The Future of Small Colleges

This is Future youe with Jeff Salingo and Michael Horn.

Welcome to Future youe. I'm Michael Horne joined by Jeff Salingo.

It's great to be here with you again, Michael. And today we're going to have Pat McGuire, who's president of Trinity Washington College, joining us. You know, being here in D.C. for the last 20 years, all you've heard about is Trinity and what Pat McGuire has done there. As we think about the future of small colleges in particular, which is something we'll be focusing on in this, in this episode, the transformation of Trinity from a small, elite women's college to what they've become, especially around adult education, connecting themselves to the city in ways they haven't, I think is a story that really other small colleges, both women's colleges, but also co ed colleges, can really take and think about as they're thinking about what's next for their own future. So, Pat, a question that we ask a lot of our guests is how did you get into higher education? Out of all the careers to do around the world, why higher ed?

I'm a public interest lawyer gone bad. I was running a clinical program at Georgetown Law center called Street Law. I had to start fundraising to be sure my program stayed funded. And the dean of the law school came to me and said, you're pretty good at fundraising. Why don't you run our development office? And I crossed the great divide into administration and never looked back. I also happened to be on Trinity's board back then. And in 1989, I was the sixth person in eight years to have that presidency. I didn't know anything about what I was doing and that was a good thing. So that's how I got there.

So that's a perfect segue because you're credited with transforming Trinity, which six leadership changes in eight years suggests that there was some transforming to be done. But for people outside of the Washington, D.C. area, they may not be familiar with the story. What was it like at Trinity when you arrived and how has it evolved over time?

Well, Trinity at that time was about close to being 100 years old. Historic Catholic women's college founded because Catholic University didn't admit women in the 19th century. But in the 70s and 80s, when all the men's schools went co ed, like many women's colleges, Trinity's enrollment declined. So when I became president, there were only 300 full time undergraduates. There was an adult studies program called the Weekend College that one of my predecessors had started. There were also graduate programs in teacher education, but the liberal arts faculty wanted the restoration of the real college, which was the full time undergraduate women's college. We were historically Catholic and Sisters of Notre Dame were the presidents. And it took the sisters a period of years to figure out that they didn't have any more candidates. And that was the other issue that affects many of the Catholic schools. When is it time for the congregation to step aside? When do you allow lay leaders to come in? So that was all part of the tumult in the 1980s. I always tell people nothing else bad could happen. That was why I was allowed to be president with no experience. But it was my alma mater. I loved it.

And so what were some of the key actions that you had to take that led to where you are today?

There were several very important things that in the first year I figured out pretty quickly. First, we had to accept the idea that diversification of our programs and our structure was permanent. There was no returning to just being an undergraduate liberal arts college. That model doesn't work. It doesn't work for many institutions. We had to accept diversity of programs. The second thing, we had to accept diversity of our students. I asked the admissions director the first day I started how many students we had from D.C. and she said, none really. And I said, why not? She said, oh, they can't do the work here. And this was the underlying institutional racism that was preventing us from focusing on the women who needed us most, which were local women, women of color who needed the advantages we could offer. So we changed that and that became very controversial, of course, but it was part of Trinity's future. It started our renaissance.

So let's talk about that controversy because this interests me a lot in terms of the role alumni play. Alumni play in terms of the. The future direction of their colleges. Everybody wants their college to be exactly the way it was when they were there. So there was a lot of pushback. I mean, you had graduated people like Nancy Pelosi, you know, really upper crust famous, who ended up becoming famous white women. How did this go over and what kind of work did you have to do with the alums that base to kind of get them to come along? Or maybe they didn't come along.

Most came, most are with us today, of course. But at the time we realized there is nothing more divisive in American society, we know this than race and social class. People don't talk about it, but in higher education, those are very divisive issues. We still see it today in many schools. For Trinity, when the alums realized that the White majority was disappearing. That became very, very frustrating and a source of anger and conflict. And they didn't really express it that, you know, they expressed it in ways like, well, we're happy with diversity, but can they do the work here? Are you allowing declining standards? And one of my favorites was, well, we like diversity, but are they Catholic? Religion played through this as well. So there was a great deal of pushback, and there was pushback on the faculty also. The faculty started complaining they can't do the work here. And that fed into the alumnae pushback. Fortunately, my board of trustees was very strong. And when we had a few alums, just a very few, did a very public revolt that was in the news and kind of terrifying for a while. The board gave me the best advice I ever got as a college president, which was to shut up and do my job and let them handle the controversy. And, boy, was that great advice. I would say my board in the 1990s was one of the best boards in America, and we worked through it.

