How Faculty Diversity Drives Enrollment: The PhD Project’s 90% Success Model:

Changing Higher Ed Podcast 236 with host Dr. Drumm McNaughton and Guests Dr. Jeffrey Robinson and Blane Ruschak

Transcript: Changing Higher Ed Podcast 236

Introduction and Guest Welcome

Dr. Drumm McNaughton: Thank you, David. My guests today are Dr. Jeffrey Robinson and Blane Ruschak of the PhD Project. From their website, for nearly 30 years, the PhD Project has helped change the future workforce by promoting historically under representative students, a model of achievement, and businesses a powerful way to enrich the talent pipeline. Over the course of its lifetime, PhD Project has graduated over 1,700 PhDs. But that isn’t all they do. They provide mentoring and building a community of support for underrepresented students and graduates.

Two of their principles. Dr. Robinson, who’s a graduate of the PhD project 27 years ago, and Blane Ruschak, the PhD project president and a consultant with KPMG, who, by the way, is one of the project sponsors. Join me today to talk about the project, what it means, and why it’s important for higher ed presidents to embrace and use.

Jeffrey Blane, welcome to the show.

Dr. Jeffrey Robinson: Thanks for having us.

Dr. Drumm McNaughton: My pleasure. I am so looking forward to our conversation. You guys have done some amazing stuff with the PhD project. I want to hear all about it. I want to hear, the benefits that you’ve had and everything else. But before we get started, I want to hear about you guys. If you’d give us a little bit of background, that’d be great.

Background of Dr. Jeffrey Robinson

Dr. Drumm McNaughton: Jeffrey.

Dr. Jeffrey Robinson: All right, I guess I’ll go first. your PhD project is, something near and dear to my heart because it is the reason that I became a business school professor. If you got to go back in the way back machine to, 1997 in my case, in 1997, I was, searching for, what I was going to do next in my life and career.

And I was already a, a project engineer working for a big pharmaceutical company. And I was looking at law degrees and looking at options for advanced degrees and doctorates. And I got a chance to go to this conference. Called the PhD project. And it, the conference was held in Chicago in November of 1997.

I, I’ll never forget it because it really changes the trajectory of my life and make a long story short. I found that about the conference, from my dad, who saw the information advertised in a, one of the trade magazines and said, maybe, this is something for you.

And I’ll, I always give him credit because boy, was he right? In the conference. They told us about, their desire to change, the front of the classroom in business schools, essentially, the idea that we could diversify who the professors were teaching business. And they made a pitch to all of us who were in the room about 300 at that time, maybe more.

And I bought it. I really was searching for my next part of my career path, what I wanted to do next and what they described fitting me to a T. You become an expert, you get a platform, you get to teach, you get to, engage people and issues. And, that was the beginning of a journey for me.

 Less than nine months later, not only did I apply, but I was accepted to. Columbia business school. I went as a first year PhD student in September of 1998. And, the rest of history. So that’s the beginning of the story. The other parts of the story, which I think are relevant to what we’re going to talk about here today, completed the doctorate at Columbia, became a professor at NYU.

Stayed there for five years, shifted over to actually coming back to my alma mater, Rutgers University, at the Rutgers School of Business, Rutgers Business School, and ended up as someone who not only did their research and study and looked at, issues relevant to the community, but over a 17 year career, really embraced the fact that business schools can make a difference in the lives of others.

I’m currently, in higher ed administration as the interim chancellor over at Rutgers University, Newark, but I really think it’s the beginning part of that story that, is relevant to what we’re going to talk today. How do you make a difference in a complete, a profession?

And the PhD project is a real good example of that. Okay.

Dr. Drumm McNaughton: That’s a fascinating background. Thank you, Jeffrey.

Background of Blane Ruschak

Dr. Drumm McNaughton: Blane.

Blane Ruschak: Well, Jeffrey gave a great lead in saying about changing the profession. So I was part of the profession. I am part of the profession. I’ve been with KPMG my entire career and right around 1994, I transitioned from being an auditor To taking over campus recruiting for KPMG. And one of my jobs was to increase our diversity hiring.

