Leaders on Leadership featuring Dr. Barbara Farley, President of Illinois College

Episode Transcript

Jay Lemons:

Hello, and thank you for listening. I’m Jay Lemons. Welcome to Leaders on Leadership, brought to you by Academic Search and the American Academic Leadership Institute. The purpose of our podcast is to share the stories of the people and the forces that have shaped leaders in higher education and to learn more about their thoughts on leadership in the academy. We’re delighted today to be joined by Dr. Barbara Farley. Barbara currently serves as the president of Illinois College, a post that she has had for the last decade. How can it be, Barbara? Congratulations on hitting a wonderful milestone.

Barbara Farley:

Thank you very much, Jay. It does seem impossible, 10 years.

Jay Lemons:

Before Barbara arrived at Illinois College, she served in various faculty and leadership roles across five different institutions. She holds her bachelor’s degree in business administration and management from the College of Saint Benedict and went on to earn her master’s and Ph.D. in business administration from the Carlson School of Business School of Management, excuse me, at the University of Minnesota. Barbara is a significant leader and her influence in higher education is national. She’s the chair of the board of directors of the Council of Independent Colleges, as well as the chair of the Midwest Conference President’s Council. I’m not sure which of those two might be the greater tax on your time; it may matter from sports season to sports season, but God bless you for all the service that you do. It’s important.

Barbara Farley:

Well, it’s a real privilege, Jay. Thank you. I love being part of our professional network of colleagues across the country. It is one of the gifts of this work, meeting fascinating people who are doing amazing, amazing work across the globe.

Jay Lemons:

It is so true, and I know firsthand how important the nurturing and the fellowship and the colleagueship that’s shared within the Council of Independent Colleges has been for so many of us. Thank you for being a steward of a great, great organization that serves 700 of our private institutions that are all working hard to do their own mission in their own way.

Barbara Farley:

Well, I am enjoying the work so much. I think one of the first professional development opportunities I had when I was a dean at Augsburg University was to attend a CIC workshop on libraries and innovation and libraries in the future, and CIC has been part of my professional life for so many, many years. I know you’ve done a podcast with our amazing leader, Marjorie Hass, and it’s such a privilege to work closely with her.

Jay Lemons:

Amen. Indeed. CIC is really this large tent organization with incredible diversity, but I have always appreciated about CIC that the presidents who are a part of it are willing to share and to lean on one another and to be vulnerable when gathered together, and you, our leader at this point in time. I also want to make note of your commitments to your local community, with a real focus around healthcare. You serve on the board of directors for both Memorial Health and the Jacksonville Memorial Hospital. You’ve also been your state association president and have served also, NAICU on its tax policy committee, in addition to being a steward of the Presbyterian colleges and universities and on the executive committee of the Federation of Independent Colleges and Universities of Illinois. You are doing it all. It’s a pleasure. I just want to say welcome, Barbara.

Barbara Farley:

So glad to have this time with you, Jay. Thank you for inviting me to join you on your very successful podcast.

Jay Lemons:

Well, thank you. It is really a joy to have a chance to spend this amount of time in a conversation with you. Really my goal and creation of this podcast is to create some space for leaders to be reflective and to consider and think about their own pathways with a hope that it will be meaningful to the next generation of leaders. And your story, Barbara, is one I have been anxious to hear more about. I want to hear about the people, the places, the events that have really forged you as a leader as your journey has unfolded. So tell us a little bit about how in the world… Where are you from, and how did you land at Illinois College?

Barbara Farley:

Well, I looked back into my biography here to think about this question. I am a Midwesterner. I was born in South Bend, Indiana. My dad was a Notre Dame fan, would’ve liked me to go to Notre Dame. Then we moved to Chicago-land area. I grew up in the northwest suburbs of Chicago and in the suburbs of Minneapolis, Minnesota. My father worked for Jostens and he was transferred to the corporate office in Minneapolis when I was a young teenager. So I count Indiana, Illinois, and Minnesota home. So I come full circle as the president of Illinois College. My family roots are in North Dakota. Both my parents grew up in North Dakota and Fargo area. I always joke if you know the Midwest, you know that’s Highway 94 and you just keep moving until you hit Fargo. So I feel very proud of my roots.

