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The Trust Agenda with Lynn Pasquerella and Jeremy Young · Partnership Work

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Lynn Pasquerella: Our current system rewards peer-reviewed journal articles, grants received,
0:04
Lynn Pasquerella: but not engagement in the communities in which we're located.
0:07
Lynn Pasquerella: And Hunter College President Nancy Cantor has long talked about
0:13
Lynn Pasquerella: the ways in which being an anchor in one's community requires that we demonstrate
0:18
Lynn Pasquerella: that our success is inextricably linked to the psychological,
0:21
Lynn Pasquerella: social, economic, educational well-being of those in the communities in which
0:26
Lynn Pasquerella: we're located and those we seek to serve.
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Lynn Pasquerella: So she enjoins us to stop telling people what we're good at and instead begin
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Lynn Pasquerella: asking them, what are we good for?
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Paul Kuttner: Hey, welcome to Partnership Work, where we explore what it takes to move from
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Paul Kuttner: isolation to action. I'm Paul Kuttner.
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Paul Kuttner: Today, we're going back to a topic that we've touched on a couple times on the show.
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Paul Kuttner: The rising distrust of higher education, and what colleges and universities can do about it.
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Paul Kuttner: Today I talk with Lynn Pasquerella, president of the American Association of
1:08
Paul Kuttner: Colleges and Universities, and Jeremy Young, their senior advisor for strategic initiatives.
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Paul Kuttner: AAC&U recently put out a report called The Trust Agenda, arguing that to build
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Paul Kuttner: trust, colleges and universities need to demonstrate that they are trustworthy.
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Paul Kuttner: A key piece of the agenda is to build stronger and more collaborative relationships
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Paul Kuttner: with surrounding communities.
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Paul Kuttner: And they say, we can find models for how to do this well by looking to community
1:34
Paul Kuttner: colleges and regional public universities where trust remains much higher.
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Paul Kuttner: Our discussion covers a lot of ground, from what fishermen know that researchers
1:43
Paul Kuttner: don't to the drawbacks of treating colleges as private commodities rather than public goods.
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Paul Kuttner: I won't spoil it all, here's Lynn and Jeremy.
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Paul Kuttner: Lynn Pasquerella and Jeremy Young, thank you so much for joining me on Partnership Work.
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Lynn Pasquerella: Thanks for having us here. It's such a pleasure.
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Paul Kuttner: It's great. Thank you. So we have a lot to talk about today.
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Paul Kuttner: We are particularly going to dive into the report that you co-authored,
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Paul Kuttner: Jeremy, and that AAC and you put out in June called The Trust Agenda,
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Paul Kuttner: a Framework for Advancing Public Trust in Higher Education.
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Paul Kuttner: So we'll dive into what you wrote, But I really wanted to kind of turn it on
2:30
Paul Kuttner: you two just to start off with.
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Paul Kuttner: So as individuals, just as people doing this work in and with higher education,
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Paul Kuttner: why do you put your trust in higher education?
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Lynn Pasquerella: Well, I certainly put my trust in higher education because it transformed my life.
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Lynn Pasquerella: I was a first-generation college student. Neither of my parents graduated from high school.
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Lynn Pasquerella: My father joined the war effort shortly after Pearl Harbor Day at the age of
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Lynn Pasquerella: 16. And my mother got married at the age of 16, at a time when you couldn't
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Lynn Pasquerella: be married and stay in school.
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Lynn Pasquerella: By the time I was 11, she was a single parent and was chronically ill,
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Lynn Pasquerella: so I was a caregiver for her.
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Lynn Pasquerella: And at 17, when I was ready to go off to college,
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Lynn Pasquerella: I had a full scholarship at my state's flagship university.
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Lynn Pasquerella: I made a decision to attend a local community college so I could continue with
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Lynn Pasquerella: my family responsibilities.
3:23
Lynn Pasquerella: And I worked under CETA funds, a comprehensive employment training act, 35 hours a week.
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Lynn Pasquerella: I had Pell Grants and Perkins loans. And that experience opened doors for me.
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Lynn Pasquerella: Two years later, I transferred to Mount Holyoke and then went off to Brown.
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Lynn Pasquerella: But when I graduated, I left with a deep and abiding commitment to liberal education.
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Lynn Pasquerella: To access to excellence in higher education, regardless of socioeconomic background,
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Lynn Pasquerella: and to political scientist Benjamin Barber's notion of colleges and universities
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Lynn Pasquerella: as civic missions, where we not only educate people to be free,
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Lynn Pasquerella: but we free them to be educable
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Lynn Pasquerella: by serving as a visible force in the lives of those who are most disenfranchised.
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Lynn Pasquerella: I know the importance of that visibility in terms of creating access, which requires trust.
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Lynn Pasquerella: In the system. And so we do all that we can to ensure that we're creating kinships,
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Lynn Pasquerella: serving as anchors in our communities,
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Lynn Pasquerella: which is absolutely necessary, to addressing the skepticism that people rightly
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Lynn Pasquerella: have around higher education and the notion that it's too expensive,
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Lynn Pasquerella: too difficult to access, perhaps isn't teaching 21st century skills.
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Lynn Pasquerella: And we may indeed be bastions of liberal progressivism that are chilling certain voices.
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Lynn Pasquerella: So I disagree with some of that narrative, and yet I am committed to taking
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Lynn Pasquerella: seriously the real fears and concerns that people have that contribute to it.
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Paul Kuttner: Right. No, I appreciate that background. What about you, Jeremy?