And that was right around the time when the PhD project was starting and Bernie Milano, who’s one of the kind of founders of the project, said, you, you really need to get involved with the PhD project. This is what’s going to help you create more diversity at business schools. And as a recruiter, I learned.

Very quickly, that there was truly a lack of diversity, especially in the accounting arena. Back then the big four firms were all hiring almost all accounting students. And if you went to a recruiting event at any major school across the U. S., You could literally count on one hand the number of diverse students in that room.

And so right when the PhD project was starting, I got involved mostly on the accounting side. They’ve, six disciplines, but I was involved with the accounting side and I got to see firsthand What a difference it made when there were faculty of color the classrooms at the universities. And as a recruiter, we leveraged that.

We were able to connect with these amazing professors and learn where the talent was and where the students were from and how we can connect. And slowly but surely we saw that increase in diversity, first in the accounting pipeline, on the PhD project and Basically expanded to include economics and finance and information systems and management and marketing.

And so five years ago, I was asked to consider, taking over as leader of the PhD project, when Bernie Milano was retiring and I thought about it and said, what a amazing way to continue my career. I’d always been involved in higher ed from the recruiting side, where I was the, demand side. I was the taker.

And now I was asked to become part of the supply side. And I had no idea how much harder supply side is. And I got involved and it’s been an amazing, five years working with people like Jeffrey and other, academics that, Have not only been the role models in the classroom, but the administrative leaders moving into leadership roles and making a difference, not only at their universities, but in their communities, and helping truly, meet our mission, which was to create more diversity in business world through diversifying the front of the classroom.

And so it’s been an amazing journey and success for 30 years, celebrating our 30 year anniversary this year.

Dr. Drumm McNaughton: Wow, 30 years. That’s amazing. And thank you for that background.

Overview of the PhD Project

Dr. Drumm McNaughton: Both of you gentlemen, let’s get into the PhD project. So people understand it. I don’t know how many people I’d never heard of it before until y’all reached out to me about the podcast 30 years. Tell me a little bit about the PhD project, what it’s supposed to do, what it has done, because you’ve had some incredible success with it.

Blane Ruschak: I’ll share a little bit about the process, but Jeffrey can speak to the actual experience because he lived it and continues to live it to this day. So that the process was, Jeffrey mentioned that annual conference and that’s the kind of the beginning. We invite, students from across the country, that are, black, Hispanic, Native American to attend this conference on our dime.

to learn about what a business PhD is. There’s a lot of misconceptions about, getting a business PhD. Things like, Oh, I need to have a master’s degree to get into a PhD program, or that it’s going to cost me a fortune. I already have student debt. So we bring them there and they learn from senior and junior faculty, what a business PhD is all about.

And then they decide at the end of the conference, either I want to do what Jeffrey did, which was apply right away. Overachiever, of course, or think about it, and then some decide right then and there it’s not for them, right? Because it is a four to six year commitment, depending on the discipline.

Once they get enrolled in a program, then we are able to, invite them in to become a member of the PhD project. From that point on, we help them network through the program, finish their PhD, 97 percent completion rate. I’m sorry, 90 percent completion rate, 97 percent stay in academia, which is our goal, get them in front of the classroom.

And it doesn’t stop there. We then continue with, developmental programs to help them become better teachers, better researchers, better leaders. And so we hope that it’s a full life cycle. All the way through their career. But Jeffrey, maybe you can share the experience itself.

Dr. Drumm McNaughton: Yeah.

The Importance of Diversity in Academia

Dr. Drumm McNaughton: Before we get into that, I want to understand better why the PhD program was established. We’re seeing so much in society right now about diversity and, the negative connotations, the positive connotations. Why was the PhD program established and what are the benefits of it?

And then Jeffrey, we can get to your experience, please. Thanks. It’s

Blane Ruschak: And I’ll share. Yeah, the world was becoming global. The world was becoming a diverse environment and our clients. I’m speaking from, when I was on the audit side, we’re starting to demand that if we were going to be their service provider, their auditors, their tax advisors, their consultants, they wanted to see a diverse slate of professionals that looked like the client.

