Felecia Commodore:
So often when we think about decisions that are made for institutions or we discussed governance it usually falls within kind of two bodies that usually either the, the president and their cabinet, or we think about faculty and faculty governance. But there’s a couple of other entities that are involved and specifically we focus on the entity of the board of trustees. The board of trustees, depending on your institutional type can be self-nominate or self, we call self perpetuating, where persons on the board nominate people on the board and bring them in, or they can be appointed by either state legislature or a gubernatorial administration. And so when we think about that, really we’re talking about persons who have vested interests in the decisions that are made in school and how they the strategic direction that institution goes in.

Keith Edwards:
Hello, and welcome to Student Affairs Now. I’m your host, Keith Edwards. Today. We’re talking about working with boards and legislatures as they lead, govern, oversee, and intervene in institutions of higher education. We have three guests with lots of knowledge and expertise with us today. Student Affairs Now is the premier podcast and online learning community for thousands 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 browser archives at studentaffairsnow.com. Today’s episode is sponsored by Anthology. Learn more about their innovative data-driven platforms to build and foster your campus student engagement experience. Learn more by visiting and anthology.com/engage. This episode is also sponsored by LeaderShape. Go to leadershape.org to learn how they can work with you to create a just caring and thriving world.

Keith Edwards:
As I mentioned, I’m your host, Keith Edwards, my pronouns are he, him, his. I’m a speaker consultant and coach. And you can find out more about me at keithedwards.com. I’m broadcasting from Minneapolis, Minnesota at the intersections of the ancestral homelands of the Dakota and the Ojibwe peoples. Let’s get to the conversation I wanted to host today’s conversation because it’s a complexity of higher education leadership that I think is often overlooked by many student affairs professionals, perhaps because our lack of access to boards and boards general lack of regard for student affairs work. However, this issue is back on our minds. As we saw legislatures and boards play major roles in censorship of critical race theory, limiting COVID safety protocols around masks in vaccines, but then Nicole Hannah Jones debacle, and so much more, I’m so excited to be joined by these three folks, all with incredible and very different perspectives on this. So let’s meet our guests today and have them introduce themselves a little bit and with their day job and then their experience with boards and legislatures. Ardell we’re going to kick it off with you.

Ardell Sanders:
My name is Ardell Sanders and I currently serve as the director for residential education at Indiana StateUniversity in the office of residential life. A little bit about my board experience. I have served for the past three years on the board of trustees at Clark University in Dubuque, Iowa, a small private liberal arts institution. I’ve also served on the the alumni board there, and I’ve done that for the past eight years. Serving on committees, both, both are groups. And we’ll talk a little bit more about as I go along.

Keith Edwards:
Thanks, Ardell. So glad you’re here with us. Joe, tell us a little bit about you

Joseph Sertich:
Yes Keith, thanks. So my name is Joe Sertich, I’m the president emeritus of the Northeast Minnesota higher education district where I served as president for nine years. I’ve three college presidencies. That was the capstone of, of those three. I currently reside on Minnesota’s iron range and I use the pronouns, he, him, and his. I am happy to be here today to talk about what I think is at the heart of a lot of important decisions that get made and why they get made and the processes that we use to get there. I’ve worked closely with the legislature as well as a local regional and a large state board. Minnesota state colleges and universities was the third largest higher education system in the state. And I also worked at a college that had a very small local board. So hopefully I look, I can look forward to bringing those kinds of experiences to our conversation today.

Keith Edwards:
So glad you’re here with us. Felecia, tell us about you.

Felecia Commodore:
Hi, thanks Keith. My name is Felecia Commodore. I am an assistant professor in higher education at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia. My research areas, coalescence of three major areas. One is looking at governance, leadership and administrative practices. Particularly focusing on historically black colleges and universities and minority serving institutions. I also engage in research around boards of trustees, governing boards, and thinking about decision-making processes, how board composition and board diversity impact those processes. And also thinking about how boards can engage in their work in a way that moves institutions to being more equitable. And lastly, I look at the relationship that black women have with leadership in the higher education space. And so that is the bulk of my work and really excited to be here today, talking about governance and how it impacts what we do on our campuses.

