Will This Dumpster Fire Burn Itself Out?

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Erin Hennessy 

Hello and welcome to the Trusted Voices Podcast. I'm Erin Hennessy alongside Teresa Valerio Parrot, and in each episode, we discuss the latest news and biggest issues facing higher education leaders through a communications lens. For these conversations, we're often joined by a guest who shares their own experiences and perspectives, but we also make time for one-on-one conversations about what we're seeing, hearing and thinking.

Teresa Valerio Parrot

Hi, Erin, good morning!

Erin Hennessy

Hi, good morning!

Teresa Valerio Parrot

It's really early here where I am. 

Erin Hennessy

Yeah, we're coming on lunch over here and I'm very excited about it. One of, one of my three favorite meals.

Teresa Valerio Parrot

Well, Allie has first breakfast and second breakfast, so I would say it's one of her four favorite meals.

Erin Hennessy

Yeah, I don't have that kind of time in my life.

So how are things in higher education? Good, good?

Teresa Valerio Parrot

A little bit doom and gloom, but that's okay. This weekend I was at AERA and we'll talk a little bit about that later, but I was able to catch up with Michael Harris, who didn't realize when he said that he had an afternoon that I was going to take up like 10 hours of his day. And we were able to talk a little bit about what's going on in the industry and he said, I need to buy Capitalizing on College: How Higher Education Went from Mission Driven to Margin Obsessed. So, we'll put that in the show notes and I think we're going to do a book club. So let us know if you'd like to join.

Erin Hennessy

Do you want to tell people who Michael Harris is? I mean, everyone should know who Michael Harris is.

Teresa Valerio Parrot

Everyone should know who Michael Harris is. So Michael Harris is professor, soon to be interim dean at SMU of Education. He was one of the reasons I started my doctoral degree at SMU. He studies presidents in higher ed. He was on my dissertation committee. He has become a very close colleague. And he is one of two authors I am working on a book with for Harvard Education Press on presidents and boards. So…

Erin Hennessy

Safe to say he's a friend of the show and one of the earliest friends of the show. 

Teresa Valerio Parrot

Yes. Yes. And he is a very, very smart dude who makes me think about higher education still very much in that mentoring professorial role. So, basically, when I say we're having a book club, I better get my poop in a group to be ready for Professor Harris to be quizzing me on the ins and outs of this book.

Erin Hennessy

Alright, well, I'm going to order it but I'm not going to tell them then. So, books, don't read them. Don't read them.

Teresa Valerio Parrot

So there we go. So I was at AERA and it was really fun to see him. I also saw Sandra Berenger, who was my dissertation chair. We had dinner. It was really nice to catch up with some higher ed peeps and just to talk about a whole bunch of things and spend some time because the conference was in my town.

Erin Hennessy

Well, that's great.

Teresa Valerio Parrot

Yeah, the reason we were talking about margins is because I was sharing with Michael that this year, the AMA symposium theme is revenue and reputation. So he was asking a little bit about the pressures that we're seeing in the industry and I was filling him in on that. So there you go. 

Erin Hennessy

Are there pressures in the industry?

Teresa Valerio Parrot

Yes, they are tied to reputation and revenue. 

Erin Hennessy

Interesting, interesting. Well, that's excellent. I went to a lot of travel team baseball this weekend and didn't do anything higher ed related really. So…

Teresa Valerio Parrot

Well, good luck to your nephew Jack. I hope that he has lots of success.

Erin Hennessy

Yeah, it'd just be great if these games were a little shorter. The pitch clock is a great invention and it should be applied to travel baseball. You have a couple other things you wanted to mention. We're intentionally keeping this front piece a little bit shorter because we have a great guest coming up and we kept him longer than we probably should have, longer than his team wanted us to, maybe. So we want to get to that conversation pretty quickly.

Teresa Valerio Parrot

Yes. Yes, the second piece I wanted to share is that after our last podcast, as you all heard, I had a lot of energy about the fight for higher ed. And so, I chatted with you after and I said, you know what we should do? We should have, the cheer mom in me came out and I said, we should have a fundraiser. And if we're going to have a fundraiser for higher ed.

Erin Hennessy

Let's wash cars in the funeral home parking lot.

Teresa Valerio Parrot

No, we were not. No, we were not going to do that. I said, we should do a merch sale. And so, I talked to Savannah of Parrot Like the Bird, and I had her come up with four designs for some merchandise that say Fight for Higher Ed. And all proceeds from our little merch sale are going to go to PEN America to support the ability to have freedom of speech and academic freedom and support pushback on book bands. So thank you for the introduction to that nonprofit.

Erin Hennessy

Absolutely.

Teresa Valerio Parrot

We will have a link in our show notes for our merch sale for Fight for Higher Ed. Our four designs go from, how would you describe them? Very...

Erin Hennessy

I would say, look at the four designs and decide which I advocated for and which Teresa advocated for. And then tell us your guesses.

Teresa Valerio Parrot

Some are more formal, some are more informal. So it won't be surprising. The President is selling best followed by, I think maybe the Dean and the Chair is not selling as well. 

Erin Hennessy

This is what we have named these designs, not... 

Teresa Valerio Parrot

The Provost is kind of in the middle.

Erin Hennessy

So often the provost is in the middle, yeah?

Teresa Valerio Parrot

But the President is by far, yes, by far selling best.

Erin Hennessy

Interesting.

Teresa Valerio Parrot

Yes. So I think yours was the Provost. Yeah, there you go. 

Erin Hennessy

Yeah, quiet behind the scenes, doing the hard work, not flashy.

Teresa Valerio Parrot

No, no, no. Yeah, but we all knew the President was the one we knew would sell the best because it's kind of straightforward. But Fight for Higher Ed is the push. All of them have accents of purple and that was intentional. It's the overlap of red and blue. So we're right in the middle. Well, that was the rationale for TVP columns too.

