Confronting the Storm: Resistance to Change and Current Attacks on Higher Education:

Changing Higher Ed podcast 259 with host Dr. Drumm McNaughton and guest Dr. Brian Rosenberg

Transcript: Changing Higher Ed podcast  259– with host Dr. Drumm McNaughton and guest Dr. Brian Rosenberg

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.

[00:00:20] Introduction and Dr. Brian Rosenberg’s Background

Drumm McNaughton: Thank you, David.

My guest today is Brian Rosenberg, currently a visiting professor at Harvard Graduate School of Education. Brian served as McAllister College’s 16th president from 2003 to 2020, and is the recent author of a book, “Whatever It Is, I’m Against It, Resistance to Change in Higher Education”.

Brian has been quoted, he’s written many articles that appear in the Chronicle of Higher Education, New York Times, Washington Post, and many others. And he joins me today to talk about the current attacks on higher education and how resistance to change factor into the “why” for those attacks.

Brian, welcome to the program.

Brian Rosenberg: Happy to be here.

Drumm McNaughton: It’s my pleasure to have you on board. You’re quite the prolific author. You’ve also been a university president, McAllister College. Served there for quite a long time. I’m quite sure you’ve got some opinions on what’s going on in higher ed nowadays.

Drumm McNaughton: But before we get into that, please tell my listeners here a little bit about your background.

Brian Rosenberg: So I was trained as an English professor and got my PhD. in English and planned to spend my career as an English professor. Did that for 15 years at Allegheny College in Pennsylvania. Then somehow, I got roped into being a dean of the faculty at Lawrence University in Wisconsin. And then 17 years, as you said, as president of McAllister College.

I stepped down from that in June of 2020, and since then I’ve been teaching at the. Graduate School of education at Harvard and doing a number of other things that don’t involve being a college president.

Drumm McNaughton: That’s probably bittersweet. There’s a lot of great things about not being a president, but I’m sure there’s a lot of things that you miss. I would guess.

Brian Rosenberg: , The feeling that you are making an impact on the lives of a lot of students, that you get to interact with alumni, all those things are very positive. But there’s a time for things to end and I felt like it was the time for my presidency to end and for me to move on to something else.

[00:02:32] Impact of COVID-19 on Higher Education Leadership

Drumm McNaughton: And that was right in the middle of Covid. So that must have been a huge transition, not only for you and your successor, but the college itself.

Brian Rosenberg: Yeah, one of the last things I had to do was send everybody home and it was difficult. I had to leave when no one was there. When you spend 17 years in a community and you have to say goodbye over Zoom to everybody, it’s not a lot of fun. But you do what you have to do. It was even harder on people who had to begin presidencies during that time.

Drumm McNaughton: Oh, no kidding. Because how do you get to know your stakeholders? How do you get to know your community? You have to put that on hold for, in that case, almost a year.

Brian Rosenberg: Yeah, it’s very challenging and I’ve spoken to many presidents, my successor and many others, and all of them, took longer than usual to connect with their community because of that forced distance. So it was anyone who began their presidency in 2020 a bumpy ride. There’s been no normal since then.

Drumm McNaughton: Well, it doesn’t seem like there’s a normal right now in higher ed anyway.

Brian Rosenberg: No. No, there is not. There is not.

[00:03:44] Whatever It Is, I’m Against It: Resistance to Change in Higher Education

Drumm McNaughton: I love the title of your latest book, “Whatever It Is, I’m Against It. Resistance to Change in Higher Education”. How did you come to that?

Brian Rosenberg: Well, the title for those who don’t know is a quote from Groucho Marx, in the Marx Brothers movie, “Duck Soup”, where he plays an academic and the head of a college, and he sings a song entitled, “Whatever It Is, I’m Against It”. And this goes back to the about 1930, which tries to encapsulate the view of the Academy to change. So resistance to change in academia is nothing new. The Marx Brothers were joking about it a century ago.

Drumm McNaughton: Well, I didn’t know that about coming from the Marx Brothers. Thank you for that piece of trivia. That’s fabulous.

Brian Rosenberg: Yeah, it’s surprising to me how many people don’t know that. But as a kid, I was a Marx Brothers fan, and so I watched their movies a lot.

Drumm McNaughton: Well, I actually was too. I had an English professor in high school who was the epitome of Elizabethan, and he collected old movies, et cetera. He really gave me a love for the Elizabethan era. But I didn’t remember it came from Duck Soup, so thank you.

