Speaker 1:

Well, C-suite leaders have certainly had lots on their plates the last three plus years, and their capabilities have been relied upon more and more. In the scope of education, that C-suite normally starts with the university president, and that person has to deal with so many issues on a daily basis whether there is a pandemic or not.

Speaker 1:

Pleasure to have you in studio with us today, the university president here at the University of Pennsylvania, Liz Magill. President Magill, great to have you with us here today. Thanks very much for your time.

Liz Magill:

It is my pleasure. I'm delighted to be here.

Speaker 1:

So what's the experience been like so far for you, and also how do you view kind of your leadership style? Because you're relatively new coming in here to the University of Pennsylvania.

Liz Magill:

I am new. Well, good question. I have spent the last year really learning as much as I can about the Penn community here in Philadelphia and also across the globe, our friends and parents and alumni. And before Penn, as I think you might know, I was at the University of Virginia where I was the provost and before that I was the dean at Stanford Law School, and then before that I was a faculty member at the University of Virginia Law School.

Liz Magill:

So I have been lucky to have a variety of leadership opportunities that helped prepare me for the role of president at Penn. My leadership style, there's really a lot of things to say about the different dimensions of leadership, so I thought I'll make a few observations and maybe we'll have further conversation. I guess I start from the view that leadership is a rare privilege and opportunity. Even on those hardest days, my starting point is I have the ability to have so much impact as a leader and I always have that at the forefront of my mind.

Liz Magill:

I take really seriously the leader, the role of a leader to, in a word, to lead, which is to say setting the strategic direction, articulating a vision that people can be a part of, pushing the organization to constantly accomplish more, making tough decisions when you need to and doing that with a confidence and a calm. And last but not least, really staying calm in any kind of crisis.

Liz Magill:

I'm also, in that role of leader, I am always aware of the role that I play as a leader for others, modeling the kind of behavior that one wants to have in the organization. I'm a big believer that excellent leaders in, I think any organization but certainly a large complex organization like the University of Pennsylvania, must be devoted to cultivating other leaders. A great leader and something I try to do is build other people up, bring out the best in them, seek ways to help them improve and thrive. And I think this makes for the most satisfying teams, but I also think it makes for the most high-performing organizations. So I spend a lot of time thinking about that.

Speaker 1:

What's it like then to actually, the process of trying to put a strategic vision together when you're talking about a university this size? And I also wonder, how much of your experience at Virginia and Stanford have played into that as you've come here to Penn?

Liz Magill:

Well, let me start with how I think about the strategic visioning process that we launched last October of 22. And I think every organization has different needs at different times and each organization has its own distinctive set of opportunities and challenges.

Liz Magill:

So last fall, I asked the group that was leading the strategic visioning process to ask two broad questions to the community, and I was asking them myself as well. It started with what the world needs from Penn. So sort of an outward focus in our missions of teaching and research and service, how can we contribute the most to what's happening in the world? And then how do we create and further cultivate the kind of community that can rise to those challenges?

Liz Magill:

We had an advisory committee, it had faculty, students and staff from across the university. It was led by John Jackson who is now the provost of the university. And they went out to the whole Penn family and said, "What are your answers to these questions?" And really engaged a very broad group of people. I was doing the same, especially in my external-facing work, and I have heard from that committee what they heard, the big themes of the conversations that they had with the community and their thoughts about what's happening in the wider world.

Liz Magill:

And later this fall we expect to, we will release the broad strategic framework for the future and I think it will be directional. It's not an operating plan, it's not an implementation plan. It's, here are big themes of what Penn can do to contribute more in the future, and here is what we can do to cultivate the community that's the strongest.

Liz Magill:

I think the specific question about doing this at a place as large and complex as Penn with 12 schools, 25,000 students, lots of centers and programs, is mostly it's been incredibly energizing and people have really come out in droves and expressed their aspirations for the institution, the future. I guess drawing on the experience I had at Stanford and at Virginia and now, I think there are a couple observations I'd make.

Liz Magill:

I think the reason to develop a strategic visioning document is then you are helping define your agenda for the future and you're not just reactive to the moment. You always have to see opportunities and see how things are changing and be ready for that. But without an overall framework, I think you're more reactive.

