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. I’m really pleased and delighted to be joined by Larry Schall.

Larry is the president of the New England Commission on Higher Education and has been in that post since 2020. NECHE is the regional accrediting body for more than 200 institutions of higher education, primarily in our six New England states.

I had the opportunity to be a part of, I want to acknowledge this, the search that helped to bring Larry to NECHE. Prior to that, I knew him as a good friend and colleague, as the 16th president of Oglethorpe University. He was the longest-serving sitting president of the university, and during his tenure, he led the transformation of Oglethorpe from truly an institution that was at risk to an institution that had doubled in its class size and had rigorous spending safeguards and raised more than a hundred million dollars and secured a really solid financial outlook for the institution.

Larry’s background is steeped in the law. He was a civil rights attorney in the Philadelphia area for a decade, and then he moved to his alma mater, Swarthmore for 15 years before assuming the presidency at Oglethorpe. Larry is creative, he’s thoughtful, he’s insightful. He’s been one of those most important thought leaders, I think of the last 25 years in higher education. He’s written widely for the Huffington Post. He has a personal blog. He’s been featured in the Washington Post, the Chronicle of Higher Ed, Inside Higher Ed. He’s been on NPR, CNN and Bloomberg News, and he also currently serves in the role of a trustee of Spelman College.

Larry’s a native New Yorker, born in Manhattan, grew up in Wilmington, Delaware. He graduated with honors from Swarthmore and went on to earn his J.D. and Doctor of Education from the University of Pennsylvania. Larry, really a special pleasure to have a chance to spend some time with you this afternoon.

Larry Schall:

Thank you, Jay. It is always fun to hear my introduction. I learn something new every day people introduce me, but yeah, delightful to be with you and connect with you again.

Jay Lemons:

Well, I am grateful for your take and time, and I really meant what I said. I think about the areas where I have seen you do such amazingly important public advocacy work around guns on campus. I love the work that you did when you made yourself an Uber driver in Atlanta and the learning, the empathy of walking in the shoes of others that I know was a very serious part of that, and thinking about your students and their challenges. I’m really grateful that you were willing to take on the role of leading NECHE. This voluntary association that we have for quality assurance in this country is truly distinctive and important, and NECHE has been a standard bearer for a very, very long time with some of our nation’s most hallowed institutions and I’m really, really pleased. I hope that that transition has been a good one for you.

Larry Schall:

Yeah, I think it’s… I’m not quite sure I knew exactly what I was getting into. I think you may recall my experience over 30 years with accreditors in different regions wasn’t always the most joyful, but I was encouraged to do my homework with the New England Commission and the people that interacted with it, and I’ll say that everything I heard has turned out to be the case. It’s an exceptional organization with a tremendous history and just sort of add a word. We now call ourselves the formerly regional accreditor because in 2020, the old boundaries were broken, and we are now not only accrediting a couple hundred schools in New England, but a whole bunch of schools in New York and Georgia and Missouri and Virginia and DC as well as I’m headed in two weeks over to Europe to meet with 27 international members and prospective members. We’re now accrediting and have schools in the pipeline from the Middle East, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Jordan, Kurdistan, from Asia, and Indonesia and Vietnam. We’re in Africa for the first time, at least in continental Africa for the first time. We’ve had a school in Morocco for a while. It’s been a really interesting few years as we’ve begun to sort of expand our reach.

Jay Lemons:

It is interesting, and yes, I will have to work on always retraining my tongue. There is nothing regional about the scope that you just laid out, and that really coincided with your arrival there.

Larry, one of the goals we have for the program is really to ask leaders to reflect and to think about their own pathways into leadership with a hope that you might light a spark for someone else. I have the privilege of knowing a bit about your story. I would love if you would be willing, in your own words, to share some about the people and the places, the events and the opportunities that really created and forged the person and the leader that you’ve become in higher education.

