Kevin McClure
So I tell people very earnestly, very honestly, that there was not a grand strategy behind this. The deepest roots of this project is in my own personal experience with burnout. So in the very early days of the pandemic, I don’t know about you, but I really believed that this was going to be a short term experience. We were maybe going to go into lockdown for a couple of months. We were going to get a handle on this, and then we would re emerge back into our normal lives.

Keith Edwards
Hello and welcome to Student Affairs NOW. I’m your host. Keith Edwards, today, I’m joined by Dr Kevin McClure to discuss his book, The Caring University, reimagining the higher education workplace after the great resignation. He presents a transformative approach to higher education workplace culture, arguing that institutions must prioritize the well being of faculty and staff to enhance student success. The book challenges traditional norms that treat staff burnout and overwork as inevitable, instead advocating for an intentional, proactive and sustained and sustained investment in employee care. I’m really looking forward to this conversation with Kevin. He’s been on a couple of other times before, and as always, great conversation. Student Affairs now is the premier podcast and online learning community for 1000s of us who work in alongside or adjacent to the field of higher education and student affairs. We release new episodes every week on Wednesdays. Find details about this episode or browse the archives at studentaffairsnow.com

Keith Edwards
This episode is sponsored by evolve. Evolve helps higher ed senior leaders release fear, gain courage and take transformative action through a personalized cohort based virtual executive leadership development experience and Huron. Huron education and research experts help institutions transform their strategy, operations, technology and culture to foster innovation, financial, health and student success. As I mentioned, I’m your host. Keith Edwards, my pronouns are he? Him, His? I’m a speaker, author and coach, and I help higher ed leaders and organization transform for better tomorrows through better leadership learning equity. You can find out more about me at Keith edwards.com I’m recording this from my home in Minneapolis, Minnesota, which is at the intersections of the current and ancestral homelands of both the Dakota and the Ojibwe peoples. Kevin, welcome so glad you’re here. Let’s let you talk a little bit about yourself and a little bit about this new book.

Kevin McClure
Thank you. Thank you so much, Keith. I am thrilled to be here. Long time listener of the podcast, longtime friend of the podcast. I love, love, love, love the work that you all have been doing through this and just excited to be able to share a little bit about this work with you all. And I’m a faculty member at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington, in our higher education program. I started my higher education career in student affairs, in housing, and then shifted a little bit into a Living Learning Program, residential program that is focused on helping to connect domestic and international students who are living together in residence halls, and then from there, shifted into academic affairs. I worked in in the Office of the Associate Provost at the University of Maryland as I was working on my doctorate, before stepping into a full time faculty role here at UNC W and for many, many years, my work focused on institutional leadership, management, finance and was not really squarely focused on workplace Issues in Higher Education.

Kevin McClure
That focus really grew out of my experience in the pandemic and starting to do some writing about the experiences of people working in higher education as we were responding to the pandemic. And so this work is really a product of a curiosity driven inquiry process that’s now going on five years, and I’m continuing to do interviews with folks across higher education, continuing to try to tell stories of higher education professionals, and continuing to really learn about how we can take some of those experiences and and improve our practices across institutions, to reimagine the higher education workplace.

Keith Edwards
And you know, I love that you’re mentioning the the great resignation, and then pandemic and all this that maybe shaped this. And I know as you began this, it was, how do we care for our people in these contexts? Now we’re in a different context, where caring for our people is is something different. I’m interested in, sort of how the the project

Keith Edwards
more so than the book, right? The the book is one part of a bigger project, how the project has kind of evolved for you, how the book emerged, and sort of how you’re maybe thinking about this in similar or different ways. From the pandemic, the great resignation to now these external attacks on higher ed,

Keith Edwards
another sort of different kind of crises around that is leading, also in very different ways, to faculty and staff burnout, overwhelm, lack of well being, and then wanting to keep.

Keith Edwards
Care for these folks, as you say over and over, prioritizing the well being of faculty and staff, which is a means to an end, which is ultimately student success and graduation and education and learning and thriving and all of that tell us a little bit about how this project has emerged.