I am thinking about the amazing, truly remarkable people who have shaped me, and if you’ll give me a moment to think about some of those early, early influencers… We all have our favorite stories about the teacher who made a difference in the world, and my two teachers in my young life when I was in Chicago were Ms. Wile… She was my fourth-grade teacher, and Ms. Wile had energy and she just sparked imagination. We were doing hands-on projects, and this was all very new. I’d always been a reader, but she was really all over that, and I have never forgotten her. And then when I was in seventh grade, I took French, and for the very first time, and Ms. Corin opened a world of this thing called another language. We can talk about this more later, but that spark of that young teacher, she was probably 22 years old, has created a lifetime passion around the study and the experience of French culture. So I think about those two people as really casting me into this world of learning in important ways.

My parents were right there behind me. My mother and father were insistent that their three children… I’m the middle child… that we would all go to college. My parents were college graduates, North Dakota State University and Morehead State University. But my mother in particular said, “You will go to college and you will live on campus,” because she did not have that opportunity. And in the day, not all of my friends’ parents were encouraging their daughters to live on campus, and so I’ve always appreciated my mom’s non-negotiable experience. I think that has influenced me in terms of being part of residential, private, liberal arts colleges for my entire career.

I also think about my career as a series of friendships and professional relationships and experiences with people who come from all over the world, students, colleagues, professional colleagues, as we talked about earlier in the industry, and they’ve been mentors and they’ve been role models, people who have been supervisors to me, people I have admired along the way. And as I have moved, and I’ll say a word about that in a minute, I have moved to different institutions as my career developed and I made choices about the direction of my career, and I have always said to everyone who knows me that it’s been the people I have met along the way who have made the biggest difference in everything that has come to me.

I was encouraged, Jay, to pursue an MBA and a Ph.D. following my time at the College of Saint Benedict where I graduated, and I was sparked by an interest in larger strategic issues of organizational behavior, organizational systems. I was different from a lot of people in my MBA class who were very focused on, “I’m going to be in finance,” and “I’m going to be in marketing.” I really wasn’t interested in the narrowness of the functional disciplines. I wanted to think more broadly about organizations and leadership and became fascinated by the role of chief executive officers in organizations. I did minor studies in my PhD program in organizational communication and organizational psychology, and that has shaped my whole career.

So I’ve had these just incredible people who have said to me, “Have you ever thought about…” And that’s such a powerful question, and it opens so many doors. The person I have to name who really was the door-opener and the encourager is my late husband, Jack Farley. He was the one who was always saying, “You know, there is an opportunity in X place at this institution. Have you thought about this as potentially a next stage?” So I was so lucky, and I think about him every day. Jack passed 16 years ago, and he is still very much at the root of the work that I do every single day.

Let me say a couple other things about my-

Jay Lemons:

Thank you so much for sharing. Yeah, please do.

Barbara Farley:

Yeah, he was amazing. He was just amazing. He was someone who was always looking to the future. I think when I talk about who has forged me, Jack had this incredible capacity with everybody around him. I was just one of the real beneficiaries. He was always looking to the future. He didn’t look back. He wanted to think, “How could I adapt to this new moment? What are the next steps I need to take to help the person who’s in front of me?” He was a very, very busy man. He told me once that you never said to somebody, “I’m too busy to spend time with you. It’s not about my calendar. It’s about, what do you need right now?” And I thought that was a powerful example of what it means to be in relationship to people.

So my career path, Jay, is one that’s very traditional and that has led me to the presidency. It is perhaps not as traditional, I know, as it used to be, but my career has been on the academic side of the house. I started as a faculty member at Saint John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota. I moved to-

Jay Lemons:

The other end of the lake.

Barbara Farley:

Yes, exactly. Exactly. And I was a department chair, and then I moved. I gave up a tenured position and had to make decisions. And I think many of your listeners have been at that point where you as a faculty member, do I see myself as having primarily an academic scholarly in the classroom-focused career at a particular institution, or am I going to make a different decision? And I made that decision and I had the opportunity to be the graduate program director at another school. I was hired as an outside department chair. I taught graduate students for the first time in my career, and it was a very meaningful experience. I was in Duluth, Minnesota, and we had satellites in Hibbing and Brainerd, Minnesota, and I was on the road teaching graduate students. It was a challenging and really important period of my life.

