 Hi everyone. I'm Beth Daley. I'm the editor and general manager of The Conversation. If you don't know what The Conversation is, we are a non-profit independent news outlet that sits at the juncture of academia in journalism. And if you imagine our newsroom, our reporters are all the academics across America who work with our editors to translate their research into digestible journalism that then goes out to over a thousand news outlets every month. So that's us. I'm just so pleased today. I've been excited for this webinar the whole week. It's something that's near and dear to my heart as a woman leader. And the women we're going to meet today are just so incredible. And the title of our webinar, Women's Transformative Power in Higher Education and Beyond, is fascinating. We're going to learn so much. So I'm going to jump right into introductions and then I'll talk a little bit about the book that brought us all here today. And I'll explain a little bit more. So without further ado, let me first introduce Michelle Ozumba. Michelle Ozumba is the principal and founder of Michelle Ozumba and Associates, a consulting firm which helps organizations develop effective programs through adverse diversity, equity and inclusion. She's a former president of Women's College Coalition and the past CEO of the Women's Funding Network, a global philanthropic organization. There's a lot more to tell about Michelle and all these women. The other thing I will say that Michelle is a conversation board member and a mentor of mine. And I'm just so incredibly grateful for her insights and wisdom helping us on so many ways, especially and including our diversity initiative here at the conversation. So welcome, Michelle. Next, I'm just so pleased to introduce Carol Christ, the 11th chancellor and the former executive vice chancellor and provost of the University of California Berkeley. I knew her being in Massachusetts because she was the former president of Smith College from 2002 to 2013, probably. And I have many friends and many people who went there and just loved it there because of your leadership there. Before that, she was a professor of English and an administrator at Berkeley for more than three decades. She's an advocate for quality, accessible public higher education, a proponent for the value of liberal arts in a broad education and a real leader and champion on women's issues and diversity on college campuses. So welcome, Carol. Again, your bio is too long to fully go. And lastly, I'm just so pleased to introduce the president of Oberlin College, Carmen Tully Amber. She's an attorney and academic and the current president, obviously, of Oberlin College in Ohio. She began there in 2017. And prior to that, she had been the ninth woman to lead Douglas College and was also dean of Douglas College and also was president of Cedar Crest College, if I have that right, Carmen. She holds a bachelor's degree in foreign service from Georgetown and master's degree in public administration from Princeton, a JD from Columbia, I think, many degrees. And we're just so pleased for you all to join us today. Your schedules are busy, your lives are busy, and we're just so, so happy to have you. And we're here really because of this book that Michelle, Carmen and Carol edited. It's amazing. It's junctures in women leadership, junctures in women's leadership around higher education. And it's a fascinating look at 12 case studies of women written by leaders themselves, often looking at a moment in time of a problem, a juncture, a challenge and how they resolved it. And how that changed institution. And it runs the gamut of leaders at public universities, private, urban, I'm forgetting all the other ones, but it's very broad and it's a fascinating read. So without further ado, Michelle, I'm gonna jump in if that's okay with you. And I prepared a few questions for you. And the first one I have is, tell us about the 12 stories in the book that were selected. I'm sure there are many other women you could have highlighted. And each essay is really powerful. Can you talk a little about the process? Thank you, Beth. And I'm really thrilled to be here. So thank you for the opportunity. Before I tell you about the stories in the women profile, I just want to take a moment to acknowledge the other contributors to these chapters, because in addition to Carol, Carmen and myself, we have nine women who are themselves stellar leaders in higher ed and researchers who brought their skills and their insights and their passions to this project. So really, when you go through the book in addition to the women who are being profiled in each chapter, the bios of the writers and the contributors are very compelling as well. So I just want to thank and acknowledge all of them. And to also give tribute to the late Alison Bernstein, who was the visionary for this whole series, and looking at women's leadership in a diversity of sectors. And so we want to thank the Institute of Women's Leadership at Rutgers and Rutgers University Press for really including an opportunity to feature women leaders in higher ed. So with that, the 12 stories, I mean, they are compelling. And I want to start by the first chapter is Bernice Sandler. And Bernice unfortunately passed away a few months before publication. But in many ways, even though she wasn't a university president, she really was the pathway for a lot of the women who are featured in the book because of her work on Title IX. And what inspired her, what really inspired, but what ignited her was when she got her PhD, she was a part-time lecturer. And there were seven open, full-time positions in her department and none of which she was considered. So she asked a male colleague, you know, why wasn't she considered for at least one of them? And he said, well, let's face it, you come on too strong for a woman as a woman. And so after sort of crying and beating herself up for saying, yeah, maybe I talked too much, she then kind of doubled down and really began a really amazing creative and impassioned advocacy campaign and research into and introduced a whole idea of sex discrimination. And what she discovered by looking at the civil rights movement in terms of racial discrimination, she discovered that in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, even though it mentioned no discrimination on sex, race, religion and so on, it excluded educational institutions. And so that really was the opening that she saw to bring forward what ended up between 1969 and signed in 1972 by President Nixon was the Title IX Act, which was an amendment to the civil rights legislation. So that groundbreaking work sort of opens the door for this whole