Leaders on Leadership featuring Dr. S. Georgia Nugent, President Emerita of Kenyon College

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 ed and to learn more about their thoughts on leadership in the academy. I’m really delighted today to be joined by Dr. Georgia Nugent. Georgia is a friend for now many decades. She is an extraordinarily well-known, nationally recognized, respected higher ed leader and scholar whose career has included two separate decades.

One as a student, faculty member, and administrator, and a number of the most selective of our institutions, including Ivy League places, and two decades as well as the president of three liberal arts colleges with different assignments in each of those that we’ll learn more about. Most recently, Georgia has served as the 20th president of Illinois Wesleyan University. Serving during a period in higher education marked by COVID, increasing financial challenges and a period of political division and unrest, and her presidency was really marked. I would say all of her presidencies have been marked by thoughtful leadership, stewardship, academic, and institutional integrity, and a real deep commitment to institutional values.

Prior to serving Illinois Wesleyan, I might say it this way. I think of Georgia as one of our very best examples of failing retirement over and over. You’ll understand more as I get through a bit more of the bio, but prior to going to Illinois Wesleyan, Georgia stepped in and served as interim president of the College of Wooster, where she focused on bringing the community together to recognize the strength of their shared values and ensured multiple voices, including those of staff were heard. And Georgia, I have run into many different people who have held up your willingness to value the work and the labor of all who are a part of these institutions in ways that are really, really meaningful. Including more than one person from Wooster, who talk about your time in that institution, which was not all that long, but you made a difference.

Georgia Nugent:

Thank you. Yeah, it was amazing.

Jay Lemons:

Yeah. Well, prior to that, and the longest stint of her time as an institutional president came at Kenyon, where for a decade she led transformative academic and fundraising initiatives, including an amazing campaign, the We Are Kenyon campaign that netted and raised more than $240 million and really significantly expanded financial aid, support for faculty and academic program. In all of these roles, Georgia was a pioneering president. She was the first female president in the institution’s history at all three of those institutions.

Georgia is on her own, a widely published scholar of the classics and also in higher education. She has held senior academic and administrative roles at Princeton, including assistant to the president, associate provost and founding dean of the Center for Teaching and Learning. She has taught on the classics faculties of Princeton, Brown, Cornell, Swarthmore and Kenyon. She holds a bachelor’s degree from Princeton and a doctorate from Cornell.

Throughout her career, Georgia has been a passionate advocate for the liberal arts, for faculty excellence, expanding access for first generation and low income students. Her leadership reflects a deep belief in education as a public good, and in the responsibility of institutions to serve both students and society. Today, Georgia continues her service to higher education as president and residence for the American Academic Leadership Institute. A role that’s especially meaningful for us at Academic Search.

The president residence brings lived experience of the presidency into our leadership development programs and work, and helping future presidents and provosts and senior leaders, not just from theory, but from the very lived real moments of decision, challenge, and stewardship. Georgia, I could go on and on. One of the great joys of the latter part of my own career was serving as a member of your task force when CIC sought to put the liberal arts more into the center of the plate. And you did a fabulous job leading that work. The need for that work only continues, but we did some really creative work in that. So I’m thrilled that you’re with us and welcome to you, Georgia Nugent.

Georgia Nugent:

Thank you so much, Jay. Thank you for the invitation. I’m delighted.

Jay Lemons:

Well, I am going to jump right in here. As we’ve shared with you, one of our goals for the program is to really invite leaders to reflect and to think about their own pathways to leadership with a hope that you might inspire or touch somebody else. And Georgia, I know a bit of your own story and it’s a rich one. And so I would love for you to take us as far back as you would like to take us in terms of … I’m serious about that because the formative experiences of our early lives really do, at the point in life that we have both arrived, begin to make some sense for choices that we have made and for doors that opened or doors that did not open for us.

So talk about the people, the events, the opportunities that have forged you as a person and a leader as you became a part of the higher ed fabric of the United States.

Georgia Nugent:

Thank you, Jay. That’s very kind of you. You mentioned my origin story as it were is unusual, and I don’t want to dwell on that very much, but I do like to allude to it in a situation like this because just as you said. I think maybe that will resonate with someone who might think that doors are closed when actually they may not be closed.

