Weekly Wisdom | Morehouse College President David A. Thomas

Bridget Burns: Hi, and 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: 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 try and unpack what it’s like to navigate this moment and to hopefully get some inspiration and distill some wisdom to share with you for the week ahead, which is why we call it Start the Week with Wisdom.

Doug Lederman: And we’re joined today by David A. Thomas, who’s president of Morehouse College in Atlanta. He’s not in Atlanta today, though. Maybe he’ll tell us where he is. President Thomas has led the institution since 2018, previously served in leadership positions at both Georgetown and Harvard Universities. Welcome to the program, Dr. Thomas.

David A. Thomas: Thank you. It’s great to be here with you.

Bridget Burns: And we can’t see you right this second, so I don’t know if you can reinstall, like turn your camera back on or there you go.

David A. Thomas: Let there be light.

Bridget Burns: Perfect. Okay.

David A. Thomas: It’s great to be here with you.

Bridget Burns: Well, we’re delighted to have you and thanks for making the time. And we know that you are getting very excited about the Harvard versus Morehouse game tonight. So we’re all pulling in.

David A. Thomas: Tomorrow.

Bridget Burns: Tomorrow. Sorry. Okay, so good.

David A. Thomas: Yeah, tonight’s a reception and dinner for the team and for alumni. And tomorrow’s the game.

Bridget Burns: Well, that’s, I’m sure that we are not the only ones who are definitely rooting for Morehouse. So very delighted to have you here today. So thanks again for making the time to be with us. And I wanted to first give you a chance to share with folks where things are in the world right now for Morehouse in terms of are you in person? Are you virtual? Kind of what’s going on in your world so that we can then dive into a conversation about how that’s affecting your leadership.

David A. Thomas: Yeah, so we are fully open as a campus. All of our 2,300 students are taking classes on campus. We also have about 25% of our classes for residential students that are still being offered remotely by faculty, but 75% are either fully in person or hybrid. And we’ve had a very successful opening as we move toward Thanksgiving. We’ve had very strict COVID protocols and they’ve proven to be quite effective. We kept our infection rate below 1% consistently, and most of the time below half a percent. And that’s really says something given Georgia’s been, you know, very high in its positivity rate. And we’re in one of the counties with the highest positivity rate. So it says a lot about our community that we’ve been able to do that. But we’re fully back. We also launched our first online degree program for nontraditional students this fall. So Morehouse is the first historically Black college to have a globally available undergraduate degree. And right now, that’s in business management. And we’re hoping to launch one or two more this year and several others over the course of the next three years.

Bridget Burns: That’s great. Do you feel like just not to go off track, but that’s a smart timing, right, to leverage the experience of the pandemic and be in a position to really start meeting the needs that we know have been undermet in society. So do you feel like, you know, if COVID hadn’t existed, do you think you’d be offering that right now?

David A. Thomas: Yes. We actually started the conversation before COVID hit. And it was interesting because, in that sense, because we were able to demonstrate that we could take our entire curriculum online, you know, quite successfully, some of the questions about, you know, going online, being a liberal arts college, et cetera, et cetera, sort of dissipated. But we had begun that conversation well before as part of our strategic planning process. We started to ask the question, you know, how could Morehouse more powerfully deliver on its mission and use our brand to do that? And we came up with a concept called Morehouse Beyond Borders. And what that meant was that in contrast to the last 152 years where we had the same delivery model, young men came, spent four to six years on campus, went out, changed the world. The world came to Morehouse. Morehouse didn’t go to the world. And so we said Morehouse Beyond Borders is about Morehouse going to the world. And how do we do that? And that led us down a path to think about alternative ways to deliver what we’re really good at, which is teaching and learning in higher education.

Bridget Burns: That’s great. I love that it’s not an afterthought. And just in general, leveraging the momentum of this moment, there’s a lot of confidence institutions have earned and they should draw upon from COVID. So, well, I did want to also, Doug, do you want to ask about MacKenzie Scott or?

