Inside the Role of College Trustees During Turbulent Times

Relevant Links

“Letters from the Corporation of Brown University,” edited by Lauren Zalaznick.

“The Affluencer,” profile of Lauren Zalaznick in The New York Times. 

“Navigating a Merger as a College Trustee,” past Future U episode.

Chapters

0:00 - Intro

4:05 - What Led to the Book of Trustee Letters?

6:40 - The Value of Sharing Once-Secret Letters

9:01 - A Reality TV Pioneer’s Interest in University History

11:34 - What Is the Role of University Trustees?

15:40 - The Case for Large University Boards

20:14 - Hearing From a Diversity of Voices

23:52 - From Rabble-Rousers to Trustees

26:42 - How Do College Boards Navigate All Those Diverse Voices?

31:24 - Reflecting on Brown University’s Deal with the Trump Administration

36:58 - Should Every College Adopt the Tradition of Sharing Reflections From Board Members?

41:55 - Sponsor Break

42:43 - How Important Is It That College Board Members Be Alums?

46:45 - Making the Board Feel Like a Team

49:54 - More on Trustees Who As Students Criticized Leadership

52:37 - Getting the Right Mix on a Board

54:03 - How Large Should a Board Be?

Transcript

Lauren Zalaznick

Clearly, this guy led a life of usefulness and reputation as is our charter mandate. And yet at that time, it was only 1881, he articulated that Brown is always old and always new. And that transition from living today, living in the past, and living for the future as an organism, as a living institution, I think is pretty extraordinary that it was highlighted that long ago.

Michael Horn

That was Lauren Zalaznick, a former trustee at Brown University and the author of the new book, "Letters from the Corporation of Brown University." She's our guest today on Future U.

Sponsor

This episode of Future U is sponsored by Ascendium, a mission-driven nonprofit committed to improving learning and training systems to better serve learners from low-income backgrounds. For more information, visit ascendiumphilanthropy.org. Subscribe to Future U wherever you get your podcasts. And if you enjoy the show, share it with your friends so others can discover the conversations we're having about higher education.

Michael Horn

I'm Michael Horn.

Jeff Selingo

And I'm Jeff Selingo.

Michael Horn

Jeff, I was a history major as you know and so I love it when people effectively look through the archives of something to find wisdom from the past for the current era. And of course you are a board member at your alma mater and I imagine in this specific turbulent era of higher education looking for guidance from how past trustees handled certain situations that were sticky could have some, you know, real value for you right now.

Jeff Selingo

Oh there's no doubt about it, Michael, as I always remind my own kids. Right? And as we know, as the old saying goes, right, history does repeat itself. 

And I think that's particularly true in higher education because you have this new generation of students cycling through every couple of decades. And even if you think about, like, a cohort of a class every four years, and there's always going to be some new controversy, new debate, new protest about something in higher ed, about something in larger society, particularly among people who are in their late teenage years. And so I think there's just so much you can learn from this. 

All of which, Michael, is why I think we're really excited to have Lauren Zalaznick join us for this interview. You know, Lauren has had a long career in the entertainment, film, and television industries. And of note, from 2004 to 2014, she held a series of leadership roles within NBCUniversal, ultimately leading the $2 billion-plus revenue of the entertainment and digital networks portfolio that included cable, broadcast, as well as digital assets. 

You may recognize a lot of the shows that were launched and blossomed under her watch at Bravo Media, in particular, Project Runway, Top Chef, The Real Housewives franchise, and more. And Lauren has won two Peabody Awards and numerous Emmy Awards for her work. 

But for this conversation, Michael, the book you mentioned up top, "Letters from the Corporation of Brown University," is really why we wanted to interview her. Although, I'm sure if we asked about the Real Housewives franchise, our numbers of listeners would go way up. But I think it's really important what she did because she served on the board of Brown University. She's not only a graduate of Brown University in 1984, but then she served on its board of trustees for six years until 2017. And that's what really got her interested in the archives of these board members as she's going to tell us in this interview today. 

So welcome, Lauren, to Future U.

Lauren Zalaznick

Thank you. So glad to be here.

Michael Horn

So, Lauren, you were a trustee, of course, at Brown for six years ending in 2017, and that's when I understand that you learned about this tradition of outgoing Brown trustees writing resignation letters in essence that reflected on their time governing the university. 

And I'd love to hear your story around this. What was it that struck you, that light bulb moment, if you will, that led you later to think, 'Hey. These letters should be published in the form of a book.'

Lauren Zalaznick

Sure. Well, two things. 

Number one, there is a formal governance requirement that trustees and fellows terming off the corporation are required to send a letter of resignation. However, it's not a requirement in any way as to what the content is. It could be, 'Dear secretary, dear president, dear chancellor, I hereby resign.' 

