Leaders on Leadership featuring Dr. Elizabeth Mauch, Chancellor of the Vermont State Colleges System

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.

Really delighted today to be joined by Dr. Elizabeth Mauch. Beth is the Chancellor of the Vermont State Colleges System. She brings with her deep and diverse background in academic leadership. Prior to stepping into her current role, she served as the 15th president of Bethany College in Kansas, beautiful Lindsborg, Kansas where the Swedes all rule, correct? And where her presidency was really marked by strategic vision, inclusive leadership, and significant institutional advancement in the form of a really highly successful campaign.

Beth led a comprehensive strategic plan there, a master plan, and raised more than $35 million for renovations, programming and a brand campaign to increase their enrollment. Beth is also recognized for her service as Dean of the College of Education at Bloomsburg University, where she led transformative initiatives in teacher preparation and STEM education.

Beth, I don’t know this, but certainly, all of your higher education to the state of Pennsylvania, I don’t know whether you’re a native Pennsylvanian or not, but Beth is an accomplished mathematician holding her PhD and master’s degree from Lehigh University, of course in mathematics. And Beth came to the state of Pennsylvania and earned her bachelor’s degree at Moravian College. She’s also a Fulbright Specialist having taught and collaborated internationally on innovative pedagogies.

Throughout her career, Beth has demonstrated a real steadfast commitment to students and student success, to the value of experiential learning and to always focusing on how institutional transformation can be accomplished. Today, in her leadership of the Vermont State Colleges System, she arrived at a very pivotal moment in our history and is really working with her colleagues to help shape a path forward, one that is marked with boldness and clarity.

I’m just really delighted to have an opportunity to really feature and celebrate the leadership that Beth has brought. I first met her through ELCA circles that brought the 25 Lutheran higher educational institutions that are a part of that particular tradition together. And even though we were neighbors living close by with Susquehanna University being a near neighbor of Bloomsburg. So Beth, it’s just a delight to have you here.

Elizabeth Mauch:

It really is so wonderful to be here and to be able to talk a little bit about what motivates me and what has continued to motivate me in higher education. And I was born in New York.

Jay Lemons:

You’re a native New Yorker. Okay, I love this.

Elizabeth Mauch:

Yes.

Jay Lemons:

That’s not surprising to me. New York and New Jersey have been very, very good to Pennsylvania, and you’re a part of that bounty. For those of our listeners who may not know, the state of New Jersey and the state of New York are both major exporters of students that land in other states, especially New Jersey. New York has, I think, the largest collection of institutions of any state in the country, but not everybody stays at home and Beth is one of those.

Well, that’s a perfect place to kind of pick up. I really appreciate and enjoy asking people to go back, Beth, and talk about their life and their journey and to think about the consequential decisions that you made and sometimes that our parents or even grandparents may have made that have really helped shape our path. And I can’t help but not ponder. How did a New Yorker find their way to Bethlehem, to Moravian College? Let me just let you pick it up there and tell us what you would about some of the people and events.

Elizabeth Mauch:

Thank you very much. My dad was actually an IBMer, and so that was why I was born in New York and my parents decided to move to Pennsylvania when IBM moved him. When I was a child, IBM and I’ve been moved, so that was that.

Jay Lemons:

That’s right.

Elizabeth Mauch:

But I will tell you today, I am sitting in front of you really because my mom used to always make sure that whatever I needed, I was always going to go to college. She always made sure that whatever I needed I had so that I could be successful in college. And what she told me when I graduated from Lehigh was that she did all of those things because when she was a child, as the daughter of a steelworker, she was told that college wasn’t for her and she was going to make sure that, that didn’t happen to me.

And so my mother became a secretary at Lehigh University where my parents actually met, and then she actually went with my father and worked at IBM for a while until I was born. But I always tell everybody the reason I’m sitting here as the Chancellor of the Vermont State Colleges is because of those choices that my mother made for me.

I started, as you know, as a math professor actually at Bloomsburg. Absolutely loved it, loved the students that I was teaching there. But what I very quickly realized was that those students had an awful lot of barriers stopping them from their own success. As a math professor at first, I really focused on those academic barriers. I actually got an NSF grant where we were looking at retention and recruitment of students in STEM disciplines, and all we did was focus on academics. I never thought about the fact that we were giving these students $10,000 a year tuition vouchers for their unmet financial need.

