Weekly Wisdom | UMGC President Greg Fowler

Bridget Burns: Well, welcome to another episode of Start the Week with Wisdom. I’m your host, Bridget Burns, executive director of the University Innovation Alliance.

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

Bridget Burns: Each week, I partner with a journalist, typically Doug, to have a conversation with a sitting college president or chancellor. And in that conversation, we’re really trying to distill a sense of what it’s like to lead in this moment. And we’re also trying to give you a bit of hope and perspective for the week ahead. So that’s why we call it Start the Week with Wisdom.

Doug Lederman: And today we are joined by Greg Fowler, who’s president of the University of Maryland Global Campus. Greg has been there since, I think, last year, the year before, I believe, he’ll tell us. And before that, he served as president of Southern New Hampshire University’s Global Campus, capping off a nine-year stint at SNHU. And he worked at Western Governors University, which basically gives you the trifecta of sort of adult-serving mostly online institutions. So you can probably give us a lot of insight into how those institutions work. So welcome and thanks for being here.

Greg Fowler: Thank you for the opportunity. It’s a great way to start off a Monday.

Bridget Burns: Well, we’re delighted to have you, and we feel like you have an expertise that we’re hoping to tap. So, what we wanted to first start with: you know, how are you holding up right now? It’s been a really long time period where a lot of other folks are dabbling in the online space, but you’ve been here for a while. So, curious about, are you perceiving kind of like the same issues that you’re seeing other spaces in terms of burnout and otherwise with your staff? Or, I mean, because this is kind of more of a natural environment, I’m just curious if you know how you’re hanging in.

Greg Fowler: Well, it’s certainly true that it’s true for our online environment, but also remember, we’ve got a lot of students who are in hybrid environments around the world, give or take, about 200 locations. And that’s been one of the more fascinating pieces of all of this is trying to figure out how to juggle the various policies. Anytime that we operate on a Marine or Army base or any of those types of things, we have to operate by whatever the commanding officer on that site is. So, whether it’s Okinawa or South Korea or Germany, trying to get various places where are they back? Are they not back? What are the policies on that has really given a lot of people some sense of anxiety, I would say, is certainly part of that, but also just a sense of exhaustion. And we’ve been trying to make sure we work our way through that. A lot of our employees, of course, who find themselves having to juggle back and forth between those types of things are working very hard to figure out how to make sure they stay on top of those. I think for everybody, whether you’re online or hybrid or face-to-face, right now is a big question of what’s going to come next. And I think some of the questions around what will or will not happen is one of the things we’re all going to have to deal with.

Doug Lederman: I’m right, though, the vast majority of your employees are dispersed physically and have been for a long time, for right? I mean, that’s just generally the way you’ve operated it. You probably have a group that’s together in Adelphi, but beyond that, most of your employees dispersed.

Greg Fowler: Dispersed in many different places, especially hybrid experiences. Because once again, those are all hybrid or face-to-face for the most part with some online experiences tied to them.

Doug Lederman: Do you have a sense that places that operated that way pre-pandemic had an edge and maybe are facing less of the, I mean, you guys probably had to have some sense, and I’m sure some of this predated you, but some sense of how to keep employees engaged. Do you have advice for those of us that are struggling to keep employees feeling connected and engaged that are used to being in a place together and haven’t been, which is what our situation continues to be? And I think probably a lot of our listeners.

Greg Fowler: Yeah, and I think that’s going to be true for both faculty, staff and even students if they are not used to it. It’s not as simple as, I mean, Zoom calls are great, but it’s really trying to find ways to personalize that experience for them. So, generally speaking, some of the things that we were doing were making sure that we spent time at the beginning and end of each call, doing sort of the informal things. When I was teaching classes, I used to say to a lot of my former faculty members, starting the class off with just a how was your weekend will get students to begin loosening up a little bit. So, I would say for faculty and for students, finding those ways to take a couple of minutes. I know it’s, you know, with Zoom meetings, everything’s sort of back to back to back, but finding ways to personalize those types of things are going to be absolutely critical. I do think that we had some of an experience advantage over a number of places. Certainly, as you know, UMGC is part of the University System of Maryland. And we’ve spent a lot of time with our fellow sister and brother colleges saying, here are some tips that may help you out in those types of things. And at the same time, recognizing that they are still a little bit different in what they’re trying to accomplish. Once again, going back to what their mission is makes a difference in how you’re going to approach that.