Doug Lederman: No, go ahead. I want to actually, let me ask just one other thing on this because we just did a story in the last week or two about quite a bit of activity in the HBCU space related to online learning and including some interesting questions about sort of what, how to bring the HBCU experience, which is pretty different in terms of how you do things into a virtual space. And this is not a question only for online institutions. We’ve talked about it in the past about religious institutions, like how does Lutheran online education differ from X or Y? But I’m curious, as you think about it, sort of, are there ways that you are already identifying that can sort of bring the HBCU way of teaching and learning and character building, which is so important for a place like Morehouse, into a virtual space?

David A. Thomas: Yeah, we’ve spent a lot of time thinking about it. And one of the ways we’ve gone about it is thinking about what are some of the common touchstones that all of our students are exposed to. And one of them, for example, is something called Crown Forum. Every week, all of our students are required to attend Crown Forum. And in Crown Forum, we do a number of activities and speakers that, if you will, transcend any particular class and really speak to the values of Morehouse College: leadership, social change, being an ethical leader, the importance of spirituality, and being what we now refer to as global cosmopolitans. So we have Crown Forum for our online students. Also, our faculty have begun to think about how you create community and bringing topics into the classroom, whether they’re teaching finance or they’re teaching psychology or they’re teaching one of our general education classes that have the same questions that we put before our students in class. And if you were to come to Morehouse, probably doesn’t matter what class you’re taking, you’re going to experience those themes of leadership, social justice, ethics, even in some of the group tasks that we give students. For example, in our science-based classes, we commonly ask students to form small groups, take what they’ve learned in this particular science class, and apply it to a problem in their community and how to make a difference using science, using mathematics. And we’re taking some of those same strategies into our online arena. And over time, what we probably will add to our online curriculum or co-curricular activity is the opportunity for our online students, not as a requirement, but if their capabilities allow to come to campus and experience some of the more ritualistic events that define Morehouse.

Bridget Burns: That’s smart. I’ve seen some campuses try and do that where it’s like almost like you get one trip either a year or at some point during your undergraduate experience or your graduate experience, so you get a chance to experience the campus. So that’s great. And I’m guessing this is connected to the next question I wanted to ask you, which is: you’re one of the leaders who has received that very weird phone call and/or email that probably caught you off guard and received a generous gift from MacKenzie Scott. And I’m wondering if people are always interested in hearing the story of how you found out and if there’s anything that for you, really, when you’re thinking about the future of Morehouse and what you’re able to accomplish, is there something that in particular this is enabling that you just wouldn’t be in this position if you didn’t have this opportunity?

David A. Thomas: Yeah, so you want to hear the answer to the second part first or you want to hear the answer?

Bridget Burns: Either way, yeah, sure.

David A. Thomas: Okay. So becoming aware of the gift was only interesting in that I had gotten an email, not unlike many emails I get, you know, where somebody writes and says, love to talk to you, like to be helpful to the college. Nothing specific, not from any name that I remember. Person also says they represent someone. I get a lot of those. And a lot of them are, you know, if you will, dry wells, you know, or they’re trying to sell me something, but they, you know. So I was having a board meeting. And our board, my assistant called, said, there’s this person who’s called a number, who’s now called a number of times, said they emailed you. They’d really like to talk to you. And I said, well, you know, I’m going to be in the board meeting. I can’t talk to him. So the board meeting ends early. My assistant tracks me. So says, can you take this call? I said, only if they can call me at this particular time. She sends me back a note, they can call you at that time. Person calls, starts to talk to me, and is using the term, you know, is using MacKenzie. My first instincts, having been at the Harvard Business School for a long period of time, was it was McKinsey Consulting. And then she said something else, and I said, MacKenzie Scott of Amazon. I’m thinking in my head. She says, Yep. She goes through, that’s who I represent, giving this gift. No strings attached. We’re not going to tell you what to do with it, which is music to a president’s ears. And then, and still hasn’t told me how much. I get to the end, and I’m just about to say, well, nice, but how much money are we talking about? And then she says, Oh, and it’ll be $20 million. And immediately, you know, we think we can deliver it to you with some small, you know, sign-offs. And I was floored. Well, the great thing about it was: if you want to say, what did the gift enable? The next day, I was presenting to my board, which is a group of very smart, you know, many of them business people, former presidents of colleges who ask very hard questions. I walk in, the first thing I do is announce the gift. And then I ask if there’s any discussion about my strategic plan. Well, there wasn’t much.

