Episode 54: Sanjit Sethi on Higher Education Leadership, Community Partnership, and Institutional Change
Listen On
How can colleges and universities see student success as part of broader community success? What structures and processes can you use to accelerate innovation? Who can you learn from and partner with at other institutions and other industries? We discuss these questions with Sanjit Sethi, President of the Minneapolis College of Art and Design (MCAD)
In the world of higher education, the phrase "student success" is often treated as a standalone goal, isolated from the broader health of the institution. However, according to Sanjit Sethi, President of the Minneapolis College of Art and Design (MCAD), this approach is fundamentally flawed. In a recent conversation on the Connected College Podcast, Sethi argued that we cannot detach the steering wheel from the rest of the vehicle. To achieve true student success, we must first address community success.
Sethi’s journey to the presidency of MCAD has been shaped by his identities as an artist, a mentor, and a leader of color. He views creativity and making as essential pathways for individual and communal growth. For him, leadership isn't about churning through bureaucratic initiatives; it's about fostering a "culture of care" rooted in empathy and innovation.
Why Community Success is the Foundation for Student Achievement
One of the most provocative points Sethi makes is that student success is only as good as faculty, staff, and board success. If the ecosystem supporting the student is fragile, the student’s success will be limited. This "interconnected" model challenges the traditional "student-first" mentality by suggesting that happy, supported employees are the primary engine for happy, successful students. By viewing the institution as a holistic ecosystem, leaders can move away from siloed retention efforts and toward a more integrated culture of innovation.
The Power of Fearless Listening
When asked how leaders can practically enable this success, Sethi offers a surprising piece of advice: "Shut up and listen." He introduces the concept of fearless listening—the ability of a leader to truly understand the unique idiosyncrasies of their specific community. This goes beyond reading industry reports or following accreditation standards. Fearless listening requires a leader to circulate through the institution, creating the conditions where truth can be told to power, and where the leader is open enough to receive it.
Agility, Innovation, and the Skunkworks Model
The pandemic forced higher education to adopt a level of nimbleness previously thought impossible. Sethi notes that agility is now a primary tool for institutional success. At MCAD, he views the continuing education program as a "skunkworks"—a space for experimentation where new ideas can be tested without being encumbered by the four-year degree arc. This allows for rapid innovation that can eventually influence the rest of the college. From rethinking the value of the associate’s degree to offering "education for life," Sethi encourages leaders to look toward the future with a willingness to iterate and take risks.
Looking Beyond the Ivory Tower
Finally, Sethi advocates for looking outside of higher education for leadership models. Whether it’s studying the employee satisfaction of the grocery chain Wegmans or the collaborative engineering models of the aerospace industry, higher ed leaders can find fresh inspiration in shared services and joint degree programs. By dispensing with territoriality and embracing collaboration, institutions can create a more accessible and equitable future for all learners.
Episode 54 Transcript
-
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 my upcoming book, The Connected College, are for you. We're here to learn and work together to bust silos, question tradition, and forge partnerships so that students feel connected to their college, their community, their coursework, and their careers. I've known Sanjit for 20 years. We've been friends since grad school at MIT. And I was lucky enough to advise him when he was the director at the G. W. Corcoran School of the Arts and Design. And now I serve on the board of trustees at MCAD, where he's the president. And whether it's at a barbecue or a board meeting, I always learn something amazing when I'm talking to him, as I did in this conversation about how leaders can build a culture of collaboration and see student success as part of broader community success. I think you'll enjoy how he reframes most of my questions into better and broader ones to get at the big picture issues facing institutions and their leaders. Let's dive in. Welcome Sanjit Sethi. tell us a little bit about yourself and how you got started as a higher ed leader.
Sanjit Sethi: Thanks for having me, Elliot. I'm super excited about this conversation. first and foremost, I'd say that, my identity as a leader in higher education is wrapped up in so many other identities that I inhabit, whether it's being a parent, a son, a brother, a board member in remarkable organizations across the country, as well as a mentor, as well as a mentee, to leaders of color. In many ways, I'd say that I'd say that being president and CEO of the Minneapolis College of Art and Design is just one facet of the way I've been fortunate to go through what I consider to be a remarkable journey. I think it's a journey that, stems from a fundamental belief that making and creativity, is a phenomenal, pathway for individuals. I think it's important for individuals to understand themselves, but also to create more, remarkable and interconnected communities. I've been fortunate to have a series of opportunities that have led me, towards, increasingly greater leadership roles and now as the 19th president of the Minneapolis College of Art and Design.
