A peer-to-peer discussion with Dean Sevin Yeltekin of the Simon Business School at the University of Rochester.

Dr. Sevin Yeltekin, a seasoned economics scholar, professor, and higher education executive, shares her unique perspective on a range of subjects, including: innovative pedagogy, balancing research and teaching, philanthropy in higher education, effective research showcase, and leadership insights.

"It's getting people to think about, how do I take my content and make it compelling in this different format, and that goes along with any kind of innovation that we wanted to do," said Sevin Yeltekin.

Discover how Dean Sevin Yeltekin of Simon Business School is revolutionizing higher education. Learn about her innovative teaching methods, balancing research and pedagogy, and her passion for philanthropy.

Listen to Episode 48 to gain valuable insights from a leading figure in business education.

About Dr. Yeltekin:

Sevin Yeltekin oversees the administrative and academic functions of the Simon Business School, shapes the school’s vision and priorities, and serves as the leading advocate of its faculty, programs and students to alumni, the business community and other external constituencies. From 2005-2020, she was the Rohet Tolani Distinguished Professor; Senior Associate Dean, Education at Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper School of Business. At Tepper, Yeltekin’s responsibilities included advancing the academic and student experience for the school’s undergraduate and graduate programs.

Dean Yeltekin full bio here.

Photos courtesy of Simon Business School at the University of Rochester.

Transcript

Music.

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, Ken Kring, Jim Ellis and Dave eichenberry, engage in conversation with highly accomplished deans and other academic leaders regarding the ever complex array of challenges that Deans face in one of the loneliest and most unique jobs in the academy. Our guest today is Savin yeltakin, Dean of the Simon School at the University of Rochester. After graduating with a PhD in Economics from Stanford, Savin started her career as an assistant professor at Kellogg in 2005 she moved to the Tepper school at Carnegie Mellon and rose through the ranks, being promoted to full professor in 2017 that same year, she was named Senior Associate Dean for education, where she gained valuable experience guiding Tepper through major academic and pedagogical transformation in July of 2020, during the middle of covid, Savin moved to Rochester and has done a remarkable job leveraging the time she had had Tepper to lead the Simon School forward. In this episode of Dean's Council, we cover a variety of topics with Sabine, including hearing some of her first impressions as she started her deanship. However, for much of our conversation, we focus on two key areas. First, we hear some pro tips, if you will, on how she is successfully driving authentic pedagogical innovation, particularly at a school so well known for its rich research heritage. Separately, we also take a deep dive and hear, after some initial trepidation how she has developed a passion for philanthropy and some of the key principles she lives by to drive that effort. There is so much to learn and reflect on in this episode. We hope you enjoy listening to it as much as we enjoyed recording our conversation when visiting with Sabine, it's a privilege to have with us. Shavin yeltikin, she comes to us today from Rochester, New York, where she is Dean of the Simon School. Welcome. Thank you. What a what a pleasure to have you here today. Tell us a little bit about your deanship so far, and more importantly, what, what sparked you to get into this racket?