Bridget Burns: We appreciate the advice, someone who really kind of knows what you’ve been in this space for such a long time with previously and then now. So, you’re really well positioned. And I’m curious, like, watching all these other campuses try and kind of dabble in the space and now say, like, inferring that they’re teaching online when, or that what they’re doing is digital learning, when really in many cases, it’s just Zoom U. I’m curious if that being in the space that you have, having a command of the real experience of what online learning really can be and should be, are there any things about that experience of everyone else kind of coming into the space and some who post-COVID likely want to just kind of maintain that presence that have been either frustrating or has it been exciting? Has it been validating for you in terms of, you know, other folks are finally catching up on some of the things that you’ve already been talking about?

Greg Fowler: No, it’s been a little bit of all of those things, to be honest with you. It’s been what some of the work I was doing right before this was I was wrapping up a stint as the New England Commission of Higher Education commissioner. And so we spent a lot of time my last year there during the pandemic trying to work with institutions that had to go online. And of course, many people were having this conversation about remote learning versus online learning and what the differences are between them. And it really was a risk mitigation strategy as opposed to a deliberate strategy that people had in place. So one of the frustrating things was around people who saw that as the end all of online education. That just wasn’t the case. For a lot of them, though, what we’re beginning to see is schools starting to get back to this question of what is really their mission? What’s the job to be done, to use a Clayton Christensen phrase here? And what we saw in NECHE, New England Commission for Higher Education, was you had a group of schools that were saying we had to do it and therefore we did it, but we don’t intend to do it in any scaled way moving forward, which is fine. If you’re one of those New England schools that that’s not what you do, you just have to make sure you have a strategy for moving forward. A lot of schools fall somewhere in the middle. That is, they’ve learned from whether the student activities or the faculty interactions that there are pieces that they want to keep around the flexibility and the agility. And that’s a good thing. It’s still not the same as creating an absolute strategy for saying, how do I become a next generation online institution? And that’s one of the things we are really sort of doubling down on. And a lot of that’s going back to student support, student satisfaction, retention, connection, things that are really going to matter beyond simply the academic content.

Doug Lederman: I know Bridget talked to you a little bit about your sort of previous, how you got to online learning, your own exposure to that. Can you tell us a little bit about that and sort of what your own journey as a student was like?

Greg Fowler: So my work when I was at Western Governors University, we were in the process of trying to think about the MBA program in a different way, project-based, agile, a 30-credit program that allows students to move through the WGU framework in a quick way. And a lot of that work was stuff that I just felt like I wanted to immerse myself in. So I began with the orientation, some of the foundation courses. My previous degrees were not specifically in business. So this was a new thing for me. And it was a great learning experience and trying to understand when students struggle, how to help them, and when not to help them. One of the things that worked for me that may not have worked for others was that I didn’t need my mentor to write to me or call me on a regular basis because I was going to do the work. And so that’s really one of the big things that, of course, online is trying to do is make those connections and keep students going. So I enjoyed the experience, but I did learn again the ways you’re going to do this matter. So for me, some of the resources that I found that helped me were not necessarily the ones that you were going to use in a traditional classroom. Some of the ones that were being recommended to other people were things that weren’t necessarily things I wanted to do. But it was a really good opportunity to get behind the scenes of, we often say you’ve got to build a learning experience with the recognition that these people have full-time jobs, many of them have families. And when they get in front of the computer at 10 o’clock at night, they’ve got two to three hours to get something done before they’ve got to go to bed and get up the next day to do things. And so being in that shape myself really gave me new insights into the fact that this can’t simply be read a 200-page book, or this can’t simply be lots of text. How do I create an engaging experience is something that I’ve carried with me ever since then.

