Improving Public University Systems at Scale:

Changing Higher Ed podcast 232 with Dr. Drumm McNaughton and guest James R. Johnsen

Transcript: Changing Higher Ed Podcast 232 – Dr. Drumm McNaughton and Jim Johnsen 

Improving Public University Systems at Scale: How to improve system operations, governance, and effectiveness

[00:00:30] Drumm McNaughton: Thank you, David. My guest today is Jim Johnsen, Vice President of Executive Search for Greenwood Asher & Associates and former President of the University of Alaska System. Jim’s new book, “Public University Systems: Leveraging Scale in Higher Education”, offers a fresh look on how public university systems can challenge access, affordability, and workforce development by leveraging their scale, potentially sparking changes that can transform the country’s education system.

[00:01:02] Drumm McNaughton: Jim’s no stranger to changing in higher ed. He was President of the University of Alaska System when Alaska’s governor massively cut its budget. And Jim shares with us some of the challenge that they faced, along with his and my perspectives, on how to make higher ed systems more sustainable and better meet the needs of today’s and future students.

[00:01:23] Drumm McNaughton: Jim, welcome to the program.

[00:01:25] Jim Johnsen: Thank you Drumm. It’s great to be here.

[00:01:27] Drumm McNaughton: I am so looking forward to our conversation. You just released a new book called “Public University Systems, Leveraging Scale in Higher Education”, and this focuses on a lot of the work that you did when you were the President of the University of Alaska system.

[00:01:46] Drumm McNaughton: Before we get into that, give us a little bit about your background so our listeners know who you are as a person.

[00:01:53] Jim Johnsen: Okay. Thank you Drumm, I appreciate this opportunity. I was born in Germany, an Army brat, so moved everywhere there were tanks. My dad was from California, so I ended up going to college there and then got really interested, frankly, because of the Vietnam War and wondering why my dad was deployed a couple of times, and that got me into politics. How do people make decisions? How do organizations make decisions? And studied that through school and, after my undergraduate experience, I went off to graduate school. And after my first year, decided to go visit my college girlfriend in Alaska and stayed there. Worked in state government for a number of years. Finished up my master’s at the University of Chicago via, mailed them a paper basically. And then got really interested in labor relations and went to work for the University of Minnesota as its chief labor negotiator and back to Alaska. All in, 35 years in Alaska with time in the private sector in a telecom, also an Alaskan native corporation running the administrative side of those companies and also had a similar role in the University of Alaska system.

[00:03:02] Jim Johnsen: And then in, I guess it was 2015, became President of the University of Alaska and did that for five years, and then became a senior fellow for the National Association of System Heads, thinking about systems and their importance, including beginning this book at that time. And then in the last couple of years, I’ve been an executive with Greenwood Asher, a higher education executive search firm.

[00:03:24] Jim Johnsen: This book is really my side hustle, I guess you will. I really love to have my feet both in the arena and in the world of action, but also at the same time, I like to be up on the balcony, observing and thinking about the larger patterns.

[00:03:40] Drumm McNaughton: That’s a fascinating background. You and I have talked a little bit about my background as well, having both military background, corporate background, and higher education. Your background reminds me of a good friend of mine, Brit Kerwin, who says, when he went for his undergraduate at Kentucky, he tells folks, “I went to university and I just never left”.

[00:04:03] Jim Johnsen: The way I put it is it just took me a long time to get it. Yeah.

[00:04:07] Drumm McNaughton: I get that one as well. You just published the book and I know you’re working on , the second in your, they all come out in threes, don’t they? So you just published the book “Public University Systems: Leveraging Scale in Higher Education”.

[00:04:24] Drumm McNaughton: Give us a little background on the book. Why did you decide to write it and we’re gonna get into all sorts of stuff, what were some of the learnings that you had?

[00:04:32] Jim Johnsen: Yeah. Why did I write it? One is I was keenly interested in the “why” of public university systems because they’re so prevalent, so important across the country, and because I worked in them and tried to lead in them, I was particularly interested in the “how” as well. But there’s very little in the literature about it, very little. In fact, interestingly, it was roughly 50 years ago, this year, when two important works were done on university systems, when the iconic university system had Clark Kerr left the University of California and went to work for the Carnegie Commission, he led a couple of studies of systems. And years later, I had the great occasion to be a visiting scholar at Berkeley. At Clark Kerr’s invitations I spent time with him. So got very interested in systems, but noticed there was very little about them written. So that’s one reason, I wanted to really pull together the best brains I could on systems to document current thinking and to think about practical ways that systems could deal with their many challenges.