Jay Lemons:

That’s right.

Georgia Nugent:

I grew up, probably the best way to say is itinerant. My family, which was only three of us. I was an only child of only children. We moved about three or four times a year throughout my childhood, and it was because my father, following in both of my grandfather’s footsteps. My father trained thoroughbred racehorses. So we followed the racing season, and that meant that we did a kind of a circuit every year.

Moving directly from that, growing up, I would never have imagined this, but I was a first generation student. So I was the first member of my family to go to college. And even more extraordinary as I look back on it, I was in the first class in which Princeton University accepted women. So I was first generation, really knew very little about college. Although interestingly, I think my parents always wanted me to go to college, but they didn’t have any experience of it themselves.

So very little knowledge of college, and then tossed into the swimming pool with about 150 women entering a student body of about 3,000 men. It was, to say the least, a very formative experience. And when you ask about the people, the opportunities that have been significant milestones or directions, in my particular path, there is no question that for me, that university transformed my life. And as you know, and as you mentioned. I have actually continued to return to that university through the course of my career, first as a faculty member, then as an administrator.

And it was really the opportunity to come to a place like that, that so valued intellectual pursuit that was just a wonderful … I always liken it to just windows being thrown open on the world, because the background that I came from was one in which there wasn’t much value placed on intellectual pursuits. It just wasn’t a part of what I grew up with. Actually, many students have this. If you’re a nerd, you’re the odd man out when you’re a teenager. And then if you’re so fortunate as to come to a place where everybody is like that, they all enjoyed reading books and they all have pursuits that they want to follow that are in the name of broader and deeper education. That was really an experience that changed my life.

And I think you mentioned people as well who’ve made a difference. I would say honestly that two Princeton presidents made a huge difference to me. The first when I was an undergraduate was a wonderful man named Bob Goheen. He was the child of missionary parents, who’d grown up in India. Just a very decent, kind person. Then he later was appointed the ambassador to India after he left this university. Just from the time I arrived on campus, he really radiated a personality that I admired. And I think it’s no accident, he was a classicist and I thought, “That’s what I want to do. I think I’ll be a classicist.”

Jay Lemons:

Wow. I wanted to ask that question. What was it that led you to the classics?

Georgia Nugent:

It was a combination of his leadership or his seeing this symbolic of a life that I would like to lead. And just very pragmatically, I took one of those great books courses in my first semester of freshman year, and I had known nothing about that tradition really. And I just fell in love with it. I think that Goheen’s record also shows what an extraordinary president he was. My years in college were now ancient history, 1969 to ’73 and of course that was the height of the Vietnam War and the campus protests about the Vietnam War.

For example, my other alma mater at Cornell, was torn apart. There were guns on campus. It was a terrible situation. Goheen, I think by the strength of his presence and his values, kept this university on track. There wasn’t any violence. There were protests and they were supported and understood by the administration. So anyway, just a great role model.

And then when I came back years later, my first role back in administration here was to be assistant to the president, and that was Harold Shapiro. He had been the president of the University of Michigan and then came here and it was just a terrific opportunity to serve in his office and see how he functioned as a president. What his values were, how he faced difficult situations and so forth. So he was a really strong role model for me.

Jay Lemons:

Who encouraged you to think about leadership in higher ed?

Georgia Nugent:

I don’t know if I’ve told you this story before. Actually, it was Harold Shapiro. I was teaching at Cornell at the time. I used to teach in the summers at Cornell and I was up in Ithaca and I got a call out of the blue from an administrator here at Princeton with whom I had worked pretty closely. And he said, “We have a new president and many of us think it would be good for him to have an assistant. Would you be interested in coming to meet with him?” And honestly, Jay. I thought to myself, “Nah, I love my teaching. I don’t want to go into administration.”

Jay Lemons:

Yeah.

Georgia Nugent:

I was teaching at Brown during the time, I just happened to be at Cornell for the summer, but I thought, “Oh, that’ll be fun. I’ll go back to campus. I’ll see some friends.” So I came to interview with Harold. This is the weirdest thing. And to this day, I cannot explain it. We were total strangers. I had never met him before. And he said, “Well, if you were to do this, what do you think you would want to do in the future?” And out of my mouth popped the words, “Oh, I think I would like to be a liberal arts college president.” Now, it’s not only the ambition of that, I had never set foot on a liberal arts college.

