Leaders on Leadership featuring Dr. Jeffrey P. Gold, President of the University of Nebraska System

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 forces that have shaped leaders in higher education and to learn more about their thoughts on leadership in the academy. I’m really delighted to be joined today by Dr. Jeffrey Gold. Dr. Gold has served as the ninth president of the University of Nebraska system since July 2024, where he leads the university and its four campuses, but he is anything but a newcomer to Nebraska, having spent a decade there, having led the University of Nebraska Medical Center and also serving as chancellor of the University of Nebraska’s Omaha. And as well, he has served as the board chair for the Nebraska Medicine Health System. Dr. Gold holds tenured faculty appointments in the University of Nebraska Medical Center’s College of Medicine, and in the College of Public Health, where his research interests focus on healthcare policy, population health and epidemiology.

Dr. Gold is a first-generation college student, and I’m very anxious to have in his own words, him share some of his own story being raised and being led to Cornell University where he was a student in the College of Engineering and has a bachelor’s degree in theoretical and applied mechanics. He earned his MD from the Weill Cornell College of Medicine and completed his general surgery residency at the New York Presbyterian Hospital and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. He also has completed a cardiothoracic surgical fellowship training at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. Dr. Gold’s national leadership has included more than 50 national professional committees and more than a hundred national organizations, volunteer boards, government and public health councils. He is tireless. He has worked extensively with national and state level elected and appointed governing and administrative bodies as an advisor and as a trusted resource in the areas of higher education, research and clinical care. Welcome, Jeff. Really appreciate your being here with us.

Jeffrey Gold:

Well, Jay, I’ve been looking forward to this for a long time and I really appreciate knowing you and working with you, and certainly the opportunity to share any experiences that I’ve had that might be helpful to either current or future leaders.

Jay Lemons:

Well, I know it will be. I’ve been looking forward to this opportunity very much as well, and I’m going to jump right in. One of our goals is truly knowing that the heart of our audience are those who might benefit from hearing leaders reflect on their own pathways. And I would love for you to share your story with our listeners and talk about maybe some of the critical seminal important events, people and opportunities that have really forged who you are as a leader and how your journey in higher education has unfolded.

Jeffrey Gold:

Well, certainly, going back to the very beginning, I grew up in the inner city of New York. Leadership was never on my agenda. It was more like survival, a product of the public school system of New York.

Jay Lemons:

Which borough?

Jeffrey Gold:

Grew up in Brooklyn, actually. All of the friends and classmates that I knew, if they did graduate from high school and had any aspirations of going to college, the overwhelming majority went to City College or to one of the state colleges. Indeed, we used to say that in my high school graduating class, more of the graduates went to jail than went to college. And I bet there’s some truth to that statement. But my mom’s brother, my uncle had gotten out of the Navy and went to engineering school and what was at that time known as the Berry Plan, which was a program that the military had for individuals that served during the war. And he got an engineering degree and told me that if I were to apply to engineering school at that time, of course, this is way back in the dark ages, like when the dinosaurs ruled the earth.

Jay Lemons:

You certainly had to use a T-square then, didn’t you?

Jeffrey Gold:

Yeah. Oh, yeah. K&E Slide Rules and all that kind of thing. Yeah. And he said, if I applied, I could likely get some scholarships. And I did apply, and I did get a very generous package of scholarship support from a number of engineering schools. But as you said earlier in your introduction, chose to go to Cornell. I’d love to tell you it was because of the beautiful campus, the deep gorges, the Greek life, the coeds. But it actually had to do with the most generous scholarship support, a workforce, a study, and of course, some student debt. But I had a wonderful four years. It was a time for me that I lived away from home. Not only was I able to study engineering, which I never thought I would enjoy, because I was pre-med right out of the box. And I thought, if you want to go to medical school, you need to take pre-med courses and be a pre-med major, so to speak, a traditional bio major.