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Jeremy Young: Well, I began my career, both academic and my professional career as a history
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Jeremy Young: professor, got a PhD in history, adjuncted and was a visiting professor for several years,
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Jeremy Young: and then spent four years teaching on the tenure track at what is now Utah Tech
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Jeremy Young: University in southwestern Utah.
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Jeremy Young: All of my teaching experience was either in red states or in red areas of swing States.
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Jeremy Young: For most of that period of time, I was teaching a 4-4 course load.
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Jeremy Young: The last 18 months at Utah Tech, I took over a small institute of politics and
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Jeremy Young: public affairs that the university had started a couple of years earlier,
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Jeremy Young: and that became a portion of my course load.
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Jeremy Young: And that institute was housed within student services.
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Jeremy Young: The student employees were student government members.
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Jeremy Young: And so for part of my role, I reported to student affairs, the director of student affairs.
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Jeremy Young: And I really got to understand what the student affairs world and work was.
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Jeremy Young: And that was transformative for me because I had come up as a faculty member.
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Jeremy Young: I had thought of myself as someone who was a writer first and a researcher first
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Jeremy Young: and a teacher to pay the bills.
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Jeremy Young: And I realized that the people who were doing the student affairs work were
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Jeremy Young: doing something that was absolutely vital for American society.
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Jeremy Young: They were supporting students in ways that I never could. As a faculty member,
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Jeremy Young: they were engaging with the community.
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Jeremy Young: I ended up serving on a strategic planning committee for a community engagement
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Jeremy Young: goal for the whole university and helping to write that goal.
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Jeremy Young: And it just opened my eyes to the transformative effect that colleges and universities
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Jeremy Young: have on students and have on communities.
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Jeremy Young: And although I left teaching in 2020 and moved into the higher education nonprofit space.
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Jeremy Young: I have never lost that love of the system that is designed to open people's
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Jeremy Young: minds and build connections.
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Paul Kuttner: All right. Excellent. Thank you. I'm curious, coming a little forward,
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Paul Kuttner: what were you hearing or what were you experiencing that led you to see trust
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Paul Kuttner: in higher ed as a critical issue that you needed to address at AAC&U?
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Lynn Pasquerella: We've been dealing with the issue of trust for decades.
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Lynn Pasquerella: It was part of our founding mission in 1915 when campus leaders came together
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Lynn Pasquerella: and talked about not only interconnectedness, but attempting to restore trust
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Lynn Pasquerella: in liberal education as inextricably linked to our nation's historic mission
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Lynn Pasquerella: of educating for democracy.
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Lynn Pasquerella: It was during the time of the rise of land grant institutions,
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Lynn Pasquerella: and we wanted to make sure that we didn't lose the focus of the good work that
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Lynn Pasquerella: was taking place around liberal education.
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Lynn Pasquerella: More recently, under the Obama administration, when we put together a crucible moment looking at
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Lynn Pasquerella: how to prepare students for work, citizenship, and life, trust was a central
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Lynn Pasquerella: component of that work and has been part of our strategic plan
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Lynn Pasquerella: since I started at AAC&U in 2016.
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Lynn Pasquerella: Now, of course, there's a new sense of urgency around this work because
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Lynn Pasquerella: we have data showing a rapid decline in trust in higher education from 2015
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Lynn Pasquerella: to today, although that's rising a bit.
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Lynn Pasquerella: We know that this is happening across all sectors. And so it's not unique to higher education.
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Paul Kuttner: Maybe I'll turn this to you, Jeremy. You're talking about trust.
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Paul Kuttner: And I think we do need to define our terms a bit here.
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Paul Kuttner: The way that the report talks about the decline in public trust in higher education,
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Paul Kuttner: trust is not maybe the way that we all use the word trust.
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Paul Kuttner: It seems very relational. It's very much of, it's defined actually as something
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Paul Kuttner: that exists within a relationship. Can you talk about what we're,
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Paul Kuttner: what we mean when we say that trust is declining?
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Jeremy Young: That's exactly right. You know, we, we, sorry, I'm realizing just now that I
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Jeremy Young: need to have this report pulled up so I can quote from it because you're going
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Jeremy Young: to need a quote for this. Just give me a moment. Here it is.
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Paul Kuttner: Did you not read the report? You should check it out.
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Paul Kuttner: It's really good.
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Jeremy Young: I know. It's really good.
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Lynn Pasquerella: It is quite different from reading it.
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Jeremy Young: Right. I'll get there at some point. I'll take a look.
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Jeremy Young: In the report, we define public trust in higher education as a dynamic of the
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Jeremy Young: relationship between colleges and universities and the public.
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Jeremy Young: We say institutions and their representatives foster public trust by demonstrating
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Jeremy Young: their trustworthiness consistently through effective actions that promote the public good.
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Jeremy Young: And that is fundamental to our understanding of trust.
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Jeremy Young: There has been some discourse lately that I think is really counterproductive
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Jeremy Young: that suggests that trust is not a value that higher education should be investing
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Jeremy Young: in or that there isn't a trust deficit.
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Jeremy Young: You know how I know there's a trust deficit because after everything that has
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Jeremy Young: happened with the administration in the last 18,
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Jeremy Young: 19 months regarding higher education, there hasn't been any significant pushback
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Jeremy Young: from the public about this.
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Jeremy Young: You go to a protest, you're not seeing signs saying hands off our universities.
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Jeremy Young: You're not seeing politicians who make a priority of attacking higher education.
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Jeremy Young: Face any sort of electoral consequences for that in the way that you do say
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Jeremy Young: at the K-12 level with book bans, school board members are being turned out for banning books.