Larry Schall:

Yeah. My story is it’s an unusual one. Atypical, although maybe not as atypical as it might’ve been years ago. When I think about my path, it really has all always been about relationships. My dad was an attorney, and that’s, if you looked at my seventh grade yearbook, it’s like, what do you want to be? I want to be a lawyer. Finished college, went straight to law school, went to a public interest practice on the civil rights side, and at some point as that decade was winding out, realized this wasn’t exactly what I thought it was going to be, just in terms of personal satisfaction. Had no idea about, okay, what do I do now? Because almost everybody I knew, went to law school with, they were, well if not partners in firms, and it’s actually very difficult to transition out of having been a lawyer.

I got a phone call one day from an older gentleman, I call him older, he was younger than I am now. I had known him, I knew his son. He was a trustee at Swarthmore, my alma mater, and then had stepped off that role to step in to be the chief operating officer at Swarthmore for a period of time to get them settled and was thinking about how does he transition out? He called me and asked if I’d have lunch. I said, “Bill, of course I’d love to have lunch with you.” He didn’t really tell me what it was about.

I went out to see him and he said, “Do you ever think about working at a college?”

I was like, “No.”

He said, “Well, let me tell you what I do. I do all the buildings and facilities and security and finances and food service,” and et cetera, et cetera. It was about 10 or 12 things.

I was like, “Wow, that’s really interesting. Never done any of those.”

He is like, “It’s not that hard. It’s not that complicated. If you came in and you were working with me for six months or a year, at the end, you’d be very comfortable doing all those things. How would you like my job?”

I was like, “What? Why would you think I’d be good at it?”

He just said, “I know you’re a hard worker. I know you’re honest. You develop really deep and important relationships with the people, you respect other people. I just think you’d be really good.” This was back 35 years ago, I guess, or something like that.

I said, “Is there a search committee?”

“No, no.”

“What would I have to…”

“I’d like you to meet the president across the hall.”

I said, “Can I take a weekend to go home and talk about it with my wife?”

“Sure.”

Literally that’s the way I got into higher education. It was just from knowing someone, someone having respect for my work ethic. I mean, I think things operate differently today than it did 35 years ago, but when I think about how I hire and the people that I hired at Swarthmore, the people that I hired at Oglethorpe weren’t always the most experienced in the thing that I was hiring to do. I just believed in them as people and as professionals, and that served me pretty well, continues to serve me pretty well.

Jay Lemons:

Thank you for sharing that. My guess, was that Al Bloom?

Larry Schall:

No, that was a guy named Bill Spock and Bill-

Jay Lemons:

Oh, he was the attorney. Who was the president at Swarthmore at the time?

Larry Schall:

That was David Frazier was the president. At some point, Bill walked me into David’s office and said, “I want you to meet Larry Schall. I’m going to hire him.”

David was like, “Oh, good, nice to meet you.”

Then Al Bloom came in that next year as president, and Al was a tremendous mentor of mine. That’s another interesting story. When I went back to school to get my doctorate in higher education, I didn’t go in thinking I’m going to get my doctorate because I want to be a president. I just wanted to be back in school and continued. That was an executive program so I could continue to work. While I was in school, I got nominated for a presidency. That’s another long story, but I was offered the job. I ended up not taking that one, but when I went in to tell Al, I made an appointment with his assistant. I walked in and I said, “Al, I’ve got something to share with you.”

He said, “So you’ve been offered a presidency of another college?”

I said, “Where did that come from?”

He goes, “No, that’s exactly what you should do.” He was always my strongest advocate.

Jay Lemons:

Well, Luther had a thing or two to say about vocation and discernment and call. Really, for most folks, it’s at the intersection of those internal questions that we have. But the external dimensions, the people you know and yours is an absolutely classic example of a relationship that you had that ultimately led you down a pathway you could not probably easily have imagined.

Larry Schall:

That’s how I ended up at NECHE, to be honest. I got a call from just a good friend of mine who was the president of a university in New England who said, “I know you’ve decided to retire from Swarthmore, but I know you want to keep working. I’ve got a job I think you’d be great at.” He said, “It’s running this accrediting agency up in New England.” My first reaction was, I’m not really fond of accreditors.

