808: How to Build a Connected Campus Community - with Dr. Jonathan Koppell, President, Montclair State University

Dr. Michelle Cantu-Wilson: Welcome everyone to the EdUp Experience podcast where we make education your business. I am Dr. Michelle Cantu-Wilson and I'm filling in today for the world-famous WWE champion, chess guru and renowned opera singer, Dr. Joe Sallustio. Yes, I'm joking. Joe is a mere public servant at a university in higher education and he is one of the founders of the EdUp Experience podcast. He's a dear friend. I told him I was going to joke on him because when I come on as a guest co-host, he always blares the air horn and has dubbed me La Reina del Air Horn. So I had to get him back. I'm thrilled to join you today. I am a higher education leadership consultant. I am also a community college trustee in Southeast Texas. And I have a wonderful guest co-host today. Cole Clark is the managing director of Deloitte. I'm going to let him introduce himself before I get to our amazing guest today.

Cole Clark: Well, I have to narrow it down a bit. Deloitte's a really big firm and my focus is higher education. So I serve as a managing director in our broader government and public sector portion of the firm that focuses on higher education in the US and have been doing that for about eight years. But I have spent my entire career in higher education, mostly with technology firms, but not as a technocrat, more of an industry evangelist with technology firms that have a particular focus and relevance to higher education's desire to transform. I started with Apple Computer in the 80s and early 90s when they were beginning to get their sea legs under them and certainly had a considerable focus on education. Then I moved to Sun Microsystems, which also had a very special and unique relationship with education and research, and then into Oracle Corporation when Sun was acquired by Oracle in 2010. For a time I led their global industry team focused on education and nonprofit research.

Dr. Michelle Cantu-Wilson: Excellent. My cousin worked for Oracle, and when you said that you were an industry evangelist, I just want to make sure that there is dancing in the industry, okay? That's the only way that I'll accept it. It is an honor to have you as a co-host. I know that you have a connection with our guest and I'll leave it to you all to share that with our audience, but I'm going to go ahead and bring our guest in now. He is an amazing higher education leader. I looked him up, I did my research and all of my cyber stalking and all I found were futuristic observations, found service that kind of goes above and beyond what other leaders are doing in higher education. And I also found a lot of promise of leadership. And so I'm thrilled to bring Jonathan Koppell, the president of Montclair State University. Jonathan, welcome to the show. We are so excited to have you.

Dr. Jonathan Koppell: Thank you. I'm excited to be here. First of all, as you said with a friend, Cole, but also to get to meet you, Michelle. I know you have an extensive background in higher education, but I didn't know you were La Reina del Airhorn. It's a pleasure to be with you, Your Majesty.

Dr. Michelle Cantu-Wilson: Thank you. Well, it's nice to meet with the common folk. It's really a pleasure. I do take time when I have it. No, welcome. It's really exciting. I did cyber-stalk you and I was blown away. I'm going to bring a bunch of things up that I want to make sure that we cover today, but I want to give you an opportunity to just kick it off. Jonathan, who are you and why do you do what you do?

Dr. Jonathan Koppell: Yeah, that's a great place to start because I'm always excited to talk about not just Montclair State University, but a big portion of the higher education world that I don't think gets talked about enough. There's a lot of conversations about higher education these days more than ever, and they're focused on a small number of institutions that really serve a tiny percentage of the American population and really are incredibly unrepresentative of what higher education's about. Nothing wrong with those institutions. I'm not talking about the current controversies, but you would think that the world looked a lot like Harvard and Penn and Columbia and that their experiences spoke to the broader experiences of the average American university student. And if you did think that, you'd be completely wrong.

And so this is an opportunity to talk about Montclair State University, the second largest university in New Jersey, 23,000 students, and a university that represents the great diversity of this country. So we're a majority-minority institution, what's called a Hispanic-serving institution. In fact, more than 40% of our students are Hispanic. Almost half of our students are the first in their family to go to college and well over 40% of our students are Pell-eligible, which means they come from families with incomes less than $60,000 a year. 

All of that's really important because we'll get to talk about this. A lot of the conversation about what's wrong with higher education, which has some validity to it, by the way. I'm a little bit different than some of my colleagues in acknowledging that. But this idea that higher education is no longer a ladder that people can use to change their life circumstances, that it's no longer an engine of economic and social mobility, that it no longer delivers on the promise of the American dream. That's all bunk. That's just all bunk.

Dr. Michelle Cantu-Wilson: I agree.

Dr. Jonathan Koppell: And the families that make a commitment to come to Montclair and the students who work hard every day to extract every bit of value out of it that they can from this magnificent university, because they believe in the promise of education. And then our job is to deliver on that, which we do. And I will talk, I'm sure, in conversation about my previous institution, Arizona State University, and many others, to show that the idea that you can't be both an excellent university and accessible to large numbers of people, that that's also bunk. That there are amazing schools, amazing universities doing remarkable things, providing incredible learning opportunities for students.