Bridget Burns: That’s great. I feel like so many folks don’t, they spend time around online on one side of the desk, but they really don’t have any personal experience with online learning. I frequently will be in conversations with folks, especially in the ed tech space, where I’m just like, have any of you taken an online class? Because I took online classes when I was in college. And I think that that sense of empathy is really useful, especially as you’re thinking about how to lead an institution. So I wanted to shift to now you’ve worked with a variety of institutions, and I feel like the biggest players. And I want to know if there’s any difference that you noticed between your current students and, for instance, at Southern New Hampshire. Is there a different kind of appetite, different priority? Or do you feel like it’s all fairly similar?

Greg Fowler: So UMGC, as you know, 75-year-old school now, has been doing a lot of this work for a long period of time. But the vast majority, well, not vast, but a substantial number of our students are military students or military-affiliated students. So give or take, about 55% of our students are either active duty military, one of their family members or veterans. And that’s a very different population because for us, it’s really important for us to have an understanding of world events and what’s happening because anything that’s happening around the world impacts our students in real time. So just in the last year or so, being able to think about, we had to have deployed students to the South China Seas. We have military exercises going on in the Ukraine. We just tried to do an evacuation from Afghanistan. A lot of those refugees are now at Ramstein Air Force Base in Germany or trying to get over here. Every time that happens for one of the students here at UMGC, we have to be aware of that because it means students who aren’t going to be in the classes. They’re going to be going away for a period of time. It’s funny, I was reading not too long ago the fact that we’ve even taught students in Antarctica. So we’ve literally been on all seven continents at this point. So how do you think about that experience? It’s a very different thing than what we were dealing with when we were dealing with students who were either in a sort of traditional adult online, if there was no such thing, experience here in the States for SNHU, or the refugee populations that we were dealing with in Africa. It’s a very different group of students. What motivates them is very different. What they come to us for in many cases is very different as well. So we have a lot of children of active service members who are overseas taking our classes who aren’t necessarily trying to get a degree from us, but are trying to up their skills or trying to get some credits done until they get back to the States. How do you think about that in a different way than these people came to us for a diploma or a degree, and we’re going to make sure they get that? So, very different audiences, different ways to motivate them, different things that we’re trying to resource as we move forward.

Doug Lederman: And that’s just a good reminder that sort of every institution, even one that has sort of a fairly well-defined mission like yours, has different groups of students. And there’s such a tendency to sort of treat students similarly. And the fact that you could have a parent and one of their children studying, you know, and needing to treat them differently, different generations, et cetera. It’s not that even you might all, people might think, oh, every UMGC student is a 32-year-old working adult, but that isn’t so.

Greg Fowler: I just wanted to say, and I think that continues to be the big challenge when we’re talking about higher education: to realize that there is no one size fits all, that different institutions, and we keep trying to lump everybody together. And when I say we, I mean the general public, it’s different institutions are doing different things and they all have value. We just got to appreciate the differences as we continue to move forward and what that may mean for the future of higher ed.

Doug Lederman: Yeah, just one other question about sort of the difference among institutions is, you know, your previous two experiences were at unusual mostly online, but private institutions, sort of freestanding. You’re now at a public institution that’s part of a larger system, and you talked about sort of having peers, peer institutions doing very different things. What has that change been like for you as a leader? And what differences do you see in, among, you know, in the people you work with, probably the students? I mean, except for the mission you just described, may not affect the students that much. But what are the, what are the key differences?

