Notes:
1) This interview in the Weekly Wisdom Series originally aired on May 17, 2021 as part of the University Innovation Alliance’s Innovating Together podcast, appearing live on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
2) This transcript is intended to serve primarily as a guide to the full conversation. We apologize for any inaccuracies and encourage you to listen to the podcast.
Click here to access our summary, along with helpful links and audio from this episode.
Mark Becker:
Parable, the blind man and the elephant. You only understand the part that you can touch if you’re a blind man, the story of the elephant. So if you touch the tusk or the foot or the tail, you have a very different view of what this creature is that you can’t see. And I think that’s part of what we get with the armchair quarterbacks. They’re out there trying to put a very complicated, very dynamic world into their worldview where they haven’t sat in these seats where they haven’t seen the political side of the world.
Bridget Burns:
Welcome to Innovating Together. A podcast produced by the University Innovation Alliance. This is the podcast for busy people in higher education who are looking for the best ideas, inspiration, and leaders to help you improve students’ success. I’m your host, Bridget Burns.
You’re about to watch another episode of Start the Week with Wisdom, which, for those of you at home, if you have not seen this before, these are our weekly episodes where we conduct an interview with a sitting college president or chancellor. And we want to talk to them about how they’re navigating the challenge of this moment. We’re in a really unique time, and we want to focus on their leadership and unpack how they’re making decisions, how they’re navigating, and hopefully it will leave you with a sense of optimism, a bit inspired, and give you a bit of hope.
Today is going to be a special episode, because we’re getting a chance to hear from someone who we’ve met before but is in a different place in their career, and we look forward to hearing some reflection and hopefully some more wisdom to inspire you throughout the week.
Doug Lederman:
So joining us is Mark Becker, who is president of Georgia State University for a little over a decade I believe, and last year announced his plans to retire this summer. And we want to have him reflect a little bit on his presidency, and what he’s learned, and what he can share with some other folks. So welcome, Mark. Glad you’re here.
Mark Becker:
It’s a pleasure to be with you. Both you and Bridget and Doug. Thank you.
Bridget Burns:
So we usually start by getting a sense of where you’re at, so how are you holding up right now?
Mark Becker:
I’m doing fine. Actually, the CDC this last week was a big boost to I think all of us. Not only does it change the conditions in the environment in terms of masks, etcetera, but it’s really a boost to the science that these MRNA vaccines work and that we’re getting closer to a world that we’re much more comfortable in.
Bridget Burns:
That’s great. Yeah, I feel like there is a sense of optimism right now. So the question that I want to ask you is, thinking about your career, you’ve been there for quite some time and we’re sad to see you go, but we also know that retirement sounds awesome. So many things about it. I want to understand you as a baby president coming on day one at Georgia State. Now, you’ve been at Michigan, you’ve been in various roles around the country. You come in, you as a leader that day, day one, versus now, where do you see the most change for you as a leader?
Mark Becker:
Well, first off, Bridget, change is evolutionary. So it’s a slow process, so it’s really hard to imagine who I was 12 and a half years ago when I started, but I’d say the thing that is most different now, if you will, is I’ve gotten a much deeper understanding and appreciation for the complexity of these roles and therefore have had to develop considerably more talent, if you will, and skill and experience and being able to navigate a complicated world between politics and life of a campus, of the politics of being in a public institution in a large city in a Southeastern state. So at the end of it, I would just say probably a little less judgmental than I used to be, a lot more circumspect. I’d say I’ve become a more contrarian leader than I was when I started. I’ve always fancied myself as a contrarian leader.
Doug Lederman:
I’m curious. Can presidents be better prepared or another – from what you just said, it sort of sounds like to some extent, it’s just through lived experience, or at least a lot through lived experience, that you can do that kind of growth. Are there things that one can do and that the ecosystem can do to better prepare presidents to walk into jobs like that?
Mark Becker:
Yeah, I think there’s a lot you can do, Doug. Certainly, it does pay to read. Read books as well as Inside Higher Ed and some other higher education publications. In fact, I begin every day by scanning about five different newspapers on both local and globe. So there’s a lot you can do to prepare. There’s also short courses, meaning that in one point in my career I took a [unintelligible 00:04:51] course in Crisis Communications. At another point I took a [unintelligible 00:04:54] course in negotiations. So I think as you travel down the journey, you start to identify where you think you would need to improve and seek education, if you will, which is what we’re all about in those areas. And then of course the experience is where all that reading and those short courses hit the road, the rubber hits the road.
