Andrew Hibel: Welcome to the HigherEdJobs Podcast. I'm Andy Hibel, the chief operating officer and one of the cofounders of HigherEdJobs.

Kelly Cherwin: And I'm Kelly Cherwin, the director of editorial strategy. Today, we are joined by Dr. Marjorie Hass, president of the Council of Independent Colleges. Marjorie is a philosopher, leader, award winning teacher, mentor, author, and one of the most influential thinkers in the independent higher education sector. Since 2021, she has led the Council of Independent Colleges, which has hundreds of member institutions serving more than 2,000,000 students nationwide. Hass has earned her bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees in philosophy from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign.

She speaks frequently on leadership, shared governance, and the state and promise of independent sector in higher education. Hass is currently a member of the board of trustees at Brandeis University. So welcome back to the podcast, Dr. Hass. It's nice to have you here today.

Marjorie Hass: It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me back again.

Kelly Cherwin: So let's start our conversation, today we're going to be discussing faculty recruitment at the start of 2025, opportunities for college and university presidents to help them advance in the new year, and how engaging with communities benefits higher ed institutions. So like I mentioned, it's faculty recruitment time. What advice do you have for professionals applying for faculty roles at colleges nationwide? And what are you seeing and hearing from member institutions?

Marjorie Hass: You know, this is a challenging but also an exciting time to be thinking about beginning a faculty career. So for those people looking for their perhaps first full time or first tenure track position, I really think it's important to delve in deeply into the mission of the institutions that you're applying to. It's very competitive process and so it's easy to just sort of spread your information around widely and not think too much about that, but particularly before you meet with a search committee, really do your homework. Institutions differ a great deal in the kinds of expectations they have about the relationships you're expected to build with students, about the relationship between teaching and service and scholarship, about what counts as scholarship. Some institutions really insist on community engaged scholarship in certain fields, for example, and others may value it as a form of service, but don't count it at all towards, tenure.

So really understanding the nature of the institution. I've seen too many people write, I can't wait to be at your university when it's a college, or I, you know, really am excited about being part of a Catholic mission when it's a Lutheran College. So really paying attention and thinking about whether you would find a home there matters. If it's a second job or you're looking to move institutions, I think what I'm hearing from a lot of people now is we know that there are challenges everywhere, financial, demographic, etcetera. But I do find people really looking to build deep roots in a community.

And I do think people are more likely to make choices about institutions based on the state or the community than perhaps was true when there was maybe less diversity around those things, in the past.

Kelly Cherwin: That's great. So it's not just about salary. There's a lot more to consider, obviously.

Marjorie Hass: Absolutely. And, you know, salary is, obviously important, and I encourage people to be both thoughtful but also realistic as you negotiate salary. But it is just one piece, and it's a piece in a moment of time, Understanding how institutions make funding and financial decisions over time is very important. If you're thinking about what kind of earning capacity you might have in the future, understanding what kinds of things there may be opportunities for additional compensation for and what kinds of things there are not, and also understanding the other kinds of lifestyle perks. There's a lot of differences in cost of living, for example.

Benefits can vary widely from institution to institution, access to the things that matter to you without having to drive in a car or get on a plane. All of those things matter. So looking holistically results in greater happiness, I think.

Kelly Cherwin: It's great advice.

Andrew Hibel: Yeah. That's fantastic advice. You mentioned kind of some of thefinancial parts of institutions today. Are you seeing folks do things differently as they evaluate institutions as far as their fiscal health? And what advice you might have for candidates as far as doing their own due diligence, short of hiring their own accounting firm to do an audit of the institutions they apply to?

Marjorie Hass: Let me maybe take a step back and say that I think one of the things that is true about this era is that everyone on campus has to be knowledgeable and engaged in all the different core parts of the institution. And here's what I mean by that more specifically. I think of institutions as resting typically on 3 different pillars. They rest on their mission. They rest on their institutional culture and they rest on their business model.

When those things are in alignment, institutions thrive. When they're out of alignment, institutions struggle. There was a time long, long ago when faculty could think of themselves as perhaps the guardians of the mission and didn't feel in many institutions like they had to pay much attention to the business model or really understand the business of higher education. And they didn't always feel that they needed to pay a lot of attention to the culture. Student life was supposed to take care of that.

The board and the president would take care of the business model. The faculty were responsible for the mission. Those days are over, and I think that's not a bad thing. I think it's very important no matter what your role is in the institution, whether you are applying to be a faculty member there or to serve in the administration or even if you are coming as a student, to truly understand the relationship between those three things. What is it that the institution says it is doing a state land grant institution is contributing to the prosperity of the residents of that state, and it is serving and responsible to those residents and its elected government.

