One of our wonderful trustees recently asked me to recommend a higher-education reading list. Here it is:

Newsletters and Magazines

I start each weekday with a review of these three:

Inside Higher Ed publishes a daily newsletter of current events in higher education. These include 3 or 4 feature stories and a daily list of briefs of related interest.

The Chronicle of Higher Education was for many years the most popular job-posting publication in higher education. The weekly newspaper format has been largely replaced by a daily e-newsletter with feature stories ranging from current news stories from the academy to annual higher-ed almanac reports, to opinion pieces from faculty, administrators, and pundits.

Peterson-Rudgers Scan is a daily anthology of links to higher-education related stories across the news media. It is a public service offered by the Peterson-Rudgers Group, a higher-ed communications consultancy. Each issue includes curated links to 2 to 4 stories on 3 to 5 timely issues including campus leaders responding to current events, trends in philanthropy, and impacts of national stories on our campuses.

I consult these publications frequently:

Higher Ed Deep Dive publishes in-depth examinations of current topics affecting higher education.

University Business publishes a variety of content in support of finance, administration, auxiliaries, and facilities management.

Educause Review is the publication of Educause, which is the principal organization supporting IT professional in higher education.

Trusteeship is a magazine published by the Association of Governing Boards. It focusses on the roles and best practices of boards of trustees and shared governance.

Liberal Education is a magazine published by the American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) focused on the relationship of liberal education and good citizenship and preparing students for lives of purpose and meaning. It also lifts up best practices in pedagogy and curricula.

Books

These are some texts I have found especially meaningful and helpful in thinking about the collegiate enterprise.

History

Kimball, Bruce A.: Orators and Philosophers: A History of the Idea of Liberal Education, expanded edition. New York: College Board, 1995.

Ricks, Thomas E.: First Principles: What America’s Founders Learned from the Greeks and Romans and How It Shaped Our Country. New York: Harper Collins, 2020.

Higher Education Identity and Purpose

Delbanco, Andrew: College: What it Was, Is, and Should Be. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012.

Bok, Derek: Higher Education in America, revised edition. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013.

Daniels, Ronald J.: What Universities Owe Democracy. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2021.

Liberal Arts

Leadership and the Liberal Arts: Achieving the Promise of a Liberal Education, edited by J. Thomas Wren, Ronald E. Riggio, and Michael A. Genovese. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2009.

Roth, Michael: Beyond the University: Why Liberal Education Matters. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014.

Zakaria, Fareed: In Defense of a Liberal Education. New York: W.W. Norton, 2015.

Detweiler, Richard A.: The Evidence Liberal Arts Needs: Lives of Consequence, Inquiry, and Accomplishment. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2021.

Diversity. Equity, and Inclusion

Williams, Damon A.: Strategic Diversity Leadership: Activating Change and Transformation in Higher Education. Sterling, VA: Stylus, 2013.

Givens, Jarvis R.: School Clothes: A Collective Memoir of Black Student Witness. Boston: Beacon Press, 2023.

Governance

Chait, Richard P., William Ryan, and Barbara E. Taylor: Governance as Leadership: Reframing the Work of Nonprofit Boards. Hoboken: Board Source, 2005

Bowen, William G. and Eugene Tobin: Locus of Authority: The Evolution of Faculty Roles in the Governance of Higher Education. Princeton University Press, 2015.

Demographics and Enrollment

McGee, Jon: Breakpoint: The Changing Marketplace for Higher Education. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015.

Grawe, Nathan: Demographics and the Demand for Higher Education. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018.

____________: Agile College: How Institutions Successfully Navigate Demographic Changes. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2021.

Business Model

Townsley, Michael K.: Small College Guide to Financial Health: Weather Turbulent Times. Washington, DC: NACUBO, 2009.

Soliday, Joanne and Rick Mann: Surviving to Thriving: A Planning Framework for Leaders of Private Colleges and Universities. Whitsett, NC: Credo, 2013.

Winter Convocation Welcome
23 January 2023

The following text is my Welcome to our Winter Convocation on the first day back to campus this Monday:

Welcome to Susquehanna University’s Winter Convocation, a highpoint in our annual commemoration of the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and for many of you, welcome back to campus. I hope you had a restorative break. I know you join me in welcoming our speaker, Autumn Rose Miskweminanocsqua Williams, to our campus.

