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How should college and university presidents lead in the digital age? Why does an authentic digital presence matter for building trust, showing gratitude, and engaging students across higher education? We talk through these with Matt Weber the Chief Creative Officer and Senior Advisor to the President at the University of Virginia and Instructor at the Harvard Seminar for New Presidents. Discover actionable strategies for communicating strategy, leveraging digital media platforms, remaining AI curious, taking time to reflect, and empowering leadership teams to foster continuous institutional improvement and long-term student success.
The Power of the Digital President: Leading Higher Education in a Connected Era
In an era defined by rapid technological shifts, evolving student demographics, and shifting public perception, higher education leadership can no longer remain confined to traditional executive suites or formal institutional press releases. Today’s college and university leaders are called to step into the digital sphere to foster trust, build community, and advocate for student success. Becoming an effective digital president is no longer a vanity exercise; it is an essential leadership strategy for modern higher education leadership.
Drawing from insights shared by Matt Weber—Chief Creative Officer and Senior Advisor to the President at the University of Virginia, as well as a faculty instructor at the Harvard Seminar for New Presidents—leading in digital spaces requires intent, authenticity, and clear alignment with institutional values.
Defining the Digital President in Higher Education
A digital president is not simply an executive who tweets occasionally or maintains a static social media profile. Rather, a digital president systematically identifies digital tools—ranging from Instagram, LinkedIn, podcasts, and Substack newsletters to traditional email and local earned media—and uses them strategically to communicate vision, engage stakeholders, and build institutional trust.
While the pivot toward online communication accelerated out of necessity during the COVID-19 pandemic, digital leadership now serves as an active bridge to meet students, faculty, staff, alumni, and community members where they already are. Meeting students where they spend their time breaks down barriers between executive administration and the student body, closing the gap between institutional leadership and student experience.
Crucial Principles for Leading Digital Engagement
Authentic digital engagement requires leaders to navigate public platforms thoughtfully. To build an impactful digital footprint that enhances institutional culture and student support, leaders can follow key guiding principles:
Build Trust and Show Your Work: Trust is earned continuously over time, not in the midst of a crisis. Using digital channels to explain decision-making processes, gather input, and share progress gives stakeholders insight into institutional operations. When leaders show their work, communities are more understanding and supportive, even during challenging decisions.
Be Open and Always Honest: Rather than relying on hyper-curated, overly polished public relations campaigns, higher education leaders should focus on open, honest communication that reflects their genuine style and personality.
Maintain AI Curiosity: Higher education leaders must stay curious about artificial intelligence and its operational advantages. Utilizing AI tools to draft social communications or streamline administrative workflows can help resource-constrained teams, provided the human core of executive messaging remains intact.
Listen, Learn, and Let Go: Social platforms provide immediate feedback and rich qualitative data. Leaders must actively listen to input, learn from public responses, and avoid becoming overwhelmed by social media analytics. Digital engagement should inform real-world operations, not replace them.
Lead with Gratitude and Joy: The most impactful communications spotlight the achievements of others. Publicly recognizing faculty accomplishments, celebrating student honors, and highlighting campus staff builds a positive, gratitude-filled organizational culture.
Cultivating Campus Culture and Strategic Alignment
Communication is a fundamental component of institutional culture. Strategic plans often fail not in their creation, but in their ongoing communication and execution. By consistently highlighting campus milestones, celebrating collaborative progress, and engaging stakeholders through accessible digital channels, leaders ensure that strategic priorities resonate across campus.
Ultimately, digital presidency transforms executive leadership from an isolated function into a collaborative, community-driven presence. By embracing digital engagement with clarity and gratitude, higher education leaders can effectively shape campus culture, foster deep trust, and drive meaningful student success.
Episode 131 Transcript
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Matt Weber: On all of these spaces, digital media, social media, earned media, you have this opportunity to show your work. And what I've often found is people are a lot more forgiving if they disagree with a decision you make if they feel like you've done it with grace and with a sense of purpose and with some real thought that went into it versus the decision comes out and you don't know what the work is.
Elliot Felix: That was Matt Weber, Chief Creative Officer at the University of Virginia and instructor at the Harvard Seminar for New Presidents. We had a wonderful conversation about how college and university presidents must lead in the digital age. We talk about why this matters like building trust and showing gratitude, the different digital media channels, and Matt's principles for putting this into practice in the ways that work for a leader's strengths, my favorite of which is "listen, learn, and let go" - not only because I love alliteration but it's just great advice in general. Let's dive in. 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 the way they're organized to enable student success. Join me for insightful interviews with higher ed innovators, sharing the stories, stats, and strategies to create better connected colleges and universities. Matt, I'm so excited for our conversation on how digital presidents enable student success.
Matt Weber: Elliot, I am very excited to talk about that, and I'm by no means an expert, but I have definitely lived experiences of—
Elliot Felix: You only teach it at the Harvard seminar for new presidents, so what do you know?
Matt Weber: It's mostly observed expertise of other people who are doing it really well that I can casually share with your audience. But it's a joy to see leaders do something really well, and for me to be able to be the reporter of it in this podcast form. So I'm super excited to share what I've seen.
Elliot Felix: I am too, and I'm excited to define what we mean by digital president. But before we do, and to build a little suspense when we do, tell us a little bit about yourself, like how you got started in higher ed and what you're up to today. I know you wear many hats, and all of them are exciting.
Matt Weber: Yeah. I guess if I had a business card of the jobs I've had in higher ed...
Elliot Felix: It wouldn't fit on the business card, would it?
