Episode Transcript

Jay Lemons:

Hello, and thank you for listening. I’m Jay Lemons. Welcome to Leaders on Leadership, brought to you by Academic Search and the American Academic Leadership Institute. The purpose of our podcast is to share the stories of the people and forces that have shaped leaders in higher education. And to learn more about their thoughts on leadership in the academy. Today, I’m delighted to be joined by Dr. Barbara Mistick. Barbara is the President of the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities known as NAICU, where she is a champion and advocate for private nonprofit higher education in Washington, D.C., and around the country. Barbara’s been an entrepreneur, an educator, and a leader in the public, private and nonprofit sectors. She has served in presidencies at Wilson College and the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh.

She held leadership roles at Carnegie Mellon and at Seton Hill Universities, and she spent more than 20 years as an entrepreneur and a business leader in the transportation industry. Barbara’s widely recognized as an advocate for women’s issues and has served on the boards of the International ATHENA Foundation, the Magee Women’s Hospital, the White House Office of Women’s Initiatives and Pennsylvania Commission for Women. It truly is an honor to have Barbara Mistick with us today. Welcome Barbara.

Barbara Mistick:

Thank you, Jay. It’s good to be here with you.

Jay Lemons:

Well, I am grateful for your sharing precious time during this period that we are living through, where time is really… I’ve been smushed together, and while you and I have had the pleasure of knowing each other for a number of years, I will say it was just such a special pleasure getting to know you even better through the search that brought you to the presidency of NAICU, and through that search, I learned about your deeper history. I am hoping that you’ll be willing to share some of your story with our listeners and talk about, some of the people, the events and opportunities that forged you, the person and the leader that you became as your journey and your expression of vocation found its way to higher education from a very different world.

Barbara Mistick:

Well, thank you, Jay. I’m looking forward to this conversation. I’m a little nervous, you do know a lot about me.

Jay Lemons:

I do. Well, tell us how does one go from running a transportation company to representing private colleges and universities?

Barbara Mistick:

Well, I certainly have had one of those career paths, Jay, that has not linear. It’s had some serpentine turns in it and I think that’s just made it richer. I grew up, my dad was part of what we know as the greatest generation and he was great in my opinion, just instilled such a sense of hard work in all of us and a great sense of the value of education. Because my dad answered the call at Pearl Harbor, after Pearl Harbor and enlisted immediately from high school into the army. So he learned along the way, how important education was and certainly the army gave him these great opportunities to be in our old backyard. He went to the War College in Carlisle when he was in the service, but I think it left him with this feeling about how important education was.

And he really wanted to make sure that each one of his kids had that opportunity to go to college. And so I am the first in my family to graduate and it’s certainly is a foundational part of who I am, it’s made me really appreciate the opportunities that education gives you. I certainly couldn’t be where I am today without that, as all of your listeners, I’m sure feel the same. But I started out, as you mentioned in the transportation industry, my dad was in the transportation industry, so I didn’t move far, but I moved to something I thought was going to be a little easier than what my dad was doing and did a lot of contract transportation. So if there one commonality in my career it’s been the academic calendar. So I’ve wandered a lot of different places as you know, but I’ve always been on the academic calendar.

Jay Lemons:

It’s one of the unspoken, I think, gifts and rewards of the academic life. Is there is a rhythm and it is as predictable as the sun rising and setting in every year of my life till this one, and even in this one, we have had perhaps late sun rises and we may have earlier sunsets, but that sense of a beginning and a middle and an end to a semester into a year. So I didn’t think of that as a common thread throughout your career, but that’s really special.

Barbara Mistick:

It’s wonderful because every year is a new beginning and there’s so much opportunity in each year. So it’s been very exciting for me and making that transition from being an entrepreneur, so I was in the transportation business, as a matter of fact, I founded my own transportation company and expanded it, had pretty significant growth curve and it’s today the company that I started is today operated by First Student, which is the largest pupil transportation company in the world. It’s just interesting, it’s an interesting twist, but I got into higher ed really because of entrepreneurship. I was running an entrepreneurship center at Seton Hill and that was my entry into higher education, one foot in the work world and one foot in academia.

