Higher Ed Leadership, Accreditation, and the Future of Education with Dr. Linda Robertson

If you enjoyed this podcast, please like, subscribe and share it with friends who might find it valuable. Your support helps us reach more listeners and continue bringing you expert insights from the world of higher education. Welcome to the newest episode of the enrollment clinic. I have very, very special guest today, special guest to me. She is actually one of my mentors, it's Dr. Linda Robertson. She is retired director at Kent State University and she's also a retired director of boards in higher education and all around a leader in international education and higher ed in general. Linda, welcome. Thank you. I can't say how do you, right? There you go. I love the look and obviously the topic of conversation today is your amazing book, Bullshit with Cream on it, which is actually an interesting leadership memorial. So when I read that, I was expecting really the traditional leadership book. Like, you know, this is what we did here. This is what I did at this other school and this is what you need to focus on. But what actually made this very, very interesting to me because you've intertwined your life in the ranch and in remote hot springs County Wyoming in the 1940s and 50s and how those experiences helped you become the leader that you are today. And as I said before we even started recording helped also us your mentees to become the leaders that we have become today. So so thank you. I'm sure for putting this book together, this is actually a very, very wonderful read. You know, it was a COVID experience like many people I wrote during that time. So and how long did it take you to write the book? It was in my head for a while, you know, as any, I guess, thoughts and everything. I have it. I'm a student of leadership. My dissertation and everything was on presidential leadership of higher ed. And I just always was thinking about writing about leadership. But then everyone kept saying you have an interesting story. Why don't you write your story? And then I thought how can I do the two? So it took a lot of walking in the woods quite frankly to think deeply. How could I intertwine my story of going up on a ranch in Wyoming, very rural part of Wyoming, if not all of Wyoming is rural? And then how did that lead me to lead me to become interested in leadership first as a public school principal and an assistant superintendent and then to go forward for a PhD and higher education administration, you know, at 52 graduating in 58 and then spending the next 20 years of my life really doing leadership projects around the world. And during that time, I was fortunate enough to serve the United States State Department with a lot of grants and that the outreach with leadership into many different parts of the world and having teachers from all over the world come to Kent State for leadership training. And so last 20 years, I was immersed in leadership. It was on my mind. And so I kind of just combined my life story, not taking myself too seriously. And I was just a title and it was an academic book. Yeah, yeah. And it's very interesting because I don't want to digress, but I'll have to say this. In the back of my mind, I've always thought when I retire, I'll work in ranch and then I read the first 30 pages of the book that are specifically on ranch life. And I said, you know, maybe I'll have to think about this. Tell me a little bit about your experience growing up and your parents play a very, very big role in shaping kind of the leader that you've become. So tell me a little bit more about that. Well, I think that, you know, in early childhood education, we learned that the first years of our lives are very important to who we're going to become. And I never really thought too much about my experiences growing up until I wrote the book. And now I really realize that I had a unique childhood for many people. My dad had just come home from World War II. My mom and dad were married right before he left to go to the Pacific. My sister was born, you know, while he was overseas. He came back after two and a half years. And he leased a ranch. We're always wanting to buy a ranch and he leased a sheep ranch. My grandfather on my mom's side had been a sheep rancher. He had worked for him. He had worked on cattle ranchers all around as a young man grew up on them. And so here they are leasing this ranch. This widow suddenly needed someone to run it and they took that on. But it was a very remote location. So here we were in a terrible house, two rooms, just in a terrible remote location. And because of that, my sister had to board with my aunt to go to school. She was six years old and had to, you know, board away. We were too far away. And so here I was at three, four and five alone at the ranch with my mom and dad very busy ranching. And so I was at the kitchen table, all of that. It was a two room house. There was nowhere else to go. A bedroom, a kitchen. I was at the kitchen table. I was there for all of the decisions of the ranching. I was with my parents when they were working. I saw everything that they saw. And so really I was in the work environment, my early childhood. Yeah. Is it playing with kids until my sister came home for the summer? But I'm the year I was immersed in business. I never thought about that till I was taking all the business classes. And I thought, why do people have to study this? You know, it's natural. You know, yeah. It's interesting because, as you know, very well, I have small children. And obviously we read a lot of the different literature and different books. And sometimes I wish we didn't have to. But it's interesting because one of the things that they do say is that it's important to involve your kids and family decisions when they're very young as well. Right? Of course, they don't have the understanding to tell you what's right or what's wrong, what options to take. But it's interesting to kind of say, hey, you know, we want to buy this or there's this big purchase decision that we have to make. What do you think about it? You know, should we do it? Should we not do it? And just have them get trained to be a part of the family of the decision making