How Fairleigh Dickinson Is Building an Ecosystem of Lifelong Learning Across Five Generations:

Changing Higher Ed podcast 321 with host Dr. Drumm McNaughton and guest Michael Avaltroni

Transcript: Changing Higher Ed podcast 321 – with  guest Michael Avaltroni

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] Welcome and Guest Intro

Drumm McNaughton: Thank you, David. My guest today is Michael Avaltroni, ninth president at Fairleigh Dickinson University. Michael’s been in the position for almost three years. He’s very unique. He is the first Fairleigh Dickinson University graduate to serve as the institution’s president, and then once he graduated from his undergraduate, went to his graduate degree, he was invited to come back to be a faculty member and moved all the way up to president.

He’s led many initiatives since he became president, including the creation of a division of FDU Health and FDU Health Path Forward, and he joins me today to talk about how Fairleigh Dickinson is changing how it delivers education with the four Ps. You’ll have to listen to this one to figure out what those four Ps are, but it’s a fascinating story, and I think you’ll really enjoy it.

Michael, welcome to the show.

Michael Avaltroni: Pleasure to be here.

Drumm McNaughton: It’s my pleasure to have you here.

[00:01:34] Basketball Connection

Drumm McNaughton: I’m looking forward to our conversation if for nothing more, and I know there’s way more than this, the nostalgic perspective of it. My alma mater, Annapolis, the Naval Academy, used to, and I think we still play your school, Fairleigh Dickinson, in basketball every year.

Michael Avaltroni: That is they definitely is a alignment of scheduling there, which is always fun. It’s a nice East Coast trip for one or the other, for sure.

Drumm McNaughton: Yes, it’s a bus trip rather than an airplane trip, which is nice.

Michael Avaltroni: Yes. Yes.

[00:02:04] From Student to President

Drumm McNaughton: So you’ve been at Fairleigh Dickinson now for coming up on three years

Michael Avaltroni: Yes. So been the president for three years and have been here, I always say, most of my adult life. So my journey started, I was 18 years old, selecting colleges, and fell in love with a place that felt very far away from where I grew up in the five boroughs of New York City, and fell in love with a Vanderbilt estate that was the Florham Campus of Fairleigh Dickinson University, and graduated there class of ’99.

[00:02:36] Returning as Faculty

Michael Avaltroni: Was a chemistry major at the time and had a wonderful experience with the faculty members there, engaging me in a research project from day one. And four years later, when I was finishing graduate school, I got a call from my undergraduate mentor, who was the one facilitating that project, and said, “I’m going to be retiring, and I think you should come and interview for my job.”

And did that in 2003 and have never looked back. Joined a member of the faculty there in ’03, became department chair, then took on the role of considering and exploring a new school of pharmacy at the university in 2008 and became the sort of silent phase leader there. Stepped into the role of dean in 2012 and did that for a decade, building all of our new health science programs, and then did a stint as university provost for a year.

Thought it would be longer, and then this role came calling. So it’s been a wonderful journey and much of it a kind of path of a number of different opportunities, all to build and grow and think about the future.

Drumm McNaughton: It sounds a lot like a good friend of mine’s path, Brit Kirwan, who went for his graduate school at Rutgers and then came back to University of Maryland College Park and started out there as a faculty member in the mathematics department all the way up through president, was president there for, I want to say, about 13 years.

[00:03:58] Authentic Alumni Leadership

Michael Avaltroni: That’s a good thing to be ambitious about, and it’s, it’s one of those things I think it’s such a unique opportunity because you have such a lived experience and such a level of authenticity you can speak with. Largely because, the things I talk about that I value about what we want to build and create really were the very same things that brought me those four transformational years as an undergraduate, and the reason I came back with the desire to frankly do that for a new generation of students.

So it’s a wonderful way to really tell the story of the institution through your own personal journey and your own personal story.

Drumm McNaughton: And students there can relate to you that much more, I would say, because you are an alumnus.