Sevin Yeltekin 2:47

The deanship so far, it's it's been very good. It's been also a challenging time. I started in the middle of covid. Covid had hit in March, and I accepted this position in May. I was interviewing during covid, and moved to this new position in July. So there was covid, and then post covid, there's, of course, been a lot of turmoil and on campuses over the last year or so. So it's definitely been a very at times, challenging at times, you know, demoralizing, to be perfectly honest, especially in the throngs of covid but at the same time, I think it really focuses you on what's important and what you're really trying to get done in the, you know, in the midst of all of, sometimes some of that chaos, what are really your priorities? So it's been a huge learning experience as well, and I got into it because I'm very, very passionate about education. Education changed my life. I come from the Middle East. I grew up in a family with relatively limited means, but valued education hugely, and it was not only my way into being able to create opportunities for myself, but being able to move from Istanbul, Turkey, where I grew up, to the United States, just when I think about all of the experiences, the kinds of people I've met, the amount of learning, the amount of opportunity, the ability to really operate in a even if you're staying in the United States, in a global environment, because that's what this sort of higher education gig gets you, is to, is to really operate in a global environment. It's, I'm very passionate about that, and I like learning. I don't like staying still, you know? I don't want my brain to atrophy. It sometimes feels like I don't use it. It is a muscle, after all. And you know, in the beginning, of course, like most academics who found their way into the academic administration, I wasn't, you know, you don't go and get a PhD because you want to become a dean or a professor. I certainly didn't. I wanted to be a researcher and a teacher, and I enjoyed those very much. Just. Like any other kind of faculty member, you get put on on committees, and you you get put down and sort of administrative roles. And I suppose I proved to have a knack for being able to do those roles well enough that I kept getting more and, you know, I got punished for it by being handed more and more, you know, administrative roles, whether that was running the PhD program, whether that was a whole curriculum overhaul, and found myself into the associate, Senior Associate Dean of Education at Tepper at Carnegie Mellon University. And I did that for three years, joined the, you know, Dean's team there, and enjoyed it. Enjoyed the problem solving aspect of it. Enjoyed the fact that you get to have a say in what educational direction and research direction the school takes, and being able to also connect with other educators and to think very deeply about what is our mission? What are we really imparting on the next generation? And how do we actually bring those two components, two missions, research and and teaching together? So and then that led me to the deanship. And here we are. Right.

Ken 6:18

It's interesting. You know, Gabe and I both know a little bit about your experience before and appreciate that you were indeed ready to take on the role of Dean, and so it was not a surprise, but would be curious to hear your thoughts about what might have either surprised you or been the area of learning that you've had to accelerate since becoming a dean.

Sevin Yeltekin 6:44