Liz Magill:

I think a second reason that's very particular to this moment in time to do what we have done is we are emerging, as you referred to in the intro, from what we certainly hope is a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic. And not only do I think people were really ready to think about our aspirations for the future as we emerge from the pandemic, but it's been a period of extraordinary change. So doing this now is a good opportunity to think about how things have changed in our core, the delivery of our core missions and what we should do in the future.

Liz Magill:

The third thing I'd say is at this moment in time at Penn, maybe it's not true in all organizations, it was definitely the right thing to have a broad participatory process. People were really hungering for that, perhaps the post-pandemic moment. And I think those who worked on the committee that fanned out across the Penn family validated that people were very excited to come to the table and offer their thoughts.

Liz Magill:

And then the last thing I'd say, and this is definitely certainly my experience at Stanford, most of my time at Virginia was occupied with Covid so we didn't do as much strategic planning there, is this is just a first step. Much of what we do to move forward will have to do with the resources we're able to put against our priorities and the initiatives that we have that fall out of them. So we're simultaneously thinking about what's next after the announcement of the broad vision.

Speaker 1:

The other interesting thing is kind of the time we're in right now when you think about higher education and the conversation around value. How do those conversations also play into your thinking and frame what potentially you're looking at in the future?

Liz Magill:

Great question. Something I think about a lot, I do want to start by saying higher education is an extremely large and complex sector. I think there are over 4,000 institutions in the country that are four-year degree granting institutions, and asking about the views of higher ed is a little bit like asking, what's your view of retail? It's very complicated, lots of different aspects to it.

Liz Magill:

The thing I'd say about the broader sector is the enviable position that Penn is in. We are not facing some of the really significant headwinds that some of the higher education sector are facing. We have so many more students than we can admit every year to all of our excellent programs. We are attracting incredible faculty, are doing great work. So we have our own challenges of course, but we are thinking a lot, as the strategic visioning process suggests, we are thinking a lot about playing offense, if you will, rather than thinking about defense.

Liz Magill:

I think the perceptions of higher education right now have definitely played into the work we have been doing as part of the strategic visioning process. I do think that we are in an era of declining trust in institutions of all types. And any political scientist will tell you that. They chart this since about World War II and the broad public's faith in institutions has declined a lot. I think my fundamental belief, as maybe evidenced by an entire career in higher education, is that the missions we are accomplishing every day are deeply valuable, both in the sense of what an individual student gets out of the educational experience and also the knowledge we generate and share with the world. Our missions are to educate the next generation and to generate new knowledge and share it with the world.

Liz Magill:

And we are and have been and always will be deeply committed to making the resources of Penn available to any person of talent, regardless of their means. And we're thinking in lots of ways about how to reach doing that right here at Wharton. I know how to reach more individuals with the terrific educational experience we offer. I do think we are sending people out into the world with a Penn education who are doing extraordinary things all over the globe and the list of impacts that our knowledge generation has had in so many sectors and for so many people, I don't even think you could list it.

Liz Magill:

I do think that an institution like Penn has a great responsibility and really an urgent one to model in what we say and what we do, what the value is of what it is that we do here and our commitment to having broad access to the opportunities available here. And that's something I'd like to work on.

Speaker 1:

So when you put the last three and-a-half years in perspective, how then has the pandemic impacted your thinking, not only around leadership but obviously crisis leadership in dealing with, as we just talked about, something that we've never dealt with before and let's hope we never have to deal with again?

Liz Magill:

That was a quite memorable experience and I think I'm still reflecting on the lessons of the pandemic for crisis leadership and leadership generally. When I was provost at Virginia, I kept trying to think of the proper analogy of what the pandemic was, because we had people who were convinced it was a financial crisis or convinced it was an operational crisis or convinced it was... They wanted to characterize it. And I don't know if this is the most apt analogy, but what I settled on was that it was like an ongoing hurricane that evolved for months, presenting new features and new challenges.

Liz Magill:

It was an incredible test of leadership, I think, and I learned a lot about leadership in the course of it. I think institutions that handled the pandemic well, and I think there were many in higher education that handled it well, it really required I think at the start a clarity about what the values were that we were going to abide by as we made important decisions.

Liz Magill:

It obviously required a level of decisiveness under conditions of radical uncertainty where that uncertainty included genuine fear among many people. The other part of leadership that I really feel like I learned a lot of lessons about from the pandemic were, that just required a kind of leadership presence that was essential to organizational resilience.