process. Because just like you said, you know, it helps growing up and kind of having that understanding as well. Now I want to continue back to the conversation. How did you get into education in general? Well, you know, to be really frank, my guidance counselor in high school, you know, we took these kind of a, I don't know, some kind of adaptive learning tests. And I scored really high in mechanics and mathematics and things like that. And I went in and I said, I wanted to be an architect. And he said, women can't be architects. And he said, you need to do something with people like be a teacher or be a personal director or something like that. And because my parents had eighth grade education, nobody had gone to college, I didn't know about things. And I was a good student. And so I kind of figured, okay, all major in elementary education. But at one point, after I was in high school, I went to change my degree into business administration. And the line was really, really long. And I got waiting. So I stayed in elementary education. I taught three years and I was an administrator of the rest of my life. So there was something early on that probably if I had grown up in a different time, I would have become, you know, a business person or something like that. It was always kind of there. And in the story, I tell the story of my aunt from Ohio who's there and asked me, what do you want to be when you grow up? You know, you tell ask a kid. And I said, I want a Marion Indian. I want to raise only bulls and I want to be a rancher. That's right. Now to me, I can remember that just as clear as anything. And then her shock. First of all, I wanted to marry an Indian. And so she asked questions, do you have a lot of Indians around here? Well, there's a reservation nearby in Wyoming standards, probably 150 miles away. So that we talked about the apura pooh and this has shown Indians. But I didn't know any. I hadn't been exposed to any. You know, my land on the ranch to raise only bulls. Why would I want to raise only bulls? And that was kind of the new trend that somebody would raise bulls and artificial dissemination was coming in. So, but how did I think that was better than just raising regular cattle and having that? I don't know. And so the whole thing, but I wanted to be the rancher, not a rancher's wife. That's right. And so I was already wanting to make the decision to be in charge to do something kind of out there. And now when I examine that, you know, I think that's kind of interesting. Yeah. Yeah. One of the stories in the book when you are a high school administrator, right? The trash can store in Aurora. So now you are leading, you are an administrator in education, K-12 education. And you were basically dealing with a crisis, you know, at your school. So tell us a little bit about that and how you handled that. That was actually a pretty funny story. Actually, it shows my total lack of experience. But anyway, I had really looked at the school and it needed to be just cleaned up. It was a building added onto a building, old high school building, elementary in there. They had never really had a principal in that building. A principal had done, you know, three buildings and now they were hiring me for this bigger building. Just come off of a teacher strike labor negotiations where they didn't really know what a principal supposed to do. But I'm trying to build rapport within the school. And I get this idea that I bought a bunch of gold trash cans and I said, we're going to have each wing have a golden trash can award. And whoever has the cleanest, you know, best environment for the children and for the in the always and everything, we're going to be proud of our school and they'll get the golden trash can award. Well, everybody kind of a variety of agreement, the custodians were loving it. And so, you know, everybody was happy. Come Friday when I'm going to inspect the rooms. One of the two of the fifth grade teachers trashed one of the other fifth grade teachers room, paper all over the place, you know, garbage and everything like that because they knew he was always going to win because his room was always clean. Okay. And I went up there and I saw all of that and I thought, oh my god, what's going on here? And you know, I had to think about me as a leader rather than it mad at them and disciplining them for doing that or being a bad example for the kids. I just remembered that I didn't get commitment from the people that I worked with. That was my idea. They didn't endorse it. I said, we're going to do it. And because of that, I always kept one of those gold trash cans under my desk. And the rest of the time as a school administrator, first as an elementary principal and then as a high school principal, I kept that and said leadership is about engaging the people that you're working with and making sure that they understand why the decisions are made and letting them be part of the decision making. And you have to make the tough decisions, but at the same time, you've got to engage that. I just announced it. Yeah. Well, what do you think, you know, because this is a very interesting question, right? I mean, there are a lot of decisions where obviously you want to, and we've seen those memes where a leader brings people along and a manager just cracks the whip and says, you do this. But I feel like there is a time for saying, you know, hey, whoever's on board come who's not on board. They probably need to make another decision. But this is what needs to be done. How do you decide which one is the best way of leading, you know, depending on the situation, right? I think we could take the example out of higher ed of my role as chair of the Bay Atlantic University, Board of Trustees. We knew we needed accreditation. And, you know, so in that role, that was a decision that just had to be done. We had to force it no matter what it took to get it done. And then when we stretched as a leadership team and as a board to go to one that we had to get done in one year, that really stretched everybody. You know, the faculty and the, if you were part of that, everybody worked really hard. But we had to have that single thrust at the time. That was so important to the