Michael Avaltroni: Yes. It’s very easy when I say I know I’ve sat in your seat, and genuinely mean it quite literally in some cases that it’s the same seat in the same classroom. So it’s fun, and it’s also for me, it’s a nostalgia journey in so many ways. There are times where I’ll get into the office early, and I’ll be walking in buildings and remember things that were the places where I had first year orientation or a certain class.

So it’s a wonderful way to continue to really kind of build on that legacy and build on your past, but build for the future, and I think that’s the thing that frankly higher education wants and needs to do now more than ever.

Drumm McNaughton: Oh, I would agree with that.

[00:05:18] Higher Ed at a Crossroads

Drumm McNaughton: Let’s go down that path a little bit. Higher education needing to build. You’ll hear a lot of folks saying that the model, the higher ed model is broken. What does that mean to you?

[00:05:31] Burning Platform Change

Michael Avaltroni: So it’s something that I say regularly and I think it’s always with the caveat of the, I think, the optimistic “but…”, I would say. I do think the fundamental model of higher education, what it was built for, is gone and not returning. However, I think higher education has a place that’s probably more important now than ever.

And we’re in this burning platform moment, right? We have to face and acknowledge that we have to do something and do something quickly because the harsh realities that we face are, whether it’s financially or whether it’s programmatically or whether it’s, in some cases, reputationally, we need to change the story about what higher education is and what it can do.

So for us, we’ve said, what if this was the time where we embraced the chaos and embraced the burning platform and said, “Let’s take this opportunity to do something that’s so difficult in higher education,” which is to invoke radical change, think very differently about who we are and who we want to be, and really redefine our university as a journey of lifelong learning rather than a four-year degree.

Drumm McNaughton: I’ve heard that before. Michael Crow, lifelong learning. If anybody wants to look to an innovator, it’s Michael.

Michael Avaltroni: Yes.

Drumm McNaughton: Your first name’s Michael too, so it could be interchangeable. We’ll see.

Michael Avaltroni: Good company, to keep. But he’s, I think, articulated really a lot of the value of lifelong learning through the generations, and it’s something that we really aspire to do.

[00:06:58] The Four Ps Framework

Michael Avaltroni: I’ve started to define in talking about our vision for the future, this university of the future model that I oftentimes link to four Ps.

I link it to thinking about the programs, the people, the partnerships, and the place. The programs is sort of the intuitively obvious. What will we offer and what should we offer for a new generation of students?

[00:07:19] Programs Health Focus

Michael Avaltroni: For us, we really decided to lean heavily into an area that actually was a passion project of mine from day one when we started exploring the creation of our pharmacy school, which is largely looking at health, health adjacent, and professionally focused programs.

And I’m always deliberate about creating these sort of concentric circles because I think it’s important for us to articulate that our value proposition, we believe, is not just building future clinicians. Certainly, we want to do that, and there’s great demand and need for that, but we also want to think about health adjacency in defining healthcare finance, healthcare entrepreneurship, aspects of cybersecurity, engineering, hospitality, all programs that we already have in our portfolio, and thinking about this sort of recalibration of the lens of view with regard to the opportunities to really redefine, in many respects, what we want as our sort of calling card.

[00:08:15] Finding a Specialization

Michael Avaltroni: What is our specialization? Because I think the challenge in higher education is we’ve tried to be everything to everyone, and in so doing, we oftentimes don’t create scale and don’t create a sustainable business model. So the programmatic side, we feel good about our direction, and we’ve done a lot of work to really align ourselves.

The people side becomes something more important.

[00:08:36] People Five Generations

Drumm McNaughton: So we’ve talked about programs, we’ve talked about people to some degree, let’s dive a little more into the people because aren’t the students different now? It’s not your, just your traditional 18 to 24-year-old.

You’re looking at multiple generations at the university at any given time.