Kevin McClure
So I tell people very earnestly, very honestly, that there was not a grand strategy behind this. The deepest roots of this project is in my own personal experience with burnout. So in the very early days of the pandemic, I don’t know about you, but I really believed that this was going to be a short term experience. We were maybe going to go into lockdown for a couple of months. We were going to get a handle on this, and then we would re emerge back into our normal lives. So in those first couple of months, I was coordinating our master’s program, teaching a full course load. My kids at the time were one and three, and so we were still very much deeply in parenting of very young kids, and I did not really dial much back, because I was expecting that we were going to just kind of shift back into a normal time. And so I had these commitments to my students. I had commitments to collaborators around projects. We had things that we needed to do, and ultimately we needed to deliver our courses and graduate students. And so I just kept, kept pushing throughout that experience, and we got through graduation, got to those summer months, and was absolutely burned out. Had all of the classic characteristics of burnout. And what I realized in learning about this was this was likely not my first experience with burnout in higher education. I think I had probably been in a bit of a cycle around, burning out, trying to pull back and recalibrate, diving right back in once I had done that, and kind of repeating the cycle. And so I, as part of that experience, had been doing already some public writing, and I decided, You know what, I’m going to talk to some folks in higher education and see to what extent My experience was singular or something that we might anticipate being a real challenge, especially as we headed into that first full fall semester of the pandemic experience. And it became clear very quickly that I was not alone in what I had experienced, and so I put together an article where I was just sharing with leaders a very simple message, hey, you might anticipate this fall that your employees are going to be showing up very differently, and that burnout is a real challenge that we should be thinking about it’s almost quaint and cute now to kind of talk about this, because it was so early in the conversation about this. Now we have so much more content and conversation about burnout. It’s something that leaders are just much more attuned to. But in that moment, we really were not having a national conversation about this in the workplace. And so it struck a nerve, and kind of took off. Got emails from people about this piece for weeks, and that was my first realization that there is more to this story that needs to be unpacked. And so I just made a commitment to follow that initial model. I kept interviewing people, and I kept trying to think about, what does a good organizational response look like to this type of crisis, and trying to articulate that as best I could,

Kevin McClure
a very early principle that I tried to bring to this work is this wasn’t going to be writing just for or about faculty. This was going to be writing that was inclusive of lots of people that are working in higher education. I didn’t want it to be the type of thing that focused on just a narrow subset of institutions. I really wanted to try to think expansively about the context in which we are working in higher education. And so eventually, I had gathered up these articles and had a set of ideas, and I said to myself, there is a model that’s coalescing here and a message, and you articulated that message beautifully, which is to say, there is, I think, such an opportunity for us to take this pandemic experience and the types of questions it has raised and the ways in. Has challenged us to reimagine our policies and practices in higher education and in a way that we never have before, truly prioritize the well being of staff and faculty. And so I challenged myself to say, Okay, if you see that there’s something that’s maybe starting to coalesce here. Write it down. Try to articulate that this thing that you have kind of bubbling in your brain, try to get it down on paper. And that’s where this idea of the caring University emerged. And there are six organizational changes that I propose through the book. Each one of those has a set of concrete approaches underneath it. And so when I talk about the caring University, for me, it is not a destination, in a sense that we are going to eventually arrive at this institutional kind of vision. Rather, it is about organizational change, and it is ongoing. It’s something that we have to pursue in a very proactive and intentional way, and there is not really an end date for it in the same way that student success probably doesn’t have an A final destination or end date. I think this is something that we need to be thinking about routinely and build into our practices. And so, yes, this was something that very much was crafted in that pandemic moment, but in a way that I personally didn’t quite anticipate that same challenges that we are experiencing now, I think give us even more reason to be exploring this idea and to really think about what it looks like to be supporting our staff and faculty. There are a number of people, of course, who are pointing to the idea that we are not in just kind of one kind of episode of crisis, and then we move on to something else. We’re in kind of a state of fairly regular crisis. And if that’s the case, our people are going to need support. They’re going to need to be able to rely upon a set of practices and policies where they are treated as whole people and treated with dignity. And so I think the current moment invites us to revisit the caring University in a new way and to realize that the urgency has changed, but the urgency is still there.

