May 5, 2026 · Episode 310
Why College Presidents Need a Coalition for Civic Preparedness
37 Min · By Dr. Drumm McNaughton
Raj Vinnakota and Dr. Drumm McNaughton examine how college presidents can build civic preparedness, public trust, and campus-wide culture change.
When civic preparedness no longer happens as a byproduct of a college education, institutions have to teach productive conversation, credible information, and collaborative problem-solving as core outcomes — and presidents who try to lead that work alone tend to get punished for it.
Higher education has reached the point where civic preparation can no longer be assumed to happen on its own. Students arrive with less practice in productive disagreement, less ability to evaluate the information in front of them, and less experience working across difference than the academic model has historically taken for granted. The institutional question this raises is uncomfortable but unavoidable: if civic skills are no longer a reliable byproduct of a college education, who is responsible for producing them?
Raj Vinnakota, president of the Institute for Citizens & Scholars, pushes that question toward the answer that matters most for presidents, provosts, boards, and academic leaders. The challenge is no longer whether civic preparedness belongs in higher education’s mission. It is whether institutions will redesign curriculum, faculty development, and governance in ways that produce civically capable graduates, or continue assuming the next generation will absorb those capacities by accident.
That is what makes civic preparedness a strategic issue for institutional leadership. A campus can host a dialogue series, fund a center, and invite outside speakers without addressing the deeper problem. If most students never encounter the skills, if faculty have no support to teach them, and if presidents who try to lead the work get punished by stakeholders for doing so, the institution is defending a structure the moment has already exposed as inadequate. That is the operating logic behind College Presidents for Civic Preparedness (CP²), the coalition Vinnakota built in response — now 135 institutional leaders strong, spanning Ivy League universities, large publics, regional comprehensives, community colleges, religious institutions, and small liberal arts colleges.
Higher Education Has Drifted from Its Public Good Mandate
To diagnose the problem, Vinnakota interviewed a deliberately diverse group of college presidents. Mitch Daniels at Purdue. Michael Roth at Wesleyan. Jonathan Holloway, then at Rutgers. Roslyn Artis at Benedict. Joan Gabel at Minnesota. Hiram Chodosh at Claremont McKenna. Wayne Frederick at Howard. Different institutions, different politics, different scales. He expected different answers. Every one of them said some version of the same thing. The short-term framing of higher education — what does college do for me, so I get a job — has overtaken everything else. Institutions still produce employable graduates. They have stopped making a credible public case for why they exist beyond that.
The cost of that drift is hard to see in any single budget cycle. It shows up in eroded political support, in contested public legitimacy, and in the difficulty, institutions now face when they try to defend academic freedom, federal funding, or tax-exempt status. Restoring the public-good claim is not nostalgia for an earlier era of higher education. It is how the sector renews the social license it has been quietly burning through.
The Political Cost of Leading Civic Preparedness Alone
The second consistent finding from those interviews was harder to absorb. Presidents who tried to lead bold civic preparedness work on their own campuses got punished for it. The political geography varied. Sometimes the pushback came from the right, sometimes from the left, sometimes from the center. The dynamic did not vary. Without peer institutions visibly engaged in similar work, every initiative becomes a referendum on the president personally rather than on the substance of the strategy.
Boards become nervous. Donors become loud. Faculty grow suspicious. Students protest. The president absorbs the cost of all of it, and most rational leaders watching that pattern play out at peer institutions decide the political risk is too high. The result is exactly the leadership void that capacity building and presidential development practitioners have been describing for years: the institutions most in need of bold civic leadership are precisely the ones whose leaders cannot afford to provide it alone.
How a Coalition of 135 College Presidents Lowers Institutional Risk
CP² was designed to lower that cost directly. When Vinnakota called presidents back and asked whether they would be willing to work on civic preparedness together, what he describes as a coalition of the willing, enough hands went up to start a national conversation. The coalition launched publicly with 14 founding presidents and has since grown to 135. The diversity of membership is not incidental. It is the strategic point. Civic preparedness presented as a coalition issue across institution types, regions, and political environments is harder for any single stakeholder to caricature as ideological capture.
Coalition membership is not a logo on a website. Members exchange specific practices, learn from each other’s missteps, and benefit from a national platform that makes individual campus moves easier to defend. For boards weighing whether to engage, the question has shifted. It is no longer whether civic preparedness work carries political risk. It is whether continued institutional isolation on the issue is a sustainable position.
What Three Civic Skills Every College Graduate Needs
CP² focuses institutional energy on three specific skills, not three topics. The first is the ability to hold a productive conversation, sometimes called civil discourse or constructive dialogue. The second is the ability to discern credible information from the noise, which has become both more important and more difficult in an environment of generative AI and algorithmically optimized content. The third pulls the other two together: collaboratively solving problems across difference. Conversation and information literacy only matter if students can use them to get something done with people they disagree with.
Vinnakota draws a distinction here that is worth holding onto. Debate sharpens individual positions and identifies winners. Discourse builds the capacity to collaborate. Higher education has historically been good at debate. It has spent far less effort on the other thing. Rebalancing requires deliberate institutional design, not exhortation.
