Show Transcript

Dave 0:13

Welcome to Dean's Council, a podcast aimed at supporting university leaders holding one of the more critical jobs on a university campus. Your panelists can Kring gemellus and Dave Ikenberry engage in conversation with highly accomplished Dean's and other academic leaders regarding the ever complex array of challenges that Dean's face and one of the loneliest and most unique jobs in the academy. Tim Carroll, the Sarah Hart Kimball, Dean of Oregon State University's College of Business since July of 2021 brings an interesting perspective to his role. With a PhD in management from Duke Tim has had a rich set of experiences at Georgia Tech, University of South Carolina's Darla Moore School, and most recently as dean of the business school at the University of the Pacific where he served for three years. common thread which permeates throughout much of Tim's career has been his focus on external organizations, and how the business school can better serve them. As such, Tim brings an interesting insight into how he's able to drive broad effective impact for his school from his large but remote location in Oregon. In this episode, Tim shares his thoughts and advice on an eclectic set of interesting issues, including micro credentials, and workforce development, effective alumni engagement to positioning the business school inside the broader context of the land grant university.

Jim 1:39

We're very pleased to have with us Tim Carolyn's the team in Oregon State University. Wonderful to have you, Tim, tell us about how long you've been on the job and the experience you've had so far.

Tim Carroll 1:49

Well, thank you, thank you for having me on, I have to tell you, I've been a listener of the podcast and was catching up on the back episodes I hadn't listened to when I got the invitation to be here. So I feel like this is like talk radio, longtime listener, first time caller. joining in on the conversation, I'm in my third year at Oregon State. And before that was dean at University of the Pacific for a few years in Northern California. So I've been on the west coast here for a little bit prior to that spent over 20 years in the southeast University, South Carolina, Georgia Tech and at Duke. And

Jim 2:22

how do you find the land grant university, and how to deal with some of those issues relative to you know, bringing the business school into the university and into the mainstream of that university. And you know, what it would have been any obstacles that you might have had or some some things you might want to tell a new dean of a public land grant university where they might be able to see a pothole or speed bumps that you had? Sure.

Tim Carroll 2:49

I think one of the things that we all focus in on is what is the mission of the university? What's the mission of the business school, and what's the best way to, to have impact through that mission, and as you're alluding to a land grant university is very much tied to the needs of the state. And, you know, our four part mission is around research, innovation and discovery around academic programs around outreach, economic development, workforce development, and around inclusive diversity. So inclusive excellence. And you know, that that pervades a lot of things that that we do. One of the things that's come up in some of the previous conversations you've had with Dean's is where the business school, in some ways plays a role beyond the business school and where we lean in. And I think that's, that's naturally become part of the conversation I've heard more frequently. So in some of the domains like workforce development, and economic development, we ought to be in the middle of the bullseye, we're very much part of the outreach mission of the university. And in one way that surprised me I didn't expect to have become part of the conversation that it has is around the inclusive excellence side of it and around viewpoint diversity. So I had a conversation with one of my colleagues in the Provost Office. And I was noting to him that the business school, I had seen to study that the business school was the only unit on campus, where our voting patterns look like the general public. And so in that conversation, we started saying, Well, maybe the business school ought to be then the leading edge in terms of leaning in on ways to promote viewpoint diversity and promote conversations dialogue across difference, those kinds of things. And so that's become an area that we're we've got some activity in. Great.

Jim 4:26

I love you to slug and beavers being business too. I think it's absolutely terrific. And very, very, very well said. So. I thought I'd throw that in. Dave, before you go to your question. Tim,

Dave 4:36

you're kind of starting to spread your wings too slow that what are the kind of the key issues on your plate right now? And also how are you dealing with some of the contemporary issues we see out in the in the on the business landscape AI and and then also some of the social issues that are out there? Yes.