Keith Edwards
Well, yeah, this we go from one crisis to another, or perma crisis, as some folks refer to it. I’m one of those people that thinks that the pace of change is just going to continue to escalate in an exponential way. As technology advances, AI advances, challenges we face will just kind of continue. And you know, higher ed has a bad habit of waiting for this to pass, and I think we need to learn to lead through it. I’m thinking about what you’re describing is the the busyness. And you know, I’ve been saying for 15 years, if you’re busy all the time. If you’re busy sometimes, that’s a circumstance, right? That’s August, that’s April, that’s the grad admission cycle, right? That’s, that’s, that’s a moment. And you can work late, you can come in early, you can work harder, you can do emails on Sunday morning to get it under 100 but you can’t live like that. That is not an ongoing way. And many people, I think we’re living like that, and then COVID hit, and they just went like, I can’t like it. This is, this is the breaking point. And I think that has really shifted how people view work, how few people view their life. So trying to reimagine new possibilities, new ways of operating as, I think, something that’s so needed and something that higher ed’s not very good at, right? We’re good at minor adjustments here and minor adjustments here, and we’ll trim up here, and we’ll adjust this. But really re, as you said, reimagining faculty life, staff life, I think, is really, really critical. So, as you mentioned this, this all sort of pours in, gets you super curious. And you’re not someone who sits in curiosity. You get active in curiosity. You get out. You start talking to people. You start reading things. You start asking people to send you things to read. Who knows about this, right? This really robust, engaged curiosity leads to all these conversations, and then your mind starts to kind of cook all of this chaos down into these six things. And these six things, essentially, this is oversimplified, so go read the book. But. Essentially each of these six things becomes a chapter in the book. And so the book isn’t really a diagnosis of burnout and overwhelm that’s out there. This is sort of a prescription for what to do about it, and whether that’s from COVID and pandemic and lockdown or or attacks on higher ed funding crisis, enrollment cliffs, whatever, whatever, sketch you up at night, the prescription is still the same. And so these things, I think, as you look at them, they make total sense if you’re thinking about the context of COVID and lockdown pandemic, they also make total sense today, as we see these, what I would call disingenuous attacks on higher education and equity. They help us navigate through this. So could you walk us through these? Tell us about these six?

Kevin McClure
Yeah, I’d be, I’d be delighted to. And you know, one of the things I was thinking about in trying to come up with, as you said, a prescription for some of these challenges that we face in higher education. First of all, I do think it’s really important that we do the diagnosis. And you’re right. There’s tons of great work out there about the problems facing higher education. In the book, I try to synthesize as much of that as possible, but I think a really important first step is, let’s be clear on what the problems are, because through that clarity, we have a better understanding of how to address them. And so when I went through that exercise, what became very clear to me was we have a tendency in higher education, and I see this all the time when I am doing workshops, for example, with senior leaders. We have a tendency to individualize problems in the higher education workplace. So we will say, I didn’t do a good enough job setting boundaries. I have a team member who won’t say, No. This is a challenge of you not finding the right mentor. We are struggling because our folks are not resilient enough, all of these ways in which we kind of put it on the shoulders of individual employees to kind of manage themselves. And as I was looking at the research, what was really clear is most of these problems, or a large number of them stem from organizational problems. They are challenges with the cultures that we create within organizations, and how our cultures then get codified or kind of built into our handbooks and our policies and our ways of operating. And so when I designed the prescription then through the caring University, it was heavily oriented towards this notion of, how do we change the cultures and the structures? I don’t want this to necessarily fall into the vein of self help or self care, which I think can be really important, don’t get me wrong, but there’s just only so far that’s going to go, and it’s not going to help us address those underlying challenges. And so a big mindset shift that I have been trying to push, as I am doing speaking engagements and meeting with folks on campuses, is to say, this is a model of organizational care.