Erin Hennessy

It's the TVP comms color as well. We just like purple.

Teresa Valerio Parrot

Well, that was the rationale for TVP columns too. We're in the middle. 

Erin Hennessy

We just like purple.

Teresa Valerio Parrot

In our creative brief, that was the rationale. And we'll also put a link to kind of why we chose to do this, because we want to support higher ed as well. So, do want to give a little shout out to PEN America and why that was your recommendation for the nonprofit that gets the proceeds?

Erin Hennessy

Sure, PEN America has partnered with ACE on a push to protect academic freedom. They're essentially an organization that allows people and supports people writing, teaching, and reading about whatever they damn well please. And certainly their focus on book bans is something near and dear to my heart as a voracious reader and someone for whom reading truly has changed my life. And so it seemed like a very straightforward, very easy way to support higher education. The truth is there's so many good organizations supporting higher ed, but this one seemed to really get at the heart of what we value and care about most and what seems at the core to be the focus of attacks from outside actors. Ooh, that sounds very like spy-novely. Yeah, that's, PEN America has always been a phenomenal organization and it's a thrill to be able to support them.

Teresa Valerio Parrot

So help us fight for higher ed. And that actually was the perfect segue to our guest today.

Ted Mitchell has served as president of the American Council on Education since September 2017. Mitchell and his team worked closely with Congress, the executive branch, and the private sector to develop policies and innovative practices that serve our country's post-secondary learners. Mitchell served in the Obama administration as US Undersecretary of Education, as president of Occidental College, vice chancellor and dean at the University of California, Los Angeles, professor and department chair at Dartmouth College, and a member of the Stanford University Board of Trustees.

Thank you for joining us, Ted. I'd love for us to begin with something today for an insider's view from you about what's going on with executive orders, court filings, Department of Education energy, and all around DC energy. What are you hearing?

Ted Mitchell

Dumpster fire.

Teresa Valerio Parrot

Well, that's what it feels like from Colorado, just so that you know.

Erin Hennessy

That's why it's so warm.

Ted Mitchell 

Well, yeah, exactly. Up close, up close and especially in the evenings, there's this delightful glow that you can mistake for the seasons changing. You know, it's never been like this before. The amount of tumult and chaos and information and misinformation. It's really quite extraordinary. The big takeaway for ACE and for our members is that it's very, very hard to do anything that looks like planning. Because you just, not only do you not know what tomorrow holds, you don't know what yesterday held.

Teresa Valerio Parrot

Right.

Erin Hennessy

That's such a good point.

Teresa Valerio Parrot

And we talk to our presidents about this all of the time. We get caught in chasing our tails for the day. And the next day, everything has changed and we're chasing our tails for that day. And then everything changes.

Ted Mitchell

Yes.

Erin Hennessy

Yeah, and half the time it feels like somebody moved your tail and you're not entirely sure where it is.

Ted Mitchell 

Right, your first is, where is my tail? Where did I leave that?

Teresa Valerio Parrot

Do I have a tail? 

Erin Hennessy

Yes, do I still have fun? 

Teresa Valerio Parrot

Yeah, exactly.

Erin Hennessy

Yeah, yep.

Ted Mitchell

Yeah, yeah. So there are all kinds of things people can do and not do, but I do think that that's saying don't just sit there, do something. 

Teresa Valerio Parrot

That's my, that's my saying. But go ahead.

Ted Mitchell

But I think we should reverse it for a while. Don't just do something, sit there. 

Teresa Valerio Parrot

That's what Erin is advocating.

Ted Mitchell

Yeah, well, we've learned a lot, right? I think that we all worked hard to respond to the executive orders. We continue to work hard and I think substantively on some of the agency changes and cuts and we'll talk, I know, about research in a bit. But aside from that, I think that what we've learned is that this stuff always sounds more dire than it ends up being. And so we should just kind of take the blow, wait for it to settle and figure out where one can actually plan a little bit for some activity.

Teresa Valerio 

Well, and we've talked about that because so many institutions that have jumped have over-interpreted and they've read into some of the language, what wasn't there. It's purposely been gray. And so when they read into it, they're imagining what it could have been and they're going further, maybe, than what was even there. And I would guess that there's somebody somewhere who's smiling and saying, thank you for taking this further than I even dreamed it could have gone.

Ted Mitchell 

Yeah, I think that's a really, really good point. And I think that we warned people in February that preemptive compliance was an objective of all of this stuff and that people really shouldn't imagine that they were going to have to do all of these things. Now, the caveat is, if you're doing things that were illegal before inauguration, they were still illegal. 

Teresa Valerio Parrot

Right, right.

Ted Mitchell 

But if you weren't, there was nothing that had changed in the law. So sit tight. Let's worry about this when there's actually something to worry about.

Erin Hennessy

One of the things that is just so destabilizing for higher ed, and I'm sure for the association world as well, is that we are an industry that really runs and functions really well when things are predictable, consistent. That there are norms that we all adhere to, that there are calendars, you know, there's a reason that many of us went to college, left college and said, you know, this, sort of rhythm is really attractive and I want to continue to work in this space and it's just not where we are. And I wonder just how you're thinking about, if there was anything we could have done short of preemptive compliance to sort of be more ready for this moment. Is this the natural outgrowth of, and Teresa and I talk about this all the time, ballrooms full of presidents saying, well, it's just a storytelling problem. Were we so busy worrying about the storytelling problem that we weren't preparing to be a little more resilient or responsive to what, in some cases, are legitimate critiques of the industry?

Ted Mitchell

Yeah, I think it's a really good framing. I think I'll use my own experience as an example. I've been at ACE now for seven and a half years, which seems remarkable. 

Teresa Valerio Parrot

Wow, time's flying and also going so slowly.