Let us begin by acknowledging the Susquehannock tribe whose name we bear. It means those who live in a place where water is heard grating on the shore, commonly known as the river people because they lived in unanimity and balance with the river and land. This campus rests on their un-surrendered territory, and we strive to honor their memory by being mindful stewards of this beautiful place.

I want take this opportunity to tell you about some recent experiences I have had and to share with you something that is hanging heavily on my heart. Over the past few weeks, I have been privileged to meet and learn from a number of scholars and leaders who honor Dr. King’s legacy every day in the important work they do. These have included:

Shelly Lowe, Director of the National Endowment of the Humanities, and a member of the Navajo Nation, reflected on how her own experiences and heritage are helping her to guide the NEH and thereby our nation to achieve a more inclusive scope and understanding of what our collective humanities are and how they can make our lived experience richer and our shared communities broader.

I heard an inspiring talk by Jarvis Givens, author of Fugitive Pedagogy: Carter G. Woodson and the Art of Black Teaching, which tells of how teachers in segregated black schools included lessons about African-American history and culture out of sight of white school boards, because they knew it was the right thing to do, even though they faced dire consequences if this work was found out. Many of these same teachers secretly conveyed information about their schools to the NAACP along with their own dollars to support the legal work that would result in Brown vs. The Board of Education, bringing a legal end to public-school segregation.

Dr. Givens kindly gave me an advance copy of his forthcoming book, School Clothes: A Collective Memoir of Black Student Witness, which provides a history of black segregated schools through the stories of the children who attended them, reminding us that their experience was the greatest cause for reform.

I heard a presentation by Eddie Cole, whose recent book, The Campus Color Line: College Presidents and the Struggle for Black Freedom, provides an historical evaluation of how college and university presidents responded to and engaged in the Civil Rights movement, for good and for bad. He said, “I wonder if they would have made different decisions if they could see how their legacies played out over the subsequent 50 to 60 years,” and he encouraged current presidents to consider that perspective in guiding the work we do today.

Last Friday, I attended a presentation given by Annette Gordon-Reed, author of the Pulitzer-Prize-winning, The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family, and the best-selling history, On Juneteenth.

Dr. Gordon-Reed began her remarks by sharing reflections about the work of a national panel she was on in 2010 that outlined a path forward to elevate the humanities and liberal education in the United States. Then she turned to a discussion of efforts to eliminate critical components of slavery from the teaching of Texas history in Texas public schools and the recent announcement from the Florida Department of Education that Florida public schools will not offer AP African-American Studies because, “As presented, the content of this course is inexplicably contrary to Florida law and significantly lacks educational value.”

The Hechinger Report that same day stated: “Florida’s latest ban follows a series of steps… including imposing speech codes on university professors and pushing the so-called “Stop WOKE Act” that restricts conversations on race and prohibits instruction that might cause guilt or shame for historic wrongdoings like slavery.” ^[1]

This follows Florida’s recent “Don’t say gay” law.

This is wrong, intellectually, educationally, and morally. It is an afront to academic freedom and a slap in the face of humanity. How will history judge us if we don’t speak up?

Susquehanna’s mission is to educate students for productive, creative, and reflective lives of achievement, leadership, and service in a diverse, dynamic, and interdependent world.

We achieve this by opening ourselves up to the lived experiences and perspectives of others. We honor each other through a shared pursuit of truth and understanding. We embrace difference, and we acknowledge how truly interdependent we are.

As Dr. King wrote in his Letter from Birmingham Jail, we are all “caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”

Earlier in her talk, Dr. Gordon-Reed averred that Thomas Jefferson’s commitment to education was rooted in his understanding that it was critical for our ability to move from subjects to citizens. When fundamental limits are placed on education, democracy is under threat.

As John Adams wrote: “Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people, who have a right, from the frame of their nature, to knowledge, as their great Creator, who does nothing in vain, has given them understandings, and a desire to know…Let us dare to read, think, speak, and write.  Let every order and degree among the people rouse their attention and animate their resolution…”^[2]

Let us use the inspiration from today’s convocation as fuel to rouse our attention and animate our resolution. Let us dare to read, think, speak, and write to support a complete education and open discourse in defense of a just and democratic future for all.