Tim Carroll 4:57

Well, one of the things that struck me and somebody previous conversations you had where Dean's talked about the arc of a 10 or 12 year, Dean ship and what they got done in the first couple years and what they got done in the middle years. And I think one of the one of the guests said, years four, or five and six were were the ones that they really had the most momentum because they had enough time to get settled. And it would be difficult to sustain that level of momentum over a longer time period. And that resonated with me and gave me a bit of hope. Because I always have the question in my head of, are we going fast enough. And there's a lot that we want to accomplish, and we want it to be a collective endeavor. We want everybody to feel involved in that. And I don't want to be coming in saying, Well, I've got a few ideas that I think are pretty good, you know, who's with me, and off I go, and then maybe everybody's behind me, maybe I'm surprised there's no one following along, I want it to be more of a, we get the wisdom of everybody. And I think that part of our role is as leaders is to, you know, create the conditions set the environment where people can do their best work and put up some guardrails and set direction, but not at the expense of having everybody involved with that. So that's been part of our conversation the first couple of years is where do we want to go? How do we want to go broader impact? AI is an area that we're leaning into, I suspect lots of folks are grappling with what that's going to mean for us if we're not, that's probably, you know, professional malpractice not to be considering the role that's going to have in an environment of a university like Oregon State. We are the land grant university, we got a strong STEM focus. And so I think that the Business School has the opportunity to complement what happens around the rest of campus. One of the things I didn't realize about the university until I started looking into exploring the the opportunity here is Oregon State has more funded research than every other university in Oregon combined. It is a large research institution. And there are a lot of those things, as I said, in the STEM areas where there's a lot of technology, there's a lot of innovation discovery, I think the business school can complement that by talking about what does that mean in the world of work? What's the future of work, not just the technology, not just what it can do. But what's that going to mean for careers and professions. And the way work gets done. And so I think we've got a lot of opportunity there.

Jim 7:10

enology plays a big part in what you do. And even with the whole university does, because the universities got a nice reputation relative to online learning. Tell us a little bit about how you've put some of those programs in place. And you've got a lot of programs in the College of Business, you know, kind of talk a little bit about the impact that the online education has had in your total offerings.

Tim Carroll 7:35

Yeah, it's, it's been one of the strengths of the university and of the business school, as you mentioned, we've got a top five ranked online undergraduate business program, a big part of the portfolio for the university, about a quarter of our students are online. And that's where we see most of the growth coming. It's very much tied with the mission of the university. As other speakers and guests have talked about places like Illinois and Florida, we're online is a major component of what they do. It's similarly a big part of, of our portfolio for us as well, because it's tied to the access mission. I think it's one of the challenges of our university is that if all we wanted to do was focus on excellence in our programs, or all we wanted to do was focus on opportunity and creating access. It would be simpler, but we're trying to do both. And so one of the ways that we're doing that is leaning into the online program. So we've got nearly all of our programs available online within the next 1218 months, it will be all of our programs that are available. We're trying to disaggregate the curriculum provide more microcredentials. Many times that's done with corporate partners where they're looking at our portfolio and saying, Can you offer things that you know, at the time and place that's convenient for our employees? Can you give an educational credential and not just continuing education as part of that, and so that's where we're seeing a lot of growth, a lot of the movement going forward. Our full time residential program undergraduate is growing, but it's matching our demographics. It's in low single digits, the online programs where there's a lot of growth, graduate programs, specialty programs. I know we're not alone in that, but we're certainly seeing that that's where that's where the momentum is.

Dave 9:12

How are your daytime graduate degrees doing particularly your MBA program?

Tim Carroll 9:17

We're grilling I think we have the largest MBA in Oregon, but Oregon's a, an interesting environment, we have one of the lowest rates of GMAT and GRE scores are god you know, taking the the exams in the country on a per capita basis. So while we've got a demographic that you might say, there's a lot of people who would be getting graduate degrees the the interest seems to be below below par below average here, right? What we're seeing in terms of interest is that the interest we get in many cases has been people who want to come to a satellite campus such as in Portland, we're about an hour and a half south of Portland, but that's our major economic center for the state. But then they quickly pivot to online because of the convenience and the quality The other we cap our online section so that we don't get up into the MOOC territory of hundreds and hundreds or 1000s of people in it. So the aim is for us to be deliberate about that market niche that it feels like an interactive personal, highly engaged process, even though it's it's delivered through the online, medium. You