And unlike some of those more famous institutions, we don't tell you the first thing when we meet you, how many people we reject when they apply to our university. We want to tell you how big a difference attending Montclair can make in your life. And we have the data to back that up. And I'm excited to spread that message because I think that a lot of the negativity, a lot of the skepticism regarding higher education, as I say, some of it has merit. I'm always happy to acknowledge that, but a lot of it's because the story is so badly told. So I appreciate the opportunity to be on this podcast and to talk with your listeners.

Dr. Michelle Cantu-Wilson: Well, we have a global audience and so this is the ideal place. I told Joe, this is the hub for the world when it comes to higher education. Now you and Cole are actually connected through an organization. Cole was wanting you to talk about this and then ask, of course, the next question on your mind. But you're connected to a forward-thinking group of leaders and an organization that is, I guess, seeking out the future of education and making pathways to it for higher education. So Cole, can you talk about that connection and then ask a burning question in your mind in regards to your good friend Jonathan?

Cole Clark: I think the genesis for developing the Forum for Higher Ed's New Era or New Era Forum as we call it for short was really to get at exactly what Jonathan's been talking about, which is that there is innovation and there's excellence in outcomes for students across the country, but because higher ed's not monolithic and because some of the national brand names tend to suck up all the oxygen, there's a need to come together and talk about some of this innovation that goes on as a way to speak more with one voice. So for the last couple of years, Jonathan's joined us and we've tried to hone in on four or five of the most salient important issues and opportunities facing the sector. 

You know, as you were talking, Jonathan, one of the things that I thought about was, you can only control so much of the narrative. But what are some of the things that you try to keep on message about when touting some of those or busting some of those myths that you were just articulating? And not get distracted by other things that might not be additive to that aim.

Dr. Jonathan Koppell: Well, I think probably I'll just get at some of the things that are the most common critiques of higher education. One of them is this debt question that students graduate from college with an unmanageable amount of debt. And look, I don't want to minimize that as an issue at all. It's a huge issue. It's complicated because it's impossible to have a really robust conversation about that without talking a little bit about how the funding of higher education has changed over the last 30 years, particularly public higher education, where it used to be possible for a person to attend college - literally, if you talk to people of a certain age, they paid a few hundred dollars a semester because public universities were supported by the taxpayer. And we sort of stopped doing that as a society. And so the burden shifted to the students. So obviously it's harder to get a good return on investment as the investment gets bigger and bigger and bigger.

Putting aside that complexity, the part that I think people lose sight of is that if you actually earn a degree, you probably are going to be just fine. You probably going to be just fine. And that in fact, the payoff on a college degree is still economically very robust. A million dollars a year in career earnings - people reduce it to that. There's reasons why that's overly simplistic and flawed and so on and so forth. But it gives you some sense. And more than 40% of the outstanding debt that gets talked about all the time, that's people who didn't earn a degree, right? Now, that's a huge issue. I'll come back to that in a second. But it's different than saying that the degree doesn't pay, right? And so we have to have a really more nuanced conversation about this.

And so one of the things that I like to talk about is first of all, the return on investment for our Montclair grads. The Wall Street Journal recently said we're one of the top public universities in the country and number four in our state only behind Princeton and a couple of engineering schools. Because for the average Montclair grad, the benefit from a salary point of view and the cost left over, it only takes about a year and a half given the advantage to pay for the cost. That's a pretty good investment.

Dr. Michelle Cantu-Wilson: I agree. I think most people would feel pretty good about that.

Dr. Jonathan Koppell: Sure, people from Princeton, they don't have a lot of debt because Princeton has a lot of money. They don't have that problem. So the reason why that matters is because then it's really important for us as institutions to make sure we're doing everything in our power to get students across the finish line. And we're really proud at Montclair of the success of our students and the completion rates. We want them to get better. There's no doubt about it. And we're laser-focused on, and we'll get into this in the conversation, laser-focused on establishing exactly what are the obstacles that bump people up from degree completion.

That's really critical. And one of the things that's the most important question that I think prospective college students and their families should be asking when they look at universities is exactly this. What is the completion rate? Who graduates and who doesn't? And I think people are getting more sophisticated about that. It's one of the reasons why even if you read the headlines, everybody's like gnashing their teeth and wringing their hands and saying, my God, nobody's going to college anymore. Yeah, we've had record enrollments for the past three years because people are becoming more discerning about this. And I think that's great. 

And we're particularly proud that the usual metric, which you can tell kind of what the likelihood of graduation is by - is the background of a student economically, by the way, not how they did in school. If you wanted to predict whether somebody is going to graduate, don't look at their grades, look at their family income, which is a sad statement, but true. So we're really proud that our students graduate at a rate that's 15 percentage points higher than the statistics would lead you to predict. That's top 10 in the country. And I think people are paying attention to that and they should.