Brian Rosenberg: Yeah, you can find quotes from Groucho Marx that apply to virtually every moment. One of the ones that I use right now, is, “Those are my principles. And if you don’t like them, well, I have others”.

Drumm McNaughton: Well, that in some ways, that epitomizes what higher ed’s going through right now with all the attacks.

Brian Rosenberg: It really does. I wish people were a little bit firmer in standing up for their principles.

[00:05:21] Current Attacks on Higher Education

Drumm McNaughton: As do I, but with the attacks, why are we seeing these right now? Other than a change of administration.

Brian Rosenberg: Well, there are a couple of different layers, I think, to what we’re seeing going on right now. There is a sense, and I write a little bit about this in the book, that confidence in higher education, public and private, has been declining for a variety of reasons. And as I point out, when the public loses faith in your work, it tends to lead to adverse policy outcomes.

Things like endowment taxes and reductions in funding. So, some of this was predictable. What was not predictable was the extent of it. And I have to be honest in saying that I think it is less about higher education specifically than about essentially an authoritarian project, which as you know, typically begins by going after institutions like the courts, the press, education. So, I think in some ways it’s less about higher education than it is about this larger project of taking away the strongest voices within a democratic society. And that’s one of the reasons that it’s deeply concerning, I think, to a lot of people.

Drumm McNaughton: As it should be. I was just recently reading your article that appeared in the Chronicle, I think it was on March 24th, about the Capitulation of Columbia, and in that article you said that one of the things that the right wing think tanks had pushed was taking out one of the major ivy Leagues or major universities out there to make them an example, to get others to capitulate.

Brian Rosenberg: Yeah. One of the things people have to understand is that this attack on higher education is using a playbook that was developed by a number of think tanks. The American Enterprise Institute, the Manhattan Institute, Claremont Institute, and essentially what they argued before Trump took office, is that higher education needed to be scared out of its mind. And the way to do that would be to destroy a very visible and prominent institution. Columbia was the one they settled on, in a lot of their writings. And I think it’s a combination of the fact that it was a very visible site of protests when the, the conflict broke out in the Middle East. It’s located in New York, and Donald Trump has always had problematic relationship with New York City. It’s a blue state and it’s an Ivy League institution, so like a perfect target. So, it was completely unsurprising to anyone who read articles by people like Max Eden’s at the American Enterprise Institute, that they went after Columbia. He was saying that they should destroy Columbia before Trump took office.

Drumm McNaughton: Well, it’s interesting, that perspective, but I have to wonder, how is this different, these protests different than what we saw say at Berkeley in the 1960s? That’s what came to mind for me.

Brian Rosenberg: I think the biggest difference on campuses, and I’ve thought a lot about why these particular protests around Israel and Gaza have been so divisive and problematic, this is a set of issues that for the first time in my memory, at least, really has divided the consensus on college campuses.

There is a certain truth to the argument that college campuses tend to be dominated by a certain set of orthodoxies. So, on various issues, one viewpoint prevails. When it came to the conflict in the Middle East, what you had was some real divisions, between progressives and other progressives, between Jewish students who were protesting, and Jewish students who felt attacked. Between faculty members who supported the protests and faculty members who thought that they were inappropriate. So more than any issue that I can recall, this one really divided the campus. In that sense, it made it almost impossible for institutional leaders to make decisions that didn’t anger someone.

Very different from protests around say racism that happened in the wake of the George Floyd killing. And even different, I think from the protests that you referred to in the late sixties around the war in Vietnam when for the most part, at least among the students and faculty, there was a pretty strong consensus on campus. So, this is divisive in a way that I think we haven’t seen in a long time.

Drumm McNaughton: Well, in many ways it reflects the divisiveness that’s going on in the country. In the Middle East, are we ever going to see, and this is more rhetorical question than anything else, are we ever going to see a coming together of the Arabs and the Jews? I personally, I don’t think so, who knows?

Brian Rosenberg: One can always hope. But, it’s been a problem that stretches back a very long time, and it’s at this point serving nobody’s best interests for that conflict to continue.

Drumm McNaughton: I would fully agree. I was involved in that type of thing back in the 1980s when I flew airplanes in the Navy. We were there off the coast of Israel monitoring a lot of these things. I’d tell you more, I wouldn’t want to have to kill you, as the saying goes.

So, let me double back.

[00:10:54] Economic Factors, Public Trust, and Political Narrative

Drumm McNaughton: You had mentioned the loss of public trust. How did we get to this place? Because I’ve read this stuff from Gallup and Lumina, it’s not good.