Kevin McClure
It is not a model of self care. And that really challenges folks, because it causes them to immediately say, Okay, if this is a model of organizational care. What do I do? What is my responsibility in this? Because self care, it’s a little bit easier to wrap my head around what my individual responsibility is. In a model of organizational care becomes a little more diffuse, and we can say it’s everybody’s responsibility, and that’s exactly right. It is everybody’s responsibility to be thinking about this and wondering, what does it look like within our zone of action to be proactive about prioritizing the well being of the people that we care about around us. So each of the chapters, as you said, each of the core chapters, covers what I think of as a big organizational change, and within each of those, there are concrete approaches that I’m advocating that will help to size it down a little bit, and to bring some examples from campuses, bring some narratives from people who are working in higher education who have said, You know what? We’re moving on this. We are taking action towards this. So it’s not all just kind of pie in the sky, aspirational stuff. Most of this is really grounded in real life, illustrations and examples. The first big organizational change is about making the employee experience a strategic priority. So the premise of.

Kevin McClure
Chapter is we have a tendency to neglect our employees as we are thinking about institutional strategy and our guiding documents like mission and value statements, we sometimes create big goals, but we don’t always think about what’s our capacity for achieving those goals. And so it’s an invitation to really think about, how do we marry together our conversations around talent and our conversations around institutional strategy, and to realize that those two things ought to be brought together if we’re going to have any chance of achieving those goals that we set for ourselves. The second overarching change is about designing policies and practices for real humans versus ideal workers. And so the concept behind this chapter is we have a tendency in our job descriptions, in our you know, HR policies, to think about kind of an ideal worker, and this is someone who is, maybe has zero or very few, you know, health issues, chronic illness issues, does not have to manage. A disability, for example, is not in a caregiver responsibility. And so we just assume that people are going to largely be able to physically show up and do really demanding jobs five days a week. And what I want to bring into this chapter is the perspective that that’s just not consistent with reality. We as human beings, live complicated lives. We are in networks where we have all sorts of responsibilities to people, and there’s a legitimate question around, okay, well, what’s the role of an employer in all of that? And my response is, is we do have a responsibility as employers to recognize that it’s not to say that our job is to fix, necessarily, problems that may arise in our lives outside of work, but we could be better designing policies and better enacting practices to recognize that we are not automatons. We are we are not robots. We are real people with real bodies that can be sometimes unpredictable, and we are in communities and in relationships that require a lot of us as well. The third organizational change is focused on compensation and professional growth, and it unpacks the many problems that we have with compensation in higher education, and is a expansion of an article that I wrote around higher education being a land of dead end jobs, where folks often find themselves stymied in a professional growth. They feel like they’re kind of in career cul de sacs, where there’s nowhere for them to kind of go up. They have to either move out to a different institution or to a different state in order to to advance. And it proposes a set of changes for us to do things a little bit differently, to really have stronger compensation practices, to ensure that we are creating robust professional development for all employees. And these will, at first blush, seem somewhat radical in the world of higher education, but the reality is that these are not things that are radical outside of higher education. These are things that in the private sector, I think, are much more commonly used, and if it is indeed the case that we want to be attracting and keeping the very best people, it is imperative for us to shift our practices here. The fourth organizational change is about pursuing structure and cultural change for equity and belonging for marginalized employees. There is a fairly simple premise to this chapter, which is it is impossible for us to pursue and try to build any notion of the caring university, so long as we still have significant numbers of employees who feel disrespected, subject to discrimination, are isolated, are tokenized, and so in the current environment where there is active legislation to prevent these types of conversations to be from happening, this is even more important than it was even, you know, four or Five years ago, and there is still incredible, incredible work that we have to do in order to make higher education fair for all employees. And I really resonate with some conversation that I’ve seen recently where, again, this some of what we’re talking about here is not about you. A huge revolutionary changes within higher education. It is really about workplace fairness, ensuring that people are treated with respect, and that everybody has an opportunity to find success here. And so this, I think, is a really important step along the way towards enacting this model. The sixth change is one that I think is super important, but doesn’t get as much air time, and it’s about ensuring that employees have rights in the workplace, that we are protecting and attempting to uphold and that we are creating opportunities for employees to have a voice in decision making. So this can sometimes get simplified down into like shared governance, but I think it’s bigger than shared governance, and I try to, in this chapter, bring forward the concept of workplace democracy as something that is a strength in higher education that we ought to be leveraging more we already have a number of practices and policies that build kind of democratic principles in so making sure that there’s due process and that we do have, in some cases, shared governance bodies for people to have a voice and decision making. We are retreating from from that in in certain ways, and I think that’s foolish. It is a strength of ours. More sectors ought to be building in democratic principles into the workplace. And so I’d like to see us really embrace that strength and strengthen it even further. And then the last one is the last of the six changes is nurturing, caring leaders, and it’s really thinking about, how do we build an ecosystem of leadership on campuses so that we are able to recruit and prepare really strong leaders, but also prevent them from burning out and really demanding jobs? So there’s a lot there, of course, but as I said, the goal all along is to try to write a book that leaders can see as a resource, that they can come back to those chapters over time when they need to, and each of them ends with a series of action steps that is an attempt to kind of further distill here are some kind of first steps that you can take towards a towards trying to realize those bigger overarching changes.

