Leaders on Leadership featuring Dr. Debbie L. Sydow, President of Richard Bland College of William & Mary

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. It is a special joy and privilege for me to introduce and to have this opportunity to spend time together with Dr. Debbie Sydow. Debbie is the fourth president of Richard Bland College of William & Mary, a post she’s held for more than a decade. The college is distinct in Virginia. It is Virginia’s only public residential two-year college and serves about 1600 students. Debbie is the President Emerita and a distinguished professor of English at Onondaga Community College, one of the largest community colleges in the SUNY system.

She spent more than 30 years in higher ed administration, and how did that happen, Debbie? My goodness. It’s yesterday that we were beginning this journey together in so many ways. She has served in leadership positions for national and regional associations, including as president of the New York Community College Association of Presidents, chair of the Board of Directors of the Institute for Community College Development at Cornell and chair of the ACE Commission on Leadership and Institutional Effectiveness. Her leadership is focused on strategic reinvestment and reinvention as a means of improving student learning outcomes, and her writings have been widely published in a range of publications, including the Community College Journal of Research and Practice, Diverse Issues in Higher Education, the American Council on Education’s Leadership Briefs, and in her own book, Revisioning Community Colleges.

Debbie’s discipline is in English literature, rhetoric and linguistics. She earned her bachelor’s degree from the University of Virginia’s College at Wise, which was then known as Clinch Valley College of the University of Virginia, a master’s from Marquette University and a PhD from Indiana University of Pennsylvania. She’s received numerous awards and honors, including an honorary doctorate from Keuka College in New York, CEO of the Year Award for the Northeast region from the Association of Community College Trustees and the Phi Theta Kappa National Honor Society’s Shirley B. Gordon Award of Distinction. Debbie, you and I do go back a very long ways to Southwest Virginia where I had an early calling in my career and you had begun your career there, and I cannot tell you how much it heartens me and warms me to see you and to have this opportunity to visit.

Debbie Sydow:

Thank you so much, Jay. It’s a pleasure to be with you today and to see you again and catch up.

Jay Lemons:

Well, we will catch up more fully as we get through our program obligation for today, our program opportunity, I should say. One of the goals that we have for Leaders on Leadership is to ask leaders to reflect and to consider their own pathways to leadership with a hope that aspiring leaders may be inspired. Debbie, I want you to share your own story with us, with our listeners and talk about some of the maybe people, events and opportunities that really helped discern a pathway for you and to help forge you into the extraordinary higher education leader that you are and has informed your journey in higher education. So I’m going to open it up and let you tell us the Debbie Sydow story and about your journey, and include all the elements that you’d like.

Debbie Sydow:

Oh, thank you so much. I really appreciate the opportunity to talk with you about leadership. I have always admired your leadership, and you have from our early days in higher education administration, you have always set a great example of leading from the heart. I just really appreciate that, Jay. Thank you so much for being a mentor to me and a role model from the very beginning.

Jay Lemons:

Thank you. That’s really sweet and truly does mean a lot. But I know I was in my early 30s. I won’t ask you what age you were, but I know you were younger than me, so let-

Debbie Sydow:

Yes, just out of graduate school. So I’m going to go back and say, because it does matter that we were working together. I was at the two-year college. You were at Clinch Valley College at the time as chancellor and that area, that part of the Appalachian Mountains is where I grew up. It’s important to say that that region is very much a coal mining region, at least it was in the ’70s and ’80s. Industries change, but it’s important to say that my father was a coal miner. In that region, that part of Appalachia, I will just say had it not been for Clinch Valley College, what is today UVA Wise, I could not have gone to college, and so I am forever grateful to have had that entry point. I am forever grateful because it changed the trajectory of my life and my family’s life.

So that’s where I would start and just say that I was inspired by the professors there to pursue graduate studies, which I did at Marquette University, as you said. My goal was to become an English professor because my world was opened up, again, a young girl from the mountains of Virginia, a very, very small world. So literature and the professors I had really helped me to envision the larger world, global concepts, all of those things. Philosophy professors opened up my mind, and so teaching English at the college level was really a goal of mine. I did land in that seat for five years as a full-time professor. That was at a two-year college in the mountains after I completed graduate school. As part of that experience, I got to apply for some grants including a FIPSE grant, Funds for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education, and that exposed me to leadership, to administration.

