Category: Perspectives

As graduates consider the next chapter of their lives, a new book provides inspiration and guidance through the unfolding story of a career well spent. Paul Grogan was a student at Williams College when the anti-Vietnam and civil rights movements set the pathway for his life and career. “What, if anything, can I do about this?” said his younger self. Mentors, who saw something in him he couldn’t see, encouraged him to become a “change agent.” It was a term that was unfamiliar to him at the time but one he would live to embody in his fifty years in public service. 

In “Be Prepared to be Lucky,” Grogan imparts lessons about leadership, mentorship, and agency as relevant today as they were when he and his co-author Kathryn Merchant were both young graduates working to make a difference in the world. Among his many roles, Grogan has been a political staffer, a CEO of a national nonprofit, and a giant in philanthropy. His career is capped by his presidency of the Boston Foundation, one of the nation’s oldest and, arguably, most successful community foundations, providing a unique combination of policy and philanthropy that has shaped what Boston is today. 

Readers follow along as Grogan tells the story of his ambitious career: a combination of opportunity, intentionality, and grit. From navigating the emotional politics of the desegregation of the Boston public schools; to building public/private partnerships to save American cities in the 1970’s and 80’s; to helping heal the town/gown tensions between Harvard and Boston, Grogan provides powerful examples of how to make a positive impact on your community, and in turn, how to live a meaningful, fulfilling life. 

MM: Paul, you’ve spent your whole career devoted to public and community service and this book has so many lessons about that from your decades of experience. But let’s start by talking about the young Paul. You went to high school in a very small town, Clinton, New York, and then went off to Williams College. How did your college experience influence your career choices? 

PG: My father was a lifelong educator — a public school teacher and administrator throughout his career — so I had a lifelong interest in education and education policy. And then two giant phenomena, the Vietnam war and the civil rights movement, brought me to that path of service. Growing up in a very small town with zero diversity, I was not anywhere close to these issues except through the nightly newscast. It was a religion in our family to sit down and watch at least one of the national newscasts, and I continued that habit throughout college. Obviously, the news was just devastating for much of that period. It led me to ask,  “What, if anything, can I do about this?”

A pivotal conversation I had was with an uncle of mine who was a dear counselor throughout my early adult life. He said to me in one of our long talks, “It really sounds to me like you ought to think about being a change agent.” I had never heard that term, but we talked about it, and I came to understand what it meant. It was not just reading the newspapers as a knowledgeable person or voting as an involved citizen. I wanted to do more than that. And I was excited about that prospect.

MM: What experiences in college helped you develop that part of yourself?

PG: We had a number of quite powerful faculty student committees at Williams in those days, and I ran for office and was elected chairman of one of them. We took a proposal to one of our meetings with the faculty as a whole to stop grading creative writing courses as a limited experiment. But Williams is a conservative place, and this was quite a debate which ultimately occurred in front of the entire faculty of the college. It took place in a hall, one of these double decker halls with a balcony going all the way around. Some of the faculty were down on the floor and many of them were up above me, and I had not said anything in the discussion, which was not going terribly well. Finally, the chairman of the committee, a psychology professor, leaned over and whispered, “If you don’t speak, this is going down.” So I gave a speech. It went extraordinarily well, and the faculty went from a unanimous no vote to a unanimous yes on the proposal. I think it was one of my first brushes with public speaking that mattered and seeing that we came back with something and won the day, that was a tremendous experience for me. 

MM: Were there other people – like your uncle – who believed in you back then? 

PG: Yes, and it was so important, particularly in college where, if you’re intimidated by the whole experience, not sure of yourself, you wonder how you’re going to do and you think you’re probably not going to do very well. Certainly, that was confirmed by the grades I got my freshman year: horrendous. But in fact, you almost always know more than you think you do, and other people see things in you that you may not see in yourself. In this case, there were two history professors who took an interest in me — I couldn’t have told you why, but they did. And they became my mentors through the rest of college and early in my career. I gained a new level of confidence as a result. They pushed me to do an honors thesis, which I had not thought of before, which became my first book, and it just put me on a higher, more ambitious path.

MM: Kathy, what’s your take on that?

KM: I just want to add that things can be very different depending on where you go to school. I went to a very large public university – there are 40,000 people who go to Indiana University in Bloomington — and finding a mentor is like hunting for a drop of water in a rainstorm. I think the point of encouragement here is also: Don’t wait for a mentor to find you – go looking for one. 

MM: Why did you choose the title Be Prepared to be Lucky? 

PG: “Be prepared to be lucky” is an adaptation of my favorite quote that originated in 1949 with E.B. White, the famed essayist and poet. He was talking to a young man who was about to go to New York City to make his fortune. White said to him, “No one should come to New York to live unless he is willing to be lucky.” And the first time I heard that, which I think was in college, it just stunned me as a unique insight into how the world really works. It wasn’t just good luck, it wasn’t bad luck. It was an acknowledgement of a complex process, which is not controllable, but which can be harvested in a certain way. And so we adopted that and we tried to apply it. Certainly, if I look at my career, I can see time after time where being alert, being watchful for opportunities, led to great things, not every time, but often enough to really justify that kind of state of mind. 