Jim 10:19

know, it's interesting, when you when you look at how well you've done in the online medium, I mean, Corvallis is not exactly a major metropolitan community, it's probably a great place to go to school, but when the kids get out, and they're looking for a job, they're gonna have to move elsewhere. And so you've really been able to leverage that how have you leveraged your alums in a similar manner, such that you can take advantage of wherever they are to help these kids get out? And, and really back to workforce development? That's part of it is just the alumni, leveraging the alumni base that you've gotten? How's that work for you? Right? Right. Well, we've

Tim Carroll 10:53

got a lot of alumni in your backyard, Jim, among the places that our alumni base is largely West Coast focused. So it's, Portland's our number one alumni base, the rest of Oregon's number two, and then you get into Northern California, Southern California, Seattle market, and so on. Probably about 50 60% of our alums are, at least the ones that are highly engaged with us are in the Portland area. We have one of the ways we do it is through advisory councils. I know that's a common feature of business schools, but I had not seen the level of engagement with those councils. Previous to coming here. We have I think, 250 people on one of our advisory councils representing something like 150 Different companies. So that's a really robust engagement opportunity for us. And you know, we do the traditional range of things with that it's experiential learning projects, advice on our curricula, providing internships, full time hiring opportunities, all the above.

Jim 11:50

That's just I, that's an amazing size of an advisory board, I think that's terrific. Because you really do have an opportunity to leverage them, do they feel that they need something from their alma mater, that you have to also give them in terms of a give back relative to they're helping you with the workforce development of your people? But how do you how do you give back to them in a way of saying, Thanks? Is there anything unusual that you've done there to say, no, thanks for playing here, we really needed you. And we appreciate you.

Tim Carroll 12:20

Right? I always wanted to approach things with that with that lens. Jim, I always wanted to look at it, like, How is this a win, win, and not just come to them as Hey, it's your opportunity to give back especially for younger alums. Traditionally, we come to them and say, you know, boy, you can help other people out, and we'd love to have some philanthropy and get donations from you. And when somebody's out 10 years, they're usually not in a place where they can do that in a in a meaningful way. And yet, we want the we want the cultivation for when that isn't appropriate conversation. And we want them to be engaged in a way that feels like we're recognizing where they are, and valuing what they have to bring to us. So I think, again, there's a lot of things we do that are probably pretty traditional. In terms of engagement, a few things that maybe while I haven't seen out of the places I've been is, when we do our advisory boards, we have coordinated those so that we have 14 or 15 advisory boards, and we all meet on the same day, at least once a year. So that we can do things like I do a state of the school speech, I do that for everybody. So I don't have to do it 15 times I did 15 times my first year. That's a challenge. That's a challenge when you're on number 12. I can't remember what I said. Which room I was in when I did that, right? Yeah, it's not best practice. So when I do one of them, and then I can go around have follow up room by room that's working a lot better. And for all of them, I want them interacting with each other in silos. They're there for the marketing department or one of our design majors or accounting, whatever it might be Career Services, I want them interacting with each other and building the network out. And so we've got a bit more intentional about ways of doing that.

Jim 13:52

I think it's really terrific. That's as doing that's good. So Great. Terrific.

Dave 13:59

Tim, you talked a little earlier about the university's land grant heritage and how you've tried to then integrate into into that talk a little bit more about your approach to integrating or perhaps not integrating into the larger fabric of the university.