institution that you just had to make a decision and then build rapport about the pride of doing it. So you work with them as you're saying, I'm forcing you to do all of this extra work. And as long as you build that rapport and you build pride in the process, then I think you are actually doing both at the same time. You know, I remember that process very vividly because as you said, it was, it was an marathon. It was a sprint and you had to make sure that you won that sprint. There was no second coming in second. You had to be first. And I actually have a picture that we took as a team kind of working on this when we were, I guess part of the process is you get accepted, right? We're kind of accepted to start working on it. So we have a picture and then we have another picture when we actually finally got it. And if you actually look at it, I want to say maybe about 15% of the people are not, that were on the first picture and not there on the second one, you know, because it was one of those things, right? Like you, you just, this has to be done. If you're not on board, you, you just not on board. And you have to go look for something else, right? It was, that was, that was actually one of the, I think the great successes I'll cherish, you know, that I'll take with me anywhere I go, just be part of that process. It was fantastic. I think it was quite small because I had been through accreditation, you know, at Kent State and net in the public schools, in fact, and had served on accreditation boards and had served on accreditation teams. I understood the process. And so I was with the process and a lot of the people had not been through that kind of process. And so it was just helpful that I was kind of the person to pat people on the back when necessary and tell them, this is what we have to do in this is just normal and, and to go forth. And even though I didn't have to do the work as such, I think that sometimes you're a guide on this side and let the people who have to do the work, but you still have to be a leader supporting the process. And then I went to, you know, all of the meetings in Boston made sure that we were there. And when they knew that I had a higher education background, that my dissertation was on presidential leadership and that I had been on boards, that all let them know that the leadership, both from the board, as well as from the school administration, were all in the line. And those were things that I think were important in the part of the process. Now, I remember I was in a board meeting where I saw you handle, like it was a very tense meeting and I saw you handle that meeting. It was literally a master class in how to handle a very high stakes conversation and different parties asking for different things or thinking something. Whatever their issue was was the most important one. How do you, and I saw how you really kind of real everybody in, how do you approach meetings like that? What's your preparation like? You know, I think that preparation also came at the kitchen table. You know, my dad was not someone who was a top down sounding person. He was, you know, a very congenial kind of a guy and used humor a lot and kind of could read people very easily. He was a good horse trader, as they say. And I think that as discussions were around the table, you know, there would be hired men and people there. My mom was there. I was there. But I think he needed to talk a lot about making decisions. He always knew that the decisions were tailored by him and shape. But I think that he always included everybody at the table, even the hired hands and all, and that sensitivity. The sensitivity of a leadership was shown in a lot of other ways. This isn't in the book, but it's one of the great stories. The first year that I met this school, I was hired two weeks before school started. The school wasn't ready. It was getting like three or four days before school started. We had to get the rooms cleaned and the lockers all cleaned out and everything. I came in and worked close and I started to clean out lockers. The custodian saw me. We did their attitude change. That here was a principle. I said, this school's got to be ready. We'll do whatever we can to get it ready. I cleaned lockers for about a couple of hours. It came and said, you have other things to do. We'll do this. I will make sure the school is ready. Sometimes you just have to jump in and where the other person is coming from. I think that you have to have empathy. You have to have, you have to listen. You have to know who you're working with, know where they're coming from. really just kind of invite them in. And I don't know how you learned that except by practice. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. One of the themes that come across, comes across the book all the time, and there's actually some really good stories, is your ability to imagine the future, and to invite everybody to imagine the future. And you have a lot of examples here of kind of bringing people from different cultures, to work on a, what was it, it was kind of almost like selling their opposite culture to each other. We called them cultural dialogues. I think I never stopped being a kid. And I still like to play, and I still like to pretend. And I think that it was kind of okay to be that way. You know, I was given that privilege, I guess, to pretend. You know, whether I was writing my dad's row post from the rodeo, but I was pretending I was a jockey, just in my mind. Little things that just had this craziness. And so when we started to put together, we had teams of teachers that would come, 25 of them, maybe from 12 different countries around the world. And we, one of the goals of it was to have them learn about each other's cultures, but for all of us as Americans to also learn about their cultures. And started something called cultural dialogues. And at universities, we have teachers all the time. If we ask those teachers to do lectures, we would get, this is how many square kilometers our building is. This is our, our, you know, this is our capital. This is our history. We can read that in books. We didn't want that. We wanted to get the feeling of that culture. So that it was like we were