This President Says Tradition Shouldn’t Feel Like Regulation

Chapters

0:00 - Intro
2:00 - A Turnaround Story at Unity
4:42 - Colleges Are Designed to Serve Employees, Not Students
TKTK - What Sparked a Viral Essay About College Structures
9:03 - How Unity Changed Its Model
13:57 - Can Other Colleges Easily Follow Unity’s Example?
16:20 - When to Stop an Experiment That Isn’t Working
19:17 - Higher Ed Is At a Crossroads
21:58 - How Will AI Change Higher Ed?
26:40 - When Tradition Seems Like Regulation
32:30 - Leaders Are Unprepared for Change
34:40 - Colleges Need Bold Action
37:15 - Presidents Should Use Their Skills As Educators to Sell Change
40:40 - The Best College Leaders Are Leaning In On AI
43:56 - Wrap-Up

Relevant Links:

“The Lie at the Center of Higher Education,” by Melik Khoury on Substack.

“The Library Card Fallacy,” by Melik Khoury on Substack.

“We Outgrew the Butterfly. Now We Are Building an Octopus,” by Melik Khoury on Substack.

“Reimagining the Academy: Unity Environmental University on Breaking the Higher Ed Mold,” in AcOps Magazine.

Transcript

Melik Khoury

Year one, you are on a listening tour.

Year two, you are creating a fully inclusive strategic planning process.

Year three, you're working for a consulting firm and your successor resets the cycle.

Michael Horn

Jeff, that's sitting college president Melik Peter Khoury of Unity Environmental University with a bit of sarcasm.

Jeff Selingo

Yeah. Well, ten years ago, Michael, Unity in Maine only had about 700 students.

Michael Horn

And today, it's more than 10,000, and get this. He wrote an essay. Yes. An essay that went viral.

His argument, too many colleges serve their employees more than their students.

Melik Khoury

We all kind of just assumed that what was tradition was regulation.

Jeff Selingo

So he took Unity apart — the board, the governance, even the faculty job.

Michael Horn

It was not a smooth ride.

Melik Khoury

Now that I have lived through it, it is ironic that people ask me how I survived it more so than how I did it.

Jeff Selingo

Plus how Unity kills the experiments that don't work and why good presidents won't even apply for the job.

Melik Khoury

I'm a successful president at Unity. Why would I wanna go and be paraded around like a prize horse at a college worse than mine?

Jeff Selingo

And then I asked him about AI.

Melik Khoury

I think anybody who could predict that right now is trying to sell a book.

Jeff Selingo

Then Michael and I dig into what every other college can take from the Unity lesson.

Michael Horn

That's ahead on this episode of 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

Jeff, we have spent a lot of time on Future U. talking about the pressures, of course, facing small colleges and whether they can change fast enough to survive in this era.

And we also talk a lot about what good governance on this show looks like at the trustee and faculty level, of course.

And while some of the big stories of turnarounds are well known, one up here in New England, I'm not sure it gets as much attention.

And that's the story of Unity Environmental University in Maine, of course, Jeff.

Jeff Selingo

That's right, Michael.

And just so our listeners are kind of on the same page just so we give a little bit more background here. A decade ago, it was called Unity College, and it was this small, largely residential institution with an environmental mission.

And then under Melik Peter Khoury, who became president in 2016 and is our guest on this episode of Future U, Unity expanded into online education. It started serving working adults and students who were never going to move to a campus in rural Maine.

It rethought its academic calendar, its pricing, its organizational structure while keeping its focus on the environment.

And it's also repeatedly held tuition flat.

And get this, Michael, today, Unity now serves more than 10,000 students up from roughly just 700 a decade earlier. It really is a turnaround story.

Michael Horn

It really is.

And the shift, of course, involved difficult choices, including layoffs, a move completely away from the traditional residential experience that had defined the college.

And I think for a variety of reasons, Jeff, this isn't just a parallel story, if you will, of a Paul LeBlanc Southern New Hampshire University style turnaround.