And of course, that turns out to be completely untrue. But I found out that a lot of the things that I learned in engineering were extremely applicable to my medical journey. And that through interdisciplinary elective coursework, I was able to accomplish all of my typical pre-med requirements. As a matter of fact, one of the things that I reflect on, I was ecstatic in my engineering degree program that I didn’t have to take foreign language, only later in my senior year to find out it was a pre-med requirement. I was almost heartbroken that I had miscalculated that, but nonetheless, I did and had just a ton of mentorship and friendship throughout my journey, both in engineering and outside of engineering in Ithaca, and then chose to matriculate at Cornell’s medical school.

And that’s a bit of a story in and of itself in that I met a young lady in college who ultimately married me. I made a very wise choice of proposing to her, probably the best decision I ever made in my life. We just recently celebrated 50 years together, just a great, great marriage. Robin is a year younger than I am. Well, actually, 51 weeks younger than I am. For one week of the year, we are the same age, and I never forget to remind her that during that one week of the year. But because of that, she was eligible for a seven-year program that Cornell undergraduate… She was a pre-med bio major. So, if she was accepted into that seven year program, I would be accepted as an incoming medical student and we’d essentially be synchronized again.

That’s how it worked out. We went to med school together. For me, it followed in general surgery five years with a very broad and deep experience in surgical oncology at Memorial Sloan Kettering, and then all the training in the Harvard system at the Brigham and at Boston Children’s in adult and pediatric cardiac surgery. Robin became an ophthalmologist trained at Manhattan Eye and Ear. And then we came back to New York City children came into the picture. I referred to my life in a BC and AC fashion before and after children. I stayed at New York Prez for over a decade, rose to the rank of full professor, nearly 20, 25 million dollars of NIH funding during that time, plus a huge surgical practice, which then went on to becoming the professor and chair of the department and the heart center director at Albert Einstein, Montefiore in the Bronx.

So, I didn’t have to sell my home, I didn’t have to pull my kids out of school. Most importantly, I didn’t have to explain to my wife that she needed to move to another city and get another job if she wanted to do that, you know how that goes, and stayed there for another decade. And then had the opportunity to start to more seriously think about leadership because when I became a department chair, a residency program director, the heart center director, issues around leadership became really important to me. And I started to study leadership, both formally with coursework. I read a lot of books on leadership. I started to look at people I worked with who were, quote, leaders and try to figure out their styles and what worked and what didn’t work among them and between them.

And then when the opportunity ultimately came up for me to consider what the next step and academic rank might be, I thought a lot about what I wanted to do, whether I wanted to go in an industry, I had an opportunity to work in a leadership role in government, but I decided that I wanted to be a medical school dean. And I decided that because in my little world previously, the medical school dean seemed to have a major platform to talk about difficult issues to interact with, political leadership, business leadership, governmental leadership to interact with major philanthropists, et cetera. And that was attractive to me at the time. And so, I applied for a number of deanships. Interestingly, most people do not go from being a department chair without becoming an assistant dean or an associate dean and get to study leadership more and practice leadership more. But I tried to do it directly and was successful.

I was offered an opportunity at the University of Toledo to become the dean and the hospital director for their healthcare system. But literally within six months, when I took that job, with a stroke of a pen, the governor of the state of Ohio combined two universities into a single university. And within six months, I was provost and chief academic officer and the head of the healthcare system of the university. And over time, I stayed there for a full 10 years. We did a lot of other integration and had experiences in tremendous undergraduate programs, intercollegiate athletics, go Rockets, and really learned a tremendous amount. And I was minding my own business until the president of the University of Nebraska reached out to me in the fall of 2013 and asked me if I was interested in serving as the chancellor of the UNMC, the University of Nebraska Medical Center, which is one of the four academic units of the University of Nebraska system, and to become the board chair of the hospital system, given my extensive experience in hospital administration.