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^[1] https://hechingerreport.org/column-pop-quiz-what-state-just-banned-a-high-school-advanced-placement-african-american-studies-course/

[2] Adams, John: A Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law (1765)

The state of higher education seems to live near a precipice, and as we enter a new year, many of us are clinging to the edge.

In the final weeks of 2019, I posted what I believed were the eight leading threats to higher education. At the time they were:

1. Market Disturbance
2. National Association for College Admission Counseling (NACAC) Changes
3. Price Sensitivity
4. International Student Decreases
5. 2026 “Demographic Cliff”
6. Poor Public Understanding of What We Do
7. Geographic Population Redistribution
8. Limited Reputation

I many ways, most remain, but their respective scale and impact have changed dramatically over the past three years.

We had our “black swan” market disturbance with the arrival of the Covid-19 pandemic, which set all of the other pieces caroming about.

We have reached a new stage of normal following the legal changes in recruiting practices (the dissolution of the old NACAC standards), which were fresh and untested in 2019. Most institutions were less predatory and most students and their families were less prone to peregrinate than many of us expected.

Following a couple of years of decline, international enrollments were decimated by the pandemic. Nationally, we have seen a gradual rebound, but it is a different market. Political challenges in China and the war in Ukraine have changed the balance of international students on our campuses and the destinations domestic students seek when studying away.

The “demographic cliff,” when we know the number of traditional college-age students will drop by about 1.1 million between 2026 and 2028 became foreshadowed as a consequence of the pandemic. Population data had projected a slight increase in enrollments between 2019 and 2026 when the 18-year-old population would continue to climb slightly before hitting a 6% and then 8% drop.

Overall population numbers have logically tracked, but in the past three years, 1.2 million fewer traditionally aged students dropped out of college or chose not to enroll. Higher education experienced the fall off the cliff, and the real cliff is still 3 to 4 years ahead.

Like institutions across all sectors, the pandemic created huge expenses and significantly undercut revenues for higher education, but many of us found significant savings from the cessation of costly programs (for us study away is 5% of our overall budget). Government relief also softened the blow.

Now that we have fundamentally gone back to normal operations, we are doing so with about 7% fewer students nationwide, and the remaining 93% have been redistributed. In Agile College, Nathan Grawe predicted that as the demographic cliff approached, not only would geographic redistributions affect enrollments by region, but a move toward flagship publics and elite independent institutions would exacerbate the impact on regional publics and private institutions outside of the U.S. News top 5o lists.

Independent colleges and universities in Pennsylvania have seen enrollment declines ranging from 6% to 25% since 2019. For tuition-dependent institutions, which is most of us, there has been a parallel drop in revenue. These decreases have occurred against the backdrop of 7+% inflation. As a result, many institutions have developed structural deficits.

A common trope on many independent college campuses has been that when a number of struggling sister institutions close, the remaining schools will take on the students they would have enrolled and reach a financially sustainable enrollment. The problem with that “plan” is that closings hurt the reputation of our sector, and our fundamental competitors are large publics, oddly not each other.

Of Susquehanna’s top ten cross-applicant institutions, only one is a four-year private. Our main competitors are Temple, Pitt, Rutgers, the University of Delaware, and our number one competitor is Penn State.

This is where we are the victims of a lack of understanding of what we do compounded by a limited reputation.

Recently, I put forward a comparison to prospective students: “In preparing for your future, do you want to have all of your classes led by expert faculty dedicated to teaching, have a faculty member serve as your advisor and mentor as you complete independent research and creative work, and develop hands-on expertise with state-of-the-art equipment and in field work, or do you want to be able to be able to say you attended 20 massive tailgate parties?”

For most students at Susquehanna, that truly life-changing first path comes at a considerably smaller out-of-pocket cost. The challenge is in helping enough of them to understand the benefits, financial and personal.

Small residential liberal-arts institutions offer a proven return on investment. They focus on the experiences and skills that best support student development and preparation for lives of consequence, and yet they struggle to maintain their share of a shrinking market.

One of the great unknowns about the coming few years is if traditional percentages of 18-year-olds will return to our campuses before the demographic cliff hits, or will we see another million+ drop compounding our current dilemma. In either case, the economics of small independent colleges and universities has rarely been so dynamically challenging.

We need to adjust our operations to align with our current resources while striving to capture a larger share of a smaller market. It is good business, but more importantly, it will be good for students.