Andy Hibel 0:05
In January of 2024, our producer, Mike Walker, and I had the pleasure of being in Louisville for a conference and taking a short drive over to Lexington to meet with my former Ph.D. advisor, Dr. John Thelin. Dr. Thelin is a historian and currently an emeritus professor and still resides in Lexington, where he taught at the University of Kentucky for many years. I had the pleasure of being with Dr. Thelin for one academic year in 1993 and 1994, and found myself having a bunch of questions for Dr. Thelin and what he thought about his career in higher education in general. The time that Mike and I got to spend with Dr. Thelin. It really told the story of not only his career, but of higher education over the past 30 to 40 years. It also told a bit of my own story, that every career has its own story and its own path, including my own. And being able to tell Dr. Thelin story with a little bit of my story is important. I actually came to Dr. Thelin in that academic year, having just completed a master's in higher education and a law degree previous to that. And I was kind of searching for my career path in becoming a plan giving officer. And being at Indiana University in that academic year really taught me a lot, not only about the history of higher education and the current state of higher education, but also gave me some thought about what higher education was about to become and what the path that I was going to take would look like. Now, in my path, what we didn't anticipate that year was when I finally found my position and started getting on my way in my career, another path opened up and that was HigherEdJobs. Seeing Dr. Thelin reminds me of the similarity of the paths that I followed. Most importantly, that academia has this unique place that transcends generations and transcend what society expects of it. What we really hope for is that listeners start learning a little bit more about where academia has been and where we are now, and maybe thinking about where you want to push the needle in the future. Dr. Thelin's perspective is unique and also amazingly thoughtful. I hope you enjoy these conversations as much as we enjoyed having them with them, enjoyed listening. And I was sharing with Mike on the drive over this morning. You probably have no recollection of this, but I came as a graduate student and after a couple of months I got the offer from Penn State, and then Penn State designed it. This will actually amuse you. Penn State designed a job description based on my experience and wanted to hire me into it. And it took six months because when I applied for the position, they determined that didn't meet the minimum qualifications of the job description they had written for me. So I was in this weird position, even though it was a full academic year. I kind of knew that Penn State had an offer in the wings and to say you did your professional duties. Absolutely. But personally you had a grounding of me to keep me engaged academically, but also hopeful and patient to wait that job.

Dr John Thelin 3:20
It's a very challenging balancing act.

Andy Hibel 3:23
Yeah. And I think the, the part when you do realize and I realized that when I read the preface to the book, that I was nowhere near the only one. I think there's a YouTube video of a lecture that you had given that I watched that was like somebody else. So like, look at all these students. And I think telling that story of how it's done and the, the love that you put into it...

Dr John Thelin 3:52
It's genuine. It's reciprocal.

Andy Hibel 3:53
If there's any. There's so many things in academia now, with new faculty, if there's one thing that, for me.
that they could keep from, from your generation is not to lose sight of that. Life and business is much more transactional than it was three years ago.

Dr John Thelin 4:09
And that's certainly true of the academic profession and of academic leadership. The changes that it's like watching them gradually but persistently before one's eyes. There are there are these definite changes. And one very fulfilling thing is that in addition to former students is I really like and click with newer, younger faculty. They're very good, but they're they've been cut adrift. Know they're very eager for some kind of conversation and assurances and reassurances that they're not getting from the formal hierarchy and structures is just a hunch that I have.

Andy Hibel 4:51
I think you're an amazing writer, but hearing you speak and hearing your passion of what you can communicate also with your voice is something that I think... The other part that kind of excites me with this. I think you're fun. You're much more fun than I think most historians get credit.

Dr John Thelin 5:09
For high school dating. I was always considered a fun guy.

We can be friends.

Andy Hibel 5:16
Yeah, I've never heard that.

Dr John Thelin 5:20
So. Yeah, right.

Andy Hibel 5:23
So. So the topic I kind of, for our purposes, have kind of title at the many academia's of America. And specifically, I think where I'm lead into it is talking about the moral plots at the University of Illinois and then obviously the moral act and just talking about, in my opinion, you can just see it. The many purposed institutions that serve different constituencies of academic consumers. They're disappearing. Some business models have thrived, others have not. The Carnegie Classification System is the gold standard for classifying colleges and universities. Is there a more practical way for the general public to look at academia? And if so, how?