And we should be judged, but this is where it gets to like, the critique is real. We should be judged on how well we're doing. 

Dr. Michelle Cantu-Wilson: Absolutely. We absolutely should be judged. And it's interesting because you've covered a lot of kind of what the pushback has been, but we know that a lot of that, Jonathan, is just sensationalism, right? We know that that is clickbait. We know that that is for ratings and for numbers and for views. We understand that. Now, I agree with you on the things that we should be held accountable for. But what I think is interesting is that there are efforts being made in higher education to be more forward-facing to the public, to enroll the entire family as community colleges do, and then also to provide data dashboards that make completion rates clear, that make time to degree clear, that make parts of term and the demographics of students. And so it's funny that there are these two completely separate conversations happening, but we know that that's orchestrated. 

And so that can be frustrating, but I think what I like that you do is you have a very buoyant sense about you in the way that you celebrate students. I was watching your videos, your welcome to students, your positivity and your attitude. And I think that sometimes that is underappreciated in higher education and our bureaucracy and our seriousness and our academics. So one of the things that you said in a quote that I saw was "public universities play a fundamental role in advancing society." And that is such promise. And so talk about some of the things that you have done as an educator, perhaps even at ASU and certainly at Montclair to provide promise to students and to keep that hope alive.

Dr. Jonathan Koppell: Yeah. So let's come back to the way you started at some point, because I actually think that it's part of the job to be energetic and fun and just be a human, right? Like, we're not cardboard cutouts. We should be accessible and real. And that's part of, I think, being an effective campus leader. But let's put that aside for a second, because what you hit on in the second part is sort of something I'm really passionate about, which is, it's not, we are public institutions. People say, you're a public institution because you get some of your budget from the state. And of course that's true. And don't get me wrong, even though the numbers gone down over the last 30, 50 years, still significant part of our budget, much less than people think, less than 25%.

But that's not what makes us public from my point of view. What makes us public is that our mission is to serve the public interest. Part of the way, this is it, part of the way we serve the public interest is by doing exactly what we've already been talking about, by creating educational opportunities that are transformative for the individual, but also transformative for society. And one of the conversations we had at the gathering Cole convened in Dallas earlier, well, I guess it wasn't this year, but at the end of last year, I felt very strongly had to be articulated was that education is a public good. And what I mean by that is society is richer because more people are educated. And the growth of the American economy post-World War II is directly linked to the GI Bill, which made it possible for a whole bunch of people to go to college who otherwise wouldn't have gone to college. And that was one of the pieces of fuel that led to this dramatic expansion of the American economy. So it's not just about return to the individual, it's return to the society. 

But I think universities have the opportunity to be much more than places where people get degrees. These are communities of thousands of people, students, faculty and staff. And if we harness that energy and intelligence and creativity and directed it at the most challenging problems we face as a society, we now have an incredible instrument for good. So part of what excites me about being in higher education and about having a role like this and the role that I had at ASU where I was Dean of what's called the Watts College of Public Service and Community Solutions, it's to sort of redesign the university to be an engine of social innovation and problem solving and to work with communities as a partner, not like this conquering force that has all the answers, but as a partner and say, hey, what are your biggest challenges and what are your aspirations and how do we take advantage of the fact that we have a business school that's supporting entrepreneurship and an education college that's training teachers. And I could go on, I could identify every part of the university. And how do we take what we do well and make that an asset that the community can deploy to address its challenges? 

And then along the way, here's the beautiful part. And then along the way, our students get hands-on learning opportunities by being involved in these things. So it's not just something in the classroom. They're out there, they're rolling up their sleeves, they're working with folks in the trenches, addressing the biggest challenges, and our faculty can do research, understanding what works, what doesn't, what are the dynamics at play. And so you have this virtuous engine where the education, the research, and the community progress are all propelling each other. Man, when you get that working, well, I'll tell you, it's a beautiful thing.

I'm excited and maybe we can talk about some of the things we're doing in the communities around Montclair, Patterson, New Jersey, very interesting historic city that played a critical role in our country, Newark, which is the biggest city in New Jersey, a few miles away where we're supporting the school system in interesting ways. We're showing that a university that is torqued to address these biggest challenges can make a huge, huge difference. And I'm proud of some of the ways we did that in Arizona as well. And I want to be clear, a lot of universities are doing this kind of work and that story needs to be told precisely to your point. So we don't get distracted by some of these negative narratives that focus on shortcomings without appreciating the whole picture. But I think in order to...

Cole Clark: I think in order to actually deliver on that, Jonathan, wouldn't you agree that the academic enterprise has to be nimble enough to adapt to the changing needs that the community has, the labor market for skills? And a lot of places do struggle with being able to not only create the new, but tear down the old in order to make space for what the institution needs to do next. How have you been able to navigate that at your institution?

