Leaders on Leadership featuring Randy Boyd, President of the University of Tennessee 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.

I’m truly delighted today to be joined by Randy Boyd. Randy serves as the 26th president of the University of Tennessee system. Since being appointed in 2018, his leadership has focused on strengthening the system’s impact across Tennessee, expanding access, supporting student success, and reinforcing the university’s role in workforce and economic development.

Before entering higher education, Randy built a successful career as an entrepreneur. He founded Radio Systems Corporation, now PetSafe Brands, growing it into a global company with thousands of employees and a broad portfolio of pet related products, including the invisible fence that has kept my dog safe for 30 years now, Randy. So thank you for that.

Randy Boyd:

Thank you.

Jay Lemons:

He later transitioned into public service where he played a central role in advancing higher education initiatives across the state of Tennessee. He founded TNR Achieves, helping expand access to community college and served as Tennessee’s commissioner of economic and community development, where his team recruited significant job growth and investment. Randy himself is a first generation college graduate, earning his bachelor’s degree from the University of Tennessee at Knoxville and a master’s from the University of Oklahoma. It’s a happy pleasure to welcome you today, Randy.

Randy Boyd:

Well, Jay, thank you for welcoming me. And two things, thank you for letting me be on your program. I’m excited to chat with you and your listeners. And then second, thank you for buying an Invisible Fence. As I might share later in the story, I’ve been able to work for the last 10 years free of charge as a volunteer, but it’s only because of customers like you buying our batteries. So keep buying those batteries.

Jay Lemons:

Well, I got to tell you, truth be told, I now have an old dog that doesn’t even need her battery anymore. And I’m disappointed because not only do I have the fence system, I have the most incredible dog door tied to her collar that will keep other critters out and let her go. I mean, she’s got her own. She’s her own latchkey dog and it’s the coolest product.

And truly, Randy, I spent 25 years living on two campuses. One of them, the campus house was a little bit remote. We were down a 200 yard lane before you got to the house. So the dogs were not really much of an issue, but you wanted to keep them close. The other one, Susquehanna University in Pennsylvania, we’re on the front edge of the campus, right next to the library, right in front of the football field. So traffic everywhere, one of the main walkways for students, that invisible fence kept I think four dogs over 17 years safe and contained. And so it’s fun.

Randy Boyd:

This is beginning to sound like a paid commercial for Invisible Fence. Should we tell our visitors where they can go by one, give them our website? I love it. Thank you.

Jay Lemons:

Thank you, Randy. One of our goals for the program is really to ask leaders to reflect and to consider their own pathways to leadership and yours is a different, a non-traditional and unusual path. But I hope that somewhere out there, someone is going to listen and hear about the forces that have shaped you. And doing the work that I do now and helping institutions to identify leaders, there’s often curiosity about non-traditional leaders. And I have my own theory about non-traditional leaders, what helps them to either succeed because not all do, as you well know. Tell us your story in your own words about your path, the people, the events, the opportunities that really have forged the person and the leader that you have become.

Randy Boyd:

Jay, thank you for the question. And as we talked before, this could be a really long answer, but I think you framed it well. If I reflect on, I’m talking to other people in academia that are thinking about potentially hiring non-traditional leaders. So I’ll maybe try to share my story with that lens and mind. So as you mentioned, first one of my family’s history to go to college. I was always very restless, graduated from high school in three years, started at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville at age 16. I always felt I was blessed. My dad said, “Son, you don’t need to go to college. I can give you a job in the factory now, but if you want to go, I can give you a job on the weekends and during your break so you can pay your own way through.” And I thought, wow, I’m a lucky kid.

How many kids get the opportunity to get a job that they can pay their own way through school? Of course, things were less expensive back then. I graduated early at age 19. I graduated in three years and always tell people it wasn’t because I was smart, it was just because I was cheap. I still remember going to the registrar and her saying, “Look, you have to take 14 hours to be a full-time student, and you can take as many as 22 for the …” So let me get this straight. It’s $174 and I can take 22 classes and there’s no extra charge. Well, give me 22 classes or 22 credits. So I ended up, that’s how I graduated early, just being cheap and trying to get the most out of the money that I was paying. Graduated at age 19.

