Doctor Bridget Burns is in the midst of an illustrious career
in higher Ed. She's advised college
presidents, she's LED higher Ed governance reform legislation,
she's served on state education task forces and received a
numerous gubernatorial appointments.
Today she leads a groundbreaking, or shall we say
path breaking organization called the University Innovation
Alliance. But our own path in education
was challenging. I'm actually Exhibit A, and many
of the people I work with were Exhibit A of the kinds of
students that America has been failing for a long time and that
our systems of our universities are not and colleges are not set
up for. She's talking about students who
are a lot like her, students who are the first generation of
their family to attend college and students who are from low
income families. A lot of these students are also
students of color, and too many campus systems are not set up to
support these students. Bridget knows that the stakes
are high for anyone pursuing a college education from that
background. It literally is the difference
between getting out of intergenerational poverty and
not. Bridget's own lackluster
experience as a college undergrad crystallized for her
of mission to improve the college experience and education
outcomes for vulnerable students across the entire field of
higher education. And to do so by fundamentally
changing the way higher Ed institutions approach problem
solving around student experience, namely through
radical inter institutional collaboration.
That's what the University Innovation Alliance is all
about. We are not interested in
posturing and preening. And that's generally where the
conversation ends in higher Ed is a lot of, you know, show pony
showing off. And but when we get to the real
substance of it, it's like, yeah, but how'd you actually do
that? And we just need good ideas to
not be a trade secret. So you've got to make it so that
it's not just possible to talk about the hard stuff around
change management and innovation.
But it's actually the currency. Welcome to Path Breakers, a show
about what it takes to cut through the noise and the red
tape and all of the other obstacles to progress.
I'm Tracy Pearson and I work on the communications team at the
Kresge Foundation. And I'm Jamie Bennett.
I work at the intersections of arts, culture, and equitable
community development. On each episode, we talk with a
different path breaker who's forging a new way forward in
their community. Today we're talking with Doctor
Bridget Burns about what it takes to get a consortium of
college presidents together, put the institutional competition
aside so that they can share their best ideas about the nitty
gritty of their most successful student support programs.
Welcome to the Path Breakers podcast, Doctor Burns, we are so
happy to have you join us today. So why don't we start with you
introducing yourself, your name, your role, and your?
Organization. So my name is Bridget Burns and
I am the CEO of the University Innovation Alliance, which is a
consortium of universities who have banded together to try and
make it so that good ideas that serve students aren't treated
like trade secrets. And we can actually team up to
address some of the big challenges that hinder the
experience of far too many low income, first generation and
students of color. So yeah, that's what I do.
Awesome. So when you say a consortium of
of universities and colleges, what does that, what does that
look like? Well, so it, it started more
than just over a decade ago and it was, it's just at the end of
these, it's just people. These are just people working in
big, large organizations in an industry that has been hyper
competitive from day one. We compete them against each
other on everything possible. And and yet there are some
things that they are struggling with that frankly are universal.
And if you expect them to individually solve those
problems, we're going to be waiting a long time.
And we also need them to team up and and actually solve some big
challenges facing us as a country.
So this group of presidents were all originally former first
generation, low income and students of color.
I started with 11 of them and they just got into a room and
they had a conversation. It was very simple.
And it was basically talking about the fact that we weren't
producing enough college graduates to keep America on
track for economic competitiveness.
And we were doing a really bad job as a country when it came to
serving low income for Shen and students of color.
And it would be a huge waste of time, energy and money if they
continue to go it alone and, you know, repeat experiments.
And so, you know, how do I do it?
We create experiences where it's we help them suspend reality and
pretend that they don't compete. And it's a matter of focusing on
two things, which is the shared problems that they have and the
big things they can only accomplish together.
That's it. I don't talk about other stuff.
I'm not interested in other stuff.
I'm interested only in creating space where those are the two
pillars that we focus our time together and make it really
acceptable. And, and, and frankly, we, we
flip the script a bit that the only way you get a microphone
and a UIA event is if you're going to share a story from
failure, you know, sharing war stories of, Oh my gosh, do not
try and combine your data systems in the middle of
changing your HR system. And let me tell you how bad that
is because those things make it so that, Oh my gosh, you don't
have to keep repeating the mistakes of others.
And, you know, because all of that is costly.