Michael Avaltroni: Yes. So our desire for that sort of second P of people is to think about five generations of learning that happens concurrently on our campus. Your traditional college-age students are, of course, one of those generations, and we know that that will always be a core business for us and most other institutions as well.

The aspects of pre-college learning, whether it’s high schools, two-year college gateway programs, other types of even pre-high school programs to begin, in particular in healthcare workforce, starting to acclimate students to the opportunities in healthcare creates great opportunities for these pathway programs.

We then think about a third generation of early career individuals who are looking to climb that career ladder from their first degree onto a management degree or something in the C-suite or something on the trajectory upward in that sort of mobility process. We then think of a fourth generation of people who, in the advent of AI and much of the displacement that we know is occurring, will want to reinvent themselves in some way that they are probably not retirement ready but might be concerned about reaching the finish line in their current role.

And then that fifth generation is one that we’ve actually had programming in that I think has been oftentimes, I would say, rather unstrategic, but a real tremendous opportunity, and that’s older adults and retired individuals, engaging them in sort of programming that allows them to be part of the vitality of a college campus that we know is such a place of dynamic learning and living and community, and really thinking about that as the definition of the people part of our five-generation continuum.

Drumm McNaughton: That, that makes so much sense. What comes to mind is an institution like Harvard, who has the new university presidents programs that people go through, and other things along those lines. What I see you doing is expanding those out so you have the equivalent for, moving up into the C-suite, but you also have lifelong learning in there as well.

[00:11:05] Mentorship Across Ages

Drumm McNaughton: And the beauty of having folks like that, those, that elder generation, is they can serve as mentors to the younger generation. Does that make sense?

Michael Avaltroni: It’s such a wonderful two-way opportunity, right? An older adult has the opportunity to be a mentor and invest in the life of a young person, and in the same way, that very same individual has the experience of being part of a community and staying off things like isolation and loneliness and other aspects that we know are concerns with the aging process.

And it sort of brings us, as you mentioned, into the other two Ps, if you will, the partnerships and place.

[00:11:43] Partnerships with Industry

Michael Avaltroni: For us, partnerships, as you said, is a lot around developing corporate programming, really thinking strategically about how do we embed educational opportunities in the corporate environment, in a business-to-business arrangement.

Thinking about it and building partnerships, whether it’s with a health system, whether it’s with a corporation where we’re currently running programs with Merck, Novartis, Fiserv, Barclays bank, delivering these on-site programs, whether it’s an MBA or leadership training or others, but doing it in this sort of curated fashion.

And so that creates a lot of the opportunities to build this sort of curated partnership ecosystem. And then the last piece is the place.

[00:12:23] Who Teaches Corporate Courses

Drumm McNaughton: Let me, interrupt you here real quickly because you just brought up something I think is incredibly important, this partnership with business. This is a very new model for most higher ed institutions. It sounds like you’re doing it well. Who are teaching these seminars? Who are teaching these programs for your corporate partners?

Are they faculty?

Michael Avaltroni: We do. We have a combination of our own faculty who are o- out and many times going on site to deliver one night a week or one day a week to a corporate partner, consortium or a kind of cohort. There are also ways where we deputize, if you will, or essentially position folks who are currently in the organization who would be phenomenal in their expertise.

Someone who is, the VP of HR teaching a course on human resource management is a very powerful way, and in some cases, team teaching it alongside a faculty member really creates this robust experience that’s so really true to the true aspects of the textbook and the practice all being married into one.

Drumm McNaughton: Yes. So how do your faculty get up to speed on the latest thing? You’re talking about something from a traditional institution that’s very radical, is faculty taking input from the outside or actually working there. As an adjunct, you kind of expect that type of thing, but if you’re tenured faculty or full-time with a research agenda, et cetera, you generally don’t see that kind of thing going on.

Michael Avaltroni: Yes.