And it was eye opening to me, because Seton Hill was a traditional liberal arts institution and not having grown up through the academy, I came in and expected to be just embraced by the academy. And I found pretty much the opposite welcome there, which was they used to call us the women in suits. We were the women that ran the entrepreneurship center. And the funny part of it, Jay, was that my office was right next to the theater arts department. So I had theater arts and all that creativity and energy that comes with that, and then we were the business center right next door. So you can understand why they had a dynamic for us, but it taught me early on about how important it is to create community, particularly on a college campus and how to bring people in. And actually as a matter of fact, the first group that came along on the push toward I was there hired by old friend of ours.

Jay Lemons:

JoAnne Boyle, I was going to say.

Barbara Mistick:

JoAnne Boyle, who’s absolutely one of my mentors in life. I can’t say enough about her leadership and really what she taught me, but her vision was to see entrepreneurship across the core and just this sense, which is… She had such an amazing vision. Because you look today how many students are working in the gig economy. They’re working in jobs that are short term assignments and so on, today we’re all working from home. And her sense was that if folks had these entrepreneurial skills, that they’d be adaptable over time. What we know now is careers are long and the average number of jobs across your career can be eight, nine, 10. It’s not our father’s world anymore, but just to finish that story, the first department that came on board was the theater arts department.

Because if you think about it, most theater arts majors are operating in the gig economy and they really need to have a certain sense of business skills, how to negotiate a contract for themselves, how to piece together various pieces of work across. So I realize that you just have to have those small wins, you can’t always have a big win. And I learned a lot at Seton Hill’s a great place to be.

Jay Lemons:

Well, and JoAnne Boyle was truly an extraordinary president, Professor of English, who found her way accidentally to administration and profoundly changed Seton Hill and its trajectory. How did JoAnne compel you and what were the circumstances of your own life that made you open to a transition from the transportation world?

Barbara Mistick:

That’s a really great question, Jay. I had actually just sold my business, the company that it became First Student was Laidlaw Transit. So they were a Canadian company, they were owned by Canadian Pacific Railways and Laidlaw was consolidating regional operators into larger operations across the country. So it was one of those moments, one of those career moments, because I had started the business, and it was my baby, right. And it had grown, I had a couple different terminals, I was running six, 700 vehicles on the road every day. The funny thing for me about being in business and being in higher education. In business, I knew it was a good day every day, when everything went out and everything came back and there were no accidents or incidents, that was a really super day.

You got feedback right away each and every day. And I remember my first day on the Seton Hill campus thinking, “Where’s the feedback that you’ve done a good job today?” Actually, the feedback is so much further and longer down the road in higher ed. It’s extraordinarily rewarding when a student comes back and I’ve been so lucky, so fortunate to have that experience say, “I took your class and this is where I am today.” But it takes a long time to get that feedback. It’s a totally different motivation. JoAnne was looking for somebody who… She had an entrepreneurship center there on campus for women entrepreneurs. And so she was looking for a woman leader to head up that initiative. And we are one of the very first grants from the SBA, from the Small Business Administration.

We worked a lot with a great, great Congressman at the time, John Murtha, another person you’d remember. And Congressman Murtha had a great commitment to his community, made sure that Seton Hill got involved in the Small Business Administration and had this opportunity to start this entrepreneurship center. And really was one of the first in the country for women entrepreneurs at that time. I know today there are many opportunities and many centers, I think the women’s initiative at the SBA must have 50, 60 centers across the country, but we were in that very first handful of entrepreneurship centers. It was really fun, it was a very fun time and JoAnne was just terrific, terrific to work for.

Jay Lemons:

Well, thank you for sharing some about your journey, which is a really special one and a place where you and JoAnne broke a lot of new ground, and I know that you have long been a champion for women. We both know the sad reality is that women remained underrepresented in presidencies in higher ed in the country. And I’d love for you to raise up how we might more effectively move the needle as [inaudible 00:12:32] effort to assure gender parity by 2030 has challenged our higher education community.