Opt-In Programming Reaches Only the Already-Convinced
Most CP² campuses already have a center, a few faculty members who do this work well, and an outside-speaker series that models constructive dialogue. The structural limitation is that almost all of that programming is opt-in. It reaches the students already inclined to participate and misses everyone else. Civic skills behave like physical fitness. They develop through repetition. Optional programming cannot deliver repetition at the scale required to shape institutional outcomes.
Forty-two CP² institutions have moved past the opt-in model toward institution-wide culture change. The practical work is unglamorous: rebuilding orientation, threading the skills into general education and freshman seminars, working them into the major curriculum, reaching co-curricular and residential life. It is large institutional plumbing, and it is the only path to ensuring every student practices these skills more than once across a college career.
Why Faculty Need Training to Teach Contentious Issues in the Classroom
When CP² presidents were asked to name their most urgent shared need, the answer was unanimous. They had nowhere to send faculty to learn how to bring contentious issues into the classroom effectively. A landscape scan confirmed the gap. Pockets of expertise existed at individual schools. National infrastructure did not. ICS built a faculty institute and ran the first cohort within five months. To date, more than 155 faculty from over 60 institutions have come through.
The deeper problem the institute exposes is structural rather than pedagogical. Faculty rarely receive sustained development in teaching during their careers. Peer observation, which used to be standard practice when professors quietly sat in the back of each other’s classrooms, has largely disappeared. Promotion and tenure decisions still hinge almost entirely on research. Asking faculty to lead difficult classroom conversations without preparation, recognition, or institutional support is wishful thinking dressed up as a strategy.
Campus-Wide Faculty Cohorts Outperform Two-by-Two Training
The original faculty institute model brought two faculty per campus to a national gathering. Presidents kept telling Vinnakota the same thing: this cannot be Noah’s ark. Two by two, no campus reaches the critical mass required to shift practice institution-wide. CP² is now piloting a different approach at five schools, supporting 20 to 50 faculty at a single institution simultaneously. The bet is that critical mass within a single campus generates the peer infrastructure needed to drive change from below, at the level of department culture, course design, and informal mentorship.
This connects to a broader point about institutional change that change management work in higher education has long emphasized. Mental models, processes, and structures all have to move together. Faculty development addresses the mental model layer. Without parallel work on promotion criteria, hiring priorities, and committee design, that energy dissipates against institutional inertia. As the saying goes, you get what you measure.
Why Shared Measurement Is What Sustains Campus Culture Change
All 42 institutions doing culture-change work with CP² have committed to a shared measurement framework anchored in the same three skills. Measurement runs on two tracks. Intervention-level data tells leaders whether a specific change is producing the intended effect on the students it touched. Climate-level data, captured through campus surveys, tells them whether the institution’s culture itself is moving.
Without shared measurement, civic preparedness stays rhetorical. With it, presidents can show boards real progress, accreditors can see what counts as evidence, and institutions can learn from each other in ways that compound over time. Schools serious about this work treat measurement as a precondition, not as a future enhancement once the initial implementation is complete.
Local Trust Is Higher Education’s Most Resilient Asset
National polling on higher education tells a discouraging story. Local polling tells a different one. Most Americans continue to trust the colleges and universities in their own communities, even as they express skepticism about the sector as a whole. That asymmetry is strategically meaningful. Institutions that engage their local communities through civic preparedness work, public dialogue, and visible service strengthen the trust that has held up best under political pressure.
Local engagement is also where the public-good narrative regains traction fastest. Local communities can see directly whether a college is producing graduates capable of thoughtful citizenship and constructive contribution. Sector reputation moves slowly. Local reputation responds to institutional behavior in real time, which makes it the most actionable lever most institutions have.
How Centering Student Voice Strengthens Institutional Governance
A recurring observation from CP² presidents is that bringing students into governance conversations, whether on committees, councils, or advisory bodies, surfaces information that institutional leadership consistently misses on its own. Students are the population the work is designed to serve. Their judgment of whether the work is landing carries diagnostic weight that internal leadership cannot replicate, regardless of the quality of internal data systems.
This is not the same as ceding strategy to students. It is the discipline of testing institutional intent against student experience and adjusting when the gap is significant. For boards and presidents, the practice has the additional benefit of reconnecting governance conversations to the institution’s actual reason for existing. It is harder to optimize for the wrong outcome when the people the institution is meant to serve are present in the room where decisions are made.
Three Takeaways for Higher Education Presidents and Boards
1. Don’t Try to Lead Civic Preparedness Alone
Join CP² or another coalition or build sustained peer relationships with presidents doing this work elsewhere. Civic preparedness is hard work, and presidents have substantially more leverage doing it collectively than they do alone. The political risk that defeats individual leaders becomes manageable when comparable institutions are visibly engaged in the same effort.
2. Build Local Trust Deliberately
Public trust in higher education as a sector is contested, but most Americans still trust their local college or university. Engage the surrounding community in everything the institution does. Local trust is the most durable asset higher education has, and it responds in real time to what institutions really do, not to what they say about themselves.
3. Bring Student Voice into Planning and Conversations
Pull students into committees, councils, and advisory bodies as a discipline rather than a gesture. Student perspective consistently provides a different read on whether institutional work is truly producing impact. Leadership without that signal ends up optimizing for its own assumptions about what students need.