And maybe thinking back on how that has influenced my wanting this job and doing this job, access is really important to me. Affordability is really important to me. Graduating on time, if not early, is also really important. I think at a very early age, I appreciated the value of education also to make sure it’s more affordable so that other kids like me had the opportunity to go. It was a life-changing experience for me and I guess kind of dedicated my life to making sure other kids had the same thing. Started my first business at age 20 … I went to work for my dad for four years and then until I decided that it was time for me to be an entrepreneur of my own.

And so I started my first company, which failed in six months. I’m getting ready to do commencements in the next couple of weeks and I have a unique commencement speech. I always tell the students, I think maybe, somebody might correct me, but I think I may be the only commencement speaker that will extol the students to go forth and fail. Everybody’s going to fail. I’ve studied business and leaders of all types my entire life and I’ve never met one that was successful. They didn’t have a failure along the way. So first you’re going to fail, but second, you learn more from your failures than you do from your successes. So having a good failure is good. If you fail early, you’re probably going to be like me when I failed at age 23 in the first business. I really had nothing to start, so I didn’t have a whole lot to lose. So it’s a cheap time to fail.

And then finally, back to learning more from your failures. If you’re young, whatever you learned, you’ve got the rest of your life to benefit from it. You wait till you’re 70 to do your first failure, well, you lose everything and you don’t have much time to take advantage of what you learn. So anyway, got a good failure out of the way early. I started a second company, which was a very pedestrian company selling electric fencing for cattle and horses out of a Dodge Maxi van with no air and no radio. Didn’t have an air conditioner because I was cheap. There’s a theme here. I didn’t have radio because I didn’t want anybody distracting my thoughts and I wanted to be making sure I was listening to my customers thinking about the next sell.

And if you listen to your customers long enough, they’ll tell you what you need to hear. And customers started asking me for this product called the Invisible Fence, called up the company, they wouldn’t sell to me. Long story short, we bet everything we own, which wasn’t much on creating our own version of the product. It turned out to be a success. And this would be a whole story for a different day about business.

It wasn’t an easy road. It took us five years before we turned the corner and knew that we’re going to be successful, but we were eventually. And when I sold the company in 2020, we were doing over 600 million in sales with 4,000 products, 1,400 employees, and we’re doing quite well. That’s the business story. I’ll say thinking about non-traditional leaders in education, I don’t think that would be enough. There’s some benefits to having been a business leader. Being entrepreneurial is important in higher education. Our world is changing fast and getting faster more rapidly every day. So we have to be able to be more entrepreneurial. So having higher education leaders that are entrepreneurial is important. Running an organization, so much of it is the same issues. Some people might be offended by this, but running a 14,000 person university system, running a 1,400 employee company, there’s so many similar HR issues are the same.

Making sure you’re investing in your people so they can continue to develop and grow is the same. Being able to recruit well is the same. A lot of the things that you do, change management, communication, all those things are very similar. So I’ll just share that. I think those are a lot of important skills, but it’s very different in the public higher educations in particular because there’s so much more interaction with alumni, with faculty, with the government. And so those skills are important as well. So back in 2007, started a couple of nonprofits. I started one to make Knoxville the most pet friendly city in America, which we are now most pet friendly city in the Southeast. That makes sense because I was in the pet business. In trade for that, my county mayor says, “Hey, I want you to help me create a program where every student in Knox County could go to technical and community college free of charge.” We called it Knox Achieves.

Long story again, I’ll just jump to the conclusion. It was a success. Within four years we were actually in 27 counties across the state, sending 5,000 students every year going to college, technical and community college free of charge, all matched with a mentor, all provided by private dollars. Then in 2013, 2013 is kind of a big transitional year in my life. Governor Councilman calls me up and says, “I’d like for you to come work for me in the state government.” And I said, “I’m a business guy. I can’t work in state government. It’s too slow. It’s too bureaucratic.” But he convinced me to come and at least work for a year. So I volunteered for one year as a special advisor on higher education. Some advice I give students sometimes, and this is probably the least useful advice one could ever give. It’s amazing the kind of jobs you can get when you’re willing to work for free.