Dr. Jonathan Koppell: Well, so I definitely think you're right. I mean, universities are not known for being nimble for the most part. And partially that's because we are legacy institutions in some ways. We hire faculty and they have a long tenure, sometimes literally. And so there can be some challenges in adapting. I think that the key is building a mindset, right? That our purpose is to serve the needs of the community. That's what we exist for. To basically, and this is, I think, what makes Montclair different, even different than other institutions that do work in the community, that you have to lay out the challenging sort of goal that says, if the community is not better because of what we're doing, then we have not achieved our mission. It has to be that. It can't be sort of, you'll have to forgive me. I have nerd speak problems and...

Dr. Michelle Cantu-Wilson: You are in good company. Go for it.

Dr. Jonathan Koppell: It can't be a positive externality. That is to say, we did a good thing. Isn't that nice? Yay, good for us. It has to be like, no, no. That's not the phrase. It's it's not extra credit. That's the assignment. And so I think when you articulate it that way, it sort of creates a different imperative. Now, I will say, Montclair is the right place to do this work precisely because our origin was always about public service. We started like a lot of universities as a normal school, which is a weird way of saying we train teachers. And by the way, ASU was Tempe Normal School. This is not an uncommon origin story and gradually the mission grew. And so, by the way, we still embrace that mission and we still are innovating in ways to create better teachers, to diversify the pipeline, to feed the pipeline as a national crisis and getting great K-12 teachers into the classroom. And we still embrace that as core to our mission. 

But we started with that baseline, right? That we existed to serve the public. I think our faculty, our staff, they are drawn to that mission and they want to be of value, they want to be of use. And you just need to keep reminding people that this is what it's about. I will say, I think the hardest thing, and I've had to learn this myself, I think we all have to learn it, is how to be a good partner when you're working in the community. It's not about coming in and saying, this is what we're gonna do. It's about coming in. It's about introducing yourself. It's about talking a little bit about what you believe you're capable of, but ultimately it's about listening. It starts with listening, and establishing trust. 

And so I'm an impatient guy. I like to do things. I like to get results quickly, but I heard this phrase a few years ago, which, which I really... It did, it did click into it. Got through my thick skull. You got to move at the speed of trust. And sometimes that's a little slower than you might like, but frankly, if you don't have trust, it's pretty hard to do anything effectively. And there are lots of reasons why people in the communities we serve, particularly communities of color and other marginalized communities, there's lots of reasons why there's distrust of universities over the years. And so we have to overcome that and... And when you do though, you can really do, you can do great work together.

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Yeah. You can. And I think it's interesting that you ended with that point just because as a Latina, I'm the first in my family to go to college and the first of 26 grandkids to even think about... yeah, I never thought of universities as engines of public good. That's just not your experience, but it sounds like you're saying the mindset needs to change, right? You're saying if you come in and you assume that you're the big guy on campus, right, or you're the big kid on the playground, you're going to be taught that culture eats strategy for lunch. Their communities have expectations, communities have norms, communities have, they have ebbs and flows. 

And so one of the things that I really appreciate is learning about the merger that happened with your university and a college of education. If that's not correct, then correct me. And you mentioned this briefly, the teacher shortage, it is a national crisis. It's one near and dear to my heart. I was an alternatively certified public education teacher. I was also an assistant principal for six years. And now I do work as a consultant in helping colleges of education in that space. What was that like? Because I looked at the history of mergers and I don't see a lot of them that have been happening in the recent future quite the way that yours was done or even at all. So talk to us a bit about that.

Dr. Jonathan Koppell: I was really excited about that. Two different things there. You're kind of like Ghostbusters, you're kind of crossing the streams a little bit. So I want to deal with both of them. So let's put, let's say teacher education, because it's like, that's super, super important to me. And we can't thrive as an educational student if we're not working with our partners in the K-12 educational space. And I think we've done some really interesting stuff there and I want to talk about...

Dr. Michelle Cantu-Wilson: Good, good, good. Okay.

Dr. Jonathan Koppell: But the merger, that's talking about something called Bloomfield College.

Dr. Michelle Cantu-Wilson: There you go. Bloomfield College. Very good.

Dr. Jonathan Koppell: Bloomfield College is a unique institution in New Jersey. We don't have any HBCUs. They've gotten a lot of attention nationally, very important institutions, historically black colleges and universities. There are none of those in New Jersey. And what Bloomfield is what's called a predominantly black institution, which means that its student body is largely African-American and it happens to also be a Hispanic-serving institution like Montclair. And it is the only four-year predominantly black institution in New Jersey. So it plays a distinctive role. 

