Note: This interview in the Weekly Wisdom Series originally aired on July 11, 2022 as part of the University Innovation Alliance’s Innovating Together Podcast, appearing live on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. The transcript of this podcast episode is intended to serve as a guide to the entire conversation, and we encourage you to listen to this podcast episode. You can also access our summary, along with helpful links and audio from this episode.
Paul LeBlanc:
Clay and I met long before he was famous. I used to tell him all the time, "I knew you when no one knew you. So, like, don't get" – but of course, Clay was most modest of people. And we met playing basketball in a church gym in Cambridge, Mass on Saturday mornings when I was still in graduate school at Boston College. So not even my doctoral program at the time. And Clay was the head of a high-tech ceramics firm long before he went to Harvard and went back to graduate school. Interestingly, we were having these very early conversations about the impact of technology, because again, he was in this whole reinventing ceramics and new technologies and I was doing a lot of work with computers, again, at the time. So we started a conversation, and back in the '90s, I was trying to find it and I can get my hands on it, but we did column for one of the higher ed trade publications. It wasn't Inside Higher Ed at the time, Doug, talking about a lot of the things that became part of the conversation much later. Now, rudimentary frameworks of theory around disruptive innovation, how that could happen.
Bridget Burns:
Welcome to Innovating Together, a podcast produced by the University Innovation Alliance. This is a podcast for busy people in higher education who are looking for the best ideas, inspiration, and leaders that will help you improve student success. I'm your host Bridget Burns. Each week I partner with a journalist to have a conversation with a sitting college president, chancellor, system leader, or someone in the broader ecosystem who's really an inspiring leader. And the goal is to have a conversation to distill their perspective and their insights gathered from their leadership journey. Our hope is that this is inspiring and gives you something to look forward to each week. This episode, my co-host is Inside Higher Ed co-founder and CEO, Doug Lederman.
Doug Lederman:
And this week, we're joined by a pretty familiar name in higher education. Paul LeBlanc, who is president of Southern New Hampshire University, had been president of Marlboro College before that, but he's been president of Southern New Hampshire – you're going to hit 20 years pretty soon. Welcome Paul.
Paul LeBlanc:
Hey, it's great to be with you, two of my favorite people in higher ed. It'll be 20 years next summer, Doug.
Bridget Burns:
Wow. I hope you have a big planned party. I just saw Michael Crow had his 20-year just come up, too. And it's like you are rarefied air. The part that I wanted to flag is that most people probably didn't know what were you up to before this. We hear you talk about Southern New Hampshire, we know what fantastic work you're doing, but the fact that you were already a college president, I find super interesting that I didn't know. Just wanted to start there in terms of, I want to know what you were up to before.
Paul LeBlanc:
Yeah, well, I started as a faculty member, but I was a grad student at UMass Amherst when PCs arrived, and the first local area networks, like the first browsers, this would be like your grandfather talking about his first Model-T, but we were using Mosaic as a browser and Lotus was our email of choice and browsing was new. So anyway, I was a writing composition TA at UMass, and Ken Olson, the famous CEO of Digital Equipment Corps, was very late to the idea of personal computers, and they made a run at it, something called the Jack Rainbow. That was their first PC. It was a huge flop. So they dumped all these computers on UMass, because he was on the board at the time. And the full-time faculty said, "Not on your life, we're not touching this stuff." So they said, turned to the most un-empowered people on campus and said, "Hey, you TAs, you got to use this in your writing classes."
And it was my first, like, "What?" No instruction. We were early days of word processing, but I just was blown away by the possibilities. Remember in this local area network being able to remove students' login names and then being able to do some things with that. And I taught a CAP class on gay and lesbian literature and film at the request of some of our gay students. And it was a very different era, I had no business to teaching that course, but they asked me to, and I remember the conversations were so awkward and weird because some kids were out some weren't, straight kids. So I put them in this LAN in this network lab and took away their login names. And all of a sudden the conversation just blew open. People could ask things, kids who had never been able to talk about their sexual orientation were doing so for the first time.
And then I saw the way that the regular face-to-face class got better as well. So I just, like, "Wait a minute. There's something here." So I jumped into technology at a time when it was really still so new, as the first Doctoral student at UMass to have a programming language as one of my two foreign language requirements. And later on, I went back, had this little alumni award. And our now retired department chair said, "Paul, you were the first person to have programming as a language part of the PhD program. And after you left, we thought you will damn well be the last." But anyway, went on to do work in that area. Did three years leave of absence from my first academic job at Springfield College to head up a technology startup at Houghton Mifflin, when all the publishers were rushing to get in because Wall Street Journal in 1992 said they were all dinosaurs and they were going to die in the world of new media.
