Category: Perspectives

At Roanoke College, purpose is part of the brand. With the motto, “Our purpose is to help you find yours,” the school prides itself on guiding young people towards full and rich lives focused on doing good in the world.  

The champion of this bold expression of formative education is Roanoke’s President Frank Shushok. With degrees in education and 30 years of experience in the field, Shushok is passionate about the role higher education can play in young people’s personal and professional growth and has compelling reasons for why they should be intertwined. In this interview with LearningWell, Shushok talks about creating counter-cultures on campus in which students are frequently asked meaningful questions without binary answers.  

LW: How has your background influenced your role as a college president?  

FS: First of all, I am a person of faith, and what I mean by that is my whole life has been shaped by a sense that life is for a purpose. Believing that my own life can push forward goodness in the world is something that both centers me and compels me. I’ve also been focused on interfaith curiosity and collaboration, and along the way, that has drawn me into many conversations about how people find meaning and purpose in their lives. 

Almost all people yearn to understand why they’re here, and I find very few people who, at the end of that question, don’t believe their life should be for something good. Whether I’m sitting at a table with Muslims, Buddhists, agnostics, Christians, or atheists, I have found that when we begin a conversation about how we find meaning and purpose in life, designing a life toward virtue is a really powerful connector. 

That framing says a lot about how I view higher education. I absolutely believe every student should be able to graduate and find work that can support them economically and support their families. But I also want them to find purpose in that work and to find an alignment between their gifts and talents and a need that the world has. When that happens, energy and hope abound, and who doesn’t want more of that?

I’m such a fan of the good work that’s being done on the science of hope and the idea that hope has three actionable components: goals, pathways, and agency. In short, to have hope, you need a goal you’re shooting for and practical ways to go after it. You also need pathways and a consistent belief that you can get there — agency. What I love about the agency part is some people have plenty of agency and some people are growing in their agency, and that’s the golden time when they need someone to walk alongside them until they have the confidence to make progress toward their goals. That’s our job. Fundamentally, I believe that higher education is there to inspire in students a sense of purpose, shaped by character, and that makes life so much richer for them and for everyone in their orbit — their families, communities, workplaces, etc.  

But for whatever reason, I find a lot of college students haven’t thought about how their education can be about connecting to much more than a job-slash-career. Often, it’s not a question or a conversation they’ve been having at home. And it’s not a conversation that they’ve been having in the educational environment they were in prior to college. Sometimes, they make it all the way through college and never have this dialogue with anyone, even within themselves. In fact, they mostly have had one conversation, which is about the return on investment question: “If I go to college, what should I study so I can get a certain job, so I can have a particular level of economic security?” 

Those are also good questions, but they’re much more powerful if they’re coupled with other questions like the imperatives we have in our strategic plan, which champions the exploration of purpose, the pursuit of character, and the graduation of leaders. This is a distinction of the Roanoke experience. We’ve created this entity called PLACE (Purpose, Life And Career Exploration) drawn from our old career center model, and what we’re saying here is this process is about so much more than getting a job.  

LW: Do you think these imperatives are particularly important at this moment in time?  

FS: Absolutely. I found a report released by the Harvard Graduate School of Education sobering. Thirty-six percent of young adults aged 18 to 25 are struggling with anxiety, and 29 percent are dealing with depression. The study reveals some likely suspects, including worrying about finances, feeling pressure to achieve, being concerned with the world unraveling, and feeling like they don’t matter to others. But the number one driver of poor mental health for young adults was a lack of meaning, purpose, and direction in their lives, with 58 percent reporting. We can’t ignore that deep yearning to understand what makes life matter.

LW: How do you go about “meaning making” with students?  

FS: There are many practices to engage, but we need practices that shape culture so that culture shapes practices. What I mean by that is we first ask good questions, which will help us get good at being thoughtful and spur us to think more deeply about better questions worthy of our time. In a way, it’s countercultural. The power of a question is a crucial thing to acknowledge. Occasionally, I experiment to see how long it takes for someone to ask me a meaningful question — a question that asks me to reveal something about who I am, what I believe, where I’m going, what’s motivating me, and why I care.

If you pay attention, you can go a whole day without anyone asking you that kind of question. I think what we can do in a place like Roanoke College or any institution of higher education is to create a culture where we teach ourselves to be countercultural and to ask questions of meaning and purpose, questions that engage all of our not-so-disparate parts: our intellectual selves, our emotional selves, our moral selves. But we have to acknowledge we live in a world where people are moving at warp speed. Technology overwhelms people, and no one’s asking them meaningful questions. In turn, they’re not developing the habit of asking other people meaningful questions. Without meaningful questions, there is little need for astute listeners. And when we don’t develop astute listeners, we’re often not encouraging thoughtful learners.