But what has happened is that not by governance, but by practice or tradition, people had begun to reflect. They're human beings, and this term of trusteeship or fellowship meant a lot. And they do tend to write reflections of their time either on the corporation or at Brown. 

My light bulb moment came in two parts. At the end of my first year of my six-year term, hearing these letters read aloud, which is the other kind of nuance of it. They're not just submitted. They're read aloud in front of 54 people in a corporation room. They were moving. They were eloquent, etc. 

And a couple years later, it was really a letter written by someone who I had gone to school with, who I had known for around thirty years, who I thought I kind of knew pretty well. His letter was read aloud, and his story that informed so much of his life was so essential and so emotional that I thought to myself, if I didn't know this man's story, look around, look around the world. You really don't know anyone's story until they choose to share it with you, and that was the real light bulb moment of having a vision to see if people wanted to share their stories with the world.

Michael Horn

I'm curious out of that, as you reflect on these letters, if you think, you know, these individuals sharing their stories, Brown sharing its stories. How well both of those things have done over time? Is that sort of a real opportunity, if you will, for Brown to better tell its story to show its value through the individuals that it has educated and then govern it?

Lauren Zalaznick

Yeah. I think there's a couple of dimensions to that. 

Number one, it has been over time these letters span from the founders' resignation letters. So, the original incorporators, their resignation letters in the late 1700s early 1800s, all the way to the last letters that I included, which was the class of '22, if you will, 2022. That's around a 150 of history and 150 years of Brown and 150 years of higher ed. 

And what I will say is that, overtly or inadvertently, the sharing of the stories of the graduates or the parents or the friends of the university who are trustees and fellows tells the story of higher ed at Brown, tells the story of the country, the United States, in many ways and its transformations. And it also allows Brown, at least, to be very upfront, and very conscious of its own changes and gyrations and metamorphoses through an academic lens, a social lens, a political lens. And all of that, I think, makes for transparent governance, more-transparent governance, which I think most people would agree tends to make a healthier organism in, you know, whether it's corporate or academic or prosocial.

Michael Horn

No. That makes sense. 

And I guess I wanna see if you'll draw one other parallel for us. Because in your own career as a TV executive, of course, you helped develop and evolve the reality TV show genre with shows like Real Housewives when you of course led the Bravo Network. Is there a parallel in your mind between showing real people working through their issues on say TV, and then your interest in these letters as trustees grapple with these changing issues throughout the country's history, throughout Brown's history, and so forth?

Lauren Zalaznick

Well, I would certainly draw a distinction between academia and its import and its value and its seriousness, but I would also draw a parallel and say that I guess I am really interested in people's stories. 

And that the thing that we found over and over again in writers and directors in my earlier movie career or my long career in nonfiction and reality TV or my semi-long career as a governor of an academic institution, people are always themselves, including, you know, in corporate life. You play roles, and you get up, and you're a little bit different, and you try to exist successfully in different lanes throughout your life. School, which you're trained for, work, which you may or may not be trained for, a role on TV, which you may or may not be trained for. 

And the most amazing thing is that very, very quickly, whatever it is that you think you're presenting to the world is actually a form of the essence of you. And to actually get people to focus on what their real self, you know, contemporary phrase, bringing your whole self to the experience has always fascinated me. 

And I think that that was part of the light bulb moment of, 'Wow. These are real stories from real people, and they don't get out most of the time.' And this is such a safe, important, valuable environment, here they come. It just comes right out of people as they as they are exiting this little corporation world.

Jeff Selingo

So, Lauren, that's really an interesting insight because Michael and I, we've done a lot of episodes where we've talked about the role of trustees. And we often talk about, you know, who are trustees really supposed to answer to? Because on a corporate board, you're really, you know your fiduciary responsibilities to shareholders. So who are really the shareholders of the university? 

But often, we also hear and I sit on a board myself, and I'm an alumni of that institution. And so and that's true of a lot of boards of trustees. Of course, they're alums. And you often hear, well, you're supposed to remove yourself from this board. Right? You're supposed to act in the best interest of this institution, the corporation, of the fiduciary responsibility. 

But it was just interesting what you said because at the end of the day, that's almost impossible.

Lauren Zalaznick

Right. And so I think that, you know, for Brown's corporation at least, I had the privilege to serve under two presidents, Ruth Simmons and then Christina Paxson. 

And these are two, I think, history does show of the finest university presidents there has been in terms of integrity, values, and transformation for the school. And yet they are two very different leaders, and the corporation is turning over. 

You know, it's quite a large corporation, which we should talk about. It's 54 people, which you would think would be highly inefficient. You would never get far in a corporate boardroom with 54 people. And yet, I think what the trustees and fellows are imbued with goes back to you know, it sounds a little treacly, but it goes back to the charter of the university from 1764. 