And then I moved to a chief academic officer role and dean of faculty, and then I moved to Augsburg University where I was the dean, and then was very fortunate to work under Paul Pribbenow as the Vice President of Academic Affairs and Dean of the college. So that’s what I was doing. I was at Augsburg for 13 years, and I had an opportunity to consider pursuing a presidency. I’m so grateful for the encouragement that I had and all the experiences that I had at different organizations that brought me to the moment where I was excited about this prospect. And I’m so honored that Illinois College elected me to serve as the 14th president. I’m the first female to serve in this role in Jacksonville, Illinois. We are in west central Illinois, town of about 20,000 people near the capital of Springfield. It’s just been a great home for me over the last decade.

So that’s my story, Jay. I think I would close it out on this reflection of saying that in this group of colleges and universities where I have worked during my career, four of them were associated with Catholic Benedictine monasteries, the two sisters, two female monasteries, and two male monasteries. And I’m an alma mater. So I spent almost 20 years under the Benedictine influence of my career, and so what was instilled in me, Jay, in those experiences or the values of the Benedictines who have a sense of place, number one, but there’s a focus on community, respect, hospitality, stewardship, and love of learning. And those values I would say have really been foundational to me as I have lived my life and been part of these really incredible colleges and universities throughout my career. So I think those are the things I would say about what has forged me, the people and the places and the experiences.

Jay Lemons:

I really appreciate every bit of that. You said so many things that resonated with me. I say to my kids all the time, “I don’t care where you are or what you’re doing; we found great people everywhere, but it is about the people that you’re with.” And then this last closing piece, Barbara, just really rings true, how we learn from the traditions of the rootedness of the place and the people where we are learning and growing as young professionals. This Benedictine influence and the charism that I think you eloquently described just… And guess what? The Lutherans and the Presbyterians who you have served more recently have also been the beneficiaries of some of those Benedictine gifts in a beautiful way.

Barbara Farley:

I’ve been very lucky to have served at faith-based institutions throughout my career, and I feel so lucky. And I’ve had that diversity of experience across denominations, so I feel very, very fortunate.

Jay Lemons:

Well, and I know those who you have worked with and for feel the same way. Let me ask you the next question is, what makes a good leader? And by good, I mean it not as in grade B. I mean it in the Ann Hasselmo realm of virtuous and effective and someone who ultimately gets results and is successful.

Barbara Farley:

I think that what makes a good leader… There are a lot of things, a few that I’d note. I think you have to have clarity of purpose. You have to know why you were engaged in this work. Why do you want to be a steward of this institution at this moment in time? You have to have commitment to the mission wherever you are. You have to have a fit. You have to have a belief in that mission that you want to carry that call into the world.

So, Jay, because of my background in organizational behavior and leadership, I’ve been influenced by some pretty cool writers along the way, and throughout my career, I have come back to the Heifetz and Laurie article, it’s from the late ’90s, called The Work of Leadership. They talk about adaptive challenges. And I think what makes good leaders really is in line with what Heifetz and Laurie tell us about the capacity to move from the balcony to the field of action. The image is so powerful to me because what they’re saying is good leaders have to be able to step back, be up on the balcony, away from the intensity of the moment to look for context, to understand context, to appreciate patterns, and they have to be able then to move onto the field of action and understand how that’s all playing out and then be able to lift back up.

So, I think there is a capacity to be able to go back and forth and recognize that adaptive challenges have no clear answers. You have to be willing to ask a lot of questions. You have to be willing to be wrong. You have to be somebody who has an attitude of alignment between the strategy and how you execute or implement the strategy. I think you have to be a problem-solver. You have to want to roll up your sleeves and be part of the action and be able to communicate the broader scope of what’s happening within an organization at any given time. And, I believe that that requires an amazing capacity for interpersonal skill development and the desire to work with a wide range of students and faculty and professional colleagues across the institution and to work outside of the institution. So those are the things that stand out to me about what makes a good leader.

Jay Lemons:

Wonderful. Well, on any of these we could chase out in greater depth. I’ll keep moving forward. Rosabeth Moss Kanter says that leadership is not a solo act, that it’s a duet or a trio, and so brings me to thinking about a team. What do you look for in the leaders that are a part of your team?

