Episode 100: Brian Rosenberg on Overcoming Resistance to Experiential Learning
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How can you make experiential learning not just something your college does but part of who you are? As you move from doing it ad hoc to integrating at scale, how can you overcome resistance to change? What's the right mix of communications, incentives, and training? On a special 100th episode, we dive into these questions with Brian Rosenberg, author of "Whatever It Is, I'm Against It", Visiting Professor at Harvard Graduate School of Education, and former President of Macalester College.
In a rapidly shifting landscape, higher education is facing a crisis of confidence. To bridge the gap between classroom theory and real-world success, leaders are increasingly looking toward experiential learning. But shifting a millennium-old model of "passive listening" is no small feat.
In this episode of the Connected College Podcast, host Elliot Felix sits down with Brian Rosenberg, President Emeritus of Macalester College and author of Whatever It Is, I’m Against It: Resistance to Change in Higher Education. They discuss why experiential learning is essential for student success, the institutional silos that stand in the way, and the "carrots" leaders can use to drive authentic change.
The Human Side of Leadership
Brian Rosenberg’s perspective is deeply rooted in his background as an English professor, specifically his love for 19th-century novels. He notes that Charles Dickens often explored how institutions dehumanize individuals—a theme that heavily influenced his presidency.
"I was determined not to stop being a human being. Leadership is not dominance or ordering people around; it’s setting the right example and inspiring people to bring out the best of themselves."
Redefining Student Success: From "Learned" to "Learner"
Success in college is often measured by the accumulation of information. However, Rosenberg argues that information is fleeting. True student success is equipping students with the mindset and skillset to be lifelong learners.
Experiential learning—or "learning through doing"—is the primary vehicle for this. It builds:
Resilience and Grit: Much like tackling an 800-page Dickens novel, experiential projects require determination.
Agency: Students move from being passive recipients of knowledge to active owners of their educational journey.
Collective Success: While the "Ivy League" model often rewards individual performance, the workplace rewards collective success. Group work teaches students to navigate different levels of dedication and quality—a mirror of real life.
Four Ingredients for Accelerating Change
If experiential learning is so effective, why is it so hard to scale? Rosenberg identifies four critical areas where leaders must intervene to overcome institutional resistance:
1. Center the Student, Not the Faculty The traditional model centers on the faculty member pouring knowledge into heads. Shifting to a student-centered model requires a massive cultural and intellectual shift away from the "sage on the stage."
2. Change the Incentive Structure Faculty are often rewarded for narrow, discipline-specific scholarship. To encourage experiential learning, institutions must broaden the definition of excellence to include community engagement, public-facing work, and innovative teaching.
3. Use Carrots, Not Sticks Rosenberg found that "presidential discretionary grants" worked better than mandates. By offering course development grants for those who included community engagement, he increased the number of courses without forcing anyone’s hand. "Begin with the believers," he suggests.
4. Address Graduate Education Faculty teach the way they were taught. Until graduate programs prioritize the art of facilitating teamwork and active learning, new professors will continue to default to the lecture hall.
Managing the "Messy" Middle: Silos and Scale
A common pitfall in experiential learning is the "unmanaged relationship." When the Alumni Office, the Career Center, and individual faculty members all reach out to the same local business, it creates confusion and damages the college's reputation.
Rosenberg emphasizes that budgets are expressions of values. If an institution is serious about experiential learning at scale, it must invest in a supportive structure to manage these external relationships. "The only thing worse than not reaching out," says Rosenberg, "is reaching out and screwing it up."
Key Takeaways for Leaders
Focus on Impact: Value scholarship that reaches 100,000 readers or helps a community organization over a journal article read by a dozen peers.
Embrace Constraint: Use the current challenges facing higher ed as a catalyst for innovation.
Model Vulnerability: Leaders should speak as humans, not as PR messages, to build the trust necessary for change.
Episode 100 Transcript
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Brian Rosenberg: When you're working in a group or a team, you have to give up a certain amount of agency. That is your success becomes dependent, not just on your own effort and ability, but on other people. And that's really hard. That involves a level of trust and vulnerability that simply working on your own doesn't. Inevitably in a group or a team, there are gonna be different levels of quality work. There's gonna be different levels of dedication, but we both know that's life, right? It's, that's the way being in a workplace is, then you have to take all that at mass and succeed at something.