Ted Mitchell

I know. But it seems like just yesterday that I was doing my final interview with the ACE board and they asked me what the number one priority for ACE should be. And I said, addressing the negative narrative about higher education. Right? So we've been here for a while. And I think I think that for too long we did believe that if we just spoke more slowly and more clearly, you know, people would say, how silly of me. Of course, higher education is great.

Erin Hennessy

Yeah. The problem was with the receiver of the message, not the substance of our message.

Teresa Valerio Parrot

Right, right.

Ted Mitchell

Not the substance of it. So then fast forward, I think that we might have been taken by surprise by Mr. Trump, but what we were really taken by surprise by was last spring's protests. 

Teresa Valerio Parrot

Yeah, I agree.

Ted Mitchell

And I think that that's really where we learned we were behind.

Teresa Valerio Parrot

I think in part because the feedback that we got from those protests is that our own people were upset with us. It wasn't just that they were upset with us, but our own community was upset with us, and we didn't know what to do with that.

Ted Mitchell 

That's right. And the upset reinforced what others were saying about us outside.

Teresa Valerio Parrot

Right, right.

Ted Mitchell 

And so you had very peculiar and problematic things and anti-Semitism continues to be an issue. But you had people in the DEI offices of institutions saying, Jews aren't a part of that. And if that's where we were as an institution, is it any wonder that we're being pilloried for anti-Semitism? And so it's that kind of thing where I think that the regularity and the predictability, on the one hand, it looks like it's linear and it's the same. But I think what, looking back, I think there was a drift. And so what looked like it was business as usual, we got called on that. And we said, business as usual isn't even what we thought business as usual was. We're not inclusive campuses. We have terrible completion rates. People can't transfer classes. Faculty are drifting way left. And so it's become more about advocacy than it has been about critical thinking. Full stop. And that's where we are today. I think there is growing recognition that we need to address those issues. Good. There are changes afoot. Great. And there's an administration that sort of doesn't care. That for them, you know, this is about punishment, it's about retribution, it's about past ills. It's really hard in that environment to sort of come up with what's the settlement? What can we do to prove that we're taking this seriously? And what will you do to take your boot off our neck?

Teresa Valerio Parrot

And that's one of the reasons I think that I really appreciated how Harvard reshaped its website. Because what they did is they decided, okay, we're going to go ahead to this messaging issue, right? We are going to reshape our website so that our audience is the public in a different way. It used to be, how do we tell people what we want them to know about us in a way that is a teachable lesson? We're not making this accessible, but instead, what do we want them to know so that they enroll or that they give or that they think about us in the ways we want them to know about us? And instead they shifted that to say, what does higher education mean to you? What does research, how has it impacted your life for the better? And can we introduce the faculty to you as human beings who are part of your community? And I think that type of meeting people where they want to engage with higher education or could engage with higher education, I thought that was a really smart move and I'm seeing more movement in that direction.

Ted Mitchell 

Yeah, I think it's great point. And I think that the idea of moving the narrative to answer the question, what's in it for me, is really important. 

Teresa Valerio Parrot

Right, exactly. That's exactly it.

Ted Mitchell 

And so what's in it for you as, you know, around the kitchen table is that the food that you eat is actually healthier and better for you because of all of the great work that our agronomists are doing.

Teresa Valerio Parrot

Right.

Ted Mitchell

And we were talking earlier about allergy medicine, it is that season. Where'd those come from? You know, it's not like somebody just snapped their fingers and came up with Zyrtec. Biomedical research is really important.

Teresa Valerio Parrot

Right. And bless those researchers.

Ted Mitchell 

And bless those researchers, especially when you're bringing your handkerchief to your face every minute. I had the occasion to drive across the country three weeks ago. Kansas, talk about Harvard's website, the state of Kansas and the University of Kansas has created billboards across the state that are highlighting research done in Kansas in that county that I'm driving through. 

Teresa Valerio Parrot

That's great.

Ted Mitchell 

And so I think that we're kind of getting it. We're kind of getting it. Can I riff for a second about the problem? 

Teresa Valerio Parrot

That's what we're here for. Go for it. 

Erin Hennessy

No, absolutely no riffing.

Teresa Valerio Parrot

Go for it. I'm here for it.

Ted Mitchell 

So let's take that. So I was talking with the president of Southern University from Louisiana the other morning. And so he said, look, when people in the rural communities outside of Baton Rouge think about us, they think about our mobile dental clinic and our mobile medical clinic. Great, good, check, just what we want. The NIH grant cuts, what did they cut? The mobile dental and medical clinic. So we're in a situation where we can't play our best cards because they're being taken out of our hands. And not only is that bad for higher education, but it's bad for the people who need those services. So one of my arguments with the Trump administration is that they seem to be dead set on punishing institutions, but they're not. They're holding research hostage and they're punishing people who need the benefits of that research.

Teresa Valerio Parrot

And all of us need to be telling that story in each of our communities for where it impacts people in their own homes and in their own businesses and therefore in their own pocketbooks and with their own families.

Ted Mitchell

Yeah, that's exactly right. And it sounds awful, but I think that in addition to telling the story about the way our researchers and the teaching and the cultural contributions to communities and in the ways that that answers the what's in it for me question, we also need to flip that and we need to be better about showing pain, showing the things that are actually happening to our neighbors, our friends, our relatives, and to bring that part of it home too.

Erin Hennessy

Ted, I'm going to throw a question out and it's just coming out of the conversation. I agree with everything you've just said, and it's a point we make often, but the thing I keep coming back to is, is there a chance to make a difference, to move the Trump administration? You just said, the point you make to the Trump administration is… What does that conversation look like? When I was at ACE, you know, the GR team had great relationships, regardless of party. Is there even an opportunity now beyond letters and sign on statements? Are you in active conversation with Secretary McMahon and other people in the department? Is there a hope in your heart to move the needle? Talking about mobile dental clinics or any of those other kinds of things. I guess that's sort of the question that sticks in my head.