Greg Fowler: So I think one of the big ones that I’ve become aware of is being a part of the state system of Maryland means that a lot of the resourcing, a lot of the interests of the Board of Regents and others is around Maryland citizenry and what they need and how that plays out. So it becomes a different perspective when you’re trying to think about: should we partner with corporations? What community organizations should we be tied to? How might we help the citizens of Maryland get to that next level? Now, fortunately for us, UMGC is in a slightly different space than, say, College Park, which is the flagship institution, or some of the HBCUs who are primarily focused around activities here within Maryland. For us, we certainly have the DMV, which is what they call the area. It took me a while to realize that didn’t mean Department of Motor Vehicles, but it’s D.C., Maryland, Virginia, that sort of area. But so you end up with advantages of being tied to a state system and also being very much committed to a state’s interest and its citizens. But it also has certain challenges. I mean, you’ve got to work within what are the other schools in the system trying to do? How do you think about the resources that are going to you as opposed to the others? How do you work together to achieve some of the larger goals, which is not something that I had to think a lot about from an SNHU or WGU perspective in the same way? At SNHU, of course, we had the online college of online and continued education, which eventually became Global Campus. And you also had the residential campus. And there were times where we had to say we have to agree on things like student outcomes at the academic side. But for the most part, you were free to do what you wanted without that sort of larger consideration in mind.

Bridget Burns: That’s great. I mean, I think I see a lot of folks go from just an institution to one that with a strong system or go between different types of systems, but the private versus public and system, especially such an iconic system that is a really strong and vibrant system, that’s a great perspective to share. So I wanted to hear, I think, by sitting in such a unique space that you have built out the infrastructure for listening to students, I’m curious if you can share with folks what you’re hearing or seeing from students right now in terms of it seems like every month we’re dealing with a different challenge throughout the pandemic, throughout this past year. And I’m just wondering if there are any new perspectives that are popping for you that you could share with us or if you’re feeling like it’s actually just generally that still same burnout and emotional exhaustion that I think we’re seeing everywhere.

Greg Fowler: Well, I think that everything’s being shaped right now by the ups and downs of the pandemic. And I don’t think there’s any way around that. And so certainly the anxieties and a lot of the concerns that we saw earlier, we continue to see those, but certainly in the last, we’re in October now. So for the last two months or so, people have been trying to figure out what does this sort of kind of back to school new normal look like for me and for my family. So in a lot of these instances, it’s not just do I go back to school? It is I’ve got kids that are going back to school. I don’t know if they’re going to be there, if they’re going to be in school. Does that mean once they had a number of schools who’ve had to shut down again for periods of time, all of a sudden the routine that they were setting in place becomes disrupted because now the kids are back at home again. And how is that going to impact my studies? And oh, wait a minute, now someone else is sick. And the Delta variant has really caused a certain level of just chaos when it came to trying to predict anything because it became a, well, we’re going to try to take the masks off and let them back in. And now, so it’s that it is the evolution of those anxieties that continues to drive a lot of these types of things. And we see this, of course, in higher education in a number of ways. Do we have the conference? Do we not have the conference? If we have the conference, what does the conference look like? So I think those are sort of the challenges we continue to hear, which is the uncertainty. So the exhaustion continues, but it’s also evolving into we just don’t know what the next evolution will be. I was watching the news this morning and it’s, did people get their flu shots? And if they didn’t get their flu shots, will there be a spike in both the flu and COVID later? And what does that actually mean? And we’re looking at right now, for example, do we do our winter graduation in December, which is normally face-to-face? And we still haven’t quite got to the point we can say yes or no because we just don’t know. And I think that uncertainty continues to drive pretty much everything that people are trying to figure out for the next several months.

Doug Lederman: One of the things that’s been really striking in a lot of my recent conversations with higher ed leaders is the challenge of getting them finding time and creating time within their institutions to look beyond what’s right in front. And so if you have any advice about how to do that, I think that would be helpful. But I guess more broadly, what are the issues that are past what we can see right at, you know, what’s demanding attention right now? What are the areas where we collectively in higher ed and need to be focused? What are the things that are mid and, and mid—Like, we froze for a second there. Uh, okay. Um, there we go. Okay. Uh, just what, what are the, what are the issues and the questions that, that you think what we either need to be creating time for or that you have, you are planning to focus on or trying to stay focused on that go beyond what’s right in front of us?