conversation around gender equity, as well as racial equity in higher ed. So the book really features women who brought their individual diversity, as well as institutional diversity. We feature women who are leading, leading private and public research universities, community colleges, there's an HBCU, there are women's colleges, there are private liberal arts colleges. So the institutional diversity was important, as well as their individual path journeys to those positions of leadership. So there, of course, there are lots of women, 12 is just a snap profile. But I think what these women, what their careers gave us an opportunity to do was really hone in on women who came to their positions at a time of transformation and challenge and and really they give examples of what it means to manage complex systems and what it means to prioritize examples of what it takes to to create a unified purpose when there's competing interests, competing challenges, and a diversity of stakeholders, which Carmen and Carol know all too well in their own roles. So that's really in a nutshell about the 12 stories. And you know, there's Juliet Garcia, who was the first Mexican American woman to lead a community college become president. And she really did an amazing job out in Texas, with a creative partnership, Judith Shapiro, who who carved out Bernard's identity really stood to keep it as independent from Columbia, even though it's a sister school, the Columbia University, Geneta Cole, who became our first sister president, you know, and put Spelman on the top as a number one HBCU in the country that continues to hold that spot today, how many years later. So there's just a lot of really rich, compelling, interesting stories that I think anyone who picks up the book will find some inspiration and models of leadership there. Yeah, it's fascinating. Before I ask, I have a couple of follow up questions, but I should do some housekeeping. We have a Q&A, I see people already populating questions. One that Michelle, you might know is someone is asking if there's a way to have an audio for the book. I don't know if you know that answer or not, but we will get that answer if you don't know it. I don't know that we have an audio version, we don't have an audio version of the book. I mean, we can check back with the publisher, but to date, it's available on Amazon just as a print copy. Okay, absolutely. And we'll be sharing how to get the book at the end of the webinar for sure, because I'm seeing other people ask that same question. And so after I'm done asking Michelle some questions, and Michelle will have a conversation with Carol and Carmen, I'll jump back in and start fielding our audience questions, which are already coming in, fast and furious. So Michelle, you know, I was really curious what, I mean, you had, you all had a focus going into it, and the book is sort of broken up into sort of a social lens, a structural lens, cultural lens. Did that come about purposefully, or was it when you were editing the books that these themes emerged? Well, it was sort of purposefully in looking at them all together. And of course, these categories are not mutually exclusive. You could take a leader like a, like a genetic and put her in structural and cultural and social, you know, and that's the same for a lot of them. But what what the idea was was to create a design to provide a framework for analyzing the context of their leadership decisions, and really help bring some context to the challenges they were faced to what their particular juncture was, and what the impact was on their decision, what the major impact was of their decision making on the institution. And so if you look at these culture, social and structural, you could say, okay, Juliet Garcia was very much structural, putting the unique partnership together of the university, partnering with a community college to create a pathway for her largely Latina students going having an opportunity for four year education without having to travel 250 miles. So it was a very courageous thing she did. Again, I would say Judith Shapiro was more structural in terms of what it took to create Bernard's independence. And I say genetic holds social because if you read her chapter, she talks about having to sort of pay attention to southernness, and what that meant in terms of being relational and accessible, and demystifying the idea of being president, because that's how you kind of build trust. And she hadn't lived in the south, except for the year she spent it to, I believe, to the left of the undergraduate she went to in the south. But anyway, so I feel she was social in sort of us, the way her personality and her compelling draw that she had with all kinds of people really pulls Spelman into this really amazing social attribute to the whole country. It wasn't just here in Atlanta. So those are just some examples of that framework of culture, social and structural. So fascinating. So I'm going to let you talk to your co editors now and sort of jump in and I'll come back with audience questions. I do want to I will put the name of the book in the chat. Some people have asked about that already. But I'll let, well, actually, I do have one more question to sell because I'd love for you to tell us just sort of briefly story of Molly Corbett Broad. It would be fascinating, the first woman to lead the University of North Carolina and president of the American Council of Education. Would you you tell us about her and where her strengths come? Sure. Well, Molly Broad came to UNC Chapel Hill to lead the University as the first woman, the first non North Carolinian and the first Catholic person to head this major public institution in North Carolina. And I would say what inspired her was really both of her parents were school teachers, not very well off. And she had one cousin who went to Syracuse and that's what she knew she wanted to do was go to Syracuse. And her father said he couldn't afford it. But luckily for her, she she managed to be such an outstanding student, she got a full scholarship to attend. And so she really started her higher education career at Syracuse and later came back to start her administrative career at Syracuse after she got married and headed up some major administrative positions there. And then she left to go to head up and become CEO at University of Arizona. And from Arizona, she was recruited to become the senior vice chancellor of California State University. And from there she was recruited to UNC. And California State, I believe had 23 campuses. So one of the reasons she really was desired at UNC because UNC has 16 campuses and a very, very diverse campuses, five of which are