Navigating Market Shifts in Higher Education with Strategic Innovation

Jonathan Morgan [00:00:00]:

Welcome to The Strategy Gap, a show for leaders who want to bridge the gap between strategy creation and strategy execution. I'm Jonathan Morgan, and along with Joe Krause, each episode we have conversations with strategy and operational leaders on key issues in strategic planning and strategy execution. If you're looking to actually accomplish your goals, this is the show for you. Joining us today is Shawn Daley. Shawn is the chief strategy and business development officer at George Fox University, the largest private university by enrollment in the state of Oregon. Doctor Daley was formerly a professor of educational technology before he became an administrator. He has been in education now for 25 years. As a native New Yorker, he continues to root for the New York Mets.

Jonathan Morgan [00:00:49]:

Unfortunately, I'm a Braves fan, so I'm not going to approve of that, even though he's been living in the Pacific Northwest for longer than he's able to admit. So, Shawn, welcome to the show.

Shawn Daley [00:00:58]:

Thank you so much. Like you. And they did split the series this past weekend, so at least they're, they're even keel now.

Jonathan Morgan [00:01:05]:

Yeah. And they've passed this in the standings. But we all know that the Mets will fall apart eventually, so we'll count on that for the end of the season.

Shawn Daley [00:01:13]:

Yeah. Sadly, this is most likely true.

Jonathan Morgan [00:01:17]:

Perfect. Well, Shawn, for those that are not familiar with George Fox University, I did want to give you the opportunity just to kick things off by introducing the university and your role and what it entails for the university.

Shawn Daley [00:01:28]:

Certainly, you know, George Fox used to be a best kept secret, like, you know, and still in certain circles, like, it's considered a best kept secret. But now we're going to have the largest freshman class in our history in a year where with all of these FAFSA issues that have stifled other institutions and people are very worried about who's coming in the door this upcoming fall, we're going to actually have more students than we might even know what to do with. We're currently, like, building beds to be able to facilitate new students who are coming in. But we've grown both in the graduate side and undergraduate side to be able to be where we are, which is a strong health sciences, business engineering school right at the footsteps of wine country in northern Oregon. And then to answer your other question about my role, I'm an advisor. I work with all of the other members of the leadership team to be able to help them with executing on their plans for being able to assure that we continue to grow, continue to serve our mission of a Christ centered education in the northwest.

Jonathan Morgan [00:02:28]:

Perfect. Well, in a recent episode of the strategy gap for those listeners that may have heard, we talked with Larkin Briley from Belmont University, and one of the topics on that conversation was about the enrollment cliff and how that's changed things for universities similar to our conversation today. Shawn, when we last connected, you shared a similar interesting perspective of universities. They historically aren't very strategic, but there's a lot of changing that needs to be happening and is happening across the landscape of higher education. I wanted to start off with what's your perspective on how universities have typically operated and what you see as the next evolution for higher education strategy?

Shawn Daley [00:03:07]:

I've been observing this now for a decade, and I think that part of the challenge historically, Jonathan, has been that, you know, professors really go deep into their area. I did my PhD when I was an administrator, so I was trying to juggle those two balls and I was one day complaining about how much was coming down the pike at my institution. And she paused and asked me, she said, what are you talking about? So I stopped to explain it to her and she's like, I have no idea of anything that you're discussing. I don't pay any attention to these trends or habits. And what that really taught me was that there are a lot of people who are involved in the governance of universities who aren't really looking at the broader landscape or as universities, as market driven organizations. And that means that they struggle when the market changes. And over the last 20 years, the changes in technology have just radically reformed how colleges work, who can access them, which institutions are out there growing and utilizing for profit techniques to be able to get the attention and mind share of people who want to go to school. And that's really changed the playing field for a lot of institutions, especially small institutions, which before online education had a definite number of students who'd be able to come because schools were predicated on the number of seats or number of beds you could provide.

Shawn Daley [00:04:22]:

And now those seats are digital and so the numbers are infinite. And a lot of schools don't really have customers who want to come out to their locations and don't have to because there are other options. Those schools still haven't pivoted their strategy to be able to address what's happening in those circles.