A large research university has significant responsibilities for supporting research, and its business model probably is dependent on a lot of research dollars coming to that institution. A small liberal arts college may be, much more closely aligned in both its mission and its business model to donations, to community engagement and relations, perhaps to a religious tradition. So really understanding that and understanding how those things fit together is very important. Imagining that you are going to land in graduate school is probably unrealistic. Graduate school and the kinds of institutions that produce PhDs are just a slice of American higher education.

Most jobs are not at those kinds of institutions. So understanding the breadth of sector and really thinking about where you might flourish, where you might feel most welcome, where you could see yourself making a contribution really matters. And then look at the business model. Understand where does the revenue come from? Where does it go?

Most institutions, the majority of the revenue, even at state institutions, often comes from net student charges. That is what students pay after they have been discounted for scholarships with the actual money collected from students and their families. Endowment can play a role, particularly at private institutions at, you know, the outgo. The majority of it goes to pay faculty and staff, then there's the keeping up other pieces of the student experience and the land grant, understanding what the debt structure is of your institution. A lot of times these can be found for public institutions easily, and even private institutions often publish their annual reports, which gives you a sense.

You know, just hearing that maybe there have been cuts or pullbacks on certain things doesn't tell you that the institution is in trouble. That may have been a very, very wise decision. We are very good at starting things at institutions. Institutions that aren't willing to sunset things when they have run their course often are the ones that run into financial trouble. So understanding the inflow and outflow matters and getting a sense of where and how the senior administration is communicating about the budget can sometimes give you a better hint of where things are headed than just hearing, oh, they closed a program, or they stopped a sport or something like that.

Kelly Cherwin: I had a follow-up question to that. I know you said, understanding the business model and for a candidate to look at the annual report. Like, how far can a candidate push? How much can they ask of the interviewing the search community, you know, to dive into more to evaluate that to see if that'd be a good fit for them?

Marjorie Hass: I think you can push pretty far, and Ithink people increasingly are. If you get a lot of roadblocks, that tells you something then about the transparency at that institution. Some of it depends on your role. If you're applying for a senior administration position, you want a lot of details about the budgeting process, about the, ways and where and how money comes. Is your department run by hard money or soft money?

How does the funding cycle work? How much of what you do is dependent? This could be for faculty positions too, is dependent on endowed lines, etcetera. But I think the biggest question I would be listening to is, is there a uniform story that I'm hearing from a variety of different people that I talk to about the college's business model? You know, if everybody is saying something to you such as, we're very tuition dependent, and so we've been paying a lot of attention to the demographic changes and, the drop in 18 to 24 year olds, and here's the kinds of things we're doing as an institution to create new revenue streams.

That's a positive story. That's a story that says we recognize that this is a tough time for higher education, and we have a vision of where we're headed and how we're trying to work that out. If you just sort of hear a, well, we don't know, or that's the president's problem, or I don't know, but all I know is, you know, I didn't get the kind of raise I was expecting, That's a less positive response, I think. Even if it sounds positive, even if it's, well, all we care about is we get our, you know, raise every year. If faculty are not engaged in the business model, at least to the level of understanding it, in this climate, that tells you something about the general disengagement, and that would be a worrisome sign to me, perhaps.

Again, you know, there are always going to be people on campus who don't want anything to do with that. But if you hear that over and over again from folks, I think that tells you something about that campus culture, which may sound positive on one hand, but would make me at least a little nervous.

Kelly Cherwin: Thank you for that.

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Andrew Hibel: You'll soon host the President's Institute event for CIC, bringing together more than 350 higher education chief executives for networking and conversation. As we move into 2025, what are some bright spots and things to look forward to in higher education, and what opportunities exist for college and university presidents to help their institution advance?

Marjorie Hass: I'm so glad you asked it that way because there's a lot of unknowns about this coming year. We certainly hear a lot of criticisms about higher education from a lot of corners. We know again that the demographics and to some extent, the, economic picture in our country is making the financing of a college education difficult, and the running of college is more challenging. But there are, I think, several bright spots, and I'll give you a few that I see. One, I think this is an outstanding time to build deeper and more meaningful relationships between campuses and the communities they inhabit.