“Without meaningful questions, there is little need for astute listeners. And when we don’t develop astute listeners, we’re often not encouraging thoughtful learners.”

I have two questions that I keep at the forefront of my mind every day as I approach my work: First, what am I trying to increase the probability of occurring through my daily activities, conversations, and experiences? And second, what am I doing when I’m doing what I’m doing? See, every one of us is engaged in seemingly unidimensional transactions, but underneath them is a greater purpose. Whether you’re serving food in the dining center or you’re advising or you’re standing in front of a classroom, the kinds of questions you ask and the kinds of listening you do and the way that you view your purpose — what you’re doing when you’re doing what you’re doing — it shapes everything. So many people on a college campus don’t understand the incredibly transformational and powerful role they play as educators when they enact the important and powerful pedagogical practice of asking meaningful questions, followed by deep and curious listening.

LW: How do you get a whole campus to embrace this approach?  

FS: It’s slow and iterative, like all transformations. In many ways, the headwinds pull you away from doing these things, so you must drive into the wind. You must be committed and undeterred when the car’s shaky. Sometimes, you have to slow down a little, meaning it will take a little extra time, but it will be worth it. But if you believe that the whole world can shift by doing this, you can stay the course.

There’s a book that I’m particularly fond of by Peter Block called “Community: The Structure of Belonging,” where he talks about the small group as being the unit of transformation. You think of these movements as top-down, and they are to some degree because one of the first things you must do is declare a shift. In our case, we determined and stated that we would make the exploration of purpose, the pursuit of character, and the graduation of leaders a distinction of Roanoke College. 

But a stated plan becomes a cultural transformation at the small group level. It’s the small conversations. What new conversations do we want to have, where will we conduct them, and who at every level will start? These things happen at the micro level, and then they become exponentially more likely to occur naturally on a campus. Over time, you’ll be surprised that everything has been transformed.

My assumption about how we build people of character and shape virtue and moral fiber is that none of it happens outside the context of community, and you can’t desire community until you’ve experienced it. One of the immediate structural challenges when people enter a new environment is to help them experience community. There are a lot of young people who come to a college campus who haven’t experienced it, and they don’t know that they need it. They’re not going to look for it. We have many, many lonely young people. It’s up to us to play a structural role in creating an environment that increases the likelihood that community happens. 

LW: Would you connect this work to what employers say we need more of: people who understand people? 

FS: Yes. When you think about the technical skills that are required to build a 21st century aircraft, it requires incredible knowledge of physics, engineering, aerodynamics. But we also need people that can convene other people from different vantage points and communicate in adaptive ways that allow for understanding based on different acculturation. And look what happens from a character or virtue standpoint. If there is pressure to produce something in a particular timeframe that may not be safe, that’s not a technical question. That’s a moral question.

You really need expertise and character. You need a competent “what” and a firm “why.” You need to know what you’re doing when you’re doing what you’re doing. Are you taking care of humanity? Are you loving people? Are you looking for opportunities to lift others up? Are you viewing yourself as part of a greater community? Those are the kinds of questions, the kinds of values, that when coupled with the job that you have, make such a powerful combination.

LW: Does higher education have a role to play in addressing the polarization we are experiencing on so many levels? 

FS: Yes. I think this is why I’m attracted to this conversation of character. Most of the skills that are important in character formation are learning to listen and asking good questions, which may be as simple as forming a meaningful question, versus a question with a binary answer. You get better at these things when you’re equipped, and then you get to practice in an environment where there are people with diverse viewpoints and different backgrounds. And I think a legitimate critique of higher education is that we have preferred echo chambers and haven’t been interested in listening to and learning from some voices, and there are some good reasons why that’s been the case. But if we view leadership as growing the skill and capacity to bring people together to achieve a common goal that is good for all, then yes, we can widen the circle. And I think those who can do that most effectively must be well-informed people of character. Because that is what will keep you in a place of productivity when times are tough and conversations are hard.  

You can reach LearningWell editor Marjorie Malpiede at mmalpiede@learningwellmag.org with comments, ideas, or tips.