“You almost always know more than you think you do, and other people see things in you that you may not see in yourself.”

MM: If I’m understanding the interpretation, it’s a combination of luck, fate, and being open to opportunities that may come your way. And it’s about agency too, correct?  

KM: The agency part is really important. When Paul and I were both still very young in our careers, we were often given responsibilities that were way beyond what we were probably qualified to do. As we say in the book, “always say yes, even when you want to say no, and then you’ll open up opportunities for yourself.” 

PG: I call it “the virtue of hanging around.”

MM: There’s a lot that you thread through the story of your career: working for two city mayors, running the Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC), resolving town/gown issues between Harvard and Boston, and then transforming the Boston Foundation – you mention the importance of ambition, leadership, and courage. What are some other big lessons from all these experiences? 

PG: I think just about everything you’re asking about has to do with how ambitious you want to be in the world. Certainly, the social and community service world is full of wonderful organizations doing great work. Much of that work though, is confined to a small space because those institutions lack the resources to take their idea to scale. The people I attracted to work with me, we wanted real impact at scale. We didn’t just want to feel good about having helped some people. We wanted to look at some of these institutions that were greatly important in the lives of people and say, how could this be different? How could we be doing much more than we are currently doing?

MM: I love that point. As a message to young people, focusing on impact is different than just developing your purpose or working on something you care about – it is actually working towards outcomes. You seemed to reach a lot of outcomes through partnerships. Can you give some examples?

PG: One example is when I got into the housing field. When you looked at the landscape, you had federal housing programs, state housing programs, and local housing programs, and they were not coordinated in any way or were directed at a particular narrow goal. Everybody had their own idea about it. But we managed to put together a new partnership, which became a permanent institution called the Boston Housing Partnership and had as its aim fostering collective and cross-sector efforts to improve the housing situation. Then to execute, you have to figure out how to get everybody credited for their support and participation. Particularly in the public sector realm with elected officials, they need to get credit for doing good things. And that’s where the non-politicians have to be attentive to their political partners, not by being political or partisan, but by understanding that politicians are dealing with a different kind of accountability than regular citizens. And there has to be a sophistication about making it rewarding and accountable for elected officials.

Many of the politicians that we were dealing with around the country had a zero sum mentality. They assumed that if a “such and such” nonprofit was getting their name in the paper in a positive way, then that would take away from the opportunity for the elected official to get recognized. What we were able to demonstrate after a period of time was that these partnerships were a way to add value that wasn’t there before. So you didn’t have to take something away from somebody in order to get their cooperation. 

MM: Speaking of partnerships and politics, tell us more about your experience at Harvard.

PG: Sure. Well, as we all know, Harvard is sort of the college and university capital of the United States, the pinnacle of higher education. But the whole Boston area or indeed New England is populated with just an enormous number of institutions of higher education. So it’s a big issue for the future of Boston and for the region. And despite the importance of those institutions and the need to make sure that they are going to be healthy going forward, the relationships that should have developed between the colleges and universities and cities and state government, and the corporate sector for that matter, really hadn’t developed before the turn of the last century. They were out of sync with the reality of it or they didn’t acknowledge how important these relationships were. So relationships that should have existed — strong, cooperative, knowledgeable relationships between government and higher ed, for instance — were just truncated in some way until there were problems.

One set of problems, but not the only one, is the whole question of land and value. Because when institutions of higher education get land, it comes off the tax rolls and gets used primarily for the higher ed community. So that’s where there is the kind of thinking that if this land is going to go to the universities, it’s going to be taken away from the community. And, particularly in the low-and moderate-income neighborhoods, there was a real fear that people were going to be forced out of their homes by the rising value of the real estate. So there was one particular transaction where the university was trying to acquire a very large plot of land in Allston, which is a neighborhood of Boston, to create a major new science and technology district. 

This was hung up for years because the city was refusing to approve the sale of this land, which was held by a railroad company. And it was just stuck as the years went by and the university didn’t seem to have the wherewithal to do anything about it, which you’d think is so odd. These institutions are so big and powerful. But in Harvard’s case, they really hadn’t made any real effort to understand the local political scene in order to engage people who might help them. But that finally did happen. A couple of very active Harvard trustees went to the president of Harvard and said, we have got to have a capacity developed here at the university to relate to the mayor (then Thomas Menino), to relate to folks who are going to be important to this process. Knowing I had a long-standing relationship with the mayor, Harvard asked me to help with this and I built a department focused entirely on external issues like this. After that, the meetings just went to a different level of seriousness and purpose, and with relative ease, we secured the approval. 

MM: Here’s a question from the last chapter of the book. Why would you encourage students to go into either public service or community work, besides just it being a good thing to do? 

PG: Well, again, I come back to this word impact and a sense of what you want your life to be about. Are you going to be a change agent? To be willing to dwell on those questions with trusted friends, advisors, and family members is a very important thing to do if you have friends and family who are willing to do that. So I think that’s a big piece of it in terms of why do it, it really has to do with what you want your life to be about. Senator John McCain was very fond of saying “believe in something larger than yourself.”