Bridget Burns:
I’m curious about when people reach out to you about the presidency and you're contemplating the advice to give them, because I know that you and I have talked about some folks who perhaps maybe shouldn’t pursue the presidency and some who should, and the guidance and the coaching that you provide. Can you give a bit more about what you say?
Mark Becker:
Certainly. One thing is you have to have courage. These jobs are not for people who think the job is all about the title and the awards and the speeches and the ceremonies. That’s all the fluff that’s around the boundary, but at the end of the day if you want to be a successful president, certainly if you want to be a president who is going to help your institution continue to evolve and adapt in a very changing and challenging world, the 21st century is by no means static in any stretch of the imagination. You have to have the courage of your own convictions, and of course you have to understand the culture of the academy. So you have to be able to have that balance of engaging in shared governance and being a colleague at the same time. You can’t shy away that you are the chief executive of the institution. You have to lead.
Doug Lederman:
Mark, when people scan the higher ed sort of landscape, they tend to identify Georgia State as a place that has evolved, maybe faster than a lot of other places, and I don’t know if you share that point of view, but I’m curious about what the conditions were/have been at the university that sort of allowed that kind of maybe slightly faster-than-normal evolution? There’s a lot of talk about whether higher ed change is enough and fast enough and sort of what the conditions might be that prevent it, incumbency and certain other things. But I’m just curious, when you think back to these 12.5 years, what were the conditions that were there, and what did you tap into to help speed it up?
Mark Becker:
So Doug, I really came to Georgia State with the idea of an experiment. The science and the scientific process, experiments don’t start from nothing. In my career coming up through the ranks, as Bridget alluded to earlier, I’d seen how NYU had come from a relatively unknown private college near Greenwich Village in New York City to a premier institution with a global footprint and a campus in China. Likewise, I remember when Washington, D.C. was a very different place than it is today, and Foggy Bottom was a place that nobody would ever go, if they had a choice, and then to watch George Washington University just blossom and grow. So what I’d seen, at least in the case of those institutions, and Northeastern University in Boston as well, that in an urban environment, in those cases, private institutions had been able to transform themselves as their cities transformed. I asked myself the question in 2008, could the same be done in Atlanta at a public institution? And so that was part of the landscape.
So I think that gave me confidence that it was worth a try, and I think we’ve done pretty well. The other side, I would say, is a condition in the environment is once you get to a certain level of status, there becomes a fear of taking risk. And so there’s one thing to transform something to be something much bigger and better than it’s ever been as opposed to, let’s say for the sake of argument, being at a Top 10, 20 or 30 institution and needing to hold onto that status. So it's a different type of mindset that you have to have when transforming an institution like was done at NYU, Northeastern, George Washington and Georgia State and others as opposed to – Arizona State, same thing, as opposed to going back to my background at Michigan, Minnesota. Risk-taking there has to be viewed differently because there’s so much to lose.
Bridget Burns:
So I’m curious. We heard a bit about what’s been a significant and proud accomplishment for you in terms of the transformation but I’m curious what has been the hardest thing that you’ve had to do as a president?
Mark Becker:
The hardest thing, Bridget, is we’ve had a lot of balls in the air, and you’ve got to balance them all. You’ve got to manage them all, so we’re probably best known – certainly to the viewers and listeners here for our work in the student success space. In fact, when we started, student success wasn’t even used. Those two words were not the words. It was about retention and graduation. So we’ve done a lot, if you will, to shape that space, but at the same time, we’ve nearly tripled our research funding, we’ve built, renovated, bought more than 18 buildings.
We’ve more than doubled our enrollment, including consolidation with Georgia Forever College but we’ve also gone from less than 10,000 applications to, this year we’ll be over 25,000 applications for the freshman year. So the challenge is being able to execute on all those fronts at the same time. We get people that interview for jobs, some deans and vice presidents, and they know one piece, and they look at the other pieces and they sort of – in some sense, they get tired and almost become afraid about working in an environment like this. It is the challenges to keep all those balls in the air and to keep forward progress in all dimensions and not become too fixated on any one thing.
Doug Lederman:
You’ve been very ambitious, as you said, on a bunch of different fronts. Do you think that’s likely to be something that most institutions can pull off? Especially in the areas of constrained resources. I’ve wondered if we’re going to see more institutions sort of narrowing their focus or at least choosing more selectively to really kick into gear on a smaller number of things. How do you think about that?
