Leaders on Leadership featuring Dr. Marjorie Hass, President of the Council of Independent Colleges

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. It’s a very special honor to host Dr. Marjorie Hass, we’re so pleased that she can join us and especially so during this month where we celebrate women’s history. Indeed, she herself has been a history-maker in many different settings. Marjorie is the President of the Council of Independent Colleges. Before coming to CIC in 2021, she spent 12 years in two presidencies, first at Austin College and more recently at Rhodes College. After having served as a member of the faculty and as a provost at Muhlenberg College, that’s where we first had the opportunity to meet Marjorie.

Marjorie Hass:

I remember it well, Jay.

Jay Lemons:

I do too. Marjorie was not new to CIC as she had served as a member of the board of directors, and she’s been very active in leadership of other higher ed associations, serving as a board member of the American Association of Colleges and Universities and was also former chair of the board of the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities. Marjorie holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Illinois and is published on philosophy of language, logic and feminism. More recently, she has had a focus on writing about women in leadership and published a book called A Leadership Guide for Women in Higher Education in 2021. Marjorie, it’s an honor and a special joy to welcome you to Leaders on Leadership.

Marjorie Hass:

Thank you so much, Jay. I’ve listened to other episodes of your podcast and have been really inspired by what the leaders you’ve interviewed have had to say, so I’m excited to be among them now.

Jay Lemons:

Thank you. Well, it’s really meant to be conversational. It’s really meant to try and provide an opportunity to do something that I don’t know that we do very often or very well, and that is to ask leaders to share of themselves some reflections about your own pathways into leadership with a hope that your story will connect and inspire others, which I know it will. So I’d love it Marjorie, if you’d share a little bit of your own story with our listeners and talk about some of the people, places, or events that help to forge you to become the leader and the person that you are as your journey in higher education unfolded.

Marjorie Hass:

It’s such an inspiring and exciting prompt because I think the way you ask it really hits at something very important, which is the difference between sort of the plot and the story of how we arrive at these leadership roles. So my plot is probably very similar to many other college presidents or leaders in higher education. I fell in love with a discipline, in my case philosophy. I never imagined I would leave that discipline. My goal was to become a professor, a tenured professor. I achieved that goal and the leadership pieces came a little bit later. They came originally because I was active as a faculty member and began to be asked to take on faculty leadership roles to chair important committees or to lead task forces to make presentations on behalf of Muhlenberg College. And, as I often say, if you develop a reputation as a faculty member for being able to get things accomplished without leaving dead bodies in your wake, you will be asked to join the administrative team at some point.

And so I had an opportunity to direct a center at Muhlenberg College Center for Ethics and found that I enjoyed that kind of working across the curriculum, working across the campus, working with both faculty members and administrators. Was then asked to serve in an interim role as the chief academic officer at Muhlenberg, an institution that I had loved. I was assured it would be just for a year, and that then was turned out to be a big fat lie. I was asked to apply for the position permanently, went through a search process and became Muhlenberg’s provost, and then that of course put me in a position to be invited into presidencies and eventually into the CIC presidency. So that’s sort of the basic plot. But as we all know, that plot can cover a variety of different stories and for me, really it was I think a story of finding ways of increasingly being of use, increasingly being able to give of myself to my institutions.

As a faculty member I could do that in a very particular way and I found that these other opportunities allowed me to explore parts of myself, and parts of the institution that had been dormant. When you go to become a philosophy professor, you put a lot of other things aside and some of the things that mattered most to me, my religious traditions, my ability to create community, my interest in helping structures become stronger, all of those things had sort of lane to the side and taking on leadership roles were ways that I could bring more of myself into my work and ultimately into services in the institutions. That’s part of why there’s joy in this kind of work. It’s also part of why this work is very difficult because it is more than just a few facts in your head or a way of writing for professionals in your discipline. It really becomes a much more comprehensive kind of relatedness to the people in the institutions where you work.

Jay Lemons:

Thank you. I can’t help, as someone who was also an undergraduate philosophy major, how did you find your way to philosophy and how does philosophy continue to shape kind of your lens, your view of the world?