You have, you know, thousands of universities and community
colleges around the country who need to do a better job for
students. We need them to perform better
for our students. But it's actually, these are
just human beings who are working in really busy, hard
jobs. And every day right now is a
slog. They are facing constant
criticism, new cuts every day the public is upset.
You know, it's it's just a really hard.
And so think about when you need to punch above your weight and
when you need to do awesome. Do you do really well when you
feel like constant scarcity and constant, you know, you know,
criticism and, and that there's no help coming?
No, you do better when you actually can focus on, you know,
the small things you can actually work on together, when
you can same team it and, and share practical advice.
And frankly, you know, we start there, but that quickly goes to
innovation. It goes to AI enable chat bots
that we've been using for more than five years now, like
everyone else, welcome to ChatGPT.
But you can you can move a lot faster when you create this kind
of a culture. And so we are focused on scaling
innovation because one of the early conversations we had was
people talking about, you know, we have a centre for this or we
have this experiment, or we've done this.
And we, if we can get past that surface conversation and get
real, then we can actually talk about the real challenges and
build solutions that help them on things that if we don't do it
together, it's never going to happen.
So that's how we do it. It's amazing.
And Bridget, I want to take a step back for a second.
I mean, you're Doctor Bridget Burns, you're leading the
University Innovation Alliance. I'm assuming that you're just
someone who's always loved school, always succeeded, just
never wanted to leave. What was?
What was your own path to getting to UIA?
So adorable that you think that that that I love that that must
it must be, you know, the the business blazer it.
Gives Scarlet. Right.
So I grew up in poverty in rural Montana, family of four living
on less than $20,000 a year. My dad was a farrier, which is
like a horseshoer, and he went into work one day and a horse
flipped over on him when I was 2 years old and he was paralyzed
from the waist down. South.
Tragedy happens all the time. People are resilient.
My family basically had 100% unemployment my whole life.
My mom stayed home, take care of my dad.
And so, you know, I didn't get a lot of good advice about how to
navigate higher Ed. I got nothing but bad advice.
Actually. My dad used to always just say
that if I wanted to go to college, I should only do, I
should just do what my brother did and win a state championship
in wrestling, which was like so helpful for a 13 year old girl.
And so like a lot of lot of first Shen and low income
students, I followed you. You get the bad advice, you find
something in it to follow. For me, I thought if I worked
really hard and won something, if I was great at something, I
would get to go to college because I knew I was going to
pay for myself. And so I totally neglected my
studies and focused exclusively on winning A state championship.
I did in debate. So I'm not a, I'm not a, I'm not
an unserious or unsmart person, but I barely eked out of high
school with a 2.3 GPA because of that.
And so I was left with the reality that it turns out, you
know, people aren't as interested in a mediocre student
who can argue about it. So I didn't have a scholarship.
I stumbled to a Community College and as soon as I got
there I discovered these people are all good people who want to
help, but this place is not actually set up around the user.
This is not set up for me as a student.
Like at no point does anyone coach me on how to be successful
at college because we don't do that.
You know, you're just supposed to pick that up, I guess from
the, the like the water supply. We, you know, I walk.
I didn't know when to go to an advisor.
I heard the word office hour and thought that meant people were
doing office work so I shouldn't bother them.
I took really interesting classes and it was a
transformative experience, but not a lot of it had to do with
my program of study because we hand 18 year olds a choose your
own adventure map with no guidance.
And I, you know, it still worked out for me.
It still was the most incredible transformative experience.
It completely changed who I am and I'm deeply passionate about
everyone getting the kind of epiphanies and like light bulb
awakening moments that I had from higher education.
And it's why I'm I literally everyday I get it.
I get to go to work and do a job that's amazing.
I wouldn't be here without it. But it became very clear that
this, it's not nobody's setting these booby traps for students.
Nobody's twisting their mustache in the ivory tower.
It's actually really hard to help an institution improve.
These are big bureaucracies. You want them to serve, you
know, thousands upon thousands of students.
It's really difficult to drive change an environment like that.
The world has changed. And so I, you know, spent a few
years working in a state where I just saw universities throwing
elbows. We should have been same team.
Why? We are serving the same state.
How is this possible? Why can't we collaborate?
And then I realize, oh, cuz collaboration frankly is a
terrible experience. It's a, it's a lot of extra work
people throw on you that they expect of you.