I had the opportunity to interact with various administrators. What I discovered is that the scope of influence could really be expanded by moving from teaching where you have your classroom and your students to a place where you could have the ability to make an impact on a larger group, on a larger group of students, on a profession, on an industry, if you will, of higher education. So I applied for a dean’s job, a chair’s position, and at a very young age was able to move into administration and took the traditional route from that academic chair to a VP and eventually to president, and it has been quite the journey. I’ve loved every minute of staying focused on student success with a real heart for the two-year mission, which is about helping students get that leg up the way I got a leg up as a first-generation college student.

Jay Lemons:

Yeah. Well, there are very few places that it can be as meaningful to be called to work as our community colleges as it was at Clinch Valley College.

Debbie Sydow:

Yes.

Jay Lemons:

One of my all-time favorite movies will forever be October Sky-

Debbie Sydow:

Yes.

Jay Lemons:

… which is a story from that region and an inspirational teacher inspiring young, in that storyline, it was mostly young boys to pursue college and the space program, of course.

Debbie Sydow:

Yes.

Jay Lemons:

But there’s a depiction, and I will never forget the hardship of one of those boys who had tons of siblings who retired early, and he had to study by almost candlelight. It was a real reminder of just the power and the meaning of those institutions. Debbie, I’m remembering correctly, and this is purely from memory, you started at Southwest, didn’t you, initially?

Debbie Sydow:

I did.

Jay Lemons:

That’s what I was thinking. So you worked with Charlie King there before finding your way back to Mountain Empire Community College and working with Bobby Sandel. I so appreciated those powerful leaders and the importance of those institutions. I’ve always felt like every American ought to at least once in their lifetime, if not once a year, go to a community college graduation because it is-

Debbie Sydow:

Oh, yes, absolutely.

Jay Lemons:

I was privileged to do a whole bunch of commencement speeches, and I always left feeling as if I had just gotten a real booster shot in inspiration and appreciation for the sacrifices of students and families and the good work of faculty and staff. I want to go back, though, for a moment in part, because who knows where this podcast will find itself? Give me some of the names of faculty or staff at UVA Wise that had an impact on you. I received in the mail today a memoir from one of our dear colleagues, Garrett Sheldon, who’s written a memoir, so I’m in this nostalgic mood. I would love to hear you just raise some names of many people who I suspect I might know and others who might appreciate your remembering these names.

Debbie Sydow:

Jack and Catherine Mahoney, huge influence from that couple who dedicated so much to teaching at the college. Dick Peake, I would say Dick is one who tapped me on the shoulder to say, “Debbie, I think you should go to graduate school,” and he helped me to visualize that pathway. Phil Shelton, biology, I studied biology as a minor. His zoology class, being outside and learning about identifying birds, it even impacted what I do recreationally, right? Roy Ball, history, Stan Willis, I just can’t say enough about the influence that those individuals had in the classroom, but also in a small campus, in a small community like Clinch Valley was at that time, the interactions were powerful. They were meaningful. They occurred both inside the classroom and outside the classroom. Judd Lewis is the one who suggested that I study abroad. Now imagine I’d never been outside the county, so now imagining that I can actually study outside the country. So yeah, thanks for that little trip down memory lane because those people are still very, very important to me. They are giants in my mind.

Jay Lemons:

Well, they were certainly incredible colleagues that I also valued and learned a lot from and were a part of the building generation of that institution. We had the founding generation, the pioneers ahead of them, but that crew of people really helped the place to find its way to its identity, so it really is meaningful to me as well. So thank you for that. It also strikes me that there are some interesting intersections between Clinch Valley College, which began as a two-year institution and the community college journey. But then also this only other analog for Richard Bland is the college at Wise in terms of having an association with one of our earliest and most hallowed of institutions and, of course, UVA on the one hand, but even older, the second-oldest institution in the country at William & Mary. I’d love to hear you reflect on how that’s brought you full circle as well.

Debbie Sydow:

I do believe that Virginia is unique in having this interesting diversity of institutions and also some remnants or vestigial extensions of higher education. It all goes back to the 1950s and ’60s, the Civil rights era in a state that was actually put on the FBI watch list for refusal to desegregate. So-

Jay Lemons:

That’s right.