Jay Lemons:

I remember you said that to me before I got you connected with Anne. That’s exactly what you said.

Larry Schall:

Yeah. I said, “Why would you think that was a good job?”

He said, “It’s a really different place and I think that the commission,” that group that was going to hire, “Is looking for someone that’s not an insider.” I think they anticipated the disruption in the industry that we’re seeing now, and someone who’s had the experience of being a disruptor as a college president might be a good fit. That was again, a call out of the blue from someone who I considered a colleague and a friend.

Jay Lemons:

Wonderful. Let me turn to trying to work to reclaim value around the word, good. In this context, I don’t mean good as grade B work, I mean good as in virtuous and effective and successful. What makes a good leader in your mind?

Larry Schall:

I mean, this is such a complicated question because I’ve seen a lot of people who in certain contexts, in certain situations, at certain times, prove themselves to be a really exceptional leader. Then the same person in a different time, in a different context, with a different set of expectations could be seen as a complete failure. So much of this has to do with timing and fit and an understanding of what are the tasks ahead and who are the people that you’re going to work with.

I was on the presidential search circuit for, I don’t know, two years maybe, or 18 months. I can’t remember. I explored presidency at probably a half dozen schools and was offered a couple opportunities that I said no to before I ended up saying yes to Oglethorpe. I also said no, then I was also told no a lot. That all had to do with a sense of was it not just the right place, but was it the right culture and the timing. Was the board leadership at that time people that I thought I could have a productive relationship and vice versa.

I mean, I do think there’s a set of general things and qualities and characteristics that generally hold. Being authentic, loving the work you do, being straightforward and honest, being willing to listen to contrary voices, but also not being afraid to make hard decisions and have some of them succeed and some of them not succeed. Being willing to take the weight of responsibility on your shoulder and not be afraid of that. I do think in the end, a lot of this just has to do with timing and fit and culture, and those things are really hard to figure out in the search process because the way the searches are run these days, you don’t end up spending all that much time with the people that matter most. In the end, your search committee is sort of guessing, hopefully making an informed guess, and you’re sort of guessing, but a lot of times you guess wrong and they guess wrong.

Jay Lemons:

There are not certainties. I would tell you it’s a place where in a way, I think COVID was a gift to search, at least in the way that I view it and the way I think about and engaging in it today. I’ve changed my practice because you’re right, more conversation, more data is better for all parties than the traditional models have been. You really laid out, I think some really important fundamentals that I hope our listeners will focus in on.

You also made the important contribution of context is everything. I am mindful of one of the things that I really appreciate, Rosabeth Moss Kanter at Harvard, who one of her phrases is something like, “You can look in at any big project at any moment in time, and it can look like a failure.” It’s sausage making and it’s not necessarily very pretty. There are a lot of leaders that don’t get the chance to complete the casing on the sausage. I wonder if they had been given more, that’s the contextual piece. It is sort of serendipitous when it seems to work both for the person leading and for the institution that they’re responsible for.

Larry Schall:

I do think the job of president, while it’s never been easy, and it varies a lot by sector, if you’re leading a community college or a regional public or a small private, selective private, or a place like Oglethorpe that was catered to that B student, first generation B student, I mean, the challenges are different, but at certain institutions right now is almost impossible to be successful as a college president. All it takes is some incident about which you have no control or a small group of faculty or a small group of students or an inept board chair or congressional hearing, and you’re cooked. You could have all the qualities of a great leader and proved yourself over decades and you’re in and out in a year.

Jay Lemons:

Yeah, my sort of sensibility Larry is, and I thought this a lot of times as present, there but for the grace of God, am I. These things are always fragile and it can always turn. I think you’re right, the crucible has never been hotter than it is right now. I am a big also believer that it’s not an individual sport, it’s a team sport. When you’re creating a team, what is it that you’re looking for in the leaders who are a part of that team, that presidency?