Jay Lemons:

Yeah. Yeah.

Georgia Nugent:

So it was odd. And he in response said, “Oh, I think you could do that.” So that was the beginning of my thinking, this is a path I’d like to follow.

Jay Lemons:

I really appreciate that. And I expect that President Shapiro was pretty intentional about creating opportunities for you to listen and see. And by the way, I had the privilege of being a youthful assistant to the president and chief of staff at the University of Virginia. I do remember feeling at some point, and I was in that office maybe two and a half or three years, three and a half years maybe. I found it hard to conceive, Georgia, having seen the big picture, which you do in a president’s office, being forced to look at individual trees, rather than the whole forest was something I really had a hard time with.

My story was maybe a little like yours, I didn’t ever have to go back to only paying attention to the forest. There is a generalist different view from the president’s office, even from a provost office or the chief financial officer’s office.

Georgia Nugent:

Absolutely. You see the whole institution. Yeah. I’ve written about that in another place, I think, as I try to assess my own strengths or weaknesses, which is a part of what I think is important in following leadership path. I know now that I’m … It’s just the fact that I’m more of a big picture thinker. So for example, in forming a team. I need to be very conscious that I need those around me who will balance that, who will be more detail oriented and so forth. So whether for good or ill … And I think you’re right, it probably partly comes from having that opportunity to see the whole picture.

Jay Lemons:

Yeah.

Georgia Nugent:

Yeah.

Jay Lemons:

Just go there. When you think about creating a team, what besides having complimentary skills are you looking for in your leaders?

Georgia Nugent:

Yeah. I want to address that, but I want to go back for just a second because I feel like I should give Harold his due. What you said is exactly right about him giving me, but also other people, the opportunities to grow into roles. We talk a lot about mentorship in leadership education and so forth. I don’t think he ever intentionally, “Mentored women,” but there were, I think in the end, four of us women, who worked closely with him in administrative roles. Who all went on to become college presidents. And I think it’s because he saw we had potential and he just gave us opportunities. So I want to give a shout-out to that.

Jay Lemons:

Shout out those other colleagues. I think I know some of the names, but let’s be sure and note them as well.

Georgia Nugent:

Ruth Simmons, who became the president of Smith and then Brown.

Jay Lemons:

Brown, yeah.

Georgia Nugent:

Amy Gutmann, who became the president of Penn for a number of years and Janet … Oh, I’m going to forget her name. It’s not McVeigh. Golly. Anyway, she was the president of Mills College for a while.

Jay Lemons:

Yes, yes, yes.

Georgia Nugent:

[inaudible 00:17:34] of her name.

Jay Lemons:

Yes.

Georgia Nugent:

It starts with an M. Anyway.

Jay Lemons:

That’s-

Georgia Nugent:

There was never any, “Oh, I’m going to mentor you.” Or something like that. It was just opening some doors.

Jay Lemons:

How we did it. Excellent. Well, talk about what you look for in team members.

Georgia Nugent:

Yeah. By now, I’ve formed enough teams that I think I have a very clear picture of what I look for. One, I would say I really enjoy and appreciate working with people who have had many different experiences. And by that, it could mean that you’ve had many different roles within a university or college. It could mean that you have been at a number of different institutions, which I especially value and I’ll come back to why. Or it could mean that you’ve been in professional positions, jobs outside of the academy.

I think there can be such a tendency toward group think or … Particularly in colleges, this is the way we’ve always done it, that the more your team brings other experiences, the stronger that team is. So I really look for that. For example, in my last role at Illinois Wesleyan, almost every member of that senior staff had been at not just one, but a number of other colleges and universities. And that brings such a breadth of experience. So it frees people from presuming there’s only one right way. So that I especially value.

I also really want people who … We could call it humility, we could call it whatever, but who are not the least bit afraid that someone else is smarter than they are. The person who’s looking for that smarter person to do the best for the college. I guess the second and related aspect is, I’m really looking for people who understand what it is to seek the greatest good for the entire institution because again, it can be … There can be such a gravitational pull toward my department, my staff, my corner of the world. And for the organization as a whole to be as successful as it can, I think everyone needs to be focused on the organization as a whole. And I always reiterate that to my senior staff.