Keith Edwards
Yeah, wow. That was that was so clear about those six things and those chapters, and Kevin just generously walked you through the book. But as as you mentioned, there’s a lot more underneath that about how to do that. I’m looking at there’s a great visual model with all six of these and how to do some caring through I’m also looking at the 10 actions of caring leaders, right? So for those of us like me who like a list to help us organize our thinking, super, super useful. So, you know, I think many folks, I think listening might be thinking about a place where they did feel burnout, where they didn’t feel like their voices were heard, or they didn’t feel like folks were treated equitably. And I’m sure you can think about examples of those. And I’m sure you heard many of those stories. However, I also know that you heard some stories where this was really working right, where these were really being put into place. Maybe no place was crushing all six of them, maybe. But there might have been some places where you saw some just beautiful examples that you’d love to kind of take and and spread to higher ed any, any stories of models imperfectly, that you’d like to highlight for us?

Kevin McClure
Yeah, absolutely you are correct that I have yet to find the perfect example of the caring University in institutional form, and otherwise that’d be the photo on the book, right? That’s right that, you know, there may be drawings that’ll be a book by itself. And instead, what I more commonly found was there are absolutely pockets of change happening that each of which provide us with a model about of how this could look. And

Kevin McClure
I think one of the really hope giving aspects of this work has been, yes, I have been, of course, been sitting in all of these problems of the higher education, where I still get so many DMS and emails from people telling me about their experience and telling me about awful things that they’ve experienced enough to know that this is this is a thing that we need to work on. But I’ve also been in so many conversations now with people who are doing something, they are innovating, trying something, and on a small scale. And seeing where it leads. And so that tells me that this is also possible, that the things that we’re talking about here are absolutely possible if we value it and we are willing to put a little bit of time and intentionality into it. So one of my very favorite examples I talk about all the time is the University of Louisville as part of a strategic planning process, really set a high bar for what it looks like to integrate employee well being and success into the strategy of the institution. Now we could have a conversation about whether they have sustained that, but the initial impetus was there, and one byproduct of that was they established an employee success center, and it is led by a long time people, leader and person who’s kind of a beloved institution himself within the institution, and So already had a ton of trust from people working there. He built a team, and they have revolutionized on employee onboarding, employee revolution. They’ve got coaching going on there. They’ve got tons of professional development programs. They launched a podcast, and through that, I have seen transformation happen. It is very clear to me that they can point to some real positive outcomes. Employees notice this stuff when it is happening. Now, I don’t think the lesson from that is necessarily that every institution needs to go launch a center. I think that we have learned that there can be some real limits to that kind of unit based approach to campus wide transformation. Nevertheless, it is a clear signal to anybody that’s coming to the institution that employee success is not something that is just completely put on the back burner. It was built into a big part of institutional strategy, and I think that’s something that’s worth celebrating and looking into a little bit more deeply. There have been a number of institutions that benefited enormously from NSF advanced grants, and unfortunately, that program has been phased out as part of the cuts the Trump administration has enacted, and I think that is an absolute tragedy, because there is wonderful, wonderful work happening around equity and compensation and workload connected to the NSF grants and so those are a positive example that I’m able to look At regularly to say, this is what change can look like in action. I love the example. First of all, at the end of each chapter is a case study of an institution that is attempting to bring some of these concepts to life in their own ways. And so there is a on there was a kind of intentional effort to build in some illustrations, and so folks can check some of those out for for further examples. But I think for me, one of the real lessons from this, and something that I tried to build into the book as well, is because we are talking about deep change, and we are, in many respects, talking about shifting mindsets. We need to be thinking about how we can draw on the wisdom of people who are experts in organizational change and organizational change management. In some cases, these changes started off by, you know, one person at the institution who is going to be a champion for it, who kind of got the ball rolling. But I think if we’re going to see this happen in a much more sustained way and have it become part of a routine on on campus, we need to really be thinking about it as an organizational change. And so throughout the book, I try to sprinkle in organizational change theory and concepts in a light way. I’m not like overwhelming folks with theory, but, but as a way of saying we do have some approaches for this type of work. There are experts in this type of work, and it would be good for us to really be tapping into that wisdom if we’re going to see something that’s more than just kind of a one off effort and becomes much more of a campus wide practice, yeah, yeah. That changed. Leadership is is so important.

