Weekly Wisdom | UCR Chancellor Kim Wilcox

Bridget Burns: And thank you so much for joining us for another episode of Start the Week with Wisdom. I’m your host, Bridget Burns, executive director of the University Innovation Alliance.

Doug Lederman: And I’m Doug Lederman, editor and co-founder of Inside Higher Ed.

Bridget Burns: Each week, Doug and I team up to have a conversation with a sitting college president or chancellor to understand what it’s like to lead in this moment, what lessons they are learning, and hopefully give us a little bit of optimism and perspective for the week ahead. And that’s why we call it Start the Week with Wisdom.

Doug Lederman: Today’s guest is University of California, Riverside Chancellor Kim Wilcox, who’s been in that position since 2013, having come from Michigan State. He’s also one of the founding leaders of the University Innovation Alliance that Bridget leads. Welcome, Kim.

Kim Wilcox: Thanks, Doug. Bridget, great to be here.

Bridget Burns: Well, it’s delightful to have you, boss. So, well, we’re honored to have you and wanted to just be able to have a brief conversation since last month we unveiled to the world that the UIA campuses have exceeded a very big goal that was set and we released that information. But I wanted to, you know, my sense amongst the board is that the things that have mattered to you have been a little bit different over time and that you really value some of the other work. And I’m wondering beyond, you know, I think, I suspect, that you’re more excited about other things than just achieving that goal but I will defer to you.

Kim Wilcox: You think and suspect that since I’ve told you that? Yeah, yeah, and I don’t mean to diminish the success because helping more students achieve a university experience and graduate than had before is huge, and particularly those who wouldn’t have had the chance. I mean that’s huge. But at the same time there’s lots of other dynamics that I’ve always thought were equally or perhaps more importantly important to the alliance. Number one is the simple visibility of the task. I’m very proud of the fact that we came together now eight years ago with a purpose of changing how universities and people in universities think about their role. It isn’t just about how many students you turn away so you have a very selective admissions process. It isn’t just about how many research dollars you have, but there’s something fundamental about that student experience. And now this many years later, almost everyone is talking about student success, graduation rates. I think changing that conversation has been perhaps the most important legacy of the alliance. The second piece is at the time people noted that to the best anyone could remember we were the first time a group of universities had come together for any purpose other than athletics. We all are familiar with athletics conferences and all that means in terms of competition and similarity and the rest. But this was a group of universities that had no other connection, all of them from different states, who said, what’s important for us is coming together to make a difference in students, particularly those students who are from families that don’t have the same resources as others, and help them succeed. That was a fundamental commitment. And third on my list of important things is I’ve wanted from the beginning to create a cohort of people who are committed to this. So it’s not just presidents and chancellors who meet and talk about student success. It’s registrars. The 11 registrars know each other, talk to each other. Undergraduate deans know each other, talk to each other. Your leadership, Bridget, has brought them together on real issues and real topics so that there are colleagues and support mechanisms to learn from, but also to measure against. That change in local culture, I think, is a huge, huge benefit.

Doug Lederman: Bridget, you want to go ahead? Do you have a follow-up on that? I was going to, yeah, especially about your great leadership. I was just going to focus on the middle of those three because I have frequently cited UIA as something representing something that I think is a gap in higher education collectively, which is the sort of well, you work in a system now. You didn’t when you were at Michigan State. Michigan State has a famously disaggregated group of public institutions, despite they work together on certain things. But in general, we don’t have a lot of structures in higher education aimed at sort of collective action. There are some associations, but they’ve got all sorts of limitations. And so I think you’re right that UIA was an early signal or an early example of a group of institutions coming together. And we’ve seen a little bit more of it, things like the, of course, now I’m blanking on the name, the group that’s come together around getting more institution, more selective institutions to have more ATI, right? And obviously, we had Achieving the Dream and some others in some other parts of the ecosystem. But I do think this idea of institutions coming together to attack a problem is, because I think we need that. I think very few institutions are going to be able to be islands unto themselves going forward. So I guess I’m interested in sort of how you’d compare like what the UC system does together versus something like UIA and where you see opportunity for more of that kind of structure.