And I find that people rise to that occasion, but again, I think there’s a human tendency, particularly when the rubber meets the road to say, “But my people need this.” Or, “My department needs that.” And then my final thing would be, I really look for people who have a sense of humor, who believe that work should be fun actually, and that being with your colleagues should be an enjoyable and even fun experience. So those are things that are top of mind for me.

Jay Lemons:

That’s wonderful. By the way, it came to me, Janet Holmgren, who had a very long run at Mills.

Georgia Nugent:

Yes. Forgive me for not … Yes, Holmgren.

Jay Lemons:

Yeah. Yeah. No. Well, thank you for indulging me in terms of thinking about the influence of all of you. I mean, wow. That’s an extraordinary … That may be as profound an impact on higher education as any of the extraordinary things that Harold Shapiro did at Michigan and/or at Princeton.

Georgia Nugent:

I haven’t seen it through that lens, but when you say that, at that time, so we’re talking about late ’80s, early ’90s. There were not that many women presidents, so that’s a large group. Yeah.

Jay Lemons:

It really is. Georgia, I feel like I’m on a one person crusade to reclaim the word good.

Georgia Nugent:

God bless you.

Jay Lemons:

By this, I don’t mean grade B, but I mean virtuous and effective and successful at helping to marshal and move an institution forward. Talk with us about what you think it means to be a good leader.

Georgia Nugent:

Yeah. I could not be more in agreement. However, we want to think about it, as you said, reclaiming the term good or really virtue. The first thing I think about in leadership and the first thing that I advise potential or aspiring leaders has to do honestly with character. Your own character and the character of the institution that you seek to lead or that you are leading. And I think more than any, what we now call skill sets or … I don’t know, those more transactional qualities that we talk about so much today and I hope that that was evident in the folks that I mentioned were important to me.

Finally, I think it’s about someone who has an admirable character and increasingly today, possesses the courage to be able to follow where that character leads. And I think it’s such a difficult environment today, where today’s leaders or aspiring leaders are being called to make decisions that honestly were very rarely a part of the past. It starts with COVID in a sense, when people like me and you were … I guess you were out of office by that time.

Jay Lemons:

I was in survivor guilt mode at that moment. I could not help get out of my own head, thinking like a campus president. I left right before that.

Georgia Nugent:

Yeah. Right. That brought some things home because you really felt that literally every day you were making life and death decisions. And that was not … Well, perhaps in some ways Vietnam had an aspect of that, but a more mediated one. This was every day. How far apart are people going to be? Will they be on campus or not? What will happen to athletes? What do we do about vaccinations? Every day, you had to make those decisions. So in a way, that highlighted that inherent aspect of leadership, but one which isn’t often so viscerally felt.

But now with our current political and more broader cultural and social environment, I think leaders in higher education are called upon every day to make decisions about their own values and the values of their institutions and how far they’re willing to extend themselves to uphold those values. The quandaries are literally existential.

I was in a meeting recently of humanities leaders, who are college presidents and foundation presidents and so forth. And one of them, a president of one of our great private universities, but not an Ivy. Said, “I’ve just cut $200 million from my budget.” And what that means, it has to do with medical research, it has to do with the opportunities for those low income or first generation students. It is incredibly consequential for the future of the institution. And there’s a single individual who has to make that decision.

The decisions about free speech, what do I … I espouse the values of free speech. What does it mean when it comes to my campus? And I think I’ve told you, I experienced that one at Illinois Wesleyan. We had a situation. By and large, our campus was very peaceful, very respectful, and we weathered those Palestine and Gaza protests very well. A lot of mutual respect and so forth, but there was a very activist student, who organized a small group of her friends and plastered the dining hall with posters, pro Palestinian posters with really despicable images and slogans.