Marjorie Hass:

We fall in love with our disciplines. It’s very much a romance and for many of us, that happens as an undergraduate, it did for me. I remember going to college as a first-year student at the University of Illinois and looking through the course catalog and circling all the courses that I thought I would want to take and calling my mother and saying, “Mom, there’s so many classes I want to take care of. They’re all in the philosophy department.” And I was very fortunate that my mother said, “Well, then maybe you’ll be a philosophy major.” I didn’t know this was something I was passionately interested. I knew I loved literature, I knew I was interested in thinking perhaps about pursuing a career in foreign relations or international relations. I had, as I said, was an avid reader always. So it was really kind of discovering that as an undergraduate by simply following my passions and my interests. Having the support of my parents for something as unconventional as being a philosophy major was very fortunate.

Jay Lemons:

Huge.

Marjorie Hass:

Some of that I learned in retrospect or came to realize in retrospect was it’s possible that they didn’t think it mattered all that much what a girl majored in, because I think they assumed that I would have a husband who would support me or be the major breadwinner. So that might have been some of it, but nonetheless, they were supportive of my pursuing that discipline and it really was a love affair. I remember the excitement with which I attended my classes, the energy I had for the things that I was learning as an undergraduate and the notion that I could continue in graduate school and continue to pursue and think about these things was just wildly exciting for me at the time.

Jay Lemons:

That’s wonderful. Well, as we sit here in the midst of Women’s History Month, I appreciate your willingness to share some of your own story and your desire and commitment through your most recent book to trying to lift other women up. And yeah, I’d love for you to share two or three pieces of advice perhaps that are really aimed at women who are seeking to be leaders in higher education.

Marjorie Hass:

I discovered when we stepped into these roles, how important it was to mentor, support and advise other emerging leaders and women naturally gravitated towards me and asked advice, women that I knew and eventually women that I didn’t know. And I began to lead some very informal seminars for women across the country who were emerging leaders. And the book really grew out of that. A few of the things that I really came to see, they were true for me in my leadership path, and I think are true for a lot of leaders, but particularly for women leaders that really became kind of central to the book, some of those things. So the first thing I would say is that for many of us, these leadership roles require a real shift in our own sense of professional identity.

And it’s important I think, and I advise women and others as well to take some time to recognize that taking on significant leadership roles, particularly for the first time not only means adopting to a new role, but it means saying goodbye to a previous role and you have to leave yourself time to mourn that. Leaving the classroom was difficult for me and in many ways, and I still have found ways to teach throughout the last parts of my career, but there is something very pleasurable about being part of a faculty, about having your primary focus on your research and your teaching, about being in relationship with students that you have to say farewell to. And taking time to acknowledge that, to mourn that, to think about what it is you’re giving up so that you can take on what you are taking on with freshness and with open eyes I think is really important.

For women that often is about the community that you leave. When you’re a faculty member, you have a whole community. And that’s true not just for faculty who go onto these leadership roles, but if you are doing student life work and you’re in direct contact with the community you have with the students or you coach a team as opposed to becoming the athletic director, you move from this sort of notion of being immersed in a group to sort of doing work that’s a little bit more independent. You don’t have the same kind of supportive peer group as you did, and that can be challenging particularly for women. So I think thinking about the professional identity shifts. The second thing I would say is that this work requires that you become very comfortable managing issues related to power, to conflict and to difficult emotions. And all of those are things that women are often socialized to not deal well with, to be accommodating rather than to engage in conflict or to be passive aggressive rather than to be open to over conflict.

To think of power as something that is in the hands of others rather than in our own hands to wield responsibly, to think about difficult emotions as perhaps something that we deal with privately rather than publicly. Leadership requires all of those very complicated things be kind of in your toolkit and at the service of the vision that you’re trying to create and the change you’re trying to lead. So getting clear and comfortable with those things are important. And again, for many women, we have to work at that because we’ve been socialized not to do those things.

And then the third thing I would say, and again I think this is important for every leader, but particularly true or came to be true in my work with women, is to think about how you lead with authenticity. For many of us, our models and our images of leaders were shaped by the images we see, which are often male images, often white male images, and encouraging each of us to become the leader that is inside of us, to find our own unique leadership voice rather than to say, “I have to look at that example outside and model myself on it.”

So these were all things that I, I won’t say learned, that I learned and I’m learning and that many of the women, and in fact many of the other leaders that I know in higher education in particular wrestle with focus on, and my book addresses those kinds of issues.