Quick Overview
- Civic preparation can no longer be assumed to happen as a byproduct of a college education.
- Presidents who try to lead bold civic preparedness work on their own campuses tend to be punished for it, regardless of which side does the punishing.
- CP² is a coalition of 135 college and university presidents organized to lower the political cost of leading on this issue.
- The diversity of CP² membership across institution types and political environments is the strategic point, not a coincidence.
- The three civic skills that define the institutional outcome are productive conversation, evaluating credible information, and collaborative problem-solving across difference.
- Opt-in civic programming reaches the students who least need it and misses the rest.
- Forty-two CP² institutions have committed to embedding the work into orientation, general education, residential life, and the major curriculum.
- Faculty had no national place to learn how to teach contentious issues; ICS built one in five months and has trained more than 155 faculty from 60+ institutions.
- Two-by-two faculty development cannot generate critical mass on a campus; cohorts of 20 to 50 faculty at a single institution can.
- Mental models, processes, and structures have to shift together or none of them do.
- Shared measurement is what separates real culture change from rhetoric.
- Local trust is intact and responds to what institutions really do in their communities.
- Bringing students into governance reveals what leadership otherwise misses.
About Our Podcast Guest
Rajiv Vinnakota is the seventh president of the Institute for Citizens & Scholars (formerly the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation). Prior to joining C&S in July 2019, Raj served as the EVP of the Youth & Engagement division at the Aspen Institute. For 18 years, Raj was the co-founder and CEO of The SEED Foundation, the nation’s first network of public, college-preparatory boarding schools for underserved children. Raj’s work has earned him recognition in the form of fellowships from Echoing Green, The Ashoka Foundation and the Aspen Institute, as well as awards such as Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson Award, Harvard University’s Innovation in American Government Award, and Oprah Winfrey’s Use Your Life award. Raj is a board director for two public companies, Enovis Corporation and ESAB. In addition to being a former trustee and executive committee member for Princeton University, Raj is the former national chair of its annual giving committee. Raj majored in molecular biology and also earned a certificate of studies from the Woodrow Wilson School of International Affairs & Public Policy.
Connect with Rajiv Vinnakota on LinkedIn →
About the Host
Dr. Drumm McNaughton is the founder, CEO, and Principal Consultant at The Change Leader, Inc. A highly sought-after higher education consultant with 20+ years of experience, Dr. McNaughton works with leadership, management, and boards of both U.S. and international institutions. His expertise spans key areas, including accreditation, governance, strategic planning, presidential onboarding, mergers, acquisitions, and strategic alliances. Dr. McNaughton’s approach combines a holistic methodology with a deep understanding of the contemporary and evolving challenges facing higher education institutions worldwide to ensure his clients succeed in their mission.
Read the Podcast Transcript →
Transcript: Changing Higher Ed podcast 310
Introduction to Changing Higher Ed®
Welcome to Changing Higher Ed®, a podcast dedicated to helping higher education leaders improve their institutions. With your host, Dr. Drumm McNaughton, CEO of The Change Leader, a consultancy that helps higher ed leaders holistically transform their institutions. Learn more at changinghighered.com. And now, here’s your host, Drumm McNaughton.
[00:00:31] What We Talk About in This Podcast
Drumm McNaughton: Thank you, David. My guest today is Raj Vinnakota, president of the Institute for Citizens and Scholars, formerly known as the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation. Prior to joining ICS, Raj served as the EVP of the Youth and Engagement Division at the Aspen Institute. He was co-founder and CEO of the Seed Foundation, the nation’s first network of public college preparatory boarding schools for underserved children.
Raj’s perspective is grounded in years of work with college presidents, faculty, employers, and Gen Z leaders, all pointing to the same conclusion. In an AI driven, mistrust heavy decade, America’s future hinges on rebuilding the human abilities that create credibility, trust, and real problem solving across differences.
And he joins me to talk about the groundbreaking work he and ICS are doing in building civics and teaching civil discourse in today’s highly politicized world.
[00:01:32] Welcoming Raj Vinnakota, President of the Institute for Citizens and Scholars, to the Show
Drumm McNaughton: Raj, welcome to the program.
Raj Vinnakota: Thanks for having me here. It’s a real honor.
Drumm McNaughton: It’s my pleasure, sir. I am looking forward to a great conversation. You have an amazing background. We’re going to talk about, what’s going on in higher ed and what you’re doing there at the Institute for Citizens and Scholars, formerly the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation.
Before we get into that. Tell the audience a little bit about you and how you got here.
[00:02:03] Raj’s Origin Story and Professional Background
Raj Vinnakota: Sure I can talk about it geographically and kind of a life way too. So I’m actually born in Switzerland of all places and—
Drumm McNaughton: My wife would love you. That’s her favorite country.
Raj Vinnakota: Yeah. So born in Lausanne to two Indian parents and then we moved to the US when I was eight. My dad was a professor and so we moved to Milwaukee where my dad was a professor at Marquette University for 35 years.
Drumm McNaughton: Wow. Marquette’s a great school.
Raj Vinnakota: And Milwaukee was a great place to grow up. I then went to college out east.
[00:02:33] Science to Consulting Pivot
Raj Vinnakota: I went to Princeton, and I majored in molecular biology. I think we’re both scientists by training here, so we can talk about that.