Keith Edwards:
Awesome. Well, as I was saying before, Felecia, we’re going to stick with you. And when we were talking about this topic with our host team and wanting to do this, as soon as I would mention it, Dr. Susana Munoz would say, oh my gosh Felecia Commodore, you got to get her and recommended you multiple times. So I’m so glad you’re here. As you just shared in your bio is such a great fit to help us really understand all of this and understand the complexity and really looking at all of it. So could you begin by just kind of helping lay the groundwork about boards and legislatures, as you mentioned, you’ve done a lot of this work broadly, but also specifically with HBCU’s but just kind of help us understand for folks who are really unfamiliar with this part of the governance structure what is beyond the institutional leadership?

Felecia Commodore:
Sure. So often when we think about decisions that are made for institutions or we discussed governance it usually falls within kind of two bodies that usually either the, the president and their cabinet, or we think about faculty and faculty governance. But there’s a couple of other entities that are involved and specifically we focus on the entity of the board of trustees. The board of trustees, depending on your institutional type can be self-nominate or self, we call self perpetuating, where persons on the board nominate people on the board and bring them in, or they can be appointed by either state legislature or a gubernatorial administration. And so when we think about that, really we’re talking about persons who have vested interests in the decisions that are made in school and how they the strategic direction that institution goes in.

Felecia Commodore:
And that could, that brings into it, a lot of political ideologies that brings into it, a lot of perspectives that could or could not align with the mission of the institution. Right? And so the discussion that myself and other colleagues have been having is why don’t we know more about people who are sitting in these seats that ultimately play a role in making decisions that impact the long-term health and the sustainability of an institution. And particularly when we look at historically black colleges and universities one of the issues that we’ve seen or that we want to explore with boards is presidential turnover, right? One of the board’s major jobs is hiring firing precedents. So when we start to see three or four or five presidents in a matter of seven or eight years, we have to start to begin to look at the board, right.

Felecia Commodore:
And what’s going on there. And when we think of state legislatures and historical black colleges, universities, often we’re thinking about budgets and budget lines. And we know that historically, particularly our public HPCs have been very much underfunded in comparison to their predominantly white counterparts. And so when you go back, right, and you think about state legislatures and governors appoint board members, so of course, and you think about the state legislatures also can control the purse strings for lack of better words to these institutions. We then begin to have to step back and think about what are the connections that happen between these legislative bodies, these boards, and how does that impact the decisions they’re making that directly impact what happens on these campuses, how these campuses approach, what they do and how they’re able to, or not able to access resources and able to do their job,

Keith Edwards:
Right. It really gets at the roots of sort of systemic systems of inequity and racism and white supremacy. If these legislatures and boards are being appointed and then overseeing institutions that are for and often by black folks I love the, the, the, you did, I’ve worked in higher education for more than 20 years. And I think you just told me more than I’ve ever been taught about boards, about appointments and everything. I mean, honestly, most of my training about boards was the boards here today you need to wear a tie. Get dressed up the boards on campus today. You gotta navigate that. So I really appreciate that. Well, you and colleagues just released I don’t know when it came out, I saw it earlier this week. A new journal article based on a research study you’ve done around boards. And my understanding clean this up, if I mess this up is that you really looked at a lot of documents from 22 different boards in looking at their support or lack thereof around diversity equity and inclusion initiatives. Could you tell us a little bit more about this research and some of the conclusions and recommendations that you and your colleagues have about boards and DEI work?

Felecia Commodore:
Sure. So yeah, the article is kind of just fresh off the presses. So we’re really excited that it’s kind of gotten the buzz. It did, but myself and my co-authors Dr. Dimitri Morgan, who’s at Loyola University in Chicago and Dr. Lucy Lepou, who is at Indiana university. We we’re discussing thinking about boards in relationship to diversity equity and inclusion work, DEI work. And what you’ll find is that often we don’t talk about boards and DEI together. Maybe the extent of what we talk about is maybe actually board composition, who sits on boards, and if the boards are diverse, but we never really think about boards as being a part of the DEI work or initiatives or strategic approaches at an institution. Often we lay that at the feet of programmatic leads, right? So student affairs, academic affairs, a lot of times, student affairs are seen as the DEI people or chief diversity officer.

Felecia Commodore:
And so what we wanted to get at is if we’re saying that boards play a role in thinking about the long-term strategic planning for an institution, and think about how they play a role in making decisions that impact the health or, or thinking about what we call their fiduciary duty. And one is to ensure that the institution is protected and, and doing the things it’s supposed to do in order to make sure that it sustains itself. Then why aren’t we talking to boards about diversity, equity inclusion, why aren’t boards involved, or are they involved? Because we really didn’t know. And so what we did was we looked at 22 governing boards who had who were at institutions that had already been designated as inclusively excellent. And so these are institutions that are already been, or honored or kind of given accolades their DEI work. And so we wanted to see were boards involved in that one of the tricky, tricky things about board research is that you’re often not allowed. You just don’t get access. Boards are very private and they don’t want people in their business. That’s really

Keith Edwards:
Interesting because my understanding is you initially plan to talk to a bunch of board members and they wouldn’t talk to you. Yeah.