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Jeremy Young: We don't see that at the higher education level. So we know there is a trust
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Jeremy Young: deficit. And we know that what that means is that trust, that the public doesn't
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Jeremy Young: see us as a community asset.
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Jeremy Young: That's how we're really defining trust.
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Jeremy Young: And it's not just that higher education, it's more complicated than what I just
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Jeremy Young: said, because actually, the
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Jeremy Young: public does see most institutions of higher learning as community assets.
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Jeremy Young: There is good data that suggests that regional public universities,
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Jeremy Young: community colleges, which together support over 80% of students in the country,
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Jeremy Young: are very highly valued by their communities.
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Jeremy Young: But when the public thinks of higher education, they have this sense of a remote, extractive,
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Jeremy Young: elite institution, perhaps in the New England area that is taking students out
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Jeremy Young: of their communities and they never come back.
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Jeremy Young: That's what people think of when they think of higher education.
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Jeremy Young: And so part of our argument in this report is that to restore trust,
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Jeremy Young: we need to change the balance of how we talk and think about higher education
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Jeremy Young: so that we focus primarily on the institutions that,
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Jeremy Young: are down the block from you, the institutions that everyone can see that are
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Jeremy Young: clearly and obviously working in the community.
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Jeremy Young: It's not an accident that we began the report with a profile of a community college in Boston.
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Jeremy Young: That is central to our message, that institutions that support the community,
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Jeremy Young: that demonstrate they are community assets, are the institutions that we need,
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Jeremy Young: to model and to reverse engineer and copy if our goal is to restore or advance public trust.
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Paul Kuttner: I want to come back to the sort of community college regional piece,
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Paul Kuttner: but I wanted to ask you, Lynn, to jump back to something you were just talking
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Paul Kuttner: about. So AAC&U, you've been working on trust in liberal education for over 100 years.
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Paul Kuttner: So that's been a part of a struggle this entire time.
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Paul Kuttner: And I know now it's different now than it was, certainly. The pressures are different.
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Paul Kuttner: But do you have a sense, like, what has higher ed done in that time that has
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Paul Kuttner: actually worked in terms of strengthening its relationship with the broader public?
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Paul Kuttner: And are there things it's been doing during that time that haven't?
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Paul Kuttner: Because clearly that problem hasn't been solved.
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Lynn Pasquerella: We have,
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Lynn Pasquerella: For decades, existed within an ivory tower as a willful disconnect from the
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Lynn Pasquerella: practical matters of everyday life.
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Lynn Pasquerella: It was part of what a liberal education was for.
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Lynn Pasquerella: You liberate your mind from past dispositions. You go into this pastoral retreat
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Lynn Pasquerella: and you think and prepare yourself for the life ahead.
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Lynn Pasquerella: There was a focus on creating lives of meaning and purpose.
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Lynn Pasquerella: And then we know in the 60s with the corporatization of higher education when
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Lynn Pasquerella: universities were focused on
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Lynn Pasquerella: on research. There was less of an emphasis on teaching and preparing students
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Lynn Pasquerella: for citizenship and life.
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Lynn Pasquerella: And now, of course, we're at a time when we're attempting to measure the value
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Lynn Pasquerella: of colleges and universities solely in terms of immediate employability and
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Lynn Pasquerella: average salaries earned.
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Lynn Pasquerella: So, liberal education, particularly the humanities, are a tough sell these days.
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Lynn Pasquerella: So, different moments in history have led to different challenges for liberal education.
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Lynn Pasquerella: And we view this as a moment of extraordinary opportunity.
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Lynn Pasquerella: Yes, the headwinds are strong and the challenges are greater than they ever have been.
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Lynn Pasquerella: But there's also a sense of hope and optimism about creating a system that really
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Lynn Pasquerella: is equitable. It meets the equity mandate before us.
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Paul Kuttner: I want to move to your recommendations. So you have five recommendations in the report.
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Paul Kuttner: Accelerate innovation. Prioritize community engagement. Recommit to inclusive,
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Paul Kuttner: excellence in a really kind of student-centered, open, welcoming way.
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Paul Kuttner: Tell a clearer story. And then coordinate a mission-centered defense of higher ed.
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Paul Kuttner: So we don't have time to go into all of those. I really want to focus on community engagement first.
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Paul Kuttner: And tell me a bit about how that ended up in there. How do you see community
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Paul Kuttner: engagement as a key pillar in this work of rebuilding trust?
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Jeremy Young: There were a few inputs that led us to the focus on community engagement.
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Jeremy Young: One is just the data showing that community colleges and regional publics are
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Jeremy Young: so much more popular and well-liked in their local communities than other institution
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Jeremy Young: types. But another factor,
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Jeremy Young: was a report or a book that we read, our team read, by Kathy Cramer called The
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Jeremy Young: Politics of Resentment.
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Jeremy Young: The book came out in 2016, but most of the research occurred in 2007 and she interviewed a number of,
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Jeremy Young: loggers and people living in rural northern Wisconsin and just conducted qualitative
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Jeremy Young: interviews with them and asked them what they thought about the University of Wisconsin.
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Jeremy Young: And it's a really useful data set because it is,
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Jeremy Young: you know, 2007 was before there were any major national or even state level
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Jeremy Young: politicians making, you know,
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Jeremy Young: critical comments about higher education at the level that we see today.
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Jeremy Young: Even in Wisconsin, Scott Walker was a couple of years away, and yet she found
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Jeremy Young: significant distrust among the public. So it was clear from this that it's not,
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Jeremy Young: you know, this is not something created by political figures in Washington, D.C.
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Jeremy Young: This is something that is real, at least at some level, at least a kernel of it is real.