Drumm McNaughton: Yeah, but you’re the smart one I think.
Raj Vinnakota: Yeah, but maybe I should just stop talking now then if that’s what we want to prove.
But I’m molecular biologist. I studied the virology, and I wanted to get involved in the cure for AIDS. , Little burned out by college, ended up as a management consultant.
[00:02:56] Launching the SEED School
Raj Vinnakota: And then my first big decision was I came up with this idea of starting a boarding school for inner city children. And I ended up finding a business partner, and in 1997 we both left our jobs and a year later we opened the nation’s first urban public boarding school, the Seed School of Washington, DC which opened with 40 students, 20 boys and 20 girls who all came from inner city DC. And we picked ping pong balls out of a lottery machine to select who would attend our school. And it was I, I called it both the happiest and saddest day of the year for me because you saw the excitement of the families whose balls got selected and the not so excitement and sadness of those who didn’t.
[00:03:42] Growing a Boarding Network
Raj Vinnakota: And we started that school and we grew it to more than 300 students. And over the next 18 years I co-led this project and opened a second school in West Baltimore, a third school in Miami Gardens, and we sent, hundreds, thousands off into the world to colleges, graduating at a really high percentage from four and two year institutions.
So it was an incredible journey for me to do my work.
[00:04:08] Aspen Institute Youth Work
Raj Vinnakota: And then in 2015, I got a fairly random outreach from Walter Isaacson who was then the CEO of the Aspen Institute.
Drumm McNaughton: Sure.
Raj Vinnakota: And Walter asked me whether I’d be interested in helping him start a third operating division at the Aspen Institute, focused on working directly with young people.
And, 18 years was a nice long run of co-leading seed. And so I went off to the Aspen Institute and I spent the next three years standing up a division focused on working with 14 to 24 year olds.
[00:04:40] Civic Virtue as a Mission
Raj Vinnakota: And I decided to make the focus of our work around this notion of how does one develop civic virtue in young people, right?
The Aristotelian conception that says you need to actually raise citizens who believe in the needs of the community over their own personal interests. But you don’t just have that happening, you actually have to develop it, you have to teach it, you have to have a culture around it. And so that was my intellectual interest.
And for those three years, we started a group of fellowships and did a whole set of programming around those notions.
[00:05:15] Addressing Our Democracy House on Fire
Raj Vinnakota: In 2018 Walter retired and I left soon after that because frankly I said our democracy house is on fire and I want to get more closely working on those issues. And I ended up syndicating a national study to rethink civic education. And my three funders were the Hewlett Foundation, Michael Bloomberg, and Charles and David Koch. Which is the, yeah, which is the first time those three funders had come together in a joint project. But I thought it was an incredible signaling device to say, there are certain things that are worthy of investment, no matter your ideological background, and frankly, what could be more important in how we educate the next generation in self-government, right?
Because that’s what civic education is in its essence.
Drumm McNaughton: And then now here at the Institute—
—citizens and Scholars. That’s, most folks have heard of the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation. You’ve changed the name but you’re doing a lot of the same type of things. Tell us about ICS please.
Raj Vinnakota: Sure.
[00:06:29] Joining and Rebranding ICS
Raj Vinnakota: So it was right when I was finishing up that research that I was approached about the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship presidency. And I have to be honest with you, I first said, I’m not sure about this job because you do great work in higher education, pipelines into the professoriate, educating K 12 teachers to be better STEM teachers. But I think that the single greatest education problem we have in this country is we’ve forgotten how to develop citizens, and that needs to be our focus. Not just of higher education, but also K 12, of our communities, of our work online and our work in the workplace. And they said, come on in, give us the pitch.
And so I did and I did end up becoming president.
[00:07:13] Strategy for 68 Million Youths
Raj Vinnakota: And so I joined in July of 2019 and, Drumm, I spent the next year building out a strategy. In a couple sentences basically it says there are 68 million young people, between the ages of 10 and 24, who are entering the public square in the next decade. If we do a good job of developing in them into the citizens we need, we’ll be fine as a country.
But that requires that we work at scale in higher education, in the workplace, in K 12, and in our communities. And so our work is focused around three of those four. We have other people who are doing great work in the K 12 system, and so we focus on the other three.
Drumm McNaughton: Yeah.
[00:07:54] Why Discourse Is Breaking Down
Drumm McNaughton: Well, it’s really interesting that you, one are a guest on the show today because we’re all seeing this highly politicized environment that we’re operating in. We’ve learned to talk past each other and we’re going for the sound bite online quotes, sound bites for television, radio, whatever the medium is. And it’s almost like we don’t care what the other people are saying, we’ve got to get our own opinion out there because we know we’re right.
Raj Vinnakota: Yes, unfortunately, I think very few of us practice intellectual humility right now, or frankly—
Drumm McNaughton: What is that? What is empathy? Intellectual, human. Come on. What are these terms? This is, nobody knows about these.
Raj Vinnakota: Well, it’s interesting, right?