[00:13:58] Advisory Councils and Execs

Michael Avaltroni: It’s one of the ways we’ve really put to great value our advisory councils that we formed for each of our colleges. So we have a business advisory board or advisory council that’s made up of many of our alums, many of whom are in leadership positions right now or retired leaders. We’ve created a faculty executive in residence type of program that allows folks to be essentially brought on who are retired corporate leaders to be essentially mentors to our students, but also in some cases mentors to our faculty.

Because much of what we always know in the academy is the challenge of many people who have deep learning and deep research in an area, but in many cases lack that sort of continuum of experience and the actual practical real world. When you marry up that deep research experience with someone who lives it day in and day out, it’s a powerful combination, and it’s really the very best of higher education and how it should work, which is taking the practices and the research and the learnings and applying them to the field in the real time and real world application in sort of the day to day in a corporate setting.

Drumm McNaughton: And I would imagine by doing this, what you’re actually preparing the students, now not your corporate partners’ students, but your actual students who this faculty member’s teaching, you’re giving them more real world experience, knowledge, that type of thing, so there’s less of a learning curve when they graduate.

Does that make sense?

Michael Avaltroni: Yes, 100%, couldn’t agree more. And really because we’re in this health adjacent professional focus, the experiential components are critical, and in many cases, they are fundamentally built into the curriculum, right? You’re not going to get a degree in nursing without having robust experience.

I would argue the same should hold true in business, and the same should hold true in engineering, and the same should hold true that you want this real aspect of marrying up what you’re learning in the classroom with what you’re applying in real time in the day-to-day applications, whether it’s patient fa- facing or consumer facing or whatever it is that you’re looking to do with your life.

Drumm McNaughton: Yes.

[00:16:12] Learn While You Earn

Drumm McNaughton: The best example of this that I have heard of is Paul Quinn College in Texas. Their first two years, they’ve purposely kept their tuition low. The students’ first two years, they’re actually working for the university, and part of that salary goes into their tuition. The second two years, the junior, senior year, they’re working with their corporate partners in meaningful jobs, and they’re earning a salary from them.

They’re getting that experience so when they graduate, they already know what they need to know. It’s not like the typical internship, and I’m being a little pejorative here. The typical internship where you’re there just to bring coffee or whatever to your boss. You’re getting meaningful work and meaningful jobs.

Michael Avaltroni: For sure, and I think it’s one of the things we’ve started to really create this learn while you earn platform that we built in partnership with some of our local health systems that’s bidirectional in nature. It can be our students embedded and working at an entry level job while they climb that career ladder, but it goes the other way of taking folks who potentially are current employees in the health system and helping them to climb their way through the ranks while the individual is retained in their current workplace.

Because as we know, one of the challenges right now in the healthcare workforce is finding talent and then keeping talent. So if you can build these sort of career ladders that are true in fashion of being able to provide upward mobility, increased earning potential, but doing it, as you said, embedded with the experiential components that are real application based and not just I’m shadowing somebody a few hours a day, it really creates this immersive environment where everyone wins.

The health system wins because they have someone currently working for them in a place where they have need. They can retain this person for the long term. We, of course, win because we have students in all different populations and all different backgrounds that might not find us otherwise, and most of all, the student wins because they’re getting this career laddering, and in many cases, the health system is paying for it along the way through a tuition remission program as well.

So it’s a really a wonderful opportunity for that student to take that journey and to do it, in many cases, fully paid for and while they’re able to earn a salary.

Drumm McNaughton: Yes. And the beauty of it, the partnerships, it’s not just a one-way partnership. It’s, it’s not just you guys going out and teaching courses at the executive level or whatever. It’s also a partnership for your students and for your faculty to raise their skills, their knowledge, et cetera.

So the partnership in itself is a complex word, but what you’ve done is spread it out in a very holistic fashion. Kudos to you.

Michael Avaltroni: Thank you.

[00:19:02] Curated Partner Ecosystem

Michael Avaltroni: And my goal is, I’ve started to use this term, in defining when we talk about partnerships, I would love to create on our campuses a curated partner ecosystem, right? And I use those words very carefully. Curated because we don’t need to do it all. We don’t need to own it all. It can truly be an aspect where we’re sort of the gathering point.