Felecia Commodore:
Board Members very often are it’s a mix of usually you, again, these are volunteers who are often very high level CEOs and executives and business persons. And so they’re either busy or they want to keep things close to their chest because they do deal with a lot of very sensitive topics and sensitive issues. And if some of those things were to get out, it could be possibly bad press for the school, or it could lead to, to issues that they’re, they’re not, they don’t want to navigate outside of your boardroom. And so they tend to, to close off access to researchers. And particularly if they’re private institutions, they don’t even have to make anything public really. And so it does make it very difficult to do kind of particularly qualitative research in which we normally do and where we, you know, sit down, you do observations on there and they’re like, no, we’re not, we’re not doing that.

Felecia Commodore:
So so this was kind of our pivot and where we decided, okay, we will find the things that we can see. Right. So board minutes, board documents for public institutions, much of that is public. And we have public access. We watched board meetings that were recorded. We went through a lot of lab data and pretty much what we wanted to see was, was there any evidence of boards kind of taking an active role in the pushing forward of the support of the initiating of DEI work on campus? Because we just didn’t know if that was the case or not. And so what we found was that there was a range. There were, there were boards very few that were kind of more active in doing that. We have boards who simply may just endorse something.

Felecia Commodore:
We have boards that never brought it up other than once maybe bringing a student, a VP of student affairs or a DEI person to the board meeting to talk. And so from that we thought about myself Dimitri Morgan and Dr. Raquel RA have a governance model that we call culturally sustaining governance, where we it’s pretty much an equity center governing model for boards. And we thought is that in concert with Lucy, Wilco’s work around commitments to diversity and inclusion for institutions. Hers mostly focuses on student affairs bodies, and we thought, what, based on our the data that we found and thinking about those two things, how can boards who want to be, to make sure that they are actually pushing forward DEI work at their institution side, they do that. And so we thought about we present this metaphor that boards act pretty much like electrical sockets in that they are, they are the socket between the internal stakeholders and the external stakeholders, and that are associated with DEI efforts.

Felecia Commodore:
And so ultimately boards that are plugged in can actually help bolster and give power and more power to those efforts that are being done. They, they, they make the connection that creates more power between those external stakeholders and those internal stakeholders. On the other hand, boards who are not plugged in actually can disempower to some extent or not make as powerful, the DEI efforts from institutions. And so we, we also present a matrix of boards, DEI capacity. And so what we present to boards is this idea of kind of four different types of boards that you can be. And not that you are stuck at whatever, kind of more, but that if you want to move to being a board that kind of pushes DEI work, there’s a way to do that. And kind of push yourself from one type biology of board to another type biology.

Felecia Commodore:
So one right, we have is like a symbolic board. That’s a board that kind of has the high capacity to do DEI work, but don’t really have the partnerships because it doesn’t really plug in. Right. And so they kind of endorse things or they do symbolic things, but there’s really no power behind it. Whereas we have an ideal partnering board, whereas the board that has high DEI capacity and early in partnership creates conditions for the, again, that power and employee tenants have robust partnerships. And so ultimately what we do with this work is we’re trying to push boards to think of themselves as not external to DEI work that they don’t DEI work is not just some programmatic thing that reports up to you every quarter or once a once a year. But that boards are partnering with these persons who are doing DEI work in order to again, empower and make more powerful, those DEI efforts.

Keith Edwards:
Fantastic. I, I love this metaphor of the electrical sockets, and I love the matrix because it’s really helpful. It’s not saying here are the good boards and bad boards. It’s, here’s how you can progress and how you can do a better job. Well, want to make, we get links in the show notes to the article, to Dr. Dimitri Morgan’s great tweet thread about this. And then also the culturally sustaining governance and model. I think people will be really interested in that. Thanks so much for sort of laying the foundation for us and, and centering DEI work with HBCUs and the work here. And that’s so critical and so important. Joe shifting gears a little bit, you were the college president of a district of community colleges for almost 10 years in that role, as you mentioned, it was your third presidency.