It's unpaid. And so I got to go.
I was given an opportunity that led to the alliance, which is I
got to do an ace fellowship, which is kind of like baby
president school and you shadow a president for a year.
And I wanted to know if all this innovation hype out there was
real. And I wanted to understand what
was going on around the country. And so I shadowed ASU President
Michael Crowe, and I quickly learned it's real.
The innovation work is legitimately different in in
certain environments. And I wanted to understand why
innovation works in some places and why it wasn't scaling.
And simultaneously, this idea for the alliance had happened.
The these presidents had come up with this idea and I was free
labor because I was an ace fellow.
And so I, you know, I jumped into it and have been here since
the beginning. That's amazing.
And Michael Crowe, I know Michael a little bit, he seems
to be one of the few university presidents I've run across who
understands that it's no longer 18th century Germany and that
universities don't have to sort of operate in the same way.
And what's interesting to me in this moment is we have some of
those big long term historic issues that were true when you
were being a student, that were true for the generation before
you, that are true today. And my hunch is that the past
six months have maybe been one of the most difficult times to
be a university in the United States.
When you sort of think about those big ongoing things and the
immediate things that are coming up and changing every day.
How are universities, how are presidents balancing those while
still trying to center the students and center the teaching
and learning? How do you do those two things?
It's very difficult. It is the hardest job in
America. These are huge organizations
that are so we cannot screw this up.
We cannot afford to lose progress.
These like the life changing experience I had and you know,
millions of other people have had where it's the it's the
trampoline upon which most of the good innovation that changes
society and it helps us evolve comes from.
And yet it at the end of the day, right now, it is under
attack and a level that has never been some of it was prior
to this moment. There has been feedback that
they that hired we should have been listening to we should have
been shifting. But it is the most precarious
moment I think in in the history of American higher education.
No question. And we could lose all the
progress we could, we could lose our leading edge as a country if
we don't see the big picture here, which is if you want
progress and innovation and change and creativity, and you
want solutions that fundamentally change the lives
of everyday people, that comes out of educating people and
giving them opportunities so that they can build those
solutions. And it comes out of
universities. We are the the laboratory.
We are the, you know, the spark. And right now, if you're a
college president, you are in the trenches.
You're head down war tattered. It is so it is so much harder
than I've. And I thought I'd knew it like
I've been at this now for 11 years and a decade prior.
And it's the hard it, it really is.
You know, I yes, I help them collaborate, but right now I'm
just trying to keep keep them in their jobs.
Because every time that you transition a president, you lose
five to seven years of progress at a university.
Because think about it like the whole team.
When you lose, think, imagine yourself losing the big boss.
That means that some now the provost's going to leave now
other vice presidents, now Dean's, now all of a sudden it's
destabilized. Anything you thought you had
permission to do, now you don't know if you have permission to
do it. I think it's either it's, it's
either fire, ice, you're either frozen and you can't move
forward or everything is on fire.
And so right now, I need them to survive this moment and navigate
it. It is really difficult.
But yeah, I think that I think we're going to get through it.
But yeah, they need, they need buddies.
And I don't know if you know that this is very unusual for
them to have buddies, an environment in which they would
get to have conversations about the real hard nuts and bolts of,
of doing these jobs. Because these jobs are really
precarious and most of the rooms they're in are massive or it's
or they're on a stage. And so they don't actually get
to talk about the heart stuff anywhere else.
I can only imagine the amount of trust that is required to be the
connective tissue between all of these individuals and and and
professionals and and their teams and bringing them
together. It's it does take a lot of trust
and usually it has to be earned, right.
Every time I get a new president, I'm just nobody,
right? Like, who are you?
I need to show up with and solve a problem for them.
Thankfully, the more that we've been established over time, the
UI has been known to actually do the real work, the more that
they are aware that this is actually a very exclusive group.
Like we're kind of like the ID league of student success
innovation. But if elitism actually, if
exclusivity served the purpose, like the future of our country,
if, if the only we're exclusive in that you have to actually
really mean it that you care about low income students and
you're going to, you're going to actually like show it.
You're going to actually make hard decisions that are not
popular in order to support improving outcomes for those
students. And so if you're willing to do
that, then those are those are our people.
Not elite for the sake of just being exclusive.