Larry Schall:

I mean, I’ll go back to ultimately it’s the quality of the person. In part their experience because that’s where quality shows out. Someone who loves work and loves to work, I mean, that’s old fashioned in that regard. I have someone come in and start talking about this work-life balance. I appreciate that concept, but that’s not my generation. I like people who like to work, not that we don’t have lives. I think it’s important to have people to build a team with just people coming at issues with a really different points of view and diverse points of view and respectful of others. If you’ve got a team that’s just always all of one mind, not likely to end up being a very successful team, I think, and being able to challenge the ultimate leader’s perspective and point of view and defend that, do it in a respectful way and when the decision gets made, everybody’s on board. Those end up being the best teams, I think.

Jay Lemons:

Very good. Larry, when you think about people who are contemplating leadership, what advice do you have for those folks?

Larry Schall:

One thing that I’ve thought about… I’ve started a few different books and I never finished one, but I have this book in my head about how saying no and declining opportunities and having other opportunities not presented to you have really ended up shaping my life and my career. When I think back to jobs I could have taken or jobs that I applied for that I wasn’t offered but might’ve been offered, whether I’ve been lucky or fortunate. My wife’s also very good about identifying things I should say no to. In the end, I think it’s the places that I’ve not ended up have ended up making my career just as successful as the places I’ve ended up. I think that’s one thing.

I talk to a lot of people that are looking for presidencies, and more often than not, I’ll say, “I think you ought to think about saying no.” I mean, I’m sure that there are worse things, but being in a presidency where you’ve got very little chance to succeed is incredibly demoralizing and depressing and hard to recover from. I think just being thoughtful about opportunities, being able to decline them even when it feels like, okay, I’ve been offered a presidency, I may not get offered another one. Then making sure that you spend your career surrounded by good people. That tends to be what brings you success and joy. Being around people where it’s not a good fit, it’s hard to back out of situations or to get out of situations or to recover from them.

The other thing I’d say I used to, when I was running the doctoral program at Penn, after I graduated from it for a couple of years, one of the exercises we did had people share their resume, their CV either with me or with another of their colleagues, and then share what’s the next step they want to have in their career, whether it’s a presidency or something else, and then actually look for the holes. Because when you go in for an interview, the conversation isn’t likely to be about, because I was a chief operating officer at Swarthmore Administrative, so that’s what I did really well. People weren’t all that interested in what… It was pretty clear that’s what I did well. What they were interested in is like, oh, I never taught. I never raised money. I never worked in the enrollment side. I spent a couple years thinking, how do you fill those holes?

I went to President Bloom and said, “I’m spending all the money you raise and I’m building all these buildings. Would you be willing to take me along to a couple fundraising trips and I can share what it is we’re trying to do?”

He is like, “I’d love to.”

I was never a development officer until I became president, but I had a couple stories to tell. I ended up, I went to the education department at Swarthmore and said, “I just finished this doctoral program in higher education. I’m really fascinated in the history of higher education. Would you be interested in having me teach a course on the history of higher education for free? Happy to do it at night.”

“Sure.”

Being honest and identifying where your holes are, because everyone’s got holes, and then trying to figure out how do you at least fill them to some extent so you can be thoughtful about areas that may not be your sweet spot.

Jay Lemons:

Excellent, excellent. That’s tremendous advice. We could spend days talking about this next question, but maybe in short form, what do you think the most critical challenges facing leaders are today?

Larry Schall:

As I said before, I think it so much depends on sector, but I think in general, the ability of people outside your control to disrupt has never been as powerful. Whether that’s the rash of campus protests and disruptions we’ve seen in the last six months since the Israel-Hamas War broke out. Before that, the Black Lives Matter movement. It’s the external pressures on a president, the expectations that the president will be able to speak flawlessly or not speak. Again, that’s more the case at a lot of our highly selected institutions where you’ve got active and activist student bodies and activist faculty. A different set of challenges at community colleges right now where you’ve got declining funding and declining enrollment. In some ways, the challenges of being a leader remain the same, but they just get compounded and added onto to. I think in particular, this wave of external pressures I don’t think is going away. Some of that’s got to do with how easy it is to use social media and the news coverages.