[00:05:48] Jim Johnsen: The second thing, there wasn’t much known about these systems. At the same time, they’re incredibly prevalent and they’re the dominant paradigm for how states govern, coordinate, public higher education in their states. 44 of the 50 states use systems. 75 percent of America’s college students are in these systems. So I thought, “Wow, these things are really important. They’re powerful. They’re big. And yet we don’t know much about them”. And frankly, many of the people who are in leadership roles in these systems haven’t been trained to think holistically, to understand the unique ability of systems, university systems, to leverage their scale, to accomplish really important political, social, and economic goals of their states.

[00:06:40] Jim Johnsen: So that really was the impetus for this book. I went to Johns Hopkins University Press to publish it and they peer reviewed the proposal and it passed, and then I got to work recruiting the authors, editing all their chapters. And it was really a fun process, but logistically it was a challenge, I assure you.

[00:06:58] Jim Johnsen: But it’s very gratifying to have it out here now which gives me the ability to have great conversations with you.

[00:07:04] Drumm McNaughton: I appreciate that. I am curious, how does one get trained to be a system President or a system Chancellor. They’re in 44 different states, but when I look at it and I look at Brit’s career, he was the President of the University of Maryland, College Park, at Ohio State, and then they pulled him back to be the Chancellor of the Maryland system of universities, 12 different universities and colleges.

[00:07:33] Drumm McNaughton: How does one get that training to be able to look big picture, versus the big picture for a smaller university? How does that happen?

[00:07:44] Jim Johnsen: That’s a great question and there are lots of different paths.

[00:07:47] Jim Johnsen: One of the authors in the book and a great, expert on university systems has said, quote, when you’ve seen one university system, you’ve seen one university system, close quote. Dennis Jones, a tremendous man and somebody who’s worked in all 50 states and all of the systems in the country. So there are probably as many paths. Probably the most dominant path is someone who was like Brit, who was the head of a flagship campus, and what the head of a flagship campus gets the experience of doing is, one, leading a very complex organization when you think about professional schools, medical centers, et cetera. Second aspect of that is the political role, working with state and federal agencies, particularly again in a flagship university. In a university system that doesn’t have a flagship, doesn’t have a medical school, et cetera, those kinds of experiences are not gonna be as common, because there’s already a system head taking care of the politics and, taking care of those issues. So I think that’s well trod path.

[00:08:54] Jim Johnsen: Another is coming up through a system as I did. I came up through a system, left for the private sector and then came back, frankly intending to come back in my plan. Leaving the system was to go out and learn business and work in business and really discover from the business side what the needs of the state were with respect to workforce, with respect to business development and innovation, and those sorts of things.

[00:09:25] Jim Johnsen: So came back with that sort of more rounded experience. Often they come from political organizations because so much of the role is political, and sometimes they come from business, but, there is no one path. I would say the skills one picks up in terms of financial savviness, being politically adept, understanding how to work with a board, how to work with political leaders. Those that’s the basic skill set, but to also be able to see across a complex organization, whether it’s a campus or a system, and see where complementarity might be. Where focus can take place, where unnecessary redundancy, and not all redundancy is unnecessary, but where unnecessary redundancy can be, frankly, eliminated and the organization can build on its strengths to meet the needs of those outside of the organization, because that’s the primary mission of these institutions. Yes, they need to serve their own interest to some extent, but ultimately to succeed, they need to fulfill a mission on behalf of society as a whole. And so I think somebody who can do that.

[00:10:44] Drumm McNaughton: Particularly the states in which they are, it’s like you said, when you’ve seen one system, you’ve seen one system. They all, every state, we’ve got 50 states, at least that was the last time I counted them, I could be wrong on that. But when you’ve got so many different states doing things different ways, you basically in one thing, you need to break it down into the types of systems you have, and I think you did this very well. Tell us about the different types of systems and from there, we’re going to get down into some of how does a system Chancellor system President work to solve problems.