And I think there are a lot of challenges right now to Jamie's
point, not higher education. So what I'm curious to know what
are some of the challenges that you all are trying to sort of
navigate within the context of UIA?
So, you know, we're in an interesting inflection point.
So the first decade of the UIA, we President Obama announced our
first goal on stage. We were going to, we were going
to commit to graduating 68,000 more students then we were on
track to. And so it was going to take us
actually, you know, think about the students who would have
dropped out. We're we wanted to commit to
68,000 / 10 years more of those would actually, actually
graduate. And in that time period, we
actually hit 164,000. So so and you know, 100% more
graduates of color, 43% more low income graduates.
Nothing in American higher Ed has ever accomplished anything
like this. So we figured out how to do
systemic changes. That's right.
And so that's what I mean by like my form of elite.
These people are like elbow grease like we are, we are, we
are, you know, we don't have time to play.
We are very serious about this work.
So you have the backdrop of, you know, UA one point O is student
success and more degrees. I think that, you know, in terms
of projects that we're working on next, the two big challenges
we're tackling right now are the, the moment a young person
is is looking at college and thinking about it right now, the
way that that experience is set up makes totally no sense.
It makes zero sense that we ask you to pick a college not
knowing anything about the outcomes of those institutions.
We make this assumption that you're going to like go travel
somewhere. No, most people actually pick a
college near them. So of the ones near me, who does
the best job with a low income first generation student who's
interested in possibly becoming an attorney, who like to, you
know, help it make it make it make sense.
Help help me feel like I understand what's actually, you
know, what I need to know. And then, and then it's insane
that we asked them to choose a major before they know anything
about a career, right? We think that by listening to
those to young students and students who are in their first
year after being admitted, that we can actually build a
fundamentally different experience that would be
connected to career readiness. Help them match, make with the
right major, reduce the number of major changes and excess
credits, help them get through in four years, you know,
actually have a plan. So that's one place, but and the
other is that the classroom is where career readiness needs to
be, that it's the one place all students go is the classroom.
And so we, we want to actually be able to to make that a
reality for them. When I ask people what it was
around their educational undergrad experience that that
set them up for their career, they talk about like, you know,
I was the president of a club, or I was the, you know, head of
my sorority, or I was the student newspaper, or I, you
know, it was, I was in a lab and I was doing undergraduate
research or I was part of a, we did this, you know, design
competition as a team and I did this.
It's things that technically didn't happen in the classroom.
Right. That and I don't think people
give higher Ed credit for all of that stuff, right?
And that's, that is the stuff that is helping them post
college that is going to set them up for success.
But we don't give students, I think good marching orders when
they come in that you're going to go to class.
That is awesome and there's going to be incredible learning
there. But you have to go out and, and
actually maximize the value. Half of it is going to be what
you do with this stuff out here. When you're going to do an
internship, when you're going to be part of activities.
You see those students who get through and at the end of their
when they're ready to graduate. And you know that if they didn't
do those things, if they didn't actually maximize the
experience, we do still have a backup plan for them.
And that is called career services.
It's an office that is only a backup plan.
It is not actually the plan. The plan was the whole place.
So it's a reframe, but it's a really big reframe because I
think people think career services is an insufficient
answer to the question of, of jobs and career.
And that's because it it's just a.
It's the backup plan for in case you didn't maximize the
experience. I think my I'm putting going to
put my PR hat on when you talk about the full experience and
ensuring that students know that they need to have that full
experience. I think that sometimes students
get pushed to pick the major, go to class, get the good grades
and ignore all of these sort of auxiliary programs that they
could really sort of lean into to help them figure out which
path they want to go down. Like, don't don't forget all the
little accoutrements to the recipe.
You know, for this to be a delicious experience, you need
you need all these other little things that go into it totally.
So yeah. Yeah, I, I mean, my everything
that I do every day is directly related to what happened in my
undergraduate experience, which is I was a competitive debater.
So I have to come up with ideas quickly.
I have to be able to defend a position quickly.
I have to be able to research and analyze.
But I also a year and a half after I stepped foot on to
Oregon State's campus, I was elected student body president.
And a year and a half after that, I was appointed by the
governor of Oregon to the State Board of higher Education.
I was a non traditional student from out of state, low income
family. Like I didn't have any
connections, right? That place changed my life
overnight and I and I was now in charge of a nonprofit with
$1,000,000 budget and I was hiring and firing college
presidents at 22 years old. That does, I mean, those are not
things that happen inside the classroom.