Tim Carroll 14:18

Well, I think I think one of the challenges for us strategically is the best well challenges and opportunities the best parts of Oregon State at least reputation really and I think with good reason. Our our outdoor sciences we've got a College of Earth ocean atmospheric sciences, that's world renowned. We've got ag forestry engineering is large and very robust, as well. And so one of the things we've been trying I've been thinking a lot about is how do we complement those because I'm not going to outward and warden in Corvallis, Oregon. But we have assets and we have, you know, we have capability here at the university that not everybody has So I look at the strengths across campus and think about how we can leverage those and how we can have those help. Those have more impact through the work of business, I look at industries that are that are uniquely Oregon that we can get behind. When I got into the role, I had conversations with alums and I almost heard two different messages. One message was we are Oregon's state business school, let's not forget that we have this land grant mission, we're deeply embedded with the place. And then I had another group of alums saying, why do we only talk about Oregon, we should have broader aspirations and look to be doing a lot more than that. And so my takeaway was, Well, where can we do both. And so we have a lot of family businesses in in Oregon, it's kind of the there aren't a lot of large companies you might find in major metropolitan areas, as an example. And so we've got a really strong family enterprise center that I think is the oldest one on the West Coast, we have a lot of work we're doing with College of Ag and food and beverage industry. Oregon's got beer, wine, dairy, all the above. And a lot of that are companies that have presence internationally and strong operations. And so looking at ways that we can work with the other colleges support industries that are in particularly strong in Oregon to me makes a lot of sense from a strategic standpoint. Did

Jim 16:12

you ever run across a problem with the other schools? When you're sitting here saying, I got an idea for an you know, you're an ag school, I'm visiting school, I got an idea for how we go work together. And they kind of go, I don't need you. I mean, do you ever run across those kinds of problems? And so how did you solve them?

Tim Carroll 16:32

I would say I, I didn't hear we don't need you. I did hear maybe two messages. One of them was depending on the size of the program and how robust they were, they might say, that's a nice idea. But it wasn't a priority for them. Well, there wasn't a lot of enthusiasm for for jumping in. And then the second one would be we know there's something there, but we don't know what it is. And so they wasn't clear the best way that we would work together. I would say candidly, we're still solving on on some of those things. And what I'm trying to do is lean on the advisory boards, the people who are in the industry who've been telling us for a long time, why are you not doing more there? And it's like, okay, well, let's, let's have a conversation where we all sit down and figure out what would that look like for you? Is this primarily about research? Is this primarily about workforce development? Is this primarily about something else? You know, how are we We're the win wins, and how are we solving their needs and doing it in a way that's consistent with our mission? We've had conversations across campus off campus around economic development, industry relations, and one of the challenges that we face in our environment is, I don't think our state economic development is particularly strong. I've lived and worked in but six different states, and I don't think it's really well done. And I came in saying, Boy, there's an unfilled role here and the university as a neutral player could really help to serve this. And my boss, the provost, pushed back and appropriately so and said, We're not a state agency trying to do their work for them. There's no, there's no guardrail, there's no boundary on that we could just keep doing it. And there would always be an appetite for more, we need to be looking for the ways where this is furthering the mission of our research or our teaching. If it's not helping us derive competitive advantage and leverage competitive advantage in those spaces, then we should be highly skeptical about what we're doing.

Dave 18:18

Did you build out Tim? Yeah. So you use the word workforce development, or the phrase workforce development a couple times. Now what what does that mean? In relation to, you know, we typically think of credit bearing courses. So So what is workforce development? How do you how do you guys leverage it there?

Tim Carroll 18:38

We have, we have some of the traditional exec ed or continuing ed, those tend to be ones where we've got a strong relationship with a company. And oftentimes the company is big enough that they have a robust need not so big that they've got a whole department or group of folks who are handling it on their own. So it's kind of a sweet spot. In terms of scale, it works out well. But what I've seen is more and more appetite for the for credit side. And I think I think this is a huge opportunity for all of us. If you look at the need for lifelong education. If you look at the challenge of stranded credits for people who have gone to college and not finished, it seems to me that microcredentials is one of the best things that we could be working on, because we may get a student who has some credit from community college or from some institution ahead of time, or maybe not. And if their company wants to sponsor them to come and do a program with a limited number of units, and we can say this is something to put on your LinkedIn, this is something that we can have give you credit for very focused, that has a clear win for them where they don't have to have the situation where they're taking out a bunch of debt when they were finished college. They don't have as much to show for in terms of the ROI. Similarly if there are students who are in our programs, we help them through those microcredentials get a better internship, which leads to a better job because they can say I did a program in digital media I did a program and analytics or whatever it is They've taken the coursework so far. And then finally, if they've already graduated, they can come back and say you didn't have analytics when I came through. And now I can come back and do something with it. I think part of the reason it's a great opportunity for us is at institutions like mine, where we've got a good amount of scale, it's really, oftentimes a matter of disaggregating, the curriculum, maybe you add a couple things, a little few wrinkles, to what you already have, and then you put a bow around it. And that's a nice product for people and well designed, we stack those and they become an easier path to two degrees, if that's what makes sense for people. So sometimes I talked about it with, with employers and say, you know, do you want the order? Or do you want the side dish or the main course, you know, we can do all of it. It just depends on what what the student needs and what they need.