And did it also help that eventually you became successful? Right. That the budgets weren't were balanced again and things like that? Right.

Nothing succeeds like success. And by the time in 1999, 2000, by the time we gathered to break ground on our new sports center, which was the first new building in 40 years, everybody wanted to claim that they were responsible for success. So, yes, it worked.

It's interesting. So you could show that financially and in the bottom line and in the growth of the student population and so forth. How did you prove the they can't do the work meme wrong? How did you show that to the faculty and alumni? Or did you not have to? Did it sort of fade away over time?

Well, I took a very important position that I still take and that our faculty have come to understand, which is it's not that the students are under prepared for us, we are under prepared for our students. And just last week, we hosted a meeting convened by the Howard Hugh Institute. We're one of 24 grantees of major grants to transform science educations. And Howard Hughes takes the position that universities must change their models of pedagogy in order to be welcoming to new populations of students who learn differently, who might be under prepared, but who can thrive with the right pedagogy. My science faculty today is very different from the science faculty we had in 1989. We had a whole generation retire, and then we hired a new generation of young, very creative faculty who took the position. I have to figure out how to Teach these students well. So we have science faculty, I use them as an example, who teach students how to write lab reports by allowing them to write poetry and to do song or the anatomy and physiology faculty member uses claymation videos to help her students learn about muscles and so forth. The faculty have learned how to transform pedagogy through engaging students in active learning. It really works. And yes, more than half of our students today are from dc, most from the DC public schools, which unfortunately doesn't prepare them well. But in fact, the students leave as powerful learners able to do all the same things that other college graduates do.

That points to another thing, which is that the location has really mattered in the transformation of Trinity. Can you talk about the importance of location and the lessons that maybe have for other college leaders around the country?

Yes. I get contacted by many college presidents, especially the smaller historic women's colleges. And location is everything. My heart reaches out to those in very rural locations who don't have that many options. Being an urban institution meant everything for us. We had the opportunity to see new populations who were local and to welcome them. We also have a great adult education program and so the moms would come and and see that it was great for moms. And then they bring their daughters or vice versa. Our programs are co ed today in the graduate professional, so we get a few dads even coming. Men are about 5% of the population, but still being able to reach out to a local population, I think rural and suburban schools could do that. They'd have to work a little harder at it to identify the population. The one thing that we learned is most small colleges cannot just keep doing what they're doing and hope that things will change. That's a formula for disaster. You have to reinvent your business model.

So Pat, let's talk a little bit about tactics there for other small colleges because a lot of small colleges, both women's only colleges but also co ed colleges, are really struggling these days. If I were president of one of these small colleges, say I wasn't in an urban area and I called you up for advice, what are the couple of things you would tell me to do?

Well, the first thing I would say is you have to know your data very well. You have to do a map of your academic programs and your enrollment speed. You have to be very candid about that data with all of your publics. I took the position early on that there were no secrets, that everybody had to know everything. At one point I gave my faculty the cost analysis of every single major and that shocked them. And the poor majors really minded that I was doing that. But it helped us to shrink the number of majors. Changing majors, changing academic programs is very, very important. Also informing the alums about what's going on and. And asking them to come with us on the change process, rather than surprising them with a news story about declining majors or we're about to close some of these colleges that are announcing closure. That. It seems like a surprise. I don't know how that could possibly happen. That's irresponsible. You should be educating your community all along.

And how about the adult market? Obviously, that's been great for you. Is that. Do you feel like that's a continuing lever that institutions can. Can push?