Jay Lemons:

Thank you for that and I so appreciate what you just said. None of us are completed works. We’re all still becoming and learning is… So I really appreciate your acknowledgement of that along with those other insights about the journey, and it does make me want to jump to exploration around the unusual walk. I think for people who have been pioneers, my colleague Shirley Pippen calls the pioneers, people who’ve been the first in their institutions, and I know you’ve been the first woman and the first Jewish person to serve at multiple institutions. Any words of advice for those? And the happy story here, I think in some ways, Marjorie, is we have more pioneers and we seem to me to be in a period of momentum around more intentional creation of a much richer, more diverse leadership cadre in higher education. But those who are the first bear special weight, talk about that some.

Marjorie Hass:

Well, Jay, I think you are absolutely right that there are more opportunities now, many more opportunities and some of that, the Academic Search and your work in particular has really helped to create, you do a great job of seeing leadership potential in a wide range of people and helping boards or hiring committees see what they want in a leader, can be found in a context that may be new to them or through experiences that may be less familiar to them. So I applaud you for that.

Jay Lemons:

Thank you.

Marjorie Hass:

The pioneer question, and I love that phrase and I have taken that up from her as well. I love that phrase. One of the things that I’ve really been noticing is that it’s easier to inaugurate and announce that pioneering president than it is to sometimes support that pioneering president in when the work gets difficult. And so I really encourage pioneers to talk with the hiring officer or the board leaders if they’re a president at the outset before you’ve even stepped on campus and before you’ve even started the role to say things such as, and I had these conversations very frankly with my boards. For example, to say, “I’m going to be the first Jewish president at this Presbyterian college.” We know there will be moments where that is difficult, or I’m going to be the first woman, we know there will be times that’s going to create some uncomfortable challenges.

Or there will be people who won’t want to work with a woman in this leadership role. How will we deal with that? How will you help create a climate where I can be successful? How will you support me when I face those issues? Because often what happens is, say the first Black president or Black vice president will come and say to the president or to the board, “I went into an encounter and there was really some racist subtext,” and the White hiring agents will sort of start to parse whether or not this was really racist or whether it was something else. And that is not helpful in that moment, right?

Jay Lemons:

No.

Marjorie Hass:

What’s helpful is instead to say, “How can I be supportive? How can I help you regain your sense that this is a welcoming institution, that this is an institution that wants to support you in your work?” And having some of those hard conversations ahead of time I think makes it easier. This was a very much an open part of my search process, particularly in my first presidency at Austin College and a Presbyterian institution, one with a very proud connection to the Presbyterian church. And I was fortunate that the college chaplain was on that search committee, and he was really able to be a good integrator or connector for me and for the campus and for the alumni for whom that relationship was important to try to talk about what I would bring to this role as a Jewish woman. It wasn’t he used to say that we’re Presbyterian, but we have a Jewish president. He would say, “We’re Presbyterian, and so we are diverse, and so we have a Jewish president.” And we worked on that and so, and that was helpful to me and I think helpful to the institution.

So being aware that you’re going to have to narrate some of that I think is important. And then just one other point that I would make, which is that it’s a real privilege. It can be very challenging and there are many hard moments. I certainly faced overt and covert antisemitism in my roles and sexism, but it’s still a privilege to hold these positions, but it’s even more of a privilege to recognize that to make your being that first pioneer part of a larger story about the institution. And so I used to look for every way, and I still do this in my presidency here at CIC, to be able to say, “Here’s how we do things in my tradition. Tell me how you do things in your tradition,” or “Here’s what this experience has been like for me as the first woman in this role. Tell me what it has been like for you.”

And to try to use my own identity and my own firstness as a occasion for talking about the institution’s aspirations, the institution’s history of progression to inclusion and about the myriad ways that people bring their identities into our organizations.

Jay Lemons:

Oh, wonderful. Wonderful. Switching gears, in your mind, what makes a good leader? And by good I don’t mean grade B, I mean good in this form that a philosopher would explore this, virtuousness, effectiveness, ultimately success in moving an organization forward.