Elliot Felix: I love, making and creativity as the tools or the ingredients for creating for understanding yourself and creating remarkable communities. I'm excited to dig into that as this conversation plays out. given that student success is our theme is our goal, is our shared mission. And today we're talking about the role that university leaders and administration can play in furthering student success. I'd love to hear how you define it. what does student success mean to you? How do you define that?
Sanjit Sethi: I think for me student success Is kind of, and I don't, I'm not critiquing the question per se, but I am saying that I would like to contribute to the question that you're asking, which is that there needs to be a hyphen or some kind of addendum, because I think by simply asking what student success looks like, what you're doing is you're detaching the steering wheel from the shocks or I don't know the automotive metaphor here, but I think you're removing part of the vehicle because you have to ask yourself what community success is and what student success looks like within that. And by that, it's to say that student success is only as good as faculty and staff success, right? It's only as good as board success. It's only as good as the ecosystem that you're able to support. I think that's been, for me, one of the fallacies within higher education, which is this notion of somehow saying it's the student's first mentality. And while I appreciate students are the thrust of the reason why institutions in higher education exist, unless you're a research institution. you know, the college that I'm at is certainly tuition driven, so it certainly relates to financial sustainability. But I think we're amiss when we simply look at it from student success. That being said, I'll still take your question, but I'll say that for me, the question is interconnected. And so I feel like I need to put that out there. But I'd say that it's a thriving culture of care, experimentation, risk taking and innovation. it's one where we think we can build equity minded, creative practices, innovation minded creativity practices that are all connected by this glue of empathy, right? That empathy is that kind of universal binder. I think there are probably institutions out there that have a more formalized view of success. I embrace the stickier version of success, the more asymmetrical version of success.
-
Elliot Felix: I love the idea that student success can't be separated from community success, and that, you're only as good as the faculty, the staff, the board, the corporate partners, the ecosystem you create. And it's interesting you bring that up, because I think in a lot of other sectors that aren't as, mission driven, that's more apparent, there's a famous quote from Richard Branson about, you know, you don't put your customers first, you put your employees first, because like, if you have happy employees, you have happy customers, that's a really interesting way of, looking at it and challenging the notion that, you can be, maybe it's about being student centered, not student first. It's like, community first or something, I don't know. what role do you think, a president, provost, dean, leadership and administration play in enabling student success?
Sanjit Sethi: The natural inclination as you're asking that question, I imagined the, the, the churning of like initiatives that with like goofy acronyms and retention efforts and someone talking about persistence and, I guess I would say that, probably for me, the inclination that I think that leaders need to do is really shut up and listen. And this is like, I actually think, cause I've been thinking a lot about this idea of, you turn Michelle Foucault's seminal text on fearless speech, this idea of truth to power, but turn it on its head and I'm more interested in talking about fearless listening. What does it take to have the condition for a leader to truly understand the specific idiosyncrasies? And I say that in the most positive way, the specific idiosyncrasies of your own community, to understand what success means that goes beyond an article you may have read in Chronicle of Higher Education, or something else, but really, really to do that deep listening to understand what's unique about your community and that, while HLC may have their standards of accreditation that say, this is what we consider to be student success, to be able to tease it out for yourself. So I guess, I wonder if, leaders need to have a more advanced form of listening and circulation.
Elliot Felix: Listen before you speak you have to do that fearless listening to understand your community and what success means to them, before you can think about, churning through initiatives with goofy acronyms. Yeah, I don't know if that will end up being the name of this episode, but it's a front runner Leadership is more than churning through initiatives of goofy acronyms Pushing back on that or maybe going one step deeper Once you've done the listening, what are some of the most important things you to do? how do you bridge between the fearless listening and the initiatives that make a difference for students and within your community?
Sanjit Sethi: Yeah. And I think that for me at that stage, cause you're right. I'm not beyond me globally saying I want to just listen and not turn out initiatives eventually there is an important impetus to act. I'd say I have a series of criteria when I think about acting, the bigger question I have that I always have is how can we create equity minded, creative communities of excellence that exists well beyond any single experience or the walls of any physical location. can this help achieve that broader goal, how can what we do create more accessible communities of learning, the decisions we make should not limit access, but rather maintain or open up additional avenues for access. the third criteria for me is to say, how can these initiatives, balance the keen insight that you and a member of your team may have with ensuring broader buy in from constituencies at all different spheres. And I do not mean just whether students will like it, obviously you're working with faculty, but you're working with staff, but to understand either the ground game is to get everyone on board about what you're trying to do, board to explain why they're about to embark on this journey, where they're going to take this risk and the confidence you have about that risk of pushing through something that people don't see the vision that you have and making sure you're able to hold space with their degree of uncertainty about what you're about to embark on.