[00:08:47] Intellectual Humility Explained
Raj Vinnakota: Because I think so many of us do, I’ll use a very specific example that, you know, will unfortunately date me, which is, you remember the scientific method, right? The scientific method, exactly, was all about intellectual humility. You did research, you developed a hypothesis, which is an educated guess, and then you did a series of experiments and you determined whether or not your hypothesis was correct.
And if you are dealing in true science, 98 times out of 100, your hypothesis would be wrong. You had to modify it, you learned from it, and you did it again, and you did it again, and you learned and you got better and better. That’s a form of intellectual humility that hopefully most of us learned at some point in our education.
[00:09:32] Consulting Lessons on Listening
Drumm McNaughton: Well, we do the same thing when we go in and do a client project, whether it be, a governance, board governance, shared governance, not so much accreditation, but those board and shared governance is we come in and after interviews or surveys, it’s got a good idea what’s going on. We present that back to the leadership team and they say, yes, no, nuanced, et cetera, and we go back. It’s that same approach, we call it a stakeholder involvement or stakeholder attunement and input process, but it’s the same type of thing. You get a hypothesis, you test it, you go back, revise, and finally you get to the point where you go, this is it.
Raj Vinnakota: That’s right. That’s right. And even then you’re still testing it and there’s still a bit of learning that’s going on all the time in iteration.
Drumm McNaughton: Yeah and your best consultants know that one size doesn’t fit all. I mean, you’ll have clients come in and they’ll ask you, and then you being a management consultant before you understand this, you’ll have a client come in and we’ll say, what are you do for me? And how much is it going to cost?
There’s sometimes I can say, well, it’s X, Y, Z and this is what it’s cost, but 95% of the time it’s like, I don’t know, I don’t know what your problems are, I don’t know, you know, where you’ve been, what you’ve done so far. Let’s have a conversation. Let’s figure it out. Then I’ll send you a proposal or I’ll send you a outline of what I think it is. You tell me if this’s right.
Raj Vinnakota: And I had clients as large as Nations Bank, right? Formerly part of, now part of Bank of America to the Bank of New South Wales in Australia.
So many different details and variables are different. And understanding what the makeup and the situation is so important before you can even determine how you’re going to tackle the problem.
Drumm McNaughton: Which is why I think what you’re doing at ICS is incredible. College Presidents for Civic Preparedness…
Raj Vinnakota: That’s right.
Drumm McNaughton: That is incredible. I want to know more.
Raj Vinnakota: Sure.
[00:11:48] College Presidents Coalition Begins
Raj Vinnakota: So it was fairly soon after we developed our strategy in late 2020, that I started reaching out to college presidents directly with a very simple question. I said, how are you civically preparing your students? And I purposely, I told you a little bit about my broad diverse array of funders before in my previous work, I, in a similar fashion chose a broad array of college presidents to talk to.
So some of them included Michael Roth at Wesleyan, Jonathan Holloway, then at Rutgers, Mitch Daniels at Purdue, Hiram Chodosh at Claremont McKenna College, Wayne Fredericks at Howard Joan Gable at the University of Minnesota, Roslyn Artis at Benedict College, and I picked this broad array of presidents and they gave me very different, specific answers, Drumm. But there were two themes that were consistent across all of the answers.
[00:12:47] Public Good vs Private Good
Raj Vinnakota: The first theme was, simply, that the pendulum had swung too far to higher education being viewed largely as just a private good. We needed to bring the public good responsibility of higher education back into play and in balance with that. So what do I mean? Yes, it’s really important to graduate your students and make sure that they get a job. But it is also important that our colleges and universities are also preparing our students to be good citizens and that our institutions are bull works for democracy.
And frankly, that was being lost and we needed to bring that back into balance. And every single president said that.
Drumm McNaughton: So, this is interesting. When did you start to roll this out and have these conversation? This was in—
Raj Vinnakota: Very late 2020. It was, yeah, late 2020, early 2021 during the pandemic.
Drumm McNaughton: Okay. So, because I’ve spoken quite a number of times about administrations and the regulatory environment for education. When you have the Democrats, the pendulum swings one way, when you have the Republicans, it swings the other way. With that, you’re saying the same thing. I always think about the Clark Care model, higher ed for the public good. And what we have seen is it’s swung too much to the private good. I really like the way you language that.
Raj Vinnakota: Yes, that if we focus solely on just kind of the short term, what do you do for me so I get a job? Colleges and universities, frankly, lose a bit of their soul and they lose a lot of the reason why we created these institutions in the first place. And every president recognized that.
Now, let me tell you the second theme, which was related, but separate. Right? So the first one is that colleges and universities need to regain their public good responsibilities.
[00:14:44] Stakeholder Pushback Reality
Raj Vinnakota: The second one was when these presidents tried to take on this challenge with bold approaches that the pushback from stakeholders made it nearly impossible to sustain the work.
Now, it’s interesting, the stakeholders could be different in different moments in different institutions, right? They could be boards, donors, alumni, they could be students, faculty, administrators, or policymakers, legislators, community leaders, families, and parents. So it was different in different circumstances, but every time this blowback made it very difficult for them to continue the bold work.
Drumm McNaughton: Interesting.
Raj Vinnakota: Now we kept hearing this over and over again.
Finally, we said, wait a second.