Barbara Farley:

It’s such an important group of people. I speak from the role of the president, the senior leadership team, they are the drivers in so many ways of what can happen on campus. I have worked with a number of people in those leadership roles. I think it comes down to, I think, a few really important things. One is all the things I just talked about, about what makes a good leader. I’m looking for that capacity, particularly this ability to, and the will, the will and the capacity to move an organization forward, and that is grounded in a commitment to the mission and why it is we do what we do. You’ve got to wake up every morning, as we say at Illinois College, and put the student in the middle of the table. What are we doing to create opportunities and great experiences, fabulous education, so that our students graduate ready for the next phase of their work? A senior team cannot lose sight of that. I think that a senior team and the leaders that I would look for are really clear about the contemporary needs.

And, this is one of the joys of leadership that we have to grab onto, which is that the organization’s not static. We all know that in reality, but that means that what we need in terms of our own contributions as a leader within the same institution and as new leaders come into the institution, we have to be ready and willing to adapt to what has happened. I am not the same person or leader I was when I came here 10 years ago because I have had this dynamic set of experiences with trustees and amazing board chairs and all the people I get interact with, and they are changing me and helping me to grow and develop. Therefore, I think the people I seek, and I have this amazing senior team at Illinois College, is we have to be ready to use Jim Collins’ image; we have to be willing to put our shoulder to the flywheel and make it move faster and faster and faster. So I look for complementarity among the members of the team, and I look for the capacity to be in this moment, but also looking ahead strategically about where do we need to be a year from now, two years from year now, and so forth. And I think leaders need to build a team that wants to spend time together and that they are excited and supportive of each other.

Jay Lemons:

That is so true. Thank you. What advice do you have for new leaders or those who aspire to leadership in the academy?

Barbara Farley:

I think that aspiring leaders and new leaders, my advice is be open to those opportunities. Be open to walking through doors within your own institution, because one can create an amazing career within your own institution. I made choices to move to different institutions to pursue different opportunities, but everyone is in a different place. I think that my advice is just keep learning, ask a lot of questions. How do things work? Why does it work that way? How can I help? Be open to change and be willing to offer solutions.

I had a great colleague who told me once that it’s best if you walk into the president’s office with solutions and not just putting a problem in the middle of the table. And I think that that is true no matter where we are in our careers. And be willing to take risks. Be willing to take professional risks in pursuing your goals and be willing to take risks within your organization to achieve those goals.

Jay Lemons:

Yeah, I love that. It comes back to, “Have you ever thought about…”

Barbara Farley:

It is. “Have you ever thought about…”

Jay Lemons:

Or “Would you?” And your advice is answer in the affirmative, unless it’s crazy. Yeah. Yeah. Wonderful. Wonderful. What do you see as the biggest challenges facing leaders today?

Barbara Farley:

It’s a complex higher education market, if I stay within our sector. We could say this about the world. I think that leading in a post-pandemic world is a new phase. It’s a new phase for leaders across the world. And what I see as challenges in our sector are around changes in some attitudes about higher education for students and their families. We have to continue to make the case for why it matters that college education will make a difference in your life and will help you to grow and develop into just extraordinary talents and talented people. There is a labor market that is really challenging right now. We talk a lot at Illinois College about building capacity, organizational capacity. Do we have the capacity to do the work we need to do? And that means, do we have the pool of talent to help us to be successful?

So I think it’s a very, very competitive market. One has to think very carefully about the challenges to our business models. We have to be thinking about the real trauma, in some cases, for students who have come through the pandemic and high school and they are… We know nationally they are struggling. There are the challenges around mental health that are real, and we have to embrace students where they are. I feel very strongly about this as a leader; we have to take students where they are and then help them to reach heights they could never have imagined. That is important work, and it’s the work that I care deeply about and why I continue to get up every day and think about, what are the contemporary challenges that we have to face as Illinois College and as a sector?

Jay Lemons:

Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. Complex is a great summary of where we live and the world that we’re at. And yet, I am mindful and I try and remind others, look back across history over a long period of time and, boy, our predecessors also had to live through and wrestle with really difficult, adaptive problems for which there are not clear, easy solutions. Yeah.

Barbara Farley:

That’s exactly right. And Illinois College will celebrate its bicentennial in 2029. I think of the 13 presidents who came before me; they all faced their own big deal issue in their era, and we have persevered and been resilient.

Jay Lemons:

Wow. Thank you for sharing that. So nearly 200 years old, 194-ish or thereabouts, and only 14 presidents. This is a place that has probably selected presidents exquisitely, but also would reflect a community that allows leaders to be nurtured, to grow, to learn, to survive, to prosper. Wow. The benefits of continuity of leadership. That’s beautiful.

