Jillian Kinzie: The institutions that participated in the original RFY project, have really carried forward is continuing, continuing to ask those kind of cultural questions. And, you know, it’s, it is definitely about, , reorienting our orient our culture. Um, in this way, but I also think it’s about some of the structural work that I know Glenn has been doing and thinking about that he reminds me of is, is examining those boutique programs and really questioning their viability and this environment and whether they are serving us.

Well, so, you know, that’s the, it’s radical to ask hard questions about sacred cow programs as well, and to me that’s, that is, that requires courageous leadership. It doesn’t mean you’re dismantling them, but it, it means that you’re really questioning how do we make more of this available to students?

What’s good about this? And how do we assure that more students get to take advantage of this, , clearly valuable but boutique program that is not affecting enough students, to really warrant the kind of investment and resources.

Keith Edwards: Hello and welcome to Student Affairs. Now I’m your host, Keith Edwards. Radical re-imagining for student success in higher education argues that the time for incremental reform in higher ed has passed, and that colleges must transform their cultures, structures, and leadership models to truly center student success.

The authors center. The question, what would our institutions look like if students really mattered? They present a call for systemic collaborative change, rooted in adaptive management, shared leadership, and radical care. I’m so glad to have the three of you here to talk about this 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 browse our archives@studentaffairsnow.com. This episode is sponsored by Evolve, evolve. Institute offers a series of leadership coaching journeys designed to bring clarity, capacity, and confidence, empowering courageous leadership to reimagine the future of higher education.

As I mentioned, I’m your host, Keith Edwards. My pronouns are he, him, his. I’m a speaker, author, and coach, empowering, courageous leadership for higher education for better tomorrow’s for us all through leadership, learning, and equity. You can find out more about me@keithedwards.com. And I’m recording this from my home in Minneapolis, Minnesota at the intersections of the ancestral homelands of both the Dakota and the Ojibwe peoples.

Let’s get to our guests. Love to have you each introduce yourselves and a little bit of your connection to our focus today. And Jillian Kinsey, we’re gonna start with you.

Jillian Kinzie: Thank you so much for bringing us together here to today to talk about this, and I really appreciate the work that you’ve done to inspire courageous leadership.

Jillian Kinsey with the National Survey of Student Engagement, I’m the associate Director of the project long time faculty member and educator at Indiana University Bloomington. Really focused on trying to help. Practitioners in student affairs and also faculty and staff understand how we can create more opportunities to create transformative learning experiences and support all of our students.

So really happy to be doing that. And Emma, little bit of a survey and data nut and wanna make sure we talk a little bit about some evidence-based decision making. So happy to be here with you today. Thanks.

Keith Edwards: Terrific. So glad to have you here.

Glenn Davis: And over

Keith Edwards: to you

Glenn Davis: Glenn. Thanks so much, Keith. Again, I really appreciate the opportunity to connect with you and the audience here.

So my name is Glenn Davis and I’m the Vice President for Student Engagement and Success at Bowling Green State University in Bowling Green, Ohio. I’ve been here for just under six years, and I have the real privilege of leading a large team whose sole focus is really trying to answer that central question that you mentioned.

What would our institution look like if students really mattered? And we focus on system level, population level, and student level change to make sure that our students are getting the best access to opportunities to really help them grow and thrive and really grateful to be part of this community.

Just a quick note, my background, I actually am a former medieval list. I was used to teach. Olden middle English language and literature just near you. Keith at St. CLA State University, the first institution where I worked and got into full-time student success work about 10 years ago.

Awesome.

Keith Edwards: Glad to have you here. And over to you, Tim.

Tim Dale: And thanks again for having us. My name is Tim Dale. I’m the Associate Dean of the College of Business Administration at University of Wisconsin Lacrosse. I started here as a professor in political science worked my way because of a loud mouth tendencies into committees that were making consequential decisions.

And mostly I’ve driven through several different positions at my current institution and my home institution. Really driven by this question how. Dewey feature student success as a center of our considerations. I was the director of first year seminar program as we rolled it out as a mandatory course back about the same time that this book was coming out.

Then became the director of general education and then was the associate dean for a period of time in the College of Art, social science and Humanities. And now I’m over at the College of Business Administration. I think that. Being on the front lines of these conversations every day every single meeting, it is clear to me why this work matters and why it is that we should all be asking really important and even radical questions because there is no question too small or no question too large where these conversations aren’t critically important.

Keith Edwards: Thank you all for those introductions and for being here and for this conversation. I should point out that this this book emerged in the midst of COVID, was largely written. Before COVID was released in the midst of COVID and a little bit of forwarding and pretext to acknowledge that.