[00:11:27] Jim Johnsen: 44 of the 50 states have them and the systems, in some states there’s one system, in other states, Texas I believe, has seven systems. They’re all unique. They do share some characteristics, and I’ll talk about those in just a second, but they really reflect the unique histories, geography, culture, economics, location of their states. So it’s reasonable to expect them to be different. But you can classify them or characterize them to some extent.

[00:11:59] Jim Johnsen: One way is are they homogenous or heterogenous in terms of their mission. So an example of an homogenous system, that is, every institution in the system has a very similar or the same mission, would be two examples would be the University of California system, where all of the campuses are research and doctoral universities, so they, they share a mission, they share a board, they share lots of things there. Another example of an homogenous system would be the California State University system. In fact, now that I think of it, all three systems in California are homogenous, the community college system as well. So they each have their own mission and purpose with many institutions in them.

[00:12:50] Jim Johnsen: So that creates a certain dynamic in terms of governance that’s different from heterogeneous systems, which include institutions of different missions. The SUNY system, State University of New York system, for example, has research universities to community colleges. Wisconsin is similar. Hawaii is similar. Alaska, to some extent, is similar. And that creates some interesting opportunities in terms of transition and articulation of students from one segment of higher education to another segment, but it also creates some really challenging decisions for boards because they have to allocate resources differently to those missions, which some overlap, but they’re different.

[00:13:41] Jim Johnsen: Research university, it’s really the faculty are different than the faculty at a community college.

[00:13:47] Drumm McNaughton: Really, I never would have guessed. Sorry, I couldn’t resist that one. And in these heterogeneous systems, some of them have one board. Some of them have multiple boards. University of Hawaii has one board for the 10 institutions in that system. I think I’m remembering that correctly,

[00:14:12] Jim Johnsen: That’s correct.

[00:14:13] Drumm McNaughton: But you’ve got others that have multiple boards. How do you get, and is there, I’m asking for a generalization and I’m sure there isn’t one. Is there generally a system board and then each school has its own board or is it just a free for all and all the boards have to work, with the legislatures?

[00:14:36] Jim Johnsen: It’s, it varies. I’d say the dominant paradigm is one board over multiple institutions in the system. There are exceptions. A good exception would be Florida, and in Florida there are 12 universities in their state university system. There’s a board of governors overseeing the entire system, and then each one of the universities in the system has a board of trustees. And the way they’ve set it up there is they’ve differentiated the roles and responsibilities between the boards of trustees at the university level and the board of governors at the system level. So all of that is laid out in statute in Florida. So that’s an example.

[00:15:22] Jim Johnsen: Another variant of this is states with a governing board over the system and a coordinating board on top of it. So a board that it doesn’t govern, but it does studies. It assesses workforce needs in the state. It might advise the governor and the legislature on the system budget requests and that’s done for several reasons. One is to provide a check, if you will, or a capacity for state level policymakers to allocate resources in a way that’s best for the state and not solely in the interest of the university system as articulated by the university system. So that model is out there as well. But typically the system will interact directly with the governor, the system leadership, and legislators. And in some states, they allow the campus chancellors or presidents, depending upon the state, different titles, to interact with legislators as well. But typically the single point of contact. between a university system and state elected officials is the system head, system office.

[00:16:36] Drumm McNaughton: And it’s interesting because here in New Mexico you have, multiple public institutions. There is no quote system here. And each of the presidents of the universities have their own board of trustees or board of regents. And they’re going up to the legislature to bargain for resources. So in some ways it leaves it up to the legislature to say, “okay, university of New Mexico, you’re going to get X number of dollars for this area. For New Mexico state university, you’re going to get Y dollars”, but you’re competing in the same areas, so what do we do about that? It seems to me like a bit of a free for all, and it puts the legislatures in a position where they’re having to make decisions based on input that they may or may not understand.

[00:17:34] Jim Johnsen: I think that’s, that is the case in states without systems. So New Mexico or Michigan are examples. And then states with multiple systems, right? So there’s going to be that advocacy. Now a state with multiple systems, I mentioned Texas, with seven systems, they have a coordinating board. And so that coordinating board is really in charge of state level planning so that when the systems go to the legislature for resources, the legislature can rely to some extent on the work that coordinating body has done.