Kim Wilcox: A great question, because you’ve touched on several different comparators. If we start with the UC, people ask, you know, I was at Michigan, notoriously disconnected. Kansas, one of the last. I mean, so I’ve had my time in states where there was a lot less control. People ask me about the UC, the first thing I always say is it’s by far the most homogeneous system in the country. There isn’t a clear flagship. I mean, we let Berkeley and UCLA argue on number one, but we’re all major research universities with huge research enterprises and graduate programs. So that changes the nature of the conversation right away. But of course, in a system, student success is important, but so is managing the medical centers and managing the research enterprise and government or state budget every year. In the UIA, those are by definition not an issue because they’re in different states. We can’t talk about them really. We can, you know, over cocktails, we can talk about them, but we can’t be instrumental. So it brings a focus on a single topic. And I think that’s a key piece. The other piece, when you think about ATI, of which we’re also a member, great organization. But when you talk about selective universities, that’s a big group. And when we have a meeting of ATI, it’s several round top tables in a room. In UIA, when we have a meeting, it’s us around a table in a room. And so, and I’m not saying one is better than one or the other. I think that’s part of what this last decade has been because we can include the APLU. No, I’m going to forget the name. Anyway, they’re...

Bridget Burns: Powered by Publics.

Kim Wilcox: Thank you. Powered by Publics. One of the questions is what is the right scale? Because of course, if you’re successful at a big scale, then that’s a bigger impact. But how much harder is it? What’s the value? And how focused can you be? So I think that’s part of, and we’re actually, the UIA is one of the Powered by Publics participants. So I think there’s a lot of us that are in all these groups and trying to move ahead and thinking about the frame is important.

Bridget Burns: That’s great. I want to follow up around the concept of a strong system presence and COVID in particular. So the UC has made a very clear statement on at least opening and uniformity across the campuses around fall and vaccinations, I believe. And so, some other states don’t have that kind of system leadership or don’t have that kind of clarity. And I think they probably are looking at California enviously because just because of how politicized everything has gotten, it’s nice to have someone else step forward on that. But I’m guessing it’s not solving all of your problems about fall term. And I’m wondering if you can speak a bit about that, about what’s, you know, beyond that topic, what is showing up for you that you’re needing to wrestle with still, despite having strong, clear leadership from the system.

Kim Wilcox: Yeah, I don’t know of anybody in the country who’s feeling satisfied, comfortable and at ease about what’s going to happen in the fall. If you just think back over the last few months, how much things have changed. We had a big surge in California, then we went away, then a big surge in Michigan. There have been toing and froing all over the place, and then overlaid on that are two dynamics. One is the health dynamic, and actually the nuanced advice from the CDC and other groups has varied a bit over time as we’ve learned more. And the political overlay, which had kind of a divisive beginning base and has only become more so over time. Even in California, where it seems like things look pretty good, and I agree where I applaud where we are in terms of the mandate. Cal/OSHA has had different standards. They actually released some about three weeks ago or four weeks ago, changed them the next week. The governor’s office has changed. The Department of Health has changed. Right now, we’re in Riverside County. We adjoin Los Angeles County, which implemented a masking mandate for the entire county Saturday night at midnight. So even in a place that has some stability and some political leaning toward being conservative on health issues rather than lax, there’s still a lot of variation. And then back to Doug’s point about the 10 UC campuses are in different counties with different oversights. Los Angeles and Riverside County were two of the unfortunate leaders in cases of COVID throughout. And unlike Los Angeles, we simply don’t have the health facilities here in our county, which is another dynamic. You can handle 50 cases if you’ve got the facilities. You can’t if you don’t. And so trying to find a way to impose the right expectations and then implement them all is a continuing challenge, I think, for every university president and chancellor in the country.

Doug Lederman: Do you think there has been everybody’s desiring of normalcy, and we all want that? You know, I think it’s going to be really hard for things to feel normal, even if most places bring more students or most students back. And I’m curious how much, do you think institutions are better prepared for pivots when they’re necessary? Do you think they’re better prepared? I guess how much have we internalized some of the lessons of the last year in terms of, I mean, there’s a lot that still has to be figured out about remote work and all sorts of things that’s going to take us a long time to get there. But I’m curious how comfortable you’re feeling about your ability, your institution’s ability to adapt, particularly?

Kim Wilcox: Yeah, of course, everyone was shocked at all of us when we were all able to simply stop meeting in person and start doing it online the last March of 2020.

Doug Lederman: 15 months, yeah.