Barbara Mistick:

Well, I think the challenge is not just for women, it really is across diversity in the sector. And I think that’s the really difficult part. So what is, I think somewhat frustrating today, especially because we’ve been doing these initiatives for a long time, is to see women leave presidencies and see the new leader come in, be a male leader. And certainly boards are hiring the best person for the job at the time, but we’re making these fits and starts. So while we want to see some level of parity soon, hopefully, I think what we’re doing is seeing a step forward and a step backward. And it means that all of us who can make a difference is to be vigilant about this.

One of the things that I’ve done across my career, because I do feel very committed to diversity is to make sure that there’s a diverse candidate in every single search. And back when I was at the library, I started this initiative and people bring searches to me with no diversity and we’d start over. And if you send that message a couple of times, as the leader of an organization, people do start to get on board, they start to understand. And no one wants to do work twice. But that makes a difference, I think is making sure that you open up the doors and that you bring somebody else along. We’re going to have to continue to have a focus on it though, I’m glad you raised the topic, Jay, because we have to keep talking about it in order to make change.

Jay Lemons:

We do. Well, and thank you for a really concrete example of how as the hiring authority, we can truly have an impact by saying no, not good enough, reach further. That can really profoundly have a positive impact. I want to switch gears and I want to take a measure of your sense about what makes a good leader and by good, by the way, I don’t mean grade B, I mean virtuous, effective and highly successful. What are the qualities?

Barbara Mistick:

Well, I think especially today, and maybe that I’m saying this a little later in my career rather than earlier, but I think you have to be empathetic, especially right now. When you have a crisis, this is a global crisis that we have that we’re all dealing with in the pandemic. When you have a global crisis like this, it’s not just the global crisis, it’s a very personal crisis to each and every person. Because every person’s situation is different, whether it’s their family, whether it’s their own health situation, just a number of reasons to create anxiety. So I think a good leader is really got to be empathetic, which means you have to be in the no judgment zone about how other people feel. And I’ve seen a lot of this particularly, I’m sure you have too, there’s so many constituencies in higher ed, there’s always one that’s going to be pushing back against the decisions.

So figuring out how to embrace that no judgment zone becomes just so important. I think the other piece that’s really important today is to be strategic. It is so hard to get lost in the moment, particularly when you’re in a crisis. Because you spend a lot of your days responding to what’s going on, but instead, what you really need to do is to be looking down the road and your institution needs you to be looking down the road. So that you can come out of the current situation and be in a different spot. So I was a big proponent, particularly at Wilson, we did very short strategic plans. We did many of them, folks will remember four, like two year plans because we were doing a turnaround and really growing in size. And so you can’t set a 10 year direction when you are changing so quickly. I think that is going to follow true at this particular time as well.

Jay Lemons:

Oh, no question. Yeah. Being more nimble and adapting more quickly. Yeah. I am hearing more and more of that. The absurdity of five year plans is just that. So thank you.

Barbara Mistick:

Yeah. I think-

Jay Lemons:

We both know that leadership’s a team sport, it’s not an individual sport. When you’re creating that team that you work with, what are you looking for? What are the qualities that you want to find and those that you are a part of teams that you lead?

Barbara Mistick:

Well, I think the number one piece is to hire people who have great functional expertise in their particular area. And in my opinion, I want them to know more than I know about that area. I want them to be smarter than I am in each of their respective specialties, because I want them to bring that conversation to the table and those insights to the table. Then the other thing that I’m looking for is people who will support each other. And I think that is especially important today, because we’re all feeling a certain amount of anxiety. So if we can’t take care of each other as a team, then how can we take care of the rest of our community? So I’d say those are the two most important pieces.

The other thing I’d say that wouldn’t surprise you, Jay, if we were on video, we’d probably both be shaking our heads, but the no surprises piece. You want people who are on your team, who are willing to tell you both the good news and the bad news, so you’re prepared each and every day, is people who will have your back, I guess that’s the bottom line.