there, but not there looking at this cathedral or that Roman room. We're there meeting the people. And so we would ask them to work in teams around a theme. And these were really improvisations. They were not prepared lectures. They were invented as they were doing them. We had props. We had this multi-purpose room that sometimes they get turned into, you know, a bus. And everybody was on a bus or something, because that's what they created. At the same time, they were all English teachers. And we were trying to get them away from memorization. Or is it teachings? [inaudible] Sorry, excuse me. [inaudible] Oof. Sorry, natural one. [inaudible] Yeah, natural one out of there. [inaudible] We would try to have them move away from maybe their own teeth well that they were comfortable in. And so we came up with this idea that they had to come together. And one of the ideas, for example, was when with so many Syrians were coming out of Syria and moving all across Europe and around the world. And there was a lot of movement of people just in a lot of places in the world. So we said people on the move is the theme. You can use that in any way possible. And so some people talked about moves that had to be made because of the Sumna-Mia and Indonesia. Other people were talking about people on the move for a variety of reasons. We paired Amarakan and Ghana to make their story. Always two people from different countries. They were going to talk about the African slave trade. Yeah. And so they started in. And we were sitting there as the audience. And as they began, here was the little Gahanean, just happened to be a smaller man. And he kind of came with not a lot of, you know, like a short sleeve shirt and some shorts kind of on and chains around him and everything. And the great big rock 'em, okay, came in with, you know, kind of lots of clothes and important. And he came in leading this other guy. And the small Moroccan man, black, the other man, looking more Arab, okay. And the small man was yelling as he was coming through the crowd. The American crowd of students, community members would come to these. We always had crowds there. And, you know, almost standing room only for everything. And he was yelling, "Africa, oh Africa, where are you?" And I had never thought about the role of African people in the slave trade. Yeah. We were only thinking Americans went and captured people and put them on the ships and came. Never thought they were sold, you know, or captured by other Africans to give to the slave trade. As they told that story and then modernized it at the end of the number of sub-Saharan Africans that are coming through Morocco through Gibraltar to go to Europe illegally. But, you know, what happens in the Moroccan experience of that? So they took that really ancient story that we all knew but gave us a fresh beginning on it. And that, we had a feeling in our hearts and in our minds that was unforgettable. If they had explained that with a PowerPoint, we wouldn't have gotten that. No, that's right. That's right. So, sometimes storytelling and improvisation, I think, can move people beyond what we sometimes think adults should be doing. We were really asking them to play and to act and to do improv. And I've studied that as a leadership aspect. And so, in the book, I included that storytelling and improvisation as tools that leaders need to think about. Yeah. And here's your goal. What are you trying to achieve? And then how can you achieve it? And don't be afraid to be a storyteller. Just to kind of switch gears a little bit and talk about the current state of higher education. And even K-12 for that matter. I just saw on the news, yesterday, the government has been sending out retirement packages to people that work at the Department of Education. What's your feeling on this? What's your thoughts on where the Department of Education is headed? And what effects, positive or negative could that have in K-12 higher ed, just education in the US overall? Well, you know, one of the things is that if you know our history in education, education was not included in the Constitution, as I mentioned. And all of the state constitutions have education as an important part of what their Constitution says. And the Federal Department of Education, I believe, was started in the '50s with Eisenhower. I'm not sure, but something like that. So in my lifetime, that was something brand new that we would think that education was so important that we needed to have a federal Department of Education. And since that time, the Department of Education was the social change agent. Started with segregation. It moved into rights for people with handicapped sentisabilities. It became Title IX for women inclusion. And all of that through federal funding that came from the federal government down to the states. Poverty was always an example of programs for families. Poverty impact money that would come. Funding for Native American colleges. Funding for historically black colleges. A lot of the social programming that was done since the 1950s till now. Has come through the federal legislation and then flow through money. What came to K-12 institutions and higher education institutions really helped shape social change. And then if you stop and you really become a global scholar, you learn in rather shocking one of my investigations is that Canada has never had a federal Department of Education. States are all very independent. And you know, they each have their own. And I was shocked to learn that the Ontario, which is our neighbor where I live here in Ohio, has four public education, K-12 education system. A Catholic English speaking public education system. A Catholic French speaking education system. A non-denominational, I can say non-religious speaking and a non-religious French. They run or separate public education systems. And so higher education system. You know, from just Ontario's universities or Ontario. Nothing to do with Alberta or Scotiaccia, which are so geographically different. Think of the spread of Canada. And so every time that people get, oh my god, what are we going to do if we don't have the Department of Education? I think how does Canada do it? Yeah. Maybe they haven't gone