Brian Rosenberg: It’s a combination of factors. Some of it is politically driven. So, the loss of trust has been much more profound among self-identified Republicans than Democrats. And some of that has to do with the perception that higher education is quote, too woke and is dominated by one particular political perspective.

And we’ve seen governors and legislatures in a variety of states take advantage of that perception, to change their policies around higher education. But some of it, and we’ve seen a loss of confidence even among Democrats, I think some of it is simply driven by economic factors. By the perception that higher education is too expensive, that it doesn’t provide opportunity, but replicates privilege and wealth, and is unavailable or unaffordable to many of the people who need it most. And I think there’s some justice in those arguments.

So I think part of it is political, but we can’t simply dismiss it as political partisanship. We have to look in the mirror and realize the fact that, Wellesley College, a few miles from where I sit, the comprehensive fee for next year is over a hundred thousand dollars. And yes, we know all about financial aid and we all know all about discounting, but when people look at a number like $100,000 a year, they think this industry is out of control. And I think that economic resentment has a lot to do with the loss of public confidence.

Drumm McNaughton: It reminds me Bill Clinton’s statement when he is running for president against George HW Bush. “It’s the economy, stupid.”

Brian Rosenberg: Ultimately, I think the main source of both challenges within higher education, and external concerns about higher education, come down at the end of the economic model. And unless that gets fixed, it’s going to be very hard either for the industry to save itself or for people to develop more confidence in it.

[00:13:07] Vocational Training vs. Civic Engagement

Drumm McNaughton: Do you think that this drive toward workforce readiness is part of the cost? Higher ed was always about the public good, but it’s becoming less and less. I have to wonder if that’s a generational thing or if that is a cause from the cost and the debt or what? I’m curious.

Brian Rosenberg: Again, these things tend not to have a single causal factor. I think on the one hand, colleges and universities have been insufficiently attentive to the needs of employers and the workforce. Probably less true of say, community colleges, which tend to have closer connections to their communities than four-year institutions do.

But if you look at the curricula at most four-year colleges and universities, you look at the majors, they haven’t really evolved very much in response to evolving nature of work and the evolving nature of the economy. That has created a problem. But I think the other thing that you allude to is also true, which is that as a society we’ve become very focused on higher education as vocational training.

And from the beginning in this country, higher education was meant to have more than one purpose. When Thomas Jefferson founded the University of Virginia, or when Benjamin Franklin founded what was eventually the University of Pennsylvania, they were very clear about the fact that, in order to have a functioning democracy, you needed educated citizens. So, part of the role of education has always been civic engagement, and not just vocational preparation. And I do think that we have, as a society, generally, lost sight of that. So, while vocational preparation is important, it is not the only goal of higher education.

Drumm McNaughton: I fully agree with that, it is a holistic issue. One of the challenges that I have seen is within the faculty and reaching out to industry to help shape the courses. What is it that we aren’t doing? What is it that you guys need, et cetera. Apology I should have said you people need instead of you guys.

Brian Rosenberg: Yeah, I think colleges have tended to be very inward looking and inward focused. And if you think about a typical college campus, it’s both a physical construct and a metaphor. They tend to be surrounded by walls that tend to be up on hills. They tend to be apart from the communities by which they’re surrounded, and the result is that they’ve lost touch with those communities, and the communities have lost confidence in the institutions. So, I think we need to break down at least the metaphorical walls and do more work connecting with the communities that these colleges are surrounded by, and that on some level they’re intended to serve.

Drumm McNaughton: I would fully agree. One of my favorite examples of doing this was when Karen Haynes was the president of Cal State, San Marcos, and she had an above and beyond the board of trustees, there was an advisory board made up of prominent citizens from the local area that would advise her, and each of the deans of the colleges had those same thing to advise on curriculum so that there was an exchange back and forth between the deans, between industry, between faculty, so that the courses were kept up to date and were really meaningful going forward.

Brian Rosenberg: It also has the potential to broaden the audience that you serve. We know that the 18 to 22-year-old audience is shrinking, particularly in New England, Middle Atlantic, Midwest, where so many colleges are located. And if many of these institutions are going to survive, they’re going to have to focus on what has always been called the non-traditional student, but is actually becoming the majority student. And connecting with your community will allow you to figure out ways that you might provide continuing education for adult learners, education for people who can’t get up at nine o’clock in the morning living on a campus five days a week. Not only will it help the curriculum, but it might actually broaden the audience for a lot of these institutions.