historically black college campuses. There's one campus that's primarily for Native Americans in North Carolina. And then of course you have UNC Chapel Hill, the flagship. And so she brought her experience with managing multiple complex institutional higher ed institutions to UNC. And her major initiative was something called the Focus Growth Initiative. And what she did was there were amongst the 16 campuses, there was such a disparity between all the assets and infrastructure at UNC Chapel Hill and the other 15 campuses spread out across the state. And after putting together a committee to study infrastructure needs, she came up with a plan that called for an investment of $6 billion to try to bring some parity to infrastructure and across the campus wide, across the university wide. And this was also because she looked at some of the campuses, for example, couldn't take more students because they didn't have the capacity. But enrollment was being projected to increase by 30-some percent over a certain period of time. And so she saw the need to really, she was looking ahead at what the needs were to meet the changing demographics of the state. She also, as an economist, saw the university as an economic driver for the state's economy because North Carolina had moved from being agricultural-based to being biomedical, technology, and so on research-based. And so we know the research triangle market that's there. And she saw that. And so anyway, she was able to bring together unlikely allies, all right? Between Jesse Holmes, Helms at the time, and African American elected officials, they were able to actually agree on the need for high-quality education across the state. So she was succeeded in getting a bond measure passed, not for $6 billion, but for $3 billion. And the other smart thing she did was extend it to community colleges. So $2.5 billion went to the university systems. And the remaining money about I think it was $6 million went to the 59 community colleges in the state. And so she was able to really involve the community, parents and people in barbershops and hair salons who all share this aspiration for their children's higher education to build the public support that was needed to get the bond approval and elected officials. So it passed. And that was her signature major defining this, I would say policy and experience at UNC that brought about the most example of what it took to build a unified purpose across a wide constituency of stakeholders, what it meant to be participatory in her leadership by really bringing in people from the community, bringing in faculty and so on to be part of the decision making and a very smart media messaging campaign to really build public will. So she was there for eight years and then went on to become the first woman president of ACE, the Association of Higher Education Council. And so her career basically is really her leadership in higher ed administration across the board. I'm sorry, I was going to feed back a little bit. I apologize. It's so interesting to really speak to this idea of, I mean, being so thoughtful about how you're building support for such a transformational change such as that. So yeah, this is a great example. So now I really, I'm going to duck out and I'll be back in a little bit with audience questions, please write your questions in the Q and A preferably everyone and I'll see you in a bit. So Michelle, it's back to you. Thank you, Beth. I'm going to start with talking with Carmen first about her chapter on Ruth Simmons and Carmen, nice to see you. Ruth Simmons story is both compelling and inspirational for many reasons. And would you, as the first African-American person to head up Ivy League University, can you sort of briefly give us the highlights of her story? Right. So Ruth Simmons is certainly an inspiration to many, many folks, but certainly to Black leaders in higher education. I think that she really stands out as someone that many of us look to. She was born in 1945. And so that gives you a sense of the era that she was born in that very much impacted her growing up in the sort of Jim Crow south in Houston. And Jim Crow across the country really, but we'll call it Jim Crow south for the purpose of this conversation. She was the youngest of 12 children. She was the daughter of sharecroppers. And that sort of background very much influenced her. She was farming early on in her career, but they, the family moved to the fifth ward in Houston and dealt with all of the sort of segregation and Jim Crow issues that were a part of our country at the time. And that is very much important to her authentic self. She talks about it a lot when she talks about how she thinks about her work in higher ed. She still, she retired and she came back out and has been doing great things down in Houston right now and went her career through USC, Princeton, Spellman in terms of leadership roles and Smith as well. A lot of women's colleges connections here on this screen and through many of the women in these roles and then came to be the first African American leader of Brown. I think it's interesting that when you ask her the thing that she is the most signature part of her career, it would not be what we're going to talk about right now. She talks about the decision to help Brown be a place that meets full need is probably her most signature achievement. But this formation of this steering committee on slavery and justice is what people talk about a lot and it's in part because remember she's doing that 20 years ago in 2003. Those headlines seem somewhat interesting to us now, but she was really at the front line of this discussion about how do you redress an institution's past and the committee was formed to look at Brown's role in the slave trade. It was controversial because the community had had this kind of a call over it in believing that the institution had no role in the slave trade and yet there were pockets who felt strongly that there was and there hadn't really been any investigation of it and so she formed this committee to do it. One of the things I thought was interesting, I'm sure Carol will appreciate this. So those of us who are college presidents know that the measures of our success are things like fundraising admissions, curricular issues, faculty awards, salary, all those strategic planning and so I thought it was fascinating. She does this in her first year or so at Brown and I ask her why did you choose to use your political capital for that and it was interesting to me because as presidents we only have so much political capital and typically we want to use that political capital on those things that people measure our success by and there was