Keith Edwards:
You worked under the oversight of a system office, a system board, and significant legislative involvement. We’d love to have you help us understand these dynamics at public institutions and really excited to have you as Felecia was saying, there’s many people who are in these roles can’t speak freely. And honestly, but your professor, a president emeritus, which means you’re retired, which means you get to do two of your favorite things, which is tell the truth and say the hard stuff. So go ahead and help our audience understand how all of this works. And what’s important about it at public institutions.

Joseph Sertich:
Yeah. And of course, I’m hoping that I’ve always told the truth and always said the hard stuff. And of course, this brings me back to something that Felecia said that I think is just spot on and it has to do with power. I believe power is good. I think if most people peel it back, they recognize that if you, if you really want to get what you want out of life, out of your career and the rest, the more power you have, the more likely you are to get what you know is right. And so I just say that because at no point in my career, did I ever aspire to become a president until I actually had somebody tap me on the shoulder and say, Hey, why don’t you? And then from there, you know, it, the rest kind of takes over.

Joseph Sertich:
And I, you know, as I have the benefit now of reflecting back, I think a lot of that had to do with some frustration of not seeing what I wanted to see in higher education in the institutions on the rest and looking at the spectrum and saying, who is it that can do the most to make, to have the greatest impact on that institution. And for me, that was the president until of course you become the president. Then you recognize that the board and the legislature actually have more power than you do. And it also brings me back to something else that Felecia was talking about and that’s internal and external and without dropping people into distinct silos, I think you can tell pretty early on whether you have an external president or an internal president as an example. And of course there aren’t good or bad.

Joseph Sertich:
I think there are benefits to both. Some people really like being on a campus and interacting with their customers or students, their clients, their constituents and see that at the heart of being genuine and authentic and others see, you know, if I’m gonna really make a difference, I’m going to have to do a lot of this work external. And that’s where we come into. I think that our work with the boards and the rest the other word that Felecia mentioned was governance. And I see it as involving the interaction between the formal institution and those in civil society. So a board for me has has more to do with the responsibilities of a strategic voice, the operational guidance and accountability. So I always make it pretty easy when I’m working with somebody and saying, you know, if you’re on a board, you have really two big things you got to do.

Joseph Sertich:
One is select the right president and be sure that you’re doing everything you can to support her or him in that role. And the second is your fiduciary oversight of how resources are expended. Now, those sound like, two simple things. But if you really look at it, I mean, that’s critical to making that ship sail to making it work or not work to getting to the issues of DEI and all the other things that are, are, are critical to to an institution. And so, you know, it comes back again to governance because it’s clear that the concept of governance as over the years kind of gained momentum and, and has kind of a wider meaning you know, apart from being what I would call an instrument of public fares management, it also gauged that political development. The governance has become a useful mechanism to enhance the legitimacy of the public realm.

Joseph Sertich:
And it’s also become an analytical framework or approach to comparative politics. And that’s where I think we get at. So, so what, what do you do about that? Well, as a president of a district of colleges, I had five colleges and six towns at one point because I’m in a rural setting, I actually timed what it would take to just drive by the front door of each of the institutions. And that took eight hours and 15 minutes if I just raved when I rode by. So obviously I, wasn’t going to be an internal president and be on the campus and interacting every day, if it took me that long just to drive by each of the institutions. And I certainly didn’t want to be at one on Monday, Tuesday when the, the point is I had the benefit of being an external president.

Joseph Sertich:
And so I I’ve done everything from testify with the us Senate on a federal level, recognizing that much of our change, many of our resources can be leveraged there. I attended every single board meeting, which was a two day event a couple of hundred miles from where I live. And that always meant an overnight or two. But I saw it as being critical. And of course the relationships that you build with board members is important, but no, this is Student Affairs Now. So you might be getting the impression. So it’s all up to your president. I say, no. I think wherever you are in the institution, wherever you are, whether you want to start at the top and come down or look to who you supervise and work up it’s all about power. How can you get as much power as you can and figure out, figure it out?

Joseph Sertich:
I don’t think there’s every, every one is different. I wanna say, because you said, I got to tell the truth. I mean, there’s a lot of bad governance going on, lots of bad governance, all over our higher ed institutions. There’s fair governance, there’s some good governance. And in rare instances, there’s some very effective governance. And I see that because of this constant power struggle that goes on among presidents and their board or whatever. So I just think wherever you are in the institution, try to figure out who is it that I should have these relationships with, that can make a difference. And in some cases it may be a US Senator. In other cases, it may be the state legislature and what they do, and whether you’re a public or private institution, I would argue across the country because I’ve worked with the you know, the state legislatures across the country as a president of the Rural Community College Alliance.