And but five years later the radical re-imagining and this question about centering around students all still really relevant, maybe even more relevant in the context that we’re currently in. I just wanna begin with how this project, this book, this question came to be Tim, how did this project start to emerge?

Tim Dale: In 2016, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation partnered with the American Association of State Colleges and Universities we call acu. To look at the question of first year student success in particular the driving question was what are we doing about the students who are capable of succeeding in college but leaving college?

And of course we know the demographics of that group. First generation college students in particular, are ones that we know. Tend not to succeed. And so this initiative became known as the re-imagining the first year of college, RFY. We refer to it as and a colleague of mine who’d been engaged in this work and had connected to George Mahaffey at ask You was really.

Part of the vision of why it came to be. Joe Arnie our colleague who is the leading force behind the book the first editor she passed away during COVID. And so a lot of this work being motivated by her early on was collecting 44 institutions across the country to partner in asking, a set of questions that looked at what would it look like as you’ve already framed, what would it look like if we made all of our decisions based on student success and no other consideration? I think part of this, and this is where I think back to the college education that maybe we all got where.

There’s an old version of college where on the first day of college, a professor says, look to your left, look to your right. One of you isn’t going to be here. That’s the college education that we’re resisting. That’s the the impulse that colleges somehow intended to weed out students.

And so there’s an ethical importance to this work, which is if we’re collecting tuition money, we should be working and doing everything we can to serve the students who come onto our campus. And then there’s a practical one, and I think this is one that we’ll come back to, which is that at the time mid 2010s.

And now even more important is as higher education is being called into question as we face challenges of demographics and increasing economic polarization we really need to be asking the question of how we keep students at our institutions and how we serve them the best way that we can. And so even though this project is at this point, nearing a decade old I don’t think it’s ever been more important.

And the things that we talk about in the book. Are things that everyone will see our conversations that are happening right now on campuses across the country.

Jillian Kinzie: Yeah, Tim I just wanna emphasize just how important this question is right now. And, you express it beautifully as a project that really is unfortunately, I suppose in some ways persistently we need to persistently attend to the issue of student success.

But I think now it’s even more important and. We need to be thinking differently about how we do this. And for someone who’s been around in the student success world for longer than many people even in this space here today, both on my screen and in our conversation, but also perhaps listening it’s, this is the time to ask different questions.

And I just wanna put a pin on that. We have to move beyond asking questions about, what solution needs to be adopted for this situation? And instead move to what is the problem? What is the issue we are trying to solve for? And I think that’s a real reorientation that this book invites people into is I’m reminded of the common business practice of the approach to solving problems as what would have to be true.

In this context, and I think this is higher Ed’s question is what if we put students at the center? What do we need to do in order to put students really at the center of our work and as if student really matters? So to me this is about a critical rethinking about how we do our work. So absolutely critical right now.

Glenn Davis: And Jillian, I remember the conversation that the four of us had. Back in the day when we were coming up with that term radical, and we know that word obviously has a number of connotations and I think that there is this radical reorientation to really address the system level issues and the systemic challenges that are there.

But one of the things we also look at in the book, and certainly has informed the work that I do, I’m so grateful for the partnership with folks here and from across the really the country working on some of these challenges is getting at the root issues. To your point, Jillian, we really have to. Take a close look.

As challenging as that is to address all of the sort of the debt that we’ve accumulated over the many decades around student success and how can we really address the root issues so that play on words radical getting at the root is something that I know that was absolutely part of our initial discussions because that’s where the real change is going to occur and the sustainable impact we’re gonna have on our students.

Keith Edwards: I love this framing about your approach to the work. And that radical re-imagining I think is so relevant in this time as we face all of these different challenges, none of which are really terribly new, but all of them happening at the same time. When we talk about ai, when we talk about federal and state governmental interference, when we talk about enrollment cliff and we talk about all the things coming from that, all of that happening at the same time.

It is unprecedented, and I think we’re starting to be unprecedented in our use of the word unprecedented, so I gotta be careful a little bit. And it does create some space for some radical re-imagining to do things radically different and ask some different questions. So I really appreciate that.

As I, as we’ve all mentioned, I think the central question driving this is what would our institutions look like if students really mattered? And jillian, what central insights emerge for you on this question? And I know that you think about this all the time and we’re helping write and edit some years ago and you didn’t stop thinking about it when the book came out.

So what Central Insights emerged for you, both in the writing and the editing of the book, but also in your thinking since.

Jillian Kinzie: Yeah. Yeah. There are so many. The first one I wanna highlight is this, the actual notion of reframing. And, I hinted at this in my previous response, but I think this idea that what would have to be true for this student success?

To be, to succeed. So if we’re really gonna make sure that we’re changing the trajectory of students’ experiences what needs to be true on our campus, and I think what this book did in our work with campus was expose again, the wide range of things that have to be true. We have to be more human with each other.