I think this is really fundamental. I’ve met too many people throughout my life who have been very successful in conventional terms but have just a sad feeling that they haven’t done anything that’s really helped anybody else or been an effort to lift someone else up. It is a uniquely satisfying thing to do and it makes society healthier at the same time. So I think it does come down to that kind of existential construct you decide to devote your finite resources to.

KM: An important point to add to that is that working in public service doesn’t have to be forever. If you have other things that you want to do, the skillset that you acquire working in those sectors are increasingly attractive to the corporate world. The opportunity to make partnerships and the fungibility of being able to move from one sector to another throughout a career is very valuable. 

MM: My last question is related to the fact that a lot of the impact that you have made in your career was largely based on listening to the other side. That appears to be a very big problem right now. Is there any advice that either of you would give to the graduates of today on that? 

PG: I think everybody should move to Massachusetts. That’s the fastest way to reduce polarization.

MM: Well, Massachusetts does have an out-migration problem, so that would be good.

PG: I’m only half kidding. We have a huge stake in the immigration outcome. It’s not something that would just be nice, it’s something that is absolutely essential. If we don’t do a better job of attracting young people and convincing people not to leave the state, things are going to be very dire in Massachusetts. And one of the positive things about Massachusetts bears directly on the ability to do the kind of partnerships that we’ve been discussing — the lack of polarization. There are conflicts, but they don’t involve the bitter, divisive, and hateful politics that we see in city, county, and state after state. Our elected officials of whatever party seem to find a way to work together, although they too need to be more ambitious than we’re being. But it is a fundamentally different environment. 

KM: Call me a Pollyanna, but I think that what we’re experiencing right now, this too shall pass. We’re now old enough that we’ve seen cycles and waves of this over time where there’s divisiveness and an inability to listen and act together, and then that calms down and we can get more things done. So I really don’t know how to stop what’s going on right now. It’s alarming. Very scary. It seems worse than it’s ever been, but every moment that’s been like this seems worse than it’s ever been. I am going to borrow Paul’s phrase, we need to practice defiant optimism.

This month, Gallup and the Walton Family Foundation released a report examining happiness among Generation Z (12- to 26-year-olds), highlighting key drivers of Gen Z’s happiness. The survey revealed that while 73% of Gen Z-ers consider themselves happy (somewhat or very), the percentage declines substantially as they reach adulthood. The report identified the strongest predictors of happiness to be: a sense of purpose in school and work, positive social connections, and having enough time to sleep and relax. We asked Stephanie Marken, the senior partner of Gallup’s education division, to explain the findings and their implications. 

LearningWell: The research reveals that the most influential driver of Gen Z’s happiness is their sense of purpose at school and work. However, just 48% of Gen Z-ers enrolled in middle or high school feel motivated to go to school, and only 52% feel they do something interesting every day. What does that say about curriculum and school-based experiences? 

Stephanie Marken: We know from our research at Gallup, that many students are less engaged in their schoolwork as they progress through schooling. We anticipate much of this is that students are unfortunately not specializing in topics that excite them as they progress through their educational experiences. We need more relevant, applied experiences in the K12 student experience to further engage and excite students about what they’re learning and how it will prepare them for the real world. 

LW: The report also shows a relationship between love and support and happiness, which perhaps isn’t surprising. Combined with the finding on a sense of purpose, do you see a reflection of previous Gallup work in the wellbeing area, specifically the Alumni Survey and the Forging Pathways to Purposeful Work study at Bates College. It seems that a sense of purpose and supportive relationships are key drivers of wellbeing across groups.  

SM: Supportive relationships are difference makers. In our prior, related research we find students who have a mentor and feel cared about as a person are more likely to be engaged in their work upon postsecondary completion and more likely to thrive in their wellbeing. We all need support, but given staggering mental health needs among Gen Z members nationally, we need that more than ever. This will only become increasingly important as this current generation continues to struggle with mounting mental health needs. 

LW: The report shows that Gen Z’s sense of love and support declines as they age. It seems like there is a turning point around 18-21, when typically young people would be leaving the house they grew up in, considered to be adults. Is this a pattern that is typical during this age range or is there something specific about Gen Z in that they are experiencing a decline in feelings of support and connection as they get older, more so than previous generations?

SM: We know that launching into the “real world”, whether that be from high school into the workforce, or high school into college, is a very stressful and complicated experience for many students. We should always expect students to report emotional stress, anxiety and worry during this difficult time. However, we also need to make sure they have a net to catch them when they struggle—mentors, and people in their postsecondary pathway and workplace—can be that net. This also reminds us that we need to prepare Gen Z members with resilience building activities and experiences early on in their development so that they can bounce back when they experience these setbacks and challenging times (because they will inevitably come). 

LW: The report also finds that feelings of significance and purpose decline as Gen Z gets older. Survey items like “My life matters” and “My life has direction” go from 69% and 85% for 12-14 year olds to 55% and 65% for 24-26 year olds, respectively. Is that replicating a pattern that you’ve seen in previous years or in previous generations? Do you have any hypotheses about why that may be happening?