So they were trying to figure it out, did that for three years. And then after that, I was heading back, because I knew I wanted to be on a campus and was nominated for the presidency of Marlboro College, this quirky little liberal arts college in Southern Vermont. And I thought, "No way, never going to hire me at 37 years old, way too young, no call on such a dial." But I went anyway, because I thought that'd be a great experience. And I was the last interview of the day after two days of interviews. And I had just flown back from Apple. I've been doing this work with Apple as on an ARPA grant. And I thought I know these guys are going to be sugar lows at this point. So I brought fresh-baked cookies out of bakery that was near the interview site. And they later told me, they said, "No, we didn't know if you'd get the job, but we knew you'd be a finalist because you brought cookies that day and we needed them badly." So I accidentally fell into a presidency.
Bridget Burns:
Because of the cookies.
Paul LeBlanc:
And I learned so much at the school. Yeah. And then I did that for seven years and learned a lot. And the beauty of being a president at a really little school is you have to wear all the hats. On my first week, we got notice that our septic system was failing and the state was threatening to close us down. I was like, "What?" So the first million dollars I've ever raised in my life was to replace the septic system. I thought, "I have a scheme. You could give us a million bucks and you could name it after your worst enemy. The so-and-so septic field." That wasn't required, but we did raise the money, and it was an amazing experience. And then was SNHU, almost 20 years ago, as I said.
Doug Lederman:
At two private, independent colleges, neither of them very wealthy, when did you decide how early in your first presidency, and then in the transition to Southern New Hampshire, did you decide that technology was going to need to be more of a factor than it had presumably been in those institutions' lives previously, and what spurred that?
Paul LeBlanc:
Yeah. Well, I had been working in the space, and of course, remember I took that presidency in 1996. So it was the explosion. This was the dotcom boom, and I could sort of see the environment of American higher education saw, can do the demographics – Marlboro was isolated. It was really small. It was struggling financially. Who gets first presidencies? People who go into small, struggling institutions. And I was passionate about technology. So I was able to persuade the board and the faculty and my colleagues to open up a new graduate center. They'd never done graduate education. And by that time, had got to be good friends with Clay Christensen. And so I took it right out of his playbook. Let's do it away from campus. Let's do it 20 minutes away down in Brattleboro. Let's open up something called the Marlboro College Grad Center.
And we did the first full degree program in e-commerce. And we did the first master's of arts in teaching with the Internet. We called it that, "with the internet", which is a funny thought now. And we did low-residency, working online, then once a month coming to Brattleboro. And that really opened our catchment area. And it really became a source of new revenues and strengthened the school and left in a good place. I couldn't get them to do fully virtual degrees. I thought, "This is the next step. We could be market leader in this." That was a bridge too far. They could only push them so far. And that was not a failure of their imagination. That was a failure of my ability to do a convincing narrative that would persuade them to go that far. So that's when we started doing it, Doug. And then of course, when we saw the growth of online learning and we saw the for-profits rush into the vacuum, because most not-for-profits were looking down their nose at it, I thought, "No, we are ceding this important part of serving Americans. How can we do that?" So SNHU was a great place to take that next step.
Bridget Burns:
I think that's just, this whole story is so interesting. And mainly I think I find it so interesting, again, that I did not know any of these things about you that I think a lot of folks, this is going to be the first time they've heard these stories. And I think, especially that story about how technology enabled a level of candor and trust in that class you taught, it's interesting that you're talking about something more than 20 years ago, and yet that is actually still something that we're trying to infuse and we're trying to get the right balance on.
I'm curious about Clayton Christensen. Most folks know that he played a critical role with your board and with advising Southern New Hampshire. But I am curious, I don't know if Southern New Hampshire was a likely candidate to have Clayton Christensen involved. And so I want to know how you met him, what your relationship was like and what you learned from him that might be surprising to folks.