I volunteered in this role, and in that one year we did some transformational things. We set a vision for the state called the Drive to 55 to take us from 32% post-secondary attainment to 55% by the year 2025, and then created a whole range of initiatives to help us get there. One of which was to create something that we called the Tennessee Promise. And I was there with the governor at the state of the state in 2014 when at the end of his speech, he announced to the legislature that now I’d like to let you know about a new initiative called the Tennessee Promise. The Tennessee promise is going to make it possible for every student in the entire state to go to technical college and community college free of charge and it’s going to be endowed forever and it’s not going to cost the taxpayers a penny. Now then of course, we had the great unveil of how we had managed to pull that off.

But I learned two things during that year, at least two things. One, everything that I thought was true about government, it was very bureaucratic. It was very slow. However, if you really wanted to make an impact, public service is the place to do it. As an entrepreneur, as a philanthropist, you could do some things that make the world a better place, but I could never set an entire vision for the state. I could have never created a program like the Tennessee Promise by myself. And so then I was, look, if I really wanted to make a difference, that was the place to be. My company was doing well. I came to the point where I really didn’t need to work. I recognized the rest of my life was going to be about giving back. Volunteered to be commissioner of economic and community development for two years. We created a whole series of initiatives, one of which was helping our rural communities. Another was finishing this drive to 55.

In 2017, I made a very fateful decision. I could either serve out my last two years with a governor and we’ll do just as much as we can until the new governor comes in and he comes up with his own initiatives because nobody wants to take the previous governor’s initiatives or I could run for governor myself and see if I could add another eight years. When I started campaigning, my first two months, I kept saying, “I don’t really want the job. It’s about the mission. I just want to complete the mission.” So my campaign manager said, “Randy, you have to stop saying that. You got to say you want the job.” So I started saying that, but we lost, and that’s a whole nother story, but we lost spectacular in the last two weeks after leading for the six months going in.

Everything blew up in the last two weeks. That was a hard time. We saw that happening after working so hard. But as I told my team, we left everything on the field. We couldn’t have worked harder. We couldn’t have done anything more and sometimes that’s just your fate. But at the end, my team was more disappointed than I was. They were looking for jobs in state government and hoping that I would win. I didn’t really want the job. So I immediately set about thinking, “Okay, how could I still accomplish some of the things I wanted to do? ” And very fortuitous.

The president of the University of Tennessee system, Joe DiPietro, who was a friend and actually probably did the wrong thing by donating to me, but he was always very supportive. I think we had worked together back during the drive to 55 launch. He called me up. We had lunch and at the end of the lunch, he said, “By the way, I’m going to be retiring in about three or four months and I’ve been talking with the board and the governor and they thought you could be a good interim.” I always like to joke. He said, “We’d like for you to be the interim until we can find somebody more qualified to do the job or somebody that’s actually qualified to do the job.” That was exactly it.

But I did call up the governor and my still current boss, the chairman and said, “Look, I’ll do this. I’ll do it for free. I’ll do it for six months, only if I can be transformational. If I can do some things that can really have an impact. If you want somebody just to kick their feet up on the desk and hang out, I’m not your guy.” And in that six months I learned we accomplished a lot.

We set five big goals. We accomplished all of them. I created some of them, for example, called the UT Promise that made it possible for today, two thirds of all Tennesseans to go to the University of Tennessee free of tuition and fees. So kind of maybe a one trick pony, keep doing the same thing. We did that. We did several other major initiatives. And I learned at the end of the six months that there was still a lot more to do. There were so many more things that we still had before us that would take a lot more time. And second, if you really want to make an impact in the lives of Tennesseans, there’s no better place than the University of Tennessee. Here’s a place where I can serve my alma mater, serve the state, accomplish all the good things that I want to do and don’t have to run for office again.

So there’s a couple of things in there thinking about non-traditional leaders. I already got the job, so I don’t really, I guess, need to rationalize why I should, but I think it’s important, especially a land grant university, to know who the people are that you’re serving. Now I got the advantage of as commissioner being in every county in the state, working on the economic development side, special advisor, higher education. I got to know all the universities across the state. As a governor, I got to know everybody with the people at the barbershop to the cafe. You got to know everybody. I was in every county at least four times. And so I always think if your job is to serve the people of the state, how do you do that if you don’t know them? So finding somebody I would suggest that actually maybe nontraditional, but knows the people they serve, knows their customer is an advantage.