Do I feel like that institution gets full credit for the
transformative experience that I had?
No, I think we think of colleges.
You, you pay your tuition, you go to class and you leave.
And I think that there's so much more that that people are
getting out of this experience. Richard, as we were looking at
the University Innovation Alliance, I am a little bit
fascinated by the listening lab. Will you sort of introduce our
our listeners to what is the listening lab?
I want to get into that a little bit.
So I've shared how these are highly complex, bureaucratic,
large organizations. But in this case, I think of it
like universities are kind of like a body.
And I would, I would go to I, I go to institutions and I would
always ask the same question when I get on campus.
And that is, where do you think students bring their problems?
Where do problems go? Whose job is it to solve
problems? And if the answer is everyone,
but then it's no one. And that's always the answer I
get. Or I would hear people say go to
the the help center and I would go to the help center and I
would ask them, can you show me the list of problems the like
the last two months worth of students problems.
And they would just tell me, Oh, no, we don't keep a list.
So think about that. The one place that students are
supposed to bring the problems. We don't keep a list.
We just expect because we're always responding in real time.
We're always like, you know, fighting the fight.
And the other place I would hear was a go to the meet with your
advisor if you have, if you're a student with a problem.
And I would go through advisors and I would ask, do you feel
like you, you get to solve problems for students?
And they would say, no, My job is to help them change
themselves and adapt to this institution.
It's about how they need to shift, right?
So now multiply that times over 10 years now 19 institutions.
It became very clear that if it's if this is a if this is a
body, where is the ear that we're going to listen and
understand which students are going through in real time to
try and actually solve their problems.
And we don't have it universities, everyone so will
have a focus group and that will you know, if you're in the room
when that that you know, the insights come.
You're lucky that's going to go sit on a dusty shelf somewhere
with a strategic plan at we don't actually feel like we can
solve these problems because the politics on that one is going to
be difficult. Well, that's good.
That's, that's not something we can do right now.
And so, but these students, but students are experiencing these
problems in real time. I can't pay my rent.
I cannot get into this class. And if I don't, I'm not going to
graduate this year. All of these issues that
students are experiencing, we need to listen to them and be
able to change how we make decisions.
So we are actually combating these challenges in real time so
that our campuses can actually navigate right.
So in COVID students we're dealing with in real time, like
I don't have access to a computer, I don't have Internet
at my house. I, you know, that we had to
listen to them more. And so the listening lab is take
that idea and put it on steroids.
We think that you, that empathy is the first step of design.
You have to listen and you have to truly be earnestly listening
and and understanding where where they are and do it
consistently, not sporadically. And don't just listen to the
student government students or the scholarship kids who get
rolled out. You know, I was one of those who
like, you know, bring me out to talk to a donor and I'm going to
say a nice thing. Yeah.
No. And don't make students just
come in and perform their trauma either.
Right. So we had to build a method by
which you could consistently listen that honored their time.
So we actually it's compensated, it's regular, it's inclusive,
we're bringing in all student voices and backgrounds.
And then we're working on how you take all those insights and
real time try and actually we're going to do a Sprint and we're
going to solve this problem. We're going to try and actually
shift how we make decisions about what we do and the changes
that we're advancing. And so these institutions are
basically, we now have a a consistent practice of not just
listening to students, but also systematically responding and
trying to address their issues. And is that something?
That the listening lab. Within the specific universities
or UIA holds a listening lab that sort of covers a bunch of
universities. So the lab is central to the UIA
and what we do is we actually, we first had a prototype, the
solution. So what would it look like if
every university had consistent focus groups?
What was the method? How do you make sure you're
actually recruit the right students, that you're not just
getting the same voices, all that kind of stuff.
So figured it out over the first, first phase of our work.
And the Kreski Foundation has been so generous with this, the
support of this, it's a, it's a strategy shift for the sector.
And so now, once, you know, now we actually run trainings, we
teach module based learning. People can get skilled up.
We've have held national national Summit, train people
at, you know, many other universities.
