if you listen to us on any of the platforms, rate us and give us a nice review, or give us any review. And we look forward to hearing you and listening to your feedback and joining us on the next episode of Future you.