Jay Lemons:

Absolutely. Part of our listenership are participants in our AALI leadership programs, that are people who are at various points in discerning what their aspirations might be and what the call on their hearts might be. And I really welcome your sharing any wisdom, any advice you have for those who do aspire to leadership positions in higher education.

Barbara Mistick:

Oh, that’s a really good question. A couple of years ago while I was at Wilson, I did a book about the future of work, it’s one of my passions. It’s the things I really care about is where is work going? And I care about it from a public policy perspective, but also in terms of all of our students, the students that we serve. And so the scope was to how to future-proof your career, and one of the things that I found that people told me over and over again in interviews, is to get a lot of experiences. As a matter of fact, I think I used the word greedy, is to be greedy about experiences. So just trying different things, often I think people will sit back and wait for an opportunity to come to them.

I think it’s important sometimes you just put your hand up, you’ve got to put your hand up and say, “That sounds like an initiative that would be interesting for me, let me have that different experience.” I’ve also found that in senior team members, those people on your team who are willing to put their hand up, they become very valuable to you as a leader as well. So I think that’s really important. I think the second thing that’s really important is to build a good network, and it seems everybody understands. Networking is one of those buzz words, but we’re only really as good as the people that we hang out with and that’s our network and it can’t be really big.

I used to say, you have to have this five to thrive, and if you can keep in touch with those folks, but it has to have this reciprocity. It can’t just be people that haven’t seen you in four months or six months or a year, and then I’m asking you for a favor. You have to spend time on it and build that deep network and get involved in organizations, professional organizations, it’s a great way to expand your network.

Jay Lemons:

Wonderful, wonderful advice on all counts. Thank you very much. Talk a little bit about what you see is the most critical challenges facing our leaders today.

Barbara Mistick:

Well, I think perhaps the most critical challenge is not to lose this moment. We’re in a moment here that allows you to really look very carefully at how you’re operating your campus and how your institution is running. There is an opportunity in these moments to make changes. There’s a little bit more permission on a campus to make a change in a challenging time. So I would say that would be important. I see people moving their academic calendars, going to different quarter systems as opposed to the trimester system. The other thing people are doing is that they’re trying things out and that’s pretty exciting. That’s something about this moment that you wouldn’t want to lose. There is some permission to try hybrid learning, there is some permission to try online learning.

All of those things are really exciting and I think a great opportunity. The other part that I would say is, particularly for private nonprofit colleges and you know I’d have to say something about this, Jay, I couldn’t miss this moment, I can’t this moment too, is to just talk about the value of the residential college. If I have seen a silver lining in this pandemic, it has been how much students value the community of being on a college campus. It’s not just the educational criteria. It’s not just wanting that degree and wanting to look to their future, but they want to be part of a community, and they’re learning both as people and as learners, lifelong learners. So I think the diversity of our sector is the strength of our ecosystem, our higher ed ecosystem.

And there’s going to be a lot of conversation going forward about the value of free public college versus private institutions. And so leaders of private institutions are going to have to really be willing to step up and not just be an advocate for their own institution, but for the sector as well. We really need leadership that’s looking at us in a broader way and is willing to be the intellectual leader that they are and talk about the value of both the liberal arts and the residential college experience. I think that’s going to be extraordinarily important. The other thing I’d say, if I can have a third one, Jay, if you let me have number three here, I’d say the margins are just narrowing and shrinking. And I’d say, this is not a new thing. In my opinion it’s been around for a long time, but because many people who are leaders are also cheerleaders, right?

They’re optimists. There are good things that happen every day, and we’re focusing on those good things. We’re going to have to focus on the margins and how tiny they are, and be able to create both efficiencies on our campus and take this conversation about public versus private and just do a big pivot to how we can focus on helping students be successful and navigate the higher ed experience and graduate successfully. That’s going to be really critical, being able to frame that narrative, being able to talk about it and tell those stories, that’s going to be so critical for the future.

