Colloquium Keynote Speaker Nancy Zimpher Shares Leadership Strategies

Found in Membership Matters

Nancy Zimpher

change change 2010’s keynote speaker, Nancy Zimpher, chancellor of the State University of New York, College Board President Gaston Caperton said, “She has been an agent of change every place she’s been — having begun her career as a teacher in a one-room schoolhouse, she has never lost her passion for providing high-quality education for every student.”

Zimpher addressed the audience of enrollment and admission professionals, representing about 200 member colleges, on the conference’s theme: “Leading Boldly in Perilous Times.”

“I think we have whined a bit too long and have presented the same story to our elected leaders in ways they cannot hear,” she said, referring to the impact of reduced state investments in higher education. We need to change the storyline. . . . We need to behave like anchor institutions.” Zimpher defined “anchor institutions” as not only universities and community colleges but also hospitals, museums and other public institutions that, with rare exception, never move their locations. They employ millions of workers, enroll millions of students, and purchase hundreds of billions of dollars each year in goods and services annually. When asked about the challenges of speaking to state legislators on behalf of both four-year and community colleges, she made the case for presenting a united front on behalf of education. “We are so divided,” she said. “ We make sport out of legislative activity, because we insist on going to legislators and having our arguments with our own industry sectors in front of them. This is not smart.”

Zimpher shared a set of leadership strategies that included the need for institutional transformation through strategic planning. An institution should be explicit about its vision, she said, which needs to be construed at the hands of many. A plan should be action oriented and metric driven, and step outside of what we spend most of our time talking about, such as college rankings and recruiting. “Rarely are our institutions’ strategic plans riveted on the external, much less attached to metric-driven goals,” she argued.

Zimpher, who has recently taken the helm at SUNY and had recently completed a tour of its 64 campuses, said she is currently developing her strategic plan, which will be connected to the economic revitalization and enhanced quality of life of the state of New York. Aspects of the plan will range from a commitment to reducing the state’s carbon footprint and investing in renewable energies, to bringing down cases of obesity in the state and sealing the leaky education pipeline.

“I have to ask you,” she said to the audience, “do you live and work in an institution whose vision is crystal clear and most of the population within that institution could articulate a set of the goals that drive that vision? And perhaps more importantly, where there are identifiable metrics that let everyone know that the institution has extended its engagement through partnerships with the community?”

One community partnership she discussed in detail was an organization called CEOs for Cities which has calculated what they call the “Talent Dividend.” The dividend asserts that if our cities could increase the number of college-educated citizens by only 1 percent, encourage residents to drive their cars one mile less a day and reduce poverty by 1 percent, in a year, the United States would increase its wealth by $124 billion. “The low-hanging fruit are residents in our communities who have a little college but never got that degree, and now CEOs for Cities is looking for cities that are willing to attach themselves to the city dividend . . . and of course no city can do it without its anchor institutions,” Zimpher said.

She emphasized higher education’s necessary role in the work that needs to take place to seal the leaky education pipeline, from early childhood to postsecondary education. She advocated for a holistic approach that includes both educational support systems and family community support. In her closing remarks, Zimpher underscored the importance of collaborative leadership across segments of education: “I consider it an immense privilege to be in a position where the future of the state, the future of higher education and K–12 is so important and so fragile. I do believe fundamentally in collaboration. Partnership is way too soft a word. I would sooner see universities be held accountable for high school graduation rates as high schools accountable for university graduation rates. … But that’s going to require a lot of leadership. I do believe university presidents have the convening power to bring these issues to the fore.”