nothing really visible in the choice to form this committee that could lead a direct line to those things that we are quote unquote measured by and so I just thought it was a fact like wow and all of her colleagues and friends thought it was a disaster meaning her decision to do it, thought it would ruin her career, thought she'd be run out of breath when she decided to do it and so the interesting thing about her are all the discussions that we had about how you make decisions at the leader, about what helps you think have clarity about the choices that you make, about how you bring your authentic stuff to your leadership and that's what makes this story interesting. They formed the committee, ultimately it's a success, many wonderful new initiatives come from that work when she's asked this to be published, she's spoken at the United Nations, at Goldman Sachs, at so many places about this specific choice and it makes her compelling in some ways. Yes and what word comes to mind when I think of what you just described is courage, the courage that it took to do something that no one thought of and what it led to subsequently in more recent years right in terms of reckoning our history with what we're dealing with today and you could look at what is it George Washington University in D.C. and what they're doing with the ancestors. Well you could look at almost every institution is thinking about these issues. Ruth just did it 20 years earlier which feels very much like Ruth for those of us who know her so the other thing I would say about her is you know when I wish oftentimes I say this when I talk about Ruth and we did a transcript of her of my conversation with her I had two really significant conversations with her and I almost wish we could just do a book that just put that interview in it because there's so many jewels dropped but I will remember that one of the things she said to me that I've taken to heart in my own leadership but I was just beginning my presidency at Oberlin when I was interviewing her and she said to me it didn't feel bold it just felt right and it's something that I keep on my mind a lot because she talks about just trying to do the right thing as a leader and moving away from this natural desire to try to please people which she views as a futile attempt and so what you should really do is try to do the right thing and so all through this chapter you see her tapping into her kind of authentic self and by the end of this chapter she gives some advice to all of us about what we bring to the table as leaders and that notion of who we are is exactly what people are looking for in leadership and coming to accept that as a leader as an important part of our think of her success. And so you know leading with conviction is another way to kind of think about what that means in terms of the courage it takes to kind of do something that's quote unpopular but driven by your instinctive sense of doing what is right. Can I ask you Carmen this may not be a fair question but given that profile of Ruth Simmons and what you just said about leadership is there anything you can share during your tenure at Oberlin that's challenged that part of your leadership? So we began at Oberlin thinking about how we were responding to the changing landscape of prior education and how it's impacting small private liberal arts colleges right people questioning our value questioning our costs questioning all aspects of who we are and at Oberlin we had to do the work of starting to rethink ourselves and so I too sort of put together this large group to help us sort of assess how we were doing our work it was not without controversy people's questions about that and what was great for me was that I was interviewing Ruth right as I was doing that and one of the things she said to me it was controversial when it began here at Oberlin and one of the things I'll never forget that she said to me is things how things begin and people's upset and angst as things began oftentimes have no comparison to how things end and so it was a reminder to me that people's angst and upset it doesn't mean that Ruth didn't pay attention to people's concern she's a collaborative leader and she's very interested in people's perspective but it's not upset that bothers her and I needed that at the time to know that that's not how you judge whether this is the right thing to do or not people's upset doesn't mean you don't respond to it and so you know I think the thing I was saying about Ruth that I have come to appreciate now I'm in my I don't even know what year I'm in in higher ed but I've been a college president maybe this is my 13th year and one of the things she said to me that I think those of us in leadership have to come to at some point and she's squarely there now is that she said I came to trust myself and to trust my leadership and one of the things I think that women in particular um have to work towards because we have all sorts of things in society that sometimes encourage us not to trust ourselves uh is to come to trust your leadership now she had some evidence which she can use to trust herself right how she made decisions but she was saying that to me in the context of a question I had for her about how she might have handled this situation when she was younger in leadership versus how she handled it now and so this ability to learn how to trust yourself in leadership is I think part of the work that we're all are striving towards and figuring out what markers help you trust yourself you know how do you gather data how do you put the right people around you how do you think about decisions so that by the time you get to a certain level in your leadership um as I say to my team all the time it's not so much that I always feel totally confident about the decision I've made but I'm pretty confident about the process I go through that make decisions and that's what gives me confidence in the decision uh and so our route is um you know just an example to us all of how to take your authentic self onto the table um and to trust yourself in the leadership role you're in thank you excellent advice uh thank you Carmen I'm going to now turn to Carol hi Carol hi and um your chapter was on Hannah Gray with as when she was doing her time when she was president of University Chicago and very intriguing story given what she inherited when she stepped into that role so tell us a bit about her story and her journey to to leadership yeah this has been such a fascinating conversation because each of these case studies provides so many lessons in leadership and the lessons and leadership that I took from Hannah Gray's story with following first of all how important it