Matt Weber: I would pick one word, and it would just be storyteller. My whole hope in higher ed was to tell the good story of the people and the places I've been associated with. So I worked at Boston College, I worked at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and now I've worked at UVA, and they're all just full of people doing really important work. And my goal has always been to help those people tell their stories or for me to tell stories of the institutions and of the individuals. So I've worked with leaders, I've worked with schools, I've worked with departments, and I would say I love higher education in general. So this is all not just institution specific, but sector specific. I think what it does is amazing, and it's impacted me as a person—a middle class kid from Massachusetts who studied American studies and film and then went on to get some further education. Each time I got a degree or each time I interacted with new professors or new institutions, I just felt like I was now continually in service of this sector that has invested a lot in me, and I want to reinvest it back into what I'm doing here. So I was at Harvard for about nine years, I was at Boston College for three years, and then now I've been at UVA for about eight or nine years, all in a president's office, and then also teaching at the College of Arts and Sciences as well.
Elliot Felix: And your official title is Senior Advisor to the President and Chief Creative Officer, right?
Matt Weber: You got that right, in the president's office. So I'm a dual appointment. My official titles at UVA are senior advisor to the president and chief creative officer. I'm director of the Causeways program and an assistant professor of practice in the College of Arts & Sciences. And then during the summer, I'm on the faculty of the Harvard Seminar for New College Presidents. But most importantly, I go home and I change my three-year-old's diaper, and I try and be a good husband and dad to my nine and seven-year-old. I live a full life, but it's all, I hope, in service of good people and good places.
Elliot Felix: Well, what more can you hope for than good people and good places? Maybe good tools that help those good people and good places achieve a purpose.
Matt Weber: Yeah.
Elliot Felix: Just to add some Ps there. And world peace I think is great also.
Matt Weber: Let's just speak in alliteration for the whole rest of the podcast and see what happens.
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 the way they're organized to enable student success. Join me for insightful interviews with higher ed innovators, sharing the stories, stats, and strategies to create better connected colleges and universities.
Jeff Doyle: All right, folks, we'll go ahead and get started. Good to have you here. I'm Jeff. I'm from Austin currently, but I actually just accepted a new job, so I'm moving actually up to DC and I'm moving up in August, but I'll be remote this summer working for strategic planning, accreditation, and assessment for a university up in the DC area. But we're excited to share a little bit about ourselves. I'm originally from Maryland. My father taught at an HBCU there for 30 years. Went to school in Virginia, several degrees there. Worked in North Carolina up in the mountains, upstate. Was at Baylor for 12 years, 10 of them as a dean of students, and currently at UT. Spent a little time at SMU and a couple schools. And then my excellent partner here, famous author, will introduce himself.
Elliot Felix: Excited to be here. My name's Elliot Felix. I'm the author of a book called "The Connected College," which is an encouraging evidence-based playbook for breaking down silos so that students succeed. And I'm really excited for this tag team because I'm gonna kinda go a bit more broad and national and share some of the things I'm seeing working with 100 or so colleges and universities, and helping more than a million students. And Jeff's gonna go deep on his sense of belonging inventory and all his experience. It's really exciting to bring these different perspectives together, going broad and deep, going national and local, quantitative, qualitative, and we hope you come away with a great picture of how to measure and improve belonging in all its many facets. So just to get us started, where or when have you felt most like you belonged? The library. I love the library as first out of the gate. Thank you. Church, LGBTQ+ center, home, family, sporting events, lounges. Affinity groups, outdoors summer camp. And I think one of the interesting things, we have some things gravitating toward the center, right? Family, home, work. But there's also a lot of things on the perimeter that are occurring maybe a little less frequently, but are just as important because we all find belonging in our own way.
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Elliot Felix: We can do it. So let me get to this idea of a digital president. What is a digital president, and why do we need them?
Matt Weber: So I'll give you the little history lesson here. I was at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and left to start working in the president's office under Jim Ryan when he left. He was the dean of the Harvard Ed School and became president of the University of Virginia. And when I left, I had this opportunity with Judy McLaughlin, who teaches and has led this series at the Harvard Graduate School of Education every summer. If you're a new college president or a new chancellor, you come for a week to Appian Way in Cambridge, and you learn how to do this. And one of the spaces they were looking to expand was how do presidents, new college presidents, experience a digital life, right? So this is in 2019 when it almost felt slightly optional. This is pre-COVID. You didn't have to be on social media. You could be in all these spaces in a traditional sort of college environment, but you didn't really have to be present maybe outside of an occasional email. And there's data that supports people are somewhat neutral to this, and then people either love it or hate it. It's like a third. Then COVID happened, and then all of a sudden I think every college and university president was thrust into understanding themselves as someone who exists almost online first, then in person second out of necessity. Then COVID happened, and my going back to this seminar every summer led me to really define what I think a college president should be doing in all of these digital spaces. And it's beyond just a college president should be on social media. This is not college presidents should tweet and that counts as being a digital president, end of story. It's identifying the tools that are out there in the digital space, and some of them could be social media, some of them could be podcasts, some of them could be your Substack, some could be just being on the local news channel or having some sort of medium to chat and connect with your community. But it's identifying what is the strength of the president and figuring out which tools are best fitting those strengths. And what I have always distilled it down to is right now there are a lot of tools out there, and I would say on social media, LinkedIn and Instagram are the two best ones a college president should be using to connect with their students and their alumni base. They have the highest growth rate, and they're also, in my opinion, the least nasty social media spaces to have those conversations. Then I've also noticed a lot of college presidents and leaders are interested in getting long-form journalism out there. A lot of them have a Substack. A lot of them will host a blog. And then thinking about what are their media partners. So how often are you talking with your local radio station and your local TV stations in the communities that you're part of? And then also not giving up on the least sexy of them all, which is email, right? Email seems like the most basic, but that is to me still the strongest lion of all of the digital channels that a college president can use to communicate with everyone because it's not opt-in in many cases. There are listservs to all faculty, staff, students, and if you send it as the college president, everyone has the option to open it, but it is in their inbox. Whereas you think of social media, you think of earned media, you have to hope that someone's opting into following you or you have to hope that someone caught you on the local news. So it's me putting together that whole sort of ecosystem of: you're a college president, here are all the different ways that you can communicate, what fits you best, and then encouraging them to do it even though it is not risk-free.
