University Leaders Nancy Zimpher and E. Gordon Gee Speak at Colloquium 2010

Programs and Services

At Colloquium 2010, the College Board’s annual gathering of senior enrollment, financial aid and admission professionals, panelists and speakers were asked to consider the event’s theme, “Leading Boldly in Perilous Times,” and to reflect on the challenges the higher education community faces from recent economic and demographic shifts. A presidents’ panel featured university leaders Kent John Chabotar, president of Guilford College; E. Gordon Gee, president of The Ohio State University; and Nancy Zimpher, chancellor of the State University of New York. Zimpher also served as the event’s keynote speaker. (Visit Membership Matters [please insert link to membership page] to read about her remarks.)

Chabotar previously served on the faculty of several executive programs at the Harvard Institutes for Higher Education teaching education management and leadership, and discussed how that experience helped inform the strategic planning he undertook when he became president. “Guilford had seven failed planning efforts and was spending 14 percent of its endowment. We were trying to plan in a crisis,” he explained. “A five-year plan included a revised academic plan, core values and growing the student body. He described their admission efforts not as a gatekeeping activity but as a recruitment activity. Strategies they have successfully employed include developing an early college on campus and much better articulation agreements for transfer students from community colleges. “Our new plan is focused on student outcomes,” he added.

Gee emphasized the important role he believes higher education can play in the country’s efforts to rebuild the economy, calling on attendees to remember the higher goals of education. “The thing the people in this room need to understand is that we are engaged in a noble cause. We don’t make cars or widgets — we create ideas and the future of this nation. I do not believe we are looking at a fundamental resetting of our economy, and colleges should lead the way.”

Despite the size of his university (with a budget as large as that of the state of Rhode Island), Gee makes a great effort to maintain as many personal contacts as possible with his staff and students. “If you’re viewed as a corporate entity, then the cynical nature of university culture will lead people to think the worst about what you do. It’s about recruitment of the people you work with — as well as students, who are the most energizing and interesting of my constituents.” Gee shared his Friday night ritual of taking an early power nap so that he can attend social events on campus, often unannounced. The audience was entertained by an anecdote he shared about surprising a student at her 21st birthday party.

Not surprisingly, Gee has had an influence on his colleagues. Said Zimpher: “In my entire career I have been profoundly affected by the intensity that Gordon brings to the job. I have learned from him that people need to know you are fully engaged.” She went on to speak about the importance of community engagement and the convening power of university presidents with community organizations and elected officials.

At the close of the session, the presidents asked audience members to deliver “rapid fire” the things they wished they could say to their own institutional leaders. Comments ranged from concern over a decreasing pool of aspiring enrollment professionals and the need for better staffed offices so that they have time to get out into the field, to a warning to “check the data” that gets put on your desk by your staff and taking a tougher stance on the divide between faculty and administrators on campus.

Two sessions sought to offer insight into education issues from experts in other fields, including behavioral science, journalism and health care. Comparisons were drawn between higher education potentially facing questions of relevance and other fields that recently experienced upheaval, such as journalism. “The depth and sweep of changes in media and journalism were enormous. We were not prepared. We did not sufficiently anticipate the impact of technology and social networks,” said Geneva Overholser, director of the School of Journalism at the USC Annenburg School for Communication & Journalism, as she described a collapse of the media’s economic model in the face of disruptive innovation. Making the comparison to calls for updated higher education models, she said, “Existing institutions will be unable to become change agents if they can’t change fast enough. … Our goal is to be relevant to the audiences we serve — and it’s time to retool and reinvent and relabel.”

In the same session, Anthony Iton, senior vice president of healthy communities at the California Endowment, explained that our current health care system is designed to address 19th-century health problems such as infectious disease, rather than the 21st-century problem of chronic disease. He drew fascinating parallels between the distribution of health care and health status, and the socioeconomic performance gaps that persist in education, and showed how as the poverty rate increases, life expectancy decreases.

On the topic of leadership and disruptive change, Iton said: “If you’re focused on your own narrow insular interests, you are going to wait and see what everybody else does. … It’s expensive to invest in technological advances that could benefit someone other than you. So leadership matters for education, too. You’re all very good with data. Your achievement gaps and health disparities are just different words for the same problem. We need leaders to stand up and say what we are going to do together, and the College Board can organize that kind of leadership.”

In his remarks, David H. Kalsbeek, senior vice president for enrollment and marketing at DePaul University, echoed Iton in his call for the education community not to lose sight of the argument for social justice through educational attainment. New narratives advocating for more resources for education are focused on a nationalistic message around global competitiveness. “If we’re shifting away from social justice in our own nation in favor of international competitiveness, I fear we have lost more than we’ve gained,” Kalsbeek said.

The event closed with a provocative and motivating speech by Michael McLendon, associate dean and chief of staff at Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College. Citing the perils of a widening affordability gap, a burgeoning gap in public confidence in higher education, the privatization of public higher education and what he called a “historic retreat of states as primary stakeholders in public higher education,” McLendon offered a set of possible ways to “act boldly.”

He called for renewed institutional commitments and investments in need-based financial aid and a stop to the arms race of tuition discounting. “The competition for good students has reached almost a pathological state in the past few years,” McLendon said. He also called for institutions to maintain their commitment to existing no-loan policies and for the community at large to do a better job of communicating to poorer students and students of color the true costs of college attendance and availability of financial aid. “One advantage of early commitment programs is they that are highly effective in recruiting high-performing low-income students and mandating financial training,” he added.

Speaking directly to admission, financial aid and enrollment managers, he asked for their help in getting colleges to understand how relying too heavily on contingent faculty can impede efforts to improve student success. He also suggested that they promote the importance of assessing student learning outcomes and support strategic academic realignment. “There is a pressing need for universities to take a careful look at weaker academic programs that have less impact on society, and put a renewed strategic focus on our distinctiveness — ‘What can we do well?’” he said. “Many of us do everything, and I think everything is no longer sustainable in this economy.”

“The future is still largely ours to shape,” he concluded.