Joe Krause [00:04:38]:

That makes sense. And I think the point you're making around certain people, maybe in the administration, maybe being focused on their specific area, but not zooming out, it just speaks to the idea of to have effective strategy management in any organization, there has to be a level of curiosity that has to exist at all levels like curiosity can't just be here. I'm just focused on my domain and that's it. So I think that's a good point to bring up. And the comment that you made around for profit techniques. It is. My wife worked in higher education probably from 2006 to around 2013, and I brought this up quite a bit where they're having issues potentially with people putting in the right amount of hours or having the right incentive. As I'm like, well, you should put this in place.

Joe Krause [00:05:14]:

And talking a lot about for profit type of techniques. She goes, oh, that'll never fly. Higher education, we do things differently. It's about the education. So are you seeing more universities kind of coming around to, if we do x in marketing, we expect, why return those types of conversations that maybe have been happening for decades outside of higher education? They're starting to kind of permeate into the nonprofit space.

Shawn Daley [00:05:36]:

We're in an interesting spot. I mean, I'm not sure if you were following, but there was an online program manager called two U that declared bankruptcy last week. And it created this conversation about where did two U come from? I mean, two U was providing services to universities and enrollment, marketing, recruitment, it went belly up like this last week. Like, it caused a lot of reflection as to, well, you know, that was predatory. It should never have existed to other people saying, well, it only came to be because universities realized they needed those services to be able to do their work. And the reason it went bankrupt was because a lot of institutions have adopted the techniques that that organization had originally provided, which to me was the right approach. Right. You learned how to be able to do those things that this really savvy market organization was able to provide.

Shawn Daley [00:06:24]:

And then you go and do it yourself and incorporate that into the university. And you see some of the bigger institutions, like Grand Canyon, like southern New Hampshire, Liberty, these institutions that weren't on the map 20 years ago now are on the map because they've adopted these techniques like, you know, into what they're doing. And I don't know if every institution is using these. Like, I think that they now are looking fondly and saying, oh, we made a strategic mistake by not doing that. And I don't know if they're going to be able to catch up in the given time that they have and given the head start that some of those other organizations do have.

Jonathan Morgan [00:06:56]:

This conversation is largely focused on higher education. But in talking to individuals across different industries, whether it's government or healthcare or nonprofit organizations, I feel like this is a common trend that happens across the board where people were operating in a sense of, this is the way we always did things and even in the commercial side, and this is the way that we're going to do things moving forward. But this conversation, I think, is important for those listeners across the board to think about outside of my organization, in other industries, what are people doing and how are they thinking about strategy and how are they thinking about technology so that I can go ahead and push my organization forward. So a quick follow up question. How much of the learnings do you bring from what you're seeing other higher education institutions doing versus looking at different types of industries, at different types of organizations as a whole?

Shawn Daley [00:07:46]:

I think it's a little bit of both. I was in a, I was on a panel for the Urban Land Institute two weeks ago. It was sort of a strange invite to come and talk about what do I see in real estate and what do I see in urban planning? And I was sort of struck because, like, hey, my panel went fine, and then I was there for this, like, local hotel year to come and talk about radical hospitality. And it was like the greatest talk I've seen at an event probably in the last ten years. And so I went right back to my team and said, this guy has it down, and we should be looking at what this hospitality industry stuff is doing for what we're thinking about when it comes to parents and students who are coming to visit the institution and what they're looking for in terms of experience. I think to my enrollment officer's credit, her name is Lindsay Knox. I mean, she already thinks this way. I think it's always hard for us to be able to share that with faculty who want things to be hard.

Shawn Daley [00:08:38]:

And we're not saying to get rid of rigor, but at the same time, the way that this hotelier talked about it, I was just sort of struck by like, oh, that's something that we should be thinking about. We talk a lot about companies like Disney. We look at how tech companies build their infrastructure. I remember sitting at a talk at Udacity, which was a tech company on its own now as part of accenture, and I remember one of their experienced officers is our goal is to delight the learner. That was just something that made an impression on me, and I always bring back to faculty. I'm like, do you have moments in class like, yes, please be hard. But at the same time, do you have moments where you delight and surprise the learner, where someone is really like, that's an interesting awareness. I try to be able to look at what's happening in other sectors.