Elliot Felix: Well, it just makes a lot of sense because this shift from a purely physical presence to a digital one as well coincides with a lot of other shifts that are maybe implied in that. Like going from being an introverted leader off in the corner where nobody knows what you're thinking or nobody can contribute to that thinking, to being more extroverted and more collaborative and more conversational. It means shifting from being more reactive and waiting for things to find you, to being proactive and telling your story and keeping people in the loop and getting their input and acting on the input. I feel like that one shift maybe enables or is part of many others.
Matt Weber: Exactly right. And it's also, for purposes of this particular podcast, which is focused on student success, it benefits the students in so many ways because it is the president oftentimes coming to where the students are. It is not assuming an 18-year-old has to go and find this information in a way that suits the president's interest. It is the president's ideas and the president's feedback gathering and strategic planning and vision, and also the personality of the type of leader being deposited in places where there are students, which is again why I'm a big fan of presidents at least having some sort of institutional presence on Instagram, which is the population center for a lot of the students who are coming on. I think it benefits students not just because they're there, but because students can know who is leading this place. I think that matters a lot to know that you are at an institution that doesn't just have a football team and a mascot and whatever US News and World Report rankings, but that there's a person, and a person who cares about certain things that are hopefully connected and tied with the ethos of the school. I think that's really important, especially when a student is out and about, and they may even see that president that they've observed for the past three months on Instagram out and about. It's nice to connect, and I like this model, which is doing as much as you can to connect the sort of real world and the digital world. I think oftentimes interactions used to start in the real world and then go to the digital world, and now that's flipped, right? Most students are going to know about the president, the leader. I'm even thinking about when I teach a class. Go ahead, Google me. You're going to learn a lot about me before you even meet me, and then you meet me, and then the hope is that there's some sort of alignment there. A president in all of these spaces can do a really good job of getting through the first date conversations and getting into what is it like to be in this sort of really productive relationship and having the president lead an institution that has to meet a lot of people where they're at in all sorts of different ways. So students on campus for sure, but also alumni, faculty, staff, donors, community members. You have to be a lot to a lot of different people. I think these channels and understanding the importance of being a digital president will help scratch that itch of people getting to know you.
Elliot Felix: That getting to know you is the foundation for getting to trust you. I remember not too long ago, Inside Higher Ed did a survey asking students who they trust, and faculty scored a lot higher than senior administration. This is nationally. On the face of it, that kind of makes sense because you have more day-to-day contact with your professors than you do with your presidents. Is being an effective digital president a way to close that gap, right? To be authentic so that people know who you are, so they trust what you're doing, especially as an institution is navigating lots of change—demographics, technology, culturally, socially?
Matt Weber: Yeah, and it's all of those changes, and then it also applies really acutely to crisis too, right? So in a crisis, a leader is oftentimes in a position to make hard decisions or to be quickly reactive and to communicate that. I think in those moments you really want to trust your leader.
Elliot Felix: Then it's too late to earn the trust, right? You have to already have had it.
Matt Weber: Exactly. So when I talk to new presidents, I say, "Hey, even if you are... Let's say you're an introvert, and let's say you hate social media and you think it's bad. You're afraid of the algorithms. Listen, you're not necessarily wrong to feel some of those things. With that said, if you're putting yourself out there, it is not because you are looking to be some sort of president influencer. You are not interested in a cult of personality or eventually having some sort of major following that feels like it's vanity based." To me, I say, be in that space so that people can, over time, get to know you. Get to know you, get to trust you, because I think once you keep building, it's essentially showing your work. People may go, "What does the president do?" And it's like my daughter who's a nine-year-old and she's doing a math problem. She messed up in the middle of her math problem, right? She gets partial credit because she showed her work. I think in so many ways the old model of higher ed was there's the decision and it's coming from high above, and that's it. Sorry, students. Especially here at UVA, there's a strong sense of student self-governance, and there's a strong sense of shared leadership amongst the faculty, the students, the president's office, the board, the alumni, everyone, right? So I think to me it's this sort of openness, this accountability, and the showing of the work. You can do that in these spaces, and I would say do it for that reason. Even if you don't like to do it, it's still really important.
Elliot Felix: I love the showing work analogy. I think it's spot on because I do think that's how you earn the trust. And I would also say a lot of what you're talking about, it's not just showing the work, it is the work because that's how you're gathering input and getting feedback. I just co-authored a white paper on the value of the student experience using a nationally representative sampling of folks, and student voice was one of the key levers for institutions to pull to improve students' sense that they were really getting value out of their experience in college. A pretty high percentage of students said they were asked for input, but there was a gap, like a 10 percentage point gap for those who saw action based on that input. So I think it's showing your work, but I think it's also doing the work and it's not making these changes in isolation. It doesn't mean everybody has to agree on everything, the point of all this communicating isn't perfect consensus, but I do think it's an important way to do the work.
