Behind the Headlines | Rhodes College President | Season 13 | Episode 6

- (female announcer) Production funding for Behind the Headlines is made possible in part by the WKNO Production Fund, the WKNO Endowment Fund, and by viewers like you, thank you.

- The new president of Rhodes College, tonight on Behind the Headlines.

[intense orchestral music] - I'm Eric Barnes with The Daily Memphian, thanks for joining us.

I am joined tonight by Jennifer Collins, she is the new president of Rhodes College.

Thanks for being here.

- Thank you so much for having me.

- And welcome to Memphis.

- Thank you, I'm really excited to be here.

- Along with Bill Dries, reporter with The Daily Memphian.

I should note at the top, election day was yesterday.

We are taping this on Thursday, so we will get to all kinds of breakdown of the election and get some of the winners and potentially some of the losers on in coming weeks.

So I just wanna note that as people tune in on Friday.

Again, as I said, welcome to Memphis.

You were named, what, in December to be new president, but you've been here about a month.

We were talking a little bit before.

I mean, Rhodes is one of those, I've been in Memphis now 27 years, beyond whether you went there, I did not go there, or my kids just happen to not go there.

Rhodes is an institution here.

I mean, it's just one of the really kind of, it just means a lot to people, above and beyond the alumni and people who've even really particularly interacted with it.

What attracted you to the job?

- Several things.

One, the commitment to the liberal arts, which I think is the best education we can give young people today who are gonna be confronting jobs that the three of us can't even imagine will exist in 20 or 30 years.

Absolutely, the city of Memphis, it's such a treasure and a rarity to be a liberal arts college located in a major city with all the opportunities that gives our students.

And frankly, all the responsibility it conveys to the college, it's just a wonderful place to be located.

And I would say third, the really deep commitment to service that permeates Rhodes.

Our students do so much in the community, our faculty study and learn and engage in the community in so many different ways.

So really those three things.

- That level of.

Let me also note that you came from SMU.

- Yes.

In Dallas.

- You were Dean there.

- I was the Dean of the law school.

- And prior to that, you were at Wake Forest.

- I was at Wake Forest University in North Carolina.

- That commitment, just to give people a little bit of background, we may touch on more of that, that commitment to service.

It is a thing that not necessarily everyone has experienced, but that the Rhodes internship programs.

I mean, I kind of remember when I was in college a million years ago, internships were kind of maybe a check the box thing for a lot of people.

Rhodes has made a commitment that gets kids out into the city, young people out into the city.

Is that typical across, I dunno, I'm just gonna say the industry, but the landscape of higher education?

Or was there something unique about the way Rhodes does that?

- I think Rhodes is really unique and it's often named as one of the most service-minded colleges in the United States, which is a distinction that we're very proud of.

So students do it in a couple different ways.

One, they might do an internship or an externship, either for academic credit or potentially for pay, but they're also just involved in service projects and service organizations trying to serve the community in as many different ways as they possibly can.

But I do think a lot of students are attracted to Rhodes because of having such incredible institutions in Memphis, like St. Jude's and FedEx, our students are really able to take advantage of those work opportunities, particularly our students who are interested in medical school, which is a path a significant percentage of our students want to pursue.

- We'll come back to some, but let me bring it to Bill.

- Talk a little bit about the impact of the pandemic.

We're not all the way through it.

I mean, we're still undergoing that, but it really wreaked havoc in any number of areas, including in higher education, where Rhodes and other colleges just overnight had to make these dramatic changes.

Is it just a matter of turning back on the lights and getting on with how things were before or has the pandemic brought lasting changes on higher ed?

- I think it's brought lasting changes to start with the positive, because I always try to look for the silver lining.

I think there's a perception of higher ed that we can be very caught up in tradition and it's difficult for us to pivot and innovate and colleges pivoted overnight, right?

I had faculty, I was at SMU at the time, who probably didn't use email and all of a sudden they were teaching online in new and creative ways and thinking about how they could adapt their courses.

And that's a positive, it's really exciting to think about how we can incorporate more technology into a residential education and use all these incredible tools that are available to us.

So in that way, I think the increased use of technology, the ability to innovate is a positive and lasting change.

The more negative side of the pandemic, of course, I think is the impact on mental health.

And we were already seeing an explosion in mental health challenges among our students, that's only been magnified by the pandemic.

And I frankly worry a lot about the mental health of our staff and faculty too, who we ask to carry an enormous workload while they were working at home and potentially manning an elementary school for their children at the same time they were trying to teach their students in higher education.

So I think we have to be really intentional about how we come back, how we take care of each other and how we build community.

Those are gonna be big priorities going forward.

- Do you, at this point, having been here for a short time are the next few months a matter of taking stock of what the institution is and then where the institution wants to go from there?

- Absolutely.

I like to call it my first year of listening and learning and trying to meet with as many people as I can, both internally inside the college, our alumni and meetings across the city of Memphis, because it is so important for me to hear from the community, what they would like to see Rhodes be, how they would like to see us contribute.

And it's just been a wonderful opportunity to meet people doing incredible things across the city.

I got to sit down with the Memphis Women's Foundation yesterday, for example, and they're just doing incredible work.

So yes, I'm trying to listen and learn as much as I can.

- What are some of those things that you're hearing that people want from Rhodes?

- I think they care very deeply, as I do, about increasing access and equity across higher education.

Certainly one of the very legitimate criticisms of higher education is that we keep getting more expensive.

And we need to think about how we make a Rhodes education available to the incredible students across Memphis and across the country who are excited about coming to be a part of our campus community.

I think that people want us to continue to deepen and strengthen our service commitments to the city of Memphis, which we're eager to do.

And one of the things that I heard that people hope we keep doing is having our graduates stay in Memphis, about 40% of our graduates end up staying and becoming permanent residents of the city and contributing in lots of different ways and that's certainly something people wanna see continue.

- I think I heard actually from a parent of a Memphis boy who is at Rhodes, but that Memphis students now make up, Memphis residents now make up something like 10% or not a particularly huge percentage of the population of the student body.

Is that right?

Or do you know that number?

- I'm not sure of that figure off the top of my head.

- Okay.

That's what he, it was very low.

I remember it as 10, let's say it was 20.

I think that was probably not the case 40 or 50 years ago.

I am curious about, you brought up access.

I mean I've talked before on the show about my kids.

I have one tuition payment in college left.

- We're in the same place.

- I'm very excited.

Yeah.

You're in the same place.

- I have a senior in college and my twins just graduated.

- It is breathtakingly expensive.

- It really is.

- And the inflation rate on it is just going up and up and up.

And it just kind of gets to where you look and think, all right, we're gonna get some of