Who We Are

This is Future youe with Jeff Salingo and Michael Horn. Hi, I'm Michael Horne. I'm the Chief Strategy Officer at Entangled Ventures and a co founder and distinguished Fellow at the Clayton Christensen Institute, joined here by Jeff Selingo for our podcast, Future youe. And, Jeff, I get to interview you here. Actually, you're often the interviewer. I'm curious, how did you get into higher education originally? Where was your start?

Well, Michael, it's great to be here, and I'm looking forward to joining you on a regular basis for this podcast, Future youe. We're here today at the streetside studios of Arizona State University's new D.C. center here at the corner of 18th and I. And I got my start in higher education reporting not too far from here, just a couple blocks over on 23rd and M Street here in Washington, D.C. for the Chronicle of Higher Education. Twenty years ago, actually, back in a little more than 20 years ago, in 1997, I started at the Chronicle at the time when they were just kind of really getting on the Web. The website, Chronicle.com was fairly new, and I was hired as a daily reporter for their daily newsletter, which is now incredibly popular. So after about a year there doing that, I stayed at the Chronicle and went into covering state politics for them, and over the course of 16 years there, reported on everything from state higher education policy to leadership issues and money issues and in higher education, and eventually ended up as editor for four years. But higher education to me is kind of a fascinating, kind of a fascinating industry to cover, and it's not something that I ever thought I would spend 20 years doing. How about you? How did you end up getting into this business?

Total dumb luck on my end. We share something, Jeff, which is that I wrote for my college newspaper. So I had a reporting background, went to work for David Gergen for several years as his research assistant chronicling American politics and things of that nature, and ran away from it, from writing in public policy to business school. And while there, I took Clayton Christensen's class on disruptive innovation, and it totally changed the way I saw the world. And at the end of class one day, he literally to the class announced, I had this opportunity to write a book with me on public education. Anyone interested stopped by and I stopped by and that book was on public K12 education. What became disrupting class? About 12, 13 years ago, we started and and then very quickly it became obvious that these ideas of disruptive innovation had maybe more relevance in the field of higher education than they did in K12 schools. And so very quickly started getting immersed in it through the work of the Clayton Christensen Institute. And then it became a bit of an addiction. I love the area. It occurred to me that in college I had done a lot on higher education as well. And it's an area I'm pretty passionate about trying to create a more student centered future.

Yeah, you know, as you mentioned, I covered higher education as an editor at the Ithacon, where I went to under graduate college at Ithaca College, where I now serve on the board of trustees. So it's kind of interesting that when I was a student newspaper reporter, I was always after the board of trustees. And now I'm a member of that institution. So it's kind of interesting.

It's funny because I was on the Yale Daily News, I was the managing editor there. But when I was a reporter, I covered the president and the trustees. And the big story was always, could you break what the corporation was going to talk about at its meeting? As though that was groundbreaking information at

the time, you know, And I've now been to a lot of trustee meetings because I get to speak to trustees often. And I'm now amazed at when you really open up the curtain, what really happens at those meetings. And to be honest with you, sometimes it's not much. It's kind of interesting. But it's great to be here with you. And I have a Clay Christensen moment in my own career and back in 2011 when he was about to do Disrupting Universities, right?

Yeah. Innovative University.

Innovative University. He called together a group at HBS. There's probably about 50 of us in the room. Paul LeBlanc at Southern New Hampshire invited me up because they're close. And I was editor at the Chronicle at the time, and I'll never forget that day and him talking about some of the theories. You know, this was right around the time when MOOCs were starting to become a big thing. And I came back from that meeting and I wrote this really long memo to my boss and said, you know, we're not covering most of this stuff. And some of it fascinated me, and to be honest with you, some of it frightened me as well as somebody who really kind of came up and covered traditional higher education. But it was because of that memo then that a couple of months later, I stepped out of the role as editor of the Chronicle of Higher Education and ended up writing my first book, College Unbound.

So, Jeff, I'm curious, what's something outside of your LinkedIn profile then? We're starting to get A sense of Jeff the professional. But as we start to go down this journey together on Future youe, I think I and the listeners would love something outside of your LinkedIn profile about you that we'd love to know.