Shawn Daley [00:09:20]:

And I do balance that with, like, hey, if another institution is really winning, right? And they're growing, I always want to know, like, okay, well, what are they doing specifically? And is it something that we could map? And one of the benefits of my job as the strategy officer is that I don't have too, too many direct reports on purpose to free me up to be able to go into, attend, visit, see, conferences, workshops, other colleges. In the past, I'd say six months, I visited at least six other states, been to ten other schools looking at their operations. And the beautiful thing still about higher education is that it's a bit more collaborative overall. Not every institution I've been able to just pop up at various schools and they share, here's what we're doing. Here's the program we're starting. And I bring that back to, could we do something that resembles this because it's working for this school in Tennessee or it's working for this school in North Carolina? And could it work out here in Oregon?

Joe Krause [00:10:12]:

That's interesting you say that, because I've been traveling around the country quite a bit over the last decade, and I've had the experience of staying at Cornell, where they have the hotel actually on campus, which is run by students, also University of Houston, same concept, but they actually have a Hilton on property. Freshman, you're cleaning the property, and as a senior, you're the hotel manager. It's a kind of a cool concept. And to your point, it is a little bit outside the box, because I know as a 2006 undergraduate, my freshman dorm was, what's the call it? A rustic shared bathrooms and all that. And as my wife was an admissions counselor, she would see all these different universities, people that are uninformed, go to a college fair. You'll see so many universities that you probably have never heard of. And I'd ask just randomly, what about this school? What about that school? She goes, oh, they're super popular. I'm like, well, what's bringing them to the table? And they go, their facilities.

Joe Krause [00:10:56]:

This was something that people started to invest in over the last couple decades, saying that it has to not only be academically rigorous, but it has to be a place that they actually want to go and visit and stay, make it nice for the parents. And so it's nice to hear that that trend continues. But how have you had success in the future of maybe changing somebody, as you're saying? I'm outlining a strategy. Here's what we should go. Based on the trends that I'm observing, you're going to have probably a decent amount of detractors that are like, that is not how higher ed is. We are different. We need to be a bastion of academic rigor. How do you eventually move people that are maybe like they have ten toes on the ground? I don't want to change anything and maybe convert them into maybe a different place so that the strategy could proceed.

Shawn Daley [00:11:36]:

We've been helped a little bit. There's a couple of answers to that question. We've been helped a little bit by the number of closures that have happened in higher education, especially for those of us who are at the strata. I mean, a flagship institution, a land grant institution, that they're not going to really deal with that problem. Like, I don't see like University of Alabama, like shuddering in the next 150 years. Institutions our size have that risk because even though we have 4500 students and that's generally healthy, the long tail on that might be that our students get sucked up by a bigger institution. And what happens is some of the institutions that are more or better financially endowed, they had a lot more fundraising in their first 50 to 100 years. They can subsidize student scholarships a lot better than institutions like ours that don't have a massive endowment.

Shawn Daley [00:12:23]:

So when schools that are a little bit smaller than us close, it makes the argument a little bit more convincing, because in the back of the head of some of the people that we're talking to, this is not some fictional hypothesis. It's a real scenario where they're seeing colleagues, other institutions no longer have jobs, and that's a motivator. Like, you know, at the very least you can say, hey, look, I mean, like, we want to prevent that from ever happening to you. And so it at least gives people a sense of seriousness when it comes to the conversation. But I've always thought people can hunker down. It's going to take a lot of relational work to go to those detractors and you're going to have some detractors who are never going to change their mind. So you have to identify who those are versus the ones who, with a little bit of convincing, can come along for the ride. And then you have to just go into the effort of like, I got to present as much evidence as possible and that takes time.