Marjorie Hass:

I love that you used the word virtue because I do think about leadership, when I talk to leaders about the qualities you want to develop, I use a virtue ethics form, and Jay, you and I are not going to go off into deep philosophy land, but I do think that it is developing certain kinds of character traits, really thinking about what philosophers are comfortable calling virtues are that you want to cultivate does enhance your leadership. And it’s important because if you’re using more of a heuristic or a rule-based form of decision making, you often don’t have time to weigh the pros and the cons or run the Kantian imperative or start to make strong lists. You have to move from principle and character so often just because of the sheer volume of decisions you have to make and the speed with which you’re often called to. Not mention the fact that often, the key decisions happen at 2:00 in the morning in a crisis situation and you and your team needs to know what they can expect from you.

And so I do find that really, really important. Leadership is such a mixture of skills and traits, and they can be put together in a lot of different ways. None of us are perfect. I do sometimes look at some of the position descriptions, particularly for the college presidency, not the ones you write, but others, and they sometimes remind me of that scene in the Mary Poppins movie where the kid they write a letter about what they want in their nanny and it has all of these things. She should be thoughtful and nice and playful and smart, and she should smell good and she should bring sweets. And I sometimes think we have this sort of magical thinking that one leader is going to be able to embody everything we need in a change organization. But leadership is really not just about the things you do, it’s about the ways you inspire others.

I define academic leadership as inspiring others to make change in the service of a shared vision that makes your institution better. And so helping to being able to craft a vision and being able to really inspire others to move in ways that make it real and to support them as they do that hard work of change takes a lot. It takes skills. You certainly need to be able to understand how institutions function. You need to be able to understand budgets and personnel matters and all sorts of skills, but that’s not in many ways the hard part. The hard part is maintaining your empathy on a bad day or holding firm to the values at the core of your mission when budgets are tight or when somebody’s mad or somebody’s asking for an exception. Those are the hard things. And cultivating those things is to me, the work of every day that we do. And then also what we are doing as we’re helping to shape and identify and support leaders.

Jay Lemons:

Wonderful, and some of what you just commented on makes me think about Gallup and their writing around leaders that leaders aren’t necessarily well-balanced. They come in a variety of forms, a variety of flavors, but the very most effective and best leaders will understand the complimentary skills that they need to bring in the form of those who are part of their teams. And so it kind of leads me to wanting to hear you maybe reflect a little bit about what it is that you look for and want from the teams that you build.

Marjorie Hass:

I love that you ask that because that is one of the most reassuring things that nobody leads alone. You lead as part of a leadership team and often multiple teams. You have a board of trustees that is helping you as a college president. You have a set of a cabinet or a set of vice presidents, you have faculty leaders, student leaders, alumni leaders. So you’re part of a variety of leadership teams that can complement your skills. I try to find teams and build teams that have complementary skills. You don’t want a bunch of clones in the room, you’ll get groupthink at worst. You’ll miss out on really important things. So diversifying your leadership team is really important. And when we talk about diversifying the team, we mean that on all of these vectors. People with different life experiences, people with different backgrounds, but also people with different thinking styles.

It’s good to know that you’ve got somebody in the room who is the listener and the synthesizer and somebody else in the room who’s the, listen, I’ve got the hard cold facts here and somebody else in the room that is the here’s a wild out of the box idea, and together you’re going to make better decisions and you’re going to have a more robust vision for the campus if you incorporate multiple perspectives. So that diversity around the leadership team is essential. It’s not as good to add it later. It’s not as good to say, “Well, everybody on the leadership team has roughly the same background,” and then we go out and kind of ask for some input from some diverse groups. That’s never as good as having that diversity baked in at the beginning.

Jay Lemons:

Yeah. Wonderful, wonderful. What are the biggest issues facing our leaders in higher ed today?

Marjorie Hass:

Oh, Jay, this could be a podcast in itself. Could it not?

Jay Lemons:

Really could.

Marjorie Hass:

The work is very hard. And I would say there’s a couple things. I mean, I think we’re all aware of some of the challenges that have emerged around the pressures on our business model, the pressures on institutions in general, which overall, there’s decreasing respect for the pressures that have come about as a result of COVID and particularly student experiences before they get to college. And now that they’re in college, the challenges our faculty and staff went through remaking our colleges multiple times to respond to the pandemic. So all of those things I think have been well discussed. I would highlight two things that I think are particularly challenging right now. One is that everything has become political, and I don’t mean political in the sense of how we grapple with power.