Ted Mitchell

Yeah. Yeah, so you both know me well enough to know that I'm an optimist. And so I do have hope that we'll be able to get through this moment and get to a moment where we're actually talking about what we can do for America's families, America's students. Right after the election, right after Secretary McMahon was named, I sent her a congratulations letter, but also talked about her appointment publicly and saying, that I thought that there was gonna be an interesting moment where the administration was going to need to choose between serious policymaking and following up on the overheated campaign rhetoric. And I'm afraid that they continue to live in that overheated campaign rhetoric space. But I have incredible hope that we'll be able to move to policymaking. We don't have direct communication with the secretary yet. I have a request out for a meeting with her and I hope that that happens. We have an agenda that we think is actually quite close to hers in many ways. We're big supporters of, I think what we're calling Workforce Pell now. We know that higher education as a whole needs to be much more closely linked to the world of work. We're total supporters of public transparency about outcomes. As you know, we just put out the new Carnegie classifications.

Teresa Valerio Parrot

Yes, congratulations.

Ted Mitchell 

That for the first time hold institutions accountable for student success. And that's everybody. We now have sort of a spot on a graph for every institution in the country. And we can talk about access and we can talk about earnings. So we're all in on a lot of the things that I think the Trump administration and other administrations are after. And to your broader point, we wanna work with people to create positive outcomes, but we also need to support higher education as an industry. And I think a lot of our return rhetoric has been about not throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Erin Hennessy

Yeah. What's the, and I'm going to ask this, not in a Pollyanna kind of way, but what's the thing that gives you hope that we will eventually move to policy? Do you think they'll just run out of energy, run out of steam with the overheated rhetoric? 

Ted Mitchell 

A couple things. I think that a lot of these fires will burn themselves out. And that's one. Two, I think that, as we were talking about a moment ago, a lot of the activity that is sort of cutting research funding now in the budget reconciliation bill that will reduce financial aid opportunities. I think that each of those creates another pain point for constituents in members of Congress. And I'm going start to hear from them. And I think that is going to drive us back into thinking about serious policy very, very, very quickly.

Erin Hennessy

You're on the record.

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Teresa Valerio Parrot

I'm gonna shift us a bit because I think we're seeing that presidents are damned if they do and they damned if they don't on multiple fronts. We've been talking about the federal front, but you're a former president and we're seeing that presidents are in this near impossible position of having the faculty say, we would like for you to advocate for us on XYZ. And state legislatures, and this is for public and private institutions, are saying, we want for you to push back on exactly those same positions. So if you go back to when you were president, what advice would you be giving for those damned presidents to be working through where they see themselves on that state level, as well as on that federal level for this damning?

Ted Mitchell 

Yeah, it really is the Scylla and Charybdis of the college presidency right now.

Teresa Valerio Parrot

Right.

Ted Mitchell 

I guess the first thing that I'll say is the strength of American higher education is the diversity of our institutions, which means that every president has a different situation. 

Teresa Valerio Parrot

Right.

Ted Mitchell 

And so one size will not fit all. One set of recommendations won't fit all. I think the most important thing is clarity and consistency, or things, are clarity and consistency. If you're not going to sign a letter, say why you're not going to sign a letter. And if you're not going to sign that letter, don't sign the next letter. And I think that that's where presidents really get in trouble is when they allow themselves to be whipsawed back and forth. And answer one constituency's demands and not another. And then they're seen as playing favorites and that doesn't work. But in general, I think, the other thing is that you use the phrase teachable moment. I think that it's a teachable moment for presidents too. I know that Sian Beilock from Dartmouth wrote a long letter explaining why she didn't sign a letter. And I think it was really important for her to do that because it laid out her reasoning and her logic. And a part of what I think we need to educate our students and activists about, is that there's a difference between having a cause and having an effect.

Teresa Valerio Parrot

Yes.

Ted Mitchell

And it's a little easy to have a cause, and it can be performative, but that may not lead you to the effect that you want to have.

Teresa Valerio Parrot

I agree with that wholeheartedly, yes.

Ted Mitchell 

And I think that that's a conversation that presidents ought to have, not just with their students, but with their faculties. About what do you want to have happen in the world and what's the right way to make that happen? And I think that they are huge.

Teresa Valerio Parrot

And those are uncomfortable conversations. My presidents that I've been able to encourage to have those conversations, they're tough, but you actually build more trust and you build more empathy with those constituencies long-term.

Ted Mitchell

I think that that's right. And I think what's important is to say “not this, but that,” and then to hold yourself, as the president, accountable for doing the “but that” part. So I'm not going to sign the letter, but I am going to do this other thing over here.

Teresa Valerio Parrot

And that's not a no, that's a “not this, but that.” Correct.

Ted Mitchell 

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. But it's a tough, tough spot. I've watched presidential inaugurations being disturbed by protesters. And it's like, really? What's that going to get you? So I think that there continues to be a mismatch between cause and effect that would be good to have as a part of a dialogue about what it means to be… How it means to change public opinion, how it means to change policy. We need to develop that muscle outside of just performative protest.

Erin Hennessy

You raised such an interesting point there and you said what seems to be the magic word lately, which is “letter.” AAC has got a lot of signatories on a letter and got a lot of media attention for it. I think we're about to enter a season where we're going to see a thousand letters bloom. And I think on some level what that points to and what the presidential inauguration protest points to or the commencement protest, is that people feel like they don't have any other real mechanisms to make that change and to engage in pushback. And higher ed, God love us, has never been great about coming together because we are so diverse and saying this is the higher ed position and, you know, ACE has attempted to play that role of convener and has done it very well. But at the same time, is that enough? And I know you've talked about being in a season of lawsuits and other kinds of pushback. What things can individual institutions really harness at this point in time beyond just, you know, I saw an interview with Sheryl Crow yesterday where she says, “I call my members of Congress every morning, every single morning.” Other than all of us downloading the five calls app and dialing up the members of Congress, what can institutions and what can their students and faculty do that can be more effective than some of the performative stuff?