through some of the things we've gone through as a nation. But, um, but still somehow they figured it out and have always score high in those, you know, national example things. So to me, it isn't so much that we have to have the federal Department of Education, but we have to figure out how to do some of the things that I think that they have done well. You know, the George Bush Times, no child left behind, you know, the big push. And I was, you know, right in public schools at that time and had to adapt and it made schools across America more equal in getting the funding. And we started to have other money and testing and things curriculum became national. Some things that became so it didn't matter if your child went to school in Mississippi in the one room school where I went to in Wyoming or hearing Cleveland where, you know, you had all of the Cleveland clinic and and republics steal and big money that was supporting, you know, schools. Then all of us could get the same curriculum, the national math teachers got the first curriculum that would be all across the nation. So other people took it on and then it became a governmental kind of thing to make sure that we were all being tested and we took the industrial model really out of, you know, all of the plants, the industrial plants and said we have to have uniform outcomes. And, and so I think we have to say we probably are in need of some new trends. I don't know what that answer is. I'm not overthinking enough, but what I can say is to reinvent something that's good for AI online learning, just now needing to know. We don't need four years of degrees. We need to know what we need to know now for our jobs because if we go to a four year degree, what we learned in our freshman years outdated by the time that we're seniors. So much of what a regular higher ed program is probably isn't relevant anymore. And people need to learn to work in teams and we kind of have it as a, you know, what you accomplish, not what a group accomplish just a lot of things that we kind of need in society now that we need to think differently about. And knowledge is being generated by IA and how that affects all kinds of things in higher education. All corporations have research departments and things like that. Universities used to be the library of the world. They used to be the research places of the world. Now everybody's doing research and guess what the internet is our library. We all have. So what higher education was when Rockefeller and Carnegie and those big industrialists wanted to reinvent higher education. They did for those times. Maybe we thought leaders and I'm not sure that I know those thought leaders now, but something that is totally different. And so we need an interruption in that probably to make the good leaders in higher education start to rethink it and try to reinvent what's necessary for a lifelong learning model for a rapid change in development model in this new era of technology that we're in. You're absolutely right. I mean, one of the big problems that we had was the 120 credits, bachelor degree system, right, especially when you work with international students and they come in, they had done their four years, but it only accounts for 90 credits. You can't accept that you can't accept those credits they have to do an extra year here to accommodate our 120 credits. And when you think about it, that was basically the Carnegie system, you know, 120 years ago, right. And here we are in the age of information and then and and we're still kind of having to deal with the 120 credits system. What is something in education, whether higher ed or K 12 that we're not talking about or we're not talking enough about. Oh, that's a tough one. I think we need to talk about being proactive. I think education is often reactive. Society changes and then we react. And you know, a bill is passed and so then we figure out how to implement it accreditation are formed by the people who all throughout all of the universities finally it becomes the accreditation thing and it's five years past due. Accreditation agencies which drive the universities, quite frankly, are never state of the art or forward thinking they're kind of standardization. And so I think if we switched our head and think being proactive, what's needed out there 10 years from now, how can we design what we need to be not what we need for now or what we needed for five years ago. When it started to go through the accreditation process. So I think being proactive, what is the world we want to have? What is the jobs that we know that are going to be there or that we want to have do we need more people to care for mental health. So that we shape that from ground up that people would want that career. How do we build people who want to do the kind of underserved areas of our society or what kind of society do we want. And I think at one time our nation had proactive leaders, the constitution, the direct, you know, the declaration of independence, think of those as guiding documents. Those were very proactive documents. We've had to adjust and change them and they're not there's still being adjusted and changed. But they were at least written with an ideal. I think I would encourage everybody to really be brave and to be proactive. Leadership is about change. Thank you so much, Linda. This has been fantastic and thank you for your advice. And I'm hoping we can do this again. Thanks a lot. It's been a lot of fun. And I got to wear my hat today. So that was good. Now where can listeners find this book? It's on Amazon. Doran's is the publisher. If you want an electronic one to translate into your own, you can get it. And it's a PDF one from Doran's publishing at their bookstore. And it's at Barnes and Noble. All right, you can order it through your neighborhood store as well. Fantastic. It's a great read. It's a fun read. When you're looking for it because of the title, which it has an asterisk for shit. And it's a great read. Because that couldn't be on some search engines. So make sure you put the asterisk in there or to just search by my name Linda F Robertson and make sure not just Linda Robertson. I will think so much. It's actually a fine thing about that at all.