Episode 91: Kevin McClure on How a Caring University Enables Student Success
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How can colleges and universities improve the employee experience and, in turn, increase student success? What do institutions need to do differently in terms of strategic planning, professional growth, and leadership development? How can institutions take on the tough decisions and conversations that come with cuts and consolidations? We dive into these questions with Kevin McClure, author of The Caring University, as well as a faculty member and department head at UNC Wilmington.
In the high-stakes world of higher education, we often talk about student success as the ultimate North Star. We pour resources into advising, high-impact practices, and state-of-the-art facilities. But there is a missing link in our strategic plans that is finally demanding attention: the employee experience.
As Kevin McClure, author of The Caring University, suggests, we cannot expect faculty and staff to pour from an empty cup. If we want students to thrive, we must first ensure that the people teaching, mentoring, and supporting them are not being "squeezed" to the point of exhaustion.
Moving Beyond the "Do More With Less" Culture
For decades, higher education has operated under a mounting pressure to "do more with less." This cycle has led to a reality where workloads have ballooned while compensation hasn't always kept pace with inflation or housing costs.
McClure points out that institutions often develop ambitious strategies without ever stopping to ask: "Do we actually have the labor capacity to pull this off?" When we ignore the labor implications of our goals, the burden falls on an already overextended workforce. To break this cycle, we must move toward a model where we "do less with more"—focusing our resources on a few high-impact priorities rather than spreading our staff thin across dozens of competing initiatives.
Integrating Employee Wellbeing into Strategic Planning
If employee well-being isn't in the strategic plan, it likely isn't a priority. Too often, "organizational excellence" is relegated to a vague, minor goal at the end of a document.
True transformation happens when the higher education employee experience is treated as a core strategic pillar. This means moving beyond "fuzzy" ideas of care and toward concrete metrics. McClure identifies several levers for change:
Talent Management Strategy: Linking long-term goals to actual staffing levels.
Human-Centered Policies: Recognizing that employees are "real breathing humans" with lives outside of work.
Equity Audits: Conducting pay equity studies to ensure compensation is fair and competitive.
Caring Leadership: Training managers to be in tune with their team’s bandwidth and personal realities.
The Link Between Working Conditions and Learning Conditions
We must recognize that employee working conditions are student learning conditions. When a faculty member is burnt out or a staff member is overwhelmed by administrative bloat, their ability to curate meaningful experiences for students diminishes.
Student success is about more than just graduation rates; it’s about curating a "constellation of experiences" that helps students reach their goals. This curation requires creativity, energy, and time—all of which are in short supply when the employee experience is ignored. By prioritizing the people who run the institution, we create a more stable, engaged, and empathetic environment for students to learn.
The Courage to Sunset: Saying "No" for the Greater Good
One of the hardest parts of being a caring leader is learning to say "no." Higher education is notorious for adding new programs without ever retiring old ones.
Sunsetting an initiative is difficult because it has real-world implications for people's jobs. However, McClure argues that contraction is already happening across the sector. It is better to lead that contraction voluntarily and with "an ethic of care" than to let it happen haphazardly. Being a caring leader doesn't mean being "nice" all the time or avoiding conflict; it means being transparent, fair, and accountable when making the hard choices necessary to keep the institution healthy.
A Hopeful Path Forward
While the challenges of the "Great Resignation" and budget uncertainties are real, there is a path toward a more sustainable future. By focusing on strategic planning in higher education that accounts for the human element, institutions can build a culture of integrity.
The "Caring University" isn't a final destination or a perfect place—it's a commitment to taking incremental steps. When we value the employee experience, we don't just help our staff; we create the foundation for true, lasting student success initiatives.
Episode 91 Transcript
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Kevin McClure: We are often developing strategy without actually thinking about the labor implications of it. Do we have the people to pull this off? That almost never enters into the decision making process, and so it's wild and so I think many of us have been on campuses where we're like looking at the strategic plan and we're like, I'm pretty sure that's gonna implicate my office. And maybe in a major way and oh, how? Like how are we gonna do that? How are we supposed to pull this off?
Kevin McClure: Some of the places that I noticed that were making some real strides in terms of actually bringing some structure to their attentiveness, to the employee experience and employee wellbeing is because it was in the strategic plan. It had some clear metrics behind it, and then there were resources that were made available to make this happen.