Ted Mitchell

Yeah. So first let me, I know I've been hard on letters and I'm probably guilty of sending more than any other human being in Washington.

Erin Hennessy

There's a lot of things to write about lately.

Ted Mitchell

There's a lot of things to write about.

Teresa Valerio Parrot

And keep that postal service going.

Erin Hennessy

Yes, please.

Ted Mitchell 

Well, I do joke with our team that with the advent of AI, we could now create letters and then our friends in Congress could respond without there ever being any humans involved. 

Erin Hennessy

Yeah, yeah.

Ted Mitchell

But it's not going to go that far. Look, I think that letters are good for identifying like-minded individuals. But then the next step is how can you take that so that the letter that continues to circulate is drawing together people who have raised their hands and who have said, we agree on these principles. So then the next step is how do you bring those individuals together and say, the letter was just a signal, now what can we do?

Erin Hennessy

Right, the “so what” of it.

Ted Mitchell

The “so what” of it. And I think one of the things, and we've been looking at the signatories quite closely, there are regions in which the letter has been quite popular. And so maybe there's an institution in that region that can take the lead and convene those institutions and say, who are, for example, the members of our state legislature? Who are the members, the congressional members? How can we reach out to them together? And to the point that we were on earlier, how can we convince them that the work that we're doing matters to them? How can we answer this “so what”? And on the flip side, how can we say to them, look, this institution in your district is suffering and the people in your district are suffering? But to just start to do that, I think this has to be bottom-up, not top-down. 

Erin Hennessy

Right.

Ted Mitchell 

And that's one of the places I would move. I think the other place that I think is quite important is for institutions to make individual connections with their lawmakers. And it's something that we always say, you know, yeah, we're going to invite so and so and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. 

Erin Hennessy

Right.

Ted Mitchell 

But it turns out to be really, really important. I was in East Carolina a couple of weeks ago, and they had just achieved the R1 status. And, you know, they were very careful to invite members of the legislature, both the state and the federal legislature, and it was great for them to be able to see this work firsthand. And I don't think you can beat that. That sounds very pedestrian, but I think we've neglected that for too long. We have, to your point about we kind of go along, I think we just expect everybody to have good feelings about us, and that's just not true anymore.

Erin Hennessy

Yeah, and it's always easier to make an enemy of something and someone that you don't know and don't have personal engagement with.

Ted Mitchell 

Right, and there's a lot, I mean there's so much social science research that says that people are willing to castigate groups, like public schools are awful. 

Teresa Valerio Parrot

Right.

Erin Hennessy

Right. But mine's great.

Ted Mitchell 

But mine is great and you touch my public school and I'm going to cut your arm off. Right? We need to make that work for us.

Erin Hennessy

Yeah, yeah.

Teresa Valerio Parrot

Well, I also think that we've forgotten to make connections and relationships. And so, so many people have changed in so many industries, and we talk about this all of the time. And yet, when we're in situations like we're in right now, when we go to reach back out to these different offices and organizations, we realize all of the staff have changed. We're forgetting to maintain those connections and those LinkedIn connections and all of the different ways that we used to meet with people, whether it was with coffee or lunch. And so we still need to maintain who's where and what our connections are so that when we need them, they matter.

Ted Mitchell 

Yeah, when I was, and this is not to say that I did it right. But when I was at Occidental, East LA, Eagle Rock is an interesting area, lots of small businesses, and I had a monthly meeting with whoever they wanted to send from those small businesses in our neighborhood, and they changed a lot, and so it was really great to be able to have these conversations with people as they changed, but it was also great to be able to recognize that they need things from us.

Teresa Valerio Parrot

Right.

Ted Mitchell 

And we needed to be able to say, oh, well, sure, we could do that. Or, hmm, we can't do that, but how about this? And so building up and maintaining that sense of local engagement, even for a giant place like UC Berkeley, is really, really important.

Teresa Valerio Parrot

When I was at the University of Colorado system, town-gown relations was a part of everybody's job description. And it was very clear that we needed to make sure that we were out and about and we were seen and we were volunteering and we were a part of the community in ways that would be meaningful. And I hope that that's something that's continuing.

Ted Mitchell 

I hope. 

Teresa Valerio Parrot

I hope. So this past weekend, I was at AERA, A-E-R-A, and there was quite a bit of doom and gloom. These are the education researchers. These are my people. These are my academic discipline people. And people were talking about contracts and grants that are being cut and layoffs. And to be honest, there was a lot of fear for enrollment, for their own positions, for those that are tenure track, what comes next. What would you say to faculty who are worried about what comes next in higher education?

Ted Mitchell

Yeah, so I would say two things. One, on the research side is, I would remind them that there are priority changes that happen over time in any discipline. And what's new about this one is that it happened overnight.

Teresa Valerio Parrot

For everybody.

Ted Mitchell 

For everybody. So, in some ways, there's a live-with-it kind of part that I would suggest. And, so that's one. And two, I think that we really are entering a time in which we have to examine graduate education in ways that we haven't in a long time. So, I think it's on us part of the problem. I think we have continued to produce PhDs in disciplines where there isn't really a hiring opportunity for them. And I don't think that that's fair to students. And I think that it puts pressure on the research agencies to fund a level of research and a level of preparation that may not be world class anymore. So I think we need to, we just need to figure that out. So in the budget, we've watched and you guys have talked about PhD programs either eliminating acceptances for this coming year or we're seriously cutting them back. I think that that's going to be a reality for some time as we go forward. And I'll add a third, which is we haven't talked about yet, is the pressure on institutions to not enroll international students.