The partnership is everyone there, and the ecosystem is thinking about every person that’s coming to the table bringing something different, right? Whether it’s a high school, a community college, another four-year institution, a healthcare organization, a corporation, all of them coming with the value that they bring so that the sum becomes greater than its parts.

Drumm McNaughton: So we’ve talked about programs, we’ve talked about people, we’ve talked really in depth about partnerships. The last one of your four is place.

Michael Avaltroni: Yes.

[00:19:54] Place Rethinking Campuses

Michael Avaltroni: So we have a very unique opportunity because we are an unusual, I would say, higher education institution in that we have two campuses just, I always joke, far enough apart to be inconvenient. So we don’t have a main and branch. We don’t have a student body that commutes back and forth. It’s a solid 30 miles of new Jersey traffic between the two, so anywhere between 40 minutes or an hour.

So students really are not fungible, but we have these tremendous assets. We also have a campus in Vancouver, British Columbia, that has about 800 students enrolled there, most of them at the current time international students because the generous policy of learning and then immigrating into Canada. But the two New Jersey campuses are a very unique asset for us.

We’ve always oftentimes been challenged to say, how do we resource both? How do we address deferred maintenance on both, capital improvements on both? But what we now see is that we have this asset of real estate that we’re sitting on, 175 acres on a restored Vanderbilt estate in Morris County, New Jersey, which I believe is second or third most affluent county in America.

It also is a direct train line into New York City, so it’s a real asset. Our other campus is in Bergen County, which is the most densely populated county in America. It is, in fact, 90 acres on the Hackensack River, about 10 minutes from the foot of the George Washington Bridge.

[00:21:22] Impact City and Community

Michael Avaltroni: So we’ve started to say, “What if we rethought what a college campus can be?”

Reimagined it to not just be a bunch of buildings that you kind of come to if you’re invited in, but actually thought of them as really a community asset, and defined this concept of what we oftentimes I define it as sort of the impact city, which is the triangulation of the aspects of education, aspects of health and whole person wellbeing, and aspects of community or neighborhood or place.

What we know now more than ever is that the value that a higher education campus once had is no longer relevant. It used to be the place you would come to consume knowledge or to get access to books or resources. Knowledge is ubiquitous and everywhere. Instead, what I believe the value is to bring together this aspect of learning and community, and think about ways we could define that by essentially redefining our campuses around aspects of intergenerational living, having university-based retirement assets alongside our student housing, alongside early career housing, and aspects of all of these folks really kind of cross-pollinating, if you will, with ideas and energy.

And then connecting that with our programming, connecting that with the aspects of health that we are threading through our programming and our curriculum, and really make them into essentially these prototype villages that we create where a lot of innovation, a lot of collaboration, and a lot of living and learning together becomes a part of really the story of our campuses.

Similarly, we’ll be doing that in Vancouver, but doing it in a very different way for a very different audience and a very different perspective. But we feel like the value there is creating a real asset in what we know people are struggling with now more than ever within the wave of technology that’s come.

We know that now people are more connected than ever, have more access to information than ever, yet they suffer more than ever from loneliness, isolation, and mental health challenges. We believe creating community in creating this aspect of living and learning together brings great value to being on a campus and making it a true asset for the communities that we’re in and the communities that surround us.

Drumm McNaughton: I’ve only heard one campus, and I know there are others and I just haven’t heard of them, but there’s only one campus that I know, Cal State San Marcos, who has this kind of mixed living retail spaces. They built apartments, et cetera. This adds a whole nother level of complexity to an institution though, does it not?

Michael Avaltroni: It does. It adds a whole lever- level of complexity and a whole level of opportunity, right? The complexity is now you’ve got essentially a mini city, and I think this is one of the things that we’re quickly learning. This is where we need, as a higher ed institution, to understand our role and our place.