Paul LeBlanc:
Clay and I met long before he was famous. I used to tell him all the time, "I knew you when no one knew you. So, like, don't get" – but of course, Clay was most modest of people, and we met playing basketball in a church gym in Cambridge, Mass on Saturday mornings when I was still in graduate school at Boston College. So not even my doctoral program at the time. And Clay was the head of a high-tech ceramics firm long before he went to Harvard and went back to graduate school. Interestingly, we were having these very early conversations about the impact of technology, because again, he was in this whole reinventing ceramics and new technologies, and I was doing a lot of work with computers, again, at the time. So we started a conversation, and back in the '90s, I was trying to find it and I can get my hands on it, but we did column for one of the higher ed trade publications. It wasn't Inside Higher Ed at the time, Doug, talking about a lot of the things that became part of the conversation much later. Now, rudimentary frameworks of theory around disruptive innovation, how that could happen.
So this was a lifelong conversation. Clay was a dear friend of 40 years, and still missing him. He passed away, as you know, a couple years ago, but he was on our board for nine years and was trustee emeritus. And I often say things that I get credit for really are really just the implementation of his playbook, but SNHU became a favorite case study for him in terms of higher ed and using the theory. And some of it, everyone uses the phrase "disruptive innovation" or "sustaining innovation". But if you go deeper, there's actually very practical things one needs to do, depending on what kind of innovation you're implementing. And you can sort of game plan it in a way that I don't hear people talk enough about, because Clay was very thoughtful about that.
One of the greatest teachers I've ever met, still drove the beat up Honda Accord that he had before he was famous, still lived in the first house in Belmont, Mass that he moved into as a young faculty member. Also you may know that Clay was a member of the Church of Latter Day Saints, he was a Mormon, and I was a huge Boston sports fan. I grew up in the Boston area after we immigrated from Canada when I was a little kid, and Clay knew all – there was a wealth of Mormon athletes in Boston at the time. Bruce Hurst was pitching for the Red Sox, [inaudible 00:11:48] who later on became the general manager, was a player. Greg [inaudible 00:11:53]. So I get to sort of revel in this sort small circle of my heroes, which is great fun. Another thing I loved about Clay, he was very generous in sharing that network.
Doug Lederman:
What's your sense of how neatly his theories applied to higher education and why higher education, I don't know, continues in certain ways to, I don't know. I don't know that it's exempt from it or an outlier from it, but I guess I'm curious how you think that intersects?
Paul LeBlanc:
Clay and I talked a lot about this, so two things I think that probably he would've gotten to with more time in his life and more time with his research, because he was always moving to the interesting questions. A great curious mind and great learner. One was I think Clay underestimated the challenges in a regulated industry. So his ideas of disruptive innovation were really played out in the kind of open-market, for-profit corporate world. But when you look at the changes he was thinking about in healthcare, they actually are playing out largely as he described, though more slowly. And I would say that a lot of what he describes for higher ed – and of course he's been beaten up with this – 50% of all schools will go out of business. But the reality is a lot of that will take slower cuts. Colleges are hard to kill, and they will go on as zombie institutions in some instances, or really flailing and struggling, but they're very hard to, they don't go to business easily.
That may change real soon with the end of HEERF money. And a lot of small colleges I think are struggling, as you know better than me, Doug. So I think he underestimated the impact of a regulated industry, a highly regulated industry. And the second thing I would say, Clay didn't have time to really go as far on the people/culture piece of what it means for these organizations to change. And so if you look at his work, it's amazing. And I think it just sort of changed our society in many ways, at least in the world of business, but it's an area that I think he didn't have enough time to really get to. He did it in a personal way. Probably one of his most widely read books is How Will You Measure Your Life?, which is based on a famous lecture he did. So I think that's what he underestimated in our world, Doug.
Doug Lederman:
That makes sense.
Bridget Burns:
I think that we might be judging this prematurely, but I think that the piece that has been missing in higher ed is we need to model how to close an institution without demoralizing the people who have committed their lives to it. We have a model in the academy for honoring the past, which is emeritus status, and we need to figure out how to gracefully transition an institution to emeritus or program. At every level, we have to learn how to stop doing things. And I feel like that's not a new observation in higher ed, but the piece that we need is modeling how to stop well, and how to do it in a way that doesn't cause harm and acknowledges the past and that will make it so that you'll see far more. But right now we're still in a place where there's almost, like, a dog whistle around the Alma mater status, and you get folks to come back in from the trenches to fight, but they aren't really going to show up for that institution time and time again. So we're kind of, I think in that stage, in that we actually have to figure out how to close and how to shut things down in a way that doesn't devastate people, and then he might be right.
