Weekly Wisdom | UCF President Alexander Cartwright

Bridget Burns: Hi, thanks so much for joining us for another episode of Start the Week with Wisdom. My name is Bridget Burns, executive director of the University Innovation Alliance.

Marjorie Valbrun: And I’m Marjorie Valbrun, managing editor of Inside Higher Ed.

Bridget Burns: Each week I partner with a journalist to have a conversation with a sitting college president or chancellor. And today, that is definitely going to be the case. And I’m delighted that we have these conversations on a Monday to give you an uplifting perspective to start the week, one that is hopeful, one is informed by the perspective of leaders, and hopefully gives you a sense of optimism for the week ahead, which is why we call it Start the Week with Wisdom. Our next guest is Alexander Cartwright, president of the University of Central Florida. President Cartwright previously served as the chancellor of the University of Missouri and the executive vice chancellor for the SUNY system.

Bridget Burns: Welcome, President Cartwright. We’re so excited to have you here.

Alexander Cartwright: Thank you. It’s great to be here today.

Bridget Burns: How are you doing today?

Alexander Cartwright: Doing well. I’m looking out at all of the students walking around campus and just excited to be able to be a part of such a great institution.

Bridget Burns: Awesome. Fall term energy feels great, I bet. And since you’re on campus every day, can you share a bit about what you are hearing and seeing from students right now? I know it’s early in the semester, but I’m sure you’re hearing lots.

Alexander Cartwright: Oh, you know, our students are really excited to be back on campus. They’ve been looking forward to a more robust campus experience. We’ve had students on campus now for the last year, but not at the level that we are now. We are fully back to in-person and a mixture of all of the activities that we’ve been doing. And what I will say is that it’s remarkable to see how much they care about each other and are willing to meet our expectations for what we are looking to do this semester. And we keep emphasizing to them that we need to have a successful semester. So it’s important that we actually follow all of our guidance in terms of mask wearing and vaccinations and trying to get as many of them vaccinated as we possibly can.

Bridget Burns: Yeah, that’s a shared challenge, I think, for everyone out there. But I think there’s one thing that you have that’s a little different than other presidents, and that was some really exciting news that University of Central Florida received. Last week we had Karen Stout on from Achieving the Dream, who received a gift from MacKenzie Scott. And And I’m so delighted to hear about the gift that you all received at UCF. So congratulations first. And then second, we’re super curious about that experience, about when you found out you were getting it. Can you tell the backstory for those of us who are just kind of on the sidelines? And especially, can you give a sense of how you think this is going to impact UCF’s work?

Alexander Cartwright: Yeah, you know, we are, of course, extremely excited that we received a gift from MacKenzie Scott and Dan Jewett. And it really is reflective of this institution and what it’s been able to accomplish as to why they were willing to invest in the institution. And I have to tell you that, you know, when I first heard about it, it was almost one of those phone calls that you’re like, this is too good to be true. So you don’t believe it. You don’t believe it until you actually know that it really happened. And I did get a phone call saying, you know, that people wanted to talk to me, that there’s a donor that really would love to invest in UCF and that it’s a significant investment. And it almost sounded, it really did almost sound like it was a scam. All I was waiting for was them to say, just send me your credit card and we’ll, you know, or a bank account, your personal bank account, and we’ll send it to you. But that actually turned out to be the truth. And the more that I talked to people, the more I realized that they knew so much about the institution. They knew about our graduation rates, our retention rates, how much we have expanded, that we’re a Hispanic-serving institution, that we’ve really improved our graduation rates for underrepresented students. And we continue to be committed to that. And they knew about our size, of course, and scale and our connection to UIA, which is also an important part of what’s impacted us. And then I started to realize that this might be actually true, that this is going to happen. And certainly, as soon as they asked for, by the point we got to them asking about the bank accounts and transfers and everything, the money showed up within a week. And we were, of course, amazed to see $40 million show up that quickly. And it’s an incredible opportunity for this institution to continue to do the great work that it’s doing. And we’ve decided that we’ll use that to invest in our endowments, the things that we do, which is endowments that will benefit student success, endowments that will benefit the faculty and staff, and all of the great research that they are doing and how they’re impacting society. So, we want to continue to grow the endowment. It’s $40 million, but what we really would like to do is look for accompanying gifts that will get that up to 80 million to $100 million in endowment that then will allow us to have an impact for generations. Whenever you have an opportunity like this, we need to be thinking of how we can leverage that to do even more great things for this institution long term.