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Jeremy Young: And what those people talked about in the book is just a feeling of remoteness from the institution.
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Jeremy Young: So there's this great story where a guy tells her, you know,
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Jeremy Young: I was fishing up at the fishing hole where I've been, you know,
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Jeremy Young: me and my friends have fished for our entire lives.
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Jeremy Young: And we encountered a University of Wisconsin scientist there and we asked him
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Jeremy Young: what he was doing. And he said, I am trying to determine whether bass spawn
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Jeremy Young: in the same place every year.
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Jeremy Young: And the man became very angry and he said he didn't ask me. He didn't ask any
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Jeremy Young: of us. We could tell him the answer. We've lived here our entire lives.
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Jeremy Young: And he says they just don't care about you. They don't want anything to do with you.
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Jeremy Young: And that was really telling. That wasn't the only story in that book like that.
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Jeremy Young: You know, we are our feeling is that in order for, you know,
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Jeremy Young: our real goal here is for the public to come to the defense of higher education when it's under threat.
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Jeremy Young: The public needs to see higher education in the way that they see the fire department,
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Jeremy Young: you know, as something that is community serving first, that is clearly invested in,
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Jeremy Young: the publics that it serves, which in the case of large selective institutions,
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Jeremy Young: may not only mean its local community, but also the communities that students call home.
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Jeremy Young: And that positions itself in the way that the fire department does as a helping
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Jeremy Young: institution, as a community asset.
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Jeremy Young: And we looked at that and we found that, you know, a number,
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Jeremy Young: of course, community engagement is not a new idea. The Campus Compact was signed over 40 years ago.
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Jeremy Young: But what is needed is a sort of universality that simply doesn't exist.
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Jeremy Young: For this to be central to the missions of institutions across the country and
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Jeremy Young: institutions of all types.
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Jeremy Young: We live in a media environment where someone doing something on one campus goes
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Jeremy Young: into the TikTok machine and people are seeing it all over the country,
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Jeremy Young: and they're assuming that's what higher education means.
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Jeremy Young: So it's no longer enough for community engagement to be a coalition of the willing.
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Jeremy Young: It needs to be uniform and universal in a way that it hasn't been in the past.
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Lynn Pasquerella: And of course, that vision that Jeremy just outlined would require upending
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Lynn Pasquerella: our current reward structures in higher education.
19:09
Lynn Pasquerella: Our current system rewards peer-reviewed journal articles, grants received,
19:13
Lynn Pasquerella: but not engagement in the communities in which we're located.
19:16
Lynn Pasquerella: And Hunter College President Nancy Cantor has long talked about
19:22
Lynn Pasquerella: the ways in which being an anchor in one's community requires that we demonstrate
19:27
Lynn Pasquerella: that our success is inextricably linked to the psychological,
19:30
Lynn Pasquerella: social, economic, educational well-being of those in the communities in which
19:35
Lynn Pasquerella: we're located and those we seek to serve.
19:37
Lynn Pasquerella: So she enjoins us to stop telling people what we're good at and instead begin
19:43
Lynn Pasquerella: asking them, what are we good for and what do you need from us?
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Lynn Pasquerella: And in doing so, become co-creators of knowledge. Take advantage of local epistemologies
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Lynn Pasquerella: to Jeremy's point of this compelling example.
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Lynn Pasquerella: The members of the community know answers to some of the questions that we're
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Lynn Pasquerella: spending millions of dollars asking their legitimate questions.
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Lynn Pasquerella: But let's take advantage of our local communities. And in that way, we can restore trust.
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Paul Kuttner: So what does it look like to have a more universal approach to community engagement
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Paul Kuttner: in higher ed? Do you have examples that you really like to share?
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Jeremy Young: Well, one example that we used in the report is the University of Texas at Arlington,
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Jeremy Young: Jennifer Cowley's incredible work there on community engagement.
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Jeremy Young: You know, it's a useful example because it is an institution that you would
20:51
Jeremy Young: not expect would be able to be community engaged. It is in a red state.
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Jeremy Young: It is a research one institution.
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Jeremy Young: Both of, you know, if you ask the average person on the street,
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Jeremy Young: you know, are the institutions like that engaged in the community? They'll say no.
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Jeremy Young: So this institution became so thoroughly mission-driven to community engagement.
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Jeremy Young: It started with their strategic plan. They wrote a strategic plan where the
21:17
Jeremy Young: entire plan focused on community connections.
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Jeremy Young: They created numerous offices and projects.
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Jeremy Young: They created incentive and reward structures, as Lynn mentioned,
21:29
Jeremy Young: to build tenure and promotion recommendations to encourage faculty and staff
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Jeremy Young: to support community engaged work.
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Jeremy Young: They work with students to build community engaged projects.
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Jeremy Young: They even got a grant to create a fleet of autonomous self-driving cars to convey
21:48
Jeremy Young: people around the city of Arlington for free.
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Jeremy Young: You know, just completely embedded in the community.
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Jeremy Young: And when President Cowley talks about this, she says that her strategy for making
22:05
Jeremy Young: sure that the campus is community focused is to begin with yes.
22:10
Jeremy Young: When she hears an idea from someone, rather than starting with,
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Jeremy Young: you know, here are the problems, here are the obstacles we're going to face.
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Jeremy Young: She doesn't agree to it automatically, but she immediately begins trying to
22:22
Jeremy Young: figure out how it can happen. And if it's at all feasible, she'll greenlight
22:26
Jeremy Young: it. And that has led to this just proliferation of community engaged work. What's...