I think we’ve struggled as an industry to try and be everything to everyone, right? We manage food services and dining and public safety. The reality is a college campus is a city, and we’ve tried to manage all of the assets ourselves. I think the future involves us owning what we do well, which is education, and allowing this partnership of others coming to bring their value, whether it’s a healthcare entity coming and embedding their healthcare programming, whether it’s someone who manages long-term care or a senior living or others coming and doing that.

And we’ll bring our strengths, you bring yours, and then the opportunities that abound are so abundant because you have the ability in a retirement community to embed programming where you actually have the retired living component alongside student housing and create collaborative programming, create mentoring opportunities, create all of these aspects where just the serendipity of connection leads to so much opportunity to grow, right?

And I think for our own students at 18, how much more valuable, as we said, to be sitting on a bench next to someone who is two generations above them that can be sharing some life experience. And for that person that’s two generations above, how dynamic an environment when you’re going for a walk on a given day to see students going to and from classes, to go and take in an athletic event, to take in a performance, just to take advantage of the very best of what a college campus can be, and to have it as essentially your clubhouse, and to be a part of that, and to be in some respects additive to it as well.

Drumm McNaughton: Yes. That’s neat. So those are the four Ps: programs, people, partnership, and place. And I have to say, there’s some real innovative thinking going into those, so kudos to you and your team for that.

Michael Avaltroni: Appreciate that. Thank you very much.

Drumm McNaughton: I’m going to double back to something that you said just a little bit ago about how higher ed can’t be all things to all people.

I think you’re spot on, but you surprised me with the language you used early on in our conversation. You talked about value proposition, which is not something that unless you come out of a marketing department in a college of business, you generally talk about. So how did you decide on what the value proposition is for Fairleigh Dickinson?

Michael Avaltroni: I think for us, it really comes back to creating I, I would say in many respects, it, and a trueness to our founding identity. I would start there. We were created and we were defined, the founder of the university, Peter Sammartino, wrote a book called Community College in Action, and it was not meant at the time that community college is thought of now as a two-year institution.

It was meant to be a college that was created of and for the communities it served. And I think in many respects we’ve run from those roots because many people don’t resonate with that. Their own experience was much more in the sort of traditions of a liberal arts institution or others. We’ve started to realize that there’s great value in creating opportunities within the communities that we’re in for the workforce that’s needed, and it, it creates great opportunity both to address the needs of the community, but to also address the opportunities for individuals.

So for us, really what it meant was looking at who are we and also where is the workforce of the future going? And frankly, it’s not a profound statement to say that we know that the disruptions of AI are going to create, in many respects, opportunities that we’ve not yet defined, but are going to create some huge challenges with many different labor markets.

One of the things we feel really good ab- about is that leaning into these health verticals, we feel like the future is very bright and in some respects brighter than ever for building a healthcare workforce. And we’re starting to think about even how do we build that healthcare workforce, not just to be able to live within the means of AI, but to actually be empowered by AI.

And so in many respects we said, let’s look at our identity as a community-serving organization. Let’s look at our strength with regard to defining these health programs, knowing the massive growth that we’re seeing across the industry in health careers. And then let’s look at the identity of how do you position these health careers to be aligned with the oncoming wave of technology?

And that’s been a lot of the work that we’ve created around this concept we call Humanics, which is looking at how do we train particularly the healthcare workforce of the future, training them to be truly human and embrace their humanity while completely having the opportunity to leverage technology and data to the fullest.

Thinking about people who are technologically literate, data literate, and human literate, understanding their role as being empathic, being creative, being good communicators, being people who are critical thinkers, and being people who are effective at being able to deliver care culturally and personally in a way that only humans can do.

If we can build that sort of as the blueprint for the healthcare workforce of the future, they’ll never be replaced by AI. They will only be enhanced by it, and they will be more effective than ever as caregivers when caregiving becomes a truly human-to-human interaction.