And as I said, going to recruit on campus, we weren’t seeing that diversity. And what was happening was firms would just basically pay money for a program to take it. Some people away from another firm. It was pretty much a zero win game, zero balance game. And I think KPMG and three other visionaries, got together and said, we can’t, we have to do incremental change.

We have to do systemic change that’s going to create incremental, numbers in the diverse population going to business. And so the hypothesis that Jeffrey mentioned was, If you change the face of the classroom, that will attract more diverse students to the classroom to become more , business consultants.

And I’ll just speak to the, the American Accounting Association does analysis every year, a supply and demand survey. And we have seen a huge increase in the Latino and the black professional population over the years. Which we will say, it’s attributable a lot to the PhD project providing these mentors in the classroom.

Dr. Drumm McNaughton: So let me understand this correctly. You had some pretty, pretty high profile partners. A-A-C-S-B was with you, gmac, the folks who put together the GMAT and Citibank, they were all part of the drivers. They wanted to see. More people

for how do i say this your clients were demanding more diverse accountants and so they felt like it was important to have people of color up in the front of the class to be able to have people they could relate to as a professor i mean i’m muddling my words very badly but i think that’s the general gist isn’t it.

Blane Ruschak: Jeffrey, I’m going to let you respond to that because I think you definitely are an amazing role model and can speak to that.

Dr. Jeffrey Robinson: So yeah, I think you got the basic elements, correct. I think what’s powerful about what was done, 30 odd years ago, is that folks were thinking about how to be innovative in achieving a goal in this case to, recognizing that the global nature of business, changing demographics in the United States, how do you make a difference, in what businesses were experiencing?

The traditional approach has been we’ll just recruit more people. More people of color, more diverse hires. We’ll get people who are coming from all kinds of backgrounds and we’ll bring them into our company. But what was done, back, in, the early 1990s, was innovative because they didn’t just think about that first order effect, because frankly, that wasn’t working as well as they thought it could.

They said, let’s think about the second order effect. Let’s think about the source of where our new employees are coming from. Let’s think about these business schools and what could be done there at the business schools that would make a difference for, our companies and others, and that’s what made this.

This theory of change, very powerful. And so having the role models in the front of the classroom, having the connections, to, to a diverse group of professors across these various disciplines that are in the business school, what was not only, a creative and innovative solution, but it actually works.

It actually works. And then we got 30 years of evidence to show that it works. And business schools have bought into it and the corporate world has bought into it. And then there are certainly a group of us who have gone through the journey, from, changing careers, pivoting to an academic career.

And, and then, seeing the benefits to, the field and also to the students that we have in our classrooms,

Dr. Drumm McNaughton: this wasn’t done because people wanted to be equitable and fair and things along those lines. There was an economic driver behind all this, wasn’t there?

Dr. Jeffrey Robinson: well, in some ways there was, I, again, I know there’s a lot of talk about, what people might think of as, the negatives or downside of quote unquote diversity as they’re talking about it, but there is an economic imperative for every company think about having a diverse workforce.

Even if they don’t want to just think about it in social justice terms, they got to think about an economic imperative. And what, Blane talked about, is interesting. You got, accounting firms their clients are all kinds of different companies in all kinds of places here in the United States and globally, with all kinds of, different products and services that they sell. If you only rely upon, one group of people to be accountants, and at that time it was a lot of white guys who were in accounting, and you didn’t have a lot of women, and you didn’t have a lot of African Americans or Latinx or Native American folks, then you’re limiting the potential of your accounting firm to relate to all those various types of clients.

That’s just, and that’s just one area. Think about the management consultants, think about marketers, thinking about the folks in finance and econ. And so the, again, the back to the economic imperative, having this diverse, workforce, is good business sense. So how do you achieve that?

And again, at the time, and certainly even since then, the companies were very keen on the direct approach we’ll open the aperture and find people from different schools. We had a set of schools we’ve been going to, so we’ll go to some other schools. We’ll loosen up, which majors we’ll accept in.

