Winnebagos on Wednesdays

How Visionary Leadership Can Transform Higher Education

Scott Cowen, Betsy Seifter

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780691174617
• eBook ISBN: 9781400889532
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Administration

Why a strong mission and inspired leadership are vital to the success of America's colleges and universities

In 1998, soon after assuming the presidency of Tulane University, Scott Cowen was confronted with a setback. Despite an undefeated football season and putting the best financial deal on the table, Cowen was unable to retain the school's football coach. The coach wanted something the president didn't have--a football program so popular, as the coach put it, that fans would line up their Winnebagos on Wednesdays in anticipation of Saturday games. In that moment, Cowen improbably found himself in the entertainment business—and his university was deemed wanting.

At a time when schools seem overrun by sports programs, spiraling costs, and absurd ranking systems, Winnebagos on Wednesdays argues that colleges and universities of all stripes and sizes can achieve their educational aims if they possess two things: visionary leadership and a strong mission. Cowen, named one of the nation's top university presidents by Time magazine in 2009, gives a behind-the-scenes look at the critical demands faced by many education leaders. He profiles a range of situations, from how Diana Natalicio of the University of Texas at El Paso expanded a school serving a specific demographic into an academic powerhouse to how Michael Sorrell shifted Paul Quinn College's mission to urban entrepreneurship in order to save the institution. Cowen also draws from his own hard-won experiences, including the rebuilding of Tulane and New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina and the decision to maintain Tulane's football program. He shows how crucial choices in tough situations shape organizations, for better or ill.

A sweeping overview of the higher education landscape, Winnebagos on Wednesdays demonstrates that the courage of transformative leadership is essential for colleges and universities to remain vital.

1

On Impact

If many of the rankings are misleading and many of

the measures irrelevant, how can we construct a nuanced

and accurate portrait of a school’s impact? How can we

get a real picture of how graduates are doing, not just

economically but in their lives as a whole?

I remember the day—I’m thinking it must have been mid-April 1964, since that was when most letters went out—that I learned of my acceptance to college. I can still recall the thrill of seeing a thick envelope in the mailbox: that was the telltale sign that the school had a lot of things to say to you, rather than a paragraph of perfunctory explanations beginning with “We regret . . .” I’d already had one of those from an institution that shall go unmentioned, and was beginning to really worry. And there was the additional issue of money, something my family didn’t have much of. But in that thick sheaf of paper from the University of Connecticut was further good news: not only an acceptance, but a student-athlete scholarship that would allow me to actually attend.

For me, as for so many young people, college was the doorway to everything else, but in my case it wasn’t by any means a given. My sister and I were the first in our family to go to college (statistics say that the chances of someone from a “no degree” family going to college are less than half that of someone from a two-degree family).1 Also, I wasn’t exactly a scholar: I struggled in school in the early years with undiagnosed dyslexia—no such diagnosis back then. But the narrative changed when I went off to UConn on my football scholarship. In the mid-1960s, amateur status meant amateur, so though I was an offensive and then defensive lineman, I could count on actually getting an education despite my obligations to the football team. (I should add for the sake of transparency that I had a fairly undistinguished career as an athlete that ended after two years because of an illness.) By the time I graduated, it was the height of the Vietnam War; I deferred entrance into graduate school and enlisted in Infantry Officer Candidate School, serving three years in the army. Then I went back to school on the GI Bill, getting a master’s and then a doctorate in business administration.

I think it was a combination of disparate experiences—my love of learning, an appreciation for the world around me, athletics, and the military (both of the latter, by the way, helping foot the tuition bills)—that ultimately gave me competence, confidence, and the ability to embrace different points of view. These are experiences and attributes that I would draw on over and over again in my life. But particularly because of my dyslexia, schooling was a critical part of my evolution as a person. Early on, the learning disability made me feel I couldn’t make my way in the world, especially in academics, and I struggled with failure, developing other capacities—what back then were called “interpersonal skills”—to compensate for my weaknesses. At some point, supported by caring teachers and mentors, I mastered the world of letters and was able to go on with my general education and then to launch an academic career, which ultimately brought me to Tulane. Education transformed my life. If this isn’t impact, I don’t know what is.

Mine clearly isn’t a unique story. Most graduates, even ones who profess to hate their schools, are shaped by their experiences at college and graduate school. These experiences occur in the crucial years of transition from adolescence to young adulthood, at a time of rapid development of brain and body.2 Learning in these years is vivid and lasting partly because young minds are fertile ground for novel stimuli. If we’re going to talk about the “impact” of postsecondary education, the intense immersion in a community that offers exposure to many domains of knowledge and many differing perspectives is inevitably going to have a substantial effect on the minds and lives of graduates.

I’ve begun with my own story because the impact of education is, at root, personal—critical events that shape who you are and hold the promise of economic security, mental and physical well-being, a satisfying career, and meaningful participation in society. The higher education sector has held these truths to be self-evident. It’s the story we’ve been telling about higher education since time immemorial; unchallenged, we didn’t feel it was necessary to flesh out the particulars.