I think one of the things that maybe you know not wholly surprising in the sense that I didn't anticipate it at all, but maybe I didn't anticipate it to that degree, is that you know, especially as a business school dean, and as somebody who's trained as an economist, I you know you, whether you're running a business school, which is in a nonprofit entity, you do, you do need to run it like a business, and you do need to, and I think I expected to find more, maybe kindred spirits in that vein, amongst my peers, not so much business School peers, but, but parts of the from the parts of the university, and you realize that that's really not the mindset, you know, there is, you know, there's some good traditions and legacies there that need to be protected. But at the same time, education is expensive. We all talk about access, we all talk about opportunity. We have a lot more competition, both at the university levels and at the, you know, school levels. We need to rethink our business models in many ways. So I think, I think the fact that, you know, that was a little bit slow and a little bit too maybe foreign to folks, surprised me. The extent of it surprised me, certainly. And I suppose the other piece of it, which I knew from, knew from, of course, being in the Dean's office as an associate dean. But I, you know, most of the people I interacted with and were responsible for were still very much on the academic side of the house, and at the end of the day, we all just end up managing people. It's it. You become, you know, you become deeply familiar with HR roles. You become deeply familiar with sort of what is really managing people at the end and and those are different skills than managing a classroom, managing a group of PhD students, and that's a big learning curve, I think, because I think the difference to me is that when I was a researcher, and I think about the faculty, while you have collaborators and so on, your output is very much dependent on your own input, there are not that many other people whose inputs are essential in producing the output. Now it's a little bit different for teaching. Obviously, you know you want to make sure that the it works. You have the TA and you have other, of course, structure that fully supports you. But to a large extent, you know, you devise your own content, you go out there and you do your thing. But when you're in an organization that is the operational side in addition to the academic side, you realize how important those linkages are and how they can get either accelerated or stuck because that input output flow isn't working very well, and that can be sometimes very both frustrating and at the same time, you know, add on To the amount of sort of, you know, operational issues that you have to resolve. So that was, that was definitely, and you're used to sort of being able to, you know, work with faculty or PhD students and be able to say, this is your class, go teach it. You know, I'm obviously exaggerating a little bit, but it's very different with staff. It's very. Different, because there's a lot more sort of, I think, direction and and and kind of goal setting involved that is much more frequent than what you do with with faculty. And you have to adjust to that. And you have to, you know, certainly get that kind of skills as well. And, you know, those were certainly, maybe, to a large extent, surprising aspects of the job. The other thing I would say this is more personal to me, is that I was a little, I had a bit of trepidation about fundraising. You know, you don't do that very much. If you're on the on the education side, as a senior associate dean, you'll show up at some events and things like that, and maybe you stand in for the Dean if they're unavailable, but you're not really out there pounding the pavement and doing Alumni Relations and fundraising as much. And even though I'm not an introvert, I am an extrovert, I thought I would find it difficult in certain ways, you know, but I've actually really enjoyed it, and not so much the you know, the nitty gritty about deciding on what that particular gift structure is going to look like. But what I've really enjoyed is just being able to meet just some amazing people and having conversations with people, or being introduced to people that I wouldn't necessarily come across as an academic, or just, you know, even outside of my academic life, very accomplished people, some very interesting peoples, mostly both and, and that has been an eye opener. And I've really enjoyed that. So for maybe, you know, budding Deans out there who have the same trepidation that I do, there's actually some really, really nice aspects of that part of the job that you get to enjoy,