Shawn Daley [00:13:10]:

One thing that I will appreciate about my president here at George Fox, Robin Baker, is that we meet with our full staff monthly, so everybody gets together and all of us on the leadership team, myself, included, have a responsibility of reviewing where are we going and why. And I think that that why is a critical part. Like, not just here are the five strategic initiatives, but the reason that we keep doing these is because of this. And then also they change. And we explain, like, hey, you know, we adapted this one not willy nilly, but because we found that when this particular initiative interacted with the market or parents or students, it was unpopular or nobody signed up for it or whatever the reason may be. And so we show that we're one thinking carefully about why we do the things that we do beyond standard work, but also like that we're willing to change, not just hold on to something for the sake of it. And then we also take time. If people have a real dispute, they're allowed to share that, and we, as a leadership team, have to engage them.

Shawn Daley [00:14:07]:

The president has an open door policy, which I think the rest of us all have adopted, to be able to listen to concerns from people who say, I don't understand this, or, I'm not sure why we're doing it. And sometimes we even share, like, hey, we changed our approach because Jim in finance had this concern, and he was right. It was important for us to be able to consider that. So I think that we're trying to be as holistically responsible as an organization to our individuals, to be research and data driven, to be responsive to market trends. And again, I don't think that we're so different from a lot of other institutions in the sense that we still believe in academic rigor. We still want students to believe here, having learned what they need to be able to succeed in business. Our worst scenario is that we have people who graduate, go into industries like nursing, and then don't know what to do, because all we need is three or four health systems to say, you do a crappy job of doing this and not hire our students, and then we will be out of business real fast.

Jonathan Morgan [00:15:05]:

Yeah. And we've had a number of conversations about the importance of communication. I think just saying you're communicating your strategy is one thing, but the conversations that you're talking about, how do we adjust our strategy? How do we decide, you know, what, we invest all this time and resources, but actually, we shouldn't do that anymore? I think those are challenging conversations for organizations to have, and I think even further than that, it's often challenging for organizations to understand that insight in the first place. We talked a little bit earlier about the importance of curiosity. I know you've shared previously that your role entails a lot of learning on the job. That's not a unique thing within the strategy world. Most strategy leaders, they don't have direct reports, but they're responsible for dotted line reporting across the entire organization. And that comes with a lot of needing to understand different aspects of different departments, different aspects of different functions, and then using that information to inform the organization.

Jonathan Morgan [00:16:00]:

So you talked a little bit earlier about how you've gone to different colleges and universities to learn, but what are you doing from a more day to day standpoint of connecting with other departments to make sure that you know what's going on so you can inform those conversations and you can inform those strategies as you're making those decisions?

Shawn Daley [00:16:20]:

I try my best. I mean, the very basic level, I mean, I do have a regular reporting relationship with each of the other executives at the organization. But I mean, as I've mentioned, like, I'm open to conversations with anyone from any department, so I regularly meet with members of the faculty. Like, I'm always interested in hearing what's happening in any of our disciplines. We have twelve schools. So I do make an effort to be able to engage with some faculty, if not multiple faculty, from each of those twelve schools and really hear about, okay, well, what's happening in your space? What are you concerned about? What are your growth potential? Faculty often make it easy for me, though, because I actually have more people who reach out to me than the other way around. They know I exist, they know that I have contacts in the business sector. They know that I'm engaged to the community.

Shawn Daley [00:17:04]:

They know that my team includes market research. And so there's lots of reasons for faculty, if they know of me, to reach out to me and say, could you help just to brainstorm, or can we think about stuff? Or could you connect me? Or I need to be in a place for thought leadership, could we sponsor this event? And that keeps me dialed in to many of these internal groups to be able to sort of hear what's happening. And what's nice is that, again, because I'm not in their structure, sometimes, because I'm this extra guy, people will share their concerns and their issues a bit more than they would in terms of their direct chain of command. And that's intentional. I get to sort of be a confessor, which fits my catholic background anyway, but I mean, I get to listen into, okay, well, what is it that's going on? What are your struggles and challenges? And then I can bring that to the leadership team. People in this department, like, yeah, and sometimes that happens in the team, sometimes that happens just with the, hey, this person in your has these concerns. They share them with me. I want to share them with you.