Like a lot of small colleges, actually like a lot of small minority-serving colleges, Bloomfield was in danger of closing about two years ago and it won't surprise you given even what you've heard me say just in the beginning of this discussion that when confronted with the idea that the only black-serving institution in New Jersey, which is about six or so miles from Montclair was gonna close that I was like, can't say all this stuff and not do something about that. And so...

Dr. Michelle Cantu-Wilson: And when did this happen? When did this start?

Dr. Jonathan Koppell: About two years ago. 

Dr. Michelle Cantu-Wilson: But you started two years ago.

Dr. Jonathan Koppell: Yeah, this was within my first few months as president.

Dr. Michelle Cantu-Wilson: Wow.

Dr. Jonathan Koppell: So I was just like, well, can't do that. We can't just stand here and watch that and say, you know, that's a shame. And so we first figured out a way to, in some sense, for lack of a more nuanced way to put it, extend a line of credit to make sure that they wouldn't be closed simply because their ratings and their paper status forced them to close. And then over the last two years, we've been working to merge Bloomfield into Montclair State University. 

And as you know, but not necessarily every, and Cole knows, but not necessarily everybody listening, probably on a more or less one a week, maybe one every two weeks, institutions close. If you read the Chronicle or Inside Higher Ed, there's just, they close. And as I say, they're mostly minority-serving, religious or rural institutions. Just, and by the way, you know, that's capitalism, that's creative destruction. Not every institution should last. That's okay. Like in some cases, that's okay. I'm not advocating that never, never should a college close. But, and here's the but, but I think it's important that there are differentiated pathways available to different communities. 

And here's where this ties in to exactly where you started, Michelle, about the distinctiveness of the community you came from. I think one of the things that we've appreciated about HBCUs over the last few years is how they create a learning environment where African-American students, in many cases, have thrived precisely because it's an environment that has been designed around the needs and strengths, by the way, that doesn't often get stated clear enough, of a particular community and leverage those strengths, those distinctive characteristics to create better outcomes. 

And so what we're excited about is to say, how do we maintain that, the differentiated learning environment of Bloomfield, but create something better than before by virtue of its integration into a robust, comprehensive public research university, Montclair State University, which by the way, I want to be clear, we're 15% African-American, our students have terrific outcomes. We're not saying that we needed to do this in order to address that. That's a strength. The question is how do we build something that works better for some learners? And this is a huge question in higher ed because because you're gonna see lots of institutions unable to sustain themselves individually. And as I say, that's okay, some of them should close, but if you lose the variation, if you lose the diversity of opportunities because only one model, the large public model exists as an alternative to the rich elite universities that we talked about already, well then that's gonna leave a lot of people out. Right. And so we're excited about this project. It's not - I will tell you, it's not an easy thing. This is a public university trying to take a private university and put it together. It's difficult from an economic point of view, from a regulatory point of view, from an NCAA point of view. I mean, you name it. And so we're working through that. We're working through that right now, but excited. And I think it's going to be an important - it's going to be an important case for the future of the sector because there's going to be more of this kind of adjustment.

Cole Clark: Jonathan, do you think that the job, because of the changes that are upon us, things like having to potentially confront mergers and consolidations, the pressure to leverage technology in ways that higher ed's never had to in the past, the threats that some of that technology potentially portends, the - I would argue significant increase in the number of stakeholders to whom the president is accountable, the board, the community, the parents, the students, the faculty. Has the job changed and do you think that the skills and competencies and experiences that you acquired over your career prepared you for this role? Are there - and is the job itself in need of a sort of a reset in terms of what the progression, what the traditional pathway to the presidency has been and maybe what it should be going forward?

Dr. Jonathan Koppell: Great. It's a great question. There's a lot of different things in there. So let me sort of follow your thread. So - and it's been on my mind in part because I've been at a few gatherings of college and university presidents just in the last week or so. And so I wasn't a president 20 or 30 years ago, but I've been with some of those too. And they all said that this is way harder. To your point, they see exactly what you described, Cole, just the degree of difficulty has gotten quite high. I think that -

Dr. Michelle Cantu-Wilson: Wait, Jonathan, are you saying people who were presidents 20, 30 years ago are acknowledging that today's presidency is far more complex than what they experienced?

Dr. Jonathan Koppell: Yeah, that's exactly right.

Dr. Michelle Cantu-Wilson: Wow. That's also shocking.

Dr. Jonathan Koppell: They watch what's going on now and they say, we didn't have to deal with stuff that we didn't have to deal with. Part of that is the - there's a lot of different pieces of that. Part of that, we're seeing in real time is the scrutiny with respect to campus engagement on current political issues. And it's not just Israel-Gaza, although that's obviously very much of the moment. And that's been an interesting dynamic here at Montclair for particular reasons. But there's a host of ways in which universities are under enormous scrutiny and they've become - they've become crucibles where many of the large political and cultural battles of society have become located and a lightning rod for various parties. By the way, I'm not just talking about the right, the left as well. And in particular geographies, if you're a university leader in Florida or Texas or whatever, this is a huge part of your job is navigating the politics of those issues on a daily basis. So that's very complicated. 