I mean, everything has become political in that it is filtered and sieved through party politics. So there’s almost nothing that one can say or read or point to or hold up that isn’t going to start to be heard in terms of a very narrow binary. The American party system is a very binary system, and that’s really problematic because inherently what we do at colleges is we make more complicated things that might seem binary or simple on the surface, what we do. And that complexity has a harder and harder time getting a toehold, not just in the popular press, but even sometimes on our own campuses when so much of American culture in particular, but global culture as well, is moving to try to push everything, every word, every sentence, every position into a narrow set of party politics.

So that is really significant pressure on our institutions, and it’s showing up in all kinds of ways, challenges and debates in the boardroom that become hard to move past, needing to respond to government intrusion into curriculum or tenure status, the difficulties around finding common ground on free speech issues on campus. All of those things play out on our campuses as they should. I mean, there’d be something wrong if these were in the air and not on our campuses. So-

Jay Lemons:

It’s exactly right.

Marjorie Hass:

But I think it’s a very challenging moment to lead because you’re trying to build a sort of common consensus around a vision, and that’s harder and harder to do when there are these pressures. The second thing I think is that communication technologies have made leadership challenging because the narrative doesn’t have a center. And so any view about what your institution is, where it’s headed, what it is, who it is, not that I’m saying leaders should control it, but institutions had a narrative to which people could respond. It’s harder and harder to even get a leadership narrative out into the conversation so that people have something to respond to, whether that’s to criticize it or to support it. And so I think that’s hard. And it also means that there are things that it’s very hard to get ahead of the kinds of things that are unfolding on your very campus in real time because by the time you’ve heard about them, they’ve often already been narrated by other forces and voices. That can have some positive effects, but it can also just make leadership ever more challenging.

Jay Lemons:

Oh, so true. So true. And as a quick follow up on that, to be successful today, are there new or different skills or ways of handling oneself in the world than there as we were coming up?

Marjorie Hass:

It does feel like it’s harder. Maybe every generation thinks that, but many of the people who’ve been at this for a long time say it, it just is harder. Some of the skills that are so essential are, I think the ability to hold onto nuance, hold onto the sense that these things are more complicated, be able to enjoy the give and take of conversation and the kind of looseness of narrative and message to be comfortable with leading without controlling everything. The more you try to control, the more it slips out of your hands. So I think that’s important. Authenticity, transparency, truly welcoming diverse voices to the table. All of those things I think are important in ways that perhaps they were less important in the past, or you could do them on a Tuesday as opposed to 24/7. And in this world of constant communication, being able and ready to communicate authentically all the time about any of the real issues is essential. And that’s exhausting it. It’s tiring. So stamina matters as well.

Jay Lemons:

Absolutely. Well, and I think you captured perfectly, why is leadership harder? There is no turning it on and off. I remember working as a young staff member in the president’s office at the University of Virginia, and the mail would come twice a day and we would process it in the morning and stack it up and organize it and all of that. Now it’s coming 24/7 in unmediated ways to leaders. And then every single person in some ways has their own press credentials and can through video and recording, can release almost anything.

Marjorie Hass:

And so thinking about how you respond, what you respond, and then what you try to state ahead of time, who are you? Who is your institution? What are we trying to accomplish? So not making sure that the majority of your communication is proactive and not reactive is important, but all of those things are important. And this is part of why, as we talked about earlier, it’s so imperative that we support leaders as they do this work and that we recognize that, again, for pioneers, this work has some added complexities to it that we will help them navigate.

Jay Lemons:

Absolutely, higher risks, fewer degrees of freedom equals even greater need for support and commitment. So yeah, let’s move into what I kind of call our lightning round. I’ll ask you shorter questions and you can answer whatever length you would like, but who most influenced you?

Marjorie Hass:

I think my parents, that may feel like a little bit of a cliche or cop-out answer, but they influenced me in different ways and in ways that I knew to some extent as I was growing up, but become even more clear as you look back in as an adult. My father who we lost just about a year ago, my father of blessed memory was a psychoanalyst and taught me that you should love your work. Taught me that ideas matter, taught me that people have all sorts of relationships to power, to an institution, to things that are played out in their relationship with the holder of the office of leader, but aren’t really about the leader. That was very influential and helpful for me, and also just gave me a way of thinking in a sort of depth way about what motivates people and the ways that people become themselves and how to support people in that journey.