Matt Weber: 100% agree with you. And I think students are really discerning consumers of any work shown, right? And then they're quick, and they will be very honest with you about calling anything that feels overly curated or BS, right? So there's this version of this which is let me show you the work, and it ends up feeling like it is some sort of AI-generated first 100 days of a college president. Everything looks perfect and pristine, and there's nothing wrong or whatever. That is not what you should be doing at all because I don't think students buy that, right? So I think about being in this space. Some people will say try and be authentic. I think the second you try and be authentic, you are going against the very grain of what authenticity is, which is not trying to be something, just being. So for me, I don't ever say be authentic because I feel like if I ever said that, you'd just fire me on the spot, end this podcast, right? So I say be open and always be honest, right? And it doesn't mean you have to show all the good and the bad in your day in a way that doesn't color correct a photo or that doesn't synthesize something. But at the same time, students and other folks who are checking in on you have high thresholds for understanding what it is that you're trying to do, and I just think being yourself is the best advice I can give you, which is to say if you're an introvert that's totally fine. If you don't give very long answers, don't try and... even for me, you can't see me on this podcast. Elliot, you know this. I can't do anything right with my hair on any given day, and if I was in a position where someone was trying to judge me, if I slicked it back and tried to make it look right, guess what? That is not me. So again, it's just trying to be the person that got them into this job and continuing with that open and honesty. That is the best advice I can give you, and having that translate as best as you can without it going through some sort of hyper-crazy PR machine that tries to make you look slick and cool. Be yourself. I think people are going to like that best.
Of course what's measured gets managed, and so it's also important to have things like metrics and translate those ideas into numbers. One of the great studies of this, the National College Health Assessment, is a pretty big data set that's tens of thousands of students every year. They ask very directly, agree, disagree, "I feel that I belong at my college or university." That's a very direct way of going at it. About 70 and a half percent agree in the latest survey so we're almost back to pre-COVID levels. Another way to think about this and another way to ask about this is NSSE which is the National Survey of Student Engagement. They have been doing amazing longitudinal work. And they asked about belonging, and they broke it down into three categories: "I feel comfortable being myself," "I feel valued," "I feel like part of the community." And some interesting findings, generally 77 to 80% agreed with those statements, but interestingly, there were some differences, about 4% less if you were a transfer student, about 5% less if you were a part-time student, about 8% less if you're living off campus. So maybe these all seem fairly intuitive, but it's nice to be able to quantify our intuition every once in a while.
We also know that when students feel like they belong, they're more likely to persist and to graduate. That same NSSE survey found forty-one percent more likely to continue first to second year. And a great study by Brady and Gopalan found, if you move the needle on belonging one point along a five-point Likert scale that's actually three point four percentage points higher grad rate. So there's some direct impact there. So with that national context belonging is critical. It's maybe hard to measure. Those measures don't always agree but are looking reasonably good.
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Elliot Felix: So you have to be out there, and as you do it, you have to be yourself. What are the other principles that should guide a president's digital presence?
Matt Weber: Yeah. So I've got a piece coming out in Harvard Ed Magazine coming up. I'll give you a little preview. It's essentially seven tips for higher ed leaders. The first one is build trust, the second one is show work, the third one is be open and always honest. In the past two years of teaching in the Harvard New President Seminar, we keep moving more and more towards how often are we using AI. It gets really interesting where, is it okay to use AI to check grammar of an email send? Is it okay to use AI to generate four or five social media posts for that week based on visits? Or is it okay to use AI to write a bereavement note versus a donor letter, right? Everyone has very strong opinions on the appropriateness of what the leader should be using in terms of AI for what appropriate uses. So I would say remain AI curious, and you're seeing a lot of people who are putting out statements. I think one just came out recently from an Ivy League school around "Hey, here is our sort of doctrine of AI use from the president's office." I think you're going to see more and more of that.
Elliot Felix: Like here's my personal stance.
Matt Weber: Here's my personal stance. It's not what the university's doing writ large, but I am not going to have this email that goes out, it's not going to use AI, or it is in these particular cases. This is happening in classrooms. My classroom currently today, it's is it okay to use AI for a project? Yes, but where? How? Are you still doing original human thinking? So I just think presidents need to remain curious to AI and its benefits, especially if you're a small school and you don't have a huge budget and you don't have a staff of three or four people. Having AI buttress some of that work and help in the sort of resource restraints is not a bad idea at all. At the same time, there are overuses of it that I think will smell wrong for the community. So it's remain curious for AI. Number five is occasionally attempt humor, but with no grandiose expectations of success. I think a little bit of joy, a little bit of fun and humor is good in showing a personality. I've been part of very successful humorous moments in presidents' offices, and then I've been also the cause of moments where it has been a major swing and a miss. Those are not fun. So you just know comedy and humor is hard, but I think it's still worth attempting at that leadership level, especially in moments when it feels like it's needed. Then my last two are listen, learn, and let go. These are great channels. You get lots of data. You get that data immediately. You put up a post, you share something out, you're going to get all the metrics within the next 12 hours on every person and who's commented what, and all the students are going to say this or that. So it's really great market research. It's terrific, but at some point you can get really overwhelmed by the data and not know what you're actually chasing. Is it clicks? Is it unique impressions? Is it likes? Is it comments? What's the actual data that matters? So I think there has to be, in our alliterative theme today, listen, learn, but also let go, that this is not a space you are living in entirely. You should not be treading water in the data of Meta and LinkedIn analytics all day because it's not a fun space to be treading water in. It's a good spot to occasionally cannonball in, get out, dry off, and be in the real world. Then number seven is lead with gratitude and joy in your community. I would say that the most popular posts that I've ever seen a president share in the course of their presidency are always the ones that are grateful. Not like, "Look at me, look what I did," but "Look at that person. This is the best chair of the physics department we've ever had. They just won this award. I am so grateful this person is at our school." Or, "Look at this student, they just won a Truman Fellowship," or they're a Rhodes. "This is amazing and we're going to surprise them with the announcement in the president's office, and we're going to record it and share that video because this student is a rock star." That's good use of it.