And as I continued on in my career, I went from math professor to Dean of the College of Education. I realized that there’s actually other barriers to student success as we all know. If your family is in some kind of crisis or turmoil, you probably are going to be less likely to go on in college. If you have these financial challenges, you can’t make the tuition payment the next semester, you won’t go on. And I’ve really focused on those things.

So as I was at first in Pennsylvania, then in Kansas, and now in Vermont, we focus a lot on those challenges that our students have because we serve a lot of Pell eligible students, first gen students who they aren’t always really clear on what it’s going to take to get through college and some of those financial barriers. So I am passionate about access and affordability and opportunity for students, and I’m really excited to be working here at the Vermont State Colleges because we are looking daily at how we can change up what we are doing in order to serve those students. And I am just so happy to be doing that every day. I do have a real strong sense of purpose in higher education. I would not be doing anything else but this job. I enjoy it. I find real purpose in what I’m doing.

Jay Lemons:

There’s no doubt about that. I’m going to ask you several follow-up questions here. First one, you’ve mentioned the Vermont State Colleges System. This has been a place that over the course of the last decade has been engaged in a lot of change. Why don’t you maybe describe for our listeners what the system today looks like?

Elizabeth Mauch:

Thank you. That’s a very good question. So today, the Vermont State Colleges System actually comprises of only two institutions. One that’s called Vermont State University and one that is the Community College of Vermont. The Community College of Vermont has been in service to students for about 50 years now and has always had actually very forward-looking way about doing things.

There’s one community college in the whole state of Vermont. There are 12 centers, but frankly right now, somewhere between 70% and 80% of their students are fully online and working through college access. And then Vermont State University is the five legacy campuses that came out of both normal schools and the Vermont Technical College. So those are centers in Johnson, Linden, Randolph, Williston, and Castleton.

So while the community College of Vermont has actually been very stable over the last couple of years, the Vermont State University has undergone a tremendous amount of change. First having to pull all these colleges together, really looking at different ways to serve their students. And those changes have not always been smooth. Some of them have been very rocky, but this notion that we need to change and we need to really work together, it’s been one thing that’s been very important to me to work together with the faculty and the staff to make sure that we are moving in the right direction is something that we’ve done.

And when I first got here, people said, “Okay, when does the change stop?” And I said, “So it’s not going to.” Change is the future and we have really been adapting to making those changes, looking for ways. And I think it always goes back to students. So our students are older than most people think. The average age of a student is 30 for part-time students, and most of our students are part-time now.

And so when we look at some of the things that we’ve been doing, our students need more flexibility, they need more options to be able to take classes. They need year-round housing. I mean, so housing is an issue. I’m sure you weren’t thinking we were going to talk about housing today, but housing is an issue in Vermont, and we have campuses where we’re really starting to look and say, “How can we maybe meet the needs of our students’ housing challenges?” Because they do. They want to spend Christmas on our campuses. They want to make these places and these locations their home.

And so we’re looking at all kinds of ways of working so that we can meet the needs of Vermonters, because really in the end, the Vermont State Colleges System was founded by the legislature for the benefit of Vermont, which means we serve all of Vermont.

Jay Lemons:

That’s a big mission. It’s also very interesting. I’m trying to think about how many, if you will, system heads there are in the country that have responsibility that runs from a comprehensive community college approach through graduate education. I’m not coming up with any right off the bat. Do you have any national peers that have the scope and span of responsibility that you have?

Elizabeth Mauch:

As someone once said to me, who is very wise, if you’ve seen one system, then you’ve seen one system. So a lot of times they’re different. So most states are so much bigger that there would be no way to have a community college and a technical institution and a four-year college and you write graduate programs all in the same system. It’s just the amount of students wouldn’t work, but it does work very well in Vermont.

And there are different similarities to a lot of the other systems. So some of them have the community colleges and the four years. It just really depends on what happens. I was just at a SEIO meeting last week and there was a gentleman there who was the chancellor of just the community college system in North Carolina, and there are 58 community colleges in North Carolina. So for us, it just becomes about the fact that we are so small and tiny that this makes the most sense for us.