, we’ll support some students, who are in the pipeline. We’ll figure these things out. And even with all of that, they still, they were shortcomings. Sometimes it was the process they were using to get people in. Sometimes it was, they just went back to old practices. So how do we increase the numbers? And again, the unique value proposition, the PhD project has put, together over time, has paid off because, it’s not just having a diverse professor in the front of the classroom. That person brings different lived experiences.

That person has different connections. That person, has, the corporate partners and corporate affiliates that they work with or do the type of research they do is different than their colleagues. Yet that has not only value in the classroom, but students connect with it differently, and that makes a difference.

 Now, these days, as a, as a chancellor of a university, I’m thinking retention, I’m thinking, how do I attract students, find those first generation students who are trying to, go to college and never don’t have that family history of it. How do I get them to come in the door and stay there and then graduate?

And part of that story, for the business school has been influenced by the work of the PhD project, because they took on one of the biggest challenges. , how do we change, the professors, the group, the pool of professors who are teaching, the, the new talent, the, the new, folks who were entering the workforce and that has made all the difference.

Personal Experiences and Mentorship

Dr. Drumm McNaughton: I remember years ago. When I was starting through my PhD program, and this was right about the same time that you started yours, Jeffrey, in the late nineties, you’re a lot, you look a lot younger than I do, but that’s besides the point. You started yours in your early teens, right? Was it late teens?

Dr. Jeffrey Robinson: Not quite.

Dr. Drumm McNaughton: Yeah, but I remember getting in there and just feeling overwhelmed with everything that was going on until I went to, and in my university, which was a fielding graduate university, there in Santa Barbara, they open up the defense. We call it final oral

Dr. Jeffrey Robinson: Yeah,

Dr. Drumm McNaughton: and sitting in on one of those and thinking to myself, I can do this. That is the same kind of thing when someone, a student of color walks into a classroom and sees a professor of color up in the front. And it’s it’s not out of reach for me anymore. I could do

Dr. Jeffrey Robinson: that’s right. That’s exactly right. If I can see it, I can be it. It’s a, it happens all the time. And frankly, that, that’s one of the gaps, right? I didn’t have any professors in my family. I didn’t have, in fact, I was the first in my immediate family to go to college. These were all new experiences to me.

It’s interesting if most of the folks who go in an academic group have, or not first generation and often have other family members who have been, professors that, and that’s certainly not my case, so to your point, there is. a mentorship component to it.

There’s an exposure component to it. And frankly, that’s where the PhD project has been. It’s most effective and most powerful is it where these have been very informal things in the past for others. They created formal pathways from the folks who are interested in, in this career and potentially changing careers to go this path all the way through completion and beyond.

The Power of Networking and Community

Dr. Drumm McNaughton: Building up this network like you do this mentorship, this network, you’ve built a community around this, which is, I would assume very supportive.

Blane Ruschak: Powerful, I think would be the word. Very powerful. I think that’s why the completion rate is so high. Getting a business PhD is hard work and Oftentimes, someone is ready to quit and then faculty, senior faculty get involved and get them through that obstacle. And all of a sudden they, graduate and become faculty and then bring the next person up behind them.

So it’s an amazing network that is supportive. I’ll also share that part of the model, I think was successful is we aim to attract people. That have some professional experience and so when they get into the classroom, they are bringing their real life professional experience plus their research and academic, so students do truly see themselves as an investment banker or as somebody in finance or, working for a big four firm, , because they heard it from their faculty member, and oftentimes my faculty wind up being mentors, Long after that student does graduate, they have students that keep in contact.

And I will say that the network and the camaraderie and the support that the groups show for each other, and they do connect with their cohort group. They’ll always, they remember what year they went to the conference and they remember their graduating group when they got capped together. We do a big capping ceremony, at our, annual conferences.

So there are. Milestone memorable moments that, I’ll say almost brings tears to your eyes when you see the camaraderie, the cheering, the tears of joy.

Dr. Drumm McNaughton: That sounds just amazing. It reminds me of my time at the Naval Academy. You always remember your classmates, , your roommate from Plebe Summer. Your freshman summer, which nobody. Nobody ever wants to go through plebe summer, but it’s something that’s required. And, yeah, I still remember my roommate’s name.