Keith Edwards
So you got curious in the pandemic, you started talking to people. You wrote a book. It’s out, coming out now, out now, depending on when this the podcast comes out, and then you’ve been talking about the book, right? So you you probably finished it maybe six months a year ago, something like that. And. But then you’ve been talking about it. You’ve been writing pieces in the Chronicle. You’ve been writing about writing on LinkedIn, as you mentioned, you’ve been working in workshops and facilitating conversations with senior leaders. You’ve been giving keynotes, and then people talk to you, and you’ve heard more stories. And so I’d like to invite you just to reflect through that process of the conversations, through writing the book and now through talking about, writing the book and sharing it and in conversations. What are some of the things that you’re learning, some of the things you maybe are relearning, or maybe things you’re unlearning through this whole process?

Kevin McClure
Yeah, it, I think I feel like the entire journey has been a very long learning exercise for me and and it’s incredibly humbling in that sense. So even in approaching the book, I had to start from a position of humility, because I was stepping into so many zones that I had a sense of, but I could not plausibly claim I had deep expertise in. And so what that meant for me, and the type of sensibility that I continue to bring to this is I need to be seeking out expertise and to be in community and conversation with people as much as possible, because I only have one lens on this. I’m in my kind of small space. I’m at one institution, and yet I’m trying to get a handle on really complex issues playing out in lots of different places. And so I think a really important insight for me, as we’re talking about higher education as a sector, as we’re talking about student affairs as as a practice area, I think all of us should feel called to be continuously learning and being in community and seeking out that expertise so that we have a much more expansive window into some of these issues and have a much wider toolkit that we can draw from conceptually and in terms of our practice. This summer, I’m stepping into a leadership position in my department, and I am so much more prepared to do that having engaged in this work, because I now have that bigger toolkit that I can draw from. And so I think that’s the other piece of this, is it just can be confidence building and skill building, to step into a project like this and to be engaged in work like this, where I am a Constant Learner and every day just trying to soak up as much as I possibly can. The other piece of this that I think has been really illuminating is it did help me get over a little bit of imposter syndrome, in the sense of, at some point we do have to step into the expertise that we have, but also recognize that it’s not possible for me to know everything, and yet, there is a space for me to contribute. I can take what I have learned and try to put it down on paper and share that with others. And so if there’s others out there that feel similarly, that have gained some extra expertise, have experience that they want to share, there is a space for you to contribute, and so long as you step into it, I think, with the right sensibility and bring that learner mindset. I’m hoping that we get more folks in the world of higher ed who feel comfortable and are empowered to write their stories down, share their insights with others, and if I can be helpful in that, in any way, I would love to do that. So as you mentioned, sometimes I’m posting stuff on LinkedIn, and it’s because I want more people to have an opportunity. I think there’s just so much expertise, and I see it in my own students. There’s so much thoughtfulness and expertise that unfortunately gets blocked and and they don’t feel empowered to be able to publish it or to speak on it, and, and I want to try to remove some of those barriers and make some of this stuff that feels hidden to be a little bit less hidden. And so well, let me.

