by Ken O’Donnell, Vice Provost, CSU Dominguez Hills
Many of us in public higher education have learned the hard way that a message can be powerful and go far, or it can be sophisticated and precise, but not both.
This limitation is the bane of system offices. By definition our state institutions are in the complexity business, pushing ahead with knowledge on messy frontiers, and driving social equity and upward mobility one student at a time. But try explaining that with any nuance to say, your regents, or your state’s higher ed legislative committee – or for that matter, your first gen applicant pool. They’ll all wait politely for you to finish and then ask you about job placement.
Good presidents play this to their advantage. I’ve known one or two who could boil down their priorities into a single phrase, like “student success” or “the endowment.” Like the messages themselves, they managed to be powerful and go far, by keeping it simple.
Like so much else, that may have changed in the past year. The principle still holds – our messages trade away their detail for impact. But the bandwidth may have grown, as if we just went from the telegraph to the radio.
I come to this after a recent conversation with Erika Beck, the new president at Cal State Northridge. She’s something of a celebrity in our system, on her second presidency at an age when others are still working toward tenure. Her 100-day listening tour had just ended, and I wanted to know how it compared to the one she had in 2016, the “before time.”
I was ready to hear how bland and bloodless the world is on Zoom, since it is. And she acknowledged losing whole chunks of interpersonal connection. But she said there were some surprising upsides. For example, this time she was able to meet with many, many more people. There was no time spent in transition, whether by moving to a different room or just shepherding everyone in and out.
And once in the meeting, her new colleagues were more candid, more vulnerable, more authentic. For all our egalitarian instincts, colleges are still painfully hierarchical, a habit webcams can help us break. On Zoom there’s no visible entourage, the conference tables are virtual, and we’re all seated on the same side. She said the difference was starkest for students. She got to know her new community more completely, and authentically, as a result. She knows what they want, what they’re afraid of, and what they need.
I asked her how she planned to prune those insights for external audiences, and which pieces of her learning she’ll be sorriest to let go of in her future messaging. She said she plans to hang onto all of it, to be deployed for different audiences and uses. This is because her listening tour included many of those same stakeholders, the regional employers, nonprofits, and R&D firms who coexist with the university in mutual and utter dependency. In other words, by putting insiders and outsiders on the same footing, folding them into this flatter hierarchy, the pandemic has added incrementally to the carrying capacity of our messages.
I find this exciting, and so should NASH. Representing the lion’s share of the whole higher education sector, we dream very big. The challenges we want to take on – the endemic racism, the stagnating curriculum, the outdated business model itself – are ripe for a Big Rethink. Almost every campus administration and system officer can help, but not in messages of a few syllables at a time. We’re going to need that extra bandwidth.
Beck understands this. She says the coronavirus has raised the stakes for off-campus partnerships, and shown that our problems these days are all wicked ones: messy, interconnected, and radically interdisciplinary. In this world, simplification isn’t a necessary evil; it’s downright misleading.
If that’s right, then this finding goes way beyond the listening tour, and the mechanics of Zoom. The next virtuoso presidents will be pushing on these new communication channels for their whole careers. So should the rest of us.