It is a fiduciary responsibility, but more than that, I think the trustees and fellows are charged with and take very seriously the mandate to create a community and create an academic environment that enables undergraduates to be brought into the real world, as it says in one word or another, into the offices of responsibility to lead lives of value. 

We have a very particular phrase, but it really is the driving energy in the room. And there are budget decisions. There are academic decisions, which are distinguished by being voted on by the fellows. There are values decisions. There are integrity decisions. And, all of that is really to drive home that the world is not just financial, the world is not just fiduciary, the world is not just an esoteric layer that you strive for but can't achieve in real life, that each decision, each person is bringing a shared set of values. 

And so once you're in that room, I think that the common mindshare kind of supersedes the individual portrait. But the individual portrait of each person, especially as it has changed over time, literally, that the composite of the 54 person body has only added to the shared responsibility. It hasn't fractured it. Counterintuitively, each person's perspective and experience has actually bonded the group even closer together.

Jeff Selingo

So it's interesting, Lauren, because you mentioned the 54 people on the Brown Corporation, and some college boards of trustees are famously large. And in the book, people make the case that this somehow works. Could you maybe read from one of the letters from Tom Tisch dated May 27, about this dynamic?

Lauren Zalaznick

I certainly will. And just to set the stage, it's a 54 person body. It includes the president and the chancellor. It includes 12 fellows, the leader, so-called leader of which is the president and the trustees, the leader of which is the chancellor. And of the 42 trustees so 12 fellows, 42 trustees. Of the 42 trustees, in my time, there was a move, which was highly debated, very interesting, and really important for other trustees and modes of governance to hear. Two recent alum trustees are now voted in for a three-year term as opposed to the trustee's six-year term. And long standing, there are three trustees who are voted in by the alumni body, not tapped by the trustees and vacancies committee. So it's really a subset of a large subset. 

Tom Tisch was the chancellor. He was a brilliant chancellor. Recently handed over that honor and responsibility to Brian Moynihan. And he wrote a letter he termed off in 2022, and I'll just read part of it. 

“Dear Rich, our secretary, it was a little more than 20 years ago that Steve Robert asked me if I would join the Brown Corporation as a trustee. I said, 'Yes. Of course, excited by the possibilities.' Yet a question kept coming back to me as I'm sure it did for so many others. How could a 54-person governing body for a university actually work? I'm happy to say that after these two decades, I have the answer. It works magnificently. 

It turns out that there is great genius in our charter from 1764, the size of 54, which seems unwieldy from the outside, is big enough to reflect the breadth of our community without being a fractured or sectarian body. We're bigger than a clique yet smaller than the congress. We are not a representative body, but our cohesion is critical and consequential to Brown's success. One voice, one observation can move the whole of us. 

And while we are never supposed to be 'management,' the breadth of our skills and backgrounds is a trusted resource for a whole array of tricky moments and issues. Our size offers a wide diversity of age and perspectives on the world and on Brown, and I've been lucky to serve with trustees and fellows whose vivid recollections of personalities, events, and institutional decisions could take me back to the Brown of the 1950s under president Henry Merritt Wriston, allowing that pivotal decade to come alive with great texture, clarity, and relevance.”

So what I would say is, A) he was more eloquent in two paragraphs than me in my tee up of 11 minutes, but that's Tom Tisch who's a genius. What I would say is that Tom goes on from this to say even more explicitly something that struck me. His frame of reference was, you know, 50 years when he started to the 1950s. Mine, as I put together these letters, it's not just when you graduated. It's this enormous span on one corporation, as I'm sure many, many corporations or boards also have. But you have people who were entering their undergraduate experience in a completely different, like a storybook, like a history book.

Jeff Selingo

That does amaze me about boards that I spend time with is that you have people on the board who, you know, completed their undergraduate career before even other people on the board were even born, but yet they're all part of the same organization. 

And to me that is kind of the amazing tapestry of not only American higher education, but of each of these institutions as well.

Lauren Zalaznick

Right. So with our young or recent alumni trustees, for instance, you have people who were born 20 years ago, and you have people who were born and went to school before World War II on the ROTC bill for World War II before the colleges merged Pembroke, the college, and Brown, the college, pre-graduate schools, pre-coed dorms, pre-everything. 

And to blend those voices and hear those ideas as you hear in Tom's letter is quite a trick, and it's not like the decision making has gotten easier. 

And, most of all, what I like about these letters in this book, "Letters from the Corporation," is that almost everyone reflects on feeling like an outsider at some point in their undergraduate career and certainly before they're asked to be on the corporation. 

And one thing that was very important to me was that when I was voted in as an alumni trustee. So I really didn't have my sights set on it. I didn't know much about it. And like most people, you think of this, you know, black box. You think of, you know, older male, white, rich. It's just this blank thing because all you've ever heard are the trustees or the corporation, and there's no visibility. That's changed under our tenure, but it was really interesting. 