Bridget Burns: Yeah, I mean, as a young institution, your endowment is something, I mean, I don’t think people understand how young UCF is. And so, that gift and that breathing room has got to be pretty remarkable. I’m super interested that it was a phone call because I had heard some stories about it being an email. And I love that you thought that it was a scam and possibly they were calling to check on your car’s home warranty or like, you know, those spam calls. You thought it might have been one of those.

Alexander Cartwright: The first contact was an email. And then there were follow-up phone calls and others, but it just wasn’t clear that it was real. And it wasn’t all the details in the email. The email basically said, we have someone who’s interested in you, but it didn’t say much about what it was. It’s once we started talking that it became obvious that they never did say, by the way, who exactly it was. It was someone who was interested. We didn’t find out until much, until later exactly who it was that was potentially willing to support us.

Marjorie Valbrun: Wow. Well, great. Thanks for sharing that. And we heard similar stories from other presidents we talked to. And one president said he thought he was being punked. And when he realized he wasn’t, he said he was so shocked and so happy he cried. So these stories have been really great to hear. And the fact that they’re unrestricted funds, I think, also helps the colleges. It gives them a lot of latitude in what you all want to do. But switching to another subject, I wanted to hear about what lessons you’ve observed from the pandemic, good or bad, from watching how others have navigated this year, how other presidents have handled it.

Alexander Cartwright: You know, this past 16 months that I’ve been here has been a challenge, right? The whole time that I’ve been at UCF, it’s been the pandemic. I started on April 13th of 2020. And so we’ve been dealing with the pandemic since then. And I would say that the biggest observations and lessons learned that I had was really around our ability to be adaptive, to be innovative, to think about how we can do things differently than we’ve done them in the past, and to work with the fabulous people that we have at the institution that want to make the best of every situation. We’re fortunate in that UCF is a young institution, like it’s already been mentioned. We’re only 58 years old, and we’ve grown tremendously over the last 30 years. And that has actually created a culture here, a culture of really can-do attitude, and that anything that comes at us, we’ll figure out a way to make the best of it. And you saw that in our faculty, in our staff, and in our students. It’s within the ethos here of everything that we do. So, working with our students, working with our faculty and our staff, you know, we were able to think about different ways to do things, how to bring people back in person, what do we do in our residence halls, how do we run events that would be a little different than we ran them in the past. We did all of that during the past year. And now, this fall again is another shift where we have even more students back on campus and a lot more in-person classes and really working with everybody and working with our student government. Everybody has been amazing to think about how we can be more flexible. I will tell you that we learned even that there are some things that we didn’t know would be really successful. And the big one that I like to think about is just office hours, right? Is that our faculty when they were offering office hours online, they started to realize that a lot more students would actually come to office hours that were available. And I think it’s a combination, it’s a flexibility of the hours that you might be able to do, but also it’s sort of the leveling of power in a way that I’m actually able to attend a meeting with someone and I’m in my environment and they’re in theirs. And so we’re much more equal. And I think that means that students are much more willing to actually reach out to their faculty and get advice. We saw a lot of creativity too. I mean, one that comes to mind is the faculty member using their shower door to actually as a whiteboard. I think that’s incredibly creative. It’s a way to make things happen. And then, you know, others doing all sorts of other activity that have to do with the research around for COVID-19. And so we saw a lot of responses that showed that creativity and showed that adaptability for our faculty and certainly for our students. And so I just can’t say enough good things about the people that we have here at this institution, their ability to accept change, their ability to just say, let’s get things done and make things happen. It’s a great environment to be in. And I think that has helped us to get through the pandemic. And I’m looking forward to what we’ll be able to do in the future as things change further.