Elliot Felix: So it's almost like step one, fearless listening. Step two, connect what you're hearing with broader goals, equity, access, and so forth. Step three, build consensus and buy in around the intersection of those two. Yeah. definitely. Imagining a Venn diagram.
-
Elliot Felix: Yeah. so for you, you as a leader have faced significant change in your roles in higher education, you know, especially in the last few years. What are the external forces that you're trying to adapt to? what's changing the way, presidents, provosts, deans, other leaders in higher ed have to do their work? what's changing about being a leader in higher ed from your perspective?
Sanjit Sethi: Anyone that was a leader before the pandemic hit in higher education and is still a leader now, they haven't retired or they haven't stepped down. Like, I personally think that we need to all go out for a collective beer, which is to say that I think, you know, I'd say that in part because I'm always interested in learning from my colleagues that have been through this, whether they were presidents or deans for 17 years before the pandemic hit, or four years before the pandemic hit. there's a degree of kind of battle wounds, but there's also just a degree of keen insight that I don't think we've collectively yet tapped. And I think, I think hopefully this book can help do some of that tapping, but I would say that to be honest with you, there's also a degree of exhaustion. there's a reason why presidential tenure is at its lowest point ever in the United States. it's been exhausting to hold space with communities that have had to see this type of change and this kind of turbidity. It's exhausting. I would say that regardless of whether you're a large institution or a small institution, anyone that didn't see agility, and nimbleness as a significant tool for institutional success probably does so now. or they've learned the hard way, that they need to be more nimble. I'm fortunate to be at a college where nimbleness and agility is not a problem because we're small and we have to sometimes stop the car with our feet. It's kind of Barney Rubble. We are that kind of an institution. my joke is that we're not Brandeis. since we don't have a 1.5 billion endowment, we're not there. but what it does is it really reflects on the fact that you want to launch a program, let's launch a program. And so that nimbleness is one thing that has been affirmed to me over the past few years. nimbleness and agility. The ability to be responsive. The ability to go ahead and say, let's try that. It may not work, but let's try it.
Elliot Felix: Do you think that's one of the best measures? how long does it take for an institution to stand up a new degree or certificate program?
Sanjit Sethi: it's funny. When I was at a previous institution and launching a program, and it was a larger research institution. there was a lot of churning through bureaucracy. I mean, it was like a year and a half process. The reason given was due diligence. But there's a point in time where you're not building a 737 that's going to fly and people may fall out of the sky. I appreciate due diligence to a certain degree to mitigate risk, but there's a point where it really stifles the culture of innovation and iteration. One of the things that higher education does not get right, right now and especially now when you're talking about student success, is we assume student success, generally means undergraduate student success. And if it doesn't mean undergraduate student success, we generally think about it as in person graduate student success. And if you don't think about it as in person graduate student success, maybe you're willing to incline to think of remote graduate degree success. I think the one thing that we don't necessarily are thinking about is student success for me is continuing education student success. It's extension school success. This era that we're entering into in terms of higher education is going to be the repositioning, the re evaluation, the ascendancy of continuing education being really part and parcel of the core mission of institutions like MCAD. I have to say, I think some of the greatest degree of innovation, curricular innovation is coming out of our continuing education program. And in part, because you're not encumbered by saying, we're looking at four years a degree arc. We need to get accreditation. This is where our skunkworks at the college is continuing education. that's where we're able to hatch a plan and try that nutty idea.
-
Elliot Felix: I love that idea because it hits on a couple of the themes, right? It's the skunkworks that can be more market driven. It can be listening. understanding people, workforce, the needs are. It can also be this agile skunkworks where you're testing things out. then it can also be furthering your accessibility goals because not everyone needs or can get a degree. maybe your unit of impact is a single course, or a single workshop.
Sanjit Sethi: Yeah, exactly. Is there going to be a time where the associate's degree ascends over the, four year undergraduate degree? Maybe. Since we still see an AA degree as less than 50 percent of an undergraduate degree, right? It's like we still see it because that's our model. Our model is you get 40 percent of that education and then you go to a real school to finish that off. Are we entering a place where maybe the AA degree is all that's there? and maybe it's time that we think about the value proposition saying, what can you get out of 24 months of education, instead of 48 months of education.
Elliot Felix: that's such an interesting point and a really unique way of thinking about it because the moment when the AA tips over 50 percent is the moment when the value exceeds the cost of time and money.