SM: Unfortunately, we don’t have historic data on these important questions so we cannot compare generation to generation on these particular items, but we do know that this generation craves purpose in their workplace in a way that we do not find for prior generations. In their workplace, Gen Z workers, as an example, are seeing opportunities at work to learn and grow and looking for opportunities to work at organizations that make a difference. This crave for purpose, impact and significance shows up in these important data, as well as other research we’ve conducted. 

LW: Many young people in Gen Z report that they don’t get enough sleep and don’t have enough time to relax during the week, which are stronger predictors of happiness than physical or financial safety. Are there policies that workplaces or schools could implement to allow for their employees and students to have more time to unwind during the week, which would potentially have great impact on their happiness, thriving and wellbeing? 

SM: We know that technology, and our relationship with technology, is having an impact here. We see a lot of students struggling to manage their relationship with technology—not necessarily social media itself, but sometimes with social media—and that technology can make sleep, restful sleep, and positive sleep habits challenging. We need to teach young people—and older people too—these tools, so that they can detach and reset as we all need to do in order to sleep restfully. 

LW: There is a substantial piece of the report dedicated to social media, and related to that, comparison with others. The survey found that social comparisons have a clear negative relationship with happiness. 40% of happy Gen Z-ers say they often or always compare themselves to others, compared to 55% of those who are not happy. And 12–15-year-olds who spend more than 3 hours per day on social media were two times as likely to exhibit symptoms of depression and anxiety. Those two findings are clearly related. Could you speak to those findings? SM: It’s a great question. The comparison with others is a really critical and concerning finding—we know that social media is a tool that can allow for that comparison which is problematic. Many people who are tuning to social media are comparing their every day to someone else’s best day and that can cause a lot of self-hatred and sadness for many who feel like they are insufficient.

Philip Glotzbach’s new book Embrace Your Freedom: Winning Strategies to Succeed in College and Life has as many lessons as it does audiences. As its title implies, it is written primarily for graduating high school students anxiously hovering between post-admissions and their first year of college, but it also speaks to their parents, who will undoubtedly read along, with advice about letting go that is not always easy to hear. Those in the field will connect themes such as “why are you going to college?” and “fall in love with your fallback school“ with some of the biggest challenges in higher education today such as skyrocketing tuition, inflated rankings, and student wellbeing.  

With a non-didactic tone, Glotzbach combines the experience and authority of a college president with the hindsight and candor of one who no longer holds the title. His advice to first-year students on making the most of this seminal period has a fair share of practical information, as well as wisdom rooted in philosophy, developmental theory, and political science. As he writes plainly about personal responsibility and pride in achievement, he reminds students we are all shouldered by our communities. Perhaps most distinctive is Glotzbach’s message about freedom itself, something students may first take to be about the absence of external controls, but which the book quickly clarifies as the joy that comes from setting and reaching goals that align with who you are as a person. His book is available for pre-order now (Simon & Schuster, Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Post Hill Press, etc.); its publication date is July 9, 2024.

You have been in academia for decades and a college president for seventeen years. What motivated you to write this book and what are your hopes and dreams for it?

I wrote it, frankly, as a labor of love. Over my career, my greatest pleasure came in seeing how undergraduates develop both intellectually and personally over those four years. It was especially satisfying to see that transformation reflected through the joy in their parents’ eyes. This book came out of talks that I gave to new students and parents every year at Skidmore in which I offered my best advice about how to realize this promise of a college education. Following those talks, I would repeatedly get asked for copies of my remarks – which I never really had available to share in any formal way. So, I knew I wanted to capture those exchanges in some fashion. 

In the book, I approach that same audience in a conversational way – not to preach at them or talk down to them, but to talk directly to them in a way that is accessible. At the same time, I wanted to have enough substantive content in the book so that, if a college decided to use it as the common read for the incoming class, faculty members could actually enjoy teaching it. It isn’t just, “Hey, here’s how to do your laundry.” Frankly, I’d love for people to review Embrace Your Freedom and say, “This book should be required reading for all new students.”

You have many important messages in the book, but what would you say is the overarching theme?

I’ve always believed that what students most need coming into college is just to pause and think about where they are at this stage of their life and how to take charge of moving forward toward where they want to go. That’s a major theme that recurs throughout: You’re in charge; you’re responsible for your life. What does that mean? You’re responsible both for what you think and for what you do. I’ve always thought those ideas are very important for new students to consider. 

I think they’re even more important today for a couple of reasons. So many students go through such a frenzy getting into college. It’s just such an anxiety-producing experience with too many thinking that if they didn’t get into their first choice school their life is over. What I am trying to encourage young people to do is look beyond all that, come through to the other side of that angst, and embrace what’s about to happen to them – and a lot of it is going to be very positive. But this is a very anxiety-ridden generation. They have been really closely engaged with their parents (or their parents have been engaged with them). Their parents have probably organized their lives in a very directed way over the years, and with all the right intentions. Given this background, and particularly coming out of COVID – which really threw a monkey wrench into their educational process – I think that the messages in this book are especially important for this generation. 

“Going to college should be an intentional project – not just the expected next step after high school.”