Dave 11:48

time permitting. I think it would be great if we could return to philanthropy and how you're here you reflect a little bit more on that transition. But before we do that, I kind of want to circle back to some some things you've touched on earlier in our conversation, from your time at Tepper and just listening to you share a little bit about some of your personal values as as a as a learner and as an educator. It sounds like you have a really deep passion for the classroom and for pedagogy. Could you share a little bit about some of the things you're pursuing at Simon, how are you pursuing those things, like, what are how are you approaching this? How are you motivating it, incentivizing it? And then, in a related vein, when I think about Rochester. I think about this shockingly accomplished research enterprise, an enterprise with a rich 60 year history and sometimes, oftentimes educational pedagogy and classic research kind of are stressors and so how do you how are you navigating that potential culture clash? Yeah,

Sevin Yeltekin 13:05

I mean, I think before I had the chance to really think about how to implement that, I had probably the same prior that that they would be much more clashing. Because I, you know, I've been on the other side. It's largely, especially if you're an assistant professor, you want to just get on with your research, and you want to be sort of, you want to have a nice teaching load that's stacked nicely, not spread out throughout the whole 12 months, and be able to teach at least the same class for a few years, so you don't have to do a lot of preps. I understand all of those preferences, and I understand why, because research faculty do have a large opportunity cost in terms of, you know, doing a lot of these, these activities that fall outside of research, and we do evaluate them mostly on their on their research productivity. So I think there are a couple of things. One which I should acknowledge is that, in a way, covid gave me a little bit of an advantage there. Because, as I like to joke during that time, everybody got in at least a technological pedagogical upgrade, whether they wanted it or not, you know. And from from there was a digital shift in multitude of ways, whether that was, you know, we stopped printing case books and notes and moved everything to whatever, you know, learning system that you're using, whether it's Blackboard or Canvas, whether that's getting comfortable with making videos, whether that's comfortable with thinking about how to administer online exams. I think, you know, necessity being the mother of invention, innovation, certainly, I think laid down that that great groundwork. But you know, Simon had been a. A pretty good innovator in the past in terms of sort of, you know, Educational Innovation did the first stem MBA had a portfolio of specialized master's program before I even arrived, which is which, at the time, at least, was not as common across many, many schools. So there was already a history there. And I want to acknowledge that, because I don't want to take credit for, you know, what has been a part of the culture and what had been done before me, and the circumstances that helped me along. But I'm an economist at heart, you know? I do believe in incentives, and they do work. And if you want to do this shift, you know, you start with sort of explaining why you have to. We didn't have a presence in online at all while most of our other schools and competitors had launched a program, maybe online MBA, or some other type of program that was online that would serve well the professional, especially students who were working during the day or had their other engagements. And we needed to accelerate that. Part of my charge as I came in was to kind of move Simon to the online space and and there was a lot of trepidation about that. There was a lot of trepidation despite covid upgrade, technological upgrading, getting familiar with online teaching, because people saw the downside of it, the the sort of, the less than ideal engagement sometimes from the students when you're you know, when you're online, as opposed to in person, some of the academic issues associated with integrity, issues associated with proctoring and so on. But those are sort of like, I think of them as kind of second order issues, to be perfectly honest, it's getting people to think about, how do I take my content and make it compelling in this different format, and that goes along with any kind of innovation that that we wanted to do, right whether that's launching new programs, launching new classes. So we went, we launched an online program in business analytics, and then we added AI. So we've done a lot of now we're adding even more. We've launched new programs with business AI and analytics and AI in them. And I created an innovation fund, basically, you know, and I created a faculty innovation fund, so provided some sort of stipends and for for faculty and and recognition, both recognition and stipends, to incorporate new technologies, new pedagogies and new content into the classroom. And I wanted to do this school wide. So we launched, for example, a generative AI initiative. And we during this phase also completely transformed what was the faculty support group, which you know, historically had been people who would be helping with kind of faculty, with their classroom materials, with registration and so on. We completely changed them into a instructional design and Instructional Technology Group and completely higher than your team. So you know, you got to kind of invest in resources. You got to explain where you're coming from. We I told the faculty in multitude of meetings, this is AI is going to be a huge technology. It already is in business settings. We're not doing ourselves or our students a service by not incorporating it into our teaching. We already have faculty who are doing a lot of work in natural language processing, so we could use their expertise and leverage their expertise. So it's really a creating incentives, explaining why you want to do why this is important for us to continue to be a competitive, viable, attractive, differentiated school with good programs, how it aligns with the way that their research is moving, and how, whether you know that was data is ubiquitous now, right now, All, all business schools have data analytics, business analytics, a lot more data embedded into the educational programs. And now it's AI, and we're going to, you know, we don't want to jump on sort of fads that are not going to be general use adapted technologies, but when we do see one, and we recognizing and giving at that at the same time giving the faculty a lot of freedom of how they want to construct that. I don't want to tell them what to teach. I just want to tell them that this is an important kind of content and skill that we should think very seriously about incorporating into our programs. And here, not only I'm providing you with some innovation funds, I have built up, and we're building up a group of support staff who will help you support this. And we arranged a lot of workshops. We also brought faculty together. Part of the kind of the getting the stipend and the Innovation Fund is that you. Had to do a very short presentation to the rest of the faculty about what you've changed in your class and what worked and what didn't. We'd done that with covid When we were doing a lot more online teaching. We did it with the generative AI program. The attendance was remarkable, and the faculty really liked it because it was like minds within the same program. So, you know, we all speak the same language. We're teaching the same students. It wasn't something, you know, taken from a completely different field, trying to kind of implement it within Simon. So it takes a lot of work. It takes a lot of but I was very I think you need to communicate the goal, you need to provide the resources, and you need to provide the nudge incentives, you know,

Ken 20:48

on a on a related sort of note, curious to hear about, sort of the impetus for or pressure towards or trend of experiential learning, which is, is no longer a new trend, but certainly must impact the pedagogy, absolutely.