It was JB Milliken at the time, I’ll never forget what I said to him. It was pretty simply, A, I’m not looking for a job. B, why do they call you JB. And C, where is Nebraska? And told me three things. He said, “Well, I’m looking for someone who’s not looking for a job because then that makes the best candidates.” Secondly, explained to me why they call him JB, his name was James B. Milliken, of course. And furthermore, he told me how to get a map and figure out where Nebraska was. And he made a few and sundry comments about my knowledge of United States geography. So, I came for an interview and a very quiet meeting, I’ll never forget. They found a very small but very effective Learjet to pick me up over a weekend. And I got to meet university leadership and most importantly, community leadership, major donors, board members, et cetera. And magically, in January of 2014, I assumed the position of the eighth chancellor of the University of Nebraska Medical Center and the chair of the board of Nebraska Medicine, our large academic medical center healthcare delivery system.

Over time, I have had four years to serve as the chancellor of our undergraduate campus in Omaha as well. These were all additive duties as assigned, was not a replacement job. And until last July, I had the opportunity for over three years to serve as the provost and executive vice president of the system. So, I’ve had a lot of opportunity and put a lot of miles on my car, commuting back and forth between the campuses and got to meet and work closely, of course, with all the chancellors, the vice presidents and others. And then came the day that my predecessor in this role decided that he was going to move to a small institution in Columbus, better known as the Ohio State University. I was heartbroken. I’d worked for a number of university presidents between JB, Hank Bounds and then Ted Carter and the interims. That would’ve been a lot of people.

So, I decided that if I was ever going to take the responsibilities of university presidency and bring together all of my knowledge and experience around public higher education, board work and board advocacy, all of the work that I’ve done philanthropically over my career and have raised well over, the last decade, well over a billion dollars in private philanthropy, I thought, if not me, then who? Initially I didn’t want to do it. You and I, Jay, have talked about this a lot early on, but I got letters and phone calls from… I remember, I got signed petitions by hundreds of faculty members asking me to do this on all of our campuses. Members of our board, the hospital board asked me to do it, major community members, philanthropists. It was endless.

And the realization came, and when the offer was made, I said, “Listen, I can’t promise you what it will look like, but I promise you this, I’ll give you 100% of my best effort, roll up my sleeves, I’ll work with you, and I’ll do everything I can to make the communities that I serve proud.” So, it’s been about eight months and I’m still at it.

Jay Lemons:

Well, we are living in interesting times, that is for sure. So, there’s no doubt that there are plenty of challenges that have come your way. I really appreciate your so fully sharing that journey and that story. So, what neighborhood in Brooklyn did you come from?

Jeffrey Gold:

I grew up in Flatbush. I’m a graduate of Erasmus Hall High School, which was one of the most racially torn and divided school districts in the state to the point that there were two separate entrances. I recall that by the time I graduated, we had more New York City police officers in the school than any other school in the public school system of New York. It’s just tragic.

Jay Lemons:

My goodness. What was the impact of that experience on you?

Jeffrey Gold:

Well, it gave me an appreciation beyond a shadow of a doubt of the power of education because in spite of living and working in that environment, in that school environment, and having a part-time job to try to make ends meet for my family, which was quite difficult for those years, that my mom unfortunately succumbed to some chronic illness when I was quite young. She had multiple sclerosis. And at that time, there was not really good treatment or early diagnosis. So, I needed to contribute to making ends meet in the family at that time. But I was also able to be mentored by a great advisor that I actually worked for, and he was an advisor for a grade one year behind me. But I got to see students, not so much because of their superb attendance and academic performance, but I got to see them parade out day after day for lack of attendance, or what today we would call truancy, for lack of academic performance. And I got to see what became of their lives.

My family, while they were not able to give us, my brother and I, much financial support, they had very strong values around higher education in spite of the fact that only one of them had even graduated from high school due to the Great Depression. And they thought that the only way out of the situation that we confronted at home on a daily basis, and the only way to have a meaningful career was through education. And so those experiences really shaped me greatly. I mean, I would see students hauled off to jail in handcuffs, not infrequently. The hallway robberies and the assaults and whatever the racial divisiveness within the system. Erasmus was a very large high school.

Jay Lemons:

Absolutely.