Paul LeBlanc:
Yeah. And the school that I first led, Marlboro College, closed just a couple of years ago and was subsumed under Emerson, and I watched it painfully, and I thought so often about the fact that part of Marlboro's scrappy defy-reality existence for was this sort of dedication to its mission and how it did what it did. But there is a point where that act, that strength that carried you through such difficult times actually becomes your Achilles heel and weaknesses, and I think that's what happened. I think that they just couldn't let go of the model, and honestly, there are folks in those institutions who would rather see it close than evolve. And that's also part of the culture piece that's irrational, but it is part of the equation that I think Clay didn't account for.
I am excited, Bridget. I think so many small schools, when they get acquired, they essentially disappear. They know their name goes on as an Institute or something else, but they disappear. And we are working on a really interesting, innovative model to look at. And it's based on a deep study of platform cooperatives. Could we build the platform that would allow small institutions to leverage economies of scale? So they don't have to build their own tech platform, their own security, their own HR, et cetera. So we are prototyping the first of those very soon, and I'm super excited about it. We're moving through the regulatory process, and it challenges them because it's not full autonomy, but nor is it acquisition. So it sits on a new middle ground we're trying to forge.
Bridget Burns:
That's cool. I mean, I do think there are a lot more examples that only just now have happened, that we're going to see greater proliferation. So for instance, thinking about what happened in Pennsylvania, no one thought was actually possible. There are examples of things that felt like they were intractable and that was going to be a hill to die on. And yet there are little examples, little points of light. And I think you're going to see more examination of those things, and it's only going to spread now that it's been proven that what was supposed to not be done or be impossible has actually happened. Anyway, tell me more about people who are for closing.
Doug Lederman:
Well, and actually, that's the thing we're going to be publishing our survey of business officers on Wednesday, and lots of a real lack of interest in merger for a lot of the reasons you just cited, Paul, but basically half of business officers' open to the idea of sharing administrative functions, and that's, that's model, but yet still a lack of models to really do it well. So I think you'll be hearing about that point.
Paul LeBlanc:
I think, Doug, those have looked like buying consortium and that kind of thing. This has to be much deeper than that. You have to get out of your structural operating deficits, which means you may not be as big in some ways, from a staffing perspective; you may get services somewhere else, but you can continue to serve as many if not more students, and survive as an institution button.
Bridget Burns:
That was super interesting, I want to know if you learned more about leadership from good examples or bad examples, and I would love for you to talk to me about some of those things you've learned from either.
Paul LeBlanc:
In our own lives, I tend to think we learn more when we stumble and fall than when we're heading easy home runs. So that would be true in my own life. It's obviously less painful when you can observe it in someone else's struggle. That sounds terrible. But I remember being a faculty member at Springfield College, and I write about it in a new book that's coming out this fall, but I watched the president there, who I liked as a human being, he was a good guy and he was trying to do good work, but he couldn't acknowledge when he was making mistakes. And I remember a faculty meeting, I was the president of the faculty senate. So we were talking about a no confidence vote, when no confidence votes were even more powerful than they are today, perhaps. And he got in front of everybody, I had this one thought, if you only could say to people in this moment, "Hey, I'm sorry. I understand now how I messed this up. I will work with you to fix it." He could've saved his presidency in that moment, and he would've come across a human being who we all struggle and follow, but he didn't. And I remember saying to myself, "When I mess up, I'm going to get in front of people and say so. I don't care what the situation is." I've had to do it more than I'd like to think.
So, yeah, I think there are great lessons to be learned by watching people's leadership journeys. And sometimes you learn more from when they struggled, and that's been true in my own life, in my own leadership here as well. In fact, it was only three years ago that we hired somebody from the outside and needed somebody to come in and take a look at an acquisition we had done. And I wanted just an objective finger-in-the-water sense of the temperature of that, "How's it going? I'm hearing from people involved in it, but can you just give me a sense of how it's going?" And this guy came in, and he did a remarkably good job. He spent weeks interviewing everybody involved and documenting things. "I'm ready to talk about it, but", he said, "can I get on your calendar? I need 90 minutes. It's out of scope. It's pro bono, do with it when you will, but I need 90 minutes of your time." I said, "Sure, absolutely."