Mark Becker:
OK. So Doug, I’m going to resonate with your point but disagree with the premise. I became president of Georgia State January 1, 2009. Summer of 2008, Lehman Brothers goes under, the stock market doesn’t hit its low of the financial crisis until about the second or third month of my presidency. I have not one but two eight-digit cuts, meaning more than $10 million cuts, total of $40 million cuts in my first year, and look what we’ve done. So I think there is – the problem is I think in higher ed, there’s way too much negative thinking. There’s way too much of what we can’t do. There’s way too much, "Well, we don’t have the resources" when the reality is we have to be clear about what our goals and our missions are and then align what we’re doing with that.
So that does mean that you’re going to have to stop doing some things you’ve been doing; it means you’ll have to make strategic investments in your future. So I think the biggest challenge to seeing the kind of change that we’ve seen and you’ve seen in some other institutions is a fear. It’s a fear of doing something different, and people are afraid of change, and if there’s anything that characterizes my personality is I’m comfortable with change. I’m comfortable with uncertainty. And I think in higher ed, we’re dealing with a lot of highly accomplished people who like to stay in a world where they feel comfortable. And in order for higher ed to be adaptive and change to achieve the best possible results, people need to get outside their comfort zones and stay more mission-focused and less concerned about what could go wrong.
Bridget Burns:
Now I’ve seen too many times where the armchair quarterback critics think they know better than institutional leaders, and I know that now that you’re about to retire, you might be able to say more than you’ve been able to in the past, but for those who are critics of the institution, critics of leadership, what is the blind spot that you so often see that they are missing when people are trying to infer something behind actions at an institution, or who just kind of go super negative? I’m just trying to leave you an open door.
Mark Becker:
Well, let me start off just clarifying. I’m not retiring. I’m stepping down as president but I’m not leaving higher ed. I’ll still be active for years to come. And hopefully will have opportunity to speak with both of you frequently and openly. But to your question, Bridget, this is why, back in the first question, I said a little less judgmental and a little more contrarian. It amazes me when I see whether it’s a newspaper story or it’s a rumor spreading around campus where I know the truth and the disconnect is so huge. There’s always this concept on the part of the armchair quarterbacks and this concept of the "they." "They" are doing this.
Whether "they" is the administration, whether "they" is the government, whoever "they" may be. And 99 times out of 100, if not 100 times out of 100, the speculators are way off base. What they’re doing is they’re trying to fit a complex world into their mindset and their worldview, and it’s the parable, the blind man and the elephant. You only understand the part that you can touch if you’re a blind man, the story of the elephant. So if you touch the tusk or the trunk or the foot or the tail, you have a very different view of what this creature is that you can’t see. I think that’s part of what we get with the armchair quarterbacks is they’re trying to put a very complicated, very dynamic world into their worldview where they haven’t sat in these seats, where they haven’t seen the political side of the world or they haven’t seen – and when I say political, I mean the campus, the city, the state, the nation, the interplay between different higher education institutions, the competition for resources. So that’s I guess what I would have to say about that.
Bridget Burns:
So I know that you and I have talked about this before, and I just want to frame it appropriately, so what I have noticed that has really stood about for me about your leadership is that you’re one of the only people I’ve seen in higher ed who is the president of an institution that has enabled and actually emboldened someone else at your institution to have a fairly significant profile in the same sector. Most presidents – it’s them and that’s it. So the fact that you have had Tim Renick out there in the public eye as much as you have, I find that interesting, and I’m wondering why that doesn’t happen more and what advice you could give to other presidents to enable that to happen?
Mark Becker:
Well, first I would have to say I think, without question, Tim’s the most sought after speaker in all of American higher education. I don’t think anybody gets more speaking requests than Tim. And deservedly so, but I think from my point of view, not to take an often used phrase, but being a servant leader is about accomplishing the mission of your institution. So in Tim’s case, specifically he was an associate provost when I came here to Georgia State. And over time he grew to being one of the three senior vice presidents in the institution.
So my job is, as always, is to surround myself with the most talented people I can find and empower them to have the maximum impact for the institution. For better or worse, my ego is not fragile. I don’t need to have my name in print or be seen more often than not. In fact, in my first year as president, I remember our VP for communications at that point came in all excited about this local newspaper story in the Atlanta paper that was saying nice things about me. "Haven’t you read?" I said, "No, I don’t read that stuff." She’s like, "Well, why not?" I said, "Because I just have to stay focused on doing the right thing." If I get distracted by what they’re saying about me, whether positive or negative, I’m going to get off track. So I stay focused on what is the mission and delivering on that. And if I can surround myself with not one but five or ten people who become national or internationally prominent for what they do, that’s our success. That’s my success. The success of a leader is not in making yourself the best person. It’s what you do for your institution, your organization.