Sanjit Sethi: at a previous institution, I remember bringing up this idea of making the AA degree sexy. You couldn't say something more conversation stopping and destabilizing in a room of academics in a research institution. And part of it's from an economic perspective. It's incredibly dangerous to go ahead and all of a sudden say, Hey, we're going to cleave a model in half. and I guess I would say that now's the time for us to start to really rethink this. People talk a lot about the enrollment cliff. As a private art and design institution, especially the only one in the state of Minnesota, I'm less concerned about the enrollment cliff. I am concerned about who we serve and how we serve them. I would say this goes back to this idea of fearless listening. if your broader community is questioning the value of a four year degree, you can shout at them, but at a certain stage, are you going to go ahead and say, I hear you like, what are our alternatives? That's where the continuing education comes in. That's where the AP extension courses essentially come in.
Elliot Felix: Yeah. And I don't know if this was her idea, but I first saw a tweet from Sarah Goldrick-Rab, previously from Temple and the Hope Center, where she just asked a simple question, What if every four year degree came with an associate's degree after your second year. I just think about what a game changer that would be, especially for the people who drop out after two years, if you didn't leave empty handed. There's 39 million Americans with some college and no degree. In a new paradigm, if you got the associates at the halfway point, or even before, how would that change things?
Sanjit Sethi: I mean, this is the time for us to start to really have these conversations. It's time to go ahead and quite frankly, it would be great to get eight people in a room and lock the door for a little bit, and just to kind of say like, Hey, what's the radical repositioning here? In the same way, I think you and I've talked about the fact that what happens if we smooth the distance that as you physically go out upon the graduation stage, something happened. You all of a sudden go from student to alumni. and what I wonder is how do you make that less steps and more of a gentle slope?
Elliot Felix: that's actually the cliff that you want to worry about, the student to alumni cliff that you want a gentle slope.
Sanjit Sethi: what happens if when you get that degree you've earned continuing education courses for life, for free? what happens if it's an all you can eat educational buffet? over 40 percent of our students are Pell eligible. When they cross that graduation stage, they are economically fragile and now they're economically fragile without a system of support. They can access our career services, but there's an opportunity for us to change the model. This goes back to student success. How does student success go ahead and occupy a lifetime of people being students? Especially when students today are switching careers many more times than people that graduated 20 years ago.
-
Elliot Felix: so we're talking about what's changing and how higher ed could pivot. I want to bring it down to a more tactical level and talk about a few examples where there's a straight line between something leadership and administration did and student success.
Sanjit Sethi: for us, a great example is our peer mentor program. A lot of our juniors and seniors really do want to mentor our incoming students. right now we've been ramping up this program and it's really contributed to some huge successes in first year retention. they're doing that from a position of understanding. You can attend a seminar, but it's really the people that can be there to say, I've been through that recently.
Elliot Felix: I would love to hear another one that's less programmatic and more like things a leader can do, whether it's a leadership behavior, mindset, or skill set.
Sanjit Sethi: the other thing leaders need to do is look outside of higher education for models and systems that exist in other fields. I was thinking about Wegmans, the grocery store chain. knew there was always a tuition pay down program for college. I'm going to look at Wegmans when I start to think about models for community success. And the other thing I'll add to that is to know there are certain things you don't need to go at alone. This is also the era for higher education to start to think about shared services and joint degree programs. this territoriality that we need to have everything covered is something I'm willing to dispense with now more than ever. One thing we've learned from the pandemic is maybe you don't need to be geographically near each other. we need to go ahead and assume the risk, tell the board it's going to be okay, and then take on some of these things.
Elliot Felix: That's really interesting. what's the role of strategic planning? How can leaders create an effective strategic plan?
Sanjit Sethi: I think the first thing that you do is you gather up all this five year strategic plans and you put them in the recycling bin. most of them are terrible. The idea that someone sends me a five year strategic plan after living through the pandemic is reprehensible. How do you build in intentional hinges into whatever planning process you're going to do? Make sure there's a place 24 months in that you check in and say, Hey, community, how's our mission, vision, and values working out? I'm more of an adherent to the adaptive strategy versus the strategic plan.
Elliot Felix: my advice to institutions is, be firm about the why and be flexible about the how. Sanjit, in our last few minutes here, what other advice would you give a new president?
Sanjit Sethi: I think the most controversial thing I'm going to say is that I think probably the most important thing leaders can do is to exercise a degree of self-care. senior leadership teams suck at it. We assume because presidents are the highest wage earners that it comes with a degree of self-sacrifice that is highly problematic. I think it's physically dangerous, mentally dangerous, and it reduces our efficacy as leaders. It's something you have to be intentional about.
Elliot Felix: Great advice. You got to put your mask on first. Sanjit, thank you so much. A great conversation about being a leader in higher ed.
Sanjit Sethi: Great talking with you, Elliot.