Jeffrey Gold:

So, we had a huge student body, and let’s say, they all didn’t see life the same way.

Jay Lemons:

Yeah, yeah. Let me get back to leadership for a moment. I feel like I’m on a personal crusade to… The Tom Peters excellence focus and all of that, which I fully embrace, but I think we have lost thinking about good. And by good, I don’t mean grade B, I mean virtuous and effective and successful leadership. What does being a good leader mean to you?

Jeffrey Gold:

Being trusted and valued by your organization and by the communities that we serve. I’ve learned a long time ago that if we make decision-making that serves the community, in my case now the state of Nebraska is my community, that what’s good for the state of Nebraska is good for the university, and what’s good for the university is good for me, and that’s pretty clear. And how does one do that? One does that by of course, being very strategic, but strategy is pretty worthless if you don’t have a culture that embraces it. And the culture of the organization is not going to embrace strategy if the leaders are not trusted. And the keys to me of being trusted are being good listeners about being transparent and very importantly, being vulnerable. And what I mean by that is admit your strengths and your weaknesses. When you take a wrong turn or make a decision that you regret, talk about it. Take the responsibility for it. Give credit to others endlessly for things that they do. Say thank you a lot and spend most of your time listening.

Jay Lemons:

I really appreciate so much of what you shared there, and it resonates. When you are creating a team, I’m curious about what you look for in those leaders, because I think the self-awareness that all of us are human, at the end of the day, all of us have strengths and weaknesses, and the best leaders seem to have the capacity to find in others the talents they may not have. How do you think about looking at building your team?

Jeffrey Gold:

Well, I have to find leadership in a very simple way for more than a decade. And that is the set of knowledge, skills, and experience that inspires others to do remarkable things, to do great things. And translated roughly into simple speak. How do you bring out the best in other people? So, when I’m building a team and I get to recruit deans and chancellors and vice chancellors and vice presidents and council center directors, fill in the blank, by the time I get to meet them, there’s no question that their academic credentials, their curriculum vitae, so to speak, their appointments, promotions, awards, are pretty well codified. And they check all those boxes. The bigger question to me is, are they going to fit the leadership styles that I value the most, that I think purvey and control and inspire the culture that I just described? So, I’m looking for people that are truly servant leaders. I’m a very big believer in several leadership books, one of which is Maxwell’s 5 Levels of Leadership.

The fundamental basic level of leadership, level one leadership, which by the way is guaranteed failure to me is you work for me and therefore, I will tell you what to do. That just doesn’t work. It doesn’t work in health care. Do we think some 17-year-old enlisted military is going to climb to the top of a hill and get shot at because somebody told them to do it? If they don’t firmly believe deeply in the mission that they’re trying to accomplish, in that example, to protect the freedom of our nation and their family, they’re never going to do that. So, I’m always looking for people who are joining our team, who are experienced leaders, who have proven that they are tough and sustained under fire because that really does test their mettle, but at the same time, have the characteristics that I think will make them a good match to work collectively, which is very caring, thoughtful, good communicators, good listeners, decisive, and of course, experienced.

Jay Lemons:

Thank you. I really appreciate your comments about culture and strategy. Of course, bring to mind Peter Drucker, and I think he had it right, culture will eat strategy for breakfast.

Jeffrey Gold:

And I would add lunch and dinner, frankly.

Jay Lemons:

Yeah, I think you’re right. What advice do you have for new leaders or those who might aspire to leadership?

Jeffrey Gold:

My own experience is I have read hundreds of books on leadership. I’ve attended dozens of courses, some of them an hour, some of them weeks long offered by professional groups that have… For instance, I took an extensive course in negotiation that I really enjoyed. And that has helped me a lot because when I get into a situation where I’m negotiating, whether I’m negotiating for a collective bargaining agreement or I’m negotiating dinner with one of my grandchildren, I always think about what style of negotiation, what’s going to work, what’s not going to work, what the BATNA is the best alternative to a negotiated outcome. And of course, I learned in that the single highest predictor of any successful negotiation is being knowledgeable about what you’re negotiating for. If you don’t know all the details, you’re going to lose. No matter how smart you are, no matter how pragmatic you are or skilled you are in negotiation. That’s part of it.