Jim 20:45

You know, one of the things that go back to what you talked about in terms of the family business program, when I ran the family business program at USC, I always looked at Oregon State as a, one of the top family business programs. Without a question, I try and say, Okay, what do I steal from what they're doing? And because I just thought it was superbly done. And I always question how that was possible. Number one, because you're in a rural environment. And then the other questions to do, do you offer credit bearing classes, for those who are going into family business? Because you obviously have, have kind of a corner on the market there, which you've been able to exploit? Tell me a little bit about that? Because I think there's a lot of schools that give lip service to family, family business programs, but don't really do it as well as you guys do. Yeah,

Tim Carroll 21:38

thank you, Jim. As I mentioned, it's the business environment in Oregon really reflects that this is a state that the many of our best known companies are family businesses, even the ones you know, Nike, Columbia, sportswear, and so on, that are that are well known and public still grew up, as, you know, strong links to the founding families. And there are a lot of our alums who are in those companies. And so it's, it's an evergreen topic for us in terms of the interest. The programs we do, we do have for credit, we have classes, a couple of classes that are on the curriculum, and then we do regular workshops for for people to come in. And those topics tend to be fairly evergreen. Every time I've seen surveys where we say what is it that you want to talk about, they want to talk about transitions between generations, they want to talk about managing internal versus the external professionals they bring in. These would all be familiar to you. I'm sure they come up over and over. And they love learning from each other. They love, you know, a good story about somebody who they know and when the people will share and be candid about, okay, well, you know that I, these three kids, and you know, where it ended up, let me tell you about the journey between here and there. And how that when that resonates well with them, something that's relatively new, I think it's got high potential is we've got a new program, not for credit, where we've got a cohort of young to middle managers who are in their family businesses, but they're all in different businesses. And so this cohort is developing the social network and getting the opportunity to be in the room and let down their guard and say, okay, you know, you've seen this in the press, here's what you haven't seen, here's what's going on, and share and learn from each other. And, you know, there's differences in scale, they're in different industries, but they've got a lot of these commonalities about building their personal their professional side, and then trying to manage their their family business as well, that they're really appreciating that opportunity.

Jim 23:34

That's terrific. You guys have really done a great job on that. Great,

Tim Carroll 23:37

thank you. And well, I'm a fan of stealing with pride wherever you find the good ideas, you know, if you see something good somewhere, and you figure out what that what that looks like, in your own context, I think that's just that's a great idea.

Dave 23:50

Speaking of stealing, Tim, you, you did a tour of duty at at at a prior institution. And so you obviously had a toolkit of experiences, were those relevant and how did you leverage those experiences to Oregon State? Yeah. Or was it just kind of new environment? Let's Let's do more listening than importing in older ideas, existing ideas? I

Tim Carroll 24:17

you know, I think it's the challenge all of us have been through you get enrolled, whether you've been at the institution or not. The first question everybody wants to ask is, what's your vision for the school in the next five or 10 years? And yeah, when you come in Dave, like you did a Colorado like I did at Oregon State, you don't think gee, I just got here the boxes aren't unpacked, you know, I don't know fully fledged vision yet about where I think we're gonna be in five or 10 years. I think the advantage for me was that South Carolina was a relatively big business school, we had about 6500 students, we had 15 different programs. There was some scale there. And I was an associate dean role and a very externally oriented one that worked out well. Pacific was far smaller. And so the advantage of that for me was that If there was no deep bench of people to do things, you know, if there's something indeed doing you were more likely to be involved in that. And so small scale wide scope, and that worked out well that Oregon State was a bit of both it was going back to a bigger scale, we're about just shy of 5000 students, and have similar product scope that then we had at South Carolina. But because I've seen a number of different things and had more opportunity to engage across the university on things like understanding how recruiting and Enrollment Management was done, being on the university's Budget Committee, you know, that kind of visibility made for a good transition for me a