Elliot Felix: Everybody's champion.
Matt Weber: Exactly. And you know what? That's the kind of thing where, in the olden days it might have been a handwritten letter, it might have been an email. I think that there is something to be said for public displays of gratitude because at the end of the day that's the kind of stuff that I noticed even people who are not on social media will screenshot, and then they'll print it up, and they'll bring it over to their mom's house who's in their late 70s and go, "Look, Mom, the president tweeted about me," or whatever. That just means something. It's the president taking a moment to recognize them, and there's a lot of runway on these social media channels and a lot of these digital places and newsletters on email where you have a lot of people to thank. I think you culminate, put that all together, and you end up creating a gratitude-based and joy-filled community. I've been part of a lot of those types of communities, and I'm part of one right now, and it's a good type of culture to be part of.
The other thing you can do is really think about the first year experience. The first year experience, I think, is one of these great opportunities to build belonging through spaces, through activities, through programming, through mentoring, if for no other reason than US News is now ranking first year experience. So it's something that we all knew mattered but it's something now that students and families and parents are looking at specifically and maybe it's Elon or Agnes Scott or University of South Carolina at the top. There's also a great resource for this. University of South Carolina, who invented the first year seminar, they do a conference every year, the First Year Experience Conference. Has anybody been to that conference? That's a really good way to zoom in on the first year experience.
The other thing is to think about how you break down those barriers to increase access to information, unmask the hidden curriculum, give students more access to social capital information and each other. Campus portals, student portals play an increasingly important role in that because services, people, support, increasingly, they're digitally and physically spread out. How many people have heard the term digital sprawl? It's really becoming a thing because as staff and as students, you have way too many different platforms to help you. You get confused. You can't navigate. How do I log in? And so you're offering all these amazing things. People may not use them. They may not know about them. The more you can bring them together digitally and physically in something like a portal like Portland State did, the better you can go. And actually Portland State, we did a whole research project to uncover this as one of the top barriers. And through that and other work, retention went up four percentage points in just a couple of years.
The other thing you can do is really look for opportunities to combine study and support, because on a lot of campuses, where students study, where they work together, where they work on projects is in a different place from where they get support, and that propagates the silos. It also can stigmatize getting support. Whereas if you think about the library, for instance, as something like a student success hub, and you have writing and tutoring in there, study abroad, and in this case at UVA, we have study abroad, we have financial aid, career, all these things, visiting on a flexible basis, doing collaborative programming, then you normalize getting help, right? And at one table you've got two students talking to each other, working on a project. The next table over, you've got a student talking to a peer mentor. The next table over, you've got a student talking to a writing coach. The next table over, you've got a student working with a tutor, right? And that can happen, and that's actually what's you're seeing in this picture. Not this kind of othering less than kind of experience, but this is what everybody does, and we do it in this place.
The final strategy, which is really great for building belonging, is building a sense of ownership over the spaces and how they're programmed. And that might be, for instance, a student group taking ownership over some of the programming that happens in an identity center or an affinity group space. It might be through student run enterprises. Quinnipiac does a great job with these student-run businesses that run restaurants, cafes, bars, juice bars. And those students, it's an experiential learning opportunity, it's also a belonging opportunity and it's a skill-building opportunity, so those are some things to think about both nationally and in terms of five things you can do.
And in order to hear your thoughts about those five things and set Jeff up for success, we're interested in hearing what you think is the most important factor. What do you think is the most important factor in belonging? Is it pride, identity, and affiliation? Is it feeling welcomed and valued? Is it access to networks and resources? Is it support, mentoring, and guidance? Seems like we have a lot of folks focusing on friendship, trust, and community, the peer connections. We have folks voting for the support and mentoring. But the big winner is feeling welcomed and valued.
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Elliot Felix: I'm glad you used the word culture there because I think that's such a critical part—communication is such a critical part of building a culture. And we know from the Peter Drucker quote, culture eats strategy for breakfast, probably for lunch too. I think presidents often spend an awful lot of time, and provosts and other deans, other leaders, on a strategic plan; they often over-index on the creation and under-index on the communication of it. Simply talking about what milestones they've achieved and being grateful for the progress that people are making and spotlighting the success along the way, that's how you build that culture of continuous improvement or a culture of student success. I think it's really critical.
Matt Weber: Yeah, and culture is really hard to quantify, so sometimes people don't like to touch it. It's one of those you just know it if you feel it. So some of it's less head and more heart, and that's the space I sit in, right? If I'm the chief creative officer and I'm talking about joy, I don't have a lot of numbers to back up whether I'm actually doing a good job or not. But at the same time, I keep thinking that chipping away with gratitude, trying to help out people, be a good citizen in the university, over time, maybe in survey data it shows up that people just like working here or people feel happy. I think you'll see it in student experiences where if you create this event, right... I have an event coming up in October where we're illuminating the Rotunda to look like a giant pumpkin, and we're calling it The Great Rotumpkin, and people are going to show up from the student body and from the city of Charlottesville. To me it is a great experience of civic joy. Then several months later for Lighting of the Lawn, thousands of students will show up, and they will illuminate the lawn, and there will be a drone show, and it will be this special moment, too. It's in those moments where it is felt that there is something special in the culture, right? Or it's just walking around the campus, or as we call it here at UVA, the Grounds, right? And there is just a spirit in the air. When you're applying to college—I went on college visits, and I always told my mother, "Hey, they have all the programs I want," but intangibly I didn't like it there. And it wasn't the weather. It just didn't feel right.