is to understand the landscape generally of higher education one of the things Hannah said to me in our interview which was so interesting is she said the temptation when you come in as president is to try to fix everything that's wrong immediately and she said you have to be selective about your issues and picking well depends both on understanding the landscape in higher education and also really understanding the institution that you're leading so you're looking for this conjunction of an issue that's significant in the larger world of higher education but is particularly relevant to the historical moment when you're leading the institution and Hannah Gray um became president of the University of Chicago in the early 1970s this was not a good time for higher education it was a time of stagflation the University of Chicago had declining enrollments it was in financial trouble so and but what she decided through this kind of double lens she had was on the one hand um that she felt graduate education really needed rethinking at the University of Chicago and secondly she wasn't convinced that the undergraduate program the graduate program and professional school programs were uh were were ideally in balance the way she went about you know these are fundamental institutional changes and um institutional changes in areas where the faculty usually thinks that they are entitled to make the decisions and the way she went about it was really really interesting I say the various ingredients of it were first of all she selected two outstanding leaders on the faculty to lead two task forces to come up with recommendations and reports and secondly she communicated she communicated she communicated she had lots of conversations with individual faculty with groups of faculty she used every organ of communication that was available to her and she also really used the understood and used the governance structures of the University so she changed the University of Chicago profoundly but it was hardly by coming in the first day and saying I know what's wrong but that that's the way it is it's a the process of universities are very complex organizations and the authority tends to be really distributed so if you want to create major change you have to be able to to to get people to to join your parade and actually think they're leading your parade is the best way thank you and you know when I read your chapter and and she said they didn't even have a budget to the office when she took over that's a huge question yeah and then also what impressed me with her story is that she actually began with questions she didn't come in with answers that's right and sort of you know and I looked at her when I thought about the uh the different categories I saw her as as one a great example of structural and cultural because she so much was a believer in the culture of University of Chicago in terms of the independence of the faculty the real rigorous attention to rigor and in academic in the academic life and she didn't want to lose that but at the same time when you talk about the model of that she put in place for graduate education in particular that became a national model that's very much a structural change so she kind of had this intersection of both the culture that she wanted to protect and preserve and also change the structure but retain that culture so I saw that as really what what stood out to me as her her major contribution and her juncture so um yeah and um the other thing that came across was she said that there was a lot of time when people would approach her as you know being a woman how does she respond to this propensity to just identify her basis of her gender as opposed to her skills I she really didn't like that she said people are much more interested in my gender than they are my ideas about higher education but I have a kind of funny story to tell that I told in the in the in the chapter Hannah Gray was born in Germany she was the child of German Jewish refugee parents they fled Germany first to the UK and then to the United States where her father finally wound up teaching at Yale and she grew up in a house of a Jewish immigrant you know Jewish refugee mostly academics and so she's fast forward many years she becomes the president of the University of Chicago and her inauguration the chair of the board of trustees says and now I am so excited to present to you the very first president of the University of Chicago who big pause was born in another country yes yes because I'm sure everybody was expecting the first woman right yeah right so uh yeah that's intriguing because you know when they when Allison conceived conceptualized this series it wasn't so much sort of down that rabbit hole of oh the difference that women are as leaders in terms of biological differences or whatever but really just trying to really create a platform for us to distill those qualities of leadership that these women these leaders who happen to be women bring to their institutions in higher ed that really have been these 12 profiles each of them really really demonstrates uh even though they tell the stories that weren't so successful but they did have success in their major junctures of decision making that any leader would be challenged to succeed in I mean universities are a business model that is so complex I don't know how you all do your jobs and come here smiling like this in the midst of of what's going on around in the in the whole sector right now so it's just an amazing both uh Ruth Simmons story and Hannah's story as as a child of immigrants uh are fascinating in their pathway to get to leadership too like where they started and um I don't know if you want to uh Carmen you mentioned it earlier about uh the influence of um of uh of of Ruth's upbringing as a parent sharecropping and how that inspired her doggedness about education and Carol likewise Hannah came from immigrant family obviously was educated and privileged in many ways uh but she came to a university that was totally in shambles almost at a time and she had to call on other skills not just her academic brilliance but really these interpersonal skills that are so much a part of what it takes to be have success as a leader in any any any sector yeah I don't know if any of you all want to comment on any of that before we actually uh just um just one thing I I this is also a theme in this conversation um Hannah attributes a lot of her leadership and her achievement to having gone to Brynmore a women's college and that's right and one that took women's aspirations for graduate degrees very seriously she also had as Ruth Simmons had varied institutional experience she was dean at Northwestern