We have to think about how data. And evidence inform what we do and how they can, how data and evidence can really expose and bust some of the myths we have about how students attend college, what they do, what their motivations are, what they’re interested in. We need to use data in that way to keep us focused on the outcome we’re after and to bust myths that are stalling our progress.

Around students. And, those things have been always on my mind, but they came full head on both in the writing and preparation for this book, but also in the days that have come since, as we continue to try and determine what do we need to do to make more, to help more students be successful and achieve their goals.

So first the idea of the reframe. Data and evidence to bear on that conversation. And then I think that the humane issue is really important these days. We have to be much more thoughtful about bringing faculty who care as Tim and Glen represent. Faculty who care about students, and I have never been somebody who believed that faculty don’t understand or don’t care about student success.

I think that I have always just wondered if we are offering appropriate opportunities for them to demonstrate. How much they care and how they can come to the table and work as partners with, whether that’s student affairs or with dedicated staff and administrators on the campus. We have to be much more open to bringing faculty in and staff in who want to support students.

So I, to me that idea of. Busting myths that people don’t care about this or they only wanna plan things that are convenient for them and for their schedule is simply not true. And we need to be more open to bringing more faculty into doing this work with us.

Keith Edwards: Yeah. I think one of the myths that’s coming up for me is this notion that.

Collaborating, co-creating. Being inclusive means it has to be incredibly time consuming, and that competes with being nimble and we can be collaborative and inclusive and nimble and quick at the same time. Just bit about the ways that we do that. Glen, you’re leading a very large division of student engagement at a very large institution, really focused on student success.

What is emerging for you on this question about what would institutions look like if students really mattered?

Glenn Davis: Yeah, and I’m gonna lean right into what both Jillian and you just said, Keith, which is how do we bring in those partnerships? I think one of the things that we’ve really explored here at BGSU is what would it look like if we structured ourselves?

Around that question. And I feel very fortunate, as I’ve already mentioned, to be part of an institution that’s really taking that orientation. And we’ve been really intentional in the way that we’ve worked where we now have an accountability for some of the outcomes like retention and graduation rates.

But I certainly recognize, and I know my leadership team that I work with, and we work with a really amazing group of folks here. We also know that, there’s the old adage that if. If student success is everybody’s responsibility, it’s nobody’s responsibility. So one of the things that we’ve worked with, and I learned this directly from colleagues like Jillian and Tim and the other folks we worked with through Ask You’s re-imagining the first year program, and especially from the co-authors and the contributors to the book, is how important it is to set a direction.

So that we’ve actually identified an orientation toward a radical student-centeredness, a radical alignment of that work, and also what it means to be radically collaborative about this work. So by taking the opportunity to set a direction and then to welcome other people in, to contribute to moving us toward that direction has been a real game changer for us here at BGSU.

So we’re not asking for. 50 different potentially orthogonal strategies or initiatives around student success. We know that we want to, make sure that we’re addressing those outcomes. So how do we work backwards to create an environment in the classroom, in our residence halls, in our advising spaces, in our clubs and organizations with athletics.

So we are not moving in random directions, but we’re working toward more engagement, intentional engagement to help our students become. Action oriented problem solvers who are curious about the world around them. So how do we work with folks to bring their complimentary strengths together? Toward a common goal that matters not only to what Tim said about our ethical question, which is we know that as admitting these students, we’re committed to them to make sure they get access to the resources and also the opportunities to really stretch themselves. But how do we then work together so that we can share in the outcomes in those successes, but then. We really take responsibility when things don’t move forward, so that we’re bringing in a much larger group of people.

We’re honoring their experience from where they are, and then we’re sharing in those wins together.

Keith Edwards: I love this. I think I got it right. Radical direction, alignment and collaboration. Yes. Yeah. And I love that clarity. So we’re not just all going about, we can be in the busy disease, right? We have, yes, we’re good at that.

96 staff all going at 96 different directions, but they’re incredibly passionate about and incredibly hardworking. Doesn’t really serve the students. But if we can have clear direction, and then align what we’re doing and then collaborate, right? So all the puzzle pieces are working for students. I think that can be quite powerful.

Glenn Davis: And if I can just add one quick thing to that too. Is we also have that built into our strategic plan as an institution. So it also helps for us to demonstrate why this work matters, not just from the moral and ethical standpoint, which of course it does first and foremost, but we can also point to ways that we’re contributing to the institutional success as well at board meetings in other kinds of spaces, which we also know is really important for the future of student success work.

Keith Edwards: Absolutely. Tim, try and follow all that. What would you add here about what essential insights are emerging for you when you ask this question?