Part of it is to be mentored by other people. And I’ve had the privilege of being mentored by a number of great leaders, including several of the former presidents of the university system, who are all very different here, but have all provided amazing mentorship and experience and given me the opportunity to, when necessary trip and fall, but always be there with a helping hand to pick me up. And part of it is, believe it or not, trial and error. You get to test leadership on small levels, and you get to test leadership on harder levels. A guy named Tom Gilmore who used to talk about that, all serious leadership is campaigning. If you want to get something done, think about what it means to stage a campaign, not a political campaign or a financial campaign, but a campaign of advocacy, a campaign of friendship, a campaign of getting people to believe.

That’s how you get from level one to level two of Maxwell’s book. And from two to three and three to four, because ultimately, the people that are going to follow you and embrace the culture and the strategy that you embrace are the people that believe that you’re doing it to make them better and to make their jobs more sustainable because you care about them and you care about their families. At the end of the day, that’s really what it’s all about. And I’ve watched really good examples of that over the years, and I’ve watched what I would call tragic examples of the absence of that over the years. So, having those experiences, I think, are really important for people that are interested in leadership. But I’d say this also, there is no single textbook or video or course that converts somebody who wants to accept a leadership role to somebody who’s going to do it without slipping and falling from time to time.

Very early in my academic career, I had an opportunity to become a chief resident at my surgical program. That may not mean very much, but if you control the scheduling, if you control the parking, the critical things in life, we all know life begins and ends and parking stalls and locations and many other things, it gives you some experience in building relationships with other people and how that works. And then onward from there to various committee roles where you get to work with other people and you get collectively around a committee.

Another thought I have for people that are interested in leadership, if you’re in an academic institution or a healthcare institution or in a business and someone says, I want to run a fundraising campaign, or I want to do a holiday mixer, or I want to plan a moonshot, I need some people to work with me, to volunteer. Most of the people you’ll see are going to step away. But if you raise your hand and say, you know, I’m not sure if I can help you, but I’d like to try, that really sends a very powerful message. Believe it or not, one of those quote, irrelevant, unquote, in air quotes, committees turns into larger and larger responsibilities, turns into leadership roles. Before you know it, you’re a university president. Not quite.

Jay Lemons:

One never knows.

Jeffrey Gold:

You never know.

Jay Lemons:

It’s a blink of the eye. Yeah. Well, thank you. We could spend a day and a week and a month on the next question, but I’ll ask you to frame it the maybe 40,000-foot level. What do you think the most critical challenges facing leaders in higher ed is today?

Jeffrey Gold:

Yeah, the erosion of the value of higher education, the combination of the ideologic rift between the far right and far left of our political spectrum on the value of higher education. Plus, the post pandemic realization that jobs in the trades and in the service industries can be extremely well compensated with no higher education. Now, that is a completely false statement, by the way. There is 100% ironclad information, highly statistically relevant studies that quality of life, duration of life, absence of illnesses, success of your children and grandchildren, as well as your earning ability are markedly enhanced the more education you have, whether it’s an undergraduate degree, a master’s degree, a graduate or professional degree, et cetera. And of course, there is some selection bias in that, and I fully understand it. But there’s a very large population of individuals who question that.

I call it the relevance of higher education. So, whenever I get to stand in front of a microphone in front of a large group of people, whether it’s a rotary or even the legislature for that matter, and so many others, I always start off with telling stories not just about myself, but more importantly about other students, other families who are impacted by higher education and what that has meant to them. When we go to the legislature to ask for our biennial budget, I always come with students, particularly first generation students who can tell the story of how this has helped them and others who have been uplifted out of poverty. The only solution to social mobility in our society is education. There is no other way to do this. And therefore, K12 education and higher education is absolutely important. We could spend a long time talking about financial challenges, business challenges, workforce shortages, et cetera. But ideologically, that’s the number one battle, and I believe it will be for the foreseeable future.