[00:18:15] Jim Johnsen: But you’re absolutely right, one of the big reasons why legislatures have established systems is to create that integrating, consolidating organization that may buffer them from direct interaction and having to make those difficult “yes or no” choices favoring one university over another. They’ve created this system that has the responsibility with a board that has a responsibility for allocating the state appropriation to the institutions based on their unique knowledge and their closer knowledge of what’s going on and what the needs are on the campuses.

[00:18:58] Drumm McNaughton: So I think at this point it’s important for listeners to understand the hierarchy of this because you’ve got governors, you’ve got your legislators, employers, community leaders, you’ve got systems leaders, boards, presidents. Each one should be responsible for a certain role. For example, when we talked yesterday, we talked about governors. Their responsibility should be, “what’s the vision for the state’s future and what should the goals for higher education be for that state to realize that vision”? Talk us through those, if you would.

[00:19:36] Jim Johnsen: Yeah, and I wish it were the case in more states that governors had visions for their states and…

[00:19:43] Drumm McNaughton: Oh, we’re not going into politics today.

[00:19:48] Jim Johnsen: But ideally, governors would consult with leaders in the state and formulate a vision for their state. And that vision may be In economic terms, cultural terms, political terms, whatever that is. But whatever it is, there needs to be a higher education component because it’s about the people of the state that are going to make that state successful, that are going to improve the health status of that state, that are going to attract foreign capital to build facilities, to manufacture things in that state. That’s all driven by human capital, by the brains of the people in that state.

[00:20:27] Jim Johnsen: So having an overall vision for the state, and included in that a vision for higher education and its role and goals. And hopefully, again, that would be supported by the legislature. Then in most states, the governor then appoints a board of regents over or trustees or governors, varies by state, a board.

[00:20:49] Jim Johnsen: And then board needs to develop its own plan for the system that supports the governor’s plan, the state plan. And then below that, if you will, but not in terms of importance, just simply in terms of the hierarchy, so the governor state level, board system level, then the institutions need to have plans with goals and resources that support the system plan and goals that in turn support the state plan and goals. And that way at each level of this three level structure, you’ve got a higher purpose that provides several really important values. Perhaps the most important one is that it can be shared across the potentially competing forces and factors within each of those levels.

[00:21:51] Jim Johnsen: Let’s take the university system level. Maybe there’s competition among the campuses in the university system. If the university system says, “hey, we have a higher purpose, our mission and purpose is at X”, then how do we all come together and serve X. And that enables, it should enable anyway, the institutional level folks to say I’m going to put interest number one, two and eight on the side here because I have shared interests with my colleagues at the other campuses that will move us expeditiously together in meeting the system’s goal, in serving the states goal”.

[00:22:32] Jim Johnsen: So always having some kind of higher purpose is a way to pull people together. They may not get all of their interests met, but ideally their most important interests are met as they serve a higher purpose, which generally is to meet the state’s needs for higher education.

[00:22:52] Jim Johnsen: Without that structure of higher purpose and goals, then centrifugal forces will dominate. And it just becomes a very competitive, not that competition is bad, but it becomes a very competitive and self serving marketplace. And markets are great, they truly are. But in this process, public sector higher education, there’s so many opportunities for leveraging scale and a system being more than simply the sum of the institutional parts.

[00:23:26] Jim Johnsen: An example, procurement. Why should N number of institutions have their own procurement functions when they can have one procurement function that has much more market power and can go out there and get better prices for things? Research administration would be another example. Payroll would be a good one. General counsel, even accreditation, which is done at the institutional level, but often, in a small system, there isn’t the expertise at multiple campuses for that. You could have that at the system level. The real, I think, something to look forward to is the possibility of increased academic collaboration. That’s not as common today as it could be, where faculty at different institutions are working together in delivering academic programs for students wherever they are across the state, in whatever institution they are.

[00:24:19] Drumm McNaughton: There are some states that are doing a much better job at that than others. And what comes to mind for me is, I believe it’s Connecticut, to where they have all the courses, the course numbers are approved at the state level so that transferability from one institution to another is much, much easier. Where I think it goes a little crazy is, of course, California, not being crazy at all is you’ve got in California, you’ve got many of the community colleges who are starting and delivering four year degrees, something that has been in the purview of the CSU, the Cal State University system, or the UC system. So it’s that competing interest that you talk about and without an overall governing board to, for lack of a better word, be a traffic cop, crazy things can happen.