Doug Lederman: Yeah, those board meetings go a hell of a lot better when you’re when you’ve got really good news to deliver.

David A. Thomas: That’s right, right. $40 million worth. And in terms of enabling our work, it also turned out that we had identified four areas where for us to really achieve our strategic plan, we would have to figure out how to make a set of strategic investments that were not currently built into our economic capabilities, if you will. But we were going to have to go out and find that money. We want to launch a $500 million capital campaign. We needed to build our advancement apparatus, which had never raised more than $19 million in a single year. They were raising about $12 million when I arrived. We had to invest in communications and being more digital. Our technology infrastructure is antiquated. And finally, we had to invest in new streams of revenue and new ideas consistent with Morehouse Beyond Borders. And so we’ve used, and the interesting thing about it was that we estimated that we would need to invest about $14 million over the next three years. And $20 million from MacKenzie Scott gave us confidence that we could move forward. And so we immediately invested in those strategic initiatives. And then, you know, we’ve also used those funds to make sure that we have what we didn’t have four years ago, which is adequate unrestricted reserves. And, you know, when we went into COVID, the COVID pandemic, our biggest fear was the economic impact, because quite frankly, we didn’t have enough in reserves to take us through more than about 12 months if that crisis had really been the calamity that some people were predicting.

Bridget Burns: Well, that’s good news that it came, good news that it came on your board meeting day, but it also does speak to as leaders who have to make hard decisions all the time. I think there’s something, you know, yes, everyone would love to have a gift from MacKenzie Scott, but there is just something so powerful about positioning leaders to kind of have that breathing room to be able to make those strategic moves instead of always having to negotiate internally of you know, borrow from here. And it kind of promotes, you know, defensive thinking. And whereas you can play offense when you can actually kind of clear the space so you can see the opportunity. So I think that’s wonderful.

David A. Thomas: Yeah, and you’re absolutely right, right, Bridget. That’s exactly what it did for us.

Bridget Burns: Wonderful. Well, I did want to also follow up and see, you know, there’s a lot of focus on partnering with HBCUs these days. I’m noticing that everyone’s probably reaching out and contacting you. And I’m wondering that’s that can create a lot of inbound. And how do you, as a leader, make decisions right now about what things are actually worth your limited amount of time and the energy of Morehouse? Because you have as much.

David A. Thomas: So it’s interesting how, you know, not to sound too cosmic, but when you have focus, you know, the universe organizes around you. And another theme we became focused on in our strategic plan was what we call partnerships of purpose. And the meaning of that was we had arrived at the conclusion that we cannot do everything our students need or provide everything we can to the world by ourselves. And that we needed to develop partnerships of purpose, which means not just partnerships driven by, you know, financial exigencies, but by shared values and long-term commitments and ways of working that will create sustainability beyond the time of whatever leaders sign the pact. And we use that to assess the partnerships that we engage in now. And I’ll give you one great example. We created a partnership with Spelman, a group called the Black Economic Alliance and Morehouse to create the Center for Black Entrepreneurship. We started that initiative in the summer of ’20. So it was during the pandemic. And today, we’ve raised close to $20 million to launch it less than a year. We’ve also raised another $20 million for an investment fund for entrepreneurs that come out of our Black entrepreneurship effort, as well as who are connected to other HBCUs to invest in startups. And we’re using that money in a way to invest in faculty, scholarships, development of the center that we know will be sustainable well beyond this moment. In the past, we might have been vulnerable to somebody coming, telling us they would give us, you know, a nice but low six-figure gift, then saying set up a center, but with no capacity to endow that center. And when that $200,000 ran out, it would lose energy. So today, when people call me up with those ideas, I’ve literally said, you know, thank you. Every dollar matters, but we can’t launch that initiative on those kinds of funds. Here’s what we can do with those kinds of funds, but we can only make big promises around partnerships that we see as investing with us to create sustainable solutions.