Kim Wilcox: Yeah, so we know we can do it. I don’t think, like to your point, everybody’s so craving for normalcy. I don’t think anyone wants to do it even more less so than we did back then. I take heart in the fact that while everyone craves normalcy, we’re all ready to accept quasi-normalcy. It doesn’t have to be all the same stuff with all the same events and all the same things going on on campus. Just having students in residence halls and for us we figure about 80% of our classes or so will be face-to-face. That’s not normal by any stretch. It would have hurt our brains two years ago to think about a world like that. But that’s a big step toward normalcy. I think everyone, students, faculty, staff alike, even on the question of masks, having to wear a mask, some people don’t like it, but people understand it in a different way than we did before. So I take a lot of heart there. I worry about shifts. Shifting in March of 2020 to everything being online was relatively easy because it was black and white. We were, and now we weren’t. This fall is much different, much more nuanced in terms of who’s working from home, who has to work from home, who doesn’t want to anymore, who wants to continue to, which classes can. We could trip through it for a year, but some of these classes, we got to get back in a richer way. And to get into that kind of nuanced world and then try to pivot from there in which direction for which parts. It’s the decision-making process and the communication with all these participants that really is the challenge, I think.

Doug Lederman: Yeah, we do best with black and white. Most of us gets harder when the gray.

Kim Wilcox: And gray looks different to every single person on campus, dependent upon their job or their class schedule or whatever it might be.

Bridget Burns: Yeah. And there’s not really a playbook. I’m seeing such different, you know, I’m like almost like a student of leadership sitting through this moment. Doug, I’m sure you and I can probably gather quite a bit that we’ve learned and seen over the past year, but there really isn’t like one clear example of the right way. So I want to shift to athletics. I know that it’s been a really, it’s with everything going on with the NCAA and a lot of those conversations, you know, folks are thinking about, you know, what it’s like now and what the changes are going to be. And I think there’s, I’ve heard some people say things like it’s, you know, there’s, it’s the end of college sports and all these wild claims. And you actually, while you have some college athletics, you do not have Division I football. And you are able to still run a vibrant, thriving institution that raises a lot of resources from its supporters, and you don’t have a skybox. And I’m wondering if you can talk to folks, because you’re on a different, you’re on the other, to some degree, on a different side of this or a different space. And especially coming from Michigan State and also from the University of Kansas. I’m just curious if you can comment as someone who really has a different experience as a top-tier institution on the topic of athletics about what surprised you about coming to Riverside.

Kim Wilcox: Yeah, you just asked about a two-hour question there, Bridget. I’ll try not to go two hours. Yeah, you are correct. We’re a Division I athletics program. We don’t have football. It turns out there’s an awful lot of schools like us. There are, I think, the five Power Five conferences, the ones that you hear most about, but there are over 300 Division I athletics programs. And many more look like us than look like the names that would come to mind, Notre Dame or Nebraska or whatever. And it was my first real experience at mid-major Division I athletics when I came to Riverside. I found it refreshing. I found it to be more like what people want athletics to be. Students are students, and we play for the love of the game, although we have scholarships and all the rest, and we try to be competitive. I should note, when our budgets tanked last year, like everyone in the country, we had a budget advisory committee in place that was making recommendations. One of their tentative recommendations was to consider moving down a division or maybe even eliminating athletics on the campus, something that wouldn’t have happened at Michigan State or Kansas where I had been before. So there is a kind of a difference in that. We weathered that. We have a plan going forward because I think there’s an awful lot that athletics brings to a campus in terms of identity and spirit and kind of connections for students and community. I noted that Mark Emmert from the NCAA commented the other day that maybe this is a time with the name, image and likeness decision from the Supreme Court that we should look at a different model for managing athletics in America. The NCAA was an outgrowth over 100 years ago, 120 years ago, as an attempt to try to manage particularly football and how out of control football had become among some schools in the eastern part of the country. And we’ve tried to use that one instrument to manage all of athletics. And I think we’ve learned over the years that that hasn’t been very effective. And I could go down a long list of reasons I think that’s the case. So kind of back to our discussion about the UIA and the ATI and the Powered by Publics. Part of the question I think going forward is what’s the scale of management and control? Is it institution? Is it conference? Is it system? Is it state? How do we want to do it? And more importantly, what do you want to accomplish? I was on the president’s forum for the NCAA for several years. And when we get into conversations about managing the competitiveness and so forth, I was the crank in the room who would repeatedly remind them that nothing in the NCAA bylaws or goals or values says anything about competition. If you read the NCAA mission statement, it’s about developing students into future leaders. And that has nothing to do with winning a single game. Now, that’s one of the aspirational pieces. But I would suggest very little of what you see the NCAA doing the last several years didn’t have something to do with competitiveness and generating revenue through the basketball tournament and so forth. So I think it’s a good time to have a calling of the question. And actually, I’ve been informally calling the question for a while.