Sevin Yeltekin 21:09

And, you know, I've seen this, and this was something I actually, as associate dean at Tepper, also grappled with, because there would be times when I was in front of the like the, you know, they have different names, the board or the National Council or the business school or the board of advisors. And they would frequently say, and this goes back to kind of Dave's question about research, faculty versus pedagogy, or the bringing the combination of the two, they would say things like, Well, why don't you just hire somebody who's been a chief marketing officer and have them come and teach a class. You know, we've all heard this many, many times, and there's a lot to be learned from a chief marketing officer. I'm not quite sure that they're the ones who should be only teaching the marketing classes, right? It's, it's, it's. So there was always this sort of, in a way, it was like this artificial tension that was created about, oh, business schools that have a lot of research faculty teach, you know, the business faculty are kind of removed from practice, and hence teach very sort of old fashion, or, you know, theories, or only talk to each other and so on. So, how do you bridge that gap between the theory of business and the and the practice of business? Right? I was never a firm believer that you need to bring and staff all of your courses with practitioners. We do have practitioners, by the way, as both adjuncts and clinical faculty, but, but I didn't think that they they were a one on one substitute at all, and I don't believe that. I think the amazing thing about the research faculty is that they're on the frontier, they're constantly renewing themselves, not necessarily because they want for the teaching of the class, because that's what's required of them as a research faculty, and they're passionate about their field, so they're going to naturally, there's a natural tendency to want to bring in the latest things that you've learned and what's happening And what you're observing into the classroom and taking advantage of that desire to keep things up to date, and then just facilitating it, making it a little easier, so that people don't feel like they're constantly kind of rewriting their slides, rewriting their content, right? And that's very important. But then saying, look, so all of that can culminate in something like a project at the end of the you know, the students need to do some project that they can sink their teeth into and really use a lot of this learning and and really see that that fundamental theories, frameworks that you have taught them How to approach data, how to think about solving problems, how to do optimization, how to think about governance issues from an economics perspective, how to do trade offs and cost benefit analysis. It's actually strengthen your case if we can show them how to use it in these, you know, practical situations. So that's the approach we've always taken, you know, and it's not easy. It's not always easy, to find projects that you can, you know, that are multifaceted to sink your teeth into. Now we have, actually, I've built a corporate engagement small group of corporate engagement people, and one of their jobs is to go and actually source a lot of meaty projects to bring into the classroom, and we use them in a multitude of ways, right? They're good for recruiting purposes, they're great for bringing in projects. They're great for mentoring, they're great for other types of connections. But I've never, and I still I I'd be very opposed to having a pedagogy that says, Let's do teach students how to do you know, human resource management in 2024 September, you know, like that's going to be obsolete before they even get graduate. That's not what we you know. Instead, we teach, what does, what does you know, delegation look like? Why do we have sort of, what does corporate. Of governance look like, what does information economics do for you as an organization? Because we want them to be completely, you know, role and industry agnostic, and be able to just pivot as these new technologies, new platforms, new, you know, ways of doing things come and go and get updated. Great. A

Dave 25:25

few minutes ago, you referenced philanthropy. Let's circle back to that you. You mentioned that you had some trepidation engaging in that obviously critical part of what defines a dean, but you've really grown, seemingly a passion for this. By the way, that story is not unique. There are many of us who started with the G golly, shucks, I'm not so sure this is me, and have switched to the other side emphatically. Share, if you would share a little bit, what's your approach to philanthropy? I'm sure you've got a great team with you. How do you how do you shape that team? How do you work with that team? Do you have a, is there a method to your madness, so to speak,