Elliot Felix: The vibe.
Matt Weber: So yeah, that's the cool kid term, right? The vibe. So I think the president is a shaper and can be a shaper of the vibe, and then having the vibe go down to the deans and the vice presidents. You set the tone and hope that it's not just top down, but that the president, if they're listening and learning correctly, which is happening right now on our grounds with a strategic plan being built—
Elliot Felix: Talking to like millions of people to inform the strategic plan. It's amazing. I got a survey as an alum that's quite uncommon to do that kind of outreach.
Matt Weber: Doing a great job. I think it's a best-in-class opportunity, and I'm very appreciative of what this group is doing, and they're really talented. But the vibe is also not "okay let's take the vibe check from above." The vibe is being generated from the ground, and it is shared up. I think, to me, that is the ultimate goal of a strategic plan, where it is a shared sort of plan that doesn't feel like, again, someone in a room with the door shut created it, came out, and then posted the ideas on the bulletin board. But it is a collective sort of experience, and that feeds really nicely back to culture and strategy.
Elliot Felix: It absolutely does. And in our last few minutes here, as we're thinking about culture and strategy into the future and which one eats which for which meal, or maybe they get along, what's your advice for how leaders, as they want to think about their digital presidency, as they want to think about their digital presence, how can they adapt to changes? Whether it's AI, whether it's demographics, whether it's finances, whether it's community and government relations—there's a lot of changes, there's a lot of challenges. How can digital presidents best adapt?
Matt Weber: I've taught my class at Harvard every summer, and every year I have to rewrite about 60% of it. It is one of those teaching opportunities where in the course of a year, so much changes. It's not just AI, it's also perceptions of higher education and leadership sort of traits, tools at hand. So I would say everyone should be very much aware of new technologies that can help, but not to over-index those technologies. I would say adapting to all of these changes that are happening, knowing that student success should be the primary outcome of a good leader, is really looking at team and looking at the people who are going to be helping you make those decisions. You and I talked about it, like the strategic planning team that's happening right now in the president's office is terrific. But also the team of deans at the University of Virginia right now are terrific, and the vice presidents are terrific, and they're all doing this work—some at the state, some at the local, some at the federal level within the sort of very decentralized university model. It's making sure that people feel empowered and have agency to make good decisions, to feel appreciated, but to also have these moments where it's not just head down, run run run. Because I don't think you can really adapt without reflection. And I keep thinking about this T.S. Eliot quote that my mother shared with me my whole life, which is, "I had the experience, but I missed the meaning." I think so much in higher education, why I love this week at Harvard every year, is that these presidents before they get started, they get a pause. They get a check-in with industry leaders and people who can help them and share best practices, and it's a lot of former college presidents who are there. And they say, "Hey, listen, this is what's worked for me. This is where I think things are going, and go forth and be well, and know that you have this cohort, this network of wonderful people," again, led by Judy McLaughlin, who's been doing it for decades. So I always am a big fan of, yes, you can adapt, and being adaptable means being quick and pivotable and having all of these sort of resources at hand. But so much of it is just taking a pause, thinking about where you want to go, what is at hand, and who's with you. And I've seen leaders who have done that the best, and they've been successful when they encounter the whole panoply of both people, technology, and always connecting it to mission and vision.
I'm a big data guy. My father taught biology, botany. I was taking math in high school, like calc one, two, and three, and so I was like we should be able to figure out what leads to student success better. So we started out with 100 variables and I worked with the associate vice president for academic affairs. And each year we studied, then we worked with institutional research, and we looked at the fall-to-fall retention to see which variables were most predictive. And of course, first semester GPA is a big one, right? But it's a lagging indicator. By the time you get first semester GPA, most of them made the decision on whether they're gonna stay or not, right? So what we found, and I went to a couple sessions on this. One of them I couldn't get in 'cause there were so many people, about pulse surveys. So we did a survey weeks three to six, 'cause the first two weeks is kinda like the honeymoon period. Everyone's still pretty happy. "Oh, it's gonna be great." And then it starts to sink in. They're getting up to that first test, and most don't... Back in my day, we used to say by the time they get to fall break, they've already decided if they're coming back or not. We almost proved that because, we asked this bunch of questions, and we identified those that were most predictive, but the one question that was more predictive than any other, it was five times more predictive than the next most predictive variable that we had, not just question. And that was, "Do you feel like you belong at this institution?" And if they said extremely disagree, they were five times more likely not to retain 10 months later. And so then it was, okay, what are we going to do about this, and how do you create a sense of belonging in a college? Because knowing that's one thing, changing it... we can't just tell people they belong, right? We have to help them feel that way.
So sense of belonging. I just decided last summer, I had some time, and I was like, "I'm gonna read more about this." So I read some pieces here. You can look up these if you want. There's research out there on belonging. Strayhorn had a definition. But I was like, "I really wanna think through this myself and what makes sense." I've been around long enough to know I can have some thoughts on my own, so maybe I should read and put something together that makes sense. So I put together this model. So I felt a fun way of teaching it would be to see, if we can't figure out, this is what they call, I think, content validity. So if you were to say, these are questions from the survey, "I know what I need to do well here," which of these would you say fits with that? I know what I need to do well. Any thoughts? I have some social capital, right? Okay. I am involved in a student group. Peer connections, good. I belong at this institution. Institutional identification, right? I get along with other students here. Social acceptance. Good, all right, so that gives you an idea of these five areas that I came up with.