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Jeremy Young: Critical with that example, and what's so different from a number of other Research
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Jeremy Young: One institutions that have struggled with community engagement,
22:42
Jeremy Young: is that they're not siloing the work in one office.
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Jeremy Young: They are, you can't walk around, you can't be a faculty member,
22:49
Jeremy Young: you can't be a staff member or a student at UT Arlington and not know that engaging
22:56
Jeremy Young: with the community is the central mission of the university.
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Jeremy Young: And, you know, I think a number of institutions have built incredible community
23:04
Jeremy Young: engagement programs and partnership offices.
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Jeremy Young: But you ask your average faculty member, what's the mission of the university?
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Jeremy Young: They'll say, well, the mission is to do groundbreaking research for a national audience.
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Jeremy Young: And they're just very remote from their own office on campus.
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Jeremy Young: And I think that's where some of these efforts have foundered.
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Jeremy Young: Of course, we don't see those problems at community colleges,
23:27
Jeremy Young: regional publics, most HBCUs, TCU.
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Paul Kuttner: Why not? What are they doing different at those kind of places?
23:33
Paul Kuttner: And, you know, speaking as someone at a regional public university, I love hearing it, but.
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Jeremy Young: Well, it's an interesting question because I had a conversation with a president
23:43
Jeremy Young: at a community college system about a year ago.
23:47
Jeremy Young: And I said, why is it that the community thinks that you are a community asset
23:54
Jeremy Young: when clearly you don't have an enormous marketing budget?
23:58
Jeremy Young: Your marketing budget is spent on maybe getting into a couple of high school
24:01
Jeremy Young: classrooms and recruiting students, but you're not putting up billboards.
24:04
Jeremy Young: You're not running television ads.
24:06
Jeremy Young: How does that message get out there? And she said, there's simply nothing else that we do.
24:12
Jeremy Young: You know, it's obvious to people that this is our entire mission because every
24:17
Jeremy Young: single thing that we do is community engagement. You'll never encounter someone
24:23
Jeremy Young: at a community college who is doing something other than community engagement in any context.
24:27
Jeremy Young: And that, I think, is very similar to the situation the fire department is in.
24:32
Jeremy Young: What happens when you encounter firefighters? They're putting out fires.
24:37
Jeremy Young: They're saving cats from the tops of trees. They're holding toys for tots raffles.
24:42
Jeremy Young: You know, there is there is nothing that you see them doing that that is counter
24:47
Jeremy Young: to that mission. So it is the mission alignment that we see in these regional
24:52
Jeremy Young: institutions and local institutions that is different from what we see elsewhere.
24:58
Lynn Pasquerella: They're often the largest employer in the region, and that's true of all types of institutions.
25:05
Lynn Pasquerella: But the people who are working there and the students who are studying there
25:09
Lynn Pasquerella: live in the community. They are invested in the community in ways that other
25:14
Lynn Pasquerella: student populations aren't.
25:16
Paul Kuttner: One thing that I definitely felt throughout the report was this really putting
25:21
Paul Kuttner: the onus on universities to change.
25:24
Paul Kuttner: And you talk about this idea of trustworthiness. And I think in community engagement
25:28
Paul Kuttner: and community partnership work, that's coming up a lot more.
25:31
Paul Kuttner: Shifting from the language of trust sort of implies that.
25:37
Paul Kuttner: If I give you enough PR, if I give you good pictures of what I'm doing, you'll trust me.
25:40
Paul Kuttner: And this idea of being trustworthy, earning that trust. So can you talk a little
25:46
Paul Kuttner: bit about what higher ed really needs to do to be trustworthy for communities
25:52
Paul Kuttner: that are very skeptical of it?
25:55
Jeremy Young: You know, the challenge of trustworthiness is the challenge of longevity.
26:02
Jeremy Young: That is really, in order to be trustworthy, you have to make promises and keep
26:07
Jeremy Young: them over years and over decades.
26:09
Jeremy Young: And that's particularly challenging now because the tenures of college and university
26:15
Jeremy Young: presidents have become so short. The average tenure is under five years now.
26:19
Jeremy Young: And so really, you can't accomplish the building of a trusting relationship
26:25
Jeremy Young: with the community in a single presidency unless the president is extraordinarily long tenured.
26:32
Jeremy Young: You need to have some continuity between administrations. And that's something
26:37
Jeremy Young: that we're hoping to see more of from institutions, even if they're – and it's challenging.
26:42
Jeremy Young: One of our recommendations focuses on innovation, being able to accelerate the pace of change.
26:47
Jeremy Young: It's important that that change not be at the expense of long-tenured relationships
26:52
Jeremy Young: in the community because that does undermine the value of that trustworthiness.
26:58
Jeremy Young: And just to follow up on Lynn's excellent point about being visible in the community,
27:02
Jeremy Young: you know, being visible in the community requires the participation of everyone involved in a campus.
27:10
Jeremy Young: You know, the faculty members, students, trustees, staff members,
27:15
Jeremy Young: alumni, all of these people, you know, the president is probably the single
27:20
Jeremy Young: most visible person in the university to the community.
27:24
Jeremy Young: But the faculty as a whole are far more visible. The staff as a whole are far
27:28
Jeremy Young: more visible. Chances are, especially if it's a smaller community,
27:31
Jeremy Young: you have somebody who works at
27:33
Jeremy Young: the university living or who attends the university living on your street.
27:37
Jeremy Young: And so these local individual interpersonal interactions need to be mission
27:43
Jeremy Young: aligned. And the only way that that can happen is if the university builds internal
27:48
Jeremy Young: trust in addition to external trust.