But then the price of a degree rose, and rose, and rose. As the cost increased and institutional missions expanded, legislators, journalists, and the general public began to question the old assumptions and to look for evidence that proved the worth of higher education. Social science researchers and, more particularly, the media began to develop metrics to determine quality and impact, gathering data that allowed observers, including parents and prospective students, to get a look at who was doing what, and how well a given institution stacked up against others. And hence were born the rankings, generated by a number of publications, most notably U.S. News & World Report. As we’ll see, those rankings have taken on a life of their own, driving decisions about how universities allocate resources, recruit and accept students, and conduct a host of other activities, from research to athletics.

The point is not simply to decry the rankings, but to consider how complicit we’ve become in trying to nudge the numbers. It would be wise to look within—define “success” in our own terms, then measure it appropriately and collect the data to support our claims.

One reason we haven’t accumulated revealing data is that the most relevant information isn’t always readily available; another impediment is an overwhelming volume of random data that requires sorting and analysis. I remember that when I came to Tulane in 1998, the Office of Institutional Research was a tiny place. In the nearly twenty years since, the explosion of information about every aspect of academic institutions has made it hard to keep pace. But now is the time not only to marshal the available facts, but to reclaim our narrative and reframe how we in higher education determine our quality and impact—not for those ranking us, but for ourselves and our own efforts at self-improvement. As we’ll see in the ensuing discussion, in letting others decide on the metrics and the data points, we’ve lost control of our own story and occasionally strayed from doing what is best for our students and the communities in which we exist. To make the case to the public, we need to tell it in our own words, using reliable evidence and metrics that will convince skeptics of our worth.

Before wading further into the issue of data, metrics, and rankings, I’m going to take a moment to describe the influence a college or university has on its community and society at large. At most institutions this kind of impact has begun to be evaluated statistically, using data about the economic and social effects colleges and universities have on their town, city, or region. For example, a 2015 report on Tulane’s economic impact enumerates the full-time students, hours of community service, patients treated by medical faculty, licensing agreements, start-ups, and jobs associated with the university. Bottom line: as the largest private employer in New Orleans, the university has had over a $1 billion impact on our community and the state’s economy, attributable to wages, purchasing, construction, research funding and operational costs, and visitor and student spending.3

The story of how the university came to have such significant impact on the city hinges on Katrina. The school’s story has a “before” and “after,” with our mission undergoing an evolution in response to the catastrophe that befell us. When I first arrived in New Orleans in the late nineties, Tulane was a midsize research university lacking the resources of some of the wealthy public universities and the Ivies, but with the capacity to be as influential as institutions more richly endowed. What was needed, I felt, was a creative, hands-on, entrepreneurial approach that would make the school noteworthy, distinctive, financially sustainable, and attractive to students, faculty, alumni, parents, community leaders, and donors—the latter a crucial element, because there’s no playing in the big leagues without the funds to compete. I focused on practical goals precisely because I wanted us to be highly competitive and distinctive. Among the many strategic aims of my first two years as president of the university—which included getting to know people, letting them get to know me, and building consensus toward the creation of an institutional vision and strategy—I oversaw a financial restructuring that involved the establishment of a decentralized management model and embarked on an active fund-raising campaign and pursuit of research grants.

Then, seven years into my tenure, Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, almost destroying the university and causing damage to Tulane that amounted to $650 million. I won’t repeat all the details of the Renewal Plan we constructed to save the university, but the basics involved merging seven undergraduate colleges into one, eliminating several undergraduate and graduate programs, downsizing the medical school, suspending half the athletic programs, and ultimately letting go about eight hundred of our full-time faculty and staff. These decisions—and they were difficult, controversial, and painful—grew out of the fiscal analysis years before, which had identified programs with relatively weaker impact in terms of enrollment, revenue, and productivity.

Perhaps the key decision post-Katrina—the one that signaled an evolution in our mission—was the integration of public service into the core curriculum for all undergraduates, with a greater emphasis on community engagement, social innovation and entrepreneurship, and experiential learning. Through the Center for Public Service, social innovation and social entrepreneurship programs, Tulane City Center4 at the School of Architecture, the Cowen Institute for Public Education Initiatives, Tulane Community Health Centers, and a host of other new research and educational programs, the university has markedly enhanced its impact on the entire community, contributing through learning, service, and research to health, education, housing, culture, the environment, and the economy.

We reached out to the city, as well as to communities around the globe, in unprecedented ways after Katrina and, in so doing, reinvented the school’s identity. Tulane had always been considered a good school (along with Vanderbilt and Duke, it’s been called the “Harvard of the South”), but it also had a reputation as a party school; it is in New Orleans, after all, where the good times roll. Our aim was to make the Tulane of the future a deeply committed anchor institution for New Orleans, where students would become active leaders and citizens of the city, and later the nation and world, through thoughtful engagement with communities outside our walls. If our graduates went forth in the world as agents of social change and community solutions—if they contributed to the public good and the enrichment of our culture—we would be doing our job of creating the next generation of committed and thoughtful participants in the democratic society of the future.