And part of my mission is to bring voices that really confront a very different reality of who the corporation is. And no matter how old they were by age or what background they came from there's chapters to this book. And, really, the the book is almost a history of protest, a history of undergraduate ideas, not corporation ideas, because that is what the trustees tend to wanna bring to the surface when they're exiting, is what they thought as undergraduates and how essentially it's almost like, 'Hey, we turned out to be right to ask this question, to wonder about this thing. And these are the tools that Brown gave me, the letter writer, to lead an unbelievably successful life.' 

And that you I think, Michael, you mentioned the word 'value.' And I think one of the things that this book brings to life is the value of undergraduate education, not just the value of the board. The value of the board should be self-evident. You should run it well. You should run the school well. That has not been the case always in other schools, I guess. But that's the job. Right?

Jeff Selingo

So yeah. So, Lauren, I wanna kind of dial in a little bit on that because I think reading through these letters, it reminds us as higher ed has long been kind of ground zero for contentious issues in society and has faced times of crisis, whether over free speech, civil rights, women's equality, the divestment, movements around South Africa, many other issues, right, over time. And I'm curious, you know, given that I'm a trustee and was editor of the student newspaper in college when many trustees didn't like the newspaper or me, and I think that's true on many college campuses. The same folks who are trustees often were activists themselves as students. 

And one kind of letter refers to this. Maybe you could read from this letter from Deborah Lee, class of 1976, for example.

Lauren Zalaznick

Yeah. Deborah Lee had a really beautiful letter, and what she says is, “I thought back to my first board meeting where I pondered the fact that as a Brown trustee, I was now officially part of the establishment and not on the outside of University Hall protesting some earth-shattering issue. That revelation scared me a little.” 

So I think whether it's phrased that way, I think whether it's David Byrne, how did I get here? I think there's another this chapter, by the way, is called 'Always an Old Brown, Always a New Brown.' And 'always an old Brown, always a new Brown' is a quote from a Brown trustee and a person who also was an undergraduate, by the way, who graduated in 1881. Charles Evan Hughes, class of '81. He was a trustee. He was also the governor of New York. He was also, the chief justice of the United States. He was also the Secretary of State. He was also the losing candidate for president of the United States against Wilson, I believe. He was the Republican, lest you think that Brown was not, diverse in that way. 

And, clearly, this guy led a life of usefulness and reputation as is our charter mandate. And yet at that time, it was only 1881, he articulated that Brown is always old and always new, and that transition from living today, living in the past, and living for the future as an organism, as a living institution, I think is pretty extraordinary that it was highlighted that long ago.

Jeff Selingo

That's a pretty interesting point. Right? Because it creates this tension that I think is true of especially as we're talking about some of these members were kind of, you know, maybe they were rabble rousers, right, in their day as undergraduates. Right? And so on one hand, you could argue that a university's mission is to prepare people to go shake up and change the world. But on the other hand, there's a need for the university to have stable leadership to get through a real crisis. So there's a little tension to that. 

So how can leaders, both of the corporation and also the university leadership, kind of navigate that? Because as you said earlier, you want these different voices in the room. You want people who are their true selves, and I see, as you said. Right? People don't necessarily change over time. They grow over time, but they may not change over time. So how do you navigate that? And then I think Michael wants to ask a question as we go into kind of current times and the tensions we're living in with now. But how do you navigate that tension, in the room?

Lauren Zalaznick

You know, in the room, I think part of my mission was to publish this book and have each and every trustee and fellow and others at other institutions read it because there's no editorializing in this book. I was the actual editor pulling these together to tell a story of an institution and a story of education. But what it kind of tells you is not that today's foibles, however big they might seem, don't matter, but that it all matters and that it has always mattered and that very tough decisions, life and death decisions. 

Civil rights remains among the most moving portraits of what was at stake in this book. And there are also very beautiful and important photographs that capture the tension between undergraduate and corporation life. 

So in the room, I don't know how to say it, things are debated very earnestly and very seriously. One thing that is, I think, possibly unique, but hopefully not at in the Brown Corporation room that I witnessed, is that one voice does not get to be recognized as louder than another. 

Even if it has a different volume or has a different level of impassioned speech, each voice is taken in and valued on its own. And so I guess, you know, one way to put it is that one voice does not have more power because of the person speaking it. A new trustee, a very established trustee, a person who is the CEO of a large corporation versus, you know, a teacher somewhere. By your self-definition or society's definition, you don't get to have a louder voice or a more important voice. 

I think the committees are set up well, and I think it all comes from the top. I think that the president and the chancellor set the tone, and they run these huge elements that command respect, especially of the faculty who were partially in the room as fellows, but this huge representative body outside. And there's always gonna be different opinions. 