Debbie Sydow:

… the General Assembly really looked at its two flagship institutions, UVA and William & Mary, and decided that it would be wise in some socioeconomically disadvantaged rural areas, underrepresented areas, to have these two-year colleges as on-ramps to these flagship institutions. That was a concept that is not unusual in other states, a way of having two-year institutions guided by those universities. However, it wasn’t too many years later that the General Assembly recognized the value of community colleges. So they established the 23-member community college system, the VCCS. It’s an interesting quirk of history that in about 1972, the institutions that were with William & Mary, Christopher Newport, Old Dominion and what was the Richmond Professional Institute, RPI, now Virginia Commonwealth University, were all with Richard Bland College in that same status.

They were all granted independence as the community colleges were forming. Richard Bland too was approved by the General Assembly for escalation to become a four-year college. But as historical nuance would have it, the proximity to Richmond for Richard Bland and the proximity to an HBCU resulted in a Supreme Court injunction, again, that FBI watch list and the state’s resistance to desegregation, there is still an injunction that prevents Richard Bland from offering four-year degrees. So we became really the only institution that was, if you will, suspended in time to offer two-year degrees but not as part of the community college system. Rather, ours is very much a university parallel, years one and two.

Jay Lemons:

So there’s value in that-

Debbie Sydow:

Yes.

Jay Lemons:

… that you are demonstrating just the wild diversity there is within the public system of UVA, and the Clinch Valley story is parallel along with that and-

Debbie Sydow:

Yes.

Jay Lemons:

… yet there was a trade off. Here we need the voice of Papa Joe Smiddy really with us around liquor by the drink in exchange for the creation of a four-year campus with a determination to be made at some point later about whether to remain tied to the University of Virginia or not. Because the policy then was that all of the four-year institutions should stand on their own at some point, and that is the case all except for that wonderful institution. As you well know, in many ways, Clinch Valley College was never quite sure where its place in the UVA family was, and it was a great joy for me to be a part of helping to open that process. Boy, what chancellor Donna Henry has done today in building on that is it just takes my breath away, but it adds to the richness of the diversity of this outstanding system of higher education. Well, I’ve taken this way, way off script, but I do think there’s value for understanding the history of these places.

I don’t know that I had understood the history of Richard Bland, and that sounds to me like you have a screenplay or a theatrical production around Richard Bland and how and why it is the way it is and the unique mission that you have, so well, thank you. Let me get back to script a little bit more. I feel like a one-person band in trying to reclaim the word good and not have it be bound up in thinking about good as somehow less than great, but good as in virtuous. I’d love for you to talk about what you think makes a good leader. By that, I really do mean effective, successful, but also virtuous because I want to believe that our institutions are served best by people who have commitments that are to a greater cause than themselves. Talk about what in your mind makes a good leader.

Debbie Sydow:

So I think I would start by saying that there has to be comfort with ambiguity. I believe that leadership is seldom black and white, that the issues that we deal with as leaders tend to be complex, nuanced, everything really has to do with human lives. In that way, there’s a lot of ambiguity, and so I believe that there has to be a comfort with that. There has to be an acceptance of that. There has to be, secondly, an open-mindedness and an open-mindedness that really is committed to listening and to hearing from other people, to understanding that none of us as leaders have all the answers. We are really indebted to teams of people, stakeholders of the institutions that we lead who come at their perspectives from very different places and all valid places, all genuinely good places. I think therefore that that open-mindedness that listening, that openness to new information is really important as we seek to do the right thing for our institutions and for the students that we are there to serve.

Finally, I would say I think that good leaders have a fair amount of risk tolerance. I believe that playing it safe is not the best approach to leadership. Rather, I believe that sometimes it’s really important to not make the most popular decision or the one that’s going to make people happy, but really have a risk for doing things differently and from time to time things that are going to grate or irritate even our donors. I just believe that there has to be a real focus on doing right by our students, doing right by our campus communities, every aspect of that honoring the history of our institutions and ensuring the sustainability of our institutions, and that’s tough work that really does require risk tolerance.

Jay Lemons:

Thank you, and I really am struck by your beginning with comfort and ambiguity. We have particular groups of colleagues whose very existence is to bring clarity, and those are critical gifts in accounting and auditing and in the application of technical matters. But it is true, I have so often said to my kids who are now through the college experience, but all who went through William Perry, that dualistic stage of psychosocial development, and a lot of people never get out of that stage. It’s really vital for leaders to be able to be comfortable and to understand multiple perspectives, just as you said, so beautiful. When you think about advice that you would want to share with those who aspire to leadership or those who have been, to use your word tapped on the shoulder by someone, encouraged, what is your best advice?