Greg Fowler: So Doug, you actually just used the word that I would use the most, which is focus. And I was talking to some people earlier this weekend. One of the things that when I saw Bridget recently was out in San Diego at a series of meetings, and it was no surprise that things were continuing behind the scenes. It was a surprise to hear just how much had been continuing because a lot of people had been focused. But if you begin to pay attention to there have been developments, there have been iterations of different projects. People are continuing to have that conversation. The big advice I would give is to sort of go back to the fundamental basics of who you are and what you are trying to do well, as opposed to chasing what I’m continuing to say to people tends to be bright, shiny objects. A lot of institutions tend to get very much caught up in that keeping up with the Joneses cycle or get caught up in the somebody’s using this tool. So it’s got to be something we get caught up in. I remind people, of course, of years ago, the sort of MOOC spike. And it’s for leaders, it’s very easy to hear other people are doing things. And if we don’t do them, then we must be behind. I think taking a step back and going, who are the students we’re trying to serve? What do we consider to be core to our mission? Which of those pieces do we need to advance as we move forward? It will be helpful to keep that type of focus with also some understanding of there continues to be evolution in the higher ed space. So it’s not a sit still, but it’s also not try to find seven things to do. It’s like I’ve talked to my team several times and said, I don’t need 5,000 questions to answer. I need about the right three, and we got to figure out what those three are. I will continue to make the case that focusing on students and what their needs are and how we are learning, how those needs are evolving will continue to be at the core of that. A lot of these other things you see the conversations around what is the role of the faculty as we continue to move forward? How does learning happen in these new environments? These are questions that we should be trying to answer, but I think we need to do so in a deliberate, intentional way and not simply react, which is what I’m beginning to see some people do as they continue to see Nathan Grawe’s conversations about demographics play out in people’s minds. And it’s like these things may be happening, but reacting too quickly will not help you. So be patient, be focused, to use the words you used again, and figure out which two or three things you’re going to try to drive for rather than trying to change everything at once.

Bridget Burns: That’s great. I’ve been seeing that a lot where folks have just been part of every COVID committee under the sun, and all they do is think and talk about it. And it just, it’s missing, we’re missing out on leveraging so much of our talent and our skill by not encouraging at least some folks to be pulled out and separated so that they are focusing on the long game. I’ve seen some examples where some folks are excluded from those cabinet conversations because it’s their job to keep the eye of the institution on the ball. So I love that focus on really your bread and butter of what you’re good at. I want to shift to you.

Greg Fowler: Oh, yeah. I just say real quickly: I think that one of the things we’ve learned in this online pandemic stage is that activity and progress are not the same thing. And you’ve got a lot of people who are in meetings that aren’t necessarily helping them get things done, but they feel busy because they’re doing a lot of things. So, what I would say to people is try to make sure you have a sense of a direction and the milestones that are going to get you there. Otherwise, you’ve got a lot of busyness and that only contributes to the exhaustion that people feel, but it doesn’t necessarily move you forward in the types of things you’re trying to get done.

Bridget Burns: That is a tattoo, I think. Somebody should get right. Activity and progress are not the same thing. I’m like, that one plus having a meeting is not an outcome. I mean, those are both really good, like temporary tattoos, I think, for higher ed. So, I want to shift to you and your leadership in our last few minutes. I am curious about, as you have had such significant roles in higher ed and you have really moved, but you’ve stayed in places a really long time. So you’ve been a leader and you’ve really showed up. I’m just curious about what advice someone else gave you that has most profoundly affected your career. Who was it and what was that advice?