The economics of higher education have become extremely difficult as we already talked about. You know, public investment has gone down. The costs have gone up because the main cost of university is people. And so as you have inflation and so on and so forth, you get massive, massive stressors on the budget. And yet I don't have to explain to you that there's also pressure to not raise tuition. So the money has to come from somewhere, right? So figuring out how that's going to work. Cole alluded to a part that is a giant question mark, which is how is technology and other changes going to alter the university. A big session that he put together was on artificial intelligence and what that means for the university. As I say, it's a big black box. We don't know the answer to that. 

And then probably the last thing I would put on this list, not that it's the last thing, but the last thing for now, is the expectations of what a university does. Now look, you're like, well, you just added to the expectations. You said you're gonna solve all the world's problems, but I'm not even talking about that. I'll give a really concrete example of what I mean by that. So we have a mental health crisis in this country and it's affecting people of all ages, but it's particularly acute for people under the age of 30. And that includes our students. And there was a time when people wouldn't have expected the university to do much about that. That time is not now. And so, and by the way, it's interesting, because people say, well, that's none of your business. Why are you hiring counselors and social workers? And the answer is because if our job is to ensure student success, and one of the obstacles to student success is student mental health, then we have to address it because you're gonna find us accountable for students not completing. And so, that's a huge issue now for every university is how are we addressing the mental health and wellbeing needs of our students? That's not something that really people expected from the university 30 years ago.

Dr. Michelle Cantu-Wilson: No, it would have been the exact opposite mentality. We know the bootstrap mentality that existed so long ago, but I think what you're speaking to is the idea that if you sit down with a student who says I'm struggling and they tell you why they're struggling, then it's not about numbers anymore. It's about the student and a byproduct of helping the student is, you get to persist and you retain them and they complete. But it is hard as an educator and certainly probably as the top educator of an institution to say we're not going to address a national crisis, people who are here, right? I admire you for being so vocal about that because I just don't - students are telling us. I've run focus groups back in my previous institution. I ran focus groups for community college students who said, I know that you have counselors, but we need more signs. We need to know more. You have to go overboard because we're not looking up. We're stressed out. We're struggling. You need to do more. If students are telling us to do more, we need to be 10 steps ahead. So thank you. Thank you for talking to us.

Dr. Jonathan Koppell: And look, I would love to be able to - I mean, this is where the pressures really get at it, right? The financial pressures, the - but you have to do more. And that's why I think people don't understand. They look at the university and they say, what are all these people - David Brooks had a piece like, there's all these bureaucrats. The ratio of professor to non-professor. It's - it's a little more nuanced than that. All those people working on the mental health of our students, yeah, they're not professors, but they are essential to us achieving our mission. And I'm not going to say that there aren't ways that universities can be more efficient and maybe there's bureaucratic inefficiency. We run a pretty tight ship here. I will tell you that. Like our ratio of employees to students is the best in New Jersey and our cost per degree is the best in New Jersey. But the reality is universities are expected to perform a wide variety of functions that they didn't in the past.

I want to get to the question that Cole raised, which is an interesting one, which is, do we have the right people in these jobs? And one of the most common - I'll just use that as an opportunity to address one of the most common digs, which is like, why do we have these people with PhDs who are researchers and academics? What does this have to do with being an academic and I don't care whether they can write a research paper. I care whether they know how to run a university. It's not an off the wall statement, but these still are educational institutions and the primary set of folks that you need to bring with you as you do make the pivots, go back to what Cole said, how do you get an organization to pivot? How do you create nimbleness? The primary constituencies that you have to bring along with you are faculty, people who care about teaching, people who care about ideas, people who care about research, people who think that that matters. And if you don't appreciate those things yourself, if you haven't lived that and done that work and felt it's important, your ability to communicate with those folks and to bring them along is gonna be severely impacted. 

And it is interesting that we say to, we say, why can't you have, you know, Joe business executive running a university and yet nobody's offering me to be CEO of Toshiba or whatever. Or most people would say, well, John, what do you know about finance? How can you be president of a bank? It's like, well, I know leadership, I know organizations. 

Dr. Michelle Cantu-Wilson: But hold on, I want to interrupt you there on that.

Dr. Jonathan Koppell: So now by the way, I'm an arrogant SOB, so I think I could run a bank. But the point is nobody would say that.

Dr. Michelle Cantu-Wilson: No, of course not. Nobody would say that.