Now, all of a sudden, they’re away at college. What are they supposed to do? And how are they going to do it! I remind them that they are in charge of their life, even if so many cultural and social forces have been telling them that they’re not – even if people have been telling them that they’re victims. Ultimately, they have to take charge of their own life if they’re going to realize the opportunities that are before them. This book makes that case and offers a lot of practical guidance about just how to do so. It suggests ways to deal with the sometimes scary aspects of that freedom.

Given what you’re saying, it is not surprising that you wrote the book for both students and parents. Do you also have a strong message for them?

The two chapters for parents are, first, how to partner with your student and, second, how to let go. And I’ll come back to those chapters in a moment. I’ve always intended to include parents in this book because, when I was giving those talks at Skidmore, they were sitting there too. I very much wanted them to hear what I said to the students. Now I want parents to read all the student chapters, because they tell a coherent story about what their students should be focussed on as undergraduates: understanding some key concepts (like freedom, liberal education, etc.), making big plans, following through to execute those plans, taking good risks, understanding the ethical dimension of their lives, and winning a “victory for humanity.” Parents have always had an enormous investment in their kids’ lives, but even more so today. One crucial role they can play now is to reinforce these ideas with their kids.

And of course, today’s parents have their own questions. How do they navigate the (probably) unfamiliar landscape of their kid’s college? How should they engage with all those different people who are there to try to help their student, without being overly intrusive in their kid’s life? I try to help them think through these issues, in the context of partnering with their student. It may sound paradoxical to say partner and then let go, but the idea is for their partnership with their child to evolve – to take a new form that’s more appropriate for the relationship they will have post-college. So, one of the most important chapters is about letting go and how to do it, while acknowledging that it’s not easy. 

For one thing, we all know that college is enormously expensive. Many parents are literally mortgaging their lives to pay for it, and they want to make sure that this train isn’t going to go off the tracks. And what if it does? Parents are in closer communication with their kids today than in the past. So, if their student is having trouble, they’re likely to hear about it. How should they react to that situation? What’s their appropriate role? Part of what I’m saying in the parent section is, “Give them the space to handle their own problems to learn from those experiences.” But there are times when it is appropriate for parents to become more active in working with the school. I give some very practical advice here as well, such as: “Contact the school at an appropriate organizational level. I.e., don’t call their professors; don’t call their roommate’s parents or the RA in their residence hall.” The primary message is: “Don’t get between your student and the people they should be working with on a day-to-day basis.”

Can you explain the title “Embrace your Freedom” – it’s not what most people, particularly students, would think, is it? 

For the traditional age student, when you go off to college, all of a sudden you have a lot more freedom or autonomy than you did even a few months ago. But becoming a mature, fully-functioning adult doesn’t happen automatically…or overnight. There’s a lot you have to learn and go through. And so my contention in this book is that if you start off thinking about some of these ideas – beginning with the concept of freedom – you will be better positioned to do the work of becoming a mature adult.

“You’re in charge; you’re responsible for your life. What does that mean?”

That’s why I talk about two different ways of interpreting freedom – beginning with the “negative interpretation,” which is just the absence of constraints. Which is our typical way of looking at it, right? Freedom means nobody’s telling me what to do. Well, that’s fine; it’s important. But the more meaningful and mature concept of freedom is what I call the “positive interpretation,” which is freedom as self-regulation. It requires taking charge of yourself and deciding what you want to do and how you do it, which is more difficult than just throwing off the constraints of your earlier life. 

In the book, I quote the Eastern European physician and poet Miroslav Holub, who says that “a marathon runner is more free than a vagabond, and a cosmonaut than a sage in a state of levitation.” To be a marathon runner, you have to devote yourself to an extended program of intense training and preparation to get ready to run your race. It requires a whole lot of self-regulation. But when you get to the point where you actually can run 26.2 miles, you experience a level of freedom or ability that you never would’ve had if you hadn’t put in all that work. And the second part of this message is that you’re necessarily doing this in the context of a community. You can’t do these things alone. And that fact, in turn, entails certain obligations to that community.

The notion of embracing your freedom really has to include this positive sense of freedom. And as you go through the book, that idea recurs as a motif. Every time I talk about taking charge of this or that aspect of your life, it’s another example of embracing your freedom. So again, it’s moving beyond the limited conception of freedom in which you no longer have anybody to tell you what to do, and finding out what it is that you want to do. What are your goals? What are you trying to get out of this college experience? Then what do you need to do to accomplish those objectives? What sequence of events has to occur? And, by the way, what does all that have to do with your decisions about drinking and sex and other aspects of your life (e.g., eating well and getting enough sleep)? How do those choices affect your ability to do the things you most want to do?

I also say to the students, “Look, you don’t have to have all the answers right away. You don’t need to have worked out all your big plans in your first year – and certainly not in your first semester/quarter. And be prepared to change your mind as you go along. But do start thinking about all this from day one. In Chapter 9, “Begin Now!” – which I think is one of the most important ones – I urge students to realize that their college career begins on that very first day. Not next semester or quarter. Not next year. That’s a good moment to begin thinking about where you want this journey to take you. 

One of the most vivid ways to do so is to envision yourself at your college commencement, the beginning of the next phase of your adult life. At that point, as you look back over your undergraduate career – and as people are asking you questions about how you’ve spent your time – what will you be proud of? What might you regret? What will you have done to gain the maximum benefit from this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity?