When the save-the-date from my son’s fraternity landed in my inbox, I was confused. I had never heard of a “Mom’s Weekend.” His older siblings hadn’t participated in the Greek system in college. The email mentioned a few activities and reminded us to bring a contribution for the silent auction. Photos of past baskets were attached to guide our creativity: a customized Yeti cooler filled with beer; a margarita-themed bucket with cactus-shaped glasses, limes, and a handle of tequila; a poker-motif basket with cards, bourbon, whiskey, and cigars.

Mom’s (and Dad’s) Weekend, I learned, is a tradition in the Greek system. It’s an opportunity to have special time with your student and get to know their friends during a number of planned activities. This is no small thing for mothers adjusting to seeing far less of their children, feeling your role in their daily life fade, to some extent, into the background of a Facetime square. Our Mom’s Weekend schedule was pretty open, with just a handful of organized social events, among them a cocktail-reception-house-tour, followed by a pub night, mimosa brunch, and silent auction, with proceeds benefiting chapter activities. 

I’m not a drinker, but all of it was a welcome window into my son’s freshman experience, more than a thousand miles from home. I decided to make it a road trip and visit family along the way. I gassed up the car and packed up my auction contribution — a barbecue-themed basket of grill utensils, spices, and sauces. (Sorry boys, not that kind of sauce.)

But I was coming into the weekend carrying more than my basket. My own experience at a small university was one where fraternities played an outsized role in campus culture and where, as editor of the newspaper, I was drawn by a campus controversy into the darker aspects of Greek loyalty. But that was then; this is now. I was hopeful I would come away from Mom’s Weekend with the sense that belonging to a fraternity today, in its more modern form, represented a positive opportunity for community among young men, including my son.

He is a private person, and I had only the vaguest idea of how his pledging process had gone earlier in the spring. Because he hadn’t participated in many of the fall rush activities — meaning, he hadn’t let it dominate his orientation to college social life — his options were limited, though he said the house he’d joined was “chill” with “good guys.” In his shorthand, that meant the parties weren’t the craziest, or the members too intense about their demands on his time. His grades were good, he had a steady girlfriend in his dorm, and nothing about the road to initiation had set off alarm bells at least from our parental perspective. We’d gotten a letter from the fraternity president assuring parents that they took their anti-hazing vows seriously.

***

During my own senior spring in college, I was working with the newspaper staff late one night to close an issue when the telephone rang on the office wall. An anonymous caller claimed to have recently broken into a secretive fraternity’s notorious windowless chapel and stolen decades of ledgers. In the pages, long-ago members had allegedly recorded their thoughts and activities, and over the years, generations of brothers had added notes the margins. The caller offered to bring me the ledgers.

At the time, I had only an English major’s best guess at the intricacies of journalistic freedoms and liabilities, something I would later study as part of a master’s degree in my chosen field. But I suspected I should not accept original stolen materials. So the caller made photocopies and left them in my car. There were references to some unsolved crimes on campus, chilling racial commentary, coded language about sexual encounters, and hazing episodes that had taken an alarming turn. More recent entries addressed changing rules and attitudes on campus and vowed that if the house were compelled to “build bridges,” they should only give enough lip service to remain the same. I began writing an article and called university administrators to let them know. They didn’t tell me I couldn’t run the piece. But they did advise against it and said they couldn’t insulate me from repercussions. 

After the article appeared, the rallies and protests began. There were calls to suspend or ban the fraternity and some to eliminate the Greek system on campus, a move that had been raised for years. Fraternity and sorority members pointed to the benefits of bonding and the charitable deeds done. The fraternity’s alumni leaders flew in with lawyers and investigators, determined to find out who had been behind the theft. I laid low. It wasn’t my place to offer opinions or get involved in debates. But I’d taken the call and written the article, and my car tire was slashed, and the university house where I lived as an RA had a window broken. I heard the fraternity’s legal team wanted to speak with me, but there was never a subpoena. The state’s shield law protected journalists’ right not to reveal their sources, but whether that covered university students remained to be seen. My father asked me to keep a low profile because he’d rather not take out a second mortgage to explore that precedent in court. 

Things quieted down a few weeks later when students left campus for the summer, but the fallout went on for years. The fraternity was suspended, moved to private property, and went underground. The faculty voted to abolish the Greek system, but the motion was symbolic and not supported by the administration. After I graduated, I received a manilla envelope in the mail with a printed list of companies that supposedly would never hire me. A year later, after I’d begun working at a magazine, I had a surprise visit. The receptionist said an industry publicist had arrived for an appointment and buzzed a man inside. He sat down in my cubicle, pulled a tape recorder out of his briefcase (there was once a thing called a briefcase), and started asking questions about the night I received the call at the newspaper office. 