27:51
Jeremy Young: We have to give the constituents of the university, including the students,
27:56
Jeremy Young: who some polling indicates become less supportive of their institution as they
28:02
Jeremy Young: spend more time in the process of getting a degree.
28:05
Jeremy Young: We have to give them a reason to believe in the mission.
28:08
Jeremy Young: And once we've done that, then we can deploy them and deputize them to spread
28:13
Jeremy Young: that mission to the public.
28:16
Paul Kuttner: One more type of trust I want to throw out and see what you think.
28:20
Paul Kuttner: Are there ways in which higher ed institutions need to trust the communities that they're engaging?
28:28
Jeremy Young: I think that's a great point. Yes, of course. And that's, you know,
28:31
Jeremy Young: that's exactly what that example of the fishermen, the bass fishermen points to,
28:37
Jeremy Young: that there is local and community ways of knowing that are not being taken advantage of by institutions.
28:45
Jeremy Young: And that's the low-hanging fruit, really.
28:49
Jeremy Young: It's easy for institutions to stop showing up and saying, I'm here to fix your
28:56
Jeremy Young: problem, and instead say, tell me what you know, and I can learn from you,
29:01
Jeremy Young: and then we can work together to find solutions.
29:04
Jeremy Young: That's just, it's an easy move to make, but it's something that needs to be
29:08
Jeremy Young: internalized throughout the process of building institutions,
29:13
Jeremy Young: through the process of training faculty and staff, through the process of incentives, and so on.
29:19
Lynn Pasquerella: And it requires us to adopt a stance of intellectual humility.
29:24
Paul Kuttner: Can you say more about what that means?
29:27
Lynn Pasquerella: It means understanding that the approaches that community members might have
29:32
Lynn Pasquerella: to solving our shared problems might actually be better than the ones that we've adopted.
29:39
Lynn Pasquerella: I was for five years led a research project in Kenya looking at clean water
29:44
Lynn Pasquerella: solutions, sustainable agriculture and entrepreneurship.
29:47
Lynn Pasquerella: And our students spent a couple semesters, students from Brown,
29:51
Lynn Pasquerella: MIT, University of Hartford, University of Rhode Island, working on designs
29:57
Lynn Pasquerella: for the most effective kiln for clay pot water filtration.
30:02
Lynn Pasquerella: The women in one of the communities we worked in took some local grasses,
30:07
Lynn Pasquerella: leaned up against them, created a kiln that was much more effective than what
30:11
Lynn Pasquerella: it took my students two semesters to do.
30:14
Lynn Pasquerella: It might have occurred to us at the beginning of this project to ask them before
30:19
Lynn Pasquerella: we spent all these resources.
30:34
Paul Kuttner: What about institutions, you know, we're talking about general distrust,
30:41
Paul Kuttner: but what about places where sort of significant harm has been done?
30:46
Paul Kuttner: You know, Lynn, when you're talking to presidents and people at institutions
30:51
Paul Kuttner: around the country, like, are there specific ways of thinking about trust
30:55
Paul Kuttner: when there's very particular harms that have led people to distrust and be skeptical
31:01
Paul Kuttner: that higher ed has their interests in mind?
31:04
Lynn Pasquerella: Yes. Well, you have to accept accountability, apologize, be transparent.
31:10
Lynn Pasquerella: And the challenge for presidents today is that there are multiple constituencies often calling for
31:21
Lynn Pasquerella: resolutions in ways that issue unconditional non-negotiable demands.
31:27
Lynn Pasquerella: And yet the demands are at odds with one another.
31:30
Lynn Pasquerella: So not everybody is going to be happy with a decision that's being made,
31:34
Lynn Pasquerella: but you must be transparent around how the decision was made, whose voices
31:39
Lynn Pasquerella: were heard, whose were marginalized, and then talk about the real impact of those decisions.
31:48
Lynn Pasquerella: What's the disparately negative impact of certain decisions?
31:52
Lynn Pasquerella: What burdens are being borne by certain populations that might not be transparent
31:58
Lynn Pasquerella: in the way that it's being communicated.
32:02
Paul Kuttner: Jeremy, when you were looking at,
32:06
Paul Kuttner: actually looking at the data on distrust, are there particular communities or
32:11
Paul Kuttner: groups within the country that have more or less faith in higher ed?
32:16
Paul Kuttner: And do you have a sense of why?
32:20
Jeremy Young: So the polling suggests that there has been a big fall off in trust in higher
32:24
Jeremy Young: ed And among Republicans in particular, starting around the beginning of the
32:29
Jeremy Young: first Trump administration, so 2015, 2016,
32:33
Jeremy Young: There has been some decline among independents. What's interesting is that over
32:39
Jeremy Young: the last year, the new Gallup poll that came out that asks this question every
32:44
Jeremy Young: year found that there has also been a decline among Democrats.
32:48
Jeremy Young: And the suggestion is that that decline has some relation to how universities
32:53
Jeremy Young: have responded or failed to respond to the actions of the current administration.
32:59
Jeremy Young: In other words, they are not inspiring confidence or trust because they're not
33:03
Jeremy Young: defending themselves in the way that the public would like to see.
33:06
Jeremy Young: Even the Democrats would like to see.
33:09
Jeremy Young: Beyond that, we don't have a lot of demographic data of different groups of
33:14
Jeremy Young: people. Of course, people who've been to college and received a degree tend
33:19
Jeremy Young: to trust higher education more than people who haven't.
33:23
Jeremy Young: Although actually that data as well has shifted a bit.
33:27
Jeremy Young: It is now only people with graduate degrees who have more trust in college than the general public.