Drumm McNaughton: And that makes perfect sense because if you take a look at the research that Lumina has done, there’s over 41 million students who have started higher ed and dropped out. People say, “oh, you’ve got to go after that demographic”. Well, yes you do, but you’ve also got to change your delivery, your pedagogy, your support systems to make sure that these folks can be successful, because bringing them back is going to be difficult.

[00:18:04] Retention and Completion Rates

Brian Rosenberg: The lack of completion that you speak about is another reason I think, for the loss of public confidence. When you have a six-year graduation rate nationally, that is under 60%, and when that rate is much worse for underrepresented populations, for African American students, it’s closer to 40%. That’s an extraordinarily inefficient industry.

Think about any other industry and imagine that you’d say, “well, about half the time we don’t get it right”. It’s a waste of money. It’s a waste of time. It’s a waste of human potential. So, we have to figure out a way to improve those completion rates.

The quickest way for a college to improve its finances is not through admissions, but through retention. And the quickest way for higher education to improve public confidence is to have more students complete, because the worst thing that you can do is go into debt for a college degree and then not get the degree you get the debt and none of the economic benefit.

Drumm McNaughton: Absolutely. I tell my clients frequently, “Any business that I know of that has a 30 or 40% customer retention rate is a failing business”, but in higher ed, we seem to accept that.

Brian Rosenberg: Yeah, those rates are not uncommon, they’re not an aberration. The overall averages are skewed by the fact that at places like Harvard, it’s 98%, which has less to do with Harvard than with inputs, the kinds of students that come in. But as you say, there are lots of institutions that have completion rates that are 30% or less, which is, it’s almost hard to wrap your mind around.

Drumm McNaughton: Oh, it is. I’ve got a friend of mine, Dr. Russell Lowery-Hart, who was the president at Amarillo College and now is the president at the Austin Community College and District there. Back during the pandemic, he had 99 of his students go homeless during the term. They lost only one student, because he had the support structures in place, not necessarily just through the college, but through the community as well, to be able to help these folks make it through.

Brian Rosenberg: Yeah, you need to have those support structures, which is again, one of my sources of concern right now. What is coming from the federal government is leading a lot of institutions to dismantle some of those support structures for the students who need the most. Underrepresented students, first generation students, and I think the result of that is that you have the potential, at least, to see those completion rates get even lower.

Drumm McNaughton: I think you’re right. So, I think you and I are in agreement that higher ed needs to reform, maybe not in all the ways that are coming out from the government, but it needs that. You talked about “Duck Soup” and “Whatever It Is, I’m Against It”. Resistance to change, how is that played into higher ed not making some of the shifts that it’s needed?

[00:21:19] Need for Transformational Change

Brian Rosenberg: Higher ed has created systems that are designed to allow for only slow incremental change, and that hasn’t entirely been a bad thing. One of the reasons that a majority of the oldest institutions in the world are universities is that they have remained true to their mission and haven’t changed every time there’s some change in the job market or in the zeitgeist.

But if you believe as I do, that we are at a different moment now, an inflection point, where what has worked reasonably well for a long time is not likely to work as well over the next 10 or 20 years. We need something more than incremental change. I think we need really transformational change. And the structures and incentives within higher education are not set up for that. If you think about the way we make decisions in higher education, we tend to place a very high priority on participation, less of a priority on outcome. And I think those two things are often in tension with one another. A disruptive change is by its nature, uncomfortable for a lot of people.

We tend to prioritize making people comfortable, through systems like shared governance. And so those systems are great if you don’t want to change much. If you need to do more than change a little bit, and you need to do it quickly, no one in higher education will tell you that our decision-making structures are agile, quick, adaptive. And I think right now, given all the things swirling around higher education, that’s a real problem.

Drumm McNaughton: I think you’re right. I would push back on you just a little bit because I do know of some institutions who can make changes quickly, but what it is, it takes a shared vision among all the participants, faculty, administration, et cetera, and there is a level of transparency there to where instead of faculty resisting change or studying it to death, they already know what the situation is and can respond quickly and appropriately.

Brian Rosenberg: Yeah, the difference that I see between institutions that are trying to change reasonably effectively, and those who aren’t. As you say, I think part of it is the open and honest sharing of information. We are after all educational institutions and one of the things that it’s really important for leaders to do is educate their own communities.

So if you have financial challenges, people need to know about that. You need to share as much as you can about the budgetary situation or about admissions or about tuition discounting. Too many institutions keep that information very close to the vest until there’s a crisis, and then all of a sudden it explodes into people’s consciousness.