[00:25:15] Jim Johnsen: Yeah. Crazy things can happen, but also at the same time, or maybe another way to describe it is that opportunities are foreclosed. Opportunities for collaboration or foreclosed. And actually to their credit, the three systems in California, you raised that, they do work together to make sure that students in the community colleges have smooth transfer into the Cal State and UC systems.

[00:25:43] Jim Johnsen: In fact, and here’s where competition can come in to play in a positive way. Community colleges in California compete with each other, not only on access and the quality of their programs and their sports teams and their location near a beach, but also on their transfer rates to Cal Poly or to Berkeley. So that’s a very positive way in which systems can not only operate effectively internally, but with other systems, in partnership with other systems. But you’re right, Connecticut, lots of states now, are really focused on transfer and making sure that students are not wasting time taking additional courses when they move from one institution to another.

[00:26:30] Jim Johnsen: But there’s still many barriers, unfortunately, even within systems. Often institutions have a different calendar. They have a different registration process. They have different grading policies. They have different financial aid forms and processes. Different email platforms. They can make it very difficult. I don’t think they’re doing it intentionally, but they have their own processes that seem to serve their own interests really well, but they don’t serve the interests of students who are trying to get what they need from the campus they can get it from in a way that’s cost effective and convenient for them.

[00:27:10] Jim Johnsen: And in this world, when we can do almost anything on these phones that we have, where applications have been incredibly streamlined and efficient, we’re pretty spoiled now and we expect big organizations to treat us well and to have lean streamlined processes for us to interact with. And I think a lot of universities have a lot to learn about how to improve in that area.

[00:27:36] Drumm McNaughton: I see that quite a bit with the merger work that we do and trying to bring together disparate systems. And it goes even beyond a disparate system. It could be that you’ve got the same SIS “student information system”, but by the way you configured it, the type of information you bring together, how do you put it together? It’s multimillion dollars to do that. Are you better off running separate platforms? These are some of the questions that a system could potentially answer, but they don’t always.

[00:28:11] Jim Johnsen: They don’t always. Just a slightly autobiographical thing. One of the things that frustrated me the most as a system head was when I got into a room with institutional research people and they couldn’t agree on how a particular variable was defined, the width of the field in this system, how far to take the number, etc.

[00:28:34] Jim Johnsen: When we have huge challenges and barriers were being thrown up at the level of just the data, just collecting the data. Forget disagreements about what this university’s mission and purpose and budget ought to be and that university’s mission and purpose and budget ought to be. No, it was about how big the field was and how frequently that we’re going to report and whether we share our numbers with the other campuses. It was very frustrating, I must admit.

[00:29:02] Drumm McNaughton: Oh, I can certainly understand that. I’ve seen that so many times. It reminds me of that old axiom, ” you’re here to drain the swamp, when you’re up to your, you know what, in alligators.” What was the purpose? Why were we here?

[00:29:17] Jim Johnsen: Yeah.

[00:29:17] Drumm McNaughton: One of the things that fascinates me about this is the change process but higher ed is not big on transformational change. And when you try and change something, what reminds me of this, is when you try and change something and you say, “okay, we want to change our retention. We want to improve retention”. But you’ve got one area that you task in it. They come up to the boundaries of where their organization go and they can’t get other parts of the organization on board. As a system how do you do that? How do you get that kind of change to come through when it’s so critical?

[00:30:04] Jim Johnsen: It’s a great question and it’s a difficult one and there are different strategies for doing it. I think one, it really helps to have that higher purpose clarified. So that in the conversation with people who disagree with each other about whether to, and if so, how to implement this change, then you can evaluate. You can say, “okay, person A or campus A, your plan for increasing enrollment is that, and Campus B, yours is something else. Okay, which one of those plans advances our goal”? The goal that we were given by either the governor or the board. So appealing to a higher purpose, I think, again, can pull people together.