Teresa Valerio Parrot

Yes.

Ted Mitchell 

Which is a real problem for our STEM graduate fields, where many, many institutions rely on not just the money, but the brain power of international students to fuel their computer science department or their chemical engineering department. And so I think that the combination of reduced funding for masters students, reduced research funding for PhD students and a press against international students is going to have a negative impact on the pipeline of new faculty.

Teresa Valerio Parrot

Anything positive there? You told us you were an optimist.

Ted Mitchell 

I am an optimist.

Teresa Valerio Parrot

You just definitely reinforced a lot of the fears that I heard.

Ted Mitchell 

Yeah, I'll bet. As a card-carrying member of AERA, I think I probably just got it by osmosis. So what do I think? I think that there will be more money available for what we used to call applied research. And I think that that's going to be useful. I think that the tenure process may be shifting a little bit toward rewarding other kinds of faculty activity. 

Teresa Valerio Parrot

Right. Which I think is going to be good for AERA members, right? This will benefit them.

Ted Mitchell 

Which is where I get to make my pitch for undergraduate teaching and learning. 

Teresa Valerio Parrot

Right.

Ted Mitchell 

One of the things we were attempting to do and take when we took over the stewardship of the Carnegie classifications, was reduce the fetish about R1. And reduce this, you know, more research, more research, more research, and I hope we've done that. But I hope in parallel, we have created an opportunity for institutions to really double down on their responsibility to undergraduate teaching and learning.

Teresa Valerio Parrot

I think you've done that through the classifications now, but what I would say is the way that higher education thinks about mimicry and the way that it thinks about prestige, that's going to take more than just a rejiggering of the Carnegie classifications. That's going to take generations before we move beyond how we currently think.

Ted Mitchell 

I think that's right. Hopefully, we can put in place some anchors from the Carnegie work. For example, lots of states now have performance-based funding models for their state institutions. If we can move some of that over to undergraduate outcomes, I think that that might help. Forget the prestige for a minute. Let's get to the real stuff about, you know, pocketbook. And if we can change the the pocketbook environment for institutions to focus more on undergraduate success. I think we will have put some teeth into it.

Erin Hennessy

As we think about undergraduate, I'm gonna expand the doom and gloom aperture. 

Ted Mitchell

Oh good, good, we don't have enough.

Erin Hennessy

I mean, I'm Irish at some point, you know, you have to dive into it. But I think a lot of the people that listen to this podcast in addition to my mother and Teresa's mother, as we talked about earlier, are planners and like the cyclical and the rhythms and so thinking about what we expect to be sort of a steep drop off, potentially, in the number of international students coming to the states for undergraduate education. What are we hearing about FAFSA? It's sort of, it feels out here like that's sort of fallen off the radar a little bit and it might be hope and it might be a willful disregard of what's there. What can our folks expect or what should they be planning for their fall semester to look like? And then I'll give you a chance to put some optimism in if you want. Where do you think the industry is going to be in four years? We hear, you know, there's always that pivot to we're gonna see a huge number of closings and we're gonna see institutions on the financial break. Where do you think we are at the end of this Trump administration?

Ted Mitchell 

The team that came in to do the diving save of FAFSA did more than a diving save. They really built the ground up infrastructure for a successful distribution. 

Erin Hennessy

These are the College Board folks, right?

Ted Mitchell 

Yeah, yeah. And so, hats off to them. And so far so good. My worry isn't so much about whether the system is going to crash and burn, it's a matter of when the glitches happen, which they will. Who's at home to help with that? 

Erin Hennessy

Sure. Yeah.

Ted Mitchell

And so I worry a lot about the evisceration of the team at FSA and education at Ed more generally, that it works while it's working and if it doesn't, we're in deep trouble. So that's my worry about FAFSA, but so far so good. But it gives me a chance to talk about some of these broader things. I think that, and on the four-year vision, one of the things that worries me the most is the reduction in our capacity to collect and analyze data. So, I think that if I were to try to do one thing, it would be to put all that stuff back in place. Because we won't know the effects of all of these changes if we can't measure them, for good and for ill. 

Erin Hennessy

Right.

Ted Mitchell

And I think going into this period of change, willfully blinding ourselves is just a bad move. It's just a bad move. But I think four years from now, will actually see the accreditation is being loosened a little bit, the ability for institutions to innovate without having to go through as many hoops as they used to. I think that that's a good thing. I think it's a good sign that institutions will be able to migrate some of their teaching and learning to third-party producers that are closer to the world of work. So I'll use the University of Texas as an example. They now allow undergraduates to put up to four Coursera-led Google certificates into their transcripts. And I think that that kind of integration is going to help higher education be closer to the world of work without compromising its academic values on the rest of the curriculum. I actually think that there may be some opening up that will be really, really helpful. 

I also think that last year's protests helped us come to terms with the fact that we needed to do a better job of identifying the line between free speech and discrimination. And it's not going to be perfect, but I think we are a whole lot better off than we have been. And that creates the opportunity to really focus on teaching people how to have civil discourse. And so that's my other hope for the next four years is that we, you know, it's in the air now. And so, if we ignore it, we've ignored a big opportunity to bring our students and faculty together to talk about what we want higher education to be like, what we want America to be like.

Teresa Valerio Parrot

I do have a question for you on that. I recently had lunch with a very dear colleague who is at WICHE, and we were talking about common data sets moving forward. And I left that lunch and I slacked our team and I was saying, oh my God, I don't, this was like the week after the inauguration, oh my God. I don't think I had been thinking about what happens to common data sets in the way that I should have been thinking about what the future of common data sets might be. 