Jay Lemons:

Well, it makes complete sense and there’s no doubt size and scale really matter, and yet it really does present for you and your team a richness that not many other people have that opportunity. Beth, I look at your career. You were shaped educationally by private institutions. You really launched your career in one of those institutions that comes out of the normal school tradition at Bloomsburg that became a comprehensive university. Then you found your way to Lindsborg, Kansas and a small private institution before reemerging. And I too was somebody who was fortunate to have been about half of my career in publics and half of it in privates, but these boundaries sometimes are not easy ones to cross. I’d love to hear how that set of experiences has really been … I feel like I was really lucky and I bet you do too.

Elizabeth Mauch:

I really do. For me, it does come down to the students that I’ve had the privilege to serve. As I mentioned, typically institutions I’ve served at have more than 50% of their students that are Pell eligible, around 50% of the students that are first gen, and I see this as a service. I always am thinking of my mother and thinking, “How can I remove the barriers for students?” And so while, yes, these are different types of institutions in the end, the students that we serve and the challenges that they face are the same, and their desire to get a higher education, their desire to move themselves and their families forward is really the defining piece that for me is so, so important.

And just looking at how can we ensure that we do have the kinds of plans so that they can be successful. I often think about the fact I always say, “Well, I already know and they don’t.” And so I’ve got to make sure that I’m thinking about what it is they’re about to walk into and how can we ensure that, that is the best way that they’re going to be able to move forward.

Jay Lemons:

And for our listeners and those who are new to higher education who may be thinking about how to move forward in their careers, what I would say Beth is, again, I have been at elite flagship institutions. I have been in regional publics. I have been in a selective private college environment. There is meaningful work to be done. Deeply meaningful work to be done every place you turn in higher education. And I think your career is just a testament to that.

I want to focus a little bit now on leadership. I’m on a one-person crusade to recapture the word good, and I feel like good has been Jim Collins, good is the enemy of great, and we’re always in pursuit of excellence. Set that aside. Good, good. And by that, I really mean virtuous and successful and effective and something about being filled with integrity that is a part of goodness in my book. And I’d love to hear you talk about what a good leader looks like for you.

Elizabeth Mauch:

I appreciate the question. For me, it is this notion that I do think you have to be very mission-driven. Every institution I have worked at, the mission and the vision of that institution really spoke to me and it spoke to me both in its historical meaning. Most of these institutions were founded in the 1800s, and what does that translate to today? And I think that if you start from what is the mission and that’s what’s going to move me, I think starting to really think about, “Okay, what is that strategic vision?”

If you’re looking for why did folks start this place in the first place, I usually say in a very plain form, what’s the vision and how are we going to achieve it? I mean, that’s very difficult nowadays. People are looking for a plan that oftentimes we can’t have because we’ve got to be changing so quickly. So you’ve really got to be able to communicate the vision and make sure that it’s malleable enough that you can move from one set of challenges to another.

And that’s the other part of this to me to be a good leader and versus you’ve really got to have the courage to act and take risks. And you have to do that in the sense that you’ve got to understand that without doing that, you are really putting your institution potentially behind. Because if you’re always doing the safe thing, that’s probably not what your institution needs. You’ve got to be able to try a few things and have the courage to try those things and have the courage to fail and have this ability to fail in a way that it doesn’t take the whole place down, but that you can fail and learn from those mistakes.

Also, just surrounding yourself with the right team. I mean, these are not jobs that you can do all by yourself. None of this will get done if it’s just your idea, and if you surround yourself with a good team that you also will listen to. I think that’s very important because a lot of times people don’t want to tell you what they think you don’t want to hear, and that’s probably what you need to hear the most.

And then to me also nowadays, just being a good leader really does mean being flexible. Even the success you’re having today may not be enough tomorrow, and that can sometimes be deflating, but really understanding that no, this is just the next part of the mission. And that’s been a lot of what we’ve been doing here at the Vermont State Colleges is looking for, okay, this worked today.

As you said in the beginning, this system has been under serious transformational change for close to a decade when you look at all of the different pieces. And yet today, we’re having to make different changes from some of the ones that were even only a couple of years ago because the world is changing so quickly. So looking at how you’re going to be able to do that and bringing people along I think is really an important part of being a leader today.

Jay Lemons:

Thank you for that. You said it, leadership is not something somebody does alone. And as you’re creating a team, what is it that you’re looking for in those leaders that you surround yourself with?

Elizabeth Mauch:

I look for raw talent. I look for drive and execution. I think a lot of times in higher ed, we really overemphasize our VEDA, right? If it’s on the VEDA, I had a colleague once who always used to say, “How much is this line on my VEDA going to cost me?”