Remember from Pueblo, Colorado. I won’t mention his name for privacy reasons, but he was from Pueblo, Colorado. I’ve still got a photo of him, he and his mom and my dad and me at parents weekend. And I looked back and said, who is that young kid? Why is he still got hair?

Dr. Jeffrey Robinson: It’s interesting the way you talked about that. Those relationships matter. And in, in academic terms, those relationships really matter. It’s the people you went through the program with. It’s the professors who taught you, the content that you’re supposed to learn.

It’s the faculty who advise you on your dissertation. It’s the folks, and this is one of the other great things about the PhD project. It’s not just the folks at your school. So you’re meeting people from across the country who are at this, they all came in the same time as you and you’re progressing through as a cohort, and you are connected to them because you have all gone through the same process.

We all had, you had to get in, you had to get the coursework. You had to, do some kind of qualifying exam. You had to, write a dissertation proposal. You had to do that dissertation, and then you had to, present it. And that dissertation defense, is monumental. The parallel to what you just described, with your Naval Academy, experience, is the similarity.

We, we go through this process. And since we, we have this commonality, we can all relate to one another, ultimately we all enter the field, together. And we get to see each other at conferences and through our work. And at the universities and colleges that we’re teaching at that’s a, that’s a complete process that has this powerful, mentorship component, which in turn, has this wonderful effect on colleges and universities.

And, for those listening who are representing their institutions, you’re missing out if you’re not tapping into resources like the PhD project that are promoting, engaging, and, and supporting your future faculty of color. Or faculty of color who are in your area that to me, it’s a no brainer.

We all say we, we value having a variety of people on our campuses and we want to have faculty who are doing interesting and award winning work, who represent not only your students and your communities, look like America. And then you say, Oh I can’t find again, we’re talking about business school right now.

If you’re looking for it in the business school and you haven’t tapped into the resources of the PhD project, you’re making a mistake.

Dr. Drumm McNaughton: Yeah, I would certainly say that one of the things that I think is really neat is you’re bringing people together from across the country as part of your conferences. One of the things that as a new academic, you’re getting on that, tenure track, teaching, research, service, all of those things. How do you find out, this is a rhetorical question, how do you find people with similar interests? As a new faculty member, you may not have those. Guess what? The PhD project, you’ve already built a lot of those relationships. So when it comes to doing research, you can hit the ground running.

Dr. Jeffrey Robinson: Absolutely when you say that, you don’t get those kind of connections, right away as a new faculty member. The PhD project had built into the research roundtables where we would sit and talk about our research with other people. It was good practice, but it was also, announcing, Hey, I’m working on this.

What are you working on? Can you get that from conferences? Yeah. Okay. But it’s just much more difficult to, as a new person trying to do that. Facilitated by, what is created in the PhD project. So you’re right on there. Some of my initial papers and research grants came in partnership with other people from the PhD project and people that they knew, the network of scholars, we got to know.

Dr. Drumm McNaughton: Right.

Blane Ruschak: conferences, they meet our students. Those students already know by the time they’re graduating, they know what school they want to go to.

They know where their research is going to be. And so it really is an amazing process to watch as they migrate through the years. And then I asked them in that last year, Oh, what schools are you looking at? And they already have their secret. They won’t tell me, but I can, you can see it in their eyes.

They already have the five schools and then they go and they still have that amazing network in place and probably already know faculty at that school they’re going to. So they’re not going there alone. They’re going there knowing somebody who’s going to help. Then figure out the process for 10 years.

So that’s a, it really is amazing to watch.

Dr. Drumm McNaughton: One of the things that I learned years ago at my first accreditation visit, which was a high school in San Diego. It had an amazing principal there. And he said. People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care. That’s what you’re doing with the PhD project.

You’re creating those relationships. You’re showing people that you really care about their wellbeing and what they’re going to do Going forward it’s not a quote diversity for diversity sake it’s helping people get that next leg up in their career because as we all know and one of the marketing projects that I did years ago and I had a business background as well as you know until I went into to higher ed is we had a

recruiting thing for a organization. And we had pictures of multiple people up there of every different race, flavor, color, et cetera. And what did people do? They’re going to click on something, a photo of somebody that they look like that they relate to, et cetera. This is the same thing with that. It’s not just.