The best advice I’d have for people, what I always tried to do is to try to remain above the fray. People will get very personal with you. Never get personal back. Try not to take things personally although it’s a challenge.

Jay Lemons:

Great advice.

Larry Schall:

Then to stay. I mean, that’s the other thing that I worry about now. Some of this turnover on the presidential level and the provost level has got to do with the trustees bringing someone in and having unrealistic expectations in a year or two.

Also I’d say too many presidents fail to make the kind of commitment they need to make, and they get off to the next best thing and they go. I reflect back on my time at Oglethorpe, I committed to stay 10 years, and there were times in those 10 years I just thought, I am never going to make 10, but hung around. I had some opportunities to go. Most of the successes, and we had a lot of success in those first 10 years, but it was really the last five where the engine really started to run and the money started to come in. I think staying is a virtue.

Jay Lemons:

Bloom where you’re planted.

Larry Schall:

Yeah.

Jay Lemons:

Let me move into a little bit more of what I call a lightning round. You can answer it with as much length as you want. Who most influenced you?

Larry Schall:

My parents, probably first. My sister Ellen, who’s still at NYU age 67, maybe. Been an advisor to several presidencies. Then Bill Spock, who I talked about, that first person that called me that got me into higher education. We’re still in touch. He’s now 90 some years old and just was an extraordinary mentor. I remember in my first, I don’t know, first few weeks, a student newspaper published this just horrible story about the dining hall and food and just nasty, nasty, nasty. I spent the weekend, I wrote this beautiful response, get published in the paper, and I brought it into him, and he said, “That’s one of the best things I’ve ever read,” and he just tore it up and put it in the trash can. He just said, “You never respond to students in the newspaper.” It was like, well, that was a good lesson.

Jay Lemons:

I love it. I love it. Do you have a fondest memory of your time as an undergrad at Swarthmore?

Larry Schall:

Yeah, Swarthmore still does an honors program. After your first two years, you went into these two seminars the semester, ungraded, given more reading work, writing that you could ever imagine. Just taught me about the ability to grind and work and love the work you do.

Then also, I like to say I graduated with honors from Swarthmore, but when you were in the honors program, you either had graduated with honors, high honors, or highest honors. I was with a lot of really smart people and I got just honors, and so it also just taught me to be humble.

Jay Lemons:

Wow. Wow. Yeah. What about a favorite tradition at a place you attended or a place where you served?

Larry Schall:

That’s an interesting question. I mean, two things come to mind. Swarthmore’s graduation for 150 years or whatever has always… It was in the amphitheater. It’s a beautiful, beautiful amphitheater, tree lined amphitheater at Swarthmore. This year, I think it was the first time ever they moved graduation off campus, because of the protests, and into Fairmont Park. I gather, from what I understand, there were protests there too, but… So that’s a tradition that was broken, which makes me sad.

Jay Lemons:

Yeah.

Larry Schall:

That’s one tradition.

The other, I just got an invitation, it’s 50 years now since my college soccer team finished second in the country. We’re being invited back to an alumni event 50 years later to celebrate that, and also our coach at the time, Bill Stetson, who’s passed away a long time ago, being admitted to the Hall of Fame, the Sports Hall of Fame. Those folks I played with 50 years ago who remain some of my best friends will gather again. We’re all 70 years old or so. Pretty extraordinary.

Jay Lemons:

Marvelous. Marvelous. Well, what a reunion that will be.

Larry, in some ways you gave us some hints about this because of your journey, but you’ve now spent the vast majority of your life and career working in higher education. What else might you have wished you would’ve done? Is there an itch out there of, oh boy, I wish I would’ve done this or that?

Larry Schall:

No, not really. I mean, I’ve been fortunate to be able to travel a ton, though sometimes connected to work. I mean, one of the things that was unexpected to me in this job was this growth of international institutions, so I’ve been able to go to places I never would’ve gone to and met some extraordinary people and leaders and students across the world.