Jay Lemons:

Thank you. I can’t help but not reflect on the importance of that, which you put your finger on, the value of the residential experience. It’s a profoundly important part of the learning experience and the environment for so many of particularly our traditional age college students. I have regretted that so much of the press, it seems to me during this pandemic has focused on either the greediness of the college presidents or the irresponsibility of our leaders, and to be certain the financial ramifications of loss of all auxiliary revenue are truly important. But I just know that those leaders understand that the best of the educational experiences that they’re providing their students are often bound up in the residential experience and in fact, our students have hungered. I recall a wonderful colleague and friend Harvard Professor Dick Chait saying once upon a time, when he was challenged and asked if there was going to be a future to the residential institutions.

He said, I don’t know anybody yet, who’s 18 year old want to go down to the basement to go to college, living at home. There are plenty of folks who must commute, who don’t have the chance for that experience, but I do think that we are learning that we can break the fissures. We have muscles, we haven’t even exercised, and so you’re so right about the creativity, the scheduling nimbleness and that the ways that people have flipped and thought about the curriculum in new ways. It’s really exciting what’s unfolded and I love your challenge of how do we hold onto some of that as we get to the other side of this pandemic experience. So thank you for sharing.

Barbara Mistick:

Well, make no mistake, Jay, I think that our presidents out there today have been absolutely heroic in this time period with very little federal direction. This has been just a… I don’t know, it has just been a bizarre time as we know. And so what you’ve seen is it’s all gotten pushed down from the federal side to the states, and then in some places, the state hasn’t taken charge and it’s down at the municipality level. So I can’t tell you how many of our presidents I’ve spoken to, who had to make decisions for themselves. And so they’re really on the front line, they’re on the front line of reopening, everybody wants everybody to reopen, but with very little direction. So people are really figuring it out, and it has been definitely a leadership test to sort that out.

Jay Lemons:

And I could not agree more. The indefatigable nature of presidents has been never more leaned on and not just presidents, but also their teams. Because it’s always been paramount to assure the health and safety of your community. But never has it been on such public display, where not just the focus on the risks of young people, but the risks of a mature workforce and the unknowns, what we know about COVID 19 has evolved and changed. To me, I feel as if there have been hundreds of untold stories of institutions that are doing pretty darn well in managing this, and I frankly know that an awful lot of those untold stories are stories of the NAICU membership. That don’t necessarily get all the headlines, and I wish that the higher ed press and others would pay attention to, I think the very best of what-

Barbara Mistick:

[crosstalk 00:30:18] I feel it too. I’ve done conversation just in the last week with the Washington Post and with the Christian Science Monitor, telling those stories, the good stories. And I haven’t seen any of them in print yet. At least people are asking the good stories, but they’re not making it to print. I think the other piece, Jay, that is so critical for a good leader is good communication skills and we didn’t touch on that earlier, but there’s a monopoly of good skills that you need to be a leader. But in this time that communication skills have become so much more important, because as we were talking about, the shifting guidance, it shifts every day. And so we are responsible as leaders to bring our community along, and that’s become very difficult in this time period.

And you’re seeing these pushbacks on campus from folks who feel like, we do live in this world. Wonderful thing about higher ed is this sense of we’re in it together, and our community is dependent on really having shared governance. And so what’s really challenging is that every part of our community wants to be part of the decision making. And so it’s been very hard for presidents who have to make decisions on the fly and build the plane and flight, and they’re making these quick decisions is to be able to bring everybody along. But it has become so critical to at least have folks understand the process. That’s the difference I’ve seen is, if people can understand how you’re going to make a decision and why you’re going to make a decision, then even though that decision might feel outside their control, they do still feel a part of how decision making is happening.

Jay Lemons:

I think that’s an excellent point. Our normal mechanisms of gathering and meeting have been supplanted. And yet we have found new pathways, new arteries that while they are different, they can be effective. That’s another part of really learning from this. Well, Barbara, let’s move to a little bit more of a lightning round, where I ask you a quick series of questions. You take as much time as you want in providing your answers, but start with who most influenced you.