Now, if you don’t have that luxury, if you’ve had a career in academia, you land in a new public land grant position, for example, my suggestion would be take whatever time it takes to get to know who your customers go visit with the legislature, not just say hello, but go listen and try to understand. Same thing across the state as much as you possibly can. We have 95 extension offices, one in every county. Within the first year, I visited everyone.

That was a commitment and most of them … Well, actually I am the only president that’s ever visited all the extension offices, but I think it’s really, really important to listen to your stakeholders and it takes time. But again, my non-traditional background, I think helped me in that way. I’ve got some great chancellors and they got great provosts and they know all the processes on approving tenure and approving academic programs and developing them. I’m here to support them from a legislative and financial point of view and help us run the organization, let them be the specialists in the areas that they’re great at. That was a very long answer. I’m going to stop with that.

Jay Lemons:

There’s so much there and I’m going to discipline myself from wanting to jump back in and explore some of those themes because you hit on some just really important themes. Longtime chair of the board at Susquehanna University, John Stringfeld, who was the chair and CEO of Prudential, used to always give a speech that was life ain’t linear. And we often, I see young people who think life is just one linear right up and it is filled with these undulations that sometimes are accompanied by failures and losing. And so your life and journey really amplify that in a beautiful way. So I appreciate your sharing all of that. As I know our listeners will. The other thing that I heard oozes out of you is the fundamental importance of higher education, Randy, as a transformational impact on an individual, not only an individual but their family and ultimately the larger population of the state.

So you really, really exemplify that in a wonderful way. I’d love to have you talk a little bit about what makes a good leader. And by good, I don’t mean grade B. I mean somebody who is good, virtuous, effective, and ultimately successful in moving, whether it is a company, an organization, a university, a state or a nation forward. What makes a good leader in your mind?

Randy Boyd:

A lot of things we could talk about, but I think I’m going to just narrow it down to one or two and I’ll say we’ve already talked about it. One of the most important things that any good leader has in any organization, whether it’s a commissioner of economic and community development, serving businesses across the state, whether it’s running a pet company, whether it’s being the University of Tennessee president, the most important attribute, the most important skill that they would have is to be a good listener and being a good listener takes work. Yesterday, for example, I had my birthday lunch and listen. If it’s your birthday in the month of April within the system staff, we have lunch together. It’s an hour, everybody gets to know each other. It’s a comfortable setting and I ask people to share ideas, creating opportunities for people to actually share and listen.

So just saying I’m going to be a good listener and showing up for work for two years and hoping it happens isn’t enough. You actually have to have proactive processes to do so. When I went to all the extension offices, I would go in and I have a set question that was always fun to ask. I would walk in and say, “As the president of the University of Tennessee, turns out I’m all powerful. I have an unlimited budget and I can change any law just like that. And I’m here to grant you a wish to make your extension office better. What would it be? ” So you got to prompt them, but they were excited about being able to answer a question like that. And as a result, got all kinds of really good ideas, but being a good listener I think is first and foremost.

I think second, you had to be able to build a strong team. And I think one of the things that is obvious that you have in any organization, you had to be transparent, you had to be trusted. Transparency is a key to being trusted. And then once you have that team, they have that trust and that transparency. I think in my opinion, and by the way, if some of this sounds familiar because you’ve read Jim Collins, Good to Great, I’m plagiarizing, but I think being a level five leader, being humble, always putting your team first. For me, if I hear a leader, a person that’s in charge stolen all the accomplishments they’ve done using the I word in every sentence, for me it’s very negative. I try to always put my team first, always give them credit. If there’s a mistake, it’s my fault. If it’s a success, it’s theirs.

And I think we’ve created a culture here at UT that replicates that. We champion and celebrate the successes of our teams and take the responsibility when we don’t succeed.

Jay Lemons:

When you’re looking for people to build your team, what specifically are you looking for?

Randy Boyd:

We have a set of values and there’s seven of them. I won’t recite them, but things like being a good listener, being nimble and innovative, being bold and impactful, being trusted and transparent, those are some of the things that we expect of our leaders. So your experience is important, your intellect is important, but most importantly, it’s your belief, or at least we feel like your ability to exemplify and live by the values that we have to say, “Hey, do you believe in being innovative? Do you believe in being transparent and trusted?” Tell us an example of when you were challenged and you had to be transparent in a way that was uncomfortable. You have to ask those types of questions to get there, but those are the most important. We can train for lack of certain skills, you’ll get the experience, but behaviors are probably the thing that you need to hire for most importantly.

