by Ken O’Donnell
In an earlier post on this blog, Nancy Zimpher outlined the NASH proposal for a radical reconception of public higher education systems in the United States, called The Big ReThink. She isn’t shy: “NASH will develop a transformation agenda to help these important systems (a) respond to the health care crisis, calls for racial justice, and the need for economic recovery in the short term; and (b) transform themselves to ensure enhanced success for their students and the states they serve for the long term.”
I find that as inspiring as it is intimidating.
Zimpher is known for leveraging the principles of collective impact to tackle complicated problems, understanding that the universities she’s led – UW Milwaukee, University of Cincinnati, and then the whole SUNY system – participate in a broader ecosystem. For her, any Big ReThink will mean seeing state university systems embedded in economic and social contexts, and then pulling levers of change in concert with other large-scale actors. NASH itself, under the leadership of executive director Rebecca Martin, has used the same strategy to punch well above its weight.
But what does that mean for the individual system officer, the well-intentioned worker bee charged with some aspect of converting the state treasury into human capital? How on earth does someone at headquarters even get started on the NASH to-do list?
I was wondering about this during a recent conversation with Framroze Virjee, president of California State University Fullerton. He and I knew each other when I was a senior director at the CSU Office of the Chancellor, where he was executive vice chancellor and general counsel. We recognized in each other a certain obsessiveness about how messages could be effectively presented to the Trustees and broader public.
Framroze Virjee, President of California State University Fullerton, recommends leadership by “divining consensus,” a tactic he learned as a partner at O’Melveny & Myers. (Image credit: Orange County Register.)
From there his successful move to a campus presidency was frankly surprising. He’s not an academic and never was, and yet had landed what few consider an entry-level job. Installed by the chancellor on an interim basis, Virjee then won over the community and got the permanent gig. I asked him how.
He said he went in humbly, acknowledging that he didn’t have the usual background and that to succeed he would need their help. But he also offered help in return, pointing to his personal connections with the chancellor, executive vice chancellors, and each of the trustees: “I was their lawyer. They all know me, and when I tell them something they know it’s true.” That was enough for the campus to give him a fair hearing, and from there it was just about the fit.
I asked him now that he’s on a campus, what does he wish he’d done differently at the system office? He said he should have listened more, left the building for more trips to campuses, and found more opportunities to bring back faculty and students. He pointed to a couple of missteps in his time there, and said they would have been avoided had he just led with that kind of interaction.
And I think that’s our answer to the challenge NASH presents us with. The Big ReThink will succeed by leveraging relationships, not just with other state-level actors, but with our campuses. It won’t come easily. Relationship management and culture change are hard, high-touch work. I loved my job at the system office, but it could feel like digging a pit in dry sand. On a good day without wind you might see the pit take shape, but you never stop digging.
State systems were conceived when a one-minute phone call from L.A. to San Francisco cost a dollar, the same as the hourly minimum wage. (Image credit: thephone10.blogspot.com.)
And most system offices began six or seven decades ago, conceived as compliance officers for the state. Communication was meant to go just one way, from the top down, at a time before free long-distance calling, let alone Zoom. So those relationships we’re creating – the pit we dig – was never part of the plan.
The pandemic has caused staggering losses and hardships, but it’s left us better positioned than ever to connect with each other on the cheap. We should use that, to cultivate the kinds of relationship President Virjee wishes he’d had, and which we’ll need for the collective action ahead.