Dr. Jonathan Koppell: So I think that having an appreciation for the distinctive culture and ethos of a university is important. Now, by the way, having a PhD after your name doesn't guarantee that you have that. But it increases the odds. Let me put it that way. It increases the odds. And so I think that that's necessary. But I do think, Cole, to your point, we probably could do a better job of preparing people. I'm like the geek king. So when I was in college, I went over to the Graduate School of Education and took a course on university administration. Cause I kind of had this idea that I might do something like this. And so my whole pathway, my whole pathway as, you know, since I went to grad school, I was thinking about this, I was looking at it. So I was sort of preparing myself to do this, but a lot of people come in and, they, nobody ever taught them how to read a budget. Nobody ever taught them how to think about marketing and personnel administration and so on and so forth.

I think there probably are ways in which we could better prepare people. And we're trying to do a better job of that ourselves, right? How do you work with department chairs and associate deans and deans? Because it's about a pipeline, it's about a process. And so I think that it's really interesting to raise that question in a sort of sector-wide basis because part of the implication of having shorter tenures is that more people are gonna be doing these jobs.

Dr. Michelle Cantu-Wilson: Right. And I was looking at your background, Jonathan, and I think that I'm going to take a liberty here and just say that you are uniquely positioned to, I guess, lead this conversation because everything in your vita tells me that you know about the global issues. All I see is public administration and policy and politics and management and political science and public policy and I mean, it is throughout your entire academic background. I mean, aside from wanting to know if you're ever gonna run for president, I guess give me some specifics about what you think that our future leaders need to know because one of the exciting things happening with the Ed-Up experience is I've created a spinoff called Ed-Up Emergence and I'm going to be interviewing emergent leaders, department chairs and deans, vice presidents who have the presidency in their sights or who could go in that way. What are - I mean, it's hard to make faculty nimble. I was faculty, you were faculty, we know it's hard to change, but looking at the future and based on Cole's question, what are some of those skills that they need to master in order to be in a position that's gonna be maybe more challenging than yours?

Dr. Jonathan Koppell: Yeah. So by the way, I want to say something. So you're right. You look at my background and my interests and it all does kind of lead to this. And that's why I'm in this job, because it almost combines all of my interests. I say that because I'm so blown away by my colleagues who are really effective, great university presidents. And it's like, yeah, I'm also a cell biologist or whatever. I'm like, how is that? How is that even possible? There are people who have really different academic backgrounds and yet they combine the skills together. I really am, I'm often awed by those, by those kind of rare birds who have these really different parts of the brain that they, that they activate for these different roles and it's amazing.

Dr. Michelle Cantu-Wilson: Mutorship is a whole passion though.

Dr. Jonathan Koppell: They'll tell you, they'll tell you it's related and no, what I do in the lab is intimately related. And of course I don't understand that because all I would do is break stuff if I were in a lab. But it really does impress me. Look, I think that the preparation for these jobs is this interesting combination of substantive or what you might call mechanical skills, the budgets, the personnel's understanding the legal and the governance structures of universities. Then if you're gonna be successful though, it's all the other stuff which people dismissively call soft skills. That's where all the action is. Your ability to interact with very varied constituencies, right?

You're dealing with students, you're dealing with faculty, you're dealing with staff, you're dealing with alumni, you're dealing with your board. If you're like I am at a public university, you're dealing with the state legislature, you're dealing with the governor's office, you're dealing with other political constituencies, you're dealing with the federal government, you're dealing with the state government, you're dealing with the many townships that you touch. So, and I could go on and you're trying to raise money from people and build relationships that way. So a good portion of the success of this is about your human interaction skills, your ability to listen. People think of it as being about talking. It's obviously about talking. It's also about listening. So I don't know that, I think you can teach some of those things, but what you really need to do is give people an opportunity to practice those skills because I don't think there's a way to learn those things without practicing. 

Let me use this as an opportunity to come back to something that I alluded to. You've got to be a human being and you've got to be able to have fun. So since you did some sleuthing, you probably found silly pictures of me in my Dr. K DJ persona, but also...

Dr. Michelle Cantu-Wilson: Awesome days, yeah.

Dr. Jonathan Koppell: Walking around and having fun with students and enjoying interacting with the community. And you have to be able to do that. You have to like it. And I do. I just like being at a campus. I like being around the enthusiasm of the students and their energy. It keeps me going. I love talking to faculty about research. Faculty are always surprised that I'm equally happy talking to an engineer or a poet or a physicist or a music instructor. I just find it all exciting and interesting. And I think you need that. I don't know how you could, personally, I don't know how you could do this without that. 

And I would say that's important on another level because these days people are gonna throw darts. Like you're gonna get angry messages from inside the university, from outside the university. People are gonna question every decision you make. If you're not comfortable being who you are, it's gonna be really hard. And I'm not saying that means like you think you're flawless. That's not what I mean at all. I mean, like just that you own it. Like you own who you are, you own the decisions you make. You accept your strengths and your weaknesses and you're like, I'm doing the best I can. If you're not comfortable in that way, it's really hard because your email is filled more with the waving fist than the...