Joseph Sertich:
Every one of them are making decisions that directly affect what happens on every campus. And you’ve just talked about a number of them that are current today, but a lot of it has to do with financial resources as well. So that’s, that’s what I think people should do is try to figure that out. And if, as Felecia mentioned, maybe a vice president might come to one board meeting, that’s kind of a broken system, in my opinion. If there isn’t a committee on student affairs a sub committee on the board, then I would make a point of finding a way to be sure that that’s front and center all the time where those policy decisions are made.

Keith Edwards:
Wonderful. Well, thank you. And your comments about power reminded me of the great quote from Spiderman with great power comes great responsibility. So how do we leverage that power to do good to foster equity, to do good for students to address the critical issues on our campus and in the communities that we ultimately serve. So I really appreciate that. And the, very practical advice to make sure there’s a student affairs student services committee and being engaged in that if there isn’t one. So thank you, Ardell. You are, we just talked about bad government. You are on a board and you’re a student affairs professional. I’d love for you to bring your experience as a student affairs, professional, your experience on the board, what you’re hearing from Joe, what you’re hearing, Felecia tie it all together for your colleagues, listening, who are student affairs professionals, just no small task, but we know you can do it. How would you pull this all together for us, Ardell?

Ardell Sanders:
I think Keith, and you actually set it up with something you said earlier related to now. I know, I know your history and how long you’ve been working in higher education and around folks. And you mentioned how little that even you knew and understood about boards and how all of that works. And I think that’s the biggest thing for a student affairs professional, no matter what the level is. I think that the first thing is to understand, understanding the structure and the composition of the board learning. And in some cases you can get some of this information. In other cases, you probably have talked to other people and try to figure out as much as you can, but from what the bylaws are the both sides, the, how the board is constructed, who’s on your board.

Ardell Sanders:
I serve on a board at a small liberal arts Catholic institution. And so when I first came on, there were seven nuns and priests on the board. And that’s because being a mission driven institution, understanding the needs of that particular institution, those folks bring a voice to that boardroom. That’s important to the institution. And so how your board is constructed matters. Looking at the history of traditions, the institutional needs how members I liked it. So not just, who’s he, like, how are they elected? So I currently serve on the board development committee. And I specifically chose that committee because of some things that I mentioned before related to the diversity of the folks on that, and not just racial diversity or gender diversity, looking at the experiential diversity of people there, the financial diversity of the people on the boards.

Ardell Sanders:
So, I mean, there, there are lots of things to look at as a student affairs professional. I knew none of these things before I actually joined the board. I knew absolutely none. And so governance you know, what type of board do you have? Do you have a consolidated or, which is, I’m assuming probably what Joe was working with a president over a district of colleges. And so looking at that, is it a coordinating where it’s just your board for your institution understanding how they govern and what structures are there, and that’s where the bylaws and all of that will come in terms of how that board is governed unplanned and the authority of a board. I mean, just there’s so many levels and so many different things that I think student affairs professionals may not understand. And, and it doesn’t matter where you are in your, in your career at times more than I know up until I joined the board is when the board of trustees was on campus. We knew, man, okay. We may have to show up at a meeting. I will be in a suit that day. There probably going to be some more prime parking space is taken up because the more it needs to be here parked in those spaces, the grounds

Keith Edwards:
The grounds are going to look beautiful.

Ardell Sanders:
Everything’s going to be going to, so we knew that the boat was empty or didn’t, we didn’t understand exactly what the did. And so one of the things that I think I’ve learned as a board member is I always thought about, or of trustees members as individuals and what I think I’ve learned. I can only from my individual experience is that it’s the whole, that has the power individuals can have influence, but the whole board, because of the way the votes go has the power. And now individuals with influence can obviously weigh that. And so there, there may be individual people who are able to make some decisions because they’re able to sway folks. But when you talk about the actual authority of a board, an individual has no ownership of an institution. They have no true authority as an individual board member, but the group, it’s a very powerful entity having to work with the college or university president or chancellor, whatever is the person at the institution, that person is important.

Ardell Sanders:
Having a powerful person in that presidential role, because having to work with the board can be very daunting. And I learned this at a very small institution and I was very fortunate in my first set of board meetings. I was able to man at the time, my we were pinging and selecting a new president after 34 years of having two nuns as president for 34 year period for 34 year period, we were able to select the new president. And we were very fortunate to get the industry that we have, but it was very different for the institution. We went with a male who isn’t Catholic, which was very, very, there was a deal, it was a big deal, but it’s selecting the right person to your institution is important evaluating that president and making sure that their performance is set based off of the key performance indicators that you all set forth as a board, working with the president to craft those looking at the board policies.