We’re very driven by these accomplishments that we can achieve. And in the end, a lot of times, it’s your experience. And that’s usually what I look at. So when I’m talking to folks who we might hire, I really talk about, “Okay, what have you done?” Talking to them about, “Okay, where have you failed? What are the big projects that you’ve really helped to move forward? How did you work in a team previously?”

And so I’m looking for someone that not only has the checkboxes, but really looking for someone who has the skillset to do the job and really the motivation to do the job as well, and the motivation to do it for what I think is the right reason, which really, I always go back to our students. What is the best thing for our students? What are the things that we’ve got to change because they’ll be important to them? And I have found that when we look for leaders in that way, that, that’s really very important and that we get the right kinds of leaders around us.

Jay Lemons:

I really appreciate your raising up the place of failure as not something to run from, but to learn from. I was in conversation with a leader earlier this week who said, “I came here because I sensed that rather than being adverse to failure, which my former institution was, this was a place where I could take some risks and try some different things, and it was okay if we failed.” I’d love to hear you talk a little bit more about the role of failure, not as … Nobody likes to fail by the way, but it’s as instructive rather than destructive or career ending as a lot of people think of it.

Elizabeth Mauch:

And sometimes that’s what it is. To me, and I actually think that when we have out there who maybe have had spectacular failures, we should actually look at them again and say, “What did you learn?” If someone has learned from a failure, that to me is more important than anything.

As a scientist, you’re always failing, so I guess maybe that is part of what I’ve always learned to live with. You try things, they don’t work. You try something else and you’re always trying to learn from that to get to the better place. And so I think that, that is just a really important skillset to have because there’s no way that you’re going to do everything right at the same time.

Right now, we are looking at, as I mentioned, how are we serving our students better by being more flexible? Okay, we think it’s online, but what does that mean and what are the things we’re going to try? We are looking at our campuses that are not always serving the needs of our current students. If the average age of a student is older than we think, then our traditional residence halls and residential campuses probably aren’t going to meet the needs of our students. So how can we ensure that we are that beneficiary to the town that we’re in or the community that we live in at the same time that we’re meeting the needs of our students? Well, you’re not necessarily going to come up with the right answer for that immediately.

And then looking at workforce needs, so in Vermont, one of the challenges we have is really looking at what is the workforce? How are we meeting the needs of students? We have a fantastic high school graduation rate here in Vermont, but less than 50% of those high school graduates go on to any college at all, and sometimes we can’t even find them. What is the message that we’re saying that they’re not hearing?

And that will probably take a few failures on our part to figure out what it is until we’re starting to get the right messages. And so I am a big believer in learning from your mistakes and talking about that and then talking about how you got better from what those mistakes were. Because a lot of times, if you were just successful all the time, you’re not actually going to really know what it takes to push through on something when you’re not always a success.

Jay Lemons:

That’s so true. A critical competency that the study done last fall by Jorge Burmicky and Kevin McClure really documented was resilience. Resilience is in some ways that salutatory benefit that’s gained through struggle. What advice do you have for those who are new leaders who aspire to leadership in the academy?

Elizabeth Mauch:

Well, besides my mother, I’m also sitting in front of you because I’ve said yes to an awful lot of things. And frankly, when I said yes to those things, I didn’t necessarily know how they would all fit together to get me to where I am today or what I would learn out of those experiences.

One of my favorite little quirky experiences that I did when I was in an undergraduate at Moravian College, I was a math major and I was dating a guy at the time who said to me, “I really think you’d make good teacher. Why don’t you get a teaching certificate in math?” And I was very smitten with this gentleman, so I said, “Yes, that’d be great.” And so I got this teaching certificate. And in 1993, there were no jobs in Pennsylvania for math teachers, which is why I went to grad school because I’ve always been a girl with a plan.

And many years later, after I was a math professor, the president of the university showed up in my office and said, “I think you could be our dean of the College of Education on an interim basis because you have this teaching certificate.” And I never would’ve put those things together. And I also would like to tell you that the guy I was dating at the time I’m married to now, it was our 28th wedding anniversary on Saturday.

Jay Lemons:

Lovely. Ain’t that awesome?