[00:30:44] Jim Johnsen: But there also, at the same time, has to be persistence because often higher education, is bureaucratic and there is a certain power of the bureaucracy of resistance and of protection of its processes, of its controls. And it’s not evil, at all. Some people do think that bureaucracies are evil. They’re incredibly powerful and important organizations for our country. But they often are not as dynamic as they need to be. The great leadership scholar, Ron Heifetz, who wrote the foreword in the book, talks about people not being afraid of change so much as being afraid of loss. And loss can not simply be a job or something like that, but it can be a loss of control or perceived control.

[00:31:40] Jim Johnsen: Universities are commonly, from an organizational change standpoint, thought of as being incredibly conservative and very resistant to change. Now, one has to understand that then, if one wants to transform. That’s going to be very difficult. One can do one’s best to set up a culture in which there is frequent experimentation, organizational experimentation. One of the reasons I suggest that, Drumm, is because the scientific method and experimentation is something we do. It’s built into the DNA, if you will, of higher education. So to the extent that leaders can tap into the values and practices and processes that are intrinsic in the culture already. People understand experimentation. They understand proving an hypothesis or not and publishing that and providing people the data and moving on to the next experiment. I think that’s a strategy that can be helpful. There’s a great chapter in the book by Allison Valencourt on leading change, and it’s a nice summary of various change models that people can, organizations can use.

[00:32:49] Jim Johnsen: But I think it’s important to maybe consider an evolutionary model a little more seriously than a transformational model, unless you’re in a crisis. And if you’re in a crisis, then, you better make some things happen. But if you’ve got the time and you’ve got the runway and you’ve got the resources, and you’re simply trying to optimize effectiveness in response to challenges that you see in the environment or opportunities that are available, that’s probably a more gradual evolutionary model would in the long run be more successful.

[00:33:25] Drumm McNaughton: And this is typically what happens within higher ed. It’s more of an adaptive, slow, evolutionary change.

[00:33:33] Jim Johnsen: Because not everything they do is bad. There’s so much good DNA in higher ed. At the same time, it needs to strike, in my own view, a better balance between maximizing its own interests and allocating those maximal interests into service. And too often we’re not thinking about the service component.

[00:33:54] Drumm McNaughton: Very well said.

[00:33:55] Drumm McNaughton: Jim, this has been a fascinating conversation for me. Thank you so much for your willingness to come on. As we always do, three takeaways for university presidents and boards.

[00:34:08] Jim Johnsen: One, what’s your higher purpose? Two, state goals, state plans, and system goals and plans supporting those, and institutional plans supporting those in turn. And third, really trying to develop adaptive leadership capabilities all the way across the university, not just those in charge, but all the way through. Developing those abilities to make the kinds of decisions that need to be made to better serve students and better serve the states these systems are created to serve.

[00:34:43] Drumm McNaughton: Excellent. Thank you so much. What’s next for you besides the next book?

[00:34:48] Jim Johnsen: Talking about this book, but the next book, which is really going to focus on practical tools for diagnosing, treating, and evaluating organizational dilemmas in higher education. So that’s what’s next.

[00:35:03] Drumm McNaughton: So on the cover of the book, there’s going to be a baseball bat, is that correct?

[00:35:07] Jim Johnsen: To go with your metaphor there, I would note that, if you get it right in baseball a third of the time, you’re going to the hall of fame.

[00:35:16] Drumm McNaughton: This is true, provided you’re there for a few seasons.

[00:35:19] Jim Johnsen: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:35:22] Drumm McNaughton: Jim, it’s been a real pleasure. Thank you so much for being on the show.

[00:35:26] Jim Johnsen: You’re welcome, Drumm. My pleasure.

[00:35:29] Drumm McNaughton: Thanks for listening today and a special thank you to Jim Johnsen, Vice President of Executive Search for Greenwood Asher Associates and former President of the University of Alaska System. Jim, thanks so much for being on the program. I thoroughly enjoyed our conversation, I look forward to the next time we get a chance to talk.

[00:35:48] Drumm McNaughton: My next guest is Larry Schall. For those of you who don’t know Larry, he’s the President of NECHE the New England Commission for Higher Education. NECHE has a reputation of being one of the most innovative accreditors out there and Larry will talk to us about what they’re doing up at NECHE, how they get the commissioners on board, and a host of other things that are really important for those of you who are thinking about or are accredited.

[00:36:15] Drumm McNaughton: Thanks for listening. Look forward to talking to you next time.