[00:15:32] CP Squared Goes Public
Raj Vinnakota: Would there be value in bringing these presidents together? Think of it as a coalition of the willing, right? The collective power of these presidents who could work with each other, learn from each other, be able to push forward to this mandate. And a number of presidents raised their hands.
So we said, okay, let’s start talking. And so we started virtually, and then we moved to in-person. And finally in January of 2023, we decided that we would announce ourselves publicly that year as College Presidents for Civic Preparedness. And so we had 14 presidents who we publicly announced this work with in August of 2023.
Drumm McNaughton: And now you’ve got 135.
Raj Vinnakota: We have 135 college presidents. Yes, it has grown quite substantially, quite quickly.
Drumm McNaughton: Everything from community colleges, two years, all the way up to R1’s.
Raj Vinnakota: That’s right. That’s actually been one of the joys and one of the things that the presidents tell us that they get real value from, right? We have Ivy League schools, the Dartmouths, Cornells of the world, the elite liberal arts I just talked about, Wesley and in Wellesley and Amherst and Denison and so on.
We have large public states, university of Wisconsin, Rutgers, Pitt, University of North Texas. We have regional universities, Montclair State University, James Madison University. We have community colleges, we have small liberal arts colleges, we have religious institutions. It’s a really broad array and not easily categorizable.
That’s actually what makes it so great.
Drumm McNaughton: That is fabulous. I want to dig down more on CP Squared as you call it.
Raj Vinnakota: Sure. Yes.
Drumm McNaughton: You said there are three basic tenants to that.
Raj Vinnakota: That’s right.
[00:17:26] Three Core Civic Skills
Raj Vinnakota: So let me tell you a little bit about the story. So when presidents sign up for this, they recognize that we’re trying to focus on the three essential civic skills that we’re trying to build in students that they’ve said they could use help on.
The first is how do we teach students to be able to engage in productive conversations, right? Call it civil discourse, constructive dialogue is a different term, but we talk about it as productive conversations. The second is, how do they discern and use credible information? Right? There’s so much coming at them. How do we know that what’s the right information that they can use?
Drumm McNaughton: You, you mean everything that I read on is not true?
Raj Vinnakota: Oh do you have time for a whole separate podcast?
Drumm McNaughton: Yes, sir.
Raj Vinnakota: Okay, so, so, and then the third skill, which is really important because it brings it all together, is working and developing the skill for collaborative problem solving across difference. So it’s not enough to just be able to engage in productive conversations. It’s not enough to just understand where your information comes from. You then have to translate that into doing the work, working with people with whom you may not necessarily agree, but actually getting things done. So these three essential skills are the ones that we focus on and our presidents have said we would really benefit from a coalition working on this together.
Drumm McNaughton: It reminds me of one of my favorite movies, The American President with Michael Douglas and Annette Benning, and the speech that Michael Douglas gives at the end about what free speech is. Being able to listen to someone whose position you literally hate. He or she has that same right to the speech that you do.
So how do you reach across those differences to collaboratively problem solve? I mean, that’s brilliant.
Raj Vinnakota: And it’s hard work.
[00:19:32] From Opt-In to Culture Change
Raj Vinnakota: The thing I would say, Drumm, is that, when we first got into this, we said any president should sign up and point to what work they’re doing on their campus around this. And we have, as you noted, 135 presidents who are engaged in this work.
What became clear to us, however, is that every one of our partner schools has a center on campus. All of them have some faculty members who do this work really well, and all of them bring outside speakers to model what it means to engage in this kind of discourse. However, a majority of this work is for opt-in students, right? So you have to opt into the work, and unfortunately, that means that a majority of the students at most campuses don’t actually learn about this or have opportunities to practice that over and over. It’s like building a muscle.
And so we started working with our presidents and saying, you can’t just do this for a few students. How do we get to actually changing campus culture so that every student has the opportunity to learn and practice these skills multiple times a year. And so at that point, this becomes a real massive institutional undertaking.
How do you put it in orientation? How does it go into the curriculum? Is it in the general education? Is it in freshman seminar? Is it part of some different programs? Right? How is it in the co-curricular and extracurricular activities. For those schools that have a residential staff, how is it in residential life? How do we make it part of the culture of the institution? And to me, the most exciting part is that we now have 42 of our residents who are engaged in many more who are continuing to line up in this work of campus culture change.
And we’re learning so much. Just like you said earlier, you have so many different types of people. We have so many different kinds of clients. We have so many different types of schools, and we’re learning so much about how does this work on a community college? How does this work on a commuter school? How does this work in an elite Ivy league school? And what can we learn from each that we can share with others in trying to drive this campus culture change.
Drumm McNaughton: And that is so critical because when you take a look at right-leaning schools, everybody at a different campus is woke. When you look at a left-leaning school, everybody at the right-leaning school is too authoritarian. You’ve got to be able to bridge that. And I think the way you’re doing it about bringing this into the students is brilliant. Because it’s, people tell me, oh my gosh, look at these students nowadays, they’re ridiculous. We can’t teach these people. And I’m going, Hey, these are the folks that are going to be taking care of us when we get old. You better learn how to do this. You better learn how to converse with them, to understand what’s important to them.
Raj Vinnakota: It’s so critical and the interesting thing is that I would say the momentum of our programming and the fact that so many college presidents are getting such value is really having a flywheel effect, right? More schools are recognizing this, more schools are joining us so they can be part of this movement and working alongside us.