One of the questions you ask students upfront is “Why are you going to college at all?” – what are you getting at here? 

Going to college should be an intentional project – not just the expected next step after high school. So ask, “Okay, just why am I going to college? What do I hope to get out of it – especially given what it’s going to cost in time, energy, and money? How do I expect my college education to help me move to the next step in my life?” Again, it’s not at all necessary – or likely! or even desirable! – to have all the answers at this point. And whatever answers you might have are likely to change. But it really helps focus your mind to ask these questions – and to realize that there are other options (e.g., a gap year, military service, volunteer service, trade school, and many others). Let’s be clear: I’m not in the least trying to discourage anyone from going to college. But they will be much more likely to succeed – to come away feeling proud of what they’ve accomplished – if they do it on purpose.

Why do you begin, in Chapter 1, with liberal education?

This book emphasizes the various dimensions of what an undergrad career should offer to students. The first chapter talks about the power of becoming broadly educated. For one thing, this outcome is enormously important if one is to thrive in the professional world today’s graduates will be entering. I include several stories of students I have known whose life pathways illustrate this point. For example, one young man who initially wanted to be a writer ended up working on the New York Times’ digital site as a senior software engineer. Today he’s running his own software company. He didn’t study computer science in college, and he certainly didn’t think about it as a potential career. But he gained a broad liberal education, and above all he learned how to keep learning.

My argument is that in the context of today’s professional world, the more narrow your course of studies in college, the shorter its shelf life. Because when you get out there, the professional world is going to continue changing. It’s evolving at a pace that is hard for any of us to wrap our heads around. So, you have to be intellectually flexible. You have to be able to access – and synthesize – knowledge and information from a variety of areas. And once again, you have to be able to continue learning.

In sum, the traditional skills you learn in a liberal education will set you up for life: critical thinking, reading, drawing upon different areas of knowledge, understanding how different areas of inquiry create knowledge in their own ways, appreciating what different cultures have to teach us and valuing the humanity of people who might present as being different from us, developing your creative imagination and the capacity to communicate effectively, and so on. 

“Colleges and universities don’t just create personal good.  They also create social good.”

Another idea I emphasize is the value of studying a subject – choosing a major, minor, or concentration – that inspires your passion. If passion drives what you’re doing, you’re more likely to excel. Studies have shown that students who choose a major based on their interests do better in college (and they do better in the rest of their lives, as well!), as opposed to students who choose a major just because they think it’s going to get them a well-paying job. Choose a course of study based on your interests so you can really get into it and get the most out of it. Be fortified with the complementary capacity to think broadly. Then you’ll be prepared for whatever the professional world throws at you. 

You talk in the book about the responsibility of becoming a good citizen as part of a student’s education. That’s not always the first thing today’s students are hearing from their administrations.  

As a college or university president, it’s easy to succumb to the temptation of saying “let me tell you about the great jobs our graduates are getting.” That’s not unimportant. Sure, we want our students to be gainfully employed. But if that’s all we are saying, we’re ignoring the other critical goal of a college education, which is why the second half of Chapter 1 addresses the topic of citizenship. And why I quote Thomas Dewey who wrote, “Democracy needs to be reborn every generation. And education is its midwife.” 

Colleges and universities don’t just create personal good. They also create social good. The people who graduate from colleges and universities in this country become citizens of our democracy, often leading citizens in both private and public life. And, in fact, the intellectual abilities and knowledge that position a graduate to thrive as a professional are precisely the same as those required to function as an informed, caring, and responsible citizen. We need them to do so today, perhaps more than ever before. So, as I’m advising students to become intentional stewards of their own education; I am also challenging them to educate themselves to become effective citizens of our democracy. 

And what does that mean? You should be able to participate in political discussions in a constructive way, including listening actively to what someone else is saying, and not just shouting across the room at them. You should be intentional about accessing good sources of information. You need to know what it would take to change your mind on a given political topic. And college should be the best place to develop those skills. If you look at the mission statements of most colleges and universities, you’re likely to find some reference to responsible citizenship or leadership. But that doesn’t mean those values are automatically prominent in the experience of their students. 

So, what I’m saying to students is, “Yes, it’s really important that you prepare yourself for the professional world. But it’s equally important – and in some ways, even more important – that you prepare yourself to be an informed, caring, responsible citizen. And you may have to do that work yourself. Your college or university may not show you what you have to do. But if you pay attention to what I’m talking about in the book, you will be well positioned to claim that part of your college education as well. You will graduate as someone well prepared to participate as an effective, caring, responsible, informed citizen of our democratic republic.”

You have two chapters dedicated to wellbeing – one on the body and one on the mind – and it also seems to be a theme woven throughout the book. What are some big takeaways there?

One of the places where I really expanded the book (beyond those original talks) was in thinking about the notion of wellbeing. I have no illusions that any book for new students will “fix” all their problems or guarantee they won’t make some mistakes along the way. That’s just part of what happens at this stage of our lives. What I am trying to do, however, is first, to provide as much science-based information as I can about a range of topics relating to physical and mental wellbeing. And second, to encourage students to use this information to make good choices as much as they can…and to get help when they need it. 