So he came in and he said all kinds of nice things about my leadership impact on the people and what they would do for me, kind went through walls. And then he said, "But you're not creating leaders here. You're failing your people. You're failing your team." And I was like, "What do you mean?" And he said, "I've been swimming in SNHU's waters now for weeks. And the number of times I asked somebody about something and they say either, "Well, it's what Paul wanted," or "What does Paul want?" Or what "Paul said X." He said, "I know in some of those cases, they disagree with you. And I asked, what do you do?" "Well, no, Paul wants to do this thing." And he said, "They have enormous trust in you. And you have track record here, and they love the mission of what you're doing. So they will simply acquiesce, but it's not good leadership. And sometimes you are wrong, from what I can tell."
I was devastated. I grew up Catholic. I'm a bit of a lapsed Catholic mutt, religiously speaking. But I remember I said to my wife just a week before that meeting, I was like, "Hey I've been doing this a long time. I think I got it." Sorry. I know that that sounds terribly immodest. "I think I've got it. These things come around the track, I've run this lap before, I know what this is." And she said, "Are you kidding? You never say that. Don't say that. You know what happens, pride goes before the fall." And sure enough, a week later I had this conversation, it just devastated me. And I said, in that meeting with him, I said, "You know what? I need you to tear up your contract expand the scope of work. And you need to interview everybody who works for me." And then I wanted to go solo in a room. "I don't want a preview, just lay it out."
And he did. And we had the toughest meeting, and he came at me pretty hard in that meeting, described me in very concrete ways. Saying things that I just told you about in broad strokes. I could see some people thought, "Mmm, about time [inaudible 00:22:08]. This is good. I like this." And then he turned around and he said, "And there's no courage in this room." There's one exception, my COO's been with me 17 years, she will say hard things to me. And then he used examples, and midway through them, shrinking, shrinking, shrinking, shirking, shirking. And some of you guys have been around long enough to have been in hard meetings, and then you kind of work through it. And then at the end you have a "Whew, that was bruising," but we didn't have that ending. We walked out of that room feeling pretty bruised and beat up. And what the hell does this mean? What does it mean for us as a team? What does it mean for us as leaders et cetera, et cetera?
And then we gathered three weeks later and spent two days really working through at a grand old hotel on the coast of New Hampshire, which doesn't have much coast, but it's called the Wentworth, Wentworth by the Sea. And we call it the Wentworth Accords. And these are our commitments to each other. Most days, we pretty much stick to them. We backslide sometimes because we're human beings. And sometimes we even weaponize it. When someone says, "I don't want to invoke the Wentworth Accords here", you're like, "OK, here we go. Go ahead, we're about to get it." But by and large, we don't do that, and I think it's really that we're in a much, much better place. But I had to really think hard about my leadership and how I lead at this stage of my career. And it was important. Oftentimes you learn the most when you've been knocked to the floor, and what you with do with that.
Bridget Burns:
That's true and super important to talk about. Because I think that topic, that precise point about how leaders cultivate and support people who say no is really difficult. Often when I go to institutions and I'm observing, I'm always looking for who the people are that have earned the right and respectfully use the ability to say no to the president. And oftentimes some of the biggest and most celebrated institutions, I know of three people. So it is very difficult to do that. But it's this issue about creating candor around you and a safe environment, but yet also still leading and still being directive. And that's a needle to thread.
Paul LeBlanc:
Yeah. And I think it's interesting, Bridget, you said you've got to earn the right, but in reality, everyone should start with the right. You may lose the right, but you should – it actually, I think, was incumbent on me to make sure that I was letting them exercise that right. So not to be impatient, to not if someone says to me, "What do you think we should do about X?" My longstanding tradition was to answer the question. As my wife says, "Often wrong, but never in doubt." Ask me a question, I'll sort of give you an answer. And I had to learn to say, "Wait a minute, you know more about this than me. You've been studying it. What do you think you want to do?"
And then learning to bite my tongue when it's 10%, 50%, or 20% different than the way I'd like to go. I can ask questions that can be helpful, but not directives pretending to be questions, like genuine questions, and see if they get there. And I think it's still hard some days, because I'm opinionated and I am passionate about some things, but letting people make their own mistakes and letting people try things out and, God, if they're not better than me in their areas, then I'm not hiring very well. They should all be smarter than me. If I'm smarter than our head of HR, we're in real trouble. If I'm smarter than our head of IT, I'm in real trouble. So it's really trying to learn that dance and make them a real team. Look, at the end of the day, when my time to step down comes, if this place is not functioning with real leadership across the board, then I've failed. You don't need cults of personality. You need organizations that are well led across the board. And I mean up and down, because we tend to think of us as a lot as my team.