My mother was, when I was a child, she was at home with us and then very early on wanted to go back to work. She got a master’s degree and taught special ed, and then she too eventually got a PsyD and opened an analytic practice as well. And she was wonderful. My mother, she always used to say, “Women can have it all, but perhaps not all at once.” And she really was a model of thinking at each stage of your life, what was going to be important to you and how were you going to live in that way. And that was something that I really appreciated. I became a mother very early in my career before I even had started a career. I was still in graduate school. And her model that you could be a loving mother, that you could make your family an important part of your life, but still have a significant career, was really important for me and continues to shape how I think about it. So my parents were very influential.

Jay Lemons:

Thank you. Both of those powerful, powerful tributes. You must have had interesting dinner conversations.

Marjorie Hass:

Yes, yes. You could say that. Someday I’ll tell you all about the kinds of conversations that psychoanalysts have over their dinner table.

Jay Lemons:

Yeah, yeah. Marjorie, is there a single book that has had great influence on you?

Marjorie Hass:

Probably the Torah is the most influential book, that’s in my examples of leadership, my metaphors, my vision of something bigger than me or more than me, my sense of virtue, ethics and of human failings. I mean, the story, Five Books of Moses have it all, right? There’s stories about families, there’s stories about leaders, there’s stories about trying to have a community together, about trying to have an ethical community. And so that continues to influence me through each site. We read the Torah in a cycle every year, and I always learn something new every time we read each week. In terms of philosophy, I would say Wittgenstein was an influential author, and Hannah Arendt is influential as well.

Jay Lemons:

Fabulous. Fabulous. Thank you. Do you have a fondest memory of your undergraduate experience?

Marjorie Hass:

Absolutely. Meeting my husband and falling in love with him in a philosophy class. So as I said, you fall in love with the discipline and I had the joy of falling in love with the discipline and with my husband at the same time. He is also a philosopher and he approached philosophy in a very different way than I did. My way was much more intellectual and structural and symbolic. I was studying formal logic and philosophy language, and Larry was studying phenomenology and the living body and experience. And he is a wonderful individual and a wonderful thinker. And so the memories of those early conversations about ideas always stick with me. And I’m fortunate that I get to go home at night and have those same kinds of conversations with the same man all these years later.

Jay Lemons:

Indeed. And if you get to the end of a philosophical trail, he can engage in some magic. For those who don’t know-

Marjorie Hass:

That’s right. Absolutely.

Jay Lemons:

Larry is a very accomplished magician, so-

Marjorie Hass:

He is, yes. Sleight of hand magician. He has retired from the classroom and is happy to let me lead these organizations while he has made a second career performing.

Jay Lemons:

I love it. By the way, the number of philosophy majors at Nebraska Wesleyan was very small. What was it like at the U of I, I mean, how many majors were there?

Marjorie Hass:

It’s interesting. So U of I, it’s a major research institution, so I can’t quite remember the numbers, but it seemed like a big department. There were very few women in it. I think I had one female professor all throughout undergraduate and graduate school in the philosophy department, just one.

Jay Lemons:

Wow. Wow.

Marjorie Hass:

And so there just weren’t a lot of role models. There weren’t a lot of examples, and that was challenging, but it was also a very supportive environment. I had professors there who were very supportive of my own intellectual development. And when I met Larry, he was in the graduate program. I was a senior in college and stayed at U of I so that we could be together. And my professors were really supportive of that, and we were very fortunate.

Jay Lemons:

Yes, you were. Indeed, indeed. Well, is there a favorite campus tradition at a place you’ve attended or served that you would raise up?

Marjorie Hass:

I would say that at all three of the institutions I have served, I have a particular fondness for opening convocation. There’s something about that moment of gathering. At each of my institutions, there was usually an opportunity to honor a professor who had made a particular impact in the classroom. Usually, some words from the president, which when I was president, I had the honor of offering the new classes there, usually for the first group. And the faculty are coming together and many of the upper-class students who work with the first-year students are there and sometimes parents or others. And there’s just something about that freshness, that revitalization, that sense that we are always starting again in higher education, we’re always starting, and the work is never over that I always find particularly uplifting.