If you wait until there’s a crisis, in order to start talking to people, it’s already too late. You have to talk to people before there’s a crisis. You have to share information; you have to be honest. Doesn’t mean change is going to be easy, but if you expect to be able to change things, you can’t do it by not being open and honest with people.

Drumm McNaughton: I completely agree. And one of the things we talked about when we spoke yesterday was your boards of trustees being asleep at the wheel, not setting direction or telling presidents, “Frankly, this is unacceptable. You need to balance the budget”. You were very fortunate, McAllister, because you had an incredible board there.

Brian Rosenberg: Yeah, I was very lucky. For 17 years I had a good board. I had good board chairs, and I had enough people, the board was large as many college and university boards are, it was about 30 people. But I had enough people on that board who were deeply engaged and who asked of the administration hard questions so that I felt like we always had good leadership. That is not universally the case.

I think in talking to other presidents, to talking to other former presidents, honestly, there are too many boards who just aren’t paying attention. Who sometimes get as surprised by a crisis as the members of the campus community are, which should never happen with a board. Ultimately the board is the group that has fiduciary responsibility for the institution. And if you’re not paying careful attention to resources, finances, budget, you are not fulfilling your legal obligation. And the number of boards that are in that category is higher than I think any of us would want.

Drumm McNaughton: I think you’re right. It’s sad for me to say, because we do a lot of board governance work and we have a survey that we administer, how many institutions, boards really don’t know what’s going on at the institution. I could remember one institution that we worked with. One of the questions on the survey is, “how often does your academic affairs committee of the board meet, are you informed of accreditation, et cetera.” Three quarters of the folks said yes, absolutely. They didn’t even have an academic affairs committee. It was that bad.

Brian Rosenberg: Yeah, they were like students giving you the answer that they thought you wanted.

Drumm McNaughton: Exactly. So, doubling back to combating this attack on higher ed. We’ve talked about a lot of different things and the reasons for it. What can higher ed institutions do at this point? There’s a lot of stuff getting thrown at them.

[00:27:03] Collaborative Efforts in Higher Education

Brian Rosenberg: So, colleges and universities need to exercise muscles that they haven’t exercised in a long time, if ever. And I think one of the reasons they’ve been slow to do these things is because they just haven’t practiced them. One of them is to work collaboratively and collectively.

Drumm McNaughton: Oh wait a minute. Wait a minute. I Did you just say those two really important C words?

Brian Rosenberg: Yes. Yes. I’ll throw in another C word, which is “competitive”. Colleges and universities tend to see themselves much more often in a competitive relationship than in a collaborative relationship. Competing for students, competing for prestige, competing for rankings. It is much harder to go after 500 institutions acting collectively than it is to go after individual institutions, and higher education has been surprisingly slow, even now, surprisingly slow to respond to these attacks collectively. We’re seeing some of that now. We’re seeing a few lawsuits where universities have joined together. We’re seeing some letters from college presidents, but it’s been slow, and it’s because these institutions are just not used to working together.

[00:28:15] Funding and Marketing the Value of Their Work in Public Health-to the Public

Brian Rosenberg: Why in the world have the Ivy League universities not joined together and acted collectively when the majority of them have either already faced or being threatened with facing the loss of funding. It doesn’t speak well of their ability to collaborate. And the other thing that they’re not used to doing is marketing themselves other than through admissions. That is speaking to the public about the value of their work. A lot of these institutions that have been attacked and whose funding have been cut, have medical centers, and while people might be divided on the value of higher education, very few people are divided on the value of healthcare. And why these universities have not more publicly explained and defended the kind of healthcare work that is now being put in jeopardy.

Any marketing expert would tell you that it would be relatively easy to put together a 30-second commercial where you made that point. Higher education has been very slow to do that.

I think from my perspective, the most effective angle right now, through which to go after some of these attacks, is through healthcare. Because, whether it’s Harvard or Columbia, they have major medical centers that perform extremely important functions in their communities. And people need to be reminded that’s going to change, if these funding cuts persist.

Drumm McNaughton: I think that’s spot on. In fact, one of the boards that I worked with, one of the trustees was a researcher from a R1 AAU institution in the south. He was specifically doing Alzheimer’s research and the last conversation I had with him very close to a breakthrough on the causes of Alzheimer’s and what could potentially be done. You start canceling grants like that, that’s a major hit to medical research and people’s health.