Jay Lemons:

Randy, a core part of our listenership are people who are thinking about leadership in higher education. And I would love to have you give them some advice about those people who are either new leaders or aspiring to leadership.

Randy Boyd:

I talk about this. I’m a Boy Scout master, by the way, I was for 17 years. And I talk about why Boy Scouts is such a great organization. One of the most important things is it gives young boys and now young girls the opportunity to lead at a very early age. And we always say in scouting, scouting is a safe place to fail. And I think the same is true for anybody wanting to develop to be a leader. I always use the analogy leadership is like shooting free throws. You can read books about shooting free throws. You can watch YouTube videos about shooting free throws. You can go to conferences about shooting free throws, but you’re really never going to get good at it until you just tow the line and take some shots.

And I think the same thing is true with leadership. Just get out there and lead and practice. So look for opportunities. So if you’re wanting to be a leader, any time there’s an opportunity to lead the company picnic, whatever it is, always step up and volunteer. The more practice you get being a leader, the better you’ll be.

Jay Lemons:

Fabulous. Wonderful advice. When you think about the context of the day, what are the most critical challenges that are facing leaders in higher ed?

Randy Boyd:

That’s a hard question because there’s so many that we have a debate about what the top 10 are. But for me and for the university, my board, my leadership, we believe that the biggest threat to us in the long term and the most important threat is a perceived lack of value in a higher education degree at all. This is an existential threat. As I share with my team and all those that listen that this is just something that’s esoteric, it’s real life and imminent. If legislators don’t believe that higher education is a good value, they’ll stop funding us. And as a public institution, that’s really important.

If parents and high schoolers or potential students don’t believe that we provide a good value, they’ll stop coming. They’ll stop paying to come. So it’s really important for us to continue to make sure that, well, there’s two parts to that. One, that we are good value and then at the same time that we’re letting the world know that we are, they’re just not going to know it by accident. And unfortunately for all of us in higher education, there are some headwinds out there. It’s popular if you’re a politician and it’s popular if you’re in the media to bash higher education. And unfortunately, we just have just enough examples that gives them something to criticize. And unfortunately also we’re as good as the lowest common denominator. If one university across the country does one thing in a particular area, people conflate that to all higher education.

If one university does something bad, I see this, hear this all the time, they’ll conclude after using that example, say, “Well, there’s higher education for you.” No, no, that was one example. It’s like a lot of industries, but higher education is so different. You’ve got a WGU versus a land grant university versus an elite Ivy League school versus a Christian and private school. And all these are so, so different organizations and different experiences. And that’s a good thing, but unfortunately too many pundits and politicians like to combine us into one homogeneous unit.

Jay Lemons:

You are so right. The great strength of American higher education is in fact the diversity of our institutions and yet we are broad-brushed through a media lens that is caricatures, unfortunately.

Randy Boyd:

If I could, taking a moment to recruit other advocates, I know everybody that’s listening believe exactly as you and I believe that we do provide a good value, but we’ve got to talk about it. We can’t assume that people understand the great value that we provide. So every chance we get as leaders in higher education, we have to extol the benefits and there’s enough of them out there. There is a part two that I’ll just add. There are some things in which we do that we could do better. And so we need to also not just brag about all the good things we’re doing, but also do the things we do better, but it’s something that’s a very serious existential threat that we have to take on.

Jay Lemons:

As important as it is that there’d be financial economic payoffs, the individual benefits to higher education will forever that be important for us to demonstrate. But I worry, Randy, that we forget about the societal benefits that come with having an educated population. People are more likely to vote. They’re more likely to pay more in taxes. Government therefore is going to have more resources to create the safety net to take care of those who can’t and the ability to manage tax loads. I would be critical that we have often oversold the individual benefits and forgotten about the societal benefits.

Randy Boyd:

That’s such a great point. I agree with everything that you just said. It reminds me of one other challenge that we have sometimes, and this is popular right now at the federal government and my state and the state of Tennessee to start thinking about ways to provide financial support for universities based on what they’re referencing as ROI. Basically the income that students might get as a result of their degree and how much their debt is.