she was provost at Yale uh she originally was a faculty member at the University of Chicago and comes back to be president so um I I think that multiple institutional contexts give give give people perspective and experience that helps them make the decisions yeah and I think Ruth would say that that is certainly important part of her own sort of framing of her own leadership I also think that Ruth talks she doesn't use this term it's a term that I use but I I'll just say it in her stead this sort of outsider's integrity I think that sometimes comes when you are a person who has been left outside the system sometimes in particular ways and so oftentimes these women um were through their upbringing or other things were not in the system and they bring a kind of a critique that is helpful to making large institutional change and so that's not a gender perspective but it is true that many women have found themselves in that path because of how our country's been built and those are some of the integral sort of attributes that they bring to their analysis of the thing that they should do the work that they should be thinking about and also have to help their constituencies respond to change because they typically have been in these moments of major change in their own lives and so they also are able to help their constituents respond to the challenge of change and if leadership is is anything it is helping shepherd all the people with whom are part of your organization through change I mean that's what it is and sometimes big women have had a perspective on that because of their careers and their personal experience thank you so Beth I think you're coming back in to bring us home I actually just want to continue listening but I did promise the audience who have have are peppering us as questions both in the chat and I apologize that Q&A wasn't working for a while so I got questions in the chat even got some by email so um okay I feel like I have so many questions based on that conversation about this idea of trusting yourself it's fascinating Carmen and um well let me ask the questions from the audience first and hopefully we can get to some of the ones I have personally so one question is I'm just going to read it if your heart and mind tell you to make a decision that you feel is is right you know the processes went through get pressure from other forces or perhaps finances pull you in a different direction how have you rectified this and I asked I'll guess I'll ask Carol first this and then Carmen I think conversation is so important I mean when you're in an executive position like this not every decision you make is popular but I find that you have the best chance of keeping the community with you if you really listen to their points of view and you explain what is bringing you to the decision that you're making that kind of sure route to lack of success is to just decide decide something without consultation it can be the rightest decision in the world but if you don't let the community into your thought process it's going to be much harder for you yeah I tell you that I would I would say two things that Ruth said to me about this kind of very topic the first thing she said to me is that at the end of the day the truth does not so discord and so when Carol's talking about explaining how you got there what your decision how you are thinking about this I think sometimes as leaders we can shy away from giving people the facts as we know them and being clear about what's making us think in this direction and and being willing to accept that the constituency can understand nuance and complexity and that there's not always clarity and then the other thing that Ruth said to me about this is that one of the things you have to do as a leader is to get comfortable with the idea that there may not be a clarity in the outcome right and I think that once you can get comfortable with that like you know I'm comfortable enough on on this campus I would say yeah I don't know what the outcome of that is going to be here's why I think we should go in this direction here are the things that we're considering here's how I'm thinking and here's what I hope the outcome will be but helping everybody know that there is lack of clarity in the outcome sometimes I think also takes some of the pressure off from this push and pull of I think it's the right thing but these things are constraining me and I'm often times saying my caps I don't care if that's too so let me tell you what came across the trends I mean like let me just show tell you what it is right as opposed to this kind of strata secrecy that I think sometimes breeds much more interesting things than this really true Carol yes yeah the lack of communication gives room for the rumor mill right yeah and I think also when you when you leave from conviction and you communicate as Carol said and you and you have the authenticity like Carmen said you can bring people along they really want to trust your leadership you know in that basis I just think it's so important to trust your own instincts because in my own experience looking back it's when I didn't trust it that the decisions were not as optimum as it could have been because you're listening and and you know to to move away from with maturity you kind of you're not doing performative leadership you really are leading from something deeper and that really comes with experience and and passion and commitment to to to your role into what it is that you're leading so it's all it's a combination of those factors that's a great it was a great question Michelle I'm going to turn this to you Virginia has a question who says very nicely I love this conversation thank you Virginia question to panel how did you get into leadership in higher ed was it a conscious decision to find opportunities or did the universe sort of speak to you Michelle why don't you take it first well actually for 12 years I was a senior lecturer at the University of Nigeria and that was my entry into into higher ed I my husband's Nigerian and he was recruited to come back to Nigeria to head up to be part of a of the foundational professors to form the first University of Technology he was a computer engineer so when we went of course you know my family thought I was a little crazy going around the world across the ocean with my little three kids and him and and the University of Nigeria is in the town of has a huge campus of professional schools in the town that where we lived and where his university was so he was at a state university technology and I was at the University of Nigeria and I was the first woman faculty member in the department of estate management my my master's