Bridget Burns: That’s great. I do think it’s going to be a challenge for all of us to figure out how do we bring forward that culture of innovation and that new speed, but not the burnout that it brought with it. And how do we balance it, right? Because I’m looking for solutions out there about how to address that because it seems to have come back a bit. But I definitely don’t want us to forget the level of how much creativity and innovation we’re capable of. So this is a really interesting moment and it’s a very challenging time for leaders. We’re seeing a lot of presidents announce their retirement. We’re seeing a lot of presidents really just get burned out justifiably. And I’m just wondering, you and I have had lots of conversations about leadership and you’ve shared some insights in the past that I just wanted to see if maybe you had some thoughts about what leadership in this particular moment is really requiring. Like, what are the unique demands at this moment you think as a leader?

Alexander Cartwright: Yeah, that’s a great question. And I do agree on your comment too about the burnout. I worry about all the people who worked so hard in the past year and a half. And as we go forward, we think that things would have gotten back to quote the normal and that it’d be easier. And in fact, it hasn’t. I mean, things continue to be a challenge, and we’ve had to make decisions very rapidly. And that’s hard. That’s hard on all of us. So I think we have to continue to do that. And the biggest lesson for leadership, I think, during these types of challenging times is just to make sure and show your compassion, show how much you care about people and make it clear that, you know, sometimes you may have to be making certain decisions, but you’re always making them with the best interests of the institution, the faculty, staff, and students in mind. And that you may have some constraints, but you’ll always try to put the institution in a position where it can be successful and that you’re able to address concerns. I think it’s willingness to listen. We talk a lot about compassion and care. We talk about listening. Knowing that as a leader, you can’t do it all. I think that’s a tough thing to learn, especially when you’ve come up through a certain pathway as a leader, especially if maybe like me, you know, you’re a faculty member that everything was about how do you get out those papers and you keep wanting to do everything you had to be involved in so many things that your natural tendency is to want to be involved in everything and you start realizing that to get all of the things done that you need to get done in a condition like this, you actually have to ensure that people are empowered around you and give them that ability to make decisions and to support them. And that your job is more to help that environment to continue to move more rapidly. You can’t be that bottleneck in terms of decision making. And when you start realizing that and you have the right people making the decisions, it really does help to speed up the transition in these types of conditions. And I will say, you know, that it’s important. And you were talking about burnout, you were talking about all the hard work that people are having to do. And I think we have to go back to our principles of community, right? And that we really are a community and we do care and love each other, and that we want that sometimes things are going to be difficult, and but we’re just going to keep helping each other to do the most that we can do. And so, I’ve talked a lot also about just loving one another and caring about each other, and I think that’s important. That’s a big lesson for me through all of this. And I will tell you the last lesson is just I talk about this a lot too: is listening. We’re at an institution, higher education is fortunate in that when you’re at a university like this, you have people around you who are incredibly talented, incredibly talented. Faculty, staff, students, we’re very blessed in that way to have that type of talent. You need to listen and you need to recognize that they’re going to have suggestions and solutions that are much better than you would have ever thought of. And if you’re willing to listen and pick up on those ideas and then act on them, I think that’s the best thing you can do as a leader. It’s never on you alone. And realizing it is a team effort and it’s a team sport to lead an institution like this size for sure.

Marjorie Valbrun: That’s great. Thank you for that. So, compassion, sense of community, delegating, recognizing other ones, others’ talents that are around you all sounds like really good advice. Switching gears, so the DirectConnect program between UCF and Valencia Community College has been heralded as a national model, but there’s still a lag in the speed by which others scaled this approach, right? So, having been at Mizzou and SUNY, you understand how DirectConnect is different. So, if you could change one aspect of how universities and community colleges partner, what would you change?