Shawn Daley [00:17:57]:

And we have to keep these things in mind because this could be a northwest term, a spike in the tree if we, we're not careful about it in terms of how we're going to move forward with this upcoming initiative. I spend a lot of time observing our internal data, and so sometimes I'll track something down. I'll see something in our HR report or in our enrollment report or digital report, and I'll say, well, that's interesting. And I'll just go and talk to that particular individual and say, hey, why do you think this is happening? And I do think it's, again, the capacity I have to flag something is different than people who have massive HR responsibilities and they're dealing with like 140 personnel and having been that person before and having floated between having lots of personnel and few personnel, I know when you're in that role, you just don't have time to be able to get that creative. And so someone like me can be helpful of being able to whiteboard stuff because you don't have that agency to do it, given all your other demands on your time.

Joe Krause [00:18:51]:

That's an interesting perspective because I think what I'm hearing from your previous response and now is it's communication to understand what needs to go into the plan. So it's talking with the different groups and also outside because you can't have all the ideas come from the inside because you might be missing something. So having that and then also communicating when a change is made based on the stimulus that's come in where basically somebody did, we have a mechanism in place, open door policy, a lot of places. That's as far as it goes, right? The doors open, but we're not going to do much with what you say when you come in. The idea of the doors open, we actually took your advice, or we took your, we tracked it down and you were right. Kudos to you. And we have made a change. Sometimes that part is skipped or the part where the plans rolled out and there's no explanation as to why certain things might not be in there.

Joe Krause [00:19:31]:

And if people don't hear why these four things I thought were important aren't in here, that's not discussed, it's going to be like, well, they didn't even think about this. They're their heads in the clouds. And the idea that I'm hearing is that you're explaining at the beginning, middle and end, why the choices are made and why maybe things are changing over the course of time, and that's something that people need to hear. But for whatever reason, I think Jonathan and I see it a lot. It's just omit it. Do you have any opinions on maybe why that's the case? Is it people wanting to avoid uncomfortable conversations? Is it oversight? Like what? Is it overlooked? What's your opinion?

Shawn Daley [00:20:00]:

The least malicious response is that there's so much that goes into the day to day life of an administrator when you're trying to put together your presentation and your deck for an all employee meeting and you're trying to do twelve things at once, you're trying to rally the crowd and explain the logic and review the research. My wife is a second grade teacher, and there are times where it's funny when she's like, complaining about administrators being an administrator. And I'm like, well, so that helps me ground a little bit. I'm like, I'm like, I don't believe that your principal or the superintendent's, like, malicious. I think that in most cases they're trying to do their job and it's impossible to cover everything. So on the best stretch of it, Joe, I think sometimes it's just human omission, right? You missed it. And in some cases, like, you know, I mean, I think that also I do see people who whiff on that because they don't want the flow of their presentation to be interrupted. I think sometimes they're trying to just like, you know, carry the flag forward and not indicate any type of dissent.

Shawn Daley [00:20:56]:

And I actually think that's a miss when you do it that way because then people are sitting in that room saying, well, I disagree with that. Like, we're not all on board. Why is he presenting it that way? And then it undercuts your credibility. But I think a lot of people sometimes want to just give that impression of like, you know, the unified front. And they also, sometimes they make a Yden mathematical configuration in their head. Like, I know that there's two people in this room who don't like this and there are 498 who do. Do I really want to favor the two? I'll deal with them later because the majority of the room is happy to go along for the ride. What I think the danger of that one is, though, is that, again, like, those two people could be very influential, like you and say, well, that guy lied.

Shawn Daley [00:21:33]:

Or I mean, like, and the moment that those things get charted out, it creates that sense of dissonance in the culture and then that's what attacks the ability to execute on strategy is that people will spike the trees and you can't see it because you weren't really paying attention to the danger that ignoring those two people was earlier in the process.