Debbie Sydow:

I have to credit Mary Beth Canter with tapped on the shoulder, that’s an analogy that she uses and very much impacted my thinking about mentorship. But to answer your question, advice for new leaders would really be to fully understand and keep the focus on the mission. I think it’s important to be selfless in this work, and really, there have been many times in my career, and I know in yours as well, when we gave up personal comfort or maybe in some cases even what we thought personally might have been a better way forward to really be about driving toward the mission. That is just, in my mind, critical. Then the second part of that is doing the hard work of aligning all of the resources. The people, the technology, obviously the fiscal resources, getting those all lined up to achieve the goals and mission of the institution.

If I had to boil leadership down to a single formula, that’s really it. So I think that the advice I would give is to really stay focused on resources. Don’t ever let any of those things slide, and stay close to those resources and how they’re being allocated and how they are actually making a difference in achieving the mission. I think I would also give leaders, especially in today’s environment, the advice to find the light and the joy in the work. These are literally 24/7 jobs, and I don’t think there’s a single executive position that doesn’t require that you’re on call all the time. We see campus communities that struggle in so many different ways and we never know when we’re going to get a phone call, when something is going to go sideways.

So I think there’s so much gloom and doom, maybe it’s just me, but the news just is not very positive around higher education these days. So I think it’s important to keep the joy of the work. I always reconnect with students, as I know you did. I always make a point of going and visiting faculty and reconnecting to that core, reconnecting to that life source, that energy source and finding the joy in the work and the light, the good things. As you said, those graduation ceremonies, Jay, they haven’t changed a bit. It’s still like a tent revival. It’s just so incredibly uplifting to see graduates who are breaking traditions and making changes like I did that will impact their family for generations. So yeah, that’s the advice I would give.

Jay Lemons:

Wonderful. Wonderful. Well, as you said, and it’s true, we live in challenging times. What are the biggest or most critical challenges that you see out there for higher education?

Debbie Sydow:

That is such a loaded question, and I want-

Jay Lemons:

It’s a lot there.

Debbie Sydow:

I want to be judicious in my answer. But I will say effective integration of new technologies into every aspect of our operations, so teaching and learning and administration, and of course, everyone is talking about generative AI, and is this the devil? Is this the savior? What is it going to be? I just think technologies don’t change holistically in that they exist to support the work that we do and we just have to figure out how to utilize them in a smart manner. So I do think that continues to be a huge challenge in addition to all of the security issues around it. Post-pandemic, as more people were forced to go online and now we are forever changed with hybrid courses being the new norm, I think that really doubling down on the best utilization of technology for teaching and learning in particular is a critical challenge.

I would say that cultural and demographic shifts is another challenge I think about that requires new approaches that requires us to really get our arms around how our institutions are changing and the ways in which we need to be sensitive to that, culturally sensitive. Also, again, thinking about generations of students who have devices as new appendages, what does that mean for the work that we do? Finally, I really think that the whole public shift in its perspective about the value of higher education writ large is a major challenge that we face. I think the healthcare industry went through this kind of transformation a couple of decades before we are going through it, but the student debt load, various ways in which higher education has been called into question has really changed the ideas about whether or not a college degree, a college credential is really adding value. What is the value proposition? So to me that is another key challenge. We do have to do a better job of making the case for higher education.

Jay Lemons:

Indeed, we do. Truly, bless you for the work that you’re doing on that front in the Commonwealth and nationally because it’s not just left to the most elite institutions, the Ivy presidents that need to make these cases. Too often the prism in which people seem to try and understand our institutions is a very, very limited perspective. I want to move into a little bit of what I call a lightning round. The questions are shorter, the answers can be whatever length you want. Who’s biggest influence on you?

Debbie Sydow:

Early in my career, there were very few female presidents. I just didn’t see any in Virginia, one or two, but they were on the other end of the state, certainly not out in the mountains. So Belle Wheelan-

Jay Lemons:

Yes.

Debbie Sydow:

… who’s now president of SACSCOC, she was president of Central Virginia Community College.

Jay Lemons:

Right.

Debbie Sydow:

She was president of Northern Virginia Community College, and she was just a larger-than-life woman who-

Jay Lemons:

Indeed. Indeed.

Debbie Sydow:

… who really influenced me. Jerry Sue Thornton, who was president of Cuyahoga Community College in Cleveland, when I was an ACE Fellow, she was my mentor. I just [inaudible 00:32:28]

Jay Lemons:

A true giant, yeah.