Jay Lemons:

I really appreciate that articulation. I think there’s clarity to it. I believe it’s impacting everything that we do, including college attendance patterns or non-attendance patterns, and the consequences of it are generational in length. Keep bringing those students, no doubt about that. Jeff, I want to move into what I call a lightning round where I’m going to ask you shorter questions you can answer at whatever length you want. First one, who has most influenced you?

Jeffrey Gold:

I would say other than my parents, the young lady who I chose to marry or who chose to marry me. She has been my conscience in many different ways. She knows me better than I know myself. She’s been my absolute stalwart supporter for all of these years, and I have never ever taken for granted how much she has meant to me in so many different ways. Just a bright, energetic, caring, loving, everything and that, and more. The mom of my children and the grandmother of my grandchildren. And believe me, as good a grandparent as I think I am, she’s 100 times better.

Jay Lemons:

Well, here’s to Robin. What a lovely tribute. Is there a book that’s had significant influence or a number of books that have had influence on you?

Jeffrey Gold:

I was thinking about that question in the sense of business books, leadership books, and I’ve already talked about The 5 Levels of Leadership. I’m also a big fan of Pat Lencioni’s work, and one of them is The Five Dysfunctions for a Team. And I didn’t comment on that earlier, but I believe that the first and the most fundamental dysfunction for a team is the failure to build trust. If you cannot have trust among and between the team members, you cannot have healthy disagreement. If you can’t have healthy disagreement, you can’t have aligned strategy. If you can’t have aligned strategy, you’ll never control the culture of an organization. Pat writes in fables, I really enjoy his fables. Actually, just came out with a new book, which I hope to plow into in the near future. But that book is very foundational to me. I also enjoyed Good to Great. I think about flywheels and leverage and who’s in which seat on the bus and things of that nature. Trying not to run over anybody with the bus, if at all possible. But that has always meant a lot to me as well.

Jay Lemons:

Let me take you back a little bit. Do you have a fondest memory of your experience at Cornell as an undergrad?

Jeffrey Gold:

Well, other than meeting the young lady who I married, scooping ice cream in the dairy store, which was a whole interesting experience when I was-

Jay Lemons:

So, Robin was a student worker in the ice cream store?

Jeffrey Gold:

Yeah. So, on Saturday nights we didn’t get paid, but we would actually volunteer to scoop ice cream. I did it to meet other people and by the end of the night, I was covered in ice cream and hot fudge, but so was she. And that’s how we met. Actually, we first met on a campus bus, but we spent a lot of time scooping ice cream.

Jay Lemons:

That’s awesome. Well, that’s pretty good. I am curious to explore with you if there is a campus tradition, a place that either you attended or served that has really stuck with. Ritual and tradition are a part of what have made these institutions distinctive. And I think enduring, and I’d love to hear you celebrate a tradition of one of the campuses that you know well.

Jeffrey Gold:

The campus traditions that I’ve really appreciated the most and participated in for years and years and years are the white coat ceremonies. That is when students that are in professional programs like med school, dental school, pharmacy, school, et cetera, become first year students, there’s always a ceremony when a white coat is literally placed on their shoulders, signifying the transition to a profession. And it’s a very emotional moment for the students, for their families, and for those of us who have literally placed the coat upon their shoulders. I remember the day that that happened for me, and I will never forget it. It really changed my life as to how I approached education, my own education and giving back to others. So, I try very hard to pay that forward and participate in those types of ceremonial events. Yeah, do I love spring games and do I going to a championship game and winning? I love all of that. I love all the pageantry of it and congratulating the coaches and the players. I love all of the academic achievement. For instance, we won a blood donation drive this year.

Jay Lemons:

Yes, you did.

Jeffrey Gold:

So, I got to stand on the football field at halftime during the Big 10 championship game and receive a million dollar check for the students that put together this program to save 60,000 lives from the amount of blood that they donated.