And I had already espoused to my senior staff and to the campus that we value free speech. We’re going to uphold free speech. And that means I respect your right to say that, even if I completely disagree with it, but it was a really tough time for me. This is probably terrible to say, but as a college president, I lived in the middle of campus. And I tell you, Jay. I was so close to creeping over in the middle of the night to the dining hall and tearing down those posters. They were really offensive. And I know that they were offensive to many of our students, but I just thought, “I can’t give lip service to this value of upholding speech that you abhor and then choose a different path.”

So I left them up, probably as a result of that, Illinois Wesleyan remains on the list of 60 cases for the Office of Civil Rights because someone not at all affiliated with the college learned about this. He was someone who was filing a zillion of such cases against colleges. So we remain on that list. I don’t think it will ever actually harm the college, but I would’ve preferred for that not to be the case.

Jay Lemons:

Yeah. These are as vexing and challenging a time as perhaps there’s been. I do think back, and it’s easy for us to be caught in the moment. The 1960s were an extraordinarily challenging time. I want to ask you, what’s your advice for folks today who are thinking about leadership or are new leaders or might aspire to one day be in a leadership position?

Georgia Nugent:

Well, I’m going to be a bit redundant, I think. I see this as in some ways going back to my classical training.

Jay Lemons:

Yeah.

Georgia Nugent:

The words on the Temple of Apollo at Delphi are know thyself. And I continue to believe that the most important thing an aspiring leader can do is to really engage in deep self-reflection and understand who they are. What their values are, and in contemplating a role, how those values will coordinate or mesh with the values of the given institution. And then I think you have to take a step further and say, “If my personal values are challenged, how far do I go to uphold those?”

And this is what I think institutional leaders in our current situation are facing. They may have a strong belief in freedom of speech, in academic freedom, in the ability to research and teach any question. But then if you’re faced with something that may almost destroy your institution because of the funding that’s lost, the publicity, the court cases. How do you reconcile those?

So I think if you’re aspiring to this position today, you have to really be soul-searching, so that before that challenge comes, you have some guidelines. You have some North Star because it’s too late in the middle of crisis to try to figure out where you stand and where your institution stands. Those are big asks, but I don’t see how you can go into this role now without carrying out that reflection.

Jay Lemons:

I think that’s incredibly important and wise. Thank you for that. Let’s move into what I call lightning round.

Georgia Nugent:

Okay.

Jay Lemons:

Where I’ll try and ask you shorter questions. The answers can be as much as you want.

Georgia Nugent:

Okay.

Jay Lemons:

Who’s had the most influence on you?

Georgia Nugent:

Well, I mentioned the two Princeton presidents who were important to me, but I wasn’t … I mean, I was pretty close to Harold, but I wasn’t tremendously close to them. Probably one faculty member, when I was an undergraduate. It was Robert Hollander. He is a renowned translator of Dante. And I was very close to him. He was my thesis advisor. I used to babysit for their children and he was such a role model to me. When I’m asked about how I decided on my profession, I think I always thought I wanted to be a teacher even when I was a younger kid. But when I got to college, he was a real role model for me.

Dante was his specialty, but he taught courses in European literature more broadly. I took a number of his courses and they would be … In those days, we had these humongous reading lists. You would read a novel in a week and whatever. And he would spring into class and say, “Isn’t this great? I stayed up all night reading this and they pay me to do this.” And I thought, “That sounds pretty good. I think I’d like to do that.” And then again, I got to know his family, his wife and his children.

He also just opened a new possibility of lifestyle to me. They spent a lot of time in Italy. They were much more … Both erudite and sophisticated than what I had grown up with. And I think that was also aspirational for me.

Jay Lemons:

Yeah. Wonderful. Is there a book that’s had the greatest influence on you? A great question for a classicist.

Georgia Nugent:

Yes. I think my answer is a predictably classical one. I wouldn’t say necessarily one book, although I would come pretty close. The Iliad means a great deal to me. And it’s odd because I’m a pacifist or maybe it’s not. I mean, Homer has a very deep understanding of the cost of war.

Jay Lemons:

Yeah.

Georgia Nugent:

But I think the combination of the Iliad… The Odyssey is great. It’s mostly people’s favorite, but not mine. But Greek tragedy really speaks to me, particularly the works of Sophocles. Oedipus, Antigone, they paint the incredible dilemmas that face human beings. In Antigone, we could debate it for decades and there is no answer to what is justice. In Oedipus, there was no way that he could escape fate. He thought he could, but ultimately you can’t. And so those enormous lessons I come back to again and again.