Bridget Burns: All right. Well, that’s super helpful, I think, for folks who are at home and thinking, you know, there is an opportunity to continue to come up with a new model for things moving forward. I want to show you.

Kim Wilcox: I’ve got so many things I thought. Let me give you another one for a lot of people at home are thinking. Think about this. We talk about coaches’ rules and coaches’ discipline in athletics all the time. And we accept it, that if you don’t come to practice, the coach has rules. You know, there are team rules, team rules. Just think if we had a single professor who had class rules that they implemented on their own, we wouldn’t tolerate it, right? Why is it we allow an entire culture to develop within our institution that is so different from the rest of the institution? And I go down a whole long list of things like that that I would love to have the nation have a call into the question. Sorry.

Bridget Burns: No, I think that was like a, that was a, yeah, we could go for a while on that one. I think a lot of people likely agree with you and they just feel like.

Kim Wilcox: But a lot of them don’t, I can tell you too.

Bridget Burns: Yes. When you talk with presidents privately, do you find that that is something they also think about? Are you alone in that space at the senior leadership level?

Kim Wilcox: No, I’m not. There’s a fair number of Division I mid-majors who have my sense of this. I think there’s a number of Division I major school leaders as well, but they’re much more restrained in what they can say.

Doug Lederman: I have over my, I used to cover college athletics—

Kim Wilcox: And expert in the room.

Doug Lederman: Well, that’s why I’ve kept quiet. But what I have used, I used to describe the deathbed conversion, which really was the post-retirement conversion that we saw a lot of presidents engage in when they moved out of the senior role at their institutions and became private citizens. You often heard them talking much more critically about athletics. There’s a long list of presidents that I would put in that category. They’re pretty impaired in what they can say in that role most of the time.

Kim Wilcox: Exactly.

Bridget Burns: Yeah. I have one in recent memory, actually, as you say that. So I know you are not wrong. Well, I wanted to shift to a bit more of a rapid fire. The questions that our audience seems to have.

Kim Wilcox: I better sit up.

Bridget Burns: Get ready. Stretch. Get ready. First, I’m curious. You’ve been a mentor. We first met when I was an ACE fellow. You were an ACE fellow. So you’re someone who helps to mentor folks. And I’m wondering about you personally, what advice served you best in your career? Who gave it to you? And what was the advice?

Kim Wilcox: There’s all kinds of great advice, of course. I’ve been so fortunate to have people who are willing to guide me. Here’s one I use a lot. It came from my wife. Many years ago, we were supposed to be taking a vacation. I said, I don’t know if we can take a vacation. Diane said, Kim, you need to take a vacation because everyone watches you. If you don’t take a vacation, they think they shouldn’t either. They don’t feel that they can take the time away. And it was just great advice, both because I needed a vacation, but also because it kind of reminds you of your role that’s bigger than just doing your job. And it’s hard for many people, myself, for sure, to think of people looking at me to know how to do things. I mean, I’m trying to figure it out myself. But that message really, and I have shared that with many other people as well.

Bridget Burns: Well, as someone who just came back from two weeks off, you make me feel like a great leader, but I’m also like, Doug, Doug, I know that you can’t take one right now, but you got it, or else your people won’t take a vacation.

Doug Lederman: Exactly. Do it for the others, not for yourself. And all of a sudden, once I thought I got to do it for other people, then I really was motivated to go do it.

Bridget Burns: And this is vacation month for higher ed. Most folks, this is the only time of year people can really take their foot off the gas.

Kim Wilcox: I had to come home, put on a tie just to see you guys.

Bridget Burns: All right. Well, thank you for doing that. Although flip-flops would have been a great look for this show. And I’ve, you know, you probably do have flip-flops on actually right now. We don’t know. But in California, we’re jealous. Okay, so then what’s the advice that you give to people who you mentor or who are, uh, you know, aspiring leaders? What advice do you frequently find yourself giving?