But Melik has been a thoughtful observer of the higher ed landscape. He writes a provocative substack newsletter about higher education called the modern CEO. We'll link to it in the show notes, and it's gotten a lot of attention.

And in it, he's very thoughtful about how he has helped turn around Unity and many of the changes he's made. And we thought that by having him on the show, there's something to learn from all of that for the rest of higher ed.

Jeff Selingo

So, Michael, with that as a backdrop, we're pleased to have Melik on. We spent time with him together at a dinner several years ago, and we both thought we'd learn a lot from this conversation.

And for those who don't know Melik, he previously served on the leadership teams at Culver Stockton College, Upper Iowa University, and then at Unity from 2012 through 2016 before he became the school's eleventh president.

Melik, welcome to Future U.

Melik Khoury

It's a pleasure, Jeff.

Good to see you.

Michael Horn

We're excited to have you as well.

And, you wrote an essay, of course, a couple months ago that I think it's fair to say for an essay went viral, that you long believed in the rhetoric, if you will, of colleges. But you had come to believe that it masked the fact that in many cases, the institutions were serving employees more than students.

Can you unpack what you meant by this, and what does it mean specifically to serve employees more than students?

Melik Khoury

Sure. I think pre-1965, higher education was truly an exclusive endeavor. There were very limited schools. It was highly competitive. And the idea was that we were the knowledge keepers. You had to come to us to have any opportunity to become the top 10% of the world. World leaders, everybody went to universities.

In 1965, you know, LBJ had this experiment that everybody deserved an education because that would lead to the American dream much faster. And I think that many institutions sprouted after that. And the conversation got diluted a little bit because some of us were about access, some were about exclusivity, some were R1s, but yet all of us still kind of worked in the model that existed pre-1965.

And so most of us are designed around a governance and an approach as if we are selective, as if we are completely subsidized.

And the more that things changed over the last fifty years, the more that we have kind of clung onto those traditions instead of adapted to what the modern learner and what a modern institution could look like outside of the elites who had that privilege and opportunity.

Jeff Selingo

Melik, was there a specific, like, moment that led you to this? Like, what changed in your mind?

Melik Khoury

Sure. I think I'm one of those people. I'm a first generation American, first in my family to get an education. And like many believe that higher education does change somebody's life trajectory. I believe in that to my core.

I've had the privilege of working in an R1 institution, in a small private college, in an online school, now an environmental science institution. And we all kind of just assumed that what was tradition was regulation. We all assumed that what is doctrine if you will, what is somehow the only way to do education. And as I have experienced higher education as a student, as an administrator, as a faculty member, I started to realize very slowly. I used the metaphor with my team. I feel like that movie Pleasantville, where very slowly life is coming into color.

And I was like, wait a second. We are all trying to do the same things, but we don't serve the same audience. So for me, it's like the frog that survived the boiling water and got to leap out and now looking in and saying, wait a second. I could be part of the problem.

And to be fair, Jeff, until about ten years ago when closures were viewed as anomalies where it... Where, you know, Christensen's kind of idea of colleges closing was dismissed instead of understood, I started to look at... there are some really good colleges closing. There are colleges with significant endowments and historical reputation that are barely hanging on. Something has to be wrong.

And when I started to study the regulations, when I started to study the governance, I realized that we take for granted and package something that could easily be disassembled.

And that's when I started to realize that there are those who push for the R1s, for the elites, and they're doing exactly what they need to do.

But there were very few people out there saying it's okay not to be like them. And if you cannot be like them, you shouldn't act like them.

Jeff Selingo

Yeah. There's a lot of me too ism, right, in higher ed.

So what have you done at Unity to do something different? Right? The institution under your watch since 2016 has obviously been dramatically transformed from a college to university, from a small place based institution to a large and largely online one focused on environmental careers, serving a different population of students and so on.

So tell us a little bit more about what you've done at Unity to do something different than what you're describing as tradition is regulation.

Melik Khoury

Absolutely. I think that... I mean, has always had a history even the way it was created to being a little bit different and a little bit avant garde.