***

Then and now, the takeaway for me about the Greek system is this: What happens when impressionable young adults join societies like these? Membership fosters group loyalty through a secretive selection and initiation process, rituals, identity, and language. To what extent is that loyalty inclined to supersede the individual morality these young people are still developing? This is the place where you live and (literally, with fraternity cooks) the hand that feeds you. These are the people you spend your weekends with, gravitate towards in classes, and have likely committed to live with going forward. Brotherhood, and all the ways that is entwined in your life, is a lot of your world. 

Loyalty is a funny thing when you live smack in the middle of it. It isn’t just a friendship where you go out for pizza and play video games, particularly if something doesn’t sit right in this new family-away-from-home. If we stick with the video game metaphor, you’ve been initiated by the people who created the world-building behind it. That shared game is your universe, and it feels like everyone in other Greek organizations have their own, too. The roles and personas and tones are set, whether it’s inside jokes or repeated stories, or old ledgers. 

The experiences you have in college, positive and negative, go on to shape your character and identity, as well as your resilience in the face of adversity. The lessons learned during these years contribute to making you you — either because of the environment, or in spite of it. A college’s atmosphere set by the administration and faculty can make the difference between a student feeling like their school has their back, or doesn’t. Mine didn’t. 

The lessons learned during these years contribute to making you you — either because of the environment, or in spite of it.

Mom’s Weekend was, to me, a smashing success, in part because most of what we did together existed beyond the footprint of the “weekend” itself. My son and I did a few of the organized activities, and I met some of his new fraternity brothers. But we skipped the bar crawls, and because it was too rainy to hike, went to the gym to work out. We had a delightful three-hour dinner at a local restaurant, and I got to know his lovely, down-to-earth girlfriend. She described for me her own pledging process, the pressure from sororities to present a cool image that’s your own impeccable brand, right down to a written statement about yourself and proof of a masterful social media presence. She is pursuing a demanding major and seemed to have kept pledging in perspective, though she saw it wreak havoc on others. A few weeks after Mom’s Weekend, I saw a story in the news that a fraternity at my son’s school had just been suspended for 40 years — though it was later revised to 15 — for repeatedly violating hazing rules while they were already on probation. They had been paddling pledges at the off-campus home of an alum. 

My son has confided to his father that he’s had some mild pressure from upperclassmen who say he doesn’t spend enough time at the house. He’s already committed to living in the fraternity during his sophomore year and, just recently, also in his junior year at one of the fraternity’s off-campus annexes. He tells us that kind of advance signing is required so that the brotherhood can retain its hold on valuable rentals. I’ve long felt that my boy is his own dog and doesn’t roll over to social pressure when he has a solid home base. Still, it’s not lost on me that this housing commitment years into the future in effect makes the fraternity the primary scaffolding of his college experience. This, before he’s even declared his major. That’s a lot of clout for an organization to have over my kid, an organization I can’t say I know much of anything about. I guess I can say that the house was pretty clean during the tour.

And yet. Another part of my maternal brain knows that belonging is so important to young people’s sense of connection and community. My son’s age-cohort was the one that entered high school remotely as the pandemic did its damage, and part of that damage was their dislocation from their peers and their academic world, slouched in front of Zoom, hoodies up. The last thing I want for him is isolation. What I do want for him is the development of a discerning character — steady in his sense of himself and true to his values, whoever he’s with, whatever they are doing. 

Leaving dinner that night, my son and I decided not to go to “around the clock” at the favorite local bar, where pitchers started off in the single digits in the afternoon, then go up by a dollar every hour. I dropped him and his girlfriend back at their dorm, then headed back toward my rental house. But first I had to stop back at the restaurant, where I’d forgotten my umbrella. 

I parked as close as I could on a side street behind the main drag of town, home to many of the annexes like the one by son had just committed to for his junior year. Just in front of me, a group of laughing young men weaved on and off the sidewalk, shirtless in the 40-degree torrential rain. From the other side of the street, another group called out to them, chanting something about… I don’t know what, but it seemed to be positive, or maybe they were mad. They ran and crashed into each other in the middle of the street with perfectly executed chest bumps, delighted or angry, yelling things I couldn’t understand. I gave them a wide berth, more than happy to be an inconsequential NPC in the background of their game. 

When I returned to the rental, my two housemate-moms were hanging out in the living room with their sons, watching basketball and eating popcorn. They’d gone to “around the clock,” then wanted to come back and chill at the farmhouse and watch TV. As the rain pounded the windows and wind threw the screen door back and forth, the four slouched, wrapped in blankets on a sectional in the dark room, ageless in comfortable silence. 