Barbara Mistick:

Oh, Jay, that’s such a difficult question because I think so many people influence you for different reasons. But a little earlier we were talking about JoAnne Boyle. I’d have to say that JoAnne has been one of the great influences in my life. She was just extraordinarily collaborative leader and really brought people in the community along. And that’s something that I feel is so important today. I feel that sense of transparency is important and JoAnne certainly had all of that. The other great higher ed leader that I had the good fortune to work with and for was Jerry Cohen at Carnegie Mellon. And Jerry and I had an interesting relationship because before I was at Carnegie Mellon for a couple of years and just saw Jerry intermittently a couple of times, I was on project that he was involved with in as well.

But when I went to the library, it turned out we were both sister organizations. We were part of Andrew Carnegie’s original set of organizations. And so that gave us a special status, we got together every two years, convened by Vartan Gregorian, who you know as well at Carnegie Corporation, and so all of a sudden, Jerry and I were peers. And so, we just got to know each other in a totally different way, and I have found that every time I’m stuck about something that I’ll drop Jerry an email and he’ll have some great insight. And it’s so been really valuable to have folks at different organizations dealing at different levels, but to be able to have them in your network, that’s just been a gift for me.

Jay Lemons:

Thank you. Do you have a fondest memory of your own undergraduate experience?

Barbara Mistick:

My undergraduate experience was a little interrupted. So I started out my undergraduate experience at Case Western Reserve in Cleveland, and then I left a couple of years in. But it’s typical of many of our students today. My dad, who I talked about a little earlier, had a health challenge, and I went back home to… I’m the oldest in the family, so I went back home to help in the family business. So I interrupted my undergraduate experience, but to this day, the friendships that I made in Cleveland are still the friendships that I have today. And as a matter of fact, one of my closest friends when I was on campus at Case Western lived directly across the street from me in Washington, D.C.

Jay Lemons:

Wow.

Barbara Mistick:

So all of a sudden I’m in a new town at a new job and you are flying all over the world, I can’t call Jay and say, “Hey Jay, can you give me a hand?” That was back in the flying all over the world days. It was just a great gift to me, these friendships that you form on a college campus are just remarkable. And I think it’s one of those intangibles that we don’t often talk about, how those relationships of people who saw you grow up and who grew up with you, how they can stay with you across your lifetime.

Jay Lemons:

Wonderful. Thank you. You represent about a 1000 private institutions today. So the irony is you’ve got the whole rainbow of colors to choose from. What are your favorite school colors?

Barbara Mistick:

Well, I like the rainbow, that’s a really great idea, Jay. I have to say the most unusual colors I ever saw at an institution I worked at was at Carnegie Mellon. They had the tartan, the tartan black.

Jay Lemons:

Right.

Barbara Mistick:

And so I can remember days at Carnegie Mellon also has, I think it might be the only institution, someone will correct me. One of your listeners on your podcast will correct me, but I think it’s the only institution that still has a bagpipe major. And so the bagpipes [crosstalk 00:36:59] my office, I could hear them. They’d practice on the green and I could hear them in my office, and it’s that sound is so, there’s something just mystical it, it’s not exactly spiritual, but mystical about the sound of the bagpipes. So I don’t know, the tartans include a lot of color, so that might be the closest thing to [crosstalk 00:37:21].

Jay Lemons:

There you go. I love it. And I love your invoking. I had no idea there was a place that had a bagpipe major. Certainly the pipes are common and many of our Presbyterian colleges, I think of monuments where the pipes are a part of every state occasion and many others where the Scottish roots are celebrated and remembered. Wonderful. How about tradition? Do you have a favorite tradition at a place that you’ve served?

Barbara Mistick:

Oh, traditions, I think there are a whole set of traditions that are just so much fun and that’s why people remember them. When you come back 50 years later, you remember them. But I think as a president, I probably answer this question differently in my own undergraduate experience, but as a president, my favorite traditions were those that really brought community together. I really liked convocation. Almost back the beginning of our conversation, Jay, I like the academic calendar and convocation kicks off the year. Just kicks off the year and everybody’s together for a moment before everybody scatters and it’s just wonderful. I think reunion is another great tradition and there’s nothing like seeing people come back to campus. I can’t you how meaningful it was to me, not knowing the community over all those many years, when people would come back and they would have tears in their eyes and they would particularly singing the Alma mater. Singing your Alma mater, man.

