Achieve more. Together.

Pennsylvania’s fall colors are spectacular. I know you know that, but having spent 36 of the last 38 years in places that aren’t as autumnally blessed, I can say they are truly breathtaking to see. The countryside changes vibrantly, minute by minute, with October’s seasonal light, making for pleasant distraction when travelling between our 14 universities.

Thus far, I’ve visited 10 universities this fall, which means I have conducted 20 focus groups on faculty shared governance; participated in 10 rich conversations with student groups learning about their concerns and gaining insights into their challenges and opportunities; held extensive Q&A sessions in 10 forums that are open to the entire university community; and met with and learned from dozens of university leaders, trustees, district legislators, and civic leaders.

All of it invigorating. Encouraging. Inspiring.

Once again, we’re blessed by the trust everyone has extended in the very open and honest conversations about our hopes and dreams for the future of our students—for the future of our universities.

Below are some take-aways from those visits:

Our students are fantastic and have incredible depth. During this semester’s visits, I’m asking the students who participate to build the agenda for our sessions. As a result, there is variation in each session, but rarely does a meeting conclude without spending at least half of it on issues of student engagement and—movingly—how students are mobilizing to support one another. We typically spend a while defining problems, but our students (like most of the rest of us) jump quickly to solutions. And there are so many solutions to explore:

• Develop a single inclusive “app” that integrates all of the educational, co-curricular, and informational resources they routinely need.
• Build out student-led “information” resources that provide tips and tricks on how to succeed at the university.
• Use our collective voice to address issues of concern with faculty and administration—typically issues of engagement and inclusion, the cost of textbooks and access codes, about academic and career advising, the availability of mental health and wellness supports.
• Pool resources available to our student clubs and organizations to host events with greater impact and turnout. And at one university, it was suggested that if we want student events to be more successful and meaningful, then we should collect data on those attending the events to develop predictive analytics (incentives drive engagement, but events with “bounce houses” …not so much).
• Establish student-led mentoring and tutoring services (did you know these are established already? often as informal networks; often within particular departments, colleges, or schools).
• Learn from students at other State System universities about what is and isn’t working in areas of key concern.

How do we unleash more of this student-led talent, energy, capability? Our students know the issues they face, are articulate in describing them, and are sometimes frustrated by having a limited role in crafting responses. Naturally they are also aware of their priorities—degree completion and launching their postgraduate lives. There is real and potent capacity here, and I am delighted to see steps being taken to harness it.

Our faculty and staff are ready for change. We know this from last spring’s “Ready, Willing, Able” survey, and now I am seeing growth in our willingness to change. I’ve learned about:

• a history faculty member who is engaging his colleagues at other universities to explore opportunities for cross-campus instruction and wanting to know how to take next steps.
• a librarian wanting to leverage our library network to make more educational resources open and more low-cost supplemental readings available to our students, working with faculty to encourage their use.
• a career services professional wanting to share a promising innovation that has worked well at her university to get students interested (early on) in thinking about their careers and connecting them with relevant opportunities and resources.

This is tremendous.

At the same time, I fear we are hobbled by our culture and its processes. During one of the open forums, one gentlemen—after outlining a promising cross-campus opportunity—said: “We are all waiting for you”… (meaning me)…“to tell us what to do.”

So I pose the following questions to us all:

• How do we break through our historical, organizational, and cultural reliance on hierarchical problem solving?
• How do we navigate towards a practice that is common in high-performing organizations where cross-functional teams are empowered to come up with solutions to today’s problems and chase tomorrow’s opportunities?
• How do we transform from an organization built on regulation and compliance to one based on devolved responsibility and accountability?
• How do we align around a unifying vision and then trust in our teams to pursue it in a way that advances the public good?
• How do we unlock and unleash the many ground-swells of support I have encountered these past several weeks for initiatives that even go beyond those being tried in System Redesign and that have significant potential?

We are ready to pull in a single direction. We are ready to suspend our disbelief in one another and to let go of transgressions remembered from the past, to let down our guard—at least for the moment—so we may come together as one to fashion our future.

The theme emerges powerfully from my campus meetings about faculty shared governance—held with faculty and academic administrators respectively and independently—where folks appear:

• exhausted with persistently confrontational approaches.
• welcoming of information-sharing sessions, but weary of and increasingly unwilling to participate in information-sharing sessions inaccurately billed as “consultation” for seeking input.
• hungry to understand the broader strategic frameworks and institutional priorities that guide decision-making, but are often shrouded somehow from faculty and administrators alike.
• willing to acknowledge that decision rights rest with management, but still wanting to understand how and why decisions are made, and to have feedback loops that give assurance that input has been received and understood, even if it has not been acted upon.

This theme is not strictly reserved for conversations on shared governance. It emerges in conversations with our students who want and have something to contribute, with university leaders who are trying new ways of engaging the community in determining strategic direction, and with councils of trustees who are engaging more closely with our faculty and staff.

This is exciting and a powerful harbinger of our eventual success.

Let us never forget, though, that organizations don’t have strong, engaged, and inclusive cultures because they are high-performing. They are high-performing because they have strong, engaged, and inclusive cultures.

We have work to do, but we are well on our way.

In fact, we have accomplished a great deal in our System Redesign efforts just since I visited our universities last spring. We are:

• awaiting the results from our first-ever systemwide employee culture and engagement survey, which was conducted this semester.
• implementing an accountability framework that gives real visibility into universities’ strategy planning and budgeting priorities and how these are contributing to their students’ success and their organizational fiscal health.
• implementing a shared services consortium that will manage—with oversight from our universities—various administrative functions such as payroll, IT, HR, and others.
• taking a new approach to strategic sourcing—one in which universities are required to buy from contractors that are willing to work in partnership with us in pursuit of our collective objectives. In fact, we’ve initiated the first such procurement—a common student information system that all 14 universities will transition to over the coming years.
• exploring coordinated approaches to the delivery of online instruction.
• engaging a new approach to systemwide academic master planning—one that allows us to better leverage our collective academic strengths when approving new programs.
• aligning our collective voice in advocating a new and stronger partnership with the Commonwealth through the General Assembly.

We have moved so far, so quickly, that I half expected to encounter more anxiety and concern—the kind I met with last spring; understandably, because at that stage System Redesign was a vision without a detailed implementation plan.

And while I have received very good, very helpful, and very critical questions and commentary (critical in the sense of “expressing or involving an analysis of the merits and faults of a work”), I would characterize the overall response generally as a readiness to engage.

I have a number of hypotheses for why there is such readiness, but for now I’m going to settle on the observation that we are ready to embrace changes because we know that by doing so we will preserve our historic public mission.

Public higher education is a driver of social mobility and equity, an engine of economic development, an opportunity to engage people with others who are not like themselves and—by so doing—breed a tolerance that is sorely lacking in our broader society.

Public higher education is a platform on which we can and we will rebuild both rural and urban communities that need us by lifting whole families into opportunity.

We know this. We have all made personal sacrifices to serve in public higher education because we believe in this mission. And while adjusting our own patterns and behaviors is difficult, the outcomes resulting from our not doing so are simply unacceptable to each and every one of us.

We have a great deal more to do but we are well along the way; and I am honored as much today as ever to work and lead in your presence. There is nothing we cannot achieve together. I believe that now more than ever.