It is exciting and it’s especially exciting when you hear stories of how students are incorporating this, when they’re seeing difference and maybe starting a club or starting a set of dinner sessions so that they can speak with each other for people with very different political views.
All the way, Drumm, to what you just said, McAllister College, actually has a partnership with a school close to them, Northwestern, where they have students, very different perspectives, very different ideologies, but they engage together along with the presidents and they learn so much about each other. Right. And so you can even take it beyond campus in that way.
Drumm McNaughton: And to me, it sounds like it’s beyond the quote, “debate society”. It’s developing relationships, friendships with other folks you may not have wanted to speak with before, and learning how to have civil discourse and understanding what makes that person tick? I remember years ago somebody telling me, you don’t know another person till you’ve walked a mile in their shoes. And this to me sounds like that’s what you’re doing.
Raj Vinnakota: That’s absolutely true. I would say so, I’m actually full disclosure, I’m a debater from high school and college. So I loved debate and I think debate is important. But I’ve actually recently written about the fact that debate in and of itself is not sufficient. You also need discourse and dialogue, right?
Because debate helps you really sharpen your points of view. It doesn’t help you convince other people in how to engage and collaboratively problem solve. Right? Debate is about winning discourse, dialogue is about how we collaborate. Now, both are important, but I think we focus and role model and spend too much time on the debate side of it. We also need to append the discourse portion.
Drumm McNaughton: I couldn’t agree more. I’m also thinking about this from a “how do you do it with students”. And obviously orientation is one of those, but your faculty need, because I would be willing to bet there can be some pretty heated conversations, or I’m sorry, heated dialogue around topics. I would guess that you’ve got to develop the faculty’s muscle to be able to, for lack of a better word, referee.
Raj Vinnakota: It’s a great point.
[00:25:32] Faculty Training and What’s Next
Raj Vinnakota: So I’ll tell you a little story, in January of 2023 when we decided that we would publicly announce later in the year, and we also were deciding what will be our first two or three areas that we would really focus on.
The number one choice from all of our presidents in the room was they asked us, they said, Raj, we have nowhere to send our faculty to learn how to bring contentious issues in the classroom effectively. And you know what I said, Drumm, I said that can’t be true. So we did a quick landscape analysis and what we determined is that there were pockets, there were certain professors at certain schools that were really good who were teaching their peers and other colleagues, but there was no place to actually send faculty to learn this.
So we actually have stood up a faculty institute. We actually did it within five months. And we’ve now had more than five sessions with 155 faculty members from more than 60 institutions who come for two and a half days to spend with us to both learn about what different practices look like, what can be incorporated, what other principles faculty members are using, and then actually even practice it in the room on difficult conversations.
And then part of those faculty members’ commitment is to go back to their campus, both incorporated into one of their syllabi or curriculum and classes. And if possible, also be a train the trainer, teach others what they’ve learned on their campus so that you have many more faculty members who start to learn about this.
And that faculty industry has just been a powerful, powerful mechanism.
Drumm McNaughton: My Navy pilot is coming out at this point. That was the purpose of Top Gun. To train fighter pilots on the art of dog fighting so they could go back to their squadrons and train other pilots.
Raj Vinnakota: Got it. I did not realize that, that I did not realize there was a train the trainer piece to that as well. Got it.
Drumm McNaughton: Yes, there, there is. And what’s interesting is you’ve touched the tip of the iceberg with schools, with faculty. And what I think about is the iceberg theory of change. You’ve probably heard of it. You’ve got, 9% or 12% of the iceberg above the water, and you’ve got below the water, you’ve got 90% at the bottom of the iceberg you’ve got structure and then your processes and then above you’ve got the output. The water you can use the model as mental models.
Raj Vinnakota: Mm-hmm.
Drumm McNaughton: But you’ve got to be able to change processes. You’ve got to be able to change structures, to make any change in the way the iceberg looks above the water.
Raj Vinnakota: So I love that analogy. Let me tell you why. As we were doing this, so we would host these faculty institutes in different institutions and, you’d have 30 or so come and so you have two faculty members from different institutions come. And our presidents kept telling us two things.
The first was, this was really great for my faculty members who came. But the other thing they said is, Raj, we can’t do a Noah’s arc, a faculty institute. I can’t send them two by two. I’ll never get to a critical mass. And so one of the things that we’re actually piloting and testing this year, is we are now going to campuses, we’re going to five very different schools and testing can we actually support 20, 30, 40, 50 faculty members at once at one institutions and do both the programming and then the community of practice support. So that you build a critical mass that starts to drive this. Understanding that the presidents are very well aware that there also needs to be processes that need to be considered. But if you’ve got a group of owners, of faculty members who are like, yes, this is very good. I’ve learned a lot from it, and I’ve linked arms with other faculty members because I believe in this. Having those champions on campus is so critical to this work.
Drumm McNaughton: Oh, it is. And when I think about it, what comes to mind is the sins of the father, the sins of the son. Faculty members are experts in their discipline. They’re not necessarily experts in pedagogy. It’s still the sage on the stage. So how do you change those processes? How do you change those structures to implement the wide scale change you’re looking for?