When you look at the research that says people have lost confidence in higher education, it's a little bit sometimes the way people say, I don't trust Congress, but I love my Congress person. It's true about higher ed too. People generally have a very positive feeling about their local college or university. And if they don't, it's usually focused on some sort of specific issues that often new employees can help mitigate or help alleviate. So thinking about the ways that whatever your role is on campus, you can deepen the relationship between your department and the community, your students in the community, you in the community, that is really important, I think, to the success and the thriving of our institutions, and it builds a kind of vibrancy on campus that is absolutely essential.

Many of our CIC campuses are anchor institutions. They're in rural communities where they may be the cultural and economic center, even if they're smaller colleges. So the role that you can play as an agent of transformation with your students, for your students, on behalf of your neighbors, I think is one of the great joys of being part of a higher ed institution. So that's one bright spot. This is a moment for local engagement.

Everybody is worn out by national politics. Everybody wants their own community to thrive, to be a healthy place, a safe place, a place of forward momentum, prosperous. Colleges and universities have a tremendous role to play there, and you can make that impact from any job on campus. A second bright spot, I think, is that this is a moment when students need you more than ever. We still are addressing the COVID generation.

We definitely are addressing a generation of young people on whom we have been conducting a, experiment of giving them, you know, cell phones at an advanced age and setting them loose in social media. They are looking to their college experience to help them grow intellectually, but also morally, socially, in terms of envisioning a future for themselves, we have an incredible amount of influence, not in the brainwashing sense that our critics sometimes think we do, but in the sense of being positive role models for what a life well lived looks like to a group of young people who have only often seen the most bizarre caricatures of a life well lived from what they see from influencers or from the people that fled across their social media. So it's a tremendous moment. Again, no matter the subject you teach, no matter the job that you hold at the institution, to think of the education you are doing and performing simply as a model and as an adult to whom, young people can relate. So those are two pieces that I think is important.

A third might be that this is really a moment to remember your why. You got into higher education for a reason, and it was probably a reason that's bigger than your own self. It may be that you yourself experience the transformational power of higher education. It may be that you understand higher education as the central engine for societal transformation and growth. It may be that you fell in love with a discipline, and you want to share the joy of the life of the mind with others.

But whatever that why is, this is a moment where it's going to be front and center for you. And holding on to it, articulating it, talking about it with your colleagues, that is a way of fostering and generating a hope for the future. Even at a moment when to many of us, it feels like we're in some benighted times.

Andrew Hibel: That's wonderful. And I love the fact that with appropriate wonder, you've pointed out just something that II think is lost on most people about higher education, which is the ability to allow 18 to 22 year olds in many instances in a more traditional model. But in other instances, basically, when kids reach this age that they want to grow into the people that they want to become. Yeah. And having a front row seat to that is amazing.

Marjorie Hass: It is.

Andrew Hibel: And for a community of any size who wants to have a part of that to have year after year after year that ability to be reminded of what's good in life and why people want to make a difference in life and believe in humanity, go go look at an incoming student and look at them 6 to 12 months afterwards and look at wonder as far as what a community, both thelocal community and the college community can do for that individual as far as their journey and where they want to go. And that's that's pretty amazing.

Marjorie Hass: Yeah. I think that's such a beautiful way to put it. And it's you have the opportunity to talk to your students and to listen to them. Right. To hear from them.

What are their hopes and dreams? And maybe on the surface some of those hopes and dreams seem very facile to you. Push that deeper. What does it mean to get a good job? What's the purpose of that?

Or, what is it you want to be an influencer? Who do you want to influence and why? Right? Really getting into a deeper core, asking that next layer down. You mentioned as well that for many of us in higher education, we're working with adults who may be returning for education or completing a degree that was begun long ago.

There too, you have a tremendous opportunity to see and learn. No one values learning more than somebody who has had to fight for their right to be in that classroom, whether it's a in person or a virtual classroom. They value that learning. And understanding why, understanding what is impactful about what is happening in your classroom or on your campus is, is essential, I think, to do it well, but also is, again, where the joy of this work comes from.

Kelly Cherwin: So, Marjorie, one of the themes for the upcoming conference is exploring how presidents can effectively engage communities. So could you talk a little bit more about that and other things that you might be exploring?

Marjorie Hass: Sure. I talked a little bit about why I think this is a particularly right moment, and we really are focusing on that theme as one of the key strands for our upcoming conference and gathering of presidents. There are other things as well that are very much on president's mind that we're talking about. Some of them, I'm sure your audience can imagine the business model, working with boards, dealing with political ideologies in the boardroom and on campus. Presidents are thinking a lot about that.

Issues related to supporting free expression and academic freedom on campus in a politically fraught moment. All of those are very much on people's minds and we'll be having conversations and programming about that. We are thinking in general also about conflict and how do we navigate and manage conflict. We don't have good models for that in this country. We have shouting at each other.