Tim Dale: Yeah. And the brilliance of my colleagues is that any of these conversations and whether it be a late night phone conversation about the book or sitting in a conference room in a hotel after hours at a conference I think that we push each other to think beyond where we are.

I, I think going to what Jillian said about finding the problems we have several large ca scale studies that show why students are not succeeding in college. And it comes down to. Factors like belonging. Do students feel like they belong on a campus? Do they see purpose in their coursework?

And these questions can’t be answered within our silos. And we talk about this quite a bit where we talk about, the student affairs people or the academic affairs people, or the people who work in the union and food service. And one of the things our colleague Joe Arney, who inspired this work, pressed on all of us as we went through is that these conversations have to involve everyone on a college campus. And Joe’s one of Joe’s favorite examples of the custodian in a building who has a conversation with a student after hours in the hallway and reinforces the critical importance of staying in school.

And so the temptation I know is when we’re dealing with problems in our own areas as we bring our own expertise to bear, but we do it in communities of people who are in the same situation as us as opposed to reaching across divisions. And so I think exactly what Jillian and Glen talked about, the importance of collaboration is collaborating across campus on every initiative.

Every question, what do we do to support students? And we can’t have these conversations within vacuums. We can’t have them in our silos. And the more we step outside of our division to have these conversations, I think every single time it’s learning a different way to approach these students’ problems.

The other thing that really became clear to me through the work on this book and the reimagining the first year project. Is how many of our initiatives were designed to impact a small number of students. So we talk about the boutique programs on our campuses where we’re gonna take the best and the brightest and we’re gonna give them a research seminar or a undergraduate research project.

Or we take the students at the most risk, the ones who show up in our institutions where they get several Fs or they come from a background that has us definitely providing resources to them. But then there’s this large group of students who are getting Bs and Cs and they’re not on anyone’s radar screen.

And we, if we know that high impact practices are important and if we know them happening earlier, are important. Part of this work is also how do we bring these things to scale. It’s not okay to approach these problems with the relatively inexpensive but easy to get behind boutique program.

And I think, and I know that we could probably list a dozen of these on all of our campuses where we’re gonna serve this small group of students with this project. And we have one faculty member who gets really passionate about it. Then that faculty member retires or moves on and then it goes away.

And part of the radicality of this and the framing is how do we make all of the students at our institution fully benefit from how intentional we are about high impact practices, for example. And the reimagine. The first year project really was about that. So that was the other thing and Jillian’s helped us with a lot of this work in framing it, is that we’re really great at providing high impact practice to students in their last year of college senior capstone seminars where they’re writing papers and doing research projects.

They’re seeing the relevance of their learning. We know that students need to see that relevance early. And so in the big lecture hall and in the the students in mass going to these different experiences, how are we scaling the high impact practices that we know students benefit from, and how are we making sure that we touch all students with them and not just the students that show up on our spreadsheet at the top or the bottom?

Yeah.

Keith Edwards: One of the things I’m thinking about aligns with that, which is. I think one of the things that I see is we’re asking a lot and des systematizing things, which then means each faculty member needs to create this from scratch on their own. Each staff member needs to develop a whole new thing. And we shift the responsibility to people who are already overburdened, overworked, overwhelmed, and can see burnout from their porch.

But how do we take some of these boutique things that are very successful, that may be a brilliant, dedicated, passionate staff member who’s created. And see what’s really working here beyond that person and their individual passion. And then how can we systematize that and give the recipe so that other people can replicate this.

Easily and quickly and without effort. And then we have lots of people replicating this, then we’re gonna learn at scale. But, we all had, 12 different people doing this and these things worked every time and these things didn’t. And these things depended on who you were with.

I think there’s a real opportunity to as you said, do this at scale. I think about it, how do we systematize? I don’t use this language, but I might start now. How do we take the boutique and make it system? Scalable in that way. Jillian, I feel like you wanna chime in there

Tim Dale: also. Sorry.

Jillian Kinzie: Yeah, go ahead, Tim.

Tim Dale: Yeah, so I just wanted to say it’s not just systematic, although it’s absolutely part of it, and maybe this is what Jillian’s gonna say because I was actually about to say Jillian does a great job talking about this, but it’s also institutional culture. It’s about how we talk about these problems.

I, I remember, and one of the more inspiring things that I heard throughout our work, we were running a conference or we were help facilitating a conference on student success and a math professor at the very end raised his hand and says, I don’t know how to say this, but what I realized through the course of several sessions today is that I’m not thinking about my students.

I’m thinking about our students. Yes. And exactly. How profound that observation was in terms of framing it in a way that I hadn’t thought of before. And how faculty in particular tend to think of the students who walk into their classroom as their students. Yeah. And so the question I think that, that moves us from my students, or the ones who walk through the door in my office to our students is really that collective or part of that collective culture shift that I think Jillian has.