They were one of the first few institutions to become an environmentally focused institution. They were the first institution to divest their endowment from fossil fuels. They were one of the first institutions to really lean into this idea of access to education. But all of that, Jeff, was under the premise that there was only one model for education, which is four year residential tuition discount, room and board, athletics. It was kind of like the package deal.

Two presidents ago, the gentleman did a fantastic job of introducing the social sciences within the construct of the environmental sciences. It's still based on liberal arts core.

My predecessor did a fantastic job of leaning into the you know the pure harsh sciences around how do you get a career in the green industry.

When I came on board, we were like many institutions. One of our peer institutions was Green Mountain. Another peer institution of ours was Northland. Another peer institution of ours was Hampshire. Another peer institution of ours... I could go on.

We had a great mission. We had a dedicated employee base, but our students were dwindling little by little. Discounting was going up little by little.

What we found out is that our model was designed around a governance structure that assumed that demand exceeded supply, that everybody could afford the college.

I have a slide I show at board orientation that there was a time that any student that went to unity would never consider a state school, an online school, or a community college. But that blur in education became larger and larger.

So we realized we were operating as if we were exclusive and we weren't.

And so the first thing we did is we started to work with the board of trustees. We had to have a conversation around, are you philanthropic? If so, you don't give enough or get enough to keep the college self-sustaining.

Are you operational? And if you are, then what are you? You are volunteers. What is the current of interest and how does that work between you and the institution?

Are you fiduciaries and strategic?

And once he decided that they were a strategic board, w realized that the governance structure and the mandate that they gave my predecessors, there was no way that my predecessors could execute them because the system in place was a system where they needed the yes and they could not make decisions. It was consensus based. It was voting based.

So the first thing we did is we changed the governance to understand the rule scope and authority of the board versus the rule scope and authority of the president.

And then we started to go down layer by layer faculty, staff, students. And what we realized is almost every type of governance that was in the institution was designed for the kind of institution that we could not afford to be.

So we did things, for example, of changing consensus based decision making to collaboration and engagement with a decision maker. So we worked two and a half years on something called role scope and authority where every dean, every director, when we brought people into a room, they got the same collaboration and engagement as they would in a regular institution, but they got to make a decision instead of getting a vote.

And as you can assume, Jeff, that was not well received, and we had to invest a significant amount in training.

We then realized that our positions were not designed for an era of adaptation over preservation. So we had to deconstruct what is an administration, what is a staff, what is a faculty.

So for example, at Unity, and I will end there because I could go on about this all day. We deconstructed the faculty position to seven distinct jobs. We created a model called the enterprise model, almost like a private system, that allowed everything that does not touch a student directly to be centralized, yet that yet everything that affects a student directly at a different audience to lean into in-person residential — are two good examples.

And so we really changed the entire operational and governance model to allow us to be more adaptive while keeping to our core.

Michael Horn

It's fascinating hearing you say that, and you've gone where I wanted to, right, on the how you actually changed this.

And It sounds like a serious investment in change management, not just sort of, ‘Hey. this is the idea. We're going here and assuming people would fall in line.’

I'm curious, like, if other institutions... Can they take this playbook, right, of change management, or is there something structural or circumstantial about unity as an institution that would only apply to institutions like unity in some ways?

And if that's the case, what's that circumstance, if that makes sense?

Melik Khoury

I think the process is transferable. I think how an institution lands as to what is centralized, what is decentralized can be different. Because every institution has strengths and weaknesses that are not identical. But the approach is the same.

I think most institutions that struggle with this, it's not a matter of knowing what to do. It's that to be fair, the governance structure that is put in place, the decision hierarchy that's put in place is designed to protect the status quo. And so as a result, many institutions will... Many faculty and staff and admissions will tell you they all agree on the mission. They all agree about... They care about students. But the devil is in the details.

The system is also not designed to really allow any change agent the longevity. And most presidents and most provosts and most senior administrators are not trained, please excuse the pun, to take a punch in the face because we are in an industry that cares about our reputation. And when we attack reputation, people stepped down.

So the transformation at Unity, Michael, was very, very turbulent.