But really and truly, it sounds like, 'Yeah. Duh.' But it's in the room, respect, shared goals, shared values, and years of strategic planning that everyone has a voice in that can't cover every issue that's going to come up. But the framework for which the rubric allows a real discussion that leads to real decisions. No one's afraid to make a real decision.

Michael Horn

Well, and Lauren, I imagine you obviously weren't on the board when this recently happened, with the Trump administration signing the agreement with Brown. I suspect there were some, you know obviously, leadership was a big part of that on Brown's part, and I suspect some very different kinds of discussions and so forth. 

You've been quoted at least in the Brown Daily Herald on the deal before, but I would just, you know, reflect on the university's decision and how it relates to the conversation we've been having around trustees at a university and the challenge of navigating this time.

Lauren Zalaznick

Yeah. I think that the deal that was struck, so to speak, I think I was quoted as saying something like it was the best deal possible under the worst possible circumstances. 

And what I couldn't say in, you know, a short quote for this student paper doing its job is that it's kind of it is about the deal. I don't love the phrase ‘the deal.’ It is about the agreement that was made, but it's not about the agreement that was made. It's about the long journey that Brown and other institutions need to embark on to restate the value of higher education. 

I think it was a given for a certain set of people for whom classical education was a given, that that was the highest goal that you should have and that that was going to make you a better person, and that by being a more educated person, you were going to be a better person. I think that as the academy sort of fractured and the canon came under appropriate scrutiny for who that canon was for and why it was important, that as new paths for education and the value of education were assumed, but not made for at least two or three generations, maybe four now, of students. 

And at the same time, I think, really, what happened is that the value of that education and what it actually does for society, which by the way, includes grant money, includes graduate programs, includes undergraduate focus at the same time, the value to society was blended, was merged with the price of education. And the value and the price, in my opinion, have gotten out of whack. 

And there hasn't been a closing of that gap of the price, which is untenable for most people in the world versus the value that it imbues. And so one is qualitative and one is quantitative. 

And until we make that qualitative statement have actual, you know, value that people can touch, I think it's gonna be that path that we all need to be on. I also think that in the fray to make the cost, the quantitative amount, make sense, everyone went in the other direction and said, ‘Well, it does make sense because you can earn more money, and we're gonna teach you how to be pre-business and pre-marketing and entrepreneur course and all these different things.’ 

And that is probably not the longest-standing scaffold that will hold up this value for the long haul.

Jeff Selingo

That's an interesting discussion. We could go in a whole different direction with that, Lauren, but we're gonna wrap up the interview. 

And I'm just I just kind of amazed at that insight because, you know, we often talk about the value of higher education on this podcast, and it's an interesting element that we think something of greater value should cost more, but maybe if we flipped it and it actually costs less in this case, people would value it more in some ways, or we value it in different ways, as you say. Right? 

As I always tell people that, you know, when higher ed used to cost a lot less, there was less risk at exploring as an undergraduate. And the reason why people have to do pre-professional now is because the cost is so high. 

But again, probably a subject for a totally different podcast. 

And, before I ask that final question of you today, first of all, I wanna thank you for saying the student newspaper was doing its job, because I think there's a lot of trustees at colleges and universities everywhere who hate the student newspaper. And as a former editor of the student newspaper at my undergraduate institution, I thank you for saying that. 

But I guess the final question I have is I found this whole thing fascinating. It makes me wonder, should every board do this?

Lauren Zalaznick

Well, you know, there's a lot of really interesting things about the making of this book, and one of them is that it was not to get too technical, but the letters are copyrighted. 

They're the property of the letter writers. Not only that, everything that happens in the corporation room, like a boardroom in a Is confidential. Is confidential. You sign a thing that says it is. Right. 

And so we had to ask, I personally had to ask every single letter writer and every estate of every letter writer for permission to sign something, by the way, during COVID, to sign something that gave us the release, the the right to publish it. 

And that, in and of itself, the fact that I did not get one single 'no' reflects Brown, reflects the transparency and the, 'Hey. What's the idea?' This was Chris Paxson when I called her, and said, 'I have a weird idea that I don't really know the end of.' And she said, 'Sure. Go ahead. Sounds interesting. Let's see how it goes.' That is unusual, the fact that, you know, these are not, they're not all easy letters. 

So when people hopefully buy the book and read these letters, they're not all easy letters, and not everyone on every board, I think, would say, 'Yeah. Sure. Put it.' But the trust and the peer-to-peer equality and putting these letters from 1764 and reckoning with everything from John Brown's slave ownership to today's most recent protests, that's pretty amazing. 

But there's no question. Short answer, 'Yes. Even the discussion of this would benefit every single corporation, every single board.