Absolutely. There are about 35 million adults in America who started college and haven't finished it. Every time I hear about all of this declining enrollment, you know, sad sob stories. That's traditional students where the demographics of who's coming out of high school are shrinking. But there are huge numbers of Americans who need to earn college degrees now. To reach them, you have to do things differently. You have to do more hybrid and maybe some online. You have to mix your programs. They may not be English majors, they might be occupational therapy majors or other kinds of applied sciences, but they're out there. And if we're going to meet the goal, you know, Lumina foundation has said we have to have 60% Americans with college degrees. We need another 20 million seats in order to do that. So all this talk of declining enrollments lies in the face of the fact that there are millions of Americans who need a college education. We're just looking at the wrong slice of the population.

So that's a really entrepreneurial stance to take on it in the face of shared governance and faculty concerns. You said you've had a strong board that's helped you and you've brought the faculty along, but how do you manage that? Shared governance opportunity or challenge?

You have to know when to push and when to drive the train and when to step back and let them decide whether it's a train or a horse and buggy. There were days when I really had to make decisions and announce them, and that was controversial. And then there were other days when I would say, well, what do you all think? That's not. That's not science. It's art. Leadership requires you to know when to push and when to pull back. But ultimately the board is saying, we got to keep going here, and you've got to make the decision. So that's the way it works.

Pat, there are people in this town and in higher ed who say, you are Trinity. So what happens next? Eventually, I guess, you will stop doing this job. Maybe you won't, but. But have you been thinking about. Because one of the things that I don't think most presidents do very well, or higher education in general does very well, is succession planning. Have you been thinking about what's next?

Oh, yeah. We talk succession planning at the board all the time. At this point. I keep thinking there's another whole life I might want to have someday that involves being in the woods with my camera and no people around. But it is hard because Trinity is an example of the kind of institution that is slim in its administrative size and in its pay and perks. So looking at, not only, you know, I am not Trinity. The faculty, the students are Trinity. The faculty do the hard work. I give all the interviews. But how to find the next leader who is going to be willing to work in an environment that's not as glorious as some other presidencies but is so richly rewarding? So finding someone with the. The right values and also with a little bit of that entrepreneurial moxie that I think I've been able to develop.

And does it matter? Does that person come from outside of Trinity, inside of Trinity? Does it matter, do you think?

You know, I don't think it matters. I think it has to be the right person. I would be willing to say that probably it'll be an outsider, but who knows, you know?

So one last question, I think from us, which is that's what's next from a succession planning standpoint. You have views on where Trinity goes next and what the next decade might look like for Trinity.

Yeah, I think Trinity has to continue to be even more creative than it's been. I think we need to do a lot more with technology and with online learning. We haven't been that much in the space. We have to keep our high touch, high feel. I don't think we'll ever do 100% online for most programs, but we have to become savvier about where the world is on technology and also related professional programs. We still are liberal arts heavy and that's great. We're moving into health care in a big way and I think the health professions are going to be a big driver of our future curriculum.

Terrific. Well, thank you so much for joining us and look forward to following both your moves and those of Trinity and the advice, more to the point, for all small institutions around the country. Thanks so much.

Great to be with you.

Thank you.

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 welcome back to Future youe. Coming off a great conversation with Pat McGuire, the president of Trinity Washington College. And a number of things jumped out at me, Jeff. But her discussion of the role of alumni or alumna, I guess as it may be, I probably have that pronunciation wrong. But as a force for maybe blocking change, but then on her board, actually a few members helping push change. I'm curious what struck you? Because you've covered so many higher ed institutions, you're on the board of your alma mater as an alum. How did that resonate with you?

I mean, this is something I see all the time, especially talking to presidents. When we talk about some of the third rails of higher education, you know, things like fraternities or alcohol on campus or athletics, a big one. It's that alums, especially powerful ones who have a lot of money or sit on the governance of the institution, really see the institution to the prism of when they were there. Right. And they want to protect that. And I see this even on the board that I sit on. I sit on the board at Ithaca College. You know, most boards, especially private boards, are heavily full of alums. And so they're really kind of protective of the status quo. So it's interesting to me that she talked about how her board then became her biggest advocate and defended her against these alums. So I think that's really important. And I also think that success helps, right? So if you're able to then counter that narrative from the alums and show them what they're able to. To do, I think it's absolutely critical.

Yeah, success is the best deodorant, as they always say. But I was struck by her board taking the front line, if you will, on the PR side and allowing her to step back and really do the work, as she said it, anyway, and how few boards are willing or able to really do that. In higher education, they're often sit back and are more passive than it sounds like the experience that she had.