Sevin Yeltekin 26:16

which there was? I mean, I think there's certain aspects. I mean, it's, it's like most things, it's, it's partially art, partially science, witchcraft, with a big dose of, you know, luck, you know, that that makes it very complicated. I think the trepidation is mostly because of the unknown. You know, again, we were never trained into kind of do fundraising, or how to think about philanthropy or fundraising or engagement at a large scale. So part of that is the trepidation and maybe kind of assuming this is not a natural habitat for me, shattered water. And partially it's, I think it's also, again, you know, maybe knowing my own personality, I'm the kind of person who wears their, you know, heart on their sleeve. That doesn't mean that I try to be in any way abrasive or anything like that, but I certainly speak my mind. And, you know, that can be a good thing most of the most days, and can be a liability on some days, right? So you have to, you have to, kind of, you know, do I have to taper my views, taper what I say all the time, and kind of be performing all the time. I think that was the part of the trepidation as well. You know, the performance art part of it. What I have found that i is at first of all, our own alumni, which is most of the donor base that or the philanthropy base and the engagement base that we will be working that they're business people, right? They are a it's very easy to get conversations going because they want to talk about their business and they and given that, you know, if you were an arts and sciences, one, were an arts and sciences then, which I think is a very hard job, right? You go and talk, you're a biologist, and you go and try to talk somebody who graduated with a degree in, you know, philosophy or economics like you don't even necessarily have the same common language, right? I think our jobs are a little bit easier, or maybe even significantly easier, because we're always going to have that language squared away. And so the So, the part of the science of it is that finding something that they're passionate to talk about, right? And it's usually relatively easy, because it starts with, especially if they've built up their own business, then I think, you know, there's lots of things happening in the world all the time, like, you know, how the tariff policies affecting your manufacturing farm. How is, you know, the new regulation affecting such and such? I think keeping in touch with what's happening in different industries and being able to put that the good use as kind of a opening gambit in conversations immediately warms people up. The other thing is, I think, again, them being business people, especially if they're still actively employed and working, their time, is very valuable. So cut to the chase. You know, if you're there to talk about kind of you're you're there at the point where you're really, need to move the conversation forward about a gift, or forward about, you know, them coming and visiting on campus or whatever, you know, opening up internship opportunities for the students. You know, whatever your goal is with that conversation, get to the point relatively quickly. You know, don't be transactional, because it's again, you're you're building relationships. But don't meander for an hour because they're busy. They've got things to do. They've given you their very valuable time, and you want to be courteous and you want to be mindful of that time. The surprising piece in all of this is that they are, they have, most people who you get in front of have such a warm and fuzzy feeling about their time at your school and. Yeah, and they they remember it fondly. It has affected their lives in multitude of positive ways, mostly because it has open opportunities for them they would not have had. Plus, you know, they've had lifelong friendships and lifelong kind of experiences, so it's not a hard conversation again, you realize that it's it's they have these fond memories, and what you need to do is match their passion with your passion, yeah, which is, what are you trying to do? Are you trying to build up your faculty in a certain area? And they remember very fondly. You know a few faculty who really changed the way they think, and who had become mentors or confidants. You match with that. They're very passionate about experiential learning. Well, okay, you know, can we try to create a fund that helps us source and support student experiential learning? They're very passionate about scholarship because they were a scholarship student. So it's always finding that match, you know, and not trying to and being okay with not finding matches either, you know, that's a bit of a dance that you have to do. But I've learned the hard way. Most of it was handed to me as a legacy that when there's a mismatch between expectations and what their passions and goals are and what you're trying to implement in programs and within the school, that is a very difficult relationship to maintain. It's painful for both sides. It's not productive. So you gotta make that match. Absolutely has to happen and and, so that would be my advice. Like, you know, establish that relationship. It's not hard with business alumni. You know the language, you know how to talk about it. Don't waste their time. They're already 90% of the way there, because they are very warm and fuzzy. And they've given you their time. They've given their their resources to the school, their resources ahead of time and find the match so that you're happy they're happy. You get to do what's really important for the school, and you get to be able to show results

Ken 32:14

beyond the Corner Office of the Dean, where the buck stops on many of these are there ways or or techniques that you've been able to deploy to socialize and make sort of a culture of philanthropy and institutional investment. Are there others that you can enlist? Sort of, what does that look like?