degree is in city and regional planning they didn't have an urban planning department so I taught urban city planning in the department of estate management which was kind of the closest thing to the kinds of subjects that you would do in city planning economics land economics and so on so that was my and I spent 13 years and had an opportunity to also chair the department to take a term as a department chair so that was my interest you know entry into academia and coming back to the US I my career has been in the nonprofit sector but also with issues related to gender and racial equity with reproductive health with women led philanthropy and then just before leaving a couple years ago president of the women's college coalition that gave me an opportunity to really learn and work with women college presidents across the country in a very intimate way and so that's my experience and really you know they're they're similar there are things that carry with you when you're in leadership whether you're in a university or heading up an NGO or maybe handling a business there's leadership qualities that trans trans cross that that there's not oh I'm a leader in higher ed so I only do this they cross pollinate if you will yeah so that's me and they do I'm sure so I'd be called the name of the the forum higher ed and beyond you did that very well Carmen how about you and what tell us here how you know I think mine is sort of a combination of a choice but also sort of stars aligning so I'm a lawyer by trainee but I was interested in education policy so that's where my focus was at Princeton and my master's degree so I honestly thought I would be the general counsel that's kind of what I thought I would be doing at a college or university when I went back to Princeton to run the graduate programs that I was connected to the thing that happened that I think it's kind of the universe reaching out when I went to think about being dean of Douglas and the folks on this panel are connected via Douglas too so that's another women's college that we're all connected to I was sitting in the interview and it was one of those typical higher ed type interviews with 25 people around the table interviewing the candidate in this particular instance and I was relatively young applying for this role and so someone sort of jokingly said what do you want to be when you grow up I think I was 31 or so and I can remember just kind of going you know in your mind like okay what do I say I'm applying for this role as dean and I just said not really thinking that I want to be a college president and there was an African-American woman on the panel that was interviewing me share a wall at Rutgers and she said to me before this group of 30 people not knowing me at all you will be a college president you will be one and that was it and that was the thing that pushed me into this role you know Cheryl recently passed away but she came to Oberlin to introduce me as the new president of Oberlin and when you bring people who know you she was integral to my career and was the first person that planted that seed of that is possible you can do it absolutely this is what you should do and it was just frankly I think a more senior African-American woman looking at a young upstart African-American kid really and saying affirming for her affirming for me what I had imagined in an instance that that was possible and she wanted me to know sort of sister to sister you will be one that's really powerful I mean that's amazing um oh Carol we want to hear we want to hear your yeah I am much hey my path was much more evolutionary I started doing the things that faculty members just expect they're going to do I chaired my department um but then as I was given the opportunity to do more and more um you know jobs with bigger portfolios I realized how much I liked this and so um so it was really I didn't have any any ambition when I was young or when I was in graduate school of being a leader in higher education and I'm curious how you had it how did Smith occur did you did was that I was the um executive when I was in graduate school I always wanted to go to a small liberal arts new England college and I got a job offer from Berkeley as my first job and I remember crying all night because I knew my dissertation director would never let me turn it down it was a really good job um but then when I finished being the executive vice chancellor and provost here in the 90s um I went back to the faculty that's what I thought I was going to do and I realized no I've really changed careers I'm really in educational leadership and then Smith started knocking on my door and I thought oh I do England college I can't have it so I went there then I came back to Berkeley to retire and um and I was tapped to be an the provost resigned very suddenly for personal reasons and I was tapped to be an interim provost and then asked to be chancellor so this is a kind of unexpected piece of my career I thought it was going to end when I stepped down from the presidency of Smith good leaders never never end you never go this is gosh we're running out of time so well this this is from Laurie um we I'm going to read a directory we Dr. Amber's approach to uh at Oberlin you were dealing with the value of a liberal education as well as the value of an arts and society through your conservatory which is a wild wildly expensive model of education how did you parse those two and where did they land um you know arts and education are inextricably interconnected to Oberlin yeah I'm not quite sure we parse them in the sense that I think that the the value of Oberlin is because we have those two divisions and it's because they come together in this unique way that we sort of talk about as a third space right I jokingly sort of say this is where innovation and creativity breed right that's what happens here at Oberlin it's true that they are that our model this in general a higher education is a high cost model some of the work that we're all trying to do is to help our families appreciate the value of this experience and in some ways I think the experience we've had in the pandemic um has um helped people reevaluate what it means to be on a campus and to be part of a residential experience it's not to say that the other methods of delivery don't have value they do but we all have recognized what we lost in not being able to be together and the only thing I think we have to do at liberal arts colleges is to help people see um how liberal arts is engaged in the way that helps people think about their lives after Oberlin and what that work will be in very clear distinct ways that still keeps the broadness and the rigor and the