I also bring up the subject of happiness. There’s been no shortage of commentary about happiness in popular culture, and it’s very much on the minds of today’s students. But it’s so important to realize that genuine happiness – as opposed to, say, pleasure – is elusive. If you pursue it, it’s likely to run away from you. And you’re not going to catch it. The way we become truly happy is by finding a purpose in life and doing meaningful work with other people. That’s how we make it possible for happiness to find us. So that’s why I encourage college students to think in those terms – to find a cause to embrace (along with their freedom). Chapter 8, specifically, talks about giving back and paying it forward. I tell them that, as a college graduate, you’ll be part of approximately 40% of the American population who has a bachelor’s degree. Only 40%. That alway sounds like a pretty small number to me. And if you look to the world at large, there are about 8 billion people out there, and probably fewer than 10% have a college degree. This means you’re in a position of privilege – not entitlement, but privilege – just by virtue of having this opportunity. So my challenge to students is: “What are you going to do with it?” Or, as I asked before (quoting Horace Mann), “What ‘victory for humanity’ are you going to win?” This is a question all of us should consider, but it’s particularly relevant for college students. If we go to college to realize both personal and social goods, then it’s incumbent upon us to ask: “What am I prepared to do to leave the world a better place than I found it?”

David McGhee has an interesting way of looking at the world. In talking with the Chief Executive Officer of the Steve Fund, it is clear he strives to see beyond popular narratives and predetermined judgements. In his new role, he hopes to bring together “unlikely allies and unusual suspects” to continue to address the issues to which he has dedicated his career – poverty, equity, and the flourishing of young people. 

The Steve Fund is the nation’s leading organization focused on supporting the mental health and emotional wellbeing of young people of color. McGhee believes his previous work in government, community service, and philanthropy prepared him well for this work which he calls “the crisis of our time.” Since its founding in 2014, The Steve Fund has been a major influencer in higher education’s ability to understand better the determinants of mental health issues in young people of color and their unique help-seeking behaviors, with research and recommendations such as the Equity in Mental Health Framework, which they created with the Jed Foundation. 

McGhee plans to strengthen the organization’s commitment to transformational change by focusing on outcomes as opposed to outputs, the former being the more sustainable result. To get there, he wants to expand the Steve Fund’s partnerships with people and organizations that he says need to be part of the conversation but may not have been invited in. He talks of enabling a set of conditions that make any strategy possible. It is an approach that McGhee learned early on as a young black man navigating poverty on his way to achieving his own personal outcomes.  

Marjorie Malpiede: What was your career trajectory before coming to the Steve Fund? 

David McGhee: My background is primarily in philanthropy. It really set the direction for the course of my career. After earning my undergraduate degree in public administration and public policy, I set out to work in the nonprofit and government sectors focusing on child wellbeing and also influencing public policy. Having come from concentrated poverty myself, I bring to this work a commitment to transformational change so that opportunity becomes systemic, not random or transactional. This is where my passion lies. 

Early on, I was an intern in the executive office of Michigan’s first female governor, Jennifer Granholm. I had an opportunity to meet the governor, and we were in her office, and I remembered something she had on her wall. It was a receipt from a lawn care service she had employed when she was running for Governor and the lawn care provider had written on it, “Don’t forget the little people” and she framed it. I was just an intern, but I actually believed I had the most important job in the executive office. From 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM every single day my job was to open every piece of mail addressed to the governor, read it, either route it to their proper department or craft a response on behalf of the governor. That job helped me develop an understanding of rural poverty as opposed to urban poverty. I knew what urban poverty was. That was my lived experience. But this helped me understand residents’ concerns throughout the entire state, which in many ways is applicable across the country. Those things really stuck with me. 

Following my internship, I was offered a job with the governor which I respectfully declined. Many people thought that I was crazy but I came back to my local community in Detroit to work at Big Brothers Big Sisters and I did that for seven years. In the neighborhood I grew up in, if you wanted out, you either played sports or you sold drugs. I had had the opportunity to go to college and it was important for young kids in my neighborhood to see that. From there I had an opportunity to work for a member of Congress and I learned a lot. I knew the amount of money that sat in the federal government and how hard it was to trickle down. I knew what nonprofits needed. And then I found my sweet spot in philanthropy. I worked seven and a half years in private foundations, and spent about a year and a half in family foundations, working for a high net-worth family in Seattle, Washington.

MM: Now that you are at the Steve Fund, what are your main priorities?

DM: The Steve Fund exists to promote the mental health and emotional wellbeing for our young people, and, in our case, young people of color. I’ve also layered in not only promoting, but really protecting the mental health and emotional wellbeing of this population. And we do so in three ways. One is by transforming environments. We know young people will occupy environments, whether it’s college campuses, or employer partners, or the community. How do we make sure that we can support the transformation of environments so young people feel as if they belong? Two, we provide resources and skill-building to ensure that families, caregivers, and young people themselves actually have the tools and resources to navigate this life at this moment. And then lastly, we shape the field by normalizing the conversation around mental health. How are we removing the stigma around it? 