Kim Wilcox: Um, yeah. Uh, I, I, I do this oftentimes when, when people ask me, “Who, who do you want to recruit?” And I always say, “I’m looking for somebody who’s a good listener.” Uh, that, that if you’re talking all the time, you’re not, all you’re doing is talking. I will never know everything about this university. I don’t even know what all the majors are. There’s so many, right? I need to learn. And the best way you can do that is to listen. So I’m always recommending we seek listeners as employees. And I’m always telling people to be a good listener, not just openly listen, but be a thoughtful listener, a respondent in a helpful way. Then the other advice I remind people, it’s not about you. In my experience, there are two categories of presidents and chancellors. The ones who, for whom it is about them, many of them wanted to be a president when they were in graduate school. Never trust somebody who wanted to be a president in graduate school. Because too often they’re doing it for the wrong reason. They’re doing it because they want to be in charge. You want to find a president or chancellor who never wanted to be a president or chancellor. And now they are, and they’re generally doing it for the right reason. And again, my wife, best advisor, reminds me every day: you know, Kim, when you stop being chancellor, you stop being chancellor. And people say, Yeah, he used to be the chancellor. It’s over. The job goes on. Other people will be in it. They’ll be talking about the dumb things that I did. I don’t know why he did it this way. We got to change it. It’s not about you.

Bridget Burns: That’s great. Doug, do you want to end with the last one?

Doug Lederman: Yep, sorry. We usually like to ask about what has guided you from what books, what pieces of writing have shaped you professionally, personally, and things, particularly things that you sort of maybe go back to and recommend to others.

Kim Wilcox: I read very little fiction. I’ll just fess up. Sorry for the creative writing faculty members out there listening. I read a lot of nonfiction. I read a lot of biographies. I just reread Up from Slavery, which was a great read in this time to kind of remind us of all kinds of, remind me of all kinds of things. A book that I would recommend for those in the academy is Lab Girl. It’s a kind of a memoir of a biologist, faculty member, and her life experience as a faculty member. So much of it resonates, I think, with people who have been on the faculty, her graduate students and all the rest. The other book I love, well, there’s two other books, I guess I’d say. One is Boys in the Boat, story of the University of Washington rowing crew team from 1940, 30, something like that. And With the Old Breed. With the Old Breed was written by a faculty member at a, I can’t remember now, a university in Georgia. He was in graduate school when World War II, or college rather, World War II broke out, and he and his buddies enlisted in the Marines. The first Marine said, finish your degree, we need officers. He was eager to go. He signed up, quit college, and went. And so he was a grunt, literally a grunt, through the South Pacific. And it’s one of the few military books that is written from the front lines, not about which generals are moving their brigades into which dimension and the flanking. This is just a guy trying to survive and do the right thing. But clearly a guy with talent who wrote his version afterward. And it’s a great way to think about leadership from a place that isn’t about leadership. So one anecdote, they’re getting ready to do whatever they’re getting ready. And there are a whole bunch of 50-gallon drums that had been full of oil. And his job was, he and his buddies were to scrub out this oil. Well, they thought it was a stupid job. So they’re out in the hot sun in the South Pacific scrubbing out oil out of these drums. And they got them clean enough. That’s good enough. So two weeks later, they deploy to Saipan or one of these, and they’re charging the beach. And it’s 100 degrees and it’s humid and it’s hot and it’s sweaty. And here comes the water in the drums that they were washing out two weeks ago. And they wish they had washed them out a little better. But that’s, you know, the supply sergeant, of course, knew what to do with the water and all the rest. So With the Old Breed is, for me, a great look up at leadership rather than down.

Bridget Burns: Okay, great. Perfect.

Kim Wilcox: When you said last question, I realized I was going on. Sorry.

Bridget Burns: No, that’s all good. I’m getting an echo, so I’m undoing that. Well, Kim, we so appreciate you spending this time with us and giving us your perspective and providing a sense of what it’s like to work with you and also your thoughts on the national landscape and the different driving forces, I would say, in higher education. So, we appreciate you starting the day with us, giving us a little bit of hopeful perspective for the week. And, Doug, as always, it’s a delight to have you as a co-host. So, we’ll see you all next week.