Yeah, I think that's the case. I mean, most of these boards kind of come in and out. You know, they may be on campus two or three times a year. The executive committee may be more. But you know, the boards in some ways are kind of very disconnected from what's actually happening on campuses. And we've seen that even in recent weeks, you know, the big scandal out at the University of Southern California, where, you know, this is, you know, things have been going on there obviously for a couple of years, but the board has been kind of the staunchest defender of Max Nikias, the president out there. And then finally, finally, after the latest salvo, especially from these really senior, well known faculty members, that is really kind of what seemed to crack that defense. But these boards, they just don't many times. They're just not part of the culture of the institution. So, Michael, what interested me was that I think a lot of people look to Trinity for the playbook, for how to solve the current problems besetting many small, small colleges. And there's some things that Trinity, I think is unique to Trinity. One is that they're in a, you know, in a very hot city. And they started this a long time ago. Right. They started this in the, in the early 1990s. But at the same time, there's not things that are unique. You know, Pat, on her way out the door was talking about health programs. And, you know, and they're fairly new to the health programs area. So as you were listening to Pat, are there lessons that other small colleges should or could adopt, or are there things that maybe you think just don't work for them as you're thinking about the Trinity story?

Yeah, I guess I was struck, Jeff, by on this podcast, we've sort of had three transformation stories now that we've told of small colleges. Southern New Hampshire University, which is no longer a small college, they're a mega university, one of the largest in the world. We have Paul Quinn College, and we had the president, Michael Sorrell on, of course, and they pioneered the urban work model and then urban work college, and then Pat today talking about how they leveraged location to transform their institution and really became a reflection of the community and an outgrowth of the community, as opposed to pushing it away and inviting people from around the country. And those are three very different stories of transformation in many ways. Two of them leveraged the location significantly, both Paul Quinn and Trinity and I was interested in Pat's comments that, you know, you don't have to do the southern New Hampshire thing where you become really a global or a national university. That location probably has opportunities for suburban and rural communities as well. But to tap them, you're going to have to leverage the adult communities and what is the economic challenges that could help unlock progress in their lives, was sort of her perspective.

And.

And healthcare, I think, is a really interesting one if you think across rural communities. We know that there's an increasing demand for healthcare services that are out of reach for lots of citizens of rural communities. We know that doctors are in short supply, primary care physicians in particular. And yet we also know that there's an outgrowth of a lot of physician assistant roles, pharmacologist roles, nurse practitioner roles and the like that can actually take on more and more care that historically has had to be done by specialists. And so maybe there's actually a huge opportunity through telemedicine and educating the adult workforce to actually grow the population and not have a decline that you're seeing. I think, regardless, the takeaway that I'm having is something we've always said is your strategy can't be to look like every other institution. You have to figure out what's unique about us, what's our strategic advantage, and really think about the cluster in which you play and where you can leverage some advantage in a dynamic way to increase the presence of your campus and stay ahead of the declining traditional population that we've explored.

There were two things that struck me in listening to her. One was the issue of transparency, that when she came in there, she talked about the budget and she showed the budget to people and she said there was something that she said, something like, you know, all these small schools have been closing over the last couple of months, and people are surprised by it. You shouldn't not be surprised.

Well, I'm living in Massachusetts right now, where shock is on everyone's minds around Mount Ida. I mean, there's investigations and everything now, Right.

And then the second one was, in listening to her, was about the. Just how she tells her stories, Right? And, you know, even when you're listening to Michael Sorrell and you're listening to Paul LeBlanc and these others, some of whom we've had on this, on this podcast, is that they're just really good storytellers for their institutions and how important that is not only to gain donors, but to gain support on and off campus with your faculty, with your alums, to gain Press. Pat McGuire for how small that institution is, I would say, gets outsized press. Right. She's always in the press. She's also willing to say things that are somewhat controversial once in a while. I think that helps with reporters. But it's incredibly important that. That the institution, especially these small colleges, have a narrative. They have a reason for being, and then they have somebody to tell that story. And it doesn't necessarily have to be the president. I think the president probably is the biggest microphone and megaphone, but I think it's incredibly important for them to figure out what their narrative is, to figure out what makes them distinctive.