Dr. Michelle Cantu-Wilson: He's waving his fist, guests. He's waving his fist.

Dr. Jonathan Koppell: It's more of that than bouquets of flowers. I'll try to paint a picture.

Dr. Michelle Cantu-Wilson: Yeah. Well, I have to say, Jonathan, that I'm going to recommend to Joe that we do a part two, because I don't know, Nicole, how you feel, but I don't think we've even scratched the surface of some of the things that we wanted to bring to light. We are going to start wrapping it up here shortly, but I wanted to ask a couple of questions that you can combine if you'd like before we close. And the first one is, is there anything that we missed that you want to make sure that our audience hears about you, about your work, or about something happening at Montclair that is especially fabulous? And then what do you think is the future of higher education?

Dr. Jonathan Koppell: So the one thing I want to mention is that it's related to the idea of serving communities, but I'm a big believer in promoting public service. It's something that I sort of have embraced as part of my assignment for many years. And I think that we have in the younger generation actually a strong public spiritedness. I think that there's an incorrect view that young people are disinterested and they only want to be on Instagram and stuff like that. I think that's not true. I think they're turned off to politics. That's an issue. We have to address that, but they're not turned off to service. So universities need to capture that energy, create opportunities for service and advance that. I'm very excited about an initiative I helped launch at ASU, the Next Generation Service Corps, which then working with the Volcker Alliance is spread nationally. We embrace public service at Montclair. We think of ourselves as the public service university of our state. And I think that's something that all of us need to be focused on. I think it's important to create this civic spirit. And I also think it's a crucial element if we're gonna heal the politics of our country, which are all about division, because service is about cohesion. And so we need to get there.

The other thing I'd throw out there is as much as I'm a defender of education, higher education, the future is going to be about change and meeting the needs of our students and not being dedicated to doing what we do because it's what we know, but actually adapting to what students need in order to thrive. And I think that means a lot of different things. One thing that it means is mixing and matching face-to-face and online and synchronous and asynchronous. The idea that there's online and there's traditional, that's so 2023. That's not gonna work. That's not gonna work. And so we're gonna have to figure out how to alter that. I'm excited about our steps towards that. We call it Montclair Unbound. That's the beginning of an evolution, not an end point.

Dr. Michelle Cantu-Wilson: Cole, is there anything that you wanted to make sure that we close with about your friend Jonathan? Anything you want to highlight about his work or a final question?

Cole Clark: Nothing I could add to what we've already, I think, discussed. I'm grateful, Jonathan, for your involvement and participation in bringing all of these ideas and perspectives to the forum and also to this forum. So thank you.

Dr. Jonathan Koppell: Thank you. And I'll say one part of the future that Cole's work underscores is success is going to be about collaboration. People think of universities competing in part because they see them on football fields, but also because we think of everything as zero-sum. The success in higher education, if there is success in higher education is gonna be about collaboration among multiple institutions because that's gonna be how we better serve students, I'm convinced of it. And so we're gonna need to figure out how to develop those muscles, right? Like, how do we do that? Because if we don't, people won't differentiate between the good guys and the bad guys. They'll just say, you're all bums.

Dr. Michelle Cantu-Wilson: Yeah. So that's important. And so the kinds of conversations that we're having, the personal relationships that are being built among individual leaders is as important as the institutional collaborations. And so it's exciting to see that happen. And you're really good at that, Jonathan. I encourage our listeners to check you out on LinkedIn. I especially appreciate it. I want to make sure I touched on this before we close, but I appreciate that you called out the president of University of Houston. Renu Khator, you're good at calling out your colleagues and highlighting the challenges that they're facing and also celebrating the good things that they're doing. It takes that type of relationship building, right, to lower the anxiety around competition, right? It's about helping students ultimately and helping the country to benefit from the strengths of students. And so I think that's something that you do well, that is one of those soft skills that we need future leaders to have. 

So it has been such an honor to interview you, to learn from you today. I know that our audience is getting a kick out of note-taking and saving this episode for future reference. I hope that we can have you back. I also hope that you'll come onto the EdUp Emergence podcast and be a guest host with me, because I think that you would do great in conversation with those emergent leaders. 

So folks, it has been a really great episode today. I'm very proud of it. We have been interviewing Dr. Jonathan Koppell, the president of Montclair State University. And my guest co-host was Cole Clark with Deloitte on the higher ed division. And Cole, it was nice to meet you, nice to work with you. Folks, make sure that you follow EdUp Experience podcast. Make sure you share the great episodes with your friends and neighbors. Reach out if you know someone that would be a great guest on the show and look out in the future for Ed-Up Emergence that's coming soon on the topic of interviewing the future community college and university presidents of our great country. You have just Ed-Uped.