Alexander Cartwright: You know, it’s always hard to say what you would change. I think what I would do is the principle that I would follow is that you need to be thinking about how you put the students’ best interests at the forefront. And that this is about how do we get the most students the opportunity to get a college education, to get into a university. And they may go a different route. They may go the route of a community college because of many different reasons, cost potentially, because they’re place bound, you know, place bound in some way, lots of other reasons that they may go through a community college and then to come to the university. And I think if we are committed to that, then what we’re saying is we’re willing to help students to achieve their dreams and recognize that not everybody’s going to go on the same path. And I think that is the key element in this: it’s about the students first. If you start from thinking about what’s my enrollment and how I’m going to grow my enrollment, how I’m going to grow revenue streams, that’s a different conversation. Whereas, if you’re thinking about how you can do what’s in the best interest of the community, the region, and how we can help, I think that changes all of this. And that’s, I think, what was special here: that there was so much growth in this area that Valencia, Seminole State, also all came together and we started thinking about how do we produce the workforce that’s needed to drive the economy in this region. And we couldn’t do it alone. And we had to start working together and we had to, you know, realize that there was value in those partnerships and that we will continue. We still work very closely together. We share a building downtown with Valencia and we’ll continue to do those things because I think it is much more about how do we serve everybody? How do we make sure that they’re able to then help us with the economic development? And as the economy grows in this region, as we’re able to provide the workforce that’s needed, there’s tremendous benefit to us as an institution. And so we have to take that long-term perspective. So I think it’s just repositioning what it is that you’re trying to accomplish and go away from the near-term budget-related conversations to the long-term benefit to society and how that then comes back in economic development and therefore how that would grow in what you’re trying to do.

Bridget Burns: That’s great. So I want to shift to you as a leader a bit more. And you and I, like I said, we’ve had some opportunities to talk about leadership in the past. And I find your perspective really grounded and always very calming. It’s from that, grown up in the Bahamas. You just like, I always feel very calm around you. But I’m wondering if you’ve shared before with me what you think is the most essential thing for you to be an excellent leader, something that you have to have on a regular basis.

Alexander Cartwright: You know, again, it’s about how do we listen and how do we respond to people? I think it’s, and when I say listening, you know, Steve Sample wrote a book, I think it was like called The Contrarian Leader. It’s somehow.

Bridget Burns: Contrarian’s Guide to Leadership, yeah.

Alexander Cartwright: Yeah, thank you, thank you. I knew it was something in there about contrarian, but what it talked about was thinking gray. And you know, I didn’t realize how powerful that was until I read the chapter, but it was something that I had done almost instinctively. I think because of being a faculty member, I was always willing to listen to all of the different arguments, even if I had maybe a different viewpoint, right? And I was willing to listen to the argument to see if my mind could be changed, right? And what I started doing even a lot more, and I think this is really important for all of us, is started thinking about how do I hear what people are saying, think about it without a bias one way or the other on the decision about what we’re trying to do, but rather to listen to all of those different viewpoints and then eventually make a decision. And if you’re able to do that, you will sometimes make decisions that are different than your own viewpoint, which is interesting, right? Because people then, one thing, don’t know exactly what you think about certain things because you’re always thinking about the collective. And I think, but I think that’s an incredible, incredibly powerful tool. And it takes practice, it takes comfort with you to be able to get to a point where you’re willing to accept that maybe you’ll make a different decision than what you might think is the right, quote, the right thing personally. But rather, by input, you get to a point where you realize that the best decision is something different than what you were originally thinking.

Bridget Burns: Okay, the one other, before Marjorie goes, I was going to ask you is: what’s the best advice that you’ve ever received that served you in your career?

Alexander Cartwright: I would say it’s about empowerment. It is about helping the people around you, valuing the people. You see this little thing back here, the walk, the talk. This is something that David Novak gave to people. It’s about the power of recognition. I think that was also really impactful on me: how do you recognize people for what they’re doing and how much it means when you recognize people and thank people? I think that’s really, really important. So, I think it’s that combination of how do you empower people, how do you thank them for what they’re doing. Those things come together to make an environment where people really want to be part of what you’re doing and what you’re trying to accomplish because they realize that it’s not something that is about you as an individual, but rather you’re always pushing together to get the institution to where it needs to be. So, I would say it’s empower and thank.