Jonathan Morgan [00:21:52]:

All great information there. And most of the conversation today has been focused on how do we incorporate and build and communicate the strategy. But I wanted to get your perspective as we go to close things out on the future of higher education. Obviously, there's a lot of things changing. Both enrollment, online education, even people can get educated on YouTube and websites, and that changes how people think about things. What is your perspective on the future of higher education and how do you incorporate that into your strategic planning?

Shawn Daley [00:22:21]:

There's a part of me, first off, that believes a little bit of what Clayton Christensen said about a decade ago, that a lot of institutions are going to close. I think that he first started with like, well, half the institutions will close. I don't know if that's true, but I think a lot will. I know that after the funds from the government dried up, after Covid, a lot of institutions that didn't use that money to change their business model, they started just falling off. And now I feel like it's like one a week that I'm watching close around the country. But I still think that the institution of higher education as a whole is going to be still seen as the way that people get the credential that big companies want to have as a demonstration or as a proxy for talent, for resilience, for preparation. Even if the concept of the exact technical skill that certain companies needs will always be a moving target. It's always been a moving target, and it's going to continue to be a moving target.

Shawn Daley [00:23:16]:

I don't see, like colleges going away. I think especially because we've had a system of, especially at the elite levels, that's the training ground, right? And maybe people are going to keep going to U. Penn or Harvard, even with all the issues that came up this past year with Palestine and Gaza. Nevertheless, like the UPenn is not going away. It wasn't like rocked by that. People will still go to Wharton and they will get their degrees. And I think that even down the circuit to institutions of our size, we still provide a lot of quality education and training and preparation in key fields that the workforce needs. And so I don't think we go away because health systems want nurses, cities need civil engineers.

Shawn Daley [00:23:55]:

I don't see those types of professions easily replaceable. As much as I appreciate YouTube and use YouTube every weekend to be able to do some home good or some home project. And you can learn a lot from systems like YouTube. I don't see that replacing some of the technical skills training that a lot of colleges provide, as well as the holistic leadership training that I think you get by having experience with general education and the liberal arts, which as a history major I always still feel is critically important for people who want it to be able to pursue it. But at the same time, like, I do see a minor bloodbath in terms of institutions closing and the institutions that survive are going to be the ones that learn the lessons from those potentially acquire and pick up some of those campuses or programs and continue to expand. Institutions that don't choose expansion in the next ten years, I think are going to be more prone to collapse. I do think getting bigger is an important part of survival in this upcoming space.

Joe Krause [00:24:48]:

I think the point you're making is a good one for people when they're building their strategic plan is getting back to first principle, like why are we here? Why are we doing this? And I think you made that point very well. It's like there's always going to be a need in the marketplace for people that have skills and there's not a perfect conduit in some other type of format where they can go get those skills, or at least we're not there yet as a society. So I guess to your point, it's the free market working in an interesting way where organizations that evolve will continue to thrive. And my brother is a graduate of Princeton. Like, as to your point, that's not going anywhere ever, right? Unless something could seismically changes, it typically is impacting certain size universities. And if they evolve, they'll be here. And if they don't, it's an interesting thing. And we say this all the time to our clients.

Joe Krause [00:25:29]:

Success over the last 510 years does not beget success over the next five to ten years. You look at GE, you look at the Dow composite of all the companies that used to be on there that are no longer there. The innovation comes for everybody. Higher education is probably feeling it a little more acutely now. But think of all the other companies that we know and love that are no longer with us. There's a fantastic movie about, about Rim and the BlackBerry, about how that they were the captains of industry and all of a sudden overnight gone. So it's a good thing. It sounds like getting back to first principles when you're getting together to build your plan is the best way to ensure that we're not looking at things myopically, that we're looking at things with a full aperture, sounds like.

Shawn Daley [00:26:06]:

I think there are more people who are trying to partner with higher education and to extort us based on the fear that, like, we're not going to have the thing that we need to be able to survive. I worked with OPM's for a good five year period at my previous institution. They had some wonderful, valuable contributions to be able to make. I still think some of them are fantastic partners because of the expertise that they bring. I get like an email a day or a call a day from some service that I don't think ever would have called a college 20 years ago. But Joe, to your point, how many companies did we see in our lifetime? Blockbuster came and went in the course of my life and they went from nothing to huge to nothing, all in the span of my short lifetime. And there are plenty of other companies that we could name, our BlackBerry friends being one of them. But yeah, I think that higher education as a sector is going to have some interesting mountains to climb.