Drumm McNaughton: Yes. Very, very well said, and very critical. The AAC&U top characteristics, you just mentioned pretty much all of them. So there’s one other piece that I think is really important for us to talk about today is shared governance. You’ve implemented a lot of these changes over the last three years, and I suspect the basis for those was there before.

But with any kind of institution who has faculty, you have shared governance. Yours is a pretty good model for shared governance. Tell us about it, how it works.

Michael Avaltroni: Yes, we’re really proud of what we’ve kind of created in true collaboration. The first thing I would say is I, and I, I always say this from the perspective of I lived it myself as a student. We have incredible faculty who are truly caring about our students and really genuinely here for the right reasons, really see- seeing our students succeed and being part of that transformational journey.

So that makes the job a lot easier to start because you have people who are here and really bought into the vision of what we’re about, right? And I think that’s been helpful. So as we’ve invoked a number of changes, and many of them have been things like program discontinuation of programs that were low enroll, we’ve really brought faculty along for the journey.

We’ve done it from a data-driven approach where we’ve said, “Here is the evidence, and here’s why we’re deciding to explore what we’re exploring. Help us to come to terms with these decisions.” So much so that when we went through and we put together a list of a significant list of programs that we would be discontinuing or in some way consolidating, we brought it to faculty referendum, and I believe it was endorsed by about 88% of the faculty overall, which there are most things on campus that you can’t get 88% agreement on.

So I think that’s a tremendous testament to them and to their character and understanding of the vision. We’ve also created this shared governance model that we feel it’s important to understand that shared governance is really the community at large sharing in the ownership, that it’s truly important to have the faculty perspective, and it is a valuable asset for us to be able to listen and understand to the faculty’s thinking as the sort of boots on the ground, if you will, interacting with students.

But we also know that shared governance should include our support staff in many different academic areas. Keeping in mind that while a student may spend 15 or 18 hours in class each week, if they’re living on campus, they spend 100 with other members of the community, whether it’s a staff member or an RA or the person in the dining hall who’s serving them their lunch, right?

It’s important to get the perspectives of all, and it’s also important to remember that this views and the voice of the student is a part of the aspects of shared governance as well. It doesn’t mean that they have an outsized voice in saying, “We want to do away with this class,” or, “We don’t think we need to take that exam,” or anything else.

But it means understanding this 360 view, that we are in fact a community, and it goes back to the core value of who we are. That if we want to truly be a university that’s of and for the community, we need to understand who is our community, how do we listen to and respect their voice, and how do we come to, in some cases, consensus around what’s best for all, understanding that we won’t always get it right, but understanding that we’re always listening.

Drumm McNaughton: Yes. And that is the most critical trait for any university president or any leader, is the ability and the willingness to listen.

Michael Avaltroni: Yes. It’s the most valuable piece, and it’s frankly, it’s the piece that in many respects is the point that I think makes the job most joyful, right? I’ve said, I think I’ve shared with a lot of people over the last couple of years, when this becomes just a job, I should find something else to do, right?

That there is a reality for what we do, and it comes through loudest when we’re really listening to the voices of those who we serve and those who we know are on this transformational journey, right? To listen to the story of a student that’s sacrificed everything to be here. To listen to the voices of the faculty members who are teaching the students and engaging them and hearing what the experience is like and how we can do better.

And getting all of these perspectives to understand that we should treat our institutions like a living, breathing organism, right? Always changing and evolving and growing and never satisfied with the traditions or the status quo. Now more than ever, if we’re not adapting, we are truly not just falling behind, we’re falling obsolete.

Drumm McNaughton: Yes don’t fall back on the old saying that we used to have in the Navy, “250 years of tradition unmarred by progress.”

Michael Avaltroni: Yes. Sometimes it feels that way. It feels like there are a lot of parallels, and I think we’ve got to change that mindset. The entrepreneurial and innovative institutions will thrive, and those that are holding on tight I think don’t have a future. And I used to say but for a few.