There’s also one that nobody knows, but that I love. It’s a Sophocles play called the Philoctetes. And Philoctetes was a Greek war who was abandoned by the Greeks on their way to Troy. And he was abandoned because … That’s complicated. The gods had done something to him and it made it impossible for him to continue with the Greeks. But he suffers all during the war. He has a physical suffering that’s been imposed on him by the gods. And ultimately, the Greeks learn that if they don’t come back and pick him up and bring him to Troy, they will never conquer Troy.

So Odysseus sets out to bring him back, and it was Odysseus who had marooned him in the first place. And Philoctetes, the real struggle of the play, is he willing to abandon his own suffering and be healed? And in the end, it appears that the answer is no, that we come to love our own suffering. And I think that’s such a profound message. It deserves to be better known.

Jay Lemons:

It does deserve to be better known. It takes me back to one of my first mentors and a person who encouraged me into higher education, leadership, administration. Who said, “Jay, you need to know. Everybody has their own troubles. Everybody has their own suffering.” And this very wise woman said, “In fact, I think if you got together with all of your closest friends and you put all your troubles in the middle, you’d probably pull out that which you know, that your own suffering.” I thought that was so interesting and that’s consistent with the message here of [inaudible 00:36:13]. Yeah. Interesting.

Georgia Nugent:

It is. And finally, Sophocles doesn’t even solve it. He has a deus ex machina and you don’t quite know what’s going to happen.

Jay Lemons:

Yeah. Well, there you go. The power of ambiguity.

Georgia Nugent:

Yeah.

Jay Lemons:

And the human condition across millennia. Being one of the 150 pioneering women students at Princeton, do you have a favorite fondest memory from your time?

Georgia Nugent:

It’s not related to … Well, it is related in a way to being a member of that class. I think some of my fondest memories do revolve around those courses that I mentioned already and that had a large effect on my life. But if I think about my undergraduate experience in general, I have to say the Princeton … And of course, you only enter this experience at the very end of your undergraduate career, but the Princeton tradition of reunion, which is unlike any other. And like 10,000 people come to the Princeton campus for their reunions, every graduation year, every age, every whatever. And there’s something really astounding about that.

For one thing, I think it’s the only place that I am aware of, maybe certain military traditions where … So there’s reunion, gazillions of people come not just every 5 years or every 10 years, but every year and come to this campus and re-meet their classmates and meet new folks. But then it culminates in this silly thing called the P-rade, which is a parade where all of the alumni march around the campus. But the astounding thing about it is, of course, it’s organized year by year.

So my husband and I, who’s also a grad, as you know. We have always thought it’s a unique anthropological experience. You literally see people year by year from when they’re 21 to when they’re 80, marching by in cohorts. And it’s fascinating to see how people age. How well they age, how attached they are to one another. That’s a profound experience that I’ve had not just … It began in my senior year, but for decades after that.

Jay Lemons:

I really appreciate that. The place of ritual and tradition in these animals and hundreds of institutions have tried to mimic the Princeton reunion tradition and not many have been able to measure up. I hadn’t thought about it, of engaging in it over one’s lifetime. How its impact and meaning might change. But yes, a great study. Hey, if you hadn’t worked in higher ed, what else might you have ended up doing? Would you have been in the horse business?

Georgia Nugent:

No. I have zero interest in horses. No, I’ve always thought that I would’ve enjoyed architecture. That I would’ve liked to be an architect.

Jay Lemons:

Yeah.

Georgia Nugent:

For two reasons. I enjoy drawing. I’m not any good at it, but I’ve always enjoyed that. My father was interested in drawing, and so I started doing that at an early age, and then I’m very interested in design, in general terms. Whether it’s fashion design, home design, and architecture. I met an architect when I was a graduate student, I guess. He was a German visitor at Cornell in the architecture school there. And he was building something in Berlin. It was a hotel. I don’t think it was ever built, as often happens with architects. They have a competition, but it may or may not get built.