Articulate and through data demonstrated that this is really the move that we need to be making on our, at our institution.

Keith Edwards: And that, that shift from my, to our, it also is collaborative and collective. It also gets my ego and need for credit and affirmation out of the way. Go ahead, Jillian.

Jillian Kinzie: Yeah, no, and I think that’s a, that’s exactly the kind of cultural reorientation that we’re talking about, and I think a lot of the.

The institutions that participated in the original RFY project have really carried forward is continuing to ask those kind of cultural questions. And, it’s, it is definitely about reorienting our orient our culture. In this way, but I also think it’s about some of the structural work that I know Glenn has been doing and thinking about that he reminds me of is examining those boutique programs and really questioning their viability and this environment and whether they are serving us.

That’s the, it’s radical to ask hard questions about sacred cow programs as well, and to me that’s, that is, that requires courageous leadership. It doesn’t mean you’re dismantling them, but it means that you’re really questioning how do we make more of this available to students?

What’s good about this? And how do we assure that more students get to take advantage of this clearly valuable but boutique program that is not affecting enough students to really warrant the kind of investment and resources. So I think that idea of thinking about how do we structure more experiences and I’m drawn to institutions that I have learned more recently about Kansas State and Bradley and other institutions that are identifying.

Curricular pathways for students to get the kind of high impact practice and experiential learning. Grand Valley State has identified very specific curricular experiences. Where they are structuring them into the curriculum. And to me that’s a way to, to be a lot more. Systematic about assuring students get the experiences that we know are valuable for their learning.

The other thing is signaling to students and families Yes. That these things are valuable. Yeah. We, it, as Glen was saying, we can’t, put things late in the curriculum and think that, oh, this is, what students are gonna be able to do and great to cap off their experience with this.

We need to value that. Signal its value much earlier in the educational process. And boy is that important today when families are seriously questioning whether this investment is worth it, both in time and money. But, and is it gonna pay off at the end? Is signaling to students that the way we’ve organized this curricular pathway, the way we’ve built in co-curricular experiences is going to assure the student.

That they are gonna get the skills and experiences that they need, but that it, it takes the student where they wanna go.

Keith Edwards: Yeah.

Jillian Kinzie: In a very demonstrable way. So to me, those are all new, it really is just reemphasizing what we discovered as teams as part of RFY is how important it’s to structure and be thoughtful about what it is that we’re trying to do, and to make that more available to more students.

Glenn Davis: Jillian, as you’re saying this, it’s reminding me, and I’m so glad that both you and Tim brought this up. This notion of scale, which is something that I think is, can be quite challenging regardless of the size of institution, because those boutique programs are often built with the best of intentions.

Yes. Have had an impact on the students. It’s just maybe not the number of students that we’re going to need to be able to impact. Tim, to your point about that middle group. And I think there’s another. Element to the work that is difficult, but I think really important, which is just making decisions and sticking to them.

So knowing that we can’t do everything for everybody, so can we as an institution make a decision for us at BGSU, we decided that design thinking was gonna be one of the core elements of the undergraduate student learning experience that was going to give them a set of skills and tools to bring together what it is they’re learning across the.

Curriculum and co-curriculum to really empower the students to make those choices. So that was an institutional decision that we made, which could have been a number of different decisions, but that’s the one that we made and we’ve really a seen the impact that it’s having in the way that students are engaging in these other kinds of experiences, these high impact practices.

Work integrated or work-based learning, getting ready to Jillian’s point to demonstrate the return on the investment that, that they and their families are making. But that making a decision at scale is difficult, but it really provides a clear direction. Something I talked about a little bit earlier, and that’s been reinforced by my friends and colleagues here.

We can’t do everything, so why don’t we, and we may have to pivot and make adjustments, but there’s a real. Sort of power in just making a decision and then having people move,

Keith Edwards: move forward. A lot of this reminds me, I was just last week at the institute on the curricular approach and which is I think a technology or a way of doing what exactly what you’re talking about, and that I often talk about that as bringing intentionality, clarity, alignment, and integration.

Some very similar words that Glen mentioned. And I think having that focus, whether it’s design thinking or global citizenship or community engagement, to some degree, you gotta pick something and go with it. And I think when, more students were plentiful. We often competed with each other by, we have all the student organizations that Bowling Green has.

We have all the majors that the University of Minnesota has. We’re just like everybody else. And I think now where students are, we’re competing for students in a different way. It’s gonna be that differentiation. That design think is a central thing here at Bowling Green. If that’s not for you, that’s fine.