Jeff Selingo

Right. Even if they don't publish it, having somebody write this letter of, essentially, on their way out the door, I think, would be incredibly helpful. Lauren, this has been a fascinating conversation. 

Thank you for doing this work. The amount of work that went into this book, can't even imagine, especially given what you just said about getting permissions. But I also think it creates this level of transparency that more boards need. Because as you mentioned earlier on, there is a caricature of boards as, you know, rich and white and out of touch and you name it. Right? There's every criticism of boards of trustees. 

And what I think this shows is more of that human element inside the room. And I think that if boards were more transparent, perhaps, in my mind, there would be less criticism. But I know that a lot of people disagree with me on that. We'll leave it at that.

Lauren Zalaznick

I will add one more thing, which is that, again, the letters literally speak for themselves. And to the value discussion, there's just the every... Two chapters are devoted to really the life-changing impact and formation of a grown-up identity in the undergraduate years, and another chapter that are simply every letter speaks to values and the transformation of humanity that Brown's education gave them. 

And so when you see it on the page, it's really not to say that Brown is this unique school and is the only one that does it. It's to say that if you really asked your graduates and you really asked your fellows and trustees, what did the school do for you? You would probably get very similar answers upon reflection, and that in and of itself might be a very interesting exercise. 

And by the way, there's a whole chapter about criticism in this book, and it is the second to last chapter, and it's called 'One Last Thing Before I Go,' because what do you know? People have a lot to say on their way out the door. And so, again, it's not that the criticism isn't there. It's that it's taken in the concept of growth and values.

Jeff Selingo

Lauren, thank you so much for joining us. Again, the book is "Letters from the Corporation of Brown University." This is just a fantastic curation of these exit memos. And so, again, I really appreciate your time today.

And we'll be right back on Future U.

Lauren Zalaznick

Thank you so much. Peace.

Sponsor

This episode of Future U is sponsored by Ascendium, a mission-driven nonprofit committed to improving learning and training systems to better serve learners from low-income backgrounds. Ascendium envisions a world where low-income learners succeed in postsecondary education and workforce training as paths to upward mobility. Ascendium's grantees are removing systemic barriers and helping to build evidence about what works so learners can achieve their career goals. For more information, visit ascendiumphilanthropy.org.

Michael Horn

Welcome back to Future U. Lots of places  we could go in this conversation, Jeff, but I wanna start here. 

You made an interesting point during the interview about how alums who graduate in different eras are able to come together on a board and work together toward a common cause even if they have different perspectives about the university based on their time there. And that really comes out in these letters in this book. 

And so I'm curious about your own reflections on that as a trustee at your alma mater and someone who also, you know, like me, speaks with, works with a lot of university boards. How do you see this play out, this dynamic that you were referencing?

Jeff Selingo

Well, Michael, I didn't really think about it until this interview. But as you know, I've been somewhat of a critic of most boards of trustees that are mostly led by alums. 

As I've said on the show before, I often talk to trustees, and one of the questions I ask when I walk into a room is, how many of you are alums? And almost in every boardroom I've been in in the last couple of years, you'll probably have 75% to 80% of hands go up. 

We know it's very unusual. We knew when Paul LeBlanc was at Southern New Hampshire, for example, the majority of his board wasn't, they weren't alumni of Southern New Hampshire. He wanted it to act more like a corporate board where you where you would bring in expertise. 

And I think one of the difficult things in higher ed is that you're trying to manage both or actually trying to manage three legs of a stool. You want philanthropy. You want expertise to come to the board, so you need people who can be on the audit committee and help with marketing and help with governance and other issues. Then, of course, you often want alumni because you want them to have that long history of the institution in their mind because given their fiduciary responsibility to the institution, you want them to understand, you know, why this institution needs to last for another hundred plus years. 

Of course, that could get into problems as we've discussed on the mergers and acquisitions episodes that we have done because it brings an emotional element to this. 

But this is the part until we interviewed Lauren, I didn't realize what does bring alumni together of different eras? And it is that shared responsibility, but it's also that shared understanding of the institution itself. 

So even if the students change, you know, obviously, some institutions have gone coed over the years, over the the history of their institutions, they still have that shared understanding of the mission of the university, whether they were a student in the 1960s or whether they were the student in the 1990s. 

And then they could come together about current issues in the news or on campus. And I think that's one thing that is often lost if you don't have alumni on the board who don't really understand what it was like to be a student at that institution.

Michael Horn

It's a good point you raise in terms of the identification with mission, not perhaps to how it's always been done, which is the trap that I've heard you worry a lot about. Right? Like, well, that's not how it was when I was here, and sort of you get stuck in patterns. And I think, you know, the episode we did with Marymount Manhattan, of course, I thought was so good about how they intentionally brought in some non-alum perspectives with very clear areas of expertise for the questions that they were confronting at the time. 