Raj Vinnakota: And Drumm,, let me make the question even more difficult here, right?
Drumm McNaughton: Oh, thanks.
Raj Vinnakota: Which is, most faculty members don’t get professional development around teaching during their time, right? They don’t get evaluated around their teaching. Maybe they get student evaluations, but from what I hear, 60 years ago, you’d have professors going into each other’s classrooms and sit in the back and just literally listen to each other.
That doesn’t happen, and your promotion decisions really aren’t dependent upon your teaching. So—
Drumm McNaughton: It’s all research.
Raj Vinnakota: Remember the systems thing you just brought up, five minutes earlier. So setting up those systems to support this, to elevate this, to champion this, while we’re also doing the professional development, needs to go hand in hand.
That’s the only way you’ll get to the eventual systems change. You need to be able to put all of these things into the conversation.
Drumm McNaughton: You’ve got to change your structures. You’ve got to change your processes, and most importantly, you need to change people’s mental models so they’re willing to accept this.
Raj Vinnakota: The interesting thing is the mental models in many ways is easier because so many from, at least my experience, so many people go into academia loving their content and wanting to figure out ways to disseminate and educate, right? You got to have an education bone in your body to want to go into higher education.
So as long as you can tap into that, there’s a lot of energy and leverage. And so the mental model part then becomes how can we teach you and give you tools and support and communities of practice and other people you can talk to so that you can do this well?
Drumm McNaughton: And it also comes back to you get what you measure.
Raj Vinnakota: Yeah, that’s right. And here’s an interesting piece. So one of the things that’s a foundation to our culture change work, with those 42 schools that are kind of at the leading edge of our work with us, is that they’ve all committed to having a shared set of measures around productive conversations, credible information and collaborative problem solving.
So we’re going to learn so much from those, not only at the intervention level, right, the specific thing you’re doing, like orientation change and so on. But also the campus climate survey level to know whether or not it’s actually impacting the DNA of the institution. So we’re going to learn so much and we’ll be able to use that as a learning mechanism to share with our institutions how are we doing and what things seem to be working and what things probably need more tweaking. That’s going to be very, very powerful.
Drumm McNaughton: I think so. If somebody wants to learn more about this from a college president or faculty perspective, how do they get in touch with you?
Raj Vinnakota: It’s very easy. Our website on this work is collegepresidents.org, so you can just go to collegepresidents.org and learn more about College Presidents for Civic preparedness, or as we call it, CP squared, and you can get in touch with us. Any member of the campus can get in touch with us and learn more.
You can also see the list of all 135 residents who are part of this work right now.
Drumm McNaughton: That sounds great. This has been fabulous for me, Raj. I enjoy all of my guests that come on, but when somebody like yourself gives a new take on solving a long problem, I lap it up. So thank you, sir. I appreciate it.
Raj Vinnakota: Well, thank you. I don’t want to take all the credit. This is a big coalition, institution leaders, people who are working on this team. It’s a joy and it’s a journey at the same time.
Drumm McNaughton: Do you want to give a shout out to those folks who have been funding all of this great work for you?
Raj Vinnakota: Well, one of the joys here is that we have such a broad array of funders. So, we have everyone from organizations like the ECMC Foundation and Lumina Foundation stand together, Arthur Vining Davis Foundation, a number of collaborators of individual donors like the Einhorn Collaborative, The Tepper Foundation and so on, One8 Foundation.
So , it’s been great in just the broad array that we’ve been able to bring together.
[00:34:21] Three Takeaways for University Presidents and Boards
Drumm McNaughton: Nice. Three takeaways for university presidents and boards. How do you build collaborative problem solving and build in the civic discourse that we so much need?
Raj Vinnakota: Well, the first thing I’d say is don’t do this alone. Join our coalition or another coalition or share best practices. This is hard work. The presidents know that. But being able to do it collectively has much more power and will accelerate your work.
The second is to recognize that people might not trust higher education. Not everyone does, but actually most do. But they still trust their local university and college, right? So keep building trust by engaging your local community in all of the work that you do.
And then third and finally is, center students in your planning and your conversations. Whether it’s at a committee level or some council or so on or so forth, bring student voice into that. I find that it always provides you with a different perspective of whether or not you’re actually making an impact. And so having that voice in the room is critical.
Drumm McNaughton: Yeah. Those are great takeaways. Thank you. What’s next for you? What’s next for ICS?
Raj Vinnakota: Well so, look, this work with citizens and scholars is generational work, so it’s really about how do we continue to double down, have more college presence, please join us, please reach out to me if you’d like, and also be our partners in this work. This is about making sure that we have the democracy that we want, a flourishing civil society, and it’s going to require all of us to engage on this.
Drumm McNaughton: So true. Raj, thank you so much for being on the program, this has been a fabulous conversation for me. I really appreciate it.
Raj Vinnakota: It’s been a joy for me too. Thanks so much.
Drumm McNaughton: Thanks for listening today and a special thank you to my guest, Raj Vinnakota. Raj, thank you so much for being on the program. I thoroughly enjoyed our conversation. It was a great insight into what you’re doing there, what you and your team are doing there at ICS, and thank you for that work. To my listeners, thanks for tuning in.
See you next week.