About diversity. It’s about increasing representation. It’s about creating more enrollment, because frankly, the first gen students, the low SES students, they need to have a pathway that they can relate to. And you’re doing that. Thank you.

Dr. Jeffrey Robinson: get it. And yeah, and it? was a good summary of it.

Challenges and Solutions in Diversity Recruitment

Dr. Drumm McNaughton: Tell me why is this important for university leaders?

Dr. Jeffrey Robinson: So I’ll take that one. I think it’s, it’s interesting that the university leaders are taking a lot of hits these

days.

But what I’ve been relying upon lately is going back to my first principles, what are my values? And I think that’s what a lot of, university leaders are thinking about. And if one of your first values. Yeah, it has to do with, diversity and thinking about, tapping into the richness, of America.

And I, I mean that in the broadest terms that we’ve got people who have different perspectives and different ways of doing things and that can contribute to your campus. So the PSU project is no brainer and I’ll extend it out to other initiatives like it because. You’re really tapping into, the very best of what academia can be. People can get hyper competitive in academia. People may not realize that, but I think most, readers know that.

Blane Ruschak: Hadn’t heard that.

Dr. Jeffrey Robinson: And, you talked about the, Karen, what the PhD project does. We know that mentorship works. I know Blane could talk in a minute about the role model effect, but I’ll just focus on the mentorship for a moment.

We know mentorship works and that the best relationships. In academia are these mentor like relationships where someone more senior is supporting the activities of somebody more junior, and we do it in so many different levels. That to me represents the very best of what we can do in academia, and this taps into that.

Because you want mentorship to work, between your faculty and the students, the undergrad students for, in particular when they are learning, what it is to become a professional. But don’t forget the graduate students. There’s mentorship that goes on between faculty and, and the graduate students who are in your charge.

And then as a junior faculty member, senior faculty member are , mentoring you. So it’s. It’s this very, very, great part about, the academic environment that can facilitate this for lots of different people. And, to me, I think what the PhD project has done is really tapped into something that, is inherently in the system, but sometimes we drive it out because of, petty squabbles and, and competitiveness and PhD project has never lost, track of, what it means to build a community that, does want to see each other succeed.

Dr. Drumm McNaughton: We do a lot of reorganization work with universities and we typically tell people you have your formal org chart and you have your informal org chart. And how do you think business gets done? It’s not the formal, it’s the informal, it’s the relationship. That’s what you’re doing with this is building those relationships.

Oh,

Blane Ruschak: speaking for the business side, Yeah, I think having student exposure to faculty of color, and I’m talking about all students, not just, ethnically diverse students.

And we have a couple of videos on our website that I would encourage people to go look at because it will be a faculty member and the student that were in their class that will share, and this is a white student saying, I never had a black professor before and what a difference this class made. So the idea is we don’t want people to start their business careers having never had exposure To someone of color, in the classroom, whether it’s a student or faculty member, and I will share, I went to three predominantly white universities and had no faculty of color for my kind of two degrees, and I think it was a real loss for me.

And so I think that’s the encouragement for university leaders to want to have, faculty in the classroom that attracts students of color. So it’s a more robust class and discussions.

Dr. Drumm McNaughton: I couldn’t agree more.

Final Thoughts and Future Directions

Dr. Drumm McNaughton: Gentlemen, we are at the end of our time. It always happens like this. This has been a wonderful conversation. I really want to thank you both for taking the time out of your busy schedules to meet with me. Our two standard questions. Three takeaways for university presidents and boards.

Yes,

Blane Ruschak: effect. We get the question how do you know you’re making a difference? So we actually did a research study, to look at the correlation of, what Attract students of color to universities. So for those universities out there saying, how do I solve this problem now of attracting diverse talent, given that the challenges now in the recruiting process, and what we found was other than the demographics of the state, the second highest correlation to the trash to students of color was Faculty of color.

So know that long term investment of attracting faculty of color to your class does generate more attraction of diverse students. So it’s a long term solution, to attracting a diverse talent. Secondly, I think that, recruiting diverse, faculty to your school is like step one.