So when we found out at Baylor that people didn't feel like belonged, we studied who is that? And we found out that a number of them were students of color, in particular women, African American students didn't feel like they belonged. So we went and interviewed the people who said they didn't feel like they belonged but they stayed. 'Cause we could talk to them, it was like, "What changed for you?" And so they talked about finding identity groups, connections, all these five things. Faculty and staff reaching out to them. One of the things we found out was that they said that the student union, which is very historic at Baylor, has a bunch of framed beautiful pictures of legendary white men who were part of the university since its founding in 1845, right? And they're like, "I don't feel at home in the student union, at least on floors three and four." And so it was like, wow, that's interesting. What could we do about that? Another one we found out was that all the Greek groups had access to a lot of money. If you were a non-Greek group and you needed money, you had to go to student government. If you went to student government, guess what you had to do? You had to dress up really nicely, first of all, 'cause they're very high on themselves. And you had to know Robert's Rules of Order, right? 'Cause that's how you get a bill through. So I don't know how many of you wanna dress up and use Robert Rules of Order to ask money for your student org, but it was intimidating to a number of folks. So we actually just took several hundred thousand dollars and said, "This is available for any affinity group that wants to request it for funds, and we'll try to lower the bar on getting access to it."
All right, so what can we do with these five areas? So I'll just give you some ideas. Obviously orientation was one of the other variables that we found at Baylor that had a big impact, especially extended orientation. So Fish Camp at A&M, Lion Camp, Horned Frog Camp, it's a Texas thing, I think. I moved to Texas in 2010, but I'm like, "What is up with all these camps? This is crazy." But I'm like, A&M and Baylor and TCU have major fan bases. I'm like, they're-- We went to Fish Camp, which is the oldest extended orientation in the country, and they're like indoctrination in the best way possible, I was like, "Now I know why they stand up the whole football game," because they learn all these cheers and chants, and they're told, "You will be an Aggie for the rest of your life. When you die, we will celebrate," "not that you died, but that you were an Aggie." And now Baylor does something similar. So orientation, where you teach students about who you are. Traditions. When I was dean, we helped put that together. I was a small part of that. We redid Fifth Street through town, which is where homecoming parade goes. We have the oldest homecoming in the country. And every so many steps, we put in a tradition. So we identified the ten biggest traditions, and we put in a year and what the tradition was. And so as you're walking up and down the street, you learn the major traditions of the university. And then sports, at Baylor, all the freshmen run across the middle of the field. Not the seniors, not the juniors, not... If you're an incoming student, it's your first year, you get to run across the middle of the football field for the first game, and it's called the Baylor Line. It's, you're becoming a part of this extended legacy of becoming the line. So involving students in sports, not just going to varsity events, but how do you connect them and plug them in?
Social acceptance. Telling people you belong here. When you're at convocation, I identified, like knowing the groups that were most likely, least likely to succeed, I went and identified students and instead of just having the president and the vice presidents talking at convocation, which is, 5,000 people coming, all the new students, I want these students on the stage if possible. I handpicked my students and they're like, "I've never talked in front of this many people before." And I was like your message is gonna be hugely important." And students said, "It was so neat to see someone that looked like me on the stage telling me I didn't think I would fit in here at the start, but now I do. And this is what I did to do that." That was so much more powerful than a legacy person like me telling them what they needed to do. Inclusion-focused programming. Okay, we've mentioned some of that, but what do we do to help people feel like, even legally, when in some states you can't do a lot of this, how do we create spaces to make this happen? And then educating on civil disagreement is another one. So how do we create space to talk about things we disagree with?
Social capital, how do we do that? So giving first-gen students, Elliot and I presented earlier on what we can do with that, during COVID, I volunteered to be in charge of all the online students in the fall of 2020, 2,000 of them at Baylor, many of them in other countries. And they just, they didn't make it to our country 'cause we wouldn't let them in because of the COVID thing. The vaccine wasn't out. And so I would meet with 100 of them on Friday afternoons, and then we'd have an activity on Friday night, all virtual, And I'm thinking like, "How do I equip these students with what they need in other countries, Bangladesh or India or China, to help them succeed here?" And so thinking through what do we do to equip our students with the knowledge they need. There was an article published in around 2012 called Who Gets to Graduate. It was in The New York Times. It was featuring David Lauderman at University of Texas back then. But we went and met with him, and he basically said, "Every student that gets in here should graduate." We should believe, once they are admitted, they will graduate. There's no one we're trying to push out. And so I think that's an important message. And Elliot talked about this, making support intuitive and easy. So if you actually go back and look at his five things, they map to our, the model that we shared here, too. I was impressed that he did that. So kudos to Elliot.
Connections to faculty and staff, The very first presentation I ever made professionally was 1996. I looked back on it, and it was on how to connect faculty to students. And I remember we had a program called Dine with a Mind where we gave them a meal card, and any faculty member could check it out and take it and go have dinner or coffee or something with a student. So connecting faculty to students, getting them involved in research and recognizing. So one of the, that pulse survey, we also asked them, have you felt like one person at this university cared about you?" And if they said no, obviously, it's like we might wanna reach out to them. If they said yes, what do we ask next? Who was it? Who was it? So then we had awards, and we celebrated all these people. And then they were like, "Oh." I was like, "You want a letter in your tenure file?" They were like, "We would love that." So suddenly, all these faculty that had never been recognized for all the students they were helping were being celebrated across campus because all these students were saying the impact they had on them. So celebrating them.