But he was designing something to stand … In those days, Germany was still divided, and he was designing something to stand on the border between East and West Germany, and he was conceptualizing it through the avid story of Pyramus and Thisbe, which is where there are two lovers and they’re separated by a wall. And it gave me a notion of the built environment, being able to physically express metaphor. And so I’ve always been intrigued by that. And I’ve had a lot of architect friends. I think I would’ve loved that, the combination of a metaphorical thinking, but expressing it in a physical reality.

Jay Lemons:

Wonderful. Georgia, I’m going to return to tradition. One of our traditions here is we like to invite our guests to reflect on the distinctive qualities, the organizational DNA that makes institutions special. You have the unique perspective of having led multiple institutions and continuing to be a major contributor in higher education, but maybe reflect a little more broadly. What are the core qualities, values that you believe matter most in an institution of higher learning and meeting the needs of its students and building a sense of community well? How do you see those values come to life?

Georgia Nugent:

Yeah. Well, I have thought about that, particularly because of having been in … Gee, I don’t know. Six or seven institutions, as you said, leading three of them. I think particularly about the latter. I don’t think there’s an external quality that you can pinpoint. What I believe is that an institution has to be clear about what its particular mission is. And as we know, one of the great strengths of American higher education is these 4,000 colleges, many of them having missions quite distinct from one another. I think when an institution is clear about that, they are successful and they do well by their students.

I don’t know, we might want to cut this, but I will contrast. One of the things I think we’re seeing more and more or understanding more and more is that there were too many of our colleges or universities who aspired to being a Harvard. Harvard has a particular mission. It’s unique historically in our nation and almost in the world. I think many institutions lost their way when they assumed that was a mission for everyone. So that’s broadly.

In my own experience, I would contrast … I mean, I’ll just say it to you and you can do with it what you want. First, I was at Kenyon for 10 years. Kenyon is very clear about its mission and everyone who is affiliated with it understands that mission. And it’s unusual these days. It remains very strongly, not just the liberal arts, but literature. If there were a poetry reading at Kenyon, the students would be in the aisles, literally. Every spring, we had a poetry day, where there would be clotheslines strung across the campus and people would be close pinning poems up. It is very clear about that mission. The English department is still the largest department on campus. So they know who they are and they follow that even if the rest of the world isn’t necessarily following them.

Jay Lemons:

Yeah.

Georgia Nugent:

That year at the College of Wooster was extraordinary for me because it was only a year and yet we accomplished a lot. And in that case, I feel it was an institution that did have a mission and had lost its way a little bit and needed to just be called back and reminded. They had begun to think that they didn’t know who they were, but actually they did. And as soon as I turned to the campus, they could articulate it themselves.

And Illinois Wesleyan is a different situation, unfortunately, I think. They don’t understand what their mission is, and it has been clear for decades. They had a president decades ago, who convinced them that they were a Harvard, and it has been unfortunate for them. Unfortunately in their character, and … Though they don’t often recognize it, it was a disaster financially. That university is still paying for dreams that were built on clouds. I hate to be unkind about an institution, but that to me was an example of where … If you don’t have that true north, it’s difficult.

What was painful about it to me, was they have what could be an extraordinary mission. And it was pointed out to them 50 years ago by an accreditation committee, because that is a liberal arts institution, who actually has very strong professional schools. And that accreditation committee said, “If Illinois Wesleyan could figure out how to meld these or how to move them forward together, it would be a model for liberal arts education in America.” And they never figured that out.

Jay Lemons:

Georgia, I just want to take a moment to say thank you for joining us today on Leaders on Leadership.

Georgia Nugent:

My pleasure, definitely.

Jay Lemons:

I’m really grateful. More generally, to say thank you for the extraordinary leadership you’ve provided across American higher education and the wonderful colleague that you’ve been to dozens and dozens and dozens of people like me. Your insights and your wisdom about leadership are important and valuable, and I’m grateful that you’ve made this contribution to our program.

Georgia Nugent:

Oh, that’s too kind. Thank you very much.

Jay Lemons:

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 podcast wherever you find your podcast. 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.

Well, again, it’s been our special pleasure to have Dr. Georgia Nugent on our show today. Thank you once again for joining us, Georgia, and look forward to our paths crossing very soon.

Georgia Nugent:

Indeed.