Yeah, I think if Pat had just said, these are the statistics, this is the data about how much these majors cost or whatever it might have been, I think that probably would have fallen flat. I imagine it had to have been woven into that narrative in a story. You know, facts and data matter, but they only matter if you can resonate with someone at an emotional level and actually see yourself in the story in some way. And so I think you're right. Weaving that story is important. And then you have to have data to back it up, of course, so it's not paper thin, but it can't just sort of be, here's the hard data. You know, we've seen that happen where presidents come out and say, this is what the cost of this is, and just sort of leave it at that, and vote of no confidence follows because, well, that's your problem, not my problem. But if you weave it into that narrative, and like she said, it's sort of dripping, so you're bringing them along with you as your own search of discovery to figuring out where is the institution going to land and continue to grow from.

So the other thing I was thinking about with her, especially near the end, as we were kind of talking about what happens after for Trinity and for Pat McGuire, because again, she's been there since 1989. She will retire eventually.

Thirty years is amazing.

It's amazing for a president, especially, is the momentum of an institution. So they went through this transformational process in the early 1990s, and she's been the driver of that. In your kind of. In your study of innovation in innovative organizations, two questions. One is, how difficult is it to sustain that initial momentum right when things are going very well? And second, what about leadership change? When the person who has been really responsible for that transformation leaves the organization, does it just snap back to where

it was really hard? On the second. So on the first one, first, you're absolutely right. That momentum is critical to keep up. And it's actually hardest when things are going well because you're. You're like, why do I want to spend scarce resources on that other thing that doesn't pay today? But it's 10 years from now. But that's when you have to do it, because that's when you have the free cash flow. That's when you have the political capital. That's when you have to be investing in the future and taking some bets. And not all of them are going to work out, but that's when you have to do it. The example we like to often cite is General Motors. If they had just started investing in the future 15 years before bankruptcy, it would have been a very different future than 2008, when that hit very hard. And so when things are best, counterintuitively, that's when you have to be investing in the future. Most last thing on the leadership side. So totally agree with your insight about succession. The thing that we think we've seen is it's a lot harder if you're not the founder or the spirit of an organization to make those hard choices for an institution. So if Bill Gates came back to Microsoft and he said, tomorrow we're all going to do something totally different from our direction, people probably would trust him because it's Bill Gates and he built the place. Steve Jobs could do this at Apple. Right. But if you're someone entrusted with their legacy, there's a lot of probably internal question of, am I following the right path? What if they don't approve sort of thing. And I think often, not always, but often you're seen as a caretaker almost as opposed to the person that has the mandate to make the tough choice and maybe split with your historical past. And so it can be hard. And we'll see, as you know, whenever that occurs at a place like Trinity, that leadership change, do they really give that mandate that says, hey, if you see something new, you gotta chase, go do it? I was struck by one other thing, Jeff, before we end this episode, and maybe something to explore. But I was also struck by how much she focused on pedagogy. And she used that word, not some of the other words that use for working with adults, but really active, learning a lot of these techniques that sometimes faculty members don't want to hear about. They say that's academic freedom. And I was curious if that struck you as well, because you don't always hear a president talk about how they actually work with students.

Yeah.

And I think that's probably part of her evolution as a president. Right. So she now has the resources, respect of the faculty. Many of the faculty were, you know, hired after she was, was president. And I think, you know, presidents who last as long as she has. And you know, Jack DeGioia also here in town, the president of Georgetown has been here almost 20 years. You know, they have multiple presidencies in my mind, right. They, they, they come in and her first presidency was kind of making the place work and then, and then talking about expansion and now talking about evolution. Right. So she had the three, three waves in this case of a presidency. And so I think she can talk about these things now in a way that probably 10, 15 years ago she couldn't talk about.

You know, that's probably a perfect segue out. But it also I think lends for another topic we'll have to explore multiple presidencies. Maybe we can have Jack on Rick Levin and some others that have lasted for measured their, measured their presidency in decades because I think that's a really important insight you just came up with. So with that we will leave it and look forward to the seeing you next time. And thanks for joining us on future. You.