Now, I agree on the debt side, and we’re working really hard to reduce students’ overall debt. Two years ago, 45% of our students graduated with no debt this last year, 55% of graduated with no debt. By 2030, our goal is to get that to 65%. So that’s important, but it can’t be just about income. We are desperate in the state of Tennessee for more social workers. We are desperate for more elementary school teachers in our rural communities, but there’s not a lot of reward, financial reward to be an elementary school teacher in a small rural community. So we don’t want to dis-incentivize students from going into those very critical fields.

Jay Lemons:

Yeah. I’m going to move us into kind of a little more of a lightning round here. Shorter questions. You can answer with whatever length you want. Who most influenced Randy Boyd?

Randy Boyd:

Can I give two answers?

Jay Lemons:

Sure.

Randy Boyd:

My father. My father was an entrepreneur, a business person. So my early years, he was my inspiration. Everything that I confronted, every challenge I had, my dad had already done it. I would think dad made it through this. I can make it through this. So he was a great example for me from the business side.

And then the second answer would be Bill Haslam. When he recruited me to come into state government, it was hard to say no because here’s a man that was worth billions. Yet he had dedicated eight years of his life basically working for free to take on not only the things that he was passionate about, but things he wasn’t, just because it was part of the job. So when he asked me to spend a year to work on the things that I really, really care about, how could you say no to that? And basically because of his example of public service, it really changed the second half of my life.

Jay Lemons:

Beautiful. Thank you. Is there a book that’s had the greatest influence on you?

Randy Boyd:

There’s a lot. Just since I’ve already referenced it, from a leadership point of view and for this audience’s point of view, I think Jim Collins, Built to Last and Good to Great. Built to Last is a little bit harder to read. Good to Great is maybe a little easier, similar points. If you’re only going to pick one, I’d pick good to great, but I’d recommend both. A lot of the philosophies that I have around business are based on his writings.

Jay Lemons:

Have you read the book around failures that he did?

Randy Boyd:

Yes. Actually, I’ve read everything he’s written.

Jay Lemons:

I like that one. Well and I have not yet ordered, but I probably will, prompted by this conversation, his new one, What to Make of A Life: Cliffs, Fog, Fire, and the Self-Knowledge Imperative. It’s just been released. It grabs me by the title.

Randy Boyd:

I’m a big fan of his. I will, as soon as we finish this podcast, the beauty about Amazon, you can order the book faster than you can write the name down. I’m going to order that book. And by the way, my values in my company, four of the seven values are direct lifts from chapter titles in his book. And then we put it in our values on the back of our business card.

So I got to meet Jim one time. When I saw him, I said, “Look, I’m a big fan, believe in a lot of things you say.” In fact, I shared the back of my business card, it says, and here’s the values that we borrowed from you. And on the other side is my contact information in case your attorney wants to reach out for copyright infringement. He says, “No, no.” So I have his permission to borrow his thoughts.

Jay Lemons:

Well, I too had an opportunity to meet him and have been a big fan. Although it’s interesting, good to great. Almost all of those companies have fallen by the wayside and he wrote this little epistle about good to great applied to the social sector that I think is more enduring and it is our institutions of higher learning that have found ways to endure across the centuries. It’s a message that I want to pound because many folks think as just as you said, they don’t trust us. They doubt the value of what we do and yet time and again, we have found a way across history. The social sector piece really reinforces that. I will never forget a lesson. I said to him, “How do you know where you’re at in this journey from good to great?” And he gave an example that I’m going to take a moment to just repeat here because you’ll appreciate it.

He said, “I know exactly,” and would just bore into me with those intense blue eyes, “I know exactly what you’re speaking of.” You can look at a fertilized egg and it will look like nothing is happening. But inside that egg, there is division of cell activity that is producing that which will ultimately break through and crack the shell of that egg, and something nobody could have imagined will come out of it. And I think a lot of organizations, a lot of leaders struggle with the expectation that you will always have demonstrable results. Sometimes staying the course is staying on the nest and taking care of that egg and making sure that there’s a chick ready to break out of there. So I thought you’d appreciate that one.

Randy Boyd:

I do. That’s a great analogy. I’m going to try to steal that if I can.

Jay Lemons:

Please do. By the way, you’re just like my dad. Graduated high school at 16, done with college at 19 and I showed up around 20.

Randy Boyd:

There’s a different path for everybody.