And then the fifth one is connecting to their peers. How do you incentivize joining student orgs? One thing we did at Baylor was we created next to the Starbucks in the student union, a space called Created to Connect, the Student Involvement Center, and we hired students and taught them how to get students plugged into student orgs, and anybody could go meet. The same way you can meet with an academic advisor or career advisor, you could meet with a student involvement advisor and learn how to get plugged in. Thinking about how you design your housing to maximize friendship. As someone that worked in housing, there are ways to build spaces that provide some privacy, but also increase collision in the best way possible. We also did a program at one school where we gave out high impact practice scholarships. If they're involved in a HIP, they would get $3,000 a year, and we ended up publishing an article in the Journal of College Student Development. It's one of the first studies to show that you can link financial aid to engagement, not just grades, and it makes a difference. So we showed that low income students involved in these HIPs were more likely to be successful. And so we told the university, "Let's give more money to these high impact practices." So now we're moving to the next stage.
Elliot Felix: I'm really glad we didn't skip that activity because small group discussion in the classroom is a super important way to build belonging, right? Breaking down the scale, building those peer connections in the classroom, and so here we are walking the talk and by the way, there's a whole group of literature around what are called wise interventions, which are these kinds of small things. Something as, what seems seemingly as small as reading a paragraph that not feeling a sense of belonging right away is common and temporary. One study, one RCT trial showed actually a full point in GPA just from reading that paragraph. So pretty amazing stuff.
These are all such great ideas, and it's been great learning about this together. And Jeff and I wanna thank you for all your ideas and insights and energy. We're happy to answer more questions afterwards, and we hope you have a great conference. Thanks for listening to the Connected College podcast. Go to Elliot felix.com for more information about my book, the Connected College articles I've written and talks I've given. There's also tools you can download information on upcoming events and information on booking me to speak at your institution or organization. Please support the podcast by rating it and reviewing it wherever you're listening. Let's create connected colleges where all students succeed.
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Elliot Felix: It's really great advice because a pause can be 10 seconds before a meeting, or a pause can be a day before a retreat or everything in between. The idea that presidents, digital and otherwise, don't do it alone, they do it with a team, I think are two really great things for folks to focus on. It's not just about understanding the trends, it's about assembling the team, empowering the team, building the trust, and then getting in that operating rhythm that includes reflection. That's the other thing that people mess up on strategic plans, right? They spend a lot of time creating it, then not enough time communicating it, they don't build in that cycle of "we're going to review it every quarter, we're going to update it every year," whatever it might be. And I think the teamwork and the reflection are just great advice for folks to adapt to change into the future as they're thinking about student success and the role of their digital and physical presence in making it happen.
Matt Weber: Yeah. I couldn't agree more, Elliot. And again, a little plug to you is that this is exactly when you came to UVA a few months ago, this is exactly what you were talking about at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and seeing your ideas put into practice here has been a real joy, and getting to know you has been really great. So wahoowa and go Hoos, my friend.
Elliot Felix: Absolutely. And I'll just end by saying still one of the most amazing communication moments and best Jim Ryan moments was one of those moments of levity with the April Fools campaign around rebranding the university as UV, still—I still get tickled by that whenever I think of it. So hats off to you and the whole team for pulling that and so many other amazing things off.
Matt Weber: Well, that was a total team effort, we should probably end with go UV.
Elliot Felix: We'll leave it there. Thanks, Matt.
Matt Weber: Appreciate you, Elliot.
Elliot Felix: Same. Thanks for listening to the Connected College podcast. Go to ElliotFelix.com for more information about my book, the Connected College articles I've written and talks I've given. There's also tools you can download, information on upcoming events, and information on booking me to speak at your institution or organization. Please support the podcast by rating it and reviewing it wherever you're listening. Let's create connected colleges where all students succeed.
Lutalo Sanifu: Yeah, I think that we are the sandbox for that. Like, how are we figuring out what change looks like? We're still figuring out a lot of this stuff ourselves as we iterate, but one thing I have always told students is if you're doing the same thing as the person next to you, you are not the best applicant. Always find another thing that you can add on. Always learn something new. That change and learning should go together. It shouldn't be, "Oh, the world has changed and I'm where the world used to be." I know people who were nurses, and when computers came into the hospitals, they retired because they didn't understand how to use the computer in that hospital context. And then I know other people who learned and kept their career going and even were able to advance themselves into leadership roles because they understood the systems. It's really gonna come down to how do you position yourself to be the best? How do you do that? And part of that is being okay with knowing that you don't know everything, learning things, and then figuring out how is it applicable to your life.
Elliot Felix: At scale, having a sandbox, having a test bed or having this place where you can prototype the future is a key part of it. It comes back to Alan Kay, "The best way to predict the future is to invent it." It seems like you are living every day as the sandbox, as you put it.
Lutalo Sanifu: That is exactly it. How do we design this new thing that didn't exist before? The Masters of Urban Technology, it's brand new. It doesn't exist anywhere else. We invented it. But the intersection between informatics and the built environment, being able to tell this is where there are a lot of traffic accidents and why based on the data, that is not what urban planning was when I was coming up. Things have evolved and changed and we should be the people that invents what that future looks like. So I'm really excited to be a part of this project. This could be my last stop in this career.
Elliot Felix: And no matter what, it's gonna always be changing, right?
Lutalo Sanifu: Of course.
Elliot Felix: Lutalo, thank you so much for a great conversation about change and in preparing students, careers, and ourselves for careers in a world that doesn't yet exist.
Lutalo Sanifu: It was a pleasure speaking with you, Elliot. Anytime.
Elliot Felix: Thanks for listening to the Connected College podcast. Go to Elliotfelix.com for more information about my book, The Connected College, articles I've written, and talks I've given. There's also tools you can download, information on upcoming events, and information on booking me to speak at your institution or organization. Please support the podcast by rating it and reviewing it wherever you're listening. Let's create connected colleges where all students succeed.