And now that I have lived through it, it is ironic that people ask me how I survived it more so than how I did it. And I don't think it is fair to put on most employees the kind of cultural pushback, alienation, and isolation that it takes to simply try to save a soul of an institution.

So I think it's less about process and it's more about culture.

Michael Horn

And you built that culture obviously from the ground up.

I'm curious about a different angle on that culture also because obviously you've put in place many successful innovations, you know, big change in the character, and scope of the institution.

I'm curious on something adjacent to that, which is, what have you tried that didn't work, and what's your process for abandoning experimental approaches when they don't perform as you expected upfront, when they don't pay those dividends, and it looks like, ‘Hey, this was a good idea on paper. It didn't work out.’

How do you step away from that?

Melik Khoury

That's a great question because I think when I started this conversation, we talked about, ow do you build an institution that is governed about adaptation in lieu of preservation?’

So by definition, we had to build decision matrix that allowed us to make decisions fast, but also have the objective capabilities to kill projects quickly.

So for example, we have launched many initiatives that have failed. The secret to our success is we've launched more that have succeeded than they have failed.

So the process itself is actually quite simple. Once we determined the structure of the enterprise where it was like... think of it as the private system, parent company, a system office, and determine its rules, government authority. Instead of going through pilot projects that do not allow for anything to succeed to be pushed back in the environment that it doesn't work, we were able to create verticals with dedicated employees, faculty, staff that have the opportunity to differentiate as much as possible without having friction with the rest of the things that are working.

And before we launch, we create something called a foundational document that clearly delineates its rule, scope, and authority and what it's allowed to do or not do so that it doesn't compete.

We create very, very stringent investment limits, ROI, timelines, etcetera.

And the people who are determining what those are are the people within. — e call them sustainable educational business units. — but the people holding them accountable are the system office.

So you get to pick the rules, but a different group gets to evaluate its efficacy.

And so then as a result, there's an objective lens to say, okay, this isn't working. We are not seeing the traction that we require. We're going to kill it.

But what is really cool at Unity because of our approach is when we kill it, we don't have to lay people off. We don't have to fire people. We just get to move them to another project or put them into open positions.

And that has created a psychological safety to try new things.

Jeff Selingo

Jeff Selingo

So people could fail. Yeah.

Melik Khoury

And you're not asking people in a full time job to do this some... This new thing in addition to their day job.

Jeff Selingo

Well, and it gives you a more flexible workforce as a result.

Melik Khoury

Yes.

Jeff Selingo

And you've been critical, you know, Melik, other college leaders for not making bigger changes.

Do you think that risk aversion is changing at all in this current higher ed environment given all the issues and challenges facing higher education?

How hopeful are you that there may be some bigger changes given the moment that we're living in right now? Or do you think that institutions will, like, go to their grave essentially being risk averse?

Melik Khoury

I think that we are at a crossroads. And I think it could go either way.

Right now, I see the pushback in hiring of leaders becoming way way too cautious.

Most of my peers who are sitting successful presidents will not apply to most institutions because of the pageantry of the application process.

I'm a successful president at Unity. Why would I wanna go and be paraded around like a prize horse at a college worse than mine? Right? So there's a search issue here of how we select our leaders.

We select our leaders to be unicorns. They're not.

I'm also in about seven NDAs right now working with a number of institutions in trying to help them. And it's not that they don't know what to do, Jeff. It's that they do not believe that there's the infrastructure in place to support their transformation.

So a few of them have chosen to close, and I quote, with dignity.

I think until there's a sea change in how you support a leadership team, until the faculty, staff, students, alumni are not weaponized against any change management without giving the kind of crisis training for a board and a president and a team to be able to survive it, presidents are finding it easier to make sure that they get their consulting gig or their next job before they actually have to give a hard truth.

I make a very, very painful comment that people don't like.

Year one, you are on a listening tour.

Year two, you are creating a fully inclusive strategic planning process.

Year three, you're working for a consulting firm and your successor resets the cycle.