We're running like hundreds of focus groups at all time,
constantly listing of students and then synthesizing those
insights and basically saying, Hey, we have a problem over at
this university. It's not your student, but we
think it's relatable. So here's an example from the
listing lab, a campus in an urban center, very relatable
students, all the student was only getting text alerts about a
crime. They were only ever getting
notified because of, because of reporting requirements that
universities have to say like, hey, if there's a crime that's
happening on campus, right? Well, the student that was only
they, they, that was all they ever heard was about bad things
that were happening on campus. So they were afraid to come to
campus because we had not realized that that's the only
communication they're receiving is a text alert about a crime on
a camp. Like, and it's such a obvious,
but like when you're running a complex organization that is
trying to change lives, like, you would totally miss that.
And yet it's completely relatable that all students in
the United States get those same kinds of texts.
And we don't think, hey, that's actually kind of scary.
And we're not contextualizing that.
And we're also not even thinking about those students who've
unsubscribed from everything else.
That's a terrible message to get about your institution.
So that's just one of the many ways that the lab has made it so
that the other institutions can solve their prevent this from
happening on their campus. I want to talk to you a little
bit about the amount of empathy that I feel like I'm hearing
that goes into this work, the vulnerability, trust, empathy,
and being open to sort of the big questions.
These all sound like things that I went in prepping for this
interview you have had some experience with and sort of
another area of your life with is the improv theatre.
And so I wanted to ask you, are there any elements of that
experience? And if you are open to sharing
that with us, we'd love to hear it that you sort of bring to
your work at the UA. Yeah, we so we first started
doing this. We knew that we couldn't do this
work the way everything else had ever been done in higher Ed.
Just it wouldn't it wouldn't accomplish what we needed to.
And so I I focused on getting inspiration from other places.
So take took improv. I tried to you know, we looked
at Carnegie's improvement science work.
We looked at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement.
We looked at all these places, but I also where are the
cultures that you can make people really trust each other
and do real work. Create create the conditions
which people can actually lower their shoulders and and feel
like they can be them. They can actually share the hard
thing and improv is a fantastic place because experience and I
think design for those kinds of experiences because the rules of
improv, they translate to the work that I do.
So I used improv to initially to try and you know, just simulate
creativity and learn about it here.
Every one of our events we start with yes, and is the framework.
We know that you do not get the best idea by yourself.
You just don't. If you think that you are going
to solve everything by yourself, you are wrong.
So when someone is vulnerable enough to share a new baby idea,
it's a baby. It's not ready to be debated.
And so the you know what, the way you meet them where they are
is you say, I hear you. I see you being being generous
because a new idea is generous because you could keep it to
yourself. And yes, and I'm going to build
on it. I'm going to meet you in that
space of vulnerability. So yes.
And it's our first rule for everything we do.
There are other rules of improv that really help.
The others are focus on being interested, not interesting,
subtle. It's a subtle shift, but think
about like right now, if I said we're going to do an ice breaker
and everyone's going to share a fun fact, immediately you stop
listening, you turn your ears off, you literally go inside to
figure out how you can be interesting.
You you don't pay attention to anything else, right?
You So that's kind of The thing is like if you focus on being
interesting, you are not going to be a good thought partner.
You are not going to be listening to people.
You're, you're going to be, you know, you're going to just focus
on yourself. So focus on being interested.
Think about what are the questions that will actually,
you know, what do you want to know about this person?
What do you think? You know, who are they get into
tapping into curiosity more. So the other rule of improv is
it's about the team. It's not about me.
And so anyway, all of that has been super helpful for our work.
And, and then years later, I also moved it on to stand up
comedy because I run a national nonprofit and not everybody
wants to talk about low income students.
So I got to find a way to make sure that all of our our work is
it can adapt to any audience and you know, people need to laugh
because the stuff can be heavy. And so it's all connected.
Love all of that. And one of our first
conversations this series was with Dean Moji, who's working on
the Merrill Grove campus in Detroit, and she has a
background as a theater teacher. I'm also a failed stage manager,
and so I think theater is excellent preparation for
anything you're doing. A lot of the work of the
alliance is also about scaling solutions, right?
We need to understand the problems.
We need to be honest about failure.
We need to have empathy. We need to do deep listening.
We lead a prototype and collaborate.
So how do you approach scale? You know, when there's a good
idea that works at the University of Illinois, how
should the president of ASU or Yale or Wayne State think about
that idea? What should they copy?