Bridget Burns: That’s great.

Doug Lederman: Keep going. Okay, you were muted.

Bridget Burns: Sorry. No, sorry. So, I did want to ask: so, coming from Georgetown, and most folks might know that, you know, Morehouse, the Morehouse man, is an iconic leader. And I think of the image of the Morehouse men coming out at Oprah’s final show, right? Like, no moment, no other institution in higher ed has had a moment like that. And so, I’m just wondering what was it like going from an institution, a very somewhat traditional institution, to one that is focused solely on serving men. And predominantly Black men.

David A. Thomas: What surprises people is I didn’t experience the transition to be difficult at all. I think part of that is that the same thing that got me to leave Harvard Business School after 22 years and go to Georgetown was very consistent with what got me to leave Georgetown. And actually, I was on my way back to Harvard when Morehouse called me. And the consistency is in the fact that there’s a normative set of values that guide both institutions. For Georgetown, they’re based in their Jesuit tradition. The notion of cura personalis, care for the whole person, the idea of men and women for others, which is about service. At Morehouse, there’s a normative set of values that start with social justice, followed by the idea that we build, create men who become leaders and servants to their communities. And leadership at Morehouse means you’re about making change and guiding that. And it doesn’t matter whether you go into medicine and you become former secretary of Health and Human Services, Louis Sullivan. You go into the law, you become Jeh Johnson, former secretary, Homeland Security. You can just go down the line, or you become Walter Massey, former president of Morehouse, but also former director of the National Science Foundation. Or you become Raphael Warnock, the first Black senator from Georgia, who is a preacher. But it’s about leadership and service and this notion of having an ethical base. So, you know, in that sense, in both contexts, the values resonated with me. And I thought, you know, because my values resonated with their values, our differences wouldn’t get in the way. So I’m not Catholic, but I resonated with Georgetown’s values. And I’m the first non-alum to be president of Morehouse College in 50 years. Right? And some people thought those things would get in the way, or the fact that I had never been at an HBCU. You know, the other thing that is different is at Morehouse, many days I feel like my own biography has come full circle. I grew up in segregated Kansas City, Missouri in the 1950s and ’60s, became enamored of Morehouse because Martin Luther King went there. I couldn’t afford to come to Morehouse, so I went in a different direction. I grew up in a family of all boys. I had a great father who was the first leader I knew. And now I’m here leading an institution of all young men who come as boys and leave as men. So, you know, I didn’t have that experience in Georgetown, and it’s great.

Doug Lederman: Curious, I mean, there’s a lot of concern about the state of men in higher education right now. And I’m curious, you know, Morehouse is probably in a little bit of a unique situation because of that tradition and your, you know, I don’t think you struggle necessarily to find men to enroll. But I’m curious, sort of, what your experience leading an institution focused on educating men can inform sort of everybody else in higher education about the issues that we’re seeing broadly in enrollment of men, success of men in college, et cetera. Just what do you think about that?