And we at the institution are so used to that that we are used to the cycle in lieu of the actual change.

Jeff Selingo

Well... and what happens is you have no momentum as a result as an institution. Right? That's this is part of the problem, I think, with these short term tenured presidencies as well because you just kind of get in this vicious cycle and you never get out of it.

You never stop listening essentially and start doing in many ways.

So last question. How much do you see AI changing the game in higher ed? And if so, what do you foresee will be or perhaps will be the big change?

Melik Khoury

I think anybody who could predict that right now is trying to sell a book.

Jeff Selingo

I guess that's what what what what... Michael and I are always trying to talk about AI, so we're

not trying to sell a book, though.

Melik Khoury

To be fair, you're currently not college presidents or retired presidents.

But the

more honest answer is, I think right now Unity has taken a position that AI is here. And whether it is in the spirit of automation, whether it's in the spirit of LLM, there is a real disconnect in the future of higher education as it comes to the idea that knowledge is getting cheaper.

So is the future of higher ed the ability to discern, certify and evaluate that the learning is real versus the historical cadence of higher education is about providing the knowledge.

I wrote an article that got a little bit of legs when I said the library card fallacy. So I use the library as a really good analogy for AI in higher education.

You know, Robin Williams said that, you know, a library card and $20 could get you an education. And I think a lot of people think that about AI.

I call BS. Here's why.

Go pluck a person at random. Give them a library card. Push them into the National Library of Congress. They will be crippled by the amount of information out there that they do not even know where to start.

So we in higher ed have an obligation to stop being afraid of it. And start to become the organization that has the objectivity to research it, understand it, embrace it so that we can be the folks who can say without question, when is AI dangerous and when it isn't.

That's why when I read AI is cheating, I remember math professors protesting calculators.

I would push against assessment.

So we at Unity have actually started the conversation. What does education look like in an age where what is real and what is known is gonna be tougher to certify than what you can produce? And that is the conversation of the day.

So culturally, here's what I did. I had my employees spend an hour a day playing with whatever LLM that they wanted without consequence. We … because I could not have the conversation with them about what is good and what is bad because none of us understood it.

After about six months, we got together and we said, okay, what have we learned?

So now we are one of the few institutions that has moved an AI guide on the side for our learners further down funnel than most institutions with 10 times our budget.

We are working with our own bespoke air-gapped LLM with a number of instructors to try to understand how do you use less energy, less hallucinations and more efficacy within the work of how you tutor students using an AI proctor or we create scenarios where our students can practice with them before to speak to real life.

So we are really doing a lot of work there.

And once we know more, we will take a harder position instead of the … we know the answer and the answer is a blue book.

Jeff Selingo

Melik, this is just a fascinating story about Unity and your work there at kind of remaking not only the institution, but rethinking the workforce and the culture of the institution.

I always say that you could have the best strategy, right, but if you don't think about the workforce, whether it's faculty, staff, and others that are gonna put it in place. It doesn't really matter how good the strategy is.

So thank you for joining us, today on Future U.

And we'll be right back.

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.

Jeff Selingo

Welcome back to Future U., Michael.

That was quite a lesson in change management, I must admit.

And I wanna come back to that.

But first, I wanna start with this line that Melik said that when he said it, we both kind of, in our little back channel way that we are able to talk to each other, during guest interviews. he said something that really struck both of us. And he said this, ‘We all kind of just assumed that what was tradition was regulation.’

And boy does that speak I think to so much of what colleges and universities do.

And you know, we're at a point right now where the comprehensiveness of colleges and universities have now these places just kind of collapsing on themselves.

We've only known growth for the last fifty years. And so when somebody wants to say they wanna get rid of a program or trim a program or serve a new group of students and stop serving a different group of students.

They wanna do recruitment differently.

Whatever comes up, as you know, Michael, it always is, well, we can't do that. We've always done it that way or that is tradition here.

And it serves as this regulator, this governor on change. In some ways, everything at a college or university is tradition. As you always said, it's how these colleges and universities have survived for two hundred and fifty years. Right?