Brian Rosenberg: And these are not things that can be restarted instantly. The damage that’s being done will take a long time to fix, because if you take apart a lab, you let the people go, you let the research stop. You don’t just pick up where you left off, you often have to start rebuilding that all over again. And so even if the funding gap is a year or two, the loss to research might be a decade. It’s really problematic. I think most people would understand that was problematic, if colleges and universities are doing a better job of communicating that message.

Drumm McNaughton: I think you’re right. There is no silver bullet when it comes to these types of things, but what really amazes me is the silence of the boards of these institutions. Why are they not speaking up?

Brian Rosenberg: I wish there were a noble reason, but I don’t think that’s the case. If you think about boards of colleges and universities, particularly of private colleges and universities, public boards are a different animal. Public boards often tend to be politically appointed, and their allegiance is more to a political party than to the institution.

But for private institutions, the boards are often made up of wealthy, influential people who have their own interests, their own businesses, law firms, manufacturing firms, tech firms. And to be totally honest, I think like so many people right now in our society, they’re acting out of fear. They don’t want their own interests to be targeted. And so rather than do what I think is the right and important and courageous thing, and defending the mission of the institutions on whose boards they serve, they’re keeping their heads down. There was an article in the Atlantic a couple of weeks ago whose title was, “The United States of Fear”, and I think right now we are living with a level of civic fear that probably neither of us has seen in our lifetimes.

Drumm McNaughton: I think you’re right.The only thing that I could liken to this was the McCarthy era back in the fifties, and I certainly don’t remember it, I was very young at the time. I think you were as well.

Brian Rosenberg: Yeah, now I don’t remember it. And I think many people liken it to the McCarthy era. When it comes to higher education, I think this is probably even worse. When you look at the number of. McCarthy year was awful, but when you look at the sheer number of people affected it, the numbers are much larger now. And the scale of the attacks on the institutions is much greater. So it has a lot in common with that, but it may in fact even be worse.

Drumm McNaughton: Well, the one thing that I hold on to is there’s always a storm, and after the storm there becomes a calm and a period of growth. Let’s just see if we can get through the storm.

Brian Rosenberg: I agree, and, the history of this country is a history of back and forth. This isn’t the first time that some really problematic things have happened in the United States. Which is one of the reasons it’s important to teach history honestly, both the good and the bad. And this isn’t the first bad and very often bad has been followed by good and you have to hope that is true in this instance as well. Still hold on to hope that will be the case.

[00:33:47] Three Takeaways for University Presidents and Boards

Drumm McNaughton: As do I. This has been a fabulous conversation, Brian. I thank you for your time, as we always do, three takeaways for university presidents and boards.

Brian Rosenberg: Well, we’ve alluded to some of it, the first takeaway for me is be honest and authentic with your community. Don’t try to hide the truth, whether it’s about financial problems or cultural problems, you have to speak the truth to people. [second] For boards. Remember that being on the board of a college or university is a privilege and with that privilege comes the responsibility to defend the mission of the institution. And if you’re not prepared to do that, then you probably shouldn’t serve on the board.

And the third would be that the working relationship between the board and the president is the single most important key to having an effective institution. If the board and the president are not effectively working together, which doesn’t mean they have to always agree, but if they’re not effectively working together, that’s going to filter down to the whole organization and you’re going to get dysfunction on every level. So those would be my three bits of advice to both institutional leaders and boards.

Drumm McNaughton: Well, thank you. And that comes from at least 17 years of sitting in the big chair, plus a lot of other great experience as well. So, thank you.

Brian Rosenberg: Sure.

Drumm McNaughton: What’s next for you?

Brian Rosenberg: I’m going to continue teaching at least for another year. I really enjoy being back in the classroom. I teach right now, both in person and in an online program here at Harvard, and so I’m going to continue to do that. Next year, I’m working with a startup university in Africa, the African Leadership University, which has been a really fascinating experience for me. And I serve on the board of the The Teagle Foundation, which is doing important work to support liberal education. And I’ll continue to write, so the one thing that I know is that will continue to do things that don’t require me to supervise people, because that was the hardest part of being a president for me. And I love having only to supervise myself.

Drumm McNaughton: Well, thank you so much. Those are great takeaways, and I really wish you all the best going forward. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed our conversation, and I look forward to the next time we connect.

Brian Rosenberg: As do I, it’s been my pleasure.

Drumm McNaughton: Thanks for listening today, and a special thank you to my guest, Brian Rosenberg. Brian, thank you for a fascinating conversation. I look forward to the next time our path cross, I’m sure that’s going to happen sometime in the near future with everything that’s going on.

To my listeners, thanks again for joining me. I look forward to seeing you next week.