Doug Lederman:
It’s funny. Bridget, I don’t know if that’s – Mark, you’re the second retiring president that we’ve had in the last three weeks and the consistency of that message about sort of ego and sort of focus – what the job is about and what the president’s role is. You and Mary Marcy are saying a lot of the same things. I’m just curious how – is that something that you just, one exudes or does one try and drive that sort of – do you talk about that, or do you just do it and behave that way?
Mark Becker:
No, we don’t talk. Doug, it goes back to something I said earlier. When you and Bridget asked about people wanting to be presidents, and my mental mindset for this actually got really clarified when I was a provost and I had to hire deans. So in the last 15 plus years, I’ve hired a lot of deans, a lot of vice presidents, and it became very clear to me early on that when I was interviewing people to be deans in the very beginning that there were a lot of people that wanted the title. They wanted to be the dean but they didn’t want to do dean. They didn’t want to actually do the job. They wanted to be up on the pedestal, to have this big title with a pay increase over what they’d get as a faculty member, etcetera. But when it came down to the hard stuff, the really hard stuff like tenure and promotion, terminating people, dealing with the fact that you may have individuals who report up through to you who are bad people. Bullies, abusers, abusers of all types. You have to deal with that. And so that’s where it sort of segregates out as to why are people doing these jobs? And I think the theme that you’re resonating to are people that really want to do the job as opposed as have the title.
Bridget Burns:
So I’m curious about what breadcrumbs you can leave for others as you move to this next chapter. What book do you go back to most consistently that has helped you as a president?
Mark Becker:
Probably my favorite is The Contrarian's Guide to Leadership by the late Steven Sample. As I said at the beginning, I fancy myself as a contrarian leader because wherever the herd is going, it’s probably not the right place, whether you’re an investor in the stock market or whether you’re the leader of an institution. So that one – another one that I’m very fond of, it’s a little bit dated now but The Creation of the Future by Frank Rhodes, written in the 1990s, but there’s still a lot of really salient points in Rhodes’ book, The Creation of the Future. So those are two of what I’ll call oldies but goodies that I’ve relied on over the course of my roughly 20 years from being a dean, provost and president.
Doug Lederman:
And both of those books obviously were written by higher ed leaders. Is the industry, the sector different enough or distinctive enough that higher ed leadership is worthy of a real focus in and of itself?
Mark Becker:
That’s a good question. I’ve read a lot of leadership books, Doug, and a lot of books on organizational change and the like, and I think there’s a lot that transports over. The key is – I have this conversation with search firms all the time now. You’ve got search firms and you want to hire a dean or you want to hire a vice president, and they ask me about the importance of higher education experience. And I said basically leadership is leadership but in higher education, you need to a) understand the culture because every industry has its own culture. Real estate is very different than finance, for example.
And the other part is that you need to understand that we’re a highly regulated environment, and you have to be able to navigate in a regulated environment. So, but if you can demonstrate the ability to work across different types of work cultures and into sector cultures, and you can work in a regulated environment, then leadership is leadership.
Bridget Burns:
What has surprised you the most compared to what you expected about the presidency coming in from the reality?
Mark Becker:
Bridget, I hate to say it, but there’s not a lot that surprised me because I’ve been studying presidents since the mid '90s. I got on the path to becoming a president when I was an associate professor at the University of Michigan serving on a committee that met with then-President James Duderstadt on a monthly basis and participated in a yearlong program that he had focused on that. So from that point of being able to work closely with a president while an associate professor, at least from the point of observing up close and seeing the kinds of issues that President Duderstadt was struggling with, I’ve literally been watching leaders of all types. When I took part of those – I watched leaders of all types, but I’ve also been watching presidents, and I see how presidents blow themselves up, step on landmines, and there’s way too many presidents that don’t make it past the third year. In too many cases, not two years. So I wouldn’t say that I’ve been surprised, but the big mistake I’ve seen that I’ve tried to avoid all throughout my career is watching too often presidents make bad judgment based on personal relationships. And I’ve seen people close to them not willing to believe that it is what it is, and all of a sudden glossing it over only to have them pay a severe price much later, and some of them have been very high profile. And other people may not recognize, but I’ve seen.
Bridget Burns:
OK. I would wrap with what’s the best advice that you’ve ever received professionally that’s served you well?