Debbie Sydow:

Oh, yes. Yes, yes.

Jay Lemons:

Both of them.

Debbie Sydow:

Really, yes, women who stood out and stepped out of the molds of the time and really carved a pathway for women like me to step into leadership roles, especially in higher education. I just would say my year with Jerry Sue Thornton taught me more than any other single point or place in my career how to lead from the heart and how to be about being authentic and genuine in doing the work every single day, because that’s how Jerry Sue did it.

Jay Lemons:

Well, my memory about that is that was through the ACE Fellowship program, was it not?

Debbie Sydow:

Yes. Yes.

Jay Lemons:

You did that from which institution?

Debbie Sydow:

I was at Mountain Empire at the time.

Jay Lemons:

That’s what I was thinking.

Debbie Sydow:

Yes.

Jay Lemons:

That is among our oldest and truly most special professional development programs, and special shout out to leadership at Mountain Empire. Would that have been Bobby who would’ve been your nominator?

Debbie Sydow:

That’s right.

Jay Lemons:

Well, that is not enough people have that opportunity, and I know how formative it was for you with Jerry Sue.

Debbie Sydow:

Absolutely.

Jay Lemons:

Yeah. Yeah. Wonderful. Is there a book that’s had the most influence on you? That’s an unfair question to ask an English professor, I recognize.

Debbie Sydow:

Oh, in terms of my leadership role, Prioritizing Academic Programs and Services by Robert Dickerson, this is an old book, and it goes way back. But I talked earlier about the importance of allocating resources in areas that drive mission, and that’s fundamentally what that book is about. The other, and it’s in the same vein of leading a business, understanding that at its core, higher education has those elements that have to be attended to for sustainability, that is David Kirp’s Shakespeare, Einstein, and the Bottom Line. Those books really shaped my thinking and my approach to both preserving that core of what higher education is all about, while at the same time managing the business aspects of what we do.

Jay Lemons:

If you hadn’t worked in higher ed, what other pathway might you have followed?

Debbie Sydow:

So I’ve always thought that I would love to do architecture, landscape design, I love those programs. It’s entertaining for me, artistic, but also an element of precision. So yeah, I think that’s what I would’ve done.

Jay Lemons:

Love it. Love it. I’m going to ask you now to dig into that undergraduate experience. Do you have a favorite memory of your time at UVA Wise?

Debbie Sydow:

I believe the most impactful experience when I was an undergraduate was the opportunity that we talked about him before, Professor Lewis, philosophy professor. He announced to the class, this was an intro philosophy course, the opportunity to study in Greece. Again, for me, that was like going to Mars. I just could never have envisioned doing that. He helped me and other students as well to create the application, and I ended up studying Greek drama and language for two semesters. It was just life-changing for me to be in another culture, for me to learn, not a lot, but at least enough Greek language, modern Greek, to manage and to see the sites of Greek drama and to be in that setting. Yeah, just an absolutely transformative experience for me. To this day, I continue to be a proponent of international study, study abroad, travel study. I just think it is so important as part of the overall educational experience.

Jay Lemons:

Without question, one of the most profound high-impact learning practices that can be found. I love that UVA Wise has its core being a public liberal arts college, and you shared comments about being shaped by a scientist in Phil Shelton and all of those English faculty members. But here, Judd was rooted in philosophy, and that just captures the beauty of what happens to students who study broadly, I think.

Debbie Sydow:

That is well stated. I still utilize, I don’t think I think about it, but I utilize logic models, right? There are just ways that I think that were influenced by that undergraduate experience. So to your point, I do think liberal arts has lost some reputation. But in terms of developing human beings, good human beings, to go back to your adjective, I do think that that fundamental liberal arts experience, there’s nothing to compare.

Jay Lemons:

Amen. One of my other questions that I love to ask people is to think about the place of tradition and ritual in American higher education. I wonder if there’s a favorite tradition at someplace that you’ve attended or served that you would share with our listeners?

Debbie Sydow:

So Jay, you mentioned Papa Joe Smiddy, and I don’t know if it’s so much as a tradition as he was chancellor when I was at UVA Wise, and I just can’t say enough about what it meant that he was very much on the ground with students. He actually taught a course in evolution, a biology course I took with him. I got to know him. He would attend college functions, not just sporting events, but he was around all the time, and you felt comfortable speaking with him. So the tradition of having approachable, accessible leaders in my undergraduate experience, it really left a lifelong impression on me and challenged me to do the same thing.