Dr John Thelin 6:09
Background of that is. When I was a graduate student at UC Berkeley, I had a job working at the Center for Research in Higher Education, and one of the cubicles down from me were the architects of that system. So I watched it all from the ground up. This was in the early seventies. It was intended to be really a very pragmatic, non-judgmental, non-hierarchy, just way of bringing some coherence to the thousands of colleges and universities. And I think what happened unexpectedly and in some ways, unfortunately, is that over decades it became regarded as this pecking order and hierarchy so that institutions were positioning themselves. How can they get into this category when it was intended simply to say, this is this is what we do here are institutions in a comparable way. The takeaway that I have is that even though I've had the pleasure and privilege of being affiliated with very prestigious universities, I am really more intrigued and impressed by those that get less publicity. That go about their work, whether it's undergraduate or graduate or professional education or whatever, with less ostentation. I think it's a greatly under appreciated sector or side of this landscape of American higher education. So I would like to somehow break that obsession with a small number of institutions and expand the appreciation and awareness of a much broader scheme that would include more of these categories that are in the Carnegie.

Andy Hibel 8:00
I think for me, having attended the University of Illinois as an undergraduate, one of the first things they do on the campus tour is bring you by the undergraduate library that's buried underground to be able to protect the moral plots which share the name the same name as the moral act, which established the university. And the plots are the longest running research agricultural research area in the world. The interesting part about that is as an undergraduate, I'm sitting there looking at I'm like, Oh, cool. The undergrad library is underneath. Yeah, I got the more plots. But as I've come to appreciate the, the amazing effects of the moral act and what it did to change fundamentally higher education and then seeing what's happened with the classification. It was very interesting to me to see all that. But as I learned and been at many campuses over the years now and I'll speak of one that in the past few months I was up at the College of Saint Scholastica up in Duluth, Minnesota. And you look at the role and I'm thinking of nursing here in particular that I believe it's the and, we're going to have to fact check this, the most amount of nurses in the state of Minnesota come from the College of Saint Scholastica. And when you look at those, things would never suspect it. You have the University of Minnesota, Duluth, that's also up there. And you have wonderful institutions in Minnesota, wonderful public and private institutions.

Dr John Thelin 9:34
Very, under, under publicized. They're not pretentious and they tend to get overlooked. Allow me to comment. Interesting. I mentioned that I was the guest of Stan Ikenberry,. He had he had just retired as chancellor and he had returned to the faculty at Illinois and invited me to come for like two or three days. And we played hooky from the formal schedule. And I asked him about the plots and he arranged that we got a private tour of it. So, yes, you and I share that lore. I was a little bit older than you by about four decades. But know the fascination and the, the story of how the plan for something like an eight story library and then they, they figured out that the shadows were going to interfere with the growth and everything. And the idea that an institution could acknowledge and respect its heritage. I might have been, you know, like small consolation to you as a student, if you're on the third floor underground, kind of like the lepers in Ben-Hur, or they put them in a cell below the ground and throw a lettuce under the grating. But, but no, the fact that institutions remember that heritage and try to make it a living heritage.

Andy Hibel 10:59
Really just a testimony to the commitment to research. Like here we are, that we've actually thought through this, that we don't want to destroy this. We're going to meet this and put the library underneath. Yeah, it's pretty amazing. So when you look across America today and looking back at when you were back at UC Berkeley and looking at the classification system and all the different types of institutions, what do you think looks different as you look across the country as far as the classification of institutions, Not for the Carnegie purposes, but more for the purposes of where it drives institutions and their mission and what they hope to accomplish.