Elizabeth Mauch:

Yeah. But that’s just one silly example of how I’ve said yes. When someone comes to me and says, “Hey, have you thought about this?” I don’t automatically shut it down. And so I always tell everybody just say yes. I’ve had a lot of people who tell me that’s probably the biggest thing that you can do to get to where you might want to go, and you might not know where that thing is. So that’s my biggest piece of advice for new leaders.

Jay Lemons:

I love that. I think it is true. Yes, say yes, and it may not seem big. Would you lead this subcommittee on our strategic plan? Say yes. Would you be involved in thinking about our accreditation team? Say yes. Those sometimes can be. Now, boy, did you give us a couple of consequential ones? Can I ask though? How did you say yes? Leaving Bloomsburg for Lindsborg, Kansas?

Jay Lemons:

By the way, Lindsborg is beautiful. I’ve been there. I know it, it really is an incredibly sweet place. And no reason I would’ve ever shared this with you, but the very piece, first piece of recruitment literature as a high school student I got came from Bethany College in Lindsborg, Kansas.

Elizabeth Mauch:

Oh my gosh. Oh, that’s so funny.

Jay Lemons:

Found me out there on the prairies of Western Nebraska somehow. Yeah.

Elizabeth Mauch:

It’s a lovely little campus. I really, really enjoyed being there. One of the things that has been important to me is looking at how the positions that I’m holding can really help more students. And so going from math professor to Dean of the College of Education, I certainly saw how I could have an impact working with faculty to impact more students.

While I was at Bloomsburg, we started the McDowell Institute for Teacher Preparation in School-wide Positive Behavior Support. It was a long title, but we did that. I did that in concert with my faculty to make teacher training programs better because we were looking at the academic and the nonacademic barriers to success, and so I just wanted to have a bigger reach. So this opportunity came up at Bethany College actually to be their Vice President of Academic Affairs. There again is place I said yes.

And so I went there and just had a wonderful time with that faculty. We were starting to put a lot of things in place, and the president who had hired me after I was there about 10 months and just had gotten back from this Fulbright, so I had really only been there for about eight months. He decided to leave and take another position, and the board came to me and said, would you be our … Actually, they started me out with I’d be the acting president until they figured this out.

And so I went to them and I said, “How about the interim president?” So I did that, and then COVID hit, and so I then just became their president because so many things were happening. But there again, I just had this opportunity to have such a more broad reach. One of my students said to me one day, she said, “The residence halls in this place are awful. You can’t imagine what we’re living in.” I went and saw them, and that started me down the path of doing all of those renovations on the residence halls so that every one of our students had an opportunity to live in a space that we could be proud of. At each one of these spots in my life, I had this opportunity to really just help more and more students, and that really is what motivates me. So that’s how I went from Pennsylvania to Kansas.

Jay Lemons:

I love it. Well, and here, I have the privilege of knowing enough of your own story and business. You said yes, leaving behind in Pennsylvania a husband and a daughter, that was not an easy yes.

Elizabeth Mauch:

It turned out to be yes, much harder than we were thinking of. Yes, they had stayed behind, and then with COVID, they were actually there. So yes, we were separated for quite some time, and my daughter though did come to the school in Kansas and to Bethany for a semester when she was in high school, and she said to me, “I will never again go to a college where my mother is the president.” And so she then came to Vermont, and that’s how I got to Vermont, because I then followed her.

Jay Lemons:

Love it. Love it. What are the most critical challenges facing leaders today?

Elizabeth Mauch:

To me, the biggest challenge for us and leaders of higher education, I will say, is this perceived value of higher education. It’s just so under fire. The first thing to me is I think we in higher education just get very defensive about that. We think say, “No, this is so wonderful.” But I think we have to just take a step back and acknowledge that probably there are some changes that we need to really be thinking about.

As I’ve been talking about our students, our students are just so different than the ones that we think of and the ones that everyone around the state thinks of. So thinking about, “Okay, how are we going to change for that?” Because in the end, higher education really does still transform lives, and we just can’t forget that we have to just have that vision of this is something that’s really going to change this person’s life if we do it in the right way.

So we’ve looked at things like credentials, certificates, apprenticeships. How can we do this so that every Vermonter has access to this high-quality higher education for us in Vermont? And really looking at what is the right balance to achieve what it is we want to do, so I think that’s probably our biggest challenge today.