Erin Hennessy

If I had a dollar for every time…

Teresa Valerio Parrot

I talked about WICHE?

Erin Hennessy

“I'm worried about common data sets.”

Teresa Valerio Parrot

I worry about common data. I think about common data sets probably every day, but now I worry about them every day. And this is my new rally cry. Like, what happens to common data sets? Because the longitudinal ability for us to assess this, this is kind of freaking me out a little bit. Should I be worried about this?

Ted Mitchell

The states will save us. 

Teresa Valerio Parrot

Do you think? All of the states? 

Ted Mitchell

I do. I do.

Teresa Valerio Parrot

Ted, you think all of the states? We have 50 and Puerto Rico in territories. You think all of this?

Ted Mitchell 

Okay, you can never say all. I haven't had a chance to praise our colleagues who are in red states, but look, I think the red states have been ahead of all of these discussions. And we could take all of the discussions we've had, and we could rewind them four years in the state of Idaho. And they can say, well, yeah, so we know how to manage all of this. And I do say to some of my blue state friends, really, you need to talk to people in red states about navigating this, building from it, finding opportunities, because they have been living this reality for some time. So, I am encouraged by the growth of longitudinal state data sets in unlikely places.

Teresa Valerio Parrot

Great, good.

Ted Mitchell 

Texas. Virginia. California is going to come on board. But I think that more and more as states become concerned with their talent development work and their economic development, they will be making commitments to data. But then, the word that you use that I ignored is common.

Teresa Valerio Parrot

That's my worry.

Ted Mitchell 

And creating interoperability among those datasets is going to be complicated and, politically, really a problem.

Teresa Valerio Parrot

Okay, so I think we've gone through our questions that we sent you and I want to end on a high note. I like to say that I'm energized when I step foot onto a campus and based on the examples that you gave in reading your non-verbals when you were talking about campuses, that's when you were energized in our conversation. So, tell us about what you're seeing on campuses that gives you renewed optimism for the future of higher education.

Ted Mitchell 

Yeah, that's an easy one. I think that we have been trapped. And it's been a political trap. It's been a media trap. We have been trapped, thinking about higher education through the lens of 10 celebrity institutions. 

Teresa Valerio Parrot

Yes.

Ted Mitchell

And that's unfair to them. And it's unfair to the rest of American higher education. You're absolutely right that if you go to a college campus today, you will find a wide variety of students pursuing their dreams with faculty who are behind them. I go to college campuses and I don't recognize the narrative that we're hearing. 

Teresa Valerio Parrot

I agree.

Ted Mitchell 

And so I think the more we can, and this gets back to the bring people to campus, show them what you're doing. If you have this image of a campus that's on fire, and it’s not where students live. 

Teresa Valerio Parrot

I agree.

Ted Mitchell 

So, let's focus on student teaching, student learning, student success, and then the rest will sort of take care of itself as long as we can focus on that.

Teresa Valerio Parrot

Excellent.

Erin Hennessy

I'm so glad you said that. I was with the president yesterday with some members of the esteemed trade press. And the one thing he asked them, after he thanked them for their work, was to remember that there are places like his institution, which is dual mission, open access, primarily commuter. There aren't protests because his students are working, are raising their families, are caring for family members and getting their degrees. They offer programs taught entirely in Spanish because they are in a heavily Latino and Hispanic area to meet local workforce needs. These are the places that are doing the work day in and day out while everybody has a heart attack about Harvard and Yale and Princeton and Stanford and et cetera, et cetera.

Teresa Valerio Parrot

I agree.

Ted Mitchell

I had an hour-long interview with a reporter two days ago, this was about research cuts. So I was talking to him, gave the Southern University story and all of these stories. And literally, this person's follow-up question was, do you think Harvard is going to have to change its cash flow policy?

Erin Hennessy

Sweet... Sweet Lord!

Ted Mitchell 

And I don't know. I don't care.

Teresa Valerio Parrot

But let's go back to where the education is happening. Most students are being educated on a regional comprehensive campus or a community college. 

Ted Mitchell 

That’s right.

Teresa Valerio Parrot

I have been on a scholarship committee for a number of years and we just had our celebration recently. And if you look at the profile of the students, they're the same amazing students over the last 15 years that we've always had. The same amazing students are coming through our campuses. The same campuses are doing the amazing work that they've been doing. And we need to keep telling people about that work.

Ted Mitchell 

And that really was when we started the Carnegie classification system, we really didn't know how it was going to turn out. And we really didn't know whether we were going to see student success on the rise. 479 institutions are high access and high earnings. And they're from everywhere. They're from red states and blue states and rural and urban and big universities and small colleges, one tribal college. As we say, higher ed builds America and it is as true today as it was 30 years ago.

Teresa Valerio Parrot

Yes.

Erin Hennessy

Nick is going to be very disappointed that it took you 45 minutes to get that in there. 

Ted Mitchell

I know. I know. I know. I know.

Erin Hennessy

Well, Ted, we have taken up a ton of your time and I'm sure the world has changed four times in the last 45 minutes.

Ted Mitchell 

I hope not. I hope not. 

Teresa Valerio Parrot

And thank you so much for having this very candid conversation with us.

Ted Mitchell 

Well, listen, thank you guys. I always love talking with you, in private or in public. So, I adore you. So, thanks.

Erin Hennessy

You're very kind.

Teresa Valerio Parrot

Thank you.

Ted Mitchell 

Alright, be well.

Erin Hennessy

Well, that was a conversation that was equal parts heartening and confirming of some of our larger anxieties, yeah?

Teresa Valerio Parrot

Yes, I always love talking with Ted because I love how open he is. I love how honest he is. And, he isn't someone to sugarcoat what's going on, but there is an optimism to how he talks about the industry that reminds me of how I think about higher education. And I love it.