But if it is, this is what we do and this is how we do it, and having that clarity and that choosing a direction. Elliot Felix in his book Connected Colleges talks about. What if we shifted from regional comprehensives to regional specifics that this regional institution was focused here. And I’m just seeing that the folks that are able to do that, their enrollments are not doing okay.

They’re doing great. Great. Because we focus on this we’ve all evoked at least before we started the conversation, and certainly Tim is as we’ve recorded this conversation. Joe Arne and Joe led this initiative is the lead editor, someone who you all very care very deeply about that.

We, we heard that in Tim’s voice. We saw that on your faces for those of you who are watching. But her chapter is how to Reimagine Comes Later in the Book, how to Reimagine. And the center idea of that chapter is this notion of, I’m gonna quote it ’cause I love it so much. Being hard on problems, but easy on people.

And it just resonates so much with what I see people struggling with and being hard on people and then justifying that with the challenges that we’re facing, right? This is why I am hard on these people. And I love this clarity of un braiding that let’s be hard on the problems and the challenges we’re facing, but easy on people, Glen.

How can we put that into practice? I, no one disagrees. Everyone agrees. No one disagrees. How do we do it?

Glenn Davis: And I just want to take a minute too, I know we all deeply Miss Joe and what she brought to this work. And I know that her legacy certainly lives on in the amazing things that she did in leading the reimagining the first year group and also just bringing us together.

That was one of her real skills. Tim was. Obviously, I don’t mean to speak for Tim. Tim she worked with you very closely at University of Wisconsin Lacrosse, but she had a real knack of bringing people together and helping of gathering folks. And I just, we all miss her.

So what I think is so important, and Jillian, I also wanna acknowledge the work that you did to help make sure that chapter really at the end came together. Joe always made sure that we were rigorously challenging the systems and structures that either impeded student progress or prevented students from taking advantage of all the opportunities available to them.

Not just resources, but opportunities to really experience things both in and around the world. So I know that was really key there. But we have to do it in a way that doesn’t. Harm the people who are actually responsible for the work. So that’s something I know. She was really a key proponent of adaptive management leading for really sustainable and purpose-driven change.

And a core element of that work is making sure that we engage the stakeholders, engage the folks who are involved, and make sure that not only are their voices heard, but that we’re providing, a psychological safety for the work to go forward so that innovation can really happen. We know the direction we’re moving, but we also know that we have to run to the best solutions, and those can come from anywhere.

So how are we making sure that we are opening up to as many voices as possible? Students, faculty, staff, administrators, folks from the outside parents, so that if they know what we’re trying to accomplish, how can we all work together to best get it done?

Keith Edwards: Yeah, it sounds like you’re talking about the cultural container we need to create for these things to flourish and take off, and for people to feel empowered to move in this direction.

Tim, what would you add here?

Tim Dale: Yeah, I think that part of it is also, and this is where Glen just put it very well, but our colleague Joe was really good at making people feel included in conversations and how important it’s to listen across campus. I think. Sometimes meetings become, who’s going to express their particular interests the loudest or the personalities in the room that can dominate.

I, I think part of being hard on problems, but easy on people is asking a lot of questions. And when someone is not, has not spoken at a meeting someone represents an office that is not always heard in conversations. Being easy on people is also asking what these experiences are for others on our campuses.

And it really is about, sensitizing ourselves to the humans who have to do this work. And that sometimes we have hard days and sometimes we have days that are exciting. And. Bringing that forward in, in a way that’s intentional, where you start a meeting with a conversation about why it matters, what we do.

You start a meeting with talking about these things and really really extroverting how will this meeting go if we are all sensitive to everyone in this room coming with the same sense of purpose. Even if we disagree. And so I think that’s also a way that there is a culture of collaboration that gives words to what it is that we’re doing together and how important it’s to collaborate.

And I think that was where Joe did not like these conversations as competitive. And so I think of the ways in which she was always disarming me and others in conversations when academics or others who work on college campuses tend to show up ready for a fight. And that the fight can’t be about us.

It has to be about what we’re fighting against. And that is these structures in place that are not good for students.

Jillian Kinzie: Yeah. The last point I wanna put on this beautiful kind of acknowledgement of what Joe brought to this work is this emphasis on relationship. And the phrase that I loved that Joe emphasized too was this idea of everybody needs a person.

And that’s been a sentiment for what helps people be successful for a long time. And it’s critical for students to feel like they have somebody on their side, and that is. Not only so important when students get into a challenging situation or they’re troubled, but it has to do with how we just build a relationship, rich educational experience.

And I think about the way that Peter Felton and Leo Lamber have furthered this concept in their work on relationship rich education. They named it. Such, and we need to tack back to that and say, how is it that we’re creating environments where people are recognized and honored for the relationships that they have with other people?