What should they learn from it? How do you think about scaling
and doing something that actually is specific to other
places, other campuses? Our version of scale is an idea
has worked in one place and we want to transport it to another
state, another institution, and they are going to have their own
narrative. They're going to have the story
they tell themselves about what's possible.
They're going to all be like, we've tried that or we can't do
that. Did you know that?
That there's always a story, Got to find out what it is.
But that's 1/2 is, you know, how do you need to shimmy it in?
You got to shave off some sides. You got to adapt it.
Scale is not black and white. It is not cut and paste.
It is, it is riffing, it is inspiration, it is, you know, it
is got to be adapting. So it depends.
So chat bots for one, we've implemented AI enabled chat
bots. Some campuses focused on career
services to apply that. Some it was the incoming student
and it was to make it so they could produce e-mail.
Some it's because they have students who want to go to talk
to someone at 24 hours a day and we can't keep offices open that
you know how. But but the idea of an AI
enabled chatbot is the same thing.
It's how are you going to adapt it to solve your problem.
And that in that example, it was boiling it down to the most
essential element, which is the question of where are the
repetitive tasks? Where are there people getting
asked repetitive questions and that makes it so that those
individuals are not able to do some higher order thinking.
Let's focus on that because we can probably use this AI enabled
chatbot to make it so that advisors are not answering the
exact same question so that we're having that 24 hour day
offering to students so that career services is able to
adapt. You know, So yeah, in in our
case, it's the first year or so. I thought it needed to be all
the same. No.
And and so it needs to be creative environment where
people can riff on each other, where they can ask the really
dumb question, the the dumb questions, the right question.
You know, like, I think I'm doing the same thing as you, but
I don't know because this is not my job, right?
Most of these people report up to me.
So and they all want to make me happy and they all want to tell
me that they're doing a great job, but I don't actually know
if what we're doing is the best thing.
That's what presidents experience.
Everyone they interact with works for them.
And so everyone's going to tell you you're doing a great job,
but they actually want to make sure you're doing a great job.
And so are we. Is this even like what, what
have we learned from other places?
So that's what the Alliance does is like the the peripheral
vision. They don't have it.
We have to fill it in because they are they, they, they have
such a massive job. And.
Yeah. Awesome.
I just have one quick question a a sort of a follow up.
Let's say a university president who's not currently a part of
the UI hears this. Is the organization open to new
membership? How does how does that sort of
work if a president wants to become involved?
So when we first announced publicly that what we wanted to
do, you know, a little over 10 years ago, I had 120
institutions reach out within 48 hours.
OK, So that was a problem because we had to figure out how
do we act like what, you know, like the whole.
And and we learned over time that the intimacy of this
network is, is really the value is that it's the lubricant
because you aren't going to you're not going to shout.
You're vulnerable moments in a giant theater, right?
And so I don't think we are not closed, but we don't right now.
We're focused on trying to actually adapt to this moment
and launch this next chapter for institutions who are not in the
UIA one. We've always believed that our
job is to act like a laboratory and build the solutions,
prototype it, test it, scale it, and then create playbooks and
accessible content that is actually useful for the listener
or for the reader to actually be able to solve this problem on
their campus. And so we believe in giving
everything away. So we have the UI Summit which
people can send their teams to and will actually, you know,
help them connect with funders, build projects.
We give them all the tools we create.
Our playbooks are freely available.
We are not trying to sell anything in the sector.
We are trying to be Exhibit A of here's how you can actually do
this and you can actually hear the tools you need to implement
it back home. And so that's one is that
everything we've ever done is actually out there and it's
designed for the user, not for the the writer.
And we are open, but it's one per state and I already have 19
states. So we've already, you know,
where each state there is a potential campus that we would
add. And over time, we are adding
them quietly. We just added Temple University.
And I don't think this is known yet, but but perhaps by the time
this comes out, we're adding University of South Carolina
breaking news. So, yeah, yeah, we're not close,
but it's hard. The rooms already getting big 19
institutions. And so I think we could go to
30, but but you have to go slow over time because you have to
get to know the other campus. You have to build trust.
We have to teach them actually how to do the real work and not,
you know, because in this sector there are a lot of things that
exist that people join and it's it's a lot of talk.
It's we are making a big announcement and then we don't
do anything different. This is this is doing we, it's
harder. And so we we're, we're open, but
we're also giving everything away so that others don't need
to join the alliance in order to change.