It's the stories that one group of students tells another group of students, that alumni tell students, that new faculty members hear from older faculty members. It's that proverbial letter in a desk from a president to the next president.

Everything is built on tradition. And so if everything is built on tradition and that is the regulator to change at universities, it's no wonder that none of these universities can make the changes that Melik was able to do at Unity.

Michael Horn

Yeah. Jeff, the line landed for me as well.

I'll say it for a couple different reasons.

One, it reminded me of some of the K-12 work that Rick Hess actually at AEI has done over the years.

He's written a couple of books about cage busting leadership, and I'm gonna mess up the second title, but something like cage busting, teachers or something.

And, basically, these are folks in K-12 schools who, like, everyone around them is like, ‘Oh, you can't do that. It's a regulation at the state level.’ And they look in and there's no regulation there.

And they're like, ‘No. You can make that change.’

But it's something... And this is the other reason it landed for me is it's actually not just higher ed that I think experiences this over time. It's very normal in an organization's growth and evolution that they start treating these traditions, as you said, as just like law from on high. This is just the way things are done here.

And it's interesting. Right? Like, as problems occurred earlier in an institution's history, culture forms. This is just how we solve these problems, and that becomes these processes and these priorities of an institution that just become assumed. They're almost like grooves in a factory floor or the train tracks that organizations just can't easily get off of.

And I think one of the things that's interesting about the higher ed sector is many universities happen to have been around a lot longer so that they've run this lap, if you will, around creating the business model or the organizational model. What are our priorities? What are the resources, processes, culture? And they've been doing it so much that it's just so... Like, those grooves are so, so, so deep.

And there are also regulations and things of that nature that make it... You know, they're not always certain what they're allowed to do differently. And so together, I think it just becomes a lot easier to stay with what you've always done rather than change. Like, the inertia is very significant.

And while I don't think it's different from other organizations, it is deeper, I think, in many higher ed institutions.

And I guess sort of the bumper sticker, I would say, if I had to, was what started as an understanding, like, these these cultures built out of an understanding of the demand side, what we need to deliver to stakeholders. It shifts to the supply side of the view of the world where it's more about organizational preservation as it has been rather than maybe serving the students or the communities in which you are today.

And there's something else out of that, Jeff, that I found interesting, which was, of course, this point that a model and a culture that was assumed for a specific slice of young people in America was then just naturally ported, if you will, to be the right model for all of higher education as it dramatically expanded its footprints.

That you could almost think of that as the original sin from decades earlier. We've talked about that before, I think.

But I wanna ask something different that comes out of that, Jeff, which is the critique he essentially leveled at university leaders just, you know, earlier in the conversation, which is he said they can't take a punch in effect.

And the implied critique, I think, is that too many leaders are ducking the fact that in your words, you know, the comprehensiveness no longer plays. It's a different era. The current governance structure is just assuming that, in his words, demand exceeded supply and that everybody can still afford college.

And what Melik described to us, I think what I hope people take, it's not what Unity did. Like, yeah, they went online. They served adult students, etcetera, etcetera. But it's the how I think is where the real lessons are here.

When all these processes are built to preserve the organization as it is, it's like a serious amount. You know, it's not a president just saying we're gonna go do this now. It's like a serious amount of tending to changing all of these accrued processes that have mounted up over the years, and it's a serious investment. And I guess I'm curious your take. If you agree that what he did is necessary. You train a lot of future leaders in higher ed. How do we get them to be able to have that sort of attention to detail, the staying power, and the chutzpah, if you will, because it was turbulent as he said for him.

Jeff Selingo

Well, first of all, I think that many leaders right now in higher ed are not really able to meet this moment.

They were trained, and they were brought up in higher education and academia in a very different era. And so they're not really used to making trade-offs to understanding kind of this, you know, where they need to put their chips and when and where they need to kind of cut their losses.

I mean, if you look across most colleges and universities, they have a couple of winning programs, both, you know, on on the academic side, even on the athletic side. But yet they invest and they spread this peanut butter pretty thin across all the institution because they don't really want to offend the faculty.