Here at LearningWell, we are always interested in new approaches university leaders take to foster community on campus—with students, among students, and within the faculty and administration. So our ears pricked up when, at a recent gathering of educators, we heard Connie Book, the president of Elon University, speak about her practice of ambushing parents with good news phone calls. 

We asked her to expand on this and other things she does to help cultivate connection. Her experience and insights tap into her years as the first female provost and dean at The Citadel, a military college in Charleston, S.C., and far earlier to her own upbringing in a large family as the sixth of nine children.

LW: I heard you speak recently about your Friday phone calls to parents of students who’d done something noteworthy. I love this idea of catching students in the act of doing something good. Can you tell us more about it? 

CB: Sometimes it’s when they’ve done something like won an academic award, but other times it’s when they’ve taken on some role on campus, like they’re on a committee or helping us with something new that we’re trying to accomplish. Or sometimes it’s just students that I think, Oh, he’s really interesting. He just makes the student body more present. It’s such an easy thing to do. The parents are always grateful, and the kids are, too.

I do it on Friday afternoons because at the end of a long week, Fridays can be a day that some unpleasant things get dumped before the weekend. When I worked at The Citadel, the military guys would never take appointments on Friday afternoons because they said that’s when the second lieutenants came in and wanted to dump the problems on them, and they didn’t want to let this ruin their weekend. So it’s my realization that my Fridays could, depending on what was going on campus, really stage either a terrible weekend or a relaxing weekend. So I started being a lot more intentional about Friday afternoons. 

LW: As a mother of college kids myself, I imagine it could be really moving for a parent to get that call. Can you give us an example?

CB: The first call I made was in my second year here at Elon when one of our first-generation college students won a Goldwater Award. If you’re in higher ed, you understand what that means. But I thought, I think her parents don’t even realize what a significant achievement that was. So I just decided on Friday afternoon, I had the staff pull her record, and I called her father. They see the out-of-state area code for the university come up on their phone, so the first thing I say is, “Your child is healthy and fine and not in trouble.” Just to get all that off the table. I did have such a powerful conversation with him that day. It felt so good to share with him what a remarkable daughter he had and that she was doing such good things, and then explain what the Goldwater was and how much our community here enjoyed having her. And then he shared about all the hard work she had done to get to college from the time she was very young. It was a conversation about the hard work that young people do to make sure they have a good opportunity, the process, and the appreciation when scholarships come through and they can afford college. Just leaving home from Arizona to come to Elon was a risk. After I hung up, I thought, Wow, I should do this more often because it was driving my sense of mission and purpose about the work. You can get so wrapped up in politics or budgeting or some other challenge that it can be a barrier to really feeling the mission, and on those calls, I feel the mission and the impact it’s having. 

LW: What are some other ways you make yourself more present for the student body? Do I recall hearing you mention something about Ping-Pong?

CB: Yes. Friday is my day to connect with students. So I play table tennis at one o’clock for an hour. They sign up on a whiteboard. There’s always a line there to play. Students will say, “This was on my bucket list, to come play with you before I graduated.” I have parents show up, because they’ve heard I do it, and they’re good at it. So they’re like, “Oh, the next time I’m on campus, I want to play the president.”

LW: And how did this activity occur to you? 

CB: When my son was in middle school, he really started answering every question with one word answers. “Yes. No.” I could not get him to talk about anything. So I told him that winter, let’s bring the Ping-Pong table inside. We had played occasionally, but we started playing every day. And then I noticed that because you talk when you play, he would start talking more after a couple of sets. 

That’s true with the students here, too. I’ll always say, “Well, what’s your major? Where are you from?” And we get talking. My son now is an Olympic-rated table tennis player, so I know how to play, and I like to win. If they have a good hit and beat me, I’m always like, “Aaand … What’s your name again?”

LW: So this game isn’t just a walk in the park! But that is true about communication with teens, having that shared activity to get you talking. 

CB: I actually do walks with students, too, a couple of times a semester. I’ll invite student groups, post where I’m going, and anybody can show up and join us. What’s really funny about that is that students, when they see where I’m going to be, sometimes they do come to lobby me for different things. I had some theater students ask for a budget increase. It’s almost like I had a little tracker on me. “Yeah, we know where she is.”

LW: Ha! Future politicians. What about community building with faculty, staff, administration? Do you have strategies for outreach with them as well?