Keith Edwards
Let me just interrupt you there, because, yeah, it’s super important. And for folks who don’t follow you on LinkedIn, I really recommend it, because you’re sharing lots of good content, but you’re also sharing here’s why public scholarship is so important, and here’s how I did it, and here’s why I did it in this way. And it’s really kind of like a little snippet master class at a time about how to do this. If you have ideas, In anything, right? Whether, whether it’s genome theory that you want to get out into the world, or whether it’s better understanding the financial model of higher education or or why endowments can’t just cover all these things, here’s a way to get that out beyond just those thick scholars who you are constantly citing and they’re citing you and going back and forth, right? We gotta get beyond that.

Kevin McClure
And I’ve been thinking a lot about courageous humility, and this is one of the things that emerges with the senior leaders we have in our evolve program, is this, this duality of courage and humility. You spoke a lot to the humility part, like I don’t have all the right answers. How can I lean on others? How can I ask questions? How can I be curious? How can I invite others in? How can I recognize the limits of my own experience being applicable to others? I’m going to do that. But then also, and you sort of spoke to this, is being courageous and saying, I do also have something to add, and I am going to step into that space, and I’m going to make the tough call, I’m going to make the unpopular decision, and I’m going to do these things that need to be done because they’re right, because they will be unpopular in the short term, but they will benefit so many more in the long term. And so that that that duality I think of being courageous and humble at the same time is really powerful. I often talk about it is great leaders take their work seriously, but they don’t take themselves seriously at all. And Jim Collins and Good to Great talked about great leaders having professional will and personal humility, right? So this, there’s, there’s this thing that is just coming through here to recognize our limits, but also step into the leadership that needs to be had, for sure, and I will often asked for advice around whether it’s public scholarship or just trying to get your work out there. And there is a piece of this where I say you just start.

Kevin McClure
I wish that I could tell you that I always had a plan for all of these things. You know, the people say, like, what’s the strategy? Like, do you like? Write out your posts in advance, and you put them in a document, you got them all ready to go. I think there are probably people who do that, and that’s great if that’s the approach that you want to take. But I think all of us can get a little stuck then and wanting to have, like, the perfect approach and strategy for these things. And there’s a writer whose name I forget now, but the quote is basically, like, the water doesn’t come until the faucet is open. You gotta, sometimes just start. You gotta open the faucet and let these things begin. And there is courage in that, because you have no idea how these things are going to resonate. And I think for a long time, if I think about when I was first starting on this pathway, there wasn’t much of a response. There wasn’t a whole lot of of this that was resonating. But you keep going, you know, you write the next thing, and before long, you have generated ideas. You’ve got this backlog of writing that you have created, and it makes it much more feasible for you to envision bigger things, because you’ve got that foundation to start with. Well. And I think we start writing little things and little things and little things, then we look back at 32 little things, we go, oh, well, there is a big thing there that I’ve been writing about that I wasn’t even able to recognize along the way, yeah, just getting getting started and sharing it with the world. I think most writers who have shared a big thing with the world often tell the story about how it wasn’t well received at the beginning. I mean, Brene Brown’s Gifts of Imperfection was a dud. It was didn’t sell until someone read it, a publisher picked it up, and then it’s one of the most best selling books. So sometimes you just got to put good stuff out and and see what happens. Well, we are running out of time. We always like to end with what is, what is with you now, what are you thinking about? What are you troubling? What are you pondering now might be related to this. I know you’re on the cusp of a big book release and lots of thinking.

Keith Edwards
There’s also news being thrown at us daily. We’re trying to keep up with our current campus context format. But boy, it’s hard, and oftentimes on Thursday mornings, we’re trying to figure out what, what are the biggest stories this week? Well, let’s, let’s give it an hour. So what are you thinking troubling or pondering now? Kevin,

Kevin McClure
yeah, I mean to the point around kind of where we’re at in the news cycle. I think my daily commitment has been to really think about who I am as a colleague and as a campus citizen, and and how I’m showing up for the people closest to me that really, really matters to me. And I would say a significant portion of my day to day thinking is in that zone and and then still, at the same time, trying to balance and cultivate some of this new thinking that that I’m trying to do.