That’s a great tradition too. This is not a good question for me [inaudible 00:39:15] because there’s so many of them that are terrific. Graduation is the other one, there’s nothing like seeing that culminating moment when students walk across the stage. The great thing about being at a small institution, you do get to see them walk across stage and you do get to shake their hand and the crowd is so huge. So it really does drive home that sense of how many it takes to see a student graduate and how many people contribute to the success of students. All your faculty are there and the staff and other students, so I think the traditions I like the best are those that bring people together, community people.

Jay Lemons:

Bringing people together. Absolutely. Well, my next question, which I ask all our guests is about roads not taken. Again, I think about the richness of your own life and career. Having responded to a family need that launched you into an entrepreneurial role in the transportation business, finding your way into higher education, landing at the Carnegie Library. You have done a lot. Are there any forks or roads not yet explored or taken, or what else might you have wished you had been able to do? What forks might there have been out there that you might have loved?

Barbara Mistick:

Well, as you said, I’ve had such a great career and just so many wonderful opportunities. The thing I’d say is people have said to me, along the way, particularly, when I took the job at the Carnegie, they said to me, “You’ll never go back to higher ed.” As a matter of fact, a search consultant who I knew and his opinion I valued said, “If you take this detour, if you leave Carnegie Mellon and you go to the library, you’re going to have a hard time getting back into higher ed.” I think today careers are much more flexible. There are many more ups and downs. And so that’s really wonderful. I think had I not gone the direction that I did, I most likely would have stayed in business.

I got to tell you, I love business. I do. I love the financial parts of it. I love the community part of it. I love seeing where you can go and figuring out a way to get there. So I think I would have stayed on that side and been extraordinarily happy. If there’s one experience I would like to have had more of, it would have been more international experience. I think that part of that, was tied together with my role and my gender. Once you end up with a family situation, it’s hard to take your family all over the place. I think that is more difficult. If I’d taken a different road, I would have done that sooner.

I would’ve done it earlier, much earlier in my career. I did get some opportunity to teach internationally in Italy, and I loved it and I’ve had some other opportunities. When I was at Carnegie Mellon, we had a project in India. So those kinds of things are to just so rich that I think I would’ve enjoyed a little more of that, but that’s not to say that every moment today is just wonderful. And I can’t imagine any other place to be than where I am right this very moment.

Jay Lemons:

Well, I know there are many, many folks grateful you are where you are. And many hundreds of thousands of folks who are dependent upon the leadership that you and your colleagues provide. One of our wrap up traditions here is we’d like to have folks talk a little bit about the distinctive qualities, if you will, the organizational DNA of NAICU. I wonder if you would just share with us a little bit about why you sense that our independent colleges matter to the future of our country?

Barbara Mistick:

Well, Jay, independent colleges are part of the richness of our country. They’re part of the diversity of our country. So we’ve got this tremendous tradition over hundreds of years. It’s just a very rich and deep legacy that private nonprofit education has in this country. And we can’t lose that. We can’t let this moment have us end up with a number of mega institutions, because that’s the direction that public college wants to take students today. They want to take them towards supporting flagship institutions that have 80,000 students. There are amazing things that happen at flagships, I don’t want to suggest that there aren’t good things at every part of our ecosystem. But I think that our ecosystem is stronger because we do keep each other competitive. We keep each other really to see the future in a better way.

We do hold together in many ways, and I think one of the things that NAICU has been able to do right now, and I have found this to be perhaps one of the most important things that we do is to continue to represent the interest of private nonprofit colleges. Because within our ecosystem, all of it is important. But we have to make sure that our voice gets heard because otherwise with declining federal dollars, with declining public support, this is all aside from the great success that we had in the CARES Act and the number of dollars that came in the CARES Act for private nonprofit institutions. Actually, you know that, Jay, that was the very first time that private nonprofit institutions have gotten stimulus dollars. In 2008, all the stimulus dollars went to public institutions.