Elliot Felix: Welcome to the Connected College Podcast. I'm your host, Elliot Felix. I've helped more than a hundred colleges and universities change what they offer, how they operate, and how they're organized to enable student success. And if you're a leader in higher ed, and you think that the silos and separations get in the way of student success, then this podcast and The Connected College are for you. Welcome Brian. I'm so excited for our conversation about experiential learning and the resistance people face.
Brian Rosenberg: I fell in love with being an English professor in college and I was fortunate enough to be able to do that for 15 years. And then for some crazy reason, I moved into administration. I became a dean of the faculty for five years and then spent 17 years as president of Macalester College. Since I left Macalester I've been doing a variety of things. I teach in the Harvard Graduate School of Education. I've been working with the African Leadership University. I'm chair of the board now of the Teagle Foundation.
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Elliot Felix: When you're making a tough decision, thinking through what's gonna help our students, I'd love to hear how do you define student success?
Brian Rosenberg: There are a lot of different ways to answer that question. But for me, thinking about the work of higher education, it's equipping students with both the frame of mind and the set of skills that they're gonna need to be lifelong learners. Very little that you actually learn in college in terms of information is gonna stick with you. But the skills that you learn, the habits of mind that you learn, those are the things that are gonna allow you to learn. Education works when they educate learners. Not learned, but learners.
Elliot Felix: So student success is the mindset and the skillset to be a lifelong learner. And you're focusing on those, not so much the information that might come and go.
Brian Rosenberg: Just learning the skill of close reading. Reading one of those books demands determination, care, and resilience. You learn as much from the act of doing this thing that's hard as you do from anything that's actually in it. It's one of the reasons I think that the diminishment of reading has been so problematic. It's not just a matter of getting the information, it's the actual act of doing the work.
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Elliot Felix: What are some of the other ways that students can learn this mindset and skillset to be successful?
Brian Rosenberg: I really do believe that what we sometimes call experiential learning, what at ALU they refer to as learning through doing, is where you develop the skill sets and the personal qualities that you need to be a lifelong learner. When you are actively engaged in shaping your own education as opposed to simply a passive recipient of something that's being passed on to you from someone else. I think making the student the center of their own educational journey and getting them much more involved in doing things in active learning rather than in listening and in passive learning. I think that's where those muscles get formed.
Elliot Felix: It’s also the relationships you build. Where do relationships fit in your view of experiential learning?
Brian Rosenberg: We have defined education in general as a form of individual success. You get the grade, you're the person who speaks the most in class. Whereas success in life really is about collective success. It's about success with other people. Until higher education begins to shift the model away from individual success to collective success, we're essentially gonna be educating people the wrong way. We're teaching them the wrong things.
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Elliot Felix: How can folks lead the way on experiential learning so students can take ownership and apply things in the abstract to real world situations?
Brian Rosenberg: The dominant model in higher education has been around for a millennium. That model is that students come to this place where there are smart people and those smart people pour knowledge into their heads. It centers everything around the faculty member, not around the student. Moving away from the faculty member being the "sage on the stage" is a gigantic cultural shift. People respond to the right incentives and right now the incentive system is still built around a traditional model. How do you get tenure? What you publish. What your teaching evaluations look like.
Elliot Felix: What role do you think new incentives could play?
Brian Rosenberg: Generally what I found is carrots work better than sticks. Beginning with the people who believe in something is much easier than trying to convince people who don't believe in it. If you can find the people who believe in a good idea and give them some runway—whether it's some time, some funding, or just some encouragement—you'll find that sometimes they will be really successful and then others will look at them and say, "What are you doing anyway?" and things can spread that way.
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Elliot Felix: Where I see experiential learning often get tripped up is who's managing the relationships. What happens when you try and do that at scale and you have the alumni office, the Center for Teaching and Learning, and faculty all reaching out to the same companies?
Brian Rosenberg: It's the incredibly fragmented and siloed nature of the contemporary university. It's divided into an almost innumerable number of departments and divisions and they don't always work very well together. Budgets are expressions of values and priorities and we just haven't made budgeting for something like managing these relationships a high priority. If we're gonna do this at scale, there needs to be a supportive structure.
Elliot Felix: Final words of advice on experiential learning and overcoming resistance to change?
Brian Rosenberg: Constraint drives innovation. Higher education right now is facing all kinds of constraints and challenges, and my hope is that will push more change. The only way for the public to see higher education more positively is to connect in more positive ways with the public, which means in part experiential learning. I'm hoping that we could make lemonade out of a grove of lemons that we are facing.
Elliot Felix: Thanks for the advice. Let's create connected colleges where students will succeed.