Jay Lemons:

I really appreciate the council of take a deep breath, pause, don’t immediately become defensive of our baby, because I know I fall afraid to that way too often. And I would guess that, that’s, especially with our public policymakers, I would guess that they appreciate that ability that you bring to them, Beth.

Elizabeth Mauch:

I have enjoyed really working with the legislature here in Vermont. We do hear about higher ed being under attack, but here in Vermont, our legislature actually has helped us to survive, and they’re now actively part of the thriving state that we are in. They have increased our appropriation over the last several years. They really stepped up for us. And that really also just gives me, it really helps to buoy my spirits when you have people that have really taken an active part in Ensuring that the system will survive and they see it as important as I do.

Jay Lemons:

That is awesome. Congratulations. I think that’s a hallmark of strong leadership too. That tribute to you. I want to move us into what I call a little bit of a lightning round. The answers can be whatever length you’d want, but the questions are maybe a little shorter, so here you go. And you may have answered this already. Who’s had the most influence on you?

Elizabeth Mauch:

My mother definitely. Maybe followed by my husband, but definitely my mother. As I said, I would not be sitting here in front of you today if it hadn’t been for her and everything I learned from her.

Jay Lemons:

Do you still have her?

Elizabeth Mauch:

I don’t. She passed away almost 20 years ago now. It’s always sad to me to realize that she’s not here to see all of these accomplishments because I know she would’ve been so proud.

Jay Lemons:

Yeah, no question about it. And there’s no question that you are even giving voice to her impact is a legacy that does have longer life than she had, so that’s beautiful. How about a book that’s perhaps had the greatest influence on you?

Elizabeth Mauch:

So I read a book many years ago that I still think of in today, and it’s something called Daring Greatly by Brené Brown. And the title comes from a poem that’s about Theodore Roosevelt and about how he wanted to be the man in the stadium getting thrown at, and everybody was questioning him. He didn’t want to be one of the spectators. And I have always thought about that. And I think about the person, they are drugged down and then they stand back up. And I’ve often thought in some of my hardest times, what does it take to stand back up after you’ve been pelted with some things? And when we talk about leaders and what they need, I think that’s so important. But that book really … And I probably read it like 15 years or however long ago it was published. I read it then, and it just has had a big impact on me.

Jay Lemons:

Wonderful. Wonderful. All right, I want to take you back to Bethlehem. Do you have a favorite memory of your experience at Moravian College?

Elizabeth Mauch:

My favorite experience was, so I was in the Math Honor Society. I’m sure you will be surprised to hear that. And we had this opportunity to run a conference that was for all of the students in the Bethlehem area because there’s a bunch of colleges down there.

Jay Lemons:

The LVAIC consortium, yeah.

Elizabeth Mauch:

Yes, that one. I don’t remember the details, but I remember just loving putting it together, getting all of the proposals and picking it out, and then seeing all of the different students throughout the whole consortium talking and presenting all of the information that they had on math and what that could mean. And that really also opened my eyes up to how getting people together was so important because you’d actually get more math if you had more students together who were able to talk about it. And so that sort of also started me on this whole path of how can we make sure we’re doing things outside of even our own institutions so that there’s more learning that goes on, but that’ll tell you how much of a geek I am, because that was my favorite remembrance.

Jay Lemons:

I love it. Well, I like to probe with people. If there were roads not taken, you hadn’t worked in higher ed, what else might you have done?

Elizabeth Mauch:

So I always thought that I was going to work at IBM, like my dad had worked at IBM. So you know how most people, they go out the path of their mother. I wanted to work at IBM, and again, I think it was just at a time when it was difficult to get a job. Well, I couldn’t get the job teaching, so that did not open to me, but I was interested in that. And even they have something called the Watson Research Center where you can go and sort of just do a lot of research. I was interested in that, but IBM was not as interested in me, but I probably would’ve been in some kind of business.

It is, I think, a testament to liberal arts education and a small private institution, because I always am not sure I would’ve continued on with math. I probably would’ve become a business major had I not been at Moravian College. And my calculus professor said to me that he said, “Ah, Elizabeth, I think you’re a math major.” And I said, “Oh, yeah.” I first said no to that one. And then a couple months later I was like, “Well, maybe I could do this.” And so I switched from business to math.

Jay Lemons:

There you go. You said yes.

Elizabeth Mauch:

I said yes.