Erin Hennessy

Yeah, yeah. And I will say that I am often, skeptical is the wrong word, maybe defensive is the right word, when people talk about higher ed brought this on themselves and higher ed needs to this and that and the other. But his approach to accepting what is very real about the critiques of higher ed doesn't feel performative to me and doesn't feel like lip service. 

Teresa Valerio Parrot

No, I agree.

Erin Hennessy

Which I think a lot of leaders who go, oh yes, yes, we must be, it just, doesn't hit me well. And Ted, I think is very sincere in his approach to that challenge.

Teresa Valerio Parrot

And I think it's because he's reflected on it, right? As he said, he's an AERA member. So he's thinking about this through, I think, an education lens. He's not just looking to scapegoat communicators. Instead, he's reflecting on, how did we get here? And I think where you and I push back is when people are looking for, who should we blame for how we got here, rather than looking for, how did we get here and what is the solution. 

Erin Hennessy

Yeah. And how do we fix the optics?

Teresa Valerio Parrot

Right. And you and I really get angry when it's whose fault is it but we're not going to learn from it we're just going to move on and instead he's saying, okay, how do we make this better and he's done, you can tell, quite a bit of soul searching on behalf of higher education to say how can he and his position at ACE help make this better.

Erin Hennessy

Sure, it tracks with his time in the Obama administration, that administration's approach to policy around higher education was very much focused on a lot of these things that he talked about, transparency, student success, those kinds of things. So it's not surprising, it comes by it honestly, to be sure.

Teresa Valerio Parrot

Yeah, I agree. And I liked how he was talking about the campuses that he's visiting. He's not just going to the biggest and those with the biggest names and brands, but he's going across the country. I'm sure it's to those who are asking him, but he's not just prioritizing the ones who are paying the highest dues to ACE. And I think that's incredibly important.

Erin Hennessy

Yes. And I think it's, you know, we didn't get to plug it while he was on, but it is a reminder that for those who pay dues to ACE, this is a membership association and they exist to serve their members. So, if you need somebody to come, have a come-to-Jesus conversation with your board or your faculty, reach out to ACE. Ted, I know travels a ton. Government relations folks travel a ton. There's a lot that ACE can provide locally to you to help make your job a little bit easier as well.

Teresa Valerio Parrot

And as we say all of the time, this is why you pay your dues. These are advocacy organizations. They talk on behalf of the industry and they represent you. So make sure that you are taking advantage of all of the ways in which they can provide services and resources and information to your campuses. And reach out and ask. And you never know. They can always say no, or they can provide you with another option, but ask.

Erin Hennessy

And indeed, that is how you and I met.

Teresa Valerio Parrot

That is exactly how we met and here we are.

Erin Hennessy

‘Cause you wouldn't stop calling me. 

Teresa Valerio Parrot

And asking. 

Erin Hennessy

And asking.

Teresa Valerio Parrot

And that is how I met Ted. That is how Ted came onto the podcast because, God bless him, he responded to my email.

Erin Hennessy

Things happen when people respond to Teresa Parrot emails. 

Teresa Valerio Parrot

Woohoo! So if I'm in your email box everybody, please open it, please respond.

Erin Hennessy

Yeah. So this is not our last episode of the semester… season, season.

Teresa Valerio Parrot

You and I still talk in semesters. In our day-to-day life, we still talk in semesters, and I always will.

Erin Hennessy

Yes. Here in early first term of the summer session, we will come back together in a couple of weeks to close out the season. It may just be 35 minutes of the two of us saying WTF to one another, depending on how the world changes by then.

Teresa Valerio Parrot

Me with an exclamation point and you rolling your eyes.

Erin Hennessy

With two middle fingers? But before we wrap this episode up, I want to make sure that we take a moment to thank someone who…

Teresa Valerio Parrot

Yes, this is what I wanted to do too, yes.

Erin Hennessy

…is behind the scenes for our listeners, but is very much in front of the scenes for us. Our dear friend, Nicole, who is the producer of this podcast. This is her last podcast that she will be producing for us because she is going on to follow her dreams, which, weirdly, involve law school.

Teresa Valerio Parrot

And nonprofits.

Erin Hennessy

And nonprofits. And to do other things. And we are devastated for us, but absolutely thrilled for her.

Teresa Valerio Parrot

And Nicole Reed, two E's, you should follow her on LinkedIn. She is such a beautiful writer and she is able to summarize life and leadership. And she has such a great way of just being a great storyteller. And I highly encourage you to get to know her. She has been a fantastic friend and resource and colleague to me. So, she has been great on Slack if I'm having a great day or just need an ear. So thank you, Nicole, for everything.

Erin Hennessy

Yes.

Teresa Valerio Parrot

And with that, thank you for listening. We'll be back for one more this season. 

Erin Hennessy

Yes.

Teresa Valerio Parrot

And we appreciate you. And thank you to Ted Mitchell.

Erin Hennessy

And thank you to you, Teresa Parrott.

Teresa Valerio Parrot

And thank you to you, Erin Hennessey. And let's go get some allergy meds.

Erin Hennessy

Bye!

Teresa Valerio Parrot 

Thank you for joining us for this episode. You can find links in the show notes to the topics and articles referenced, as well as a copy of the show's transcript on the Volt website, voltedu.com. Remember that you can always contact us with feedback, questions or guest suggestions at trustedvoices@tvpcommunications.com. Be sure to follow Trusted Voices where you get your podcasts, and we invite you to check out Higher Voltage, another podcast on the Volt network that is hosted by our friend, Kevin Tyler. Kevin explores the evolution of higher education that is happening right before our very eyes. Until next time, thanks to Erin Hennessy, DJ Hauschild, Aaron Stern, Nicole Reed and the Volt team for a great episode, and thank you for listening.