Kevin McClure
Really thinking about, Okay, what, what does it look like as a next step beyond the caring University, for example? Or could we continue to look for examples of this in practice? What are the barriers that are preventing this from taking shape? You know, I hear about some of the barriers when I’m in conversation with folks on campuses, so I know that they’re there. But if I wanted to take this in the direction of being even more helpful, what would it look like to try to distill this down even more practically? So that’s a big thought exercise, and I’ve, of course, I have about six different book, two concepts that I’m playing around with. I am unsure if any of them have legs at this point, but I’ve

Kevin McClure
been thinking a lot about supervision. I’ve been thinking about a lot about how we build trust in organizations. You know, the unfortunate thing is, there’s no shortage of challenges in higher education. But I suppose if you’re someone who is interested in and how we can leverage our talents to maybe bring some clarity to those challenges and develop solutions. It does mean that my brain is never lacking and things to keep busy with. No, I imagine you’re not someone who is bored very often and some time just to think is like an incredible luxury. And I bet you also have a couple of book ideas that have nothing to do with the caring University, or completely other other topics as well. So good luck sorting through that we look forward to sort of what emerges. And for folks who want to connect with you, where’s what’s the best way for folks to connect with you if they want to learn more, talk more, explore some possibilities? Yeah, absolutely. So my website is Dr Kevin R mcclure.com and you can find out about speaking and some of my media or most recent articles. So that’s a great spot. I’m on LinkedIn and also on blue sky. And if you’re interested in this particular content, I have a newsletter called The Karen university that comes out monthly, and try to include some snippets from the book, but additional stuff as well that might be of interest. And of course, the book comes out on July 1. It is available for pre order, and I’m in the stage now where I’m booking and folks are reaching out about campus visits and speaking opportunities, and so there’s further opportunity if you want to set something like that up on your campus as well. Super cool. So there’s a book, there’s a newsletter, right? There’s everything from a free newsletter to a cheap book to further engagements in so many different ways. People can engage with this. I think it’s so helpful, and I really appreciate your generosity in being willing to do that with folks. It’s, it’s a great read.

Keith Edwards
It’s clear and and very helpful. It’s very tactical with some some revolutionary ideas that, at the end, don’t seem so revolutionary kind of seemed pretty obvious. So really appreciate your curiosity, your engagement, your humility. Those are some of the things that were sort of standing out to me. So thanks so much for your leadership in the space, Kevin, it’s super helpful. Thank you all. Thanks. Thanks to the podcast. Thanks to you, Keith, for just a lot of your encouragement and vision as well throughout all of this. And just want to say thanks as well to all the student affairs folks out there.

Kevin McClure
You all, I think, were just a huge part of these ideas in this book coming to fruition and and when I think about a particular community that I hope this book helps and serves and is in discussion with its student affairs folks.

Keith Edwards
So love you all little Student Affairs. Hug there at the end. I love it. Well, thanks for your leadership. Kevin, I also want to thank our sponsors, Evolve and Huron. Evolve help senior leaders who value aspire to lead on and want to unleash their potential for transformational leadership. This is a program I lead, along with my colleagues, doctors Brian rau and Don Lee. We offer a personalized experience with high impact value the asynchronous content and six individual and six group coaching sessions maximize your learning and growth with focus time investment that’s specifically designed for senior leaders, it can greatly enhance your ability to lead powerfully for social change, and Huron collaborates with colleges and universities to create sound strategies, optimize operations and accelerate digital transformation by embracing diverse perspectives, encouraging new ideas and challenging the status quo. Huron promotes institutional resilience in higher education. For more information, you can visit them at go.hcd@go.hcg.com/now, as always, a huge thanks to you Nat ambrosey, who does all the behind the scenes work to make us look and sound good. We love your support of these conversations, so please share this episode. Talk about it with your friends and think about it as a professional development opportunity. You can help us reach even more folks by subscribing to the podcast on YouTube or to our newsletter. On our newsletter, we announce each new episode on Wednesday mornings, and if you’re so inclined, you can leave us a five star review. It helps great conversations like this reach even more folks. I’m Keith Edwards, thanks to our fabulous guest today, Dr Kevin McClure, and to everyone who’s watching and listening, make it a great week.

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