Awesome. Well, we'll make sure that the
website is in the show notes and people can take a look at all of
that. We want to wrap up our time with
our little tradition of doing couple rapid fire questions to
just get a different part of your brain.
So Bridget, on a scale of 1 to 10, how good are you at keeping
secrets? Like it's 0 from my best friend,
but it really depends on the juiciness of the secret and like
what it's about, right. So if it's like super actually a
legit secret, I have like I mean the nuclear codes are in here.
I would say I'll give myself A6, you know, just average it out.
OK, other than Innovating Together and Path Breakers,
what's your favorite podcast? I listen to pivot.
Oh, I love Kara Swisher. You spend a lot of time in
Portland, OR. What's the most stereotypically
Portland thing you have ever done?
I ride A1 wheel go away. Just stop.
You know, those like those like electronic devices, you see some
teens whiz past you and you're like, what is that?
I ride one of those and I ride it to work actually.
And of course, I have a dog. Everybody has a dog in Portland.
What's your song of the summer for 2025?
I keep having all these different TikTok songs that I
don't even know what they are, that are stuck in my head.
But I would say that one, that was just on America's Got Talent
that I think is going to go viral.
Lots of movies about the college experience.
Wondering if you have a favorite movie that's sort of a college
theme slash college experience? Well, mine is unlikely, which is
the documentary that the Kresge Foundation actually supported
and that covered our work. 10 out of 10 recommend.
Texting or talking? It depends on who it's with,
right? There's some people I don't want
to text me, but but I like to talk.
I I probably process through verbally so I will talk about.
What tabs are open on your computer right now?
Oh my God, like 100. Who gets to play you in the
movie about Doctor Bridget Byrne?
So I've spent my whole life people telling me I look like
Glenn Close and so she is obviously older than me, but
that would be the aspirational target, right?
I. Like Glenn Close, go with Glenn
Close. What's something that's given
you hope this week so far, big or small?
I am really excited about the direction that we're moving in
here. We can we can convene people
around creating a future for each of our states that is just
better and create the kinds of conversations and exeriences
where we will design the kind of future that we need the.
Title of the podcast is Athbreakers.
The theme of the annual report is Path Breakers.
So I wanted to ask you who's a path breaker in your life?
I'll go back to just acknowledging earlier that I
wouldn't be in this position for if it not to be for Michael
Crowe at Arizona State. He's someone who saw the
potential of ASU when it was just people thought of as a
party school and ignored it. And now it's the most innovative
university in higher education and, you know, more than 100,000
students. And then, you know, I run his
friend group essentially, you know, and he made it so that
this kind of work was normal. You know, other presidents are
innovative and they have big ideas, but we often have existed
in the structure of universities that are not set up for you to
to change them. And so he broke the path and
made it possible for other leaders to think differently
about the job and to change their institution, and not in
the ways that it always been, to not just focus on becoming more
exclusive, but actually reframing the relationship
between what universities are and what they can do for
society. And so he's the path breaker for
me. I love that Doctor Bridget
Burns, chief executive officer of the University Innovation
Alliance. Thank you so much for taking a
little bit of time today to share some of the stuff that's
happening. I know you've got a full day in
Washington, DC ahead of you, so we'll let you get out of here
and get off to doing that work. Just thanks so much for being
with us today. Thank you, Doctor Burns.
Thanks for having me. Doctor Bridget Burns is the CEO
of the UIA, the University Innovation Alliance, a multi
campus laboratory for student success innovation.
We've put the links to the UIA, as well as the documentary that
Bridget was featured in, in our show notes.
Path Breakers is produced by the Kresge Foundation, which was
founded in 1924 with a mission to promote human progress.
Today, Kresge works to expand equity and opportunity in
America's cities. Read the stories of all of this
season's Path Breakers and learn about our grant making and
social investing work in Detroit, Memphis, New Orleans,
Fresno, and cities across the US at kresge.org.
To hear more stories from the Path Breakers, be sure to
subscribe to the show wherever you listen to podcasts.
Our producers are Juliet Hindley and Zach Rosen.
Managing editor is Krista Yankee.
Our show art is by Rochelle Baker and Creative direction by
Alejandro Herrera. Special thank you to my
colleagues on the education program for lifting up Doctor
Burns and speaking her name as a truly phenomenal path breaker.
We'll talk to you all next week.