Marjorie Valbrun: And what advice do you find yourself most consistently giving to other aspiring community college presidents?

Alexander Cartwright: So, you know, when I’m talking to anybody, it’s again, I go back a lot to how do you show people respect? How do you show people that you value individuals? And I think it’s important that people fundamentally realize that you care and that you value all of those people that are around you. It is so incredible how much people will do when they feel valued. And so, I would always say, think about how you show that respect. I have incredible respect for all of my colleagues. The president of Valencia is someone we work with, and I just think she is incredible, President Plinske. She’s just fabulous. And she does incredible work there that we respect and we value. And it helps us as an institution. And so, I’ll always be an advocate for her and what they’re doing. And because long term, it will help us too. So, I think it’s that environment of making sure that you start to recognize the importance of everyone at the institution. And it isn’t just people at your level. You know, for us to be successful as an institution here at UCF, everybody has a role to play. You walk on our campus, you see how immaculate our landscaping is here, and how beautiful the campus is. Well, there are really some tremendous staff that make that possible. And they make the impact. You think about our student success, it’s about our advisors, it’s about the things that they’re doing to help our advisors. When you think about in the residence halls, it’s all of our RAs, it’s all the people who come together to make this work. We have to do all of these things together, and we need to value and respect everybody for all that they’re doing to make these things possible.

Bridget Burns: So, I think we’re going to be running up on time. So, I want to just end with one question that is based on a conversation I’ve had with you about processing complex issues. I before asked you when you actually get a time to even think about email, considering you’re back-to-back in meetings all day. And you shared with me that when you get a really complicated issue, how you handle it. And can you just give folks that anecdote? Because I thought it was really helpful.

Alexander Cartwright: You know, it goes back to, and you can ask my wife this one, goes back to when I was even in college and I would have a big test or a big problem set that I’m working on, and I may be really struggling to get the answer to the problem. And what I would do is go to sleep because I always felt that I needed that time for my mind to get quiet, for me to think about problems, and for me to continue to be able to process those problems. And you know, she’ll even tell you that at times she’ll see my hand writing when I’m asleep because I tend to continue to process the problem. And I think that’s really valuable because what happens is that it’s that time period where you go away from the immediacy of needing to make the decision to actually having time to really process all of the different possibilities. And when you wake up refreshed, mornings are incredibly important to me. I need to be able to go to sleep, wake up in the next morning, and I feel like I’m in a much clearer state of mind that I can then think about all of the different possibilities. And I do think that as long as you can stay level about every decision you have to make, not get too excited, not get too down, then you’re able to look at all of the different outcomes that could possibly happen by different decisions. And you’re able to make a clearer decision at that point. So for me, it’s always: I like to know about the problem. I like to learn about the problem. I like to then have time to think it through in a way that I can really concentrate on just that issue. And sometimes that does take overnight to be able to do that because you’ve got so many other things going on during the day. That then you’re able to get to a much better place with what’s the right way to make the decision. So that’s just, I’ve always been that way, even throughout college. And now that I think about it, you would ask my mom, it was the way that I always was even when I was in school at the beginning. Is I just, I would always read things over the night before, go to sleep, and then the next day it all seemed to be there. I don’t know how to explain that, but there’s something that continues to process somewhere that helps me to get the clarity I—

Bridget Burns: Well, that’s wonderful. Well, thank you so much, President Cartwright, for joining us today. And thank you, Marjorie, for being an excellent co-host. And we hope that, folks, at home, this has been inspiring, giving you some stuff to think about. But ideally, you start the weekend or you start the week with a little bit more optimism than perhaps before you listen to this. So we will see you. We’re going to take two weeks off. I hope that you take next Monday off, everyone, for Labor Day and actually do take it off and try not to just sleep on problems. Although I’m going to have to try that issue or that approach in the future. So otherwise, we will see you all very soon. Thanks so much.

Alexander Cartwright: Thank you so much.