But this identification and real understanding of mission, I think, is important because I'll tell you, I talk to folks all the time who look at the college challenges that some of these places are having right now, and they're like, 'Well, why don't those two just merge.' 

And you're like, 'Well, one's a religious institution, the other is focused on, you know, the workplace economy of such-and-such location.' Like, it would be a complete clash from day one. It doesn't make any sense. Right? And so I think you're right. A clear sense of mission, who we serve, what that means is a critical foundation point. 

I also took from it, Jeff, for what it's worth, I thought a lot about when I was at Yale at the Yale Daily News. One of the parts of my beat was covering the corporation. I'll come back to that in a moment. But one of the things that people like David Gergen, who we've had on the show, Charlie Ellis, others always talked about was how Rick Levin really created, I think it was 16 people on the board of trustees, the corporation. They were really a team. And just this dynamic when they got together, the comfort level they had to talk openly, ask tough questions, really, despite being different generations and so forth, how much how important that was of crafting really a team identity. 

And I just do think it's interesting, like, to be able to bring people who have a shared understanding of mission in very different eras together, confronting different challenges, and crafting that team. That spirit, I think, is a really important part of the president's role, obviously, but also whoever's leading the board of trustees, something that's square in their mission, I would think, as well.

Jeff Selingo

And it's also the ties that really bind people together. 

I'm often ... I often wonder, I've said this to my wife recently. You know, I really do enjoy my time on the Ithaca board, and I asked her why. Like, why is my presence on that board different than other boards I've been on? 

And I think largely because we have that shared experience of who we were at 18. Even if I was 18 in, you know, 1991 and another board member was 18 in 1973, there is that moment that, you know, college is a time in your life where you are developing, where things are changing, and then you're able to share those moments, and this often happens at every board meeting like, ‘Oh, I remember this professor. I remember this department. I remember this building.’ You have these memories, especially, again, because boards meet on campus often, you know, at least a couple times a year, you have that shared memory, and that is unlike almost any other board, nonprofit or for-profit, that anybody sits on. 

Like, I don't think anybody goes to Apple Headquarters, right, when they're meeting for the board and suddenly has this, like, memory come through about why they're there. And I think that's what happens at the end of the day. There's this kind of understanding of the enormous responsibility that you have as a board member because of the shared responsibility you have among the different members of the board who are alums.

Michael Horn

No. I think that that is the advantage that you bring. I think that's extremely well said, Jeff. 

You talked about the student newspaper also doing its job, in the interview. You gave a shout-out to her for understanding that. As I said, I covered the corporation, and, like, our biggest story was to try to break what was discussed in the boardroom, the room where it happened, if you will. Sometimes we'd get someone to leak something to us, and sometimes  we didn't as, when Yale really wanted a front page story in The New York Times around this $500 million investment that they approved into the sciences, at Yale. 

But either way, I suspect though that there's sort of this other piece of it, right, that came out of it, which is this tension of student interests and how board members, you know, may perceive their own interests or the university's interests and sort of their identification may be as an activist when they were a student versus now sort of supposed to govern this. And you know, be the adult in the room, if you will. 

What jumped out to you around that sort of, you know, my memory of a place might be there is some sort of rebellion or moment of student activism or whatever it is. Now I'm the trustee charged with helping preserve this mission, particularly, you know, as we think about what does mission mean at these institutions? I'm just sort of curious your reflections there.

Jeff Selingo

It's really interesting, Michael, because, just to tell you a story about, like, breaking stories, I remember Scott Jaschik, who was the former editor of The Chronicle of Higher Education who went on to be one of the founders of Inside Higher Ed. Yeah. You know he was at Cornell. He was editor at the Cornell Daily Sun, and I remember us him telling us the story about how the Cornell trustees used to meet at the Statler Hotel there. And he got to know people who worked on the staff at the Statler who essentially would like you know, they would throw notes away back in the day, you know, in the garbage, and they would just be able to pick up notes from the meetings and then leak them to the Cornell Daily Sun. 

I'm sure now, you know, of course, most board minutes and meeting notes and all those other things are now all electronic.

Michael Horn

Well, I'm sure their boardroom is getting added in the Signal chats. Right?

Jeff Selingo

Yeah. You don't get the board books like you used to, so it's hard to get those scoops anymore. 

But I think you bring up an interesting fact because, you know, trust me, when I was a student at Ithaca, I probably being on the board someday was, like, probably the last thing that I would imagine. I was the editor of the student newspaper. We were constantly at the administration and at the board for the decisions that you were making. And now sitting on the other side, it's interesting. 

You know, some of my former board members are president of student government, president of, you know, the senior class, other people who've worked on the student newspaper, other activists in some ways. 