Sevin Yeltekin 32:35

I've certainly enlisted. I mean, I do have an advancement, small advancement group that travels with me. I have a gift officer, an executive director investment and they're, you know, professionals in this domain. And I certainly almost always, I am a firm believer that you know, everything takes a village, if not a city or a whole nation. You have to be, of course, mindful of who you put in front of whom. You know it can be an open invitation Rolodex situation, whether that's about students, that's about something else. But I always go with two things. One, employ as many people who are willing to bring something to the table. So if there are faculty who have certain expertise, are very passionate about their plot topics that are very good, you know, relationship builders, I bring them I you know, whether that's with somebody who's visiting us, or with somebody that, you know, maybe they're giving a talk at a conference, and I say, Hey, we're going to put together a small group of people for lunch. Would you mind attending and talking about your research, or talking about your class, whatever it is that they that they can so always trying to kind of bring more expertise variety, and to really showcase what we're doing and who we are and and what do we have people? What I do realize a lot of times about kind of alumni is that they want to know what's happening at the school. They want a piece of it, like they want a piece of it. They want to relive some of that excitement, the learning environment, the intellectual discussion, and it's great for them to be able to dip into it. And I try to utilize that. The other one is value added. Look, everybody's busy. We want people to attend some of our get togethers. We want to attend people to some of our engagement opportunities, beyond just sort of, here's a social networking event. Let's have a glass of wine and a cheese plate. There's got to be value added. Are they going to learn something? Are they going to make connections? You know? How are we using their half an hour effectively? It's a two way engagement, my model has always been a two way engagement. It needs to deliver something for them. It needs to deliver something for us. If those two things are not aligned, then yes, we can always go back to the extremely, extremely accommodating people and keep on taxing their time and taxing their resources. Yes, but I don't want to be in that position. I want them to see a value added, and that can take many forms. And so one of the things I've done a lot is I've had Dean's blog where we write in blog format, maybe as podcasters. That resonates with you. A lot about our research, a lot about so that we do it for a general audience. So we don't do it just for an academic audience. Translating our research, our new developments, we write on a lot of topical issues, whether that's the Fed interest rate cuts, or are we really in a recession or not in a recession? What's happening with AI? You know, we write on a variety of topics. It's been going strong now for four years. When I first started it, faculty said, Some faculty around me said, it's going to get really hard to get engagement, especially sustained engagement, excuse me, and but we've been able to get engagement. We put out something every two weeks, and our alumni love it. And then we took those and turn them into what we call Simon quick text into half an hour quick summer lunchtime webinars, and get in front of the audience, answer questions about, you know, a variety of topics. So again, I think it's the engagement piece is key, but it needs to be beyond just what I call, maybe slightly facetiously, just shindigs. People go to enough dinners and enough receptions, like lovely, but that's not what they really want to be there for. This

Dave 36:33

is, this has just been a remarkable half hour. It's flown by, and you've really provided lots of let's call them pro tips on on just a variety of things, whether it's pedagogy or philanthropy or engagement. Thank you so much for taking the time to be with us. My pleasure. And I think, I think our listening audience has a lot to reflect on. I think it's you have just done a remarkable job and and I look forward to seeing what's going to transpire in the years to come.

Ken 37:08

Well, thank you really, really delighted to have you here with us.

Sevin Yeltekin 37:12

Thank you.

Dave 37:22

So Ken, what did you think of our visit today?

Ken 37:27

Well, extraordinary in a half an hour. The kind of content that we packed in, that she packed in, was just remarkable. What a very capable, intelligent, charismatic leader, yeah,

Dave 37:40

yeah. I really, I really appreciate the thoughtfulness that she put into to thinking about both of the big topics we talked about, pedagogy, reform and, you know, authentic innovation in the classroom. And then, you know, following up those following up that up with real, tangible mechanisms, support mechanisms, incentive mechanisms, and then on the same side, you know, we got into philanthropy and and, you know, so many deans, I had a little bit of it, but I had some prior experience, but so many Deans really have trepidation about philanthropy. So her, her start in that space was, is quite common, and then what, what a joy it is to see that she's thriving in that enjoy and and and really kind of has identified some of the magic moments that that need to happen to be successful at it, Matt, matching the institution's needs with the donors passions. Almost everybody knows that, but the bigger step is having the courage to decline a gift where the match is not there, and she is so wise, and, and, and I can't tell you how many millions and millions of dollars I had to turn down braying as I walked out the door, just because the match wasn't there. And it was, it was not going to be fair to the institution. So yeah, again, what an insightful conversation we benefited from there.

Ken 39:26

Well, even framing philanthropy as a two way engagement is just such a perfect way to characterize and you can see, you know her being, you know, gleefully willing to make it a two way engagement. Yep, yeah, great. Thank

Dave 39:46

you for listening to this episode of Deans Counsel. This show is supported in part by Korn Ferry leaders in executive search. Deans Counsel was produced in Boulder, Colorado by Joel Davis of analog digital art. Arts for a catalog of previous shows, please visit our website@deanscouncil.com if you have any feedback for us, please let us know by sending an email to feedback@deanscouncil.com and finally, please hit follow or subscribe on your favorite podcast player so you can automatically receive our latest show you.