Jim 25:37

lot of talk about the changes in graduate business education, ie, a two year MBA, going into a one year MBA the specialized masters that have just come on. So very, very strong. The online offerings, as you know, we talked about earlier, you know, where do you see all this shaking out? And how do you stay up with it? Maybe not necessarily ahead of it? Because sometimes for those of us get out ahead of the thing, we get slapped around a little bit. Sometimes we're better to be followers than leaders in this world. But I do you see that? Where do you see this all going? That's

Tim Carroll 26:15

a good question. I'd love to ask you both the same questions. Given your perspective and all the people you've talked to what you've seen, we've seen the same thing. We've got specialty programs, they're growing well, especially in analytics space, we've got a couple supply chain analytics, marketing analytics that are doing well. You know, we're looking at doing some more in those spaces. i One of the things I think about and I worry a little bit about is, I don't think this is just unique to Oregon State, but we're better at launching things than sunsetting them. And so it's easier to proliferate with new programs, new concentrations, new majors, and it's a tougher conversation to say maybe that's outlived its usefulness, or even more likely, it's an okay idea, but it's not our best idea. And the resources would be better deployed in other places. So we're gonna be having that conversation coming up. But that's a tricky one. You know, you've got people you've hired, you've got offices and functions and things that are all tied to that and redeploying it, I don't think is our strongest muscle. I don't know, I think I think the microcredentials side and disaggregating, the curriculum makes a lot of sense to me, in particular, because I don't think I don't think we're heading for one of these, like, what we used to have residential education, it's all going to become online, it feels to me like the product portfolio is meeting different needs for different people. And there's always going to be demand for residential education for an undergraduate from 18 to 22. It's just the growth is for people who need something different than that. And that's what we're seeing online, as an example. So I think that the microcredentials and disaggregating, our regular curricula is something that's got a fair amount of runway ahead of it, but I don't know, I think, I think was so much going on. And, and factors like AI that are, they're certainly gonna have a big impact, and we don't understand exactly where they're gonna go. The the way I think about it mostly is experimentation, taking different approaches to pilots. And you know, start with the concentration. If that looks good, turn into a major, if that looks good, maybe it's a full time program. Because I don't really know how this is going to shake out.

Jim 28:17

Just a quick follow on that. I think you're you're right. And the testing, we just don't know how to cut the dead limbs off the tree. And that you really identify that correctly. Yeah, excuse me, Dave. Go ahead.

Dave 28:29

Well, I was just gonna ask him to go just a little bit deeper. I, I'm not really aware of a university that actually does a good job at pruning. How do you share a little bit more about how you're thinking about approaching this task?

Tim Carroll 28:49

Yeah, I don't have stories of success for you on this yet. We've done it. In our strategic plan. We all agreed, you know what, we need to do that, but we haven't agreed exactly what that looks like. I think we have to be principled for one thing. I think we have to, you know, be clear up front. What's how are we going to keep score? How are we going to say, you know, what are the areas that need to be be scaled back and in the interest of helping other other areas? It's clear to me we've got a version of an RCM budget approach is modified apparently everybody's is modified. I've never heard anybody say we've got a straight out RCM it's always a modified RCM but yeah. In our case, we tend to get roughly the same share of the university budget pi. Over time, you know, we're not out and we're we're doing a lot to contribute to the university's growth, but it tends to be fairly consistent what we get. So one of my takeaways is any way that we can help the university be successful is going to be helpful for us. And I don't think that's inappropriate because we support the university the Business School is a cash cow for the university and you know, we want everybody to to thrive and be successful. So We need to be contributing to that. All of that to say there's no constraint on our our ability to reallocate within the business school, right. So if we're not going to have a magic wand, if we're not going to have bags of cash that just show up on our doorstep and say, you know, you can do whatever you want, there will be some increase, but not as much, of course, as we would like to see, then it becomes about how to reallocate and so I think in answer your question, Dave, I think part of it is, you know, how are we going to keep score? How are we going to do the process? We know from procedural justice, if you if you lay out a process that seems like it's reasonable and fair, then regardless of where it lands, you're more likely to have buy in on it.