Ardell Sanders:
I mean, there’s just so many different pieces that I think student affairs professionals and learn. And then one last piece that I think are those board committees having a student affairs or student life or whatever the term may be for your board committee. That’s so critical. Looking at other board options like enrollment management budget and finance there are just a lot of different committees that will give student affairs professionals an opportunity if they have an opportunity to sit in and work with any of these committees because you don’t have to be at every single thing you can work on behalf of university on behalf of your department on a committee. And I think that’s an opportunity for people to understand board sharing, how to work with the board. But those committees, I think are vital. If student affairs professionals have an opportunity to work, otherwise just passing information up through your leadership team the president and the president’s cabinet, and hopefully having them take on some of that innovation, whether it’s from faculty, Senate, staff, Senate, whatever obviously in student affairs, it’d be staff Senate working with that group to make sure that your voices are there and that the collective voice of the staff is heard lots and lots of different things that I think student affairs professionals can learn in terms of working with boards.

Ardell Sanders:
But that that’s been my experience. And I think those will be key pieces to, to know

Keith Edwards:
Wonderful. Again, you you’ve taught me so much and all three of you, I’m just learning a ton which, which is wonderful love to kind of circle back around and see real quickly kind of what additional tips you would have for student affairs leaders. We’ve shared some Felecia, we, we heard from you, you guys set us up at the beginning and what would you like to add for what Joe and Ardell have shared tips for student affairs pros?

Felecia Commodore:
Great. so one of the things that I think student affairs leaders can do is really not in agreeance with what Joe said about having committees on the board that are dedicated or thinking about student affairs, student life. I think also to go a step further is really thinking about what it is that you can put before the board as an opportunity to partner. And this comes again right with knowing who’s on the board. What is the board talking about? What are the current conversations going on the board, but often board members are not people who have worked in higher education. Mostly their connection to higher education is often that they went to college. And so we assume that they, because they’re in these positions, that they know what opportunities there are to partner what it is. They, they couldn’t be supporting on campus, but really a lot of times that knowledge comes through them from getting information from people on campuses.

Felecia Commodore:
And so they are thinking about not just reporting what you’re doing to the board, but also being a bit proactive and laying out before them. Here’s an opportunity that could really help our institution grow, could help our students to help us achieve our mission, can help our reputation, but we do need some support. We need either resources or we need manpower. We need something. And how can the board partner and helping us do that, whether that’s connecting us to external resources, whether that is approving a budget, increase different things of that sort. So giving them actual opportunities to partner and, and laying those before them. And then the last thing that I would say is that public institutions who most of those board meetings have something which is called an open session and open session is an part of the board meeting where the public can come.

Felecia Commodore:
They can get on the docket to talk for a brief amount of time about anything that they feel needs to be put before the board. And often I find that persons don’t go to the open session. They don’t sign up for the open session. They don’t even come to observe what the board is talking about or what’s on the agenda. And so I would encourage student affairs leaders to look particularly at public institutions to find out when the board is meeting. If there’s something that you feel the board needs to be thinking about, to get on that open session docket, to give your two minute speech about what it is they should be thinking about, or to let them know that, you know, there’s things that on the campus that should, they should be, be aware of now understand student affairs leaders are super busy, right?

Felecia Commodore:
And so this may in another meeting, but I do think it’s really important to utilize that opportunity to, to really make sure that your voice is heard and that you’re part of the process and that you’re on the record. And being able to say, Hey, the board can’t say that they didn’t know because somebody told you it’s on the record that that happened. And, and then I would also add, even if you don’t say anything to go and observe and see what’s on the agenda, see what the board is talking about. See what’s coming down the pipeline. And so you can be prepared and think about not only how you can shore up your office or prepare your office and the people you work with for what might make may happen, but also with where you can position yourself and leverage yourself in that conversation so that you can make sure that you benefit from it. As well as Joe said, this is about power. And I think often students, student affairs leaders feel disempowered from the governance process, but there are opportunities for you to plug in to different parts of that process so that you do have power and you do have voice. And so I would encourage them to do that in order to make sure that their students’ voices are heard and that student affairs practitioners, voices are heard as part of this process.