David A. Thomas: What I think is hard for us still to do in our society is to focus on differences that matter and not fear that we’re not going to serve everyone equitably. So, what I would say about my experience at Georgetown is that it would have been a much harder conversation and much more politically fraught to say, you know what, there are experiences of men that we should address that are specific to men, right? That would have been a political bombshell or a minefield, if not bombshell. At Morehouse, part of our success is that we can speak explicitly to those things without worrying about that minefield. And, you know, I think if we had a way in our co-ed institutions, and by the way, you know, there are only three all-male undergraduate institutions left in higher education. So, you know, collectively we serve about 1% of all men who are in college. So it is important for those other institutions that are co-ed to develop that muscle that rather than it being the tyranny of the “or,” it is the empowerment of the “and,” right. But they don’t have that capacity. And I think why, you know, we experience the success. And the great thing about Morehouse is we experience this tremendous success when 60% of our students are Pell eligible. So we’re not educating, you know, some people think, you know, we’re out educating the wealthy Black community, but that’s far from the truth. Only 2% of our students come from families that can pay the full cost of Morehouse. But I think why we’re able to have the success we have is because we’re able to directly address those specific statistics and things we know about the difference in the experience of men and women that can make them vulnerable.

Doug Lederman: Maybe for another conversation, I’d love to talk a little bit more about what from your experience is transferable. Because I just think that’s, you know, you’re right that if the only place that you can do what you do is in those three institutions that serve, you know, a few thousand people, you know, thousands of people a year, there’s a lot of unaddressed issues out there. So, anyway, but thanks for that.

Bridget Burns: No, that’s a great question. I mean, I literally just had a conversation on Friday with Mitch Daniels and Michael Crow about the topic of what we’re going to do as a country to address what’s happening for young men, and especially we look at enrollment pipelines. And I just don’t know who’s leading nationally in that conversation. And perhaps we should talk to President Thomas then in terms of, I mean, there’s, you’re right, only three institutions actually know like exclusively can give a level of expertise that we should be tapping. Well, good question. We could wormhole on that all day, I think, because I think it’s really fascinating and couldn’t come up at a better time. I do want to wrap things up, though, President Thomas, because I know you’re very busy. I would love for you to share with folks the advice that you have received as a leader that or that has served you best as a leader. Who gave you advice in your life that when you think about your leadership, really it has been the message that helped you the most?

David A. Thomas: The two critical skills of being a leader are one, knowing how to ask the right question and two, knowing how to listen. And if you put those two together, it means that in most rooms you’re in, when you’re talking about important topics, you’re probably speaking less than everybody else because you’re asking questions and you’re listening. And I think if you were to go to people who’ve worked with me and ask them to describe me, those two characteristics would probably be perhaps the only thing common across the group.

Bridget Burns: Well, those are great characteristics to be known for, and that is great advice. The other part I wanted to ask is you are, I mean, as someone who is leading a lot of men, but also in general, who’s had a very distinguished career, I’m sure that people come to you for advice about leadership as well. And I’m wondering, what advice do you find yourself most frequently offering other than what you just shared with us?

David A. Thomas: Other than that, people usually come to me at two moments. Moments where they are struggling and struggling much more with, you know, why people aren’t moving in the direction they want them to move. And sometimes, with that is a story that that leader has taken sort of personally. And I remind them that, you know, most of the time it’s really not about us. And that part of what we have to learn to deal with is that in these roles, we are more object than we are subject to people. Right? And, you know, so I remember when I was dean at Georgetown, a faculty member came in and he said, I assume that you want me to resign. He was chair of a department, really good chair, I thought. But we disagreed fundamentally on something. He had accused me of cutting a deal. I gave him the data and said, now you go check it out yourself. And he was a very good person. So he went and checked it out. And he came back and he said, I assume you want to fire me. I said, why is that? He said, because I checked out everything and I was totally wrong. And I assumed that you were angry at me. And I said, no, it never, I said, no, I didn’t want to fire you. And I said, I wasn’t angry. I was hurt. And you could see in his eyes that it had never occurred to him that he could hurt the dean, right? That I’m a human being, right? And most of the time, people see you in many ways as an object. It’s like I walk in a room, nobody knows who I am. Suddenly, you know, somebody says, Oh, you know, that’s the president. People will literally come back around and apologize for having treated me like a regular person. I didn’t know you were the president, right? Otherwise, I would have treated you like an object. As opposed to, I just thought you were this guy, David Thomas, standing there looking like the rest of us. And the other piece, the other time people come to me is when they’re trying to figure out how to be successful. And it’s oftentimes minorities and women who are moving into roles that they’re the first or that they know are highly scrutinized. And my advice to them is, you got to let all that go, right? That you just have to wake up every day and really try to embrace doing the best you can. Because if you worry about the fact that the world is watching you and that really matters, or that’s what matters most, you may be successful, but you won’t be as powerful and impactful as you can be about the things you care about. And, you know, I’ve had a number of young leaders really go work with just that advice and come back to me later and say, it took me a while, but I got what you were saying, and you were absolutely right.