My job is to strengthen these assets by creating a set of enabling conditions that are really ensuring that there’s organizational efficiency and effectiveness. We are one organization in this entire ecosystem contributing to the overall mental health and emotional wellbeing. So how do I make sure that we can manage every aspect of our organization towards a unified whole and achieve the results through performance efforts? How do we commit to organizational learning and agility? We need to be flexible. We need to be nimble and responsive in this moment. 

I think the term diversity has become so politicized that we need to ask the question in a different way: Is there any population that faces a disadvantage in achieving what this institution sets out to achieve?

And then importantly, how are we catalyzing and supporting strategic partnerships? How are we bringing together unusual suspects and unlikely allies? How do we establish, encourage, and engage in partnerships that build continuity, otherwise unattainable on our own? And this to me means being willing to go into places other organizations may not be willing to go, to have conversations other organizations may not be willing to have, and to have those conversations with different audiences that some people may shy away from. 

MM: What, in your opinion, are some of the things young people of color need in order to thrive in these environments? 

DM: What do I believe young people need? If there was a magic wand that I had, then I could identify a handful of things that would contribute to better outcomes – but I might start with agency, readiness and connection. I think young people would benefit from agency to be able to make decisions on their own to feel empowered. I think they need to be prepared to take advantage of opportunities presented to them, and I also think that the environments they go into need to be ready. I fundamentally believe that when we want to work towards the power of achieving outcomes, they’re achieved in one of five ways. Either change behavior, shift attitudes, create better conditions, improve knowledge, or equip people with more skills. If a young person enters an environment that has prioritized these things, at least some of these things, I think that they are set up for success.

To really understand this better, we are continuing to rely on one of our strengths – and that is to use survey research to examine the attitudes of both students and families. We think it’s an important time to ask these questions coming out of the pandemic and the post affirmative action decision. It also allows us to explore different issues within different population groups that maybe we hadn’t thought of before. For example, I’ve become fascinated by the lack of data – or at least what I’ve been exposed to – around student athletes. Have we thought through what it might mean for a young person whose skills and gifts and talents have earned them a college scholarship, but they now find themselves in a campus environment that’s totally different from the environment that they were reared in? What does it mean for an inner city Chicago student to now be at the University of North Dakota? Just using that as an example, or vice versa. What does it mean for a standout high school student in Iowa to find themselves in New York City? Some of it is different by race for sure, but some of it is also situational.

Another area that’s rarely explored is the different generational issues among students of color. There’s some first-generation college students whose families see this as such a phenomenal opportunity that a lot of the skills and the resources and support they have are beyond measure, right? However, depending on your environment, there’s a level of stress and anxiety for non-first generation college students. What if I’m a fifth generation college student and everyone in my family had a history of performing at Yale and then I’m here and my experience is not quite the same? 

I think this notion of “unusual suspects and unlikely allies” can start with identifying the person you think is less likely to contribute to this conversation and creating a reason why they can contribute to the conversation.

MM: You strike me as someone who looks beyond the obvious or the commonly accepted. Would you say that’s true?

DM: Yes, though it is not to suggest that I’m right, but I actually think it comes from my experience: one, having to navigate poverty, because I always had to find another way. I just naturally had to find another way. But then it also came from my decade or so in philanthropy. Many philanthropic organizations throughout history were complicit or had simply gone along with current conditions. But many of our nation’s wealthiest foundations and their respective namesakes built their wealth by defying the odds — by not going with the status quo. Henry Ford said, “Many, many moons ago, if I would’ve asked the people what they wanted, they would’ve told me a faster horse.” 

How do we strike the right balance between, “yep, this is what’s presented. This is the status quo” to have we thought about, have we considered, there’s also a layer beneath that? If we don’t dig, we run the risk of not getting the full story. I think this notion of “unusual suspects and unlikely allies” can start with identifying the person you think is less likely to contribute to this conversation and creating a reason why they can contribute to the conversation. 

MM: Are you hopeful we can bring different viewpoints together in these polarizing times?

DM: One of the best leaders that I’ve ever known and worked for, a woman by the name of Tanya Allen, would often give this analogy around 70, 20, 10, especially when it came to coalition building and alliances. It was this notion of 70% of the things that we want for children, even if we’re on a different perspective or different side of the aisle, we can agree on. There may be 20%, depending on the day or the context, that we’ll never agree on, right? And there may be 10% that’s negotiable depending on what the conditions are. The problem is – oftentimes we start at the 20% as opposed to starting at the 70%.

MM: Issues related to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) obviously impact the mental health of young people of color. What is your opinion on the way this is being debated in higher ed today? 

DM: I actually don’t think it’s a diversity issue that we need to solve. I actually think it’s a disparities issue, because the minority today could be the new majority tomorrow. I think the term diversity has become so politicized that we need to ask the question in a different way: Is there any population that faces a disadvantage in achieving what this institution sets out to achieve? In a college environment that exists to provide a high quality education, is there any population here that suffers from some type of disparity in their ability to receive that? And can we get to a place where we agree on minimizing those conditions?

To learn more about the Steve Fund, visit stevefund.org