Keith Edwards:
Wonderful. Well, a couple of things I’m hearing from you is build relationships where you can right. Find what they’re interested in, build relationships. Don’t be afraid to educate the board about how these institutions actually function, because they may just not be familiar. And I know we’ve talked about some board members who are not engaged their CEO. They’ve got other things. I also think there are board members who really want to be involved. They want to spend more time on campus. They want to meet the students. They want to do that. And then the other thing I think a lot of times what we’re doing with boards is telling them everything’s great. Everything’s great. Everything’s fine. Let us keep our jobs. But how do you find opportunities to tell the board what’s not going well to say the hard stuff, these are the challenges we’re facing, and we need your help with that. Joe, what would you add anything you’d like to add? For recommendations for student affairs professionals, working with boards and legislatures,

Joseph Sertich:
I want to leverage off of what Felecia said. And you know, I’m a certified life coach working mostly with executive leadership. And the question I asked more often than any other one is what do you want? And I think that’s at the heart of this that comes back to power. And then I’d like to just bifurcate that into two politicals when you’re working with government, which is a key component of everything that affects us, that’s the big P and I just want you to know that for years you know, there was no question which party I was affiliated with. And just to keep you all guessing, I will tell you here, but I was a state delegate in 2018 you know, at the convention. And there was no secret about that. And that actually helped me with everybody in the political arena.

Joseph Sertich:
Once somebody says, I will serve as your, whatever their, that Senator representative or whatever for everyone. And they recognize that you can actually get more attention from them than people of their political party. And so don’t hide the fact and say, well, I have to be a political, even as a president. I never understood that because I would actually find that to be helpful. So there’s the big P with the political, there’s a small P with the board. And let me just tell you a quick story there. When I was trying to put this governance structure together of five community colleges in the district and had public hearings and all the rest I got called in front of this 15 member board that had three students on it, all appointed by the governor. I got called before the board, because one trustee had some questions and she just grilled me. And it was, it was actually people felt sorry for me, the way she attacked, what I was trying to do. And more importantly, the way she thought I was trying to do it and everything strategic. As it turns out, I walked away from the table and, you know, I kind of get how things work. And, and I was thinking, I was hoping this was true and sure enough to have that one person against me, guaranteed 14 other votes.

Joseph Sertich:
I think strategically it’s not bad when somebody lines up against you, because that may be just what it takes to get. And I hate to call it the sympathy vote because it was the right thing to do. But you know, it actually kind of pushed me over. The other thing is formal and informal. I love the informal. That’s kind of the open hearing part, say, whatever needs to get said and the rest. And then there are other informals by building those relationships with board members. I don’t mean in the, on the side, but at board meetings, they take breaks. You, you get a chance to meet people and build that relationship so that you have some credibility as well as the formal. And then let me just end with I was a chair of a board, a non-profit several years ago, and went to a conference in New York.

Joseph Sertich:
I came back convinced that what our board needed more than anything else was a governance committee. And it has absolutely changed Keith you’re actually working with this board. Now that governance committee changed everything. Now that we’re purposeful about DNI, they were, they were purposeful about how we evaluated board members, how we evaluated the president and how we would align all that because somebody was paying attention to how the board works and that’s where you could go, if you want it to get on the agenda and had trouble, either doing it through a different process and say, you know, this is something’s missing here. So again, I know I’m saying governance a lot, but in this case, I hope every board has a governance committee.

Keith Edwards:
Great suggestion. Great suggestion, Ardell, anything you want to add for recommendations?

Ardell Sanders:
I would say that basically nailed it. The one thing additional that I would add on the open sessions joining committees is staff council staff set, or a committee. That’s a part of the board that you may be a join would be to just do your homework on how the institution works. And it’s the, it’s not just from the president down, it’s from the board down. And it may even start at the governor down understanding how the entire structure of the institution works. And then how can I, as a student affairs professional, get my foot in doors so that my voice can be heard and I can speak on behalf of myself, my constituents and the students that I serve.

Joseph Sertich:
And if I could just be smart about just like I, I gave that kind of, that story about how one was against and the rest are for be careful not to just think you won because you now have a student affairs committee. That could be exactly how you get devalued by saying, oh, we have a committee on that. We shouldn’t have to worry about it. So it works both ways. You gotta be really strategic in how you see how this plays out.