Can I give you one example where we're trying a different leadership practice? After the murder of George Floyd, we set aside with the trustees how to support $5 million on social justice fund that had three questions we wanted to address. What do our people need in this moment, this very hard moment? So almost in the moment, what things can we do differently? Secondly is longer-term question: what does it mean to be an employee of color at SNHU, how do we make it better? And the third question was, what does it mean to be a student of color at SNHU, what can we do better? So we dedicated, and in our old practice, I would've brought in our head of DEI and maybe an outside consultant. And my team would've got together. We would've said we didn't put out a memo saying, "Here's what we're doing with the money." And we would've been applauded. People internally loved the fact that we were doing this and felt like we were being proactive. We addressing hard questions, et cetera, et cetera, we would've been applauded. And then they would've watched to see how it all went.
We changed our practice and said, "We're use a new tool that is not common to us," which is like, we're going to do three communities of practice around each of these questions. We're going to put 20 people on each, because the research tells us that's about the optimal side. We're going to train people to facilitate them, because that's a certain kind of skill and art. And then the way you get on is not by your title or your place in the organization or where you sit in the hierarchy; you go on on the basis of two questions. Then you have credibility among your peers. Doesn't matter where you sit. But if people say, "Oh yeah, Doug has cared about this forever." And then track record. It's one thing to talk about it. But have you done anything? Have you been engaged in the work? So we had three communities of practice that were, like, you couldn't tell from an org chart how did someone get on here? Didn't matter. And it was messy and it took longer for them to come up with recommendations, but they did better work than if we had reverted to our old top-down command and control hierarchical, higher-ed leadership thing. And what was different? They owned work.
And then there were multiple side benefits. They talked about how they were meeting people that they didn't know from the organization, they were forging new relationships. It was a way of being in the work that was different to them. And it just had to spill over positive. We were trying to figure out more of those tools, more of those ways of working because higher ed, our institutions, even though they're egalitarian and we have things like shared governance, they're very hierarchal. They're very siloed. They're very command-and-control in some ways. And I just don't think that works very well in the world in which we find ourselves today, which is changing so fast. The certainty of leaders is really suspect in my mind right now.
Bridget Burns:
I agree. Well, I do want to wrap on our two rapid-fires real quick. Number one, best advice you've ever received that has helped you in your career?
Paul LeBlanc:
Say yes. I mean, say, "Yes." Say yes, say yes to opportunities. Say yes to the invitation. Say yes. In my career, in my life.
Bridget Burns:
Who gave that advice to you?
Paul LeBlanc:
I'll try to shorten this really quickly. I took a semester off from college, almost broke my mother's heart. I was delivering heavy appliances. Everyone was had two guys on each truck. I was the driver because I'm pretty sure my partner, Jerry, had a DUI, probably multiples. So I had to pick Jerry up every day. Now, wife was going off to the west coast, 3000 miles away, and broke up with me on a phone call. We had a wonderful romantic summer. Now she's away, like, "This is impossible, law school's stressing me out." Now I picked up Jerry, I was going to drop him off at work. He said, "Wow, what are you doing?" I said, "Well, Pat broke up with me last night." "Yeah?" I said, "I'm going to go find some place to get drunk." So he goes, "Oh hell, I'll go with you." So we didn't go to work. We found a Chinese restaurant that would serve us at eight o'clock in the morning. And at the end of this, I was having an argument that only drunk men have, which is, "She would never break up with me if we had been face-to-face." Like, oh yeah. He was like, "You should go out." I was like, "You know what? I will." So I got on a bus, pre cell phone days, pre ATM. And I got on a bus, and four days later, get off to campus and University of Oregon at the law school, found my wife, a longer version of this. And we've been together since. Sometimes you just say yes to the invitation.
Bridget Burns:
Did not think that that anecdote was going to lead to that. So that's great. Lastly, a book that you recommend about leadership or that consistently you find yourself recommending time and time again?