And a lot of this comes down to, Michael, the shared governance process of higher ed and how it's really broken now. And it really is broken at a time when there is no institutional memory among senior leaders.

So as you know, there's a lot of turnover. You know, both of us were at this dinner in New York a couple of months ago, and everybody who went around the table, mostly presidents and provosts, they all were talking about how long they were in their job on their campus.

And I don't believe, Michael, you'll correct me if I'm wrong. I don't remember anybody being over like a year. And many of them were talking in months.

And so what happens is you come to a campus, you understand the problems. Even if you understand the problems, what's going to happen is that the faculty are going to wait you out, and they believe that they're the keeper of the flame at these places and that they will just wait you out.

And given how much turnover there is in higher ed right now, in many places, they're not wrong.

And so not only does it require a little bit of chutzpah in terms of presidents, but it requires a discipline and a scale and a, you know, kind of seizing the moment and just moving faster.

What I don't get about presidents right now are two things, Michael.

First of all, not enough of them want to win. They just wanna wait it out.

We're seeing this in the M&A world. So we know that a number of institutions really need to either merge, be acquired, or be the acquirer. But everybody's kind of stepping back, waiting, you know, because they think, well, our institution will be able to be saved once these three other institutions in our state or our competitors go out of business. So let's just wait them out.

So there's no sense of urgency. There's no bias to action, for these presidents, right now.

And I think that's really hurting them at a moment where they do have to take more decisive action.

And that's what I would like to see from some leaders right now is to come in with a plan like Melik did, and say, here's what we're gonna be. Here's what we're gonna do. Here's how we're going to win. Here's where we're gonna play, and here's how we're gonna win. And we're just gonna go and do it, and you're either with me or you're not with me.

I'm sorry. I just think that that is the the decisive action that most colleges and universities are really lacking right now.

And I think presidents either think they have time or boards think they have time, and they just don't.

I will tell you, I got a text the other night from our friend Doug Moore, who was a guest on our show, last fall, and he said... or last spring. And he said, wait until February or March. It's gonna get really bad out there, because he's seen the books of these colleges or universities.

And so waiting around is just not an option anymore.

Michael Horn

That slogan you just said, want to win, or that line, want to win, I think Jeff is the key one there.

Jeff Selingo

And I think of this because, you know, as you know, I live in Washington DC. I'm a huge baseball fan, and I get very frustrated with the Lerners down here because I feel like they own a baseball team and they don't wanna win.

Like, who runs a university and doesn't... Is not competitive about winning? Whether...

And by the way, that could be winning. I'm not talking on the sports field here. I'm talking about, like, I wanna win in these programs, or I wanna win with these students, or I wanna win with these clubs that we're gonna... Whatever it might be. you don't have to win at everything, but you have to pick a couple of things that you're gonna play and win for.

Michael Horn

I think it's a great point. It strikes me that it comes back to boards on two critical dimensions then.

Number one is when boards are selecting a president, look for someone who wants to win on a few select things, right, and has a strong vision and has that mindset, Jeff.

And then secondly, for boards, I think the education of them, like, they have to be change management part one, which is ‘This is what it's gonna take on my campus to get us to this place where we're winning, and you need to have my back because this is how it's gonna get ugly. Let me be super clear about all the things, the no confidence votes, the headlines, whatever it is, let me tell you all the things that are gonna happen and maybe make it worse than it really is. But you have to have my back if you believe in this vision through this because you guys are the ones that hire and fire the president.’

And so there's sort of two ends of the board.

I'll say something different, which is... And this remains, in my mind, not, like, so different from a lot of other organizations in other industries in the sense of, like, this change management process using the right tool at the right time and really sequencing it out is critical.