33:33
Jeremy Young: People who have received only a bachelor's degree have the same amount of trust
33:38
Jeremy Young: in higher education as people who have some college or no college experience.
33:43
Jeremy Young: So it really, you know, there is a group of boosters for higher education,
33:47
Jeremy Young: typically people who are very involved in the higher education system.
33:51
Jeremy Young: The farther away you get from that system, the less popular it becomes.
33:56
Jeremy Young: But really, that points, I think, to a challenge with not just a particular
34:02
Jeremy Young: group, but with the public as a whole.
34:05
Jeremy Young: You shouldn't have to reach out
34:08
Jeremy Young: and touch higher education in order to understand what it does for you.
34:11
Jeremy Young: Again, going back to the fire department example, most people never call 911.
34:16
Jeremy Young: Most people never have a fire, but they understand the value of having a fire
34:20
Jeremy Young: department in their community.
34:21
Jeremy Young: And that is something that we need to change for higher ed.
34:25
Lynn Pasquerella: Yeah, it's one of the consequences of the shift away from the notion of higher
34:29
Lynn Pasquerella: education as a public good to viewing it as a private commodity.
34:33
Lynn Pasquerella: There is skepticism about the value added of a college degree and return on
34:39
Lynn Pasquerella: investment. And I think that's part of what's fueling the narrative.
34:44
Paul Kuttner: You put this out in June. What has been the response from higher ed,
34:50
Paul Kuttner: from people outside higher ed to the report? And I assume you going around the
34:55
Paul Kuttner: country and sort of sharing these ideas in other forms.
34:58
Jeremy Young: So we've gotten a lot of a very large number of readers and views for the report.
35:05
Jeremy Young: So people are reading it, they're listening to it, they're paying attention.
35:08
Jeremy Young: We had coverage in all the major higher ed publications when it came out in
35:12
Jeremy Young: the Washington Post and the Atlantic and some other places.
35:15
Jeremy Young: And since then, it's interesting the way the trust conversation has evolved
35:21
Jeremy Young: into – there are these other reports from Yale and Vanderbilt that have focused
35:27
Jeremy Young: on trust in different ways from how we addressed it.
35:30
Jeremy Young: And the administration has been seizing on those reports and saying that this
35:35
Jeremy Young: demonstrates that the administration's priorities are the reason that the loss of trust has occurred.
35:42
Jeremy Young: And we are trying to make, I think, a very complex argument that isn't obvious
35:47
Jeremy Young: to, that doesn't fall along obvious political lines.
35:51
Jeremy Young: We are arguing that there is a serious trust problem for higher education,
35:56
Jeremy Young: but that it doesn't map very closely at all onto the administration's concerns,
36:01
Jeremy Young: that the concerns of the bass fishermen are very different from the concerns
36:05
Jeremy Young: of the person the bass fisherman votes for.
36:08
Jeremy Young: And we need to understand that public level of concern and that community level
36:12
Jeremy Young: of concern and address that.
36:14
Jeremy Young: I think we have had a real strong wave of support from frontline practitioners
36:20
Jeremy Young: who do community engagement work, who do student success work,
36:23
Jeremy Young: who see us as advocating for.
36:26
Jeremy Young: You know, that the type of work that they do is no longer a nice to have.
36:30
Jeremy Young: It's no longer optional. It is central to solving this problem that higher education faces.
36:36
Jeremy Young: And so we are continuing to promote the ideas and the recommendations of the report.
36:41
Jeremy Young: We are starting a leadership institute in January that will have campus teams
36:47
Jeremy Young: come and work with us to implement those recommendations on their campuses.
36:52
Jeremy Young: We are building a coalition. We're starting the process of building self-assessment
36:57
Jeremy Young: metrics for campuses to evaluate trust.
37:00
Jeremy Young: So really, I think the strongest response has been from people on the front
37:03
Jeremy Young: lines, people who are engaged in this work and doing this work and see this,
37:08
Jeremy Young: as a new way of thinking about the problems and possibilities of higher education.
37:13
Paul Kuttner: Lynn, did you want to talk about what you've heard?
37:16
Lynn Pasquerella: Well, yes. I mean, Jeremy mentioned other reports, reports like the Yale report
37:22
Lynn Pasquerella: that focus on grade inflation or legacy admissions are disconnected in many
37:27
Lynn Pasquerella: ways from the institutions that
37:31
Lynn Pasquerella: students are predominantly attending.
37:32
Lynn Pasquerella: And so I think we offer something that's quite different, an approach that speaks
37:38
Lynn Pasquerella: to a broader segment of the population than many of these other reports that
37:43
Lynn Pasquerella: have received so much attention and so much negative reaction.
37:48
Paul Kuttner: I really do appreciate that. I haven't read these other reports,
37:50
Paul Kuttner: but just in general, it is kind of amazing how much of the discourse around
37:54
Paul Kuttner: higher education is focused on maybe 5% of the institutions.
38:00
Paul Kuttner: And so I appreciate you kind of pushing us to both focus on the institutions
38:05
Paul Kuttner: most people go to and to learn from them.
38:08
Paul Kuttner: That sort of elite institutions, R1 institutions, you know, have a lot to learn
38:13
Paul Kuttner: from community colleges, from regional state universities, from these places
38:17
Paul Kuttner: that are just inherently a bit more embedded in their locations.
38:23
Paul Kuttner: What do you think of all the recommendations that you've put in here?
38:27
Paul Kuttner: You know, Lynn, you've done a lot of you've been a leader in higher ed and done a lot of change work.