Paul LeBlanc:
That's funny, because I don't tend to read a lot of higher ed books. I read a lot of other books. And I think I keep coming back to novels. I keep coming back to fiction. I keep coming back to try to understand who we are as human beings in other ways. So the one that I'm reading right now is George Saunders' wonderful book. I think it's called Swimming in a Pool in the Rain, which is based on a class he teaches at Syracuse deconstructing five Russian short stories. And it's really about our humanity. And I think I'm old enough and at a place in my career that I used to think it was all about our skills. And I actually think it's about our relational power now. And I was just talking about this with a group of young leaders we just hired, I was like, "No." My old tendency was to start every meeting with the agenda. My tendency today is like, "How are you doing? How are you in this moment today?" I think that's partly a reflection of the world we find ourselves in. I think it's the effects of the pandemic, but if I can, again, just very quick with a short story.
A friend of mine from New Jersey went to work for a provost down in Texas at a very close end of her career, and my New Jersey friend, who was full of, "I'm going to take this place on," in the first meeting, she was the associate provost, had the agenda in front of her, and she's, "Alright, everybody. Great to see you this morning. Let's jump in", and this provost kind of tapped her on the arm and said, "Honey. Hold on for a second. Doug, how's your mama? I know she was a little sick, she feeling any better?" And Doug said, "Well, she's kind of seeing a doctor." So, "Bridget, how's your little girl? You little girl's going to that championship. How'd she do, Bridget?"
And she went around the room, and everyone got ground, and everyone was reminded that they have lives of rich human beings outside of work. And then she tapped my friend and said, "Honey, now we can to go to work." And my friend relates the story of taking that extra beat. So I think that – sorry, I wandered from your question, but I read constantly and I read voraciously. So if you read High Fidelity, I'm like the guy who gets asked about, which is your favorite album and he says he can't answer that question. But George Saunders, because that's the book I'm knee-deep in right now.
Doug Lederman:
I was just going to note for Paul that you and Freeman Hrabowski was on the show six, eight months ago, maybe. And you and he gave the exact, not the same book, but basically the focus on fiction, which I think says something, both leaders who think about people as human beings. And he basically said the same thing about what we really need to be focusing on is how people interact. So anyway, I thought that was interesting.
Paul LeBlanc:
Yeah. And I think now, as an English major, books teach life values and habits of people a lot unlike yourself. So I love Tommy Orange, for example, and trying to understand what it means to be Native American in this country. I can't get there, but he can help me understand. I think there's just so many good examples of that.
Bridget Burns:
This has been wonderful. Yeah. Someone also on LinkedIn just commented that we heard about the Charlotte's Web being recommended from Nova's president, too. So yes, this concept of fiction as a teacher around leadership in particular, I think, is very important. Thank you so much, President LeBlanc. It's been a delight to get to know this totally other side of you. And I hope that others have been, their idea of you has expanded as well. And Doug as always, thanks for being a great co-host, and folks at home, we hope this has been inspiring, and we will see you soon.
Paul LeBlanc:
Thank you both. Thank you so much.
Bios of Guest and Co-Hosts
Guest: Paul LeBlanc, President, Southern New Hampshire University
Dr. Paul J. LeBlanc became President of Southern New Hampshire University (SNHU) in 2003. Since then, SNHU's enrollment has grown from 2,800 to over 150,000. As the largest nonprofit provider of online higher education in the country it was the only university included on Fast Company’s “World’s Fifty Most Innovative Companies” list. Among Dr. LeBlanc's numerous awards, Forbes has listed him as one of its 15 “Classroom Revolutionaries” and one of the “most influential people in higher education,” and in 2018, he won the TIAA Institute Hesburgh Award for Leadership Excellence in Higher Education. He served as Senior Policy Advisor to Under Secretary Ted Mitchell at the U.S. Department of Education, working on competency-based education, new accreditation pathways, and innovation. He serves on the National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity (NACIQI); the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine’s Board on Higher Education and Workforce; the American Council on Education (ACE) Board; and the Association of Governing Boards (AGB) Council of Presidents. Paul immigrated to the United States as a child, was the first in his extended family to attend college, and is a graduate of Framingham State University (BA), Boston College (MA), and the University of Massachusetts (PhD). From 1993 to 1996 he directed a technology start-up for Houghton Mifflin Publishing Company, was President of Marlboro College (VT) from 1996 to 2003. His wife Patricia is an attorney, and they have two daughters, Emma and Hannah.
Co-Host: Bridget Burns, CEO, University Innovation Alliance
Dr. Bridget Burns is the founder and CEO 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 (A.C.E.) 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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