And they’re good relationships. They’re positive. They’re not tearing other people down to get things done. And leaders have to model that. Yeah. Leaders have to model that emphasis on everybody needs a person. We need to recognize and honor people who foster those kind of relationships with others, and particularly with students.

And, recognize that people are the backbone of our institutions. And we’ve gotta treat them well in order to do this, in order to have them serve our students.

Keith Edwards: Yeah, I think Tim mentioned earlier that, that students need belonging and purpose. And Jillian, you’re reminding they also need a champion, which reminds me of one of my favorite TED talks.

Rita Pearsons. Every child deserves a champion and the centering of relationship which is really about K 12 education, but. It works just fine for us. Just skip that part. We are gonna do our next question, but we’re gonna do it in a bit of a rapid fire because I think we’ve touched on this broadly.

But maybe here we get a chance to be a little bit more specific. As we mentioned the book was largely conceived and written. Pre COVID came out in the midst of COVID and we’ve lived through a few eras and Taylor Swift album since then. So what has shifted, clarified, and emerged for you since the book has come out, it’s been almost five years.

What are some new thoughts, some new ideas, some new ahas or some old ones that you’re just more certain of now than ever before. Tim, anything coming up for you?

Tim Dale: Yeah I think we, I just remember us having conversations after most of the chapters were completed and then COVID happens and what are we even doing?

Although I think Glen may have said it, and it was definitely an aha moment when he said, COVID is bringing into stark relief why these conversations are important. Yeah. And that has really been so clear to me over the last five years. What we have now is increasing eec, economic inequalities.

We have students who are my daughter’s applying for college this year, and she was online, most of middle school. And so we have students who are showing up on college campuses. They may lack some. Forms of preparedness that we’re not even sure what those are going to be or what’s lost in those times.

But then it’s also our campuses transitioning more to online spaces where students have maybe fewer and fewer opportunities to create those connections and to see higher education as a deliverable that just gets laid out and students can either take it or leave it. I think we are into some dangerous territory in terms of some of these conversations about how we serve all people.

I also think, and this is a a interesting twist is the higher wages in service industry, I think means that we’re dealing with a generation of students that the value proposition of college, particularly for lower income students is just not there in the short term. And so I go back to what Glen pointed out, I think COVID is putting some of these things in, really stark relief. So our institutions I think are facing really daunting challenges, and I think student success absolutely needs to radically be the center of these conversations. And it’s never more clear than it has been the last few years.

Jillian Kinzie: I just wanna amplify that. I think Tim is the idea that our COVID really exposed how policies and practices also were getting in students’ ways and getting in faculty’s way of doing a good job with students and then we can change

Keith Edwards: them really quickly when we want.

Yes,

Jillian Kinzie: we did. We demonstrated that we can change. So how do we keep and not just use those in a time of a national emergency or a worldwide emergency, but retain them and really go back to the student first. Policies, orientation. Students are the first po, they should be the first thought in our policies.

So is how is this serving students? How is this? Thwarting their success by having this particularly rigid policy in place. So I think COVID really demonstrated how we can get through those different, the problems with workflows and problematic policies that we’re keeping students out instead of bringing them in.

It’s a real reorientation and I think that is one of the most serious ample. Amplification of a principle in this book is the idea that we need to be more thoughtful and supportive of mindset, belonging cultural wealth models for how we do our work. And, it can, relieving yourself and thinking about student first policy is a way to really breathe new life.

Into practices as well. A lot of people aren’t happy with policies that don’t seem to be working, and I think this gives us permission and invites us to really think about how policies can be more effective at keeping students in versus pushing them out and creating barriers.

Glenn Davis: I would just underscore what both of my colleagues said there and to really Keith the point that you and Jillian just made.

This is what it shows how fast we can mobilize if we need to. And we were addressing barriers that we typically don’t at scale. How do we make sure everybody has internet? How do we make sure everybody has access to a laptop? Now, of course, there are situations where we’re always. Making sure that students who are coming from lower income backgrounds need those, but everybody needed that support in a very quick manner.

And one of the lessons I know that I think it’s important for all of us to take is look what can happen when we’re all moving in the same direction. How quickly we can make those changes. To both structures and systems and also our culture. So how can we really take the best of that and keep that moving forward?

Keith Edwards: Yeah. It’s also occurring to me that in this moment when addressing systemic obstacles for students is something that can be hard to talk about for many folks that this student first. Is a great way to, to language that and on, on all of our students first. And I think adding that all in can really help us think about that.

What are the obstacles for all of our students? How do we make sure all of our students are able to access this to be successful to, and that radical re-imagining I think is a great way to do that. We are running out of time. So we always like to end with this question. What are you thinking troubling or pondering now?