And it's something that I feel like actually higher ed has one thing, Jeff, at its disposal that I don't think they use enough. And I... Just a story from industry, which is when Andy Grove, you know, the legendary CEO, former CEO of Intel, and he worked with Clay Christensen, of course, to turn... You know, create a significant amount of growth in the business by going to the bottom of the market and launching the Celeron chip, etcetera, etcetera. But when he sort of got the basic idea from Clay, he didn't just go announce, ‘Hey. this is what we're doing.’ What he did, Jeff, was interesting. He actually educated... It was something like 2,000 mid-level managers and up in the company about the basic sort of theory at work, the action, what had happened in other industries, gave them a common language, and then together they all said, now we got it. We're gonna do this really counterintuitive thing.

And I guess it has always struck me, Jeff, that educators, because we educate, should be particularly well positioned to use that tool of education, in helping the campus.

I think of what Art Levine is doing on Brandeis right now. And as he said, I just told him the truth. Do you wanna be mediocre? Because that's where we're headed. And he's like, I'm only gonna be here 20 months or whatever it is. And if you'd vote no confidence, I'll be sad, but I'm only gonna be here 20 months, but we gotta move quickly.

And I... Maybe this is more of a plea on my part, but I think this is a major tool we have. We have to not be afraid in higher ed to really just lay out the facts, nothing but the facts, tell you the reality of what this is.

Let's go win together as a campus.

And I thought it was really sobering when he mentioned all these peers in environmental or environmental tangent, or spaces of Unity’s that have closed over the last several years.

I think that should be, like, a real way to get people's attention and just say, like, this is... It's this or this. Right? And the closing is not a pretty picture.

One other thought on bold leadership, and I love your take as we close out here.

We always end with AI, it seems, this season. His response on AI was consistent with a pattern I'm noticing, which is that to me, it seems like the bold leaders who really are on the front end of pushing universities forward and innovating and so forth and doing better, they seem consistently from my perspective to be leaning into AI and not running from it or being paralyzed by it.

It's not that they're just running without clarity and purpose. In his case, right, they took their time to sort of learn about the tool, figure out what their posture was.

But they're not pretending it doesn't exist. They're not pretending it's going away, and they see the value in the real world impact it's gonna be.

And so, again, it's like a learning organization. School should be learning organizations, I think, and then developing a real plan and leaning into it. It seems to me that this is a pattern that's emerging among the people that I think of as the best leaders at the moment in universities.

Do do you agree? Do you see something different? What does that tell us?

Jeff Selingo

Yeah. I definitely think that the university leaders who are leaning into AI see the long game that they're playing here. Right?

That this is part of what is going to probably define higher education for the next, you know, 20, 30, 40 years.

And I just feel that many other leaders who are really thinking about the kind of the short-term survival of their institutions are the ones that are burying their head in the sand. Right?

They really don't wanna deal with their faculty around this issue. They believe that it's kind of, you know, the counterintuitive argument to be kind of against AI now or maybe it's not even counterintuitive anymore because it seems like there is, like, a growing, you know, market of people against AI right now. So maybe it's more politically popular to be against it.

But, you know, Michael, the shows that we had on this summer that just aired really have made me believe that those leaders who are, you know, looking ahead, you know, 20 or 30 years to figure out, like, how can I position my university best on this?

You know, the analog experience is still going to be critical, you know, even in an online environment, and he understands that, what they're doing at Unity.

But to me, it's those, it's those presidents who can think two things can be true at once. I could be very worried about the impact of AI on teaching and learning, administrative work, and then work of this university and on my students, you know, in their first jobs, but I also can believe that this is going to be a life-changing technology that is going to change the university for the next 20 or 30 years.

And the problem is I think most presidents, not only on this issue, but on other issues, can't hold two truths at the same time because they just have so much going on.

And I think that's the problem that we're facing right now in higher ed. You're either for it or you're it. You can't have this nuanced middle ground that allows you to follow multiple paths at the same time.

Michael Horn

I think that's a perfect place to leave it, Jeff.

A really interesting lesson in change management, from Melik Khoury.

Huge thanks to him for joining us.

A huge thanks to all of you as always for joining us.

We'd love your takes. Love your, hate mail as always, and love your ideas that come from this that spawn how universities can continue to innovate toward, improving what they do for all of their stakeholders.

And with that, we'll look forward to seeing you next time on the next episode of Future U.