Barbara Farley:

I think that it’s important. I think it’s really very important. We’ve seen the difference that that has made at Illinois College.

Jay Lemons:

Yep. Yep. Hey, I’m going to move into a little more of a lightning round, where I’m going to ask shorter questions. You can answer in whatever link that you would like. And in a way, you may have answered the first one I wanted. Just give you another chance to talk about, who’s most influenced you?

Barbara Farley:

Well, you’re right. I was very happy to talk about Jack Farley. But I’ll tell you one other person I will lift up. It is my paternal grandmother, Catherine Schultz. She was a very special person in my life. She was in Fargo. She was a gentle, kind soul and loved her grandchildren unconditionally. I learned so much from her just gentle spirit. I also carry her with me among the other people who have forged me. I want to name her.

Jay Lemons:

Well, thank you for sharing that. Barbara, you are one of those colleagues who has this openness. It’s a part of who you are, and so I think you are honoring her.

Barbara Farley:

Thank you. That’s very kind.

Jay Lemons:

Well, I sincerely mean it. And it’s a part of the privilege of why I was looking forward to having this sort of opportunity. Is there a book that has had the most impact and influence on you?

Barbara Farley:

I would say there’s a genre. Dating back to high school, I’ve been very interested in biographies of political leaders. I love to pick up those books. I just finished reading, appropriate to where I’m living right now, And There Was Light by Jon Meacham about Abraham Lincoln. So New Salem is not very far from where I sit. We have a lot of Lincoln statues and reflections here. His best friends in New Salem were at Illinois College, and they brought books back to him in New Salem, and so we hold onto to the lore that had he been able to go to college, Illinois College would’ve been the place he would’ve come. So I just love reading about people in the context of their world. I looked up that book as one that I just finished that I enjoyed very, very much and was meaningful to me because of where I am in Illinois right now.

Jay Lemons:

No doubt. So that almost begs, is there a particular figure, heroine or hero, that you would, beyond Lincoln, as a significant, or are there others that you’d hold up from the genre that you would commend?

Barbara Farley:

I am part of a women’s literary society in Jacksonville and I-

Jay Lemons:

Awesome.

Barbara Farley:

So one year, the theme was leadership. I happened to be reading Blanche Wiesen Cook’s first book about Eleanor Roosevelt. And Cook went on to write a trilogy, and it covers the period of time from birth to death in three amazing volumes. So after I did book number one, the literary class, Wednesday class, said, “Well, is there a next edition?” And I said, “Well, actually, the second book is out,” and they said, “Great. Will you do that next year?” So three years in a row, I focused on that. I was fascinated by a period of time in Eleanor Roosevelt’s life I did not know anything about, and it was in about the six years before FDR became president in 1932. I was fascinated by her. So I’ve recently been in the 20th century, early 20th century, and late 19th century, thus my Lincoln book, but I really appreciate American history and reading about these really remarkable people. I learned so much.

Jay Lemons:

Yeah. Well, let me take you back to the College of Saint Benedict.

Barbara Farley:

Yeah.

Jay Lemons:

Fondest memory of your time at Saint Ben’s?

Barbara Farley:

Very easy answer. I spent the junior spring semester in Aix-en-Provence, France. Now we come back… We’re going to circle back to French. I loved my introduction to French when I was in seventh grade. I went to the College of Saint Benedict imagining that I was going to do a French major. In fact, I was just a couple courses short of the French major. I did spend a semester abroad. I lived with a family…who were in their mid-30s. They had three children, and they took me in for six months. They brought me into the full context of being part of the family. And that was a transformational experience, which I promote with our students at Illinois College.

And the big circle here about lifelong learning, Jay, is that I had not been to France since that period of time in my semester until about five years after Jack died. I started to study French again, and I did that because I wanted to go back to France. And it would be immersion French. I had to be able to engage and speak and so forth. So in 2012, I returned to Aix-en-Provence, and I have been part of the family’s orbit for the last 10 years. Except for Covid, I’ve gone every summer, and I am planning to see the family again this June. So I want to say to our listeners that liberal arts education and that spark of passion that someone offers you, this is the way I spend my hours when I am not focused on being the president of Illinois College. I love the study of French, and it all goes back to having that teacher who made a difference in my life.

Jay Lemons:

Fabulous. That’s wonderful. How neat, the full circle. Favorite campus tradition at a place you’ve attended or served?