Bridget Burns: That really is excellent advice. Doug, you had a follow-up question?

Doug Lederman: No, I was just, I was, I was going to ask whether you think on that object versus subject thing, my sense is that there are some leaders who like being treated as objects and actually make that happen. And I think that’s, yeah.

David A. Thomas: You’re absolutely right. Because, you know, the other thing about being in these roles is, you know, you constantly feel the vulnerability of these roles. And being colluding with the objectification of you is also a way to protect you from the real vulnerabilities, right? Because you know, you do have to think about who you said that to. So, so me telling that person that I was hurt by what they did was also my assessment that they were a good human being and that our disagreement was an honest disagreement. But because he had made me object, he thought I must be up to some power play because that’s the way he had experienced leadership in the past, right? And he just projected that onto me and didn’t see the other data that was available to him. But because I thought, but I could imagine somebody I would say that to, and they would come and say, Oh, you know, the dean was trying to get me to be sympathetic to him, put me on a guilt trip. And I was, I was, I had only been dean about 18 months, and I was shaking the place up. And there were people who, you know, didn’t know what it meant to have this guy come from Harvard and yada, yada, yada. And, you know, he’s a Black guy. And so I think you’re absolutely right. And I know a number of presidents who do invest in their objectification. Right. This is a buffer. You know, and it’s a social defense.

Bridget Burns: That’s really interesting. That makes me think about how, you know, we you see a lot of people talking about folks walking around in the world with from with unhealed childhoods. And so you’re kind of like, you know, passing on this story and the and your trauma and others. But like, I think people also carry around their terrible leadership experiences and they pass them on to others, right? Like how you were managed poorly is how you will manage poorly, how you, if you have been hurt by leadership in the past, that you might actually inflict that on others. So just that everyone really has this conception of leadership that is born from their experience. And we have to kind of question that. But I think there’s that, you know.

David A. Thomas: And I also get bruised as a leader. So it’s sort of like I’m committed to transparency. What I’ve learned being a leader is that if you walk into an institution that hasn’t been used to transparency and you become transparent, people always think you’re lying. Right. And, you know, if there’s anything, right? I’m invested in my integrity. That’s why I wanted to be transparent. But then, you know, I’ve experienced people say he must be lying. Why? Because in the absence of facts, people make them up. And then when you go tell them the real facts and they’re not consistent with theirs, you must be lying because they already have a story for why things are the way they are. And it’s very easy to take that personally. And how many times have we seen leaders come in, start out by doing a town hall every quarter, three years into their leadership, they’re not doing any town halls? And if they are, they’re not taking any questions. And the town hall is a lecture, not an exploration of what’s important or where the institution is actually at.

Bridget Burns: That is true.

David A. Thomas: So I know you guys have other things to do. And he looks like he’s getting anxious. So I don’t want to keep you on too long, but you know, I’ve actually enjoyed this tremendously.

Bridget Burns: Agreed. Pleasure. This has been wonderful to have this deeper conversation. So thank you so much, President Thomas. We’re really grateful for the time and just the impressive work that you’re leading and clearly the talent and expertise that we should be tapping more consistently. Doug, excellent co-hosting, as always. And for those of you at home, we will see you next week where we’ll have President Nicole Hurd from Lafayette who will be our host. And we’ll see you next week. Go Tigers tomorrow night.

David A. Thomas: Yes, go Tigers.

Doug Lederman: All right, go Tigers. Take care.