CB: I would say our culture is pretty open already. Like last week, I had two faculty conversations that I announced literally on Monday and had them on Friday. And I always have audience microphones. I have three suggestion boxes on campus and an online one where anybody can tell me anything.

LW: Are they used? 

CB: Yes. And they do tell me anything. Some are like, “The doorknobs are broken here.” But they are usually about things that make the workplace or the learning environment better. “Have you considered doing this?” 

I am a believer in letting people know you are open, saying to them essentially, “Hey, if you see something, let me know because I can’t see what you can see.” It may not create the solution they have in mind. Bring me the problem, but don’t get too wedded to the solution. They have to be open to us problem-solving together. 

LW: Do you have an example of some kind of problem brought to you that way?

CB: We have an ombuds program here for the faculty. It’s very official. You have to do the training. We pay a stipend. But one of the staff people that serves as the ombuds also happens to be an employee in Human Resources. And people said, “I’m not comfortable going to HR to talk to the ombuds person because it’s supposed to be a confidential unit.” I had never thought of that because we have been doing this through HR for a long time, and it never occurred to me that people saw that as a disciplinary unit so that there was hesitancy. We did add another ombuds person to the mix. And we worked together on the job description to give people more choice. 

LW: What kinds of things did you learn from the requests coming into the ombuds person? 

CB: What was really powerful about that is that I was always thinking it was workplace disagreements, but I learned a lot that people need somebody to talk to about personal challenges. They were coming to her for things like food insecurity, car repairs. And I was like, Wow, it’s almost like pastoral care. We have on-site counseling services for students but not employees. So it was a good learning moment for me as well. 

LW: Is that going to spark any kind of a change in the way you offer counseling services or pastoral services for employees? 

CB: It could. We have a chaplain here, and the chaplain has an emergency fund. Part of it was letting the ombuds person know they have a resource in the chaplain, who can help. But for some people, religion might be a barrier, too. 

LW: Is there anything else you’d like to add about community building? We’re at a very difficult moment nationally—both socially and politically, as well as educationally. Is there anything you do at Elon to break down barriers? 

CB: Well, we have 7,000 students on campus at Elon, and there’s a longstanding community dead-period—a time where you don’t have any classes—on Tuesday and Thursday mornings around 10 o’clock. On Tuesdays, we have College Coffee—free coffee and donuts outside when the weather is good—and there’s always several hundred people that come. And then on Thursdays, we have a spiritual program with singing. We’re not religiously affiliated. We’re independent. But there’s certainly a really vibrant feeling with multiple faiths represented. 

Also, we have a street that runs down the middle of campus, and during really difficult times, we will put a chalkboard out there. The day after the election, for example, we put up boards inviting the hopes that students had about the future. Politically, we don’t overly lean one way or the other, so the responses were really down the middle. Like, “There’s happiness for all to find joy in every day.” Or, “Strength and unity. God is good. We can all love and accept each other, no questions asked.” And then we kept them up in the student union for several weeks. I decided to take some pictures of them because every now and then I like to remember that part of what we’re doing on college campuses is the critical work of a future that we won’t be alive to witness, but we are planting all these seeds for a really strong future for all of us all around the world. To me, that is purpose-driven work. And I like to pull it out and be reminded.

“I like to remember that part of what we’re doing on college campuses is the critical work of a future that we won’t be alive to witness.”

LW: You have a very insightful and empathic way of talking about students and the experience of leading a university, something people might not expect to evolve from working in a military environment. How did you come by this mindset? 

CB: That’s a really good question. Growing up in my own family, I’m number six of nine kids, and both of my parents were educators. I think about all the great lessons of sharing and compromise and negotiation that you learn in a family. I think one of the things as a president that I think a lot about is that I see and witness things. And then my job is often to tell the story of that to people who influence the resources and regulatory policy that shape the world we live in on campus. 

LW: Thank you for that plug for the benefits of a large family. I have five children, but it doesn’t always feel like the world sees that as a positive. 

CB: Oh yeah, the good lessons of humility, of being an equal and doing your part. My job was to do the laundry growing up, three loads a day. 

LW: The chore chart. And the role of fairness and truth-telling. And squabbling and learning to work it out. Those are powerful things.

CB: I have been really aware of the power of this witnessing piece. And so now I think I’m intentionally looking all the time, talking to parents, and wanting to be effective in sharing the power of the work that’s going on on college campuses. Especially at a time when the negative rhetoric is suggesting that it’s not needed and it’s not worth it. Yet we all know 99 percent of what we’re experiencing on a college campus is good and powerful.