We have war making. We have writing snide comments on somebody's Facebook, but increasingly campuses are taking on as a key part of their core learning objectives, helping community members learn how to disagree productively. And we'll be spending a lot of time talking about that and have some workshop kinds of things that our presidents will be engaging in and hearing from different groups that have developed models for how to do that while on campus. There are some other things that are perhaps new and tell us a little bit about the age. For the very first time, we have a session on security for presidents and the presidential families.

These are very public roles. Presidents often are the subjects as almost every public figure is in America today of threats, of threats of violence, etcetera. And so we'll be talking a little bit about that. That's new and perhaps a distressing sign of the times, but I think it's important that we'll be working on that. We also have a session on how to keep your relationship strong, your marriage or your partnership strong.

Again, when the work is stressful, thinking about how you integrate it into your whole life is very important. And it's very hard for presidents to lead well if they're also struggling with crises in their own personal lives or their own relationships.

Andrew Hibel: You've been a university president twice over. You've been a university provost. You've witnessed and and lived through many changes in in higher education and related policy on a federal and state level. 2025 is shaping up to be a year where in many aspects, there's anticipating a lot of legislation and regulation and deregulation and different changes. What advice do you have for colleges and universities about effectively navigating any potential policy changes that might occur in 2025?

Marjorie Hass: This is certainly a moment for courage and integrity, and it's a moment to stand on your mission. The clearer your mission is and the clearer the ways you have a building, a culture that supports the learning, the more effectively you can advocate for that. And that has to be a campus wide effort. I work largely with private institutions who will, I think have more flexibility in many states than public institutions will, but even those institutions are under pressure and it is important that we really tie in all of those pieces together, the business model, the culture and the mission, and show how the ways we are relating to our students, the kinds of services we're providing them are not just nice things to do, but are actually essential. You can't learn if you're hungry, which is why many of our campuses have food pantries.

You can't learn if you're harassed on your way to class every day, which is why we try to create environments where students have a sense of safety and engagement and relationship. It's harder to learn if you don't feel like you see role models of others who have been successful, who look like you or come from your background or are also first generation students or what have you. So tying all of that in using our intellectual assets, such as our ability to do research, to look at our own data, to draw those conclusions is going to be extremely important. A lot of politics now runs by slogan. I don't care what we call the things.

You can ban words. You can ban phrases, but we have a responsibility to ensure that every student who comes to us feels as though they are at the center of the teaching and learning experience, and every student has the resources they need to be successful at our institution. If you admit a student to your campus, you're saying, we believe you can succeed. You have to do your part, and we'll do our part, and we will help you graduate. We will help you graduate in a timely fashion.

When there is distraction and dispute, the best thing we can do is focus on our students and focus on what our students need to be successful and to make sure we provide that whether it is formally in the forms of different kinds of offices and services or in our own interactions day to day with students. So that's going to be, I think, absolutely essential.

Kelly Cherwin: So well said. So let's close it out on a good note here. So what excites you about moving ahead in 2025 with the opportunities in the academic community?

Marjorie Hass: Well, again, a very good way to ask the question. There are many things that give me pause, many ways in which I have had to personally mourn the loss of things that seemed to me to be central to who we are as a country. But overall, I am entering the year with a sense of hope. Even in dark times, even in times where higher education is very misunderstood and perhaps not valued in the ways it should be, We have opportunities to make progress. We have opportunities to teach and learn.

We have opportunities to broaden our own understanding. There are many things that we can accomplish this year. We can give our students the foundation that they need to understand and am always inspired when I talk am always inspired when I talk to the people on campus doing the work. Make sure that you have lots of time to support yourself. Again, you're every time you open the paper, somebody's going to be saying something negative or largely without merit, although we need to be reflective as well about how we're doing our work.

But somebody's going to be criticizing and taking broad swipes at higher education, but we know what it's really like on campus and we know the good work that we do. We know how it impacts everything from the prosperity of this country, to our possibilities for peace, for addressing changes to our climate, for creating a generation of young people that also have a sense of vibrancy and hope. So the work you do has never been more important, and that alone that alone should feel very energizing.

Andrew Hibel: That's a wonderful way to end the podcast, but we'd like to hear from you. If you have any thoughts or comments or reflections for Marjorie or even your own thoughts about 2025 and what it might bring, please feel free to email us at podcast@higheredjobs.com or send us a direct message on x @ higheredcareers. We'd love to hear from you. Thanks for listening, and we wish you a wonderful 2025.