Jay Lemons:

Phenomenal success. As I recall, it wasn’t even close. Nebraska led the Big 10 by a long stretch.

Jeffrey Gold:

We were just over twice the runner up. And by the way, there was no check for the runner up this year.

Jay Lemons:

Wow, that’s awesome. It’s really special. Your comments about the white coat ceremony, I will say I’ve been privileged to be at a lot of graduations. I was at a Columbia graduation for one of my kids, and when the medical school graduates took the Hippocratic Oath as a part of the graduation ceremony, wow. When you think about the length of time that that has served as the professional standard in Western civilization, it was really powerful. So, I really appreciate what you just shared. If you hadn’t worked in higher education or academic medicine, what might you have done?

Jeffrey Gold:

I’ll tell you, I really enjoyed engineering. I never really thought that I would enjoy it. I really chose it because of the financial aid and support that I was able to have. But I really enjoyed it. And I think there’s very little question that I would’ve pursued some hybrid of engineering and architecture. I took quite a few courses in architecture during my undergraduate years. I have studied architecture, traveled to enjoy architecture, actually have done a lot of sketching and things of that nature. There’s a whole artistic side of me related to music and art and architecture as well. So, I’m thinking that that’s where I might’ve ended up, or who knows, I might be driving a bus or a taxi in New York.

Jay Lemons:

There you go. Thank you so very much for all of that. One of our traditions here on Leaders on Leadership is I also like to close by inviting and asking our guests to share with our listeners the distinctive qualities or if you will, the organizational DNA, that culture that makes your institution, and in this case the University of Nebraska, a place that has had a claim on your heart for the past decade. And I know that you’re hoping it will continue to have a claim on your heart for the next decade. So, talk about that organizational DNA in whatever way you’d like, Jeff.

Jeffrey Gold:

Well, the biggest attraction to me is the scale and scope of the state and the communities that we serve and the culture across the state. We have a saying here, we call it the good life, and it is the good life. It’s people who genuinely care about each other, who want to work hard and do their best, who understand that if they extend a helping hand to somebody in need, that that’s the right thing to do, and there’s no better compensation. And that. People are measured by what they give and not by what they receive. And that is a very big contrast to much of my experience in various parts of the East Coast and in other parts of the country where I have worked, where there’s a very different work ethic and there’s a very different sense of the need to the good of the community.

And I will tell you, the alignment overall of our state government, our county and city governments, our philanthropic community, we are the only public university system in the state. So, it’s us or nothing. That’s a huge responsibility that sits upon our shoulders to get it right. We’ve just measured it, but we’re 9% of the gross domestic product of the state of Nebraska just under that, 8.9%. That is a huge responsibility in addition to educating the next generation, pushing back the frontiers of research science, all the community engagement, the extension work, all the work we do in the ag community and in healthcare and so much else. But it’s a very aligned community that deeply cares about their university. And it’s a university that deeply cares about the community.

Jay Lemons:

Thank you. As a son of the state of the good life, indeed. And by the way, the public service announcements that accompanied athletic events with Johnny Carson’s voice did a wonderful job of capturing that spirit. Dick Cavett, you remain rooted in Nebraska, wherever you may be, if ever you lived some of your days there. It’s been a really special pleasure for me as an alumnus of the university and as someone who was associated with the search that led to your appointment, Jeff, to have you here on Leaders on Leadership, and I just want to thank you for taking the time and sharing your thoughts and wisdom with us.

Jeffrey Gold:

Jay, it has been a true honor, and if there are any members of the audience that would ever want to dig a little deeper into any of my experiences, if you identify them, just send them in my direction.

Jay Lemons:

That’s very kind and very generous. Thank you so much. Well, 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 podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever else you find your podcast. 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, it’s been a special pleasure to have Dr. Jeffrey Gold on our show today. Jeff, thank you again for being with us.

Jeffrey Gold:

My pleasure. Thank you.