Barbara Farley:

My favorite campus tradition I experienced for the first time at Augsburg University, and I brought it to Illinois College… Well, part of it. It is the bookends of the opening convocation and commencement, where at Augsburg, the faculty lined up and the new students processed through the faculty, and I loved that. And then at Augsburg, we had the same thing at commencement. When I came to Illinois College, we had the commencement part, but we didn’t have the opening part, and so we added that. And I just love the bookends, the story of, “We are welcoming you into this community, and now we send you forth to do the good work.” So the vision at Illinois College is that we inspire achievement and empower students to make a difference in the world. I think that those symbolic moments of welcoming and sending forth, in the middle, we’re just doing the important work of preparing young people for a world that they are going to change and my hope is in them.

Jay Lemons:

Well said. Beautifully said. I can appreciate and applaud that. Yes. Those are powerful symbols. Hey, if you hadn’t found your way to higher ed, what else might you have done?

Barbara Farley:

I think I might have pursued being a high school French teacher, perhaps. But I will tell you what my mother thought I should do, and I appreciate it because this wasn’t the profession of the era for women who were graduating from college at my time. My mother thought I should be an attorney. And I look back on that and I say, “Thank you, Mom.” I’m not sure that would’ve been the right one, but I appreciate that she was thinking about those opportunities for me. I was very, very, very lucky to have parents who had confidence in my future. They wanted to do everything they could to support me and my siblings. They were part of my graduation for my Ph.D. at the University of Minnesota. I’ve lost both my parents in the last five years, but they were here for my inauguration. It happened in September of ’13, and it is one of the glorious days in our family’s history book and our memories. They were so proud that I came to Illinois College. They were bursting that day of my inauguration. And I think of them with great gratitude and the support that they, along with Jack, gave me and made sure that I would walk through those doors, and they would be there to support me every step of the way.

Jay Lemons:

Wonderful. Well, and I know that you have now done that for generations of students at Illinois College and other institutions, and so your classroom has been larger than, and maybe a little more indirect, than being a French professor or a French teacher. But I just know that’s who you are and one of those gifts that you have brought to those you’ve served and worked alongside.

Barbara Farley:

Thank you very much, Jay. It’s been such a pleasure to talk to you.

Jay Lemons:

Well, pleasure’s been mine. One of our traditions here as we wrap up is asking guests to share with our listeners the special sauce, the distinctive qualities, the organizational DNA that has made Illinois College the place that has had a claim on your heart.

Barbara Farley:

It is the deep love that this campus has for our students through the ages. As I said, we are really focused on inspiring their achievement and empowering them. And that is true today; it was true when the college was founded by the Yale Band in 1829. I think in the DNA of Illinois College we find this optimism, resilience, a “We will persist,” and the capacity to adapt and be nimble in the time. So as I read that book about Abraham Lincoln, I was thinking about what was going on at Illinois College in that era of the 19th century in which he lived because we were part of most of his life. So I think that it is that frontier spirit and this strong desire to make a difference in the communities we serve.

Jay Lemons:

Wow. Wonderful. Wonderful. I’ve never had the opportunity to visit your campus. I hope one day that I will.

Barbara Farley:

I hope so.

Jay Lemons:

You have made it…

Barbara Farley:

It’s a beautiful, beautiful campus. At this time of the year, it just glistens. So I will look forward to welcoming you here, Jay.

Jay Lemons:

I’d love that. Well, thank you, Barbara, for joining us on Leaders on Leadership. So wonderful to have the chance to visit, to hear your insights and your wisdom. I really appreciate how much of your heart you shared today, too.

Barbara Farley:

Thank you, Jay. I really appreciate it. I’ve enjoyed so much having this conversation and look forward to listening to all the podcasts that you’ll be doing in the future, and I wish you the very best.

Jay Lemons:

Thank you so much. Listeners, we welcome your suggestions and thoughts for leaders we should feature in upcoming segments. You can send those to leadershippodcast@academicsearch.org. You can find our podcasts on the Academic Search website and wherever you find your podcasts. Leaders on Leadership is brought to you by Academic Search and the American Academic Leadership Institute. Together, our mission is to support colleges and universities during times of transition and through leadership development activities that serve current and future generations of leaders in the academy. What a joy it’s been to host Barbara Farley today. Thank you one final time for joining us, Barbara, on this beautiful spring day.

Barbara Farley:

Thank you, Jay.