Jay Lemons:

Different path for everybody. Yes. So his son took five years and didn’t go to school until I was six years old. But I hope in that three years in one of America’s great college towns, Knoxville, Tennessee, you had a fond and fun memory that you might share from your undergraduate experience.

Randy Boyd:

I was in and out so quickly and I worked 24 hours every weekend, every spring break. So I only went to half of a football game, one basketball game. So I was an atypical student. But I was in Air Force ROTC for two years and that was my brotherhood. That was my friends. We had the air commandos. We did a lot of fun things together. One of my favorite experiences with them was going in a B, oh gosh, now I’m spacing the number, aircraft re-fueler.

And you’re flying through the air, you get in the bay, which is just a glass bay underneath you. So you’re looking straight down at the ground, you have this big tube coming out the back of your jet. And then a F-15 flies up out of nowhere, just suddenly is right underneath you and you stick the tube in the top of the jet and refuel them. That was pretty exciting. That was a pretty cool memory. It was because of Air Force ROTC, because of the University of Tennessee, that I got to have that experience.

Jay Lemons:

Wow. Well, one of the questions I love to probe people is there a favorite campus tradition that an institution that you know or have attended or served that you would hold up? Because traditions are that element that connects generations across a common landscape. So favorite tradition?

Randy Boyd:

Well, I’m getting ready to go to a series of commencements, and I’ll do commencements at five different campuses. And at the end of the day, of all the things we do, that’s the most rewarding and they’re exhausting, but at the same time it’s rewarding. Standing on the stage, shaking those hands for that split second, you’re sharing the most important moment in that person’s life and you know that if it wasn’t for the work that you and your team had done, they may not be there. And so that’s an incredibly moving and rewarding moment. Then for just a fun one, being the president of the University of Tennessee and being able to go down to Neyland Stadium on a football game and watching the team run through the power T. For about 60 seconds, there’s not a moment that’s more exhilarating than that.

Jay Lemons:

Hear, hear. Well, that is a great place of worship on Saturday afternoons, isn’t it?

Randy Boyd:

Worship is a great way to describe it.

Jay Lemons:

Well, one of our traditions here on Leaders on Leadership is we’d like to invite our guests to kind of talk a little bit and share with our listeners the distinctive qualities, or if you will, the organizational DNA, Randy, that makes the University of Tennessee system so very special to you and to those that you serve.

Randy Boyd:

Well, we’re doing a lot of things that a lot of public land grant universities do, like trying to be more affordable, be more accessible. We actually acquired a small liberal arts college to provide more public access in a region of the state that was underserved. So we’re being bold and innovative. We’re growing. All those things.

So if I picked one thing that I would particularly be proud of is the change in our culture. We set up purposely to create a culture that we call Be One UT, the One UT culture. And we work together as a team. And I’m told, don’t know this for a fact, but I’m told that it’s very unusual, if not unique, the chemistry and the camaraderie between our campuses. So there’s five campuses, but we all come together as one. We work together in so many different ways at all levels. So I think the culture of being one UT, and it extends out to our partners.

We’re partners with Patel when we manage Oak Ridge National Labs. We’re a partner with the state of Tennessee. I know that many states, the universities and their state legislature or their governor or both are at war and our state we’re partners. They share their goals and we help them to meet. If we want to make the state a leader in nuclear energy, we need to provide them the nuclear workforce. So we’re there at the planning stage developing plans to help the state accomplish their goals. So I think the 1UT culture both within and with our external partners is maybe one of the things that’s kind of unique and that we’re very proud of.

Jay Lemons:

Well, Randy, thank you for joining us on Leaders on Leadership. We’re glad to have you and really appreciate your sharing these thoughts and insight, really wisdom about leadership more generally, but also leadership as it applies in your run over the last eight years in the University of Tennessee system. I welcome any parting words that you might want to share.

Randy Boyd:

Stay the course, be persistent, continue to be innovative, know that the work that we’re doing in higher education is critical to the future of our country.

Jay Lemons:

Thank you, Randy. Again, it’s been a great pleasure to have you with us, and we look forward to your many successes in the years ahead with gratitude for being willing to take on a unique and different calling in your life.

Randy Boyd:

It’s the honor of my life. Jay, thank you for having me.

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 podcasts. 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. Thanks for joining us.