Retaining them is the harder part. And I think what’s really important to keep in mind is oftentimes universities. We’ll give all the task forces and things that have the word diversity in it to a diverse faculty member, which keeps them from getting their research done, which keeps them from getting tenure.

So it’s just a comment there to really, protect your, diverse faculty in those first, six or seven years when they’re going up for tenure to make sure that they do become, a successful member of university. And then the last. Takeaway is, keep your leaders in university accountable.

So not only expect them to go out and, try to attract diverse talent, but hold them accountable to doing that. We all know that, what gets measured gets done. So those would be my three takeaways.

Dr. Drumm McNaughton: Thank you, Blane. Jeffrey. Great. Okay.

Dr. Jeffrey Robinson: of our academic leaders would be, if you want to have, your faculty who are doing, exciting and groundbreaking research Again, you gotta find diverse talent. Can’t just have people who are going to do the same thing people have been doing for years.

And one of the ways to change that dynamic is to recruit folks who are, have, these different lived experiences. And they do different types of research, and I think every university wants to be known for, unique, groundbreaking types of research. I think my second thing would be, really unleashing the power of mentorship, and mentoring, on these multiple levels, which I guess I’ve talked about a little bit about already, this is one of the great things that education is about.

And, , by thinking about this, in those terms, you’ll see why this is so valuable. And then, lastly, , don’t forget about the economic imperative around diversity. Yes, demographics are changing. We live in a global, economy. We can’t, assume that.

That there’s only one way to do things or, one approach that works. Again, how do you maintain that and make sure that your students are competitive for the future? You gotta make sure you have some, faculty who are really, able to tap into, not only their best, but bring their lived experiences to the table.

Dr. Drumm McNaughton: Gentlemen, thank you. Those are great. Great takeaways and something that I think every university president should be thinking about. What’s next for you? What’s next for the Ph. D. project?

Blane Ruschak: All right, I’ll go first again. So for me, I am getting ready to retire and hopefully, serve as an adjunct or part time faculty member to teach intro to accounting. That was my first love when I went to the University of Hawaii and got my master’s in accounting degree. So 42 years later, I’m going full circle and I want to be part of the solution to the shortage of accounting students.

So that’s my goal. For the PhD project, we’re looking forward for the next, I’ll say 30 years. We have 1, 700 members now up from 294 when we started. So while we’re trying to continue to attract, new students to become new members. We also want to make sure we don’t forget about our existing members and what we need to do to provide development and opportunities for them.

We will continue to, thrive and make sure that our members are making a difference on campus.

Dr. Drumm McNaughton: Mahalo for all the work you’ve done with this,

Blane Ruschak: Mahalo. Thank you. That’s great.

Dr. Drumm McNaughton: Jeffrey.

Dr. Jeffrey Robinson: You look, I’ll be, right there with the PhD project as it enters its next 30 years, supporting it in however way I can. From a personal perspective, I’m a, I’m an endowed chair, having an endowed chair in business, at Rutgers Business School. Although I’m serving in administration right now, I’ve got some ideas for the university.

I’ve got some ideas for research projects. I still got a couple of doctoral students I want to get out as well. I’m looking forward to this next phase of my career.

Dr. Drumm McNaughton: Very good. Gentlemen, thank you so much for being on this show. I thoroughly enjoyed our conversation and I wish you both all the best and moving forward with the PhD project.

Dr. Jeffrey Robinson: Thank you.

Blane Ruschak: Thank you, Jerome.

Dr. Jeffrey Robinson: Take care.

Closing Remarks and Next Episode Preview

Dr. Drumm McNaughton: Thanks for listening today and a special thank you to Dr. Jeffrey Robinson and Blane Ruchak of the PhD project. Gentlemen, thank you for all the work you’re doing in this area. It’s incredibly important and we look forward to hearing more about the project in the coming years. Join me next time when Tom Netting comes back to give us an update on what’s going on in Washington, the elections, the Department of Education, and all sorts of other things that, in my opinion, things are going crazy right now.

So join me next week. See you then.