Jay Lemons:

Yeah, yeah. One of the things that I particularly cherish about colleges and universities is the place of ritual and tradition. And I’d love to hear if there’s a favorite tradition at a place that you’ve attended or served.

Elizabeth Mauch:

I’ve gone to lots and lots of graduate ceremonies. I will tell you the one that has brought me the most meaning and has been right here in Vermont. We do a lot of different graduations because we have a lot of legacy institutions. At so many of those institutions, people walk across the stage with their children, with their babies, with their children holding hand in hand, and it just shows the significance of this event in their lives, and they want to share that with their children, and it breaks me. It’s just the most wonderful thing, and I just love that.

Jay Lemons:

Yeah, that is beautiful. That’s truly beautiful. So did they do that in your graduations across the system, or is that owned by one or the other parts of your campuses?

Elizabeth Mauch:

I have seen that at our regional publics, which is now Vermont State University. I have seen it at what was Vermont Technical College, and I have seen it at the Community College of Vermont. So when I talk about the fact that our students are different, they really are. They have children, they have lives, and they want to have their life and go to college, and this is just a way that you can know how significant that is to them, that they would walk their children across the aisle with them.

Jay Lemons:

Thank you for sharing. You said yes when you were invited to consider the post that you now occupy. One of our traditions from this program is to let our very special guests talk about the secret sauce, the distinctive qualities, the organizational DNA that makes the Vermont State Colleges System the place that you’ve said yes to and has a full call on your head and heart.

Elizabeth Mauch:

I really am so glad you asked me this question. The thing that I love the most about the Vermont State Colleges System is we are just so deeply rooted in all of the Vermont communities. As I said, our mission is for the benefit of Vermont, and that means we serve Vermont. We really are ingrained in every rural town and city in the entire state of Vermont and it means something to us.

I’m very passionate, as you know about access. So the fact that we really are making college possible for students who might not otherwise go to college, and we do that every day. I was in the legislature this last session talking about free college for students who maybe couldn’t afford to go to college for free, and the legislature responded and said yes to me. We already have free community college for everyone in Vermont whose family makes $100,000 or less. Just thinking about having classes that are more online or flexible for them has been so important.

We’re very focused on real world and hands-on experiences, so we have plumbers and electricians, but we also have folks in the humanities who are able to go out and learn their own craft and think about the world as we know we want them to do. As you mentioned, it is community colleges, it’s technical colleges, it’s your regional publics. We have many pathways that students can take and they can use each one of these. We want to be that trusted partner throughout their entire life. And most of all, and I will tell you this is everyone I have found, we just lead with purpose. Students are the reason that we are here. And having that many people around me and having them in this system is just so, so important, I think.

Jay Lemons:

Beth, I had the privilege of sharing some time with you not so very long ago, several weeks ago, but I was really touched at how you were talking about the way that you’re trying to think about the assets and the resources of the institutions and responding to extraordinarily damaging floods that the state has provided. And it just struck me as you are every day thinking about how you can meet the unmet needs of Vermonters.

Elizabeth Mauch:

That is what we are doing. Yes. We want to make sure that everything we do, we’re thinking about Vermonters and Vermont first. And as I said, I have a group of people around me who feel the same way internally and externally, and that’s just a really great feeling. It’s a great reason to go to work every day.

Jay Lemons:

What a special joy it’s been to have had Dr. Elizabeth Mauch, Beth as I know her as our special guest here today. And listeners, we welcome your suggestions and thoughts for leaders we should feature in upcoming segments. You can send those suggestions to leadershippodcast@academicsearch.org. You can find our podcasts wherever you find your podcasts. It’s also available in 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. Beth, I’d love for you to send our listeners off with a final word.

Elizabeth Mauch:

Well, thank you very much. I just want to thank you for this time and to say this work, this life’s work of mine has just been so meaningful and I am so happy I had an opportunity to do it. And for anyone out there who’s thinking, “Is this something I should do?” There’s so many challenges. I would say there’s probably always been this many challenges. If we go back to my Kansas example, the first president was out on a trip in California trying to get more money for that institution when he passed away suddenly. And it just makes you realize that there’s always been challenges and that we’ve just got to continue to work because this mission, this thing that is higher education is just so important to us, to our students, and to this country, so keep going on.

Jay Lemons:

A perfect ending. Thank you, Beth.

Elizabeth Mauch:

Thank you.