Shawn Daley [00:26:56]:

But to the other story, really quickly, I don't think I'll see a change until your brother loses a job to somebody who just did the project management program at Google, we don't have enough of those stories. Yeah, I have my Princeton Ba, but I haven't been able to get a job because I keep losing out to people who have tech course from Google. Many of those companies, like they might at very low levels hire some folks, but I mean, they're still going to be mining Harvard, MIT, Stanford to be able to fill the ranks of the organization because those people are super smart. That's the way that it's been in our society and culture. As long as that's the case, higher ed is going to continue to exist in our society.

Joe Krause [00:27:33]:

And one quick point before we close, there's a big article online about a pizza hut went out of business and then that building is reopening as a pizza hut. So it shows you that the cycle always comes around. And in Pizza Hut's like, oh, we should probably have the pizza buffet get all these millennials get excited. And so they're even thinking like, what can we do to spur our business model? And it's actually just going back to what they used to do is what's getting them out of what they're in now. So the nature is healing. And when a pizza hut turns back into a pizza hut, things are typically pretty good.

Shawn Daley [00:28:01]:

Well, what else do you do with that roof? Right.

Joe Krause [00:28:04]:

IHOP, Pizza Hut, that's it.

Shawn Daley [00:28:07]:

Except maybe we'll see Howard Johnson if they could come back in the next 15 years. Like, yeah, definitely an east coast memory that a lot of folks could really use. I mean, a lot of comfort in Howard Johnson's. Jacques Le Pen is still alive, so we could get him, we can draft him in to come and do some food just for one last survey.

Jonathan Morgan [00:28:26]:

Well, Shawn, it was a great conversation today. One final question as we close things out. So thinking about your time and strategy, your time in higher education, if you go back to when you first started, either in education or as an administrator and give yourself a piece of advice, what would that advice be?

Shawn Daley [00:28:43]:

I've been in education for 25 years. I was a k twelve teacher for ten. I sometimes get asked about, like, should I have gone to higher Ed sooner? And I always answer no. I learned a lot about people from being a k twelve teacher and how people organize themselves and how to groups work was probably a much better opportunity to sort of see how interactions play out than if I was in a cube. I think that when it comes to the sector, I think getting conversant in what was happening more broadly sooner. I followed that trend of staying in my discipline for the first, like, say, seven years of being in higher education, and I just ignored a lot of the stuff that was happening broadly institutionally. I would attend staff meetings and I would nod my head, but like, whatever was happening was that was happening over there and I think I should have been more invested in it. So if I was speaking to, like, younger people in my field, I would say, read the Chronicle more closely.

Shawn Daley [00:29:40]:

I realize that you're up against tenure, so you want to spend all of your time in your discipline, but you can't ignore the sector, and you have to understand what's happening in the world that you're in. I think a lot of people do because I'm on a group. The professor is out on Facebook about a lot of people who want to leave higher education, and it's because they've hit a point where they realize that, like, oh, wait a minute, this is not as comfortable as I thought it was going to be, but they should have been reading about that when they were in their PhD program. So I wish I had read a bit more earlier because it would have set me up, I think, to be able to navigate the strata and the different groupings that higher ed exists in and potentially have gotten me further faster. But again, I'm in a wonderful location with wonderful staff, and I can't complain too much, but if I wanted to say, like, to be slightly better, maybe I would have gotten a bit more engaged with the broader sector earlier. Perfect.

Jonathan Morgan [00:30:31]:

Well, great closing advice there, and certainly lots of great insights throughout the conversation today. Shawn, it was great having you on, and we look forward to chatting again in the future sometime soon.

Shawn Daley [00:30:40]:

Yeah. Thank you, guys. Appreciate it.

Joe Krause [00:30:41]:

Thank you.