38:33
Paul Kuttner: What is going to be the most difficult for universities to implement?
38:40
Lynn Pasquerella: I think it will be difficult to make this shift
38:48
Lynn Pasquerella: to focusing on visibility within communities and to collaborate in ways
38:56
Lynn Pasquerella: that will be necessary to change the messaging, to be authentic messengers and
39:01
Lynn Pasquerella: speak across not only our sector, but across all sectors about repositioning
39:06
Lynn Pasquerella: higher education as a public good.
39:09
Lynn Pasquerella: We've been so steeped in this system of competition reflected in rankings in U.S.
39:15
Lynn Pasquerella: News and World's Report, which perpetuates some of our bad practices,
39:20
Lynn Pasquerella: measuring prestige in terms of how many people we exclude as opposed to a focus
39:27
Lynn Pasquerella: on inclusive excellence.
39:29
Lynn Pasquerella: And so that shift in our values, I think, is going to be the most difficult
39:34
Lynn Pasquerella: obstacle that we'll have to overcome.
39:37
Jeremy Young: I think Lynn's probably right about that, this one. The only other point that
39:42
Jeremy Young: I would say is going to be particularly tough is our first recommendation around
39:46
Jeremy Young: accelerating innovation on campus.
39:48
Jeremy Young: I think it's very challenging and really for the reasons that Lynn says,
39:51
Jeremy Young: it's very challenging for institutions to work together as a single voice,
39:56
Jeremy Young: as a single organism, to work across institutions, to implement things that
40:01
Jeremy Young: most people agree need to happen and yet are stymied by parochial interests and gridlock,
40:08
Jeremy Young: at the campus level and at the system level.
40:10
Jeremy Young: You know, it continues to astonish me.
40:14
Jeremy Young: Over a decade now into my higher education career that the degree to which this
40:21
Jeremy Young: sector is fragmented in every possible way.
40:25
Jeremy Young: You know, the decentralization of higher education is valuable in that it encourages
40:31
Jeremy Young: innovation and it creates all sorts of different models of higher education
40:35
Jeremy Young: institutions that serve different student populations.
40:38
Jeremy Young: But it makes it almost impossible for institutions to coordinate in the way
40:43
Jeremy Young: that virtually every other professional sector in the United States would,
40:48
Jeremy Young: in their own defense, in their ability to enact organizational changes.
40:52
Jeremy Young: We're still arguing over universal transfer, even though everyone agrees,
40:56
Jeremy Young: even though universally we agree that it's a good idea, we still can't figure
41:00
Jeremy Young: out how to make it easy and seamless for every student every time.
41:04
Jeremy Young: Those are the kinds of things that I think we're just going to have to find
41:09
Jeremy Young: a way to make them happen. But it's going to be challenging.
41:13
Paul Kuttner: Okay, so we're coming towards the end of the time. Is there anything that we
41:18
Paul Kuttner: didn't get to talk about that you just really want to share?
41:21
Paul Kuttner: Sort of one gem that you want to make sure people walk away from from this report with?
41:29
Lynn Pasquerella: I think what people need to take away is
41:34
Lynn Pasquerella: a sense of urgency around addressing what I see as the biggest challenge facing
41:40
Lynn Pasquerella: American higher education today, and that is a growing economic and racial segregation.
41:46
Lynn Pasquerella: We have lost ground. We need to work to restore trust through trustworthiness in order
41:55
Lynn Pasquerella: to meet our mission at AAC&U, which is centered on advancing the democratic
42:01
Lynn Pasquerella: purposes of higher education through liberal education,
42:04
Lynn Pasquerella: and to ensure that higher education remains a cornerstone of the American dream.
42:10
Jeremy Young: I agree. You know, it's I think if there's anything else that I want people
42:15
Jeremy Young: to take, it's that this is this is a solvable problem.
42:18
Jeremy Young: The loss of trust in higher education is not a foregone conclusion.
42:21
Jeremy Young: It is something that institutions can turn around and that can be turned around
42:25
Jeremy Young: at the level of the individual leader or the individual institution,
42:27
Jeremy Young: as well as more broadly through the sector.
42:31
Jeremy Young: And that the key is to take our eye away, our eyes away from the splashy political
42:38
Jeremy Young: news about higher education and focus on the basics.
42:43
Jeremy Young: How are we serving our students? How are we serving our communities?
42:46
Jeremy Young: And to do those things well and to do them well everywhere and all the time.
42:51
Jeremy Young: And if we're able to do that, we will eventually turn around,
42:58
Jeremy Young: those trend lines that go down forever. They will stop going down.
43:02
Jeremy Young: They will come back up. We will restore and build public trust in higher education.
43:08
Jeremy Young: We just have to take the first step.
43:11
Paul Kuttner: Excellent. Thank you both for joining me and for diving into a little bit of
43:15
Paul Kuttner: the report. I'll definitely share the link so people can get the whole report.
43:20
Paul Kuttner: And there's a lot more in there that we didn't have a chance to get to.
43:23
Paul Kuttner: But I just want to thank you for taking the time.
43:26
Lynn Pasquerella: Thank you. Thanks so much for all that you do.
43:28
Paul Kuttner: Thanks for having us.
43:38
Paul Kuttner: For show notes and links to subscribe to the podcast and our Substack newsletter,
43:42
Paul Kuttner: go to partnershipwork.org.
43:44
Paul Kuttner: Partnership Work is an independent podcast produced with the support of Urban
43:48
Paul Kuttner: Media Arts here in my hometown of Malden, Massachusetts.
43:52
Paul Kuttner: Visit them at urbanmediaarts.org.