Dr John Thelin 11:40
Probably the temptation that on the one hand, colleges and universities, they want to be resilient. And as they sense that there are changes in the economy and the external world, they, they want to adapt to that. What concerns me is often you get late comers, for example, the flourishing of MBA programs. At some point you have, I think, too many institutions too late ascribe into that innovation. So you get this lag of like kind of yesterday's fashions. So you get an over extension or proliferation of what were once new fields. They actually become saturated fields. Also, like you mentioned, for example, like nursing programs. And I think what we've found is that a lot of colleges at one time central to their mission was like education of future teachers for public school systems. And that has changed because in some ways the demographics, the demand for well educated public school teachers has tapered. So some of those original missions have tended to subside and are replaced by others. And so there's a little bit of a temptation that institutions imitate. Going back to the agricultural model, I had heard one time that agricultural progress was preceded by the rate of one acre per year because one farmer would see that his neighbor was getting a better crop yield, and so he would then imitate what he was doing and then apply it to his own. And I think colleges sometimes are the same way. So you, you get some belated and false starts and there's always a little bit of danger that all institutions end up kind of converging on a similar model. And it's a bit more difficult to be truly distinctive. The paradox that I keep encountering is that particularly with high profile, prestigious institutions, they could be state institutions, they could be private. There is this peculiar American relationship that Americans love colleges, but Americans also love to hate colleges. There is a peculiar tension. For example, I'm sure that some of the recent controversies over the congressional hearings and how selective presidents did it is this kind of like gloating of external groups, kind of taking pleasure the fact that Harvard and MIT and Penn were on the griddle. On the other hand, these same people, probably more than anything, want their children to be accepted at those institutions. That they're, that they're kind of ridiculing or I, I look at, for example, some members of Congress who disparage elite institutions, and then I find out that, well, one of them was an undergraduate at Yale and captain of the baseball team and Phi Beta Kappa, and then went to Harvard Law. Well, pretty hard to criticize elite institutions if you've had such a great education from them. And so there's this always this kind of sweet and sour relationship where just as every community, they, they want a college because they have rental buildings and grocery stores and restaurants. They just don't want problems with a student. So we all Americans want it all ways. And sometimes get it.

Andy Hibel 15:10
So for somebody working in academia today, what would be your best advice on finding the right institution for your career and what you may want to do in your time working this community?

Dr John Thelin 15:26
I think as you consider the possibilities and options. Obviously, at one level you understand and absorb the kind of conventional imagery and heritage of an institution, and we in a generic sense acknowledge that this particular institution is great and is prestigious or whatever. But I think you also then have to look very thoughtfully within yourself as to what are you familiar with and what are you comfortable with. For example, in my case, I study selective admissions. A great deal is one of my passions. Yet I am increasingly and have for many years been appreciative of non-selective admissions. I like the idea of some of the happenstance or chance of why students may wander into a particular college or a field of study. What serendipity has brought them here, or what adversities. And I'm intrigued by the amount of underappreciated talent in students that may or may not have had the most outstanding record from, from high school or whatever. And the same thing in graduate school there, the patterns of life where people have been out for a while or whatever, and why they end up in some particular community where there's a campus. So I actually lean more toward appreciating the predictable, highly prestigious institutions.

Andy Hibel 16:58
So and this was actually it kind of lost its way. Or is it a lost weekend for American higher education? And this is kind of my question. By academia trying to serve everyone. Is it now perceived that we serve no one?

Dr John Thelin 17:17
I would modify that gently, is that we end up not serving everyone, well or appropriately so. I'll fudge a little bit of a shortfall in there. And I think one sign of that, what I have actually started to notice is that I will encounter young adults who are working in a variety of fields that may or may not have required a bachelor's degree. And some of them are definitely bright enough and sharp enough that they could pursue a bachelor's degree. But they are opting for some other kinds of certification or training program. So I think some of that, that optimism, I think that came out of post-World War Two, the idea that providing universal access for, for anyone who wished to go to college or university. I think we've realized some of the, oh, somewhat extravagant expectations of that and that it actually does not serve everyone well. So I think we're going through a little bit of a realignment. The interesting thing there was a famous sociologist who was Corker's assistant with the expansion of the University of California in the 1960s. He claimed that higher education. Colleges and universities that we think of like traditional campuses. He felt that they work pretty well when they tried to educate something like roughly, say, like 50 to 60% of young Americans who are graduating from high school, he said. However, when you try to go to like 80% or 90 or 100%, the structures and the culture of the institution break down that it's asking the institution to do too much, to do well, at too many things, and that, that there was some vague but unmistakable point at which the idea that a traditional college education is it really appropriate and right for everyone and is it necessarily good for society. One addition to that, though, is that there were underserved groups, particularly adults, returning, which were totally overlooked in that 1950s or early 1960s. And I think that's been a pleasant discovery. And I like the resilience of colleges that acknowledge that talent.

Mike Walker 19:39
Thanks for joining us for our second installment of our conversation with Dr. Thelin. If you have any thoughts or questions on this or any other episode, email us at podcast@HigherEdJobs.com. Or reach out to us on X, @HigherEdCareers. Thanks for listening. We look forward to talking soon.