Mark Becker:
So it was really simple. It was when I was going off to become a dean. I was asking a colleague or expressing to a colleague – we were out for a run, along Huron River near the University of Michigan campus – and expressed my, if you will, my doubts/concern about how I would do as a dean relative to the dean that I worked with, the late Noreen Clark, who was an absolutely incredible leader and had skills that I’ll never be able to match. And my colleague said, “That’s OK, Mark. You don’t have to be her. You have to be you and go off and be true.” So it’s really to the current generation, be authentic and be an authentic leader. Don’t try to become a character you aren't. Be the character you are rather than try and become the character of a title that you have as a model.
Bridget Burns:
That’s the perfect way to end today. So thank you so much for sharing your wisdom and for leading such a distinguished career and leaving higher ed better than you found it. I think the model and the example of Georgia State, it continues to be vitally important to the future of higher ed that we have other campuses be able to do this kind of transformation. So really excited to see what you do next.
Mark Becker:
Thank you. I look forward to seeing you down the road, I’m sure.
Bridget Burns:
All right. Well, thanks, Doug, I’ll see you later and everyone else at home, I’ll see you next week.
Bios of Guest and Co-Hosts
Guest: Mark P. Becker, President, Georgia State University
Since beginning his tenure as Georgia State University’s seventh president in January 2009, Dr. Mark P. Becker's ambitious vision has led the institution to become one of the nation’s premier urban research universities. He was named one of America’s ten most innovative university presidents in 2015 by Washington Monthly, while Georgia State was ranked third most innovative university in the country by U.S. News & World Report in 2020. G.S.U.'s need- and merit-based scholarship funds have tripled under Dr. Becker's leadership. He launched initiatives to hire exemplary senior faculty, create new research centers, and increase G.S.U.'s global role. He previously served as Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs and Provost at the University of South Carolina, and Dean of the School of Public Health and Assistant Vice President of Public Health Preparedness and Emergency Response at the University of Minnesota. From 1989 to 2000, Dr. Becker was a professor in the Department of Biostatistics at the University of Michigan’s School of Public Health, also holding appointments in the Institute for Social Research and the Department of Statistics, and serving as Associate Dean for Academic Affairs. He has held academic appointments at the University of Washington, the University of Florida, and Cornell University. He is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and has been principal investigator on research grants from the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation. Dr. Becker attended Harford (Maryland) Community College, earned his bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Towson State University in 1980 and his doctoral degree in statistics from the Pennsylvania State University in 1985.
Co-Host: Bridget Burns, Executive Director, University Innovation Alliance
Dr. Bridget Burns is the founding Executive Director of the University Innovation Alliance (UIA). For the past decade, she has advised university presidents, system chancellors, and state and federal policy leaders on strategies to expand access to higher education, address costs, and promote completion for students of all backgrounds. The UIA was developed during Bridget’s tenure as an American Council on Education (ACE) Fellowship at Arizona State University. She held multiple roles within the Oregon University System, including serving as Chief of Staff and Senior Policy Advisor, where she won the national award for innovation in higher education government relations. She was a National Associate for the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, and has served on several statewide governing boards including ones governing higher education institutions, financial aid policy, and policy areas impacting children and families.
Co-Host: Doug Lederman, Editor and Co-Founder, Inside Higher Ed
Doug Lederman is editor and co-founder of Inside Higher Ed. With Scott Jaschik, he leads the site's editorial operations, overseeing news content, opinion pieces, career advice, blogs and other features. Doug speaks widely about higher education, including on C-Span and National Public Radio and at meetings and on campuses around the country. His work has appeared in The New York Times and USA Today, among other publications. Doug was managing editor of The Chronicle of Higher Education from 1999 to 2003, after working at The Chronicle since 1986 in a variety of roles. He has won three National Awards for Education Reporting from the Education Writers Association, including one for a 2009 series of Inside Higher Ed articles on college rankings. He began his career as a news clerk at The New York Times. He grew up in Shaker Heights, Ohio, and graduated in 1984 from Princeton University. Doug and his wife, Kate Scharff, live in Bethesda, MD.
About Weekly Wisdom
Weekly Wisdom is an event series that happens live on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. It also becomes a podcast episode. Every week, we join forces with Inside Higher Ed and talk with a sitting college president or chancellor about how they're specifically navigating the challenges of this moment. These conversations will be filled with practicable things you can do right now by unpacking how and why college leaders are making decisions within higher education. Hopefully, these episodes will also leave you with a sense of optimism and a bit of inspiration.
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