Elliot Felix: That was Kevin McClure, author of the book The Caring University and faculty member and department head at UNC Wilmington. One of the big ideas in The Connected College is that staff and faculty can only support students if they take care of themselves. Kevin and I had an informative and inspired conversation about this, and we went through many of the practical suggestions from his book about how to make this happen.
Laura Paxton Hassner: Thanks for having us. I am the strategic advisor to the Chancellor here at the University of California Berkeley. I also hold the titles of Executive Director of Innovation and Entrepreneurship and the Berkeley Changemaker Academic Program. Berkeley Changemaker started out of the Office of Innovation and Entrepreneurship. Our team came together and what we were really trying to solve for was the challenge that entrepreneurship is such a narrow word, and so few of our students see themselves as included in it.
Cornell Suhartono: Hi, my name's Cornell. I'm currently a junior at UC Berkeley, studying both business and economics. I call myself a Berkeley Changemaker. I've ran a couple different kinds of ventures ranging from a clothing company to a B2B AI SaaS company.
Samiha Singh: My name is Sam. I graduated from Berkeley in 2024. I studied computer science and business. Currently I'm an analyst at McKinsey and Company and on the entrepreneurship side, I was very involved with startups on campus.
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Elliot Felix: I'd love to hear a little bit about your definition of student success.
Kevin McClure: I might come at this from a slightly different angle in the sense that, so I work almost entirely with graduate students. And nevertheless, we are still very much in the student success game. They want to be engaged in work of significance that is very much connected to their values and their aspirations, and ultimately they want to develop the skills and experiences that are gonna help them get to that next step, whatever that might be.
Kevin McClure: And so we are curators of an experience of skill development, of exposure to existing and emerging knowledge to help them get to where they want to go. And part of our job is to figure out with them what that looks like. What is that kind of constellation of experiences that's gonna help them get there?
Elliot Felix: I love the idea that the role of faculty and a college or university more broadly is curating experiences and skills and relationships to get students where they want to go and do it in a meaningful way.
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Kevin McClure: This is a book that's very much focused on the higher education employee experience. And that is something of a unique perspective to take. We, for the most part, placed a lot of emphasis on students and the student experience. That makes a ton of sense. But it has meant at times that we have not sufficiently paid attention to the employee experience.
Kevin McClure: I don't think that it takes a ton of calculus for all of us to recognize that our employee working conditions foster our student learning conditions. We can't just squeeze to get these desired outputs. I really wanted as part of this conversation to say we need to take a look at the environmental conditions in which our employees are working, because I think that is such a necessary precursor to everything that then takes place within the classroom.
Elliot Felix: If you take care of your employees, you have better productivity, you have better profitability, you have better workplace safety. And of course, students are more than customers, but just, seeing faculty and staff success as a precursor to student success, I think is critical.
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Kevin McClure: For a long period of time, we enjoyed significant demand for jobs in higher education. We were able to hire someone and if for whatever reason they left, it wasn't a good fit, we could swap somebody in. The experience with the pandemic and the great resignation exposed a few cracks in that logic and we found ourselves a little flatfooted because all of a sudden our employees had a different set of expectations of the workplace.
Kevin McClure: A big problem is that in many cases we never really developed an understanding of staffing sufficiency in higher education. And so we have often not really tracked people's workloads. During the pandemic, certainly there was an explosion for many people, myself included. Our workloads just absolutely exploded.
Kevin McClure: Then folks started to say, I'm actually not getting paid particularly well for this. That is getting harder as housing prices increase and with inflation, all sorts of services have become more expensive. We've had a ton of financial uncertainty. We've had politicization that has rendered certain aspects of our work much harder to accomplish.
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Kevin McClure: Every single day as a leader, I need to have attentiveness to my people in order for that change to take place. Our capacity to change well is partly based on some of these structural and cultural conditions that make up our workplace experience.
Elliot Felix: One leadership practice that higher ed is not so great at is saying no—the sun setting. What's your best advice to caring leaders who wanna say no so that people can focus?
Kevin McClure: Part of what we're talking about here in some cases is sun setting things that have implications for people's jobs. That's where it gets difficult. But contraction is happening whether it's voluntary or involuntary, and I think I'd rather be on the voluntary side of it and to take responsibility for our future.
Kevin McClure: Some people equate care and niceness. You care for your children; you know that's not the job all the time. Sometimes the job is making hard decisions. Employees are interested in fairness and transparency and living up to the standards that we set for ourselves. Let's do this as transparently as possible and live up to our own standards.