And I think that being an activist in college, however you define that, actually gives you a greater appreciation for the moment and the institution that gave you that opportunity. And I think that's why these discussions about free speech on campus are so difficult right now because you might not understand the topic or the subject that people are debating right now because it's not what we debated, for example, in the 1990s, but it allows you to put yourself in their position now to understand where students are coming from. 

And so I think having that perspective on the board is really important because you don't just want the students who didn't participate in anything in college to be on the board just because maybe they're the biggest donors now or something like that. You want that perspective. 

And I think it goes back to those three-legged stool of the board, and I think it's important why every board has a matrix to decide what we need on the board. And I think every board that I've been part of or have advised over the years, their governance committee, their trustee committee, whatever they call it, is really smart about coming up with that matrix. 'Okay. We need, you know, obviously, diversity in terms of of gender, race, and ethnicity. We need diversity in terms of graduation year,' which I think is really important. Right? You don't want graduates of just one era. You need that diversity of professional expertise. 

And one other idea, I think, is this diversity of student activities. So it's not just your major, or your school within the university and your year, but what else did you do? What you know, do you have enough athletes on the board, former athletes on the board? Do you have enough people who were in these different schools? 

I think that's really important, and I think the school matrix is really important because most of these places, you know, you don't want all humanities majors or all STEM majors at Yale, for example.

Michael Horn

Yeah. Yeah. I'm gonna think about that a little bit more. Last thing, though, as we think about representation, 54 members of the Brown board, she made the case for why it's great. Your take?

Jeff Selingo

Well, first of all, I wanna hear what you think about this because ...

Michael Horn

I can't imagine.

Jeff Selingo

I can't imagine maintaining that. 

And I think, you know, I've spoken to the Notre Dame trustees before. I know they have a big board. I think a lot of this is for philanthropy. And I think that most institutions should have much smaller boards and then move the philanthropy to the side, and have advisory groups or things like that because there's no reason you should have a 54-member board of trustees. I'm sorry.

Michael Horn

Yeah. I mean, that's certainly what Yale does, right, is they have plenty of... They have 16 members of their board, I think, like I said, and they have plenty of other advisory groups, you know, for philanthropy, I think. 

And some of those people step up and then, you know, sort of present themselves as potentially great board members who'd be contributing expertise. Minerva University, where I'm on the board, we're even less than that. I think we're a little bit too small, frankly, but the point being, 54 to me seems like really hard to have the kind of robust discussions that I would wanna be able to have across the board and not just look. I guess you're really relying on great leadership and probably committees to get a lot of the work done, particularly an executive committee, I would imagine. But that seems … it just seems very big me.

Jeff Selingo

Well, and then what ends up happening, Michael, is when more work is done in the executive committee, you essentially have a board within a board, which is always gonna happen. 

It particularly happens among leadership of boards. Right? They just do more work. You know, many of the chairs and vice chairs I've met of boards, it's almost a full-time job, especially these days at colleges and in universities. 

But then you have this board-within-a-board, and then the committees just become even overwhelming in themselves because if everyone's on a committee or multiple committees, you know, some of these committees then could be 20 or 25 people, and that is really where the real work of the board should get done. You know, the finance committee should discuss and argue over the budget and make sure that the administration is focused on the right areas of the budget, that when the budget comes to the full board, you're not relitigating it. Because I often see this at boards, like, why have committees if you're gonna relitigate everything at the full board meeting? 

But you have to have trust. That means you have to have trust in the committee structure. And when the full board is that big and the committees are that big, I just feel like that trust is lost then because not a lot of work is able to get done when you have just a group that large.

Michael Horn

No. I think that's right. 

My experience as well, and I serve on a lot of other boards, obviously, in a lot of other settings for profit and not-for-profit. And the really good ones, the committees do take on a fair amount of work on some of these items. And it would be crazy if you were relitigating that every single time, except for maybe major pieces of strategy that you really want to hear all voices on. There has to be some delegation of that work, I think, Jeff.

Jeff Selingo

Yeah. I mean, it's very much like Congress. Right? It's like the work is done in the committees, and then it comes up to the full body, and that's really what these boards are established to do.

Michael Horn

Yeah. Well, let's not leave with a comparison of boards to congress, I hope, but for everyone listening.

Jeff Selingo

Yeah hopefully boards of trustees get more done.

Michael Horn

More done and more productive conversation. 

But as we wrap up here, a huge thank you to Lauren Zalaznick. 

Again, the book is "Letters from the Corporation of Brown University." Really interesting where she lets these letters speak for themselves quite literally, and you can pull these insights from them. Thank you to her. 

Thank you to all of you for listening. Remember to subscribe to our newsletter. Check it out at futureupodcast.com. 

And we'll see you next time on Future U.