I’m not sure we can even say that anymore. I think every institution, no matter their current standing, needs to continue to move forward and rethink what higher education can be.

Drumm McNaughton: Mission-driven, student-focused. There’s no other way to say it.

Michael Avaltroni: That’s at the core. That’s, that will do well by you, and if you deviate from that, you won’t be long for the future.

[00:35:38] Three Takeaways for Presidents and Boards

Drumm McNaughton: As we wrap up, three takeaways for presidents and boards. How do other institutions leverage what you’ve done at Fairleigh Dickinson to evolve their own institutions?

Michael Avaltroni: I think the first thing I would say is know who you are. Don’t try and be like everyone else. Don’t try and be the institution you graduated from or you did your doctoral training at. Be the institution that you’re called to be, to serve the students that you’re called to serve. That’s number one.

Number two, is really think, in an entrepreneurial, innovative way about what higher education can be, that I think the days of linking it to four years of time-driven, time dependent, hours logged towards a degree, I think that day has come and gone, and I think thinking much more creatively about the future and how we deliver true lifelong learning as a value proposition.

I often say the best scenario would be creating higher education as a subscription-based model for life. Thinking about you come, you become a member, and you never leave.

And then the third thing I think is be bold. I think that we’re going to see that fortune will favor the brave in this space, right?

Those who just try and nibble around the edges and tweak a little bit here and there and say, “Well, we don’t want to do this. That seems too far for us,” I think you’re going to regret it, right? I’ve said we want to take a big swing and if we’re off the mark a little bit, we can adjust course. But I do think the best scenario and the best outcome for us is to think boldly, and in some cases, with the rate of change in the world, we may find that we weren’t bold enough even when we thought we were.

And I think that sort of courage in leadership, I think, is what’s sorely needed in higher education today.

Drumm McNaughton: Very much so. And I’m going to add one more to that. Bring everybody along. It’s a holistic process.

Michael Avaltroni: Could not agree more. I think the key is you don’t want… What do they say? If you go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. I think that’s an African proverb that I resonate on very regularly. You never want to be running and turn around and realize that you’ve left everyone behind.

I think the goal is do it as a team.

Drumm McNaughton: Yes, very much.

What’s next for you, Michael? Or what’s next for FDU?

Michael Avaltroni: I think we continue to really feel good about the future and really leaning into this identity. The next big piece for us, we feel, in order for us to successfully build the university of the future, is going to require us to begin reimagining the campus of the future. So a lot of that work is underway right now.

We’re excited about some of the conversations we’re having because we feel like there’s such opportunity to build partnerships through some of the strategies on our campuses in collaboration and some of the work that we can do with other partners. So it’s a lot of building some healthcare partnerships that are really run deep and really run in, in multiple streams, and in building some of these opportunities on our campuses to begin the creation of this vision.

So a lot of this, I think, next year or so will become from the concept into the implementation. And so that’s, I think, where it’s, it gets exciting and it gets a little bit tricky. But I think for us it’s this move from the vision place, which I feel good about, to really beginning to implement that vision in very tangible and very visible ways.

Drumm McNaughton: That’s fabulous. And as I recall, there was a pretty famous author who said, “Anybody can have a great idea. You put your smartest people on the implementation to make sure that it works.” And I have a feeling that’s exactly what you’re going to do.

Michael Avaltroni: Yes. Well, we appreciate that. That’s the key is it’s always when the rubber meets the road, right? For sure.

Drumm McNaughton: That’s it. Michael, it’s been a pleasure talking with you today. Thank you for being on the show. I look forward to the next time our paths cross.

Michael Avaltroni: It’s been a pleasure. It was wonderful talking with you.

Drumm McNaughton: Thank you.

Thanks for listening today, and my special thank you to my guest, Michael Avaltroni. Michael, thanks for being on the program. I very much enjoyed our conversation. I look forward to the next time our paths cross.

To my listeners, thanks for tuning in. See you next week.