Ironically, it was a disaster that helped us sharpen our sense of mission and led to the development of service learning and community engagement. At the same time, we preserved our discovery mission as a research university, continuing our commitment to scientific investigation and progress. Tulane University actually started as the Medical College of Louisiana, founded in 1834 and chartered in 1835 by a small group of young physicians in response to a cholera and yellow fever epidemic in New Orleans. In 1847, the Medical College merged with the newly established University of Louisiana, a public entity, and expanded to include an undergraduate school and other graduate programs. In 1884, with an endowment from philanthropist Paul Tulane, the university was rechristened in his name and privatized. Today, Tulane has a robust and significant commitment to research in all fields, anchored by a health science complex that includes the Tulane University School of Medicine, the School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine, the Tulane Primate Center, the Tulane Hospital and Clinics, and segments of our School of Science and Engineering. This complex, like similar ones at other universities, is conducting research and caring for patients, with a significant impact on the lives of people locally, nationally, and around the globe.

Biomedical research has a very personal meaning to me because my wife, Margie, who has Parkinson’s disease, is a beneficiary of that research. Though there’s no cure for Parkinson’s, levodopa, the “miracle drug” that quells tremor and eases rigidity, emerged from clinical trials in the 1960s at the Universities of Vienna and Montreal, and later Brookhaven National Laboratories in New York. The impact of our research institutions on millions of lives is hardly news, but sometimes forgotten when we begin doubting the ultimate value of higher education. To name just a few examples of research at our universities that have changed our world: sequencing the human genome, stem cell therapies, targeted immunotherapy for cancer, HIV combination therapy, minimally invasive surgery, transplant surgery, bionic prostheses, functional magnetic resonance imaging—the list goes on.

Tulane’s story is a narrative of rising impact associated with a transformed mission. It’s true that institutional stories are told in many ways—brochures, websites, mission statements, press releases—but in our “evidence-based” age, reports like the one Tulane issued on its economic impact, full of graphs and tables and statistics, carry significant weight. What stories do the numbers tell? Katie Busby, Tulane’s former assistant provost for assessment and institutional research, had the job of supplying information to the Tulane community and to outside organizations like the Association of American Universities and a host of accreditation and data-gathering agencies. She supplied the data, on everything from student-faculty ratio to graduation rates to alumni giving, so that impact could be measured. One of the chief recipients of data from Tulane (and from most other colleges and universities in the United States) is U.S. News & World Report, which publishes an annual ranking of schools from first to worst. And here we come to the issue I mentioned at the outset, that others have seized control of the story line and established a powerful, though distorted, narrative of institutional value. Rankings based on trivial metrics often exert a strong influence on applicants and donors and sometimes radically alter an institution’s strategic aims.

Katie describes USNWR as “the devil you have to dance with”; it’s an arms race you can’t get out of precisely because everyone else is in it.5 When she herself was asked, “Why is college so important?” she responded with some version of “Your son/daughter is going to grow and develop,” considering this the primary impact of higher education. Meanwhile, many metrics focus on employment and earnings rather than assessing student satisfaction, intellectual growth, or the ability to solve problems and make constructive decisions.

Apart from the variable meaning of the word “impact” and the variable means of measuring it, Katie Busby’s chief problems were insufficient data on students, who as seniors often have “survey fatigue,” and inadequate information about alumni, whose postcollegiate lives are even more difficult to track. Without a good clearinghouse that includes longitudinal data, it’s hard to measure the impact undergraduate school is having (or has had) on graduates’ careers, happiness, contributions to society, socioeconomic status, or anything else.6

In social science realms, impact studies sometimes have a tendency to prove the obvious, but an essential function of impact measurements is to do just that—provide credible evidence of what is known in order to defend against critics, advertise worth, and fortify institutional values. For example, Tulane social scientist Barbara Moely has been studying community engagement since 2003, with a focus on whether service learning helps produce civic-minded graduates. After Hurricane Katrina, the university’s inauguration of a public service requirement gave her a rich source of data. Her findings, though not surprising, are reassuring: students engaged in service learning, compared to those not so engaged, showed increases in plans for future civic action, positive assessments of their own interpersonal, probl...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1:  On Impact
• 2:  Door Wide Open
• 3:  Keeping the Ship Afloat
• 4:  The Tail Wags the Dog, Part I: Athletics
• 5:  The Tail Wags the Dog, Part II: Medicine
• 6:  Brave New World: Innovation and Scholarship
• 7:  Can We All Get Along?
• 8:  The Ivory Tower
• 9:  Who Are We?
• 10:  Presidential Leadership: Character and Context
• Notes
• Index