Well, believe it or not, I don't work all the time. I have a great family here in. In Washington, D.C. i have two daughters who I absolutely love. Hadley, who's 8, and Rory, who's 6. And part of my passion about higher education is what's the future going to be for them, what it's going to be like. And the other thing I think I really love to do because it just kind of gets me away from people and thoughts, is I love to ski. I grew up skiing in northeastern Pennsylvania, which is really not mountains, but hills in the Pocono Mountains. But it's something that. Where I kind of get away and am able to be by myself and have my thoughts. And it's something that I still enjoy and I'm hopeful, keeping my fingers crossed, that I'm going to be able to get my daughters into it.

So I'm jealous of that. No, I'm jealous of that. So I have two daughters as well, and my wife comes from a family of skiers. And when they met me, I had never skied before, and so they looked at me like I was an alien, not liking winter sports and winter weather, but have gotten a little bit into it because of them. Not very well, but I'd say my wife and I have become addicts of CrossFit and sort of the healthy wellness lifestyle that that promotes. And that's a huge part of who we are outside of work and trying to balance family and create opportunities for healthy e, healthy living, healthy working out and so forth that infuses everything in our. In our lives. And so that's something you won't find on my LinkedIn profile, but it's a pretty big way I see the world.

Well, we're gonna have to talk about how we could get the presidents and other senior officials fit right in terms of their crazy schedules when they're on planes all the time and everything else. But it's gonna be great to be joining you in this. In this journey of future youe we're gonna be talking to interesting people who are shaping higher education. We're going to be tackling a lot of different topics. You know, higher education is kind of a, as we said earlier, a kind of a fascinating industry. We're going to be talking about admissions and finances and pedagogy and technology. Which I know is a topic that you're interested in, and also alternative credentials and alternative markets for higher education. What are you most interested in trying to tackle in this? What subject do you think is going to be. Is going to be something that is going to resonate with listeners or something that you think we're going to kind of come back to often?

I think the future of liberal arts colleges is going to be huge. And I mean that in multiple dimensions. Right. You can imagine both the curricular relevance for today's society. That's a big question a lot of people have, and yet a lot of people who are asking it themselves are the products of a liberal arts education. And so that paradox or that question, I think is something we're going to come back to. And then the corresponding piece of it is the business model for a lot of those institutions that have been staples of not just their communities, but the American democracy, quite frankly. And what's the future going to be for that? Because I think for a lot of them, it's not going to be sustainable as they've always done it. And yet higher education has had this enormous capability of adapting over time. So what's higher education going to look like from a business model perspective? And who are the institutions 20 years from now?

You know, what's interesting about that, Michael, is that most people say, you know, well, we're not really, you know, respecting the history of higher education. And in the recent months, I've been really looking back at the history of American higher education in particular. And what's interesting to me is that the period that we're in now is very similar to a period in American higher education right before the American Civil War and the decades before that. Right. You know, Yale in 1826 came out with a report saying, you know, defending the liberal arts against all these new institutions that were growing up to basically teach people how to become engineers and other types of professions, you know, and then in the middle of the Civil War, President Lincoln signed the Morrill land Grant, which created the land grant institutions, which really focused on mechanized farms and factories and teaching people how to get ready for those. So we've been having this debate between kind of the professions and the liberal arts for a very long time. And it's really interesting to me how back in the 1840s and 50s and 60s, people were approaching that change with a lot of optimism, and it was a challenge to them. And they're really excited about starting new institutions and new ideas. And now when we talk about this, people approach it with fear. Right. And they're afraid of what they have changing. And it's just really interesting on how American higher education approached it back in that period and how they're approaching it now and why that is. Why do people feel this is such a threat?

Yeah, I think it's going to be that entrenchment mindset. Digging deeper into that is going to be fascinating. And I think talking to the leaders and the faculty members and alumni even of a lot of these institutions who are seeing them go through these changes or fight these changes to get inside their psyches and understand why and what they're trying to drive toward, I think is going to be fascinating. And so I'm really looking forward to launching this podcast and bringing some fascinating interviews and conversation between the two of us that I hope enhances those interviews as we embark on this journey of future you.

It's going to be a lot of fun, so we look forward to you joining us on a regular basis for future you. Thank you.