I’m squeamish around blood so that doctor route wasn’t going to happen. I got to practice before the United States Supreme Court before the age of 30. No, I’ve been really fortunate and blessed professionally. I say I’ll be 71 this fall and when I came up here, I thought, well, I’ll do this for five years, but I love what I do and I’ll keep doing it as long as they have me. No, as I say, I’ve been blessed by having great opportunities and I don’t feel like there’s something I will look back on and said I should have done professionally that I didn’t get to do.

Jay Lemons:

Very good. You have had a wonderful, rich, and truly an inspired life, and I’m so grateful for your spending some time this afternoon. One of the things that I like to hold up as a tradition of this program is all of our guests are taking time away from the devotion of their days. Right now for you that’s NECHE, and I’d love for you to talk about what it is about that work and that organization that’s distinctive, that keeps you energized and ready to serve and to lead.

Larry Schall:

Sure. I mean, it’s when I thought about the opportunity and began to talk to friends who worked at different institutions in New England and said, “So what’s been your experience with the commission?”

They would say, “Oh my gosh.” Sister Pat, who has been our executive VP here just retired but been here 20 years-

Jay Lemons:

She did? Oh my goodness.

Larry Schall:

Yeah, “We love Sister Pat,” or, “I have a great relationship with Laura and Carol and Paul.” They were naming people and I’m like, I couldn’t name people from my accrediting agency. That’s not the kind of relationship I had. It’s got this… I think it rooted in New England always is a true region. Pat would always say, you could get in your car and visit every… Get to every one of your institutions in a couple of hours, except some of the ones up way northeast Maine. There was this, I think, culture or community respect for our members. I think our members think of us as partners, not as regulators.

I got a call maybe two weeks ago from one of our presidents who… We’ve seen a lot of our schools have to close or merge because of the difficult demographics up here. The president just picked up the phone and called and said, “Could I just have an hour of your time to talk through just a really difficult situation that I think’s going to end up leading us to closure and get your advice on how to do that?” She just saw us as a good partner. That, even though we’ve now expanded across the globe and across the country, that culture of relationships and partnerships I think is special and separates us, I think from some of the other formerly regional accreditors that just are much bigger and don’t have the ability to do that.

During COVID, I started, I got hired on Zoom, started in July of 2020. I used to go to the office. I was the only one to go to the office because that’s what I just did for my life. I was the only one in the office. At some point, my wife and I was like, “Okay, this is not working. You like to be around people. What about if we just go on the road and try to start and meet other presidents of your institutions?” We started this thing called… And she’s helped me put this together, called NECHE on the Road. We’ve now, I visited more, but I think we’re up to 60 some blog posts of these just going out and spending time with presidents and learning about them and learning about their institution instead of just sitting in the office and reading reports and writing reports.

It’s been a real joy to work with leaders that some are presidents of institutions that have been around a couple hundred years and have lots of money in the bank, and most of them don’t look like that and they’re just really trying to figure out how best to position their institution. When I can be helpful to them, it’s rewarding. It feels like a really nice way to finish my career.

Jay Lemons:

I really appreciate what you said, and there’s a through line in terms of our conversation, and it’s been really about relationships from the start of the interview to this point. I just want to say thank you for joining us on Leaders On Leadership. Really glad to have you. Appreciate wisdom and the insights that you shared on leadership with us, Larry. Let you say a final word as well before I close this out.

Larry Schall:

Just I appreciate having a chance to talk with you. You’ve played a big role in my career. I think we’ve been together in some searches that have turned well and other searches that didn’t end up. As they say, you’ve been a real professional and a friend through all of it, so appreciate what you do. It’s really important work.

Jay Lemons:

Thank you. I appreciate that. I appreciate you. We’ll look forward to having a chance to talk again soon.

Listeners, we welcome your suggestions and thoughts for leaders we might feature in upcoming segments. You can send those to leadershippodcast@academicsearch.org. You can find our podcast on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, or wherever else you find your podcast. It is also available on the Academic Search web.

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. It’s been a great pleasure to have Larry Schall as our guest today on the program. Larry, thank you again for joining us.

Larry Schall:

Happy to, Jay. Enjoy your evening. Enjoy your weekend.

Jay Lemons:

Thank you.