The other aspect of that was Joe Smiddy was also very much a mentor to his staff. I believe that it meant a lot to him to bring people along, bring his team along in ways that would help them grow and assume higher levels of leadership in their careers, and that also really stuck with me. I will tell you, especially at this stage of my career, and you mentioned I’ve got more than 30 years, probably closer to 40 at this point, but that has always just meant so much to me to in every way possible, create very diverse teams and to help individuals in those teams to continue to grow and to see pathways for building their own careers. That all goes back to Clinch Valley College.

Jay Lemons:

For those folks who don’t know, and more folks probably don’t than should, Papa Joe Smiddy was the chancellor from essentially soon after the founding in 1954 until 1985 and a legendary leader, a legendary educator. By the way, his son, Joe Frank, didn’t do so well in that evolution class. That was a source of some tension in the home. Joe Frank, who became a very, very, very prominent and significant healthcare leader in Northeast Tennessee/Southwest Virginia, but he struggled with his own father, so there were no slippage of standards.

But Joe as storyteller, Joe as assessable, as you were talking about, willing to help and to meet the students where they were and to help faculty to know that that was the job for all of us, these are lessons that I got nearly a decade after he had departed. Mix it all together with the warmth and hospitality of Papa Joe’s musical gifts, some of the greatest memories of my life will always be thinking about Papa Joe and doing little claw hammer banjo playing and singing the music and telling stories in a different way, true. So thank you for that wonderful tribute. One of the special joys of doing this is also inviting our guests, our leaders to tell us a little bit about the special DNA that makes Richard Bland College a place that continues to have a huge claim on your time, your talent, your heart. I would really love for you to say whatever you’d like to about the special sauce, the DNA that makes Richard Bland so distinctive.

Debbie Sydow:

Jay, thank you for that opportunity. You did talk a little bit about Richard Bland’s history, its connection to William & Mary. I actually report to the William & Mary Board of Visitors, as does President Rowe. Richard Bland is located on a very large campus land wise, and we have the oldest and largest pecan, I’ve learned to say pecan, not pecan-

Jay Lemons:

Interesting.

Debbie Sydow:

… we have the oldest and largest pecan grove in the state of Virginia in the Commonwealth. I say that to say it is an idyllic campus. It is just beautiful and safe and tucked away in this very remote part of the state. We are 35 minutes south of Richmond, but we could be in the middle of nowhere and you would know no difference. But I described that environment and that campus to say that we are a small family at Richard Bland College. The college has for more than six decades been very focused on providing that university parallel experience primarily for students in this region, in the Richmond- Petersburg region, but also really ensuring that students have residential experience.

We have very competitive athletics. It feels like a small private college experience. Faculty here, our faculty who are engaged, we have very much a hands-on learning environment. I think more than anything, I would stress that about 98% of the degrees we award are Associate of Science. So there is a very strong STEM focus that goes all the way back to the ’60s. STEM is very much en vogue today, but at Richard Bland, math and science have always been the prominent piece of our curriculum, and it really has had an impact in terms of having a base of alumni who are very active in a number of scientific careers and also healthcare.

Jay Lemons:

Wonderful. Wonderful. Well, I am happy for clarification from a place that’s rooted in the production of pecans because I would’ve said pecan and to know that really speaks to the great agricultural roots of the Commonwealth, and that really does go back to the through line to the founders in the presence of farming. Jefferson said farming is the most noble profession, and yet I’ve always maintained that were Jefferson alive today, I think he might call education our most noble profession. You have been such a wonderful guest. I have loved connecting with you again in this context, and I really appreciate your sharing these thoughts and wisdom and the insights along with your time with us today, Debbie. So thank you very, very much.

Debbie Sydow:

Thank you, Jay. It was absolutely my pleasure.

Jay Lemons:

Well, listeners, we hope you’ve enjoyed today’s edition of the Leaders on Leadership Podcast. We welcome your suggestions about other leaders that we might hold up. You can send those suggestions to leadershippodcast@academicsearch.org. You can find our podcast on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts and wherever else you find your podcasts. It’s also available on the Academic Search website. 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. Again, what a joy and pleasure it’s been to have Debbie Sydow with us today. Debbie, thanks once again for joining us.