Liz Magill:

I'll give you one example that I think will resonate with everyone. The pandemic brought right to the surface people's really varying risk tolerance, and in a really vivid way. And leaders had to take all of that in, the many and varied risk tolerances that were revealed by the pandemic, and remain calm and thoughtful and obviously compassionate to the wide range of individual responses that people had in the work environment.

Liz Magill:

The second part of the pandemic where I really feel like I learned a lot of lessons were just about organizational capacity and nimbleness. We had to work in radically new ways. An example again I think will resonate, every important decision that we made, and I think every educational institution had to make, it required three legs of a stool that did not normally have to work together hand in glove. So obviously required a deep understanding of, just think about the classroom and teaching.

Liz Magill:

It required an understanding of the public health concerns and ways to mitigate those concerns. It required a strong understanding of the academic mission, what was teaching, what was the essence of teaching, how could you continue with that mission? And of course it required extraordinary operational capacity. So it's not always the case that the chief epidemiologist of the hospital and the chief academic officer and the chief operations person along with the COO are making all decisions together, but really we made dozens and dozens and dozens of important decisions in universities that required all of that.

Liz Magill:

The second thing that was a real test, and I think most organizations responded, rose to the challenge, but lots of people had to step up and do things they had never done before. So universities setting up fast testing, for instance, something they had never done before, not an easy thing to do, complicated at every level from how do you do it to how do you operationalize it? And so that was another. I think institutions that responded well had these organizational capacity and sort of a nimbleness.

Liz Magill:

The third and last thing I'll say is communication is everything when you're in the midst of a crisis and probably even when you're not, and that's certainly a truism about crisis leadership. I thought it before I went into the pandemic, but it really underscored the significance of communication. Every single day as the provost, I was asked a very good question by a dean a the school who was being asked these questions.

Liz Magill:

They were very good questions like, "Will we be teaching in person next semester? Will the students move into the dorms? What will be the public health constraints on our research mission?" These were fundamental to the mission of the organization and I didn't know the answer to these questions. And the best I could do was say, "Well, what do you think?" And, "We are all working on it and you will know by Friday, and we'll have the answer then."

Liz Magill:

And obviously then broad communication with the whole community. Lots of schools, including Virginia, did all sorts of new forms of communication, but communication on every level to your team, to the people who are leading the organization was just absolutely critical. So I learned a lot of lessons. The one I've been reflecting on lately is how do you capture the innovation that happened and make sure you don't fail to remember the lessons.

Speaker 1:

Anyone impart a great piece of advice to you about leadership that you've had in the past?

Liz Magill:

I have had so much luck in mentors. I'll give you two. I think I should probably just give you one, but I'll give you two. I think the pithiest and one that I have remembered, tried to remember it in every leadership position, is if you speak first, you may not hear things that you wish you had known after the meeting is over.

Speaker 1:

That's good.

Liz Magill:

And I have seen the wisdom in that. The second, and this is observing leaders I've really admired, is articulate your values and articulate them explicitly about how you hope the organization will work together and then model them as best you can.

Speaker 1:

Let me finish on this note, because I think the other side of the story for you and really for any university leader is not only the relationship you had with the professors and such, but it's also the relationship with the students. How do you view how students handled all of this with the pandemic and the adjustments that they had to make?

Liz Magill:

Well, thanks for the question, because I haven't had enough time in these questions to talk about the students. I've just had the wonderful experience of getting to welcome the new class of 2027 at Penn and our transfer students, and nothing brings me more joy than spending time with students. If I am ever having a bad day, and I don't have many that are bad days, I just leave my office and I go find some students and I talk to them, hear about what they're doing, what they're interested in doing.

Liz Magill:

I mean, the resilience of our students is extraordinary, and every student we now have at Penn experienced the pandemic at a very formative time of their life. Some of them, our graduate students might've been in college, our undergraduates may have been in high school, and they adapted and they thrived and even acknowledging how difficult it was, they rose to the occasion.

Liz Magill:

And I am an optimist. I really believe that they're, in this generation who are in higher education right now because of the pandemic and what we experienced together as a society, we are going to have an enormous flowering of creativity and new ideas and new ways of looking at things that are really going to change society for the better. I'm absolutely confident that this really searing experience for these students at a formative age is going to lead to a better society in the coming years.

Speaker 1:

Well, great to have you here and great to have you in our studio. Nice to meet you.

Liz Magill:

Nice to meet you too. My pleasure.

Speaker 1:

Thank you. President Liz Magill here of the University of Pennsylvania.