And if any of you want to also share where folks can connect with you, we can absolutely do that. Glen, I think we’re gonna start with you.

Glenn Davis: All right. Thanks again for the opportunity to come together. I always love connecting with my colleagues and friends here. And Keith, it’s been great to be part of this podcast.

The thing that, my, my keeping up at night, this has come up a couple of times, is how do we get more of our students engaged? I wanna make sure that our students are more of our students are seeing the value of taking advantage of what we have to offer, both on the resource side, but also on the opportunity side.

I know that’s a challenge that Jillian’s working on in her research, and I know that’s something that we’re all working on. So that’s definitely my keeping up at night. And again, LinkedIn is probably the best way to get in touch with me. I’m fairly active there and would love to see folks.

Keith Edwards: That’s great. Jillian, how about you? What’s troubling you now?

Jillian Kinzie: I don’t there are lots of things troubling me, but I’m gonna focus on the thing that I think there’s some exciting work to be done, and it’s around this idea. And you mentioned at the very beginning, Keith I think this idea of more work integrated learning, emphasizing where students are going and how we can help them get there in a way that’s very clear.

And helps keep them at the institution to realize the value of what they’re doing through. Wh where that’s gonna take them. The kind of experiences they’re gathering, the kinds of experiences they are gaining new skills and learning how to approach problems. That those are the kind of experiences I want more students to have early on.

And I think we’re being a lot more thoughtful. Part of it is the pressure of the families and students reevaluating what’s the return on investment here? We’ve got to be a lot more thoughtful about a new phrase that Lumina has. Has been championing is career connected, high impact practices.

And I really like that idea. Of not only just looking at experiential learning as an opportunity to, develop personally and professionally. All those things are true, but how can we make sure that those things are career connected and students see the instrumental value and faculty are also given opportunity to really emphasize that dimension of this work.

So that’s exciting to me. It’s definitely getting more emphasis because of the value proposition and the questions that families have, but I think it’s always been something that we’ve just underplayed in higher education. We just haven’t had to discuss and share it, and now we have an opportunity.

Keith Edwards: Great. Great. How about you, Tim?

Tim Dale: I am becoming increasingly concerned about the way that we approach problems in higher education when we’re constantly in crisis. And I think that there is an underlying sense of, you, you read the headline and higher education has another crisis and another problem and another issue, and there’s this kind of fatigue that develops in terms of just feeling like we’re in the trenches and just weathering this thing.

The problem is that we’re always weathering the crisis and higher education is going to be in crisis. Then I worry about the students who show up on our campuses, who this is they’re starting college. This is exciting, and they’re gonna need an experience. And so what I’m interested in is how we.

A in a collaborative environment, being each other’s support but also make sure that we’re always attentive to what students are needing that show up on our campus. And there are broader political pressures that are going to happen. There are gonna be wins of political change. But I think that, that the renewal that we need to.

Really confront is just how it is that we deliver and continue to deliver on our core principles and keep those core principles driving us regardless of who is in office at a particular time or what a state legislature does in a given year. Because we still have students showing up. So I think that some of this conversation is also.

This constant state of crisis that we feel ourselves in, but we have for two decades now. Yeah. And so this doesn’t look like it’s going to change. I think we need to dedicate ourselves to being clear that our students are going to show up on campuses that can’t be in crisis, even if there are other parts of the world that are,

Keith Edwards: yeah, it’s challenging and as difficult as it is, there’s also something addictive.

About being in a state of crisis, right? There’s a little something alluring about that, so I appreciate that. Thanks to each of you for being with us and for this great conversation. I really appreciate your leadership in this space. This has been super helpful. Some big ideas, but also some very practical ones as well.

So thank you all very much. I also want to thank our sponsors of today’s episode; Evolve. Higher Education is Facing Unprecedented Challenges, as we’ve talked about. And needs courageous leadership now more than ever, and poor leadership has never been more costly. At Evolve Institute, we’re empowering a new generation of leaders with the capacity to turn these challenges into possibilities and lead with and through them.

At Evolve, we help leaders develop the capacity to lead with clarity, confidence, and courage. We offer leadership coaching journeys for leadership teams and individual leaders focused on executive leadership, emerging executives, emerging leaders, and those leading for equity. As always, a huge shout out to our producer, Nan Ambrosey, who does all the behind the scenes work to make us look and sound good.

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I am Keith Edwards. Thanks again to our fabulous guests today and to all of you watching and listening, make it a great week. Thanks all. Thanks every Thank you.

https://www.amazon.com/Relationship-Rich-Education-Connections-Success-College/dp/1421439360/

https://youtu.be/SFnMTHhKdkw?si=cYUcI2djx9QHLRMe