Jay Lemons:

I love that. One of the great rewards of my journey has been that higher ed is a world in which you have beginnings and endings. And what you said about opening convocation, it rings so powerfully for me as well, because it is the time of year where everybody’s got an A and every class and every sports team is undefeated, and you’re filled with what’s possible.

Marjorie Hass:

Yes. I love that. It’s true. And obviously, commencement, which is the other side of that, is always very beautiful and meaningful, but it’s also thin with a tinge of sadness because you’re saying goodbye to these students, seeing them on their next path, and then you sort of come to opening convocation and there’s that sense of revitalization again.

Jay Lemons:

Yeah, absolutely true. Hey, if you hadn’t worked in higher ed, what would you have done?

Marjorie Hass:

Oh, that’s a very good question. My job at CIC is the very first adult job I have ever had where I’m not living and working on campus. I’ve lived on college campuses since I was 18 years old and went to college. And for the last 20 years, I’ve lived in a campus home as president and provost. So there isn’t a lot of me that is sort of outside of higher ed. When I think about what I would do, I don’t know. I have many, many interests and I recognize, I didn’t know this when I was 18, but certainly through my leadership roles, I’ve become a good businesswoman. I have skills to lead organizations. I am good at mentoring and supporting others. So I think there certainly would be things that I could have found and could continue to find outside of higher ed. But there’s something about this environment that really suits me very well.

Jay Lemons:

I understand. I really do. Well, Marjorie, I’m really grateful for your sharing this time. And one of our wrap up traditions here is that we’d like to close by asking you to share with our listeners the distinctive qualities, if you will, the organizational DNA of CIC. And I’d love for you to reflect and have the elevator speech with audiences that may or may not know about independent colleges, why these institutions matter so much to the future of our country.

Marjorie Hass:

Sure. And it’s a really important time to emphasize this, I think. So, Council of Independent Colleges, we are a membership organization of more than 665 independent institutions. Those institutions are independently governed. They have a commitment to the liberal arts expressed through their curriculum in some way or another, and they all care deeply about undergraduate education. There’s still a very varied group. More than 70% of them have graduate programs, for example, our membership is a wide arranging group. We have institutions that have more than 10,000 students. We have institutions that have fewer than 500. So it’s a very diverse group. I think a couple things. One is just the volume of students we serve. So CIC institutions educate more than 2 million students a year. That is, even though we’re small and do that on often one by one and student by student in very relationship driven education, collectively, that’s a significant impact.

And we know that those students go on to great success professionally and in leadership roles across the country and the world. So we’re serving as a really important point for that. We’re also an important access point. CIC institutions enroll, Pell Grant students enroll first generation students in numbers that are relatively similar to public institutions as a whole, and we graduate them in greater proportion because our students are more likely to graduate and to graduate in four years. And the other thing I’ll say that I think is really important is that independence is really important, and we’re seeing that in real time as we watch government intrusion state by state by state into curriculum, into tenure decisions, into the kinds of organizations students are able to form, the kinds of topics faculty members can teach about, what majors students can have.

That independence is going to be increasingly important. And I talked to our presidents about our need to stay firm, to speak up in favor of campus freedom of expression and academic freedom because we will be the torch bearers for that in what is a very challenging and in some ways very dark and frightening era, I think, of the relationship between government and education.

Jay Lemons:

Yeah. Thank you for that. And it is a reminder that the academy is its own ecosystem, in this period of time, there is a way in which our leaders can support their public colleagues in really powerful ways, and thank you for sharing that.

Marjorie Hass:

Absolutely.

Jay Lemons:

I can’t say thank you enough, Marjorie, for joining us here today on Leaders on Leadership. It’s been a special pleasure to have this chance to hear you reflect, to share insights and wisdom. And I just want to say thank you so very, very much.

Marjorie Hass:

Jay, it is truly a pleasure, and thank you for the work you do in identifying and supporting leaders for our sector and in having this podcast and giving a forum for these kinds of important conversations. It’s been a pleasure.

Jay Lemons:

Well, pleasure is mine. And to our 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 the Academic Search website or wherever you find your podcasts. Leaders on Leadership is brought to you by Academic Search and the American Academic Leadership Institute. Together, our mission is to support colleges and universities during times of transition and through leadership development activities that serve current and future generations of leaders in the academy. What a joy and an honor it’s been to have Dr. Marjorie Hass with us today. Thank you once again, Marjorie, for joining us.