critical thinking cultural competency all those things that we know the liberal arts brings but also says to our students that they're going to launch effectively from our institutions and so we try not to break it up in that way but just try to demonstrate our value in different ways to our families and I think that you know well one of the things that we'll be doing at Oberlin is guaranteeing a funded internship for every Oberlin student so we're going to launch that in a few months here and that's sort of demonstrating that you can take this degree and have a broad framing on it and still be able to launch effectively into the things that you really care about right and always in particular but students at liberal arts colleges more broadly want to make the world be different. I say all the time the world needs more Oberlin graduates and it's because they want to change the world for good and what happens at a liberal arts college in particularly Oberlin is that they get all of the skill sets that they need to go out and meet the world as it is but also change it for good and that's that's the value of this experience yeah. Good I'm gonna well I have one question coming in that I a couple questions have come in that we're not going to be able to get to but I'll try to respond to the participants afterwards and maybe catch Michelle um but but you know I realize this is leadership in general but what I'm very curious and one of the um participants are what do you see the biggest challenges in higher ed? I know we can go up but that could be a whole separate um issue but you know through the lens of leadership and through the lens of um women leadership and Karen I'll start with you. Well I think there are two um really big challenges which are also opportunities. I mean one is the growing diversity of the population of the United States and the fact that our institutions are not becoming as diverse as the population is and I just this early this morning I had an orientation for new faculty in the first presentation was about how you teach to a diverse student body. So I think diversity is not only diversity equity inclusion belonging is how we put it um is a huge challenge generally in our country but particularly for higher education with its um requirements that we change the kinds of institutions that we are and the second thing which is both a challenge and an opportunity is the pandemic. I keep looking for super linings in the pandemic. The pandemic has cut the the the link between place and instruction and and so we have this new set of digital tools that people are newly fluent with look at us on zoom we wouldn't have done it this way two years ago and um and so what do we make of that? So those are two of the two of the big ones. Yeah I would I would agree absolutely and I would say on the second one so the first one I've been saying and Carol has too that the institutions that get this right the the piece around racial equity diversity and inclusion and how we change ourselves will be the most sought-after institution in the country. So you know those of us who can try to figure out how to get that right we will be the institutions of choice. On on Carol's second one I think that you know we've been marching towards this challenge of place to divide for a while and the pandemic just codified it and made it really clear that we have to figure out how we're going to think about how we deliver this experience in all sorts of ways and how it impacts those things that we know are really valuable about our institutions and so we all are trying to figure out what I've been jokingly calling COVID learning right what have we learned from what have we learned from this that we got applied to this experience. So just one quick example you know in Oberlin Ohio we don't get a chance to get the sort of I'm traveling down the east coast to go to all the schools because we did virtual recruitment all last year but there was more equity across our competitors we are bringing in the highest number of students that we've ever brought in in Oberlin's history after a pandemic. That just shows you that there are some things we need to take from COVID around how we recruit virtually even though we may go back to a system where we have in-person admissions right so there are things that we can learn about our institutions that we're going to need to change and COVID has helped us but it's also been a tremendous challenge for many colleges and universities and how many of us will emerge from this stronger that is a question mark right because of its challenge. If I can just play in a little bit I know we have almost out of time but I think what I think about in terms of where the sector's opportunity is is in a larger sense we have to really do a better job of making the notion of education so important and essential to a healthy democracy and get off to defensiveness about the value of education. I think that's the call of the entire sector and the leadership needs to I think in higher and I come in as a little bit from an outsider in the sense of majority of my career being an NGO world of activism we're not the best advocates for our sector and so we were caught put on the defensive by you know the technology world and everything was sort of reduced to what's the earning power of your degree. Well you know philosophy still has relevance if you look at the history of democracy it's up to us to figure out how do you frame that to be relevant to the 18 year old today that it has values so I think Carmen's model about making this internship for our liberal arts students is so important because becoming relevant to solving the complex social problems is key if this sector is going to really endure in the future. So I think the key thing is preserving our democracy and and really making it clear and educated citizens is key if we don't have it Langston Hughes said the US will either kill ignorance or ignorance will kill the US and it's sort of he said that how many years ago and now here we are. Great well the conference that's great question coming in I wish we had another hour but we do not and I'm so sorry wonderful conversation I'm so grateful to Michelle to Carol to Carmen for joining us we will we did record this this will be extending out to all the participants and all the registrants as well as turning into a story we will embed this as well so stay tuned to watch it more thank you so much for everyone I'm sorry we couldn't get to all the questions but what a fascinating conversation thank you all thank you all thank you thank you bye bye I'm going to and here's the name of the book as well for people to join in I'm going to end it now bye