Felecia Commodore:
Yeah, I would, I would add to with Ardell, like come, and this is something I stress to the students and my student affairs program. You need to know how things normally work, and then you need to know how things are practiced, right? So you need to know what the, the way things informally work. And, and I think that’s really important to sometimes we, we look at like the form of what I was supposed to do this, this and that, but really a lot of times decisions are made in the bathroom over dinner. And so you kind of also need to know what are the informal channels in which decisions are made within that formal channel. So you really that can really be thoughtful and strategic about how you’re going to navigate that, that arena,

Keith Edwards:
Well, to my surprise where you have a new sponsor for this episode, it’s Bowman and deal’s four frames of leadership. We’ve mentioned the symbolic political relationship, all of that. So so we’ll, we’ll send them a bill since they’re getting a lot of free plugs here. We are almost out of time. This podcast is called Student Affairs Now. Just real quick from each of you, you just tell us one thing that you’re pondering, wondering troubling right now, maybe related to this or not. So just real quick from each of you, one thing, and then if folks want to connect with you work and they do that Ardell, what are you troubling now?

Ardell Sanders:
I think right now, for me, it’s the enrollment cliff and the challenges around enrollment management, how boards and universities, colleges, and universities are going to navigate that moving forward and not just for the institution that I serve, but across the board, because it affects everyone in various ways. But there are some folks who will be looking for people, other folks looking for different types of people. So it just kind of depends on that. That is a big thought on my heart and mind now,

Keith Edwards:
Thank you, Joe. What are you troubling now?

Joseph Sertich:
Cost of higher education under my presidency. And I was directly responsible for all of these tuition increases. I think over nine years, I’ve raised it about 120% at the time. I was just convinced I needed more money to do more good. There were many unintended consequences, so you might think things like free community college might be a good thing. And I actually led that in a nationwide thing, visiting Tennessee and elsewhere. But now with the opportunity to reflect back, there are too many unintended consequences of these blanket, big blanket programs that might actually put money in the hands of the wrong people. So I think the cost of higher education is my main concern. We’ve got to get it under control. The bubble’s going to burst as it has in higher ed and banking and a host of other institutions. And I think we got to find a way to make that work.

Keith Edwards:
Wonderful. Felecia, what are you troubling now?

Felecia Commodore:
So I’m actually thinking about leadership and thinking about how between the grain of the presidency, which we’ve been talking about for probably 15 years now has hit us. And, and I think COVID pushed it forward a little bit more, and we’ve got a number of presidential vacancies and, and presidential resignations that are happening kind of in the swift moment particularly in the HBCU sector. And so the question is that we’ve been asking for the last 15 years, this is where the new presidents coming from, are there pipelines for them? And this is where boards come in. How will boards be selecting presidents for this new era of higher education? How are they thinking about what is needed to be a leader in a post COVID higher education space and a space where we are reaching that tuition cost bubble, where we’re thinking about enrollment clubs, who are the people who are best primed, and is it the traditional pipelines that we thought of before who are the people sitting around the table that are going to make that decision? And in addition to that, what does it look like when generation Z and millennials are becoming presidents and cabinet leaders on our campuses and tenured faculty? How is that going to shift what higher education looks like? Because now we’re seeing a generational shift that large on who is the leadership on campus. So what will that look like? And what does that mean for higher education and how we know it well. And what boards follow. I should add that

Keith Edwards:
I can’t wait for Gen Z to get on these boards. This has been terrific. Thanks to each of you for all of your hard work in this conversation, your experience, your expertise, your scholarship, your researcher, wisdom. It’s been fantastic. Thanks to our sponsors of today’s episode, Anthology and LeaderShape. With Anthology, transform your student experience and advanced co-curricular learning with Anthology engage with this technology platform, you are able to easily manage student organizations, efficiently plan events, and truly understand student involvement to continuously improve your engagement efforts at your institution. Learn more by visiting anthology.com/engage and also LeaderShape. LeaderShape partners with colleges and universities to create transformational leadership experiences, both virtual and in-person for students and professionals with a focus on creating a more just caring and thriving world. LeaderShape offers, engaging learning experiences on courage, courageous dialogue, integrity, equity, resilience, and community building to find out more, please visit leadership.org/virtual programs or connect to them on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Huge shout out to Natalie Ambrosey Nat’s, the production assistant for the podcast who does all of the behind the scenes work to make us all look and sound good. So thank you Nat. And if you’re listening today and not are already receiving our weekly newsletter, please visit our website at student affairs. Now.Com. Scroll to the bottom of the homepage to add your name to our MailChimp list while you’re at it. Check out the archives. I’m Keith Edwards, thanks to the fabulous guests today and to everyone who’s watching and listening, make it a great week.