Jim 30:36

Yeah, I would agree with that. Yeah, I think that there's so much going on, you know, we just have to be on top of it. That's always just got to be figuring out. What's next, where do we go, and you're doing a great job. And we really appreciate the time you've given us this has been just terrific, really terrific. And the job you're doing there, you know, you're in such a different environment than many of us that were in urban environments in your very rural environment, and yet, just doing a spectacular job. So thank you for sharing, sharing your thoughts with us and the time today, we really appreciate it. Thank you.

Tim Carroll 31:10

It's a pleasure to talk to you and looking forward to hearing more of your conversations. But my colleagues have been learning a lot from that and appreciate being part of the conversation. Thanks, Tim.

Jim 31:29

So Dave, what did you think?

Dave 31:30

I enjoyed that conversation. So many, you know, there was a whole collection of, you know, subtle ideas in there that I thought were really, really, really interesting, I think is, is I think there's a lot of good advice relating to how to operationalize this concept of lifelong learning, which we hear a lot about, but we don't necessarily hear how to get it done. And so I started really like that, I think the other core idea and I and maybe in retrospect, it would have been nice to build this out, maybe maybe we think about this in a future show is this whole concept of sunsetting programs that have outlived their life, it is such a, an emotionally difficult thing to accomplish. And it also comes at personal risk, personal professional risk to the Dean, who who brings it on, it's one of the reasons why we're not so good at it. But it's, you know, in the 1970s, when, when things were flush, particularly in our public programs, we never had to worry about sunsetting. But we're on the backside of the demographic curve, and, and the no all end all be all university is starting to have to ask serious questions. And I'm glad you know, again, maybe maybe this is an area where we need to bring Tim and others to help us think this through, it'd be a little bit more prescriptive for folks.

Jim 32:58

Yeah, I thought he was extremely creative in the programs he's put together with the other parts of the university. And how do we build, you know, he's, he's in a small, suburban, urban rural environment, and yet has really built up that school nicely with online offerings with offerings that really work well with other parts of his university. And is, like I said, with his family business program, he's really got a strong program there. So he's leveraging his strengths very, very well. And as a good clear thought as to where he goes with that.

Dave 33:32

Yeah, and again, you're touching on the rural theme there just a little bit, this idea of bringing all the boards together at the same time, you know, think about how the logistics of that would otherwise be complicated. But by putting those boards together, you know, on a common Saturday, it really is a way to to look up some synergies. And I admire from that we actually tried to it took a while to do that at Colorado, because you have all these independent units that kind of want to go out in their own direction. But now, every, you know, once after we've done it a few times, they they realize they actually do benefit everybody benefits by bringing the group together once a year in an integrated fashion. So it's worked really well.

Jim 34:18

Yeah, it was really, he brought in a lot of people that way and was able to give them a singular state of that school address and, you know, include them I thought was really, really that was terrific. That's a job well done there. So that was great. Great job. Yeah. Good.

Dave 34:32

Yeah. Nice show. Thanks, Jim.

Jim 34:35

Thanks. Thank you.

Dave 34:36

Thank you for listening to this episode of Dean's Council. This show is supported in part by Korn Ferry leaders in executive search. Dean's Council was produced in Boulder, Colorado by Joel Davis of analog digital arts. For a catalogue of previous shows, please visit our website at Dean's council.com If you have any feedback for us, please let us know Though by sending an email to feedback at Dean's council.com And finally, please hit follow or subscribe on your favorite podcast player so you can automatically receive our latest show

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