So this has really been a watershed moment, and I’ve been thrilled to be a part of that, but in order for us to stay in this small and to continue, we’ve really have to stay much closer to our elected officials. We are at a point in time where they need to understand our needs. I think for many of our institutions, they underestimated the challenges of reopening this fall, so the range of stimulus that we are really looking for in this next round is significant. We did some estimates early on about the cost of reopening on a per student basis and multiplying that out over the five million students in our sector. We’re looking at over a hundred billion and aid that would be necessary to compensate for the revenue losses, the expenses to reopen.

It’s just a huge number. The current proposals that are out there, none of them even come close to that. I think what NAICU does, particularly today, when we are going to need the fed in order to come out of this particular crisis, come out of the challenges of this time and be stronger afterwards, we’re going to need to be actively on the ground in Washington and making sure that our representatives understand our sector. The difference with NAICU, the part I love best about NAICU is the way that we are a community. So we count on our presidents to tell their story and their local community, to their local elected official. And then we back that up in Washington on the public policy side, working with committees just to make all of this come together, mesh together.

It’s so powerful, we’re really lucky in many ways because our membership, as you mentioned, is so diverse. We’ve got everything from research institutions to smaller faith-based institutions, so we’re wide across the spectrum, but what we share together is our independence and the fact that we want to be able to offer the education we know is really going to benefit the students of the future.

Jay Lemons:

Thank you. You’re absolutely right. And I can’t help, but not reflect on and celebrate the way that our independent institutions are really been engines of innovation in higher education across centuries now. I think it does represent this critical part of the higher ed ecosystem that you have called it. And the absence of that sector, that sector not being healthy would impact public higher education in ways that would create unusual burdens for those institutions and extraordinary expenditure of public dollars, where our independent sector not thriving and present.

Barbara Mistick:

Right. No, you’re absolutely right. At this particular moment, it’s not just our institutions too, but it’s the communities that we’re in. For many of our institutions, we support a college town and if our institutions are suffering, are declining in those communities, the communities are too. So it has an added responsibility and an added burden to higher education institutions and higher education leaders as well.

Jay Lemons:

It really does. I really appreciate the point that you just made because it’s true of many of our regional public colleges that are located in rural serving places. Wow, they have an outsized impact and frankly, the reality is in a world like ours, we need all of our institutions.

Barbara Mistick:

Yep. We are better together, Jay. Right.

Jay Lemons:

Amen. Amen. Thank you, Barbara, for joining us on Leaders on Leadership, we’re really appreciative of this time and you sharing your thoughts and your insights, wisdom, and some of your own experiences with leadership with our audience. I’d welcome a final word from you at this moment, Barbara.

Barbara Mistick:

Well, Jay, I just want to thank you. It’s a pleasure to be with you today, and it’s always been a pleasure to work with you and I thank you for your unique insights. You always seem to know who’s right for every single physician. So I’m looking forward to following all of your placements in the future.

Jay Lemons:

Well, thank you. I look forward to our past continuing to intersect because we’re both doing mission based work that’s really aimed at celebrating the benefits of higher education for a free open in democratic society to flourish. So thank you for your time this morning. Listeners we welcome your suggestions or thoughts for leaders we might feature in upcoming segments. You can send those to leadershippodcast@ academicsearch.org. You can find our podcast on Apple Podcast, Google Podcast, or wherever else you might find your podcast. By the way, it’s also available on the Academic Search website. Leaders on Leadership is brought to you by Academic Search and the American Academic Leadership Institute. Together our mission is to support colleges and universities during times of transition and through leadership development activities that serve current and future generations of leaders in the academy. Again, it’s been a special pleasure to have Barbara Mistick, the President of NAICU on our show today. Thank you again, Barbara, for joining us and have a great day.