Greg Fowler: So, you know, I have to give a lot of credit to my former boss, Steve Hodownes, who was the CEO of the College of Online and Continuing Education at SNHU when I took the job there. And I think the reason for that is because Steve said something once that I’ve never forgotten and he said it to a lot of our team members. It was that if you’re not measuring, you’re just practicing. And I think a lot of the ability to say, how do we put in place KPIs that we’re going to truly hold ourselves accountable for? I’d certainly seen that play out in a lot of the work that I’ve done. I mean, certainly competencies at WGU played a big role in that, but the ability to sort of sit down and go, no, really, if we are saying we’re doing this for students, how do we know that? What’s the metric that’s going to tell us if that’s true or not? And how do we continue to try to build on that over a period of time? He was the first person who really got me focused on that idea of trying to make sure that the outcomes and accountabilities that we need to have, we actually put in place. And it’s something I’ve never served me really well because, of course, as a faculty member myself, that wasn’t one of the things that I spent a lot of time thinking about. When I was a faculty member, students magically showed up on the rolls, and I was supposed to teach them, and they were mine, but I didn’t understand the rest of the business side of it. He really has played a big role in having me understand a lot of the various ways that all the pieces of higher education come together. And I think that just for the future reference of people, faculty and administration are often at odds, not because they are really at odds, but because they don’t communicate well. And I think helping to have a certain amount of transparency around what each other is doing and helping faculty understand these are the pieces will be a critical piece of evolution as they continue to move forward. So got to give my hat off to Steve Hodownes for that.

Bridget Burns: I mean, these are pretty good ones. I feel like that one as well. It’s these are, we can make a coffee cup out of like these are, we could start selling these on Inside Higher Ed and be a whole new revenue line. The other question I was curious about is as other leaders come to you and seek advice, what advice do you find yourself most frequently giving that you have learned yourself that you think is really important and you always lead with?

Greg Fowler: So it’s really two pieces. One is an old piece of advice that I heard growing up from my mom and others, and that is God gave you two ears and two eyes and one mouth for a reason. Um, and the ability to listen and hear, and I mean, and I mean, truly listen, um, is something that many leaders don’t have. Um, they think they’re listening, but they’re really just waiting for the other person to stop talking. Um, so the ability to really listen to the various stakeholders and allow them to do the work, um, and then speak only when you need to on things is a big part of that. The other big thing that I would say is: um, leaders have to be comfortable with what is their superpower and what is their kryptonite. Um, the what I’m not going to be good at everything, and I’ve got to be comfortable recognizing what I am good at, and then build the team that supports you in the areas of weakness that you don’t have, empower them, and then trust them to do the job. Um, that’s the only way as a team to move forward. But I see a lot of leaders who are very much caught up in either the headline or the ego or worried that somebody’s going to outshine them or that they’re going to look like they don’t know when, in fact, they don’t have to always know. Um, I think for leadership, that level of humility and laughing at yourself is and saying, Okay, I’ll be better today than I am. I’ll be better today than I was yesterday, and I’ll be better hopefully tomorrow than I am today. Um, is just an approach that keeps you from feeling like you have to have all the answers when you walk in the room because you’re not going to. Um, and I think a lot of people just aren’t comfortable with that, and that you’re going to get some things wrong. And I think that if you do this right, you also allow them for your leadership and your team members to walk in with a certain comfort level because if you know you’re not going to get it always right giving them that same benefit of the doubt allows them to have a space of safety to try things and hopefully innovate and do some things that you didn’t even know they were going to be possible to do.

Bridget Burns: Well, that was, I think that’s some good stuff. We’ve got several quotables that are going to be circulating the internet, I think, for quite some time now. So we appreciate you spending this time with us today. And I think you’ve given us some great things to really think about and process. Doug, thanks for being a great co-host. But this has just been a real pleasure. And you’re welcome to come back anytime. If you’d like to, Greg, we’d love to have you come back. So thanks so much. And for those of you at home, we hope this has been useful. We know it’s been useful. Don’t get those tattooed, but again, coffee mug, perhaps. And otherwise, we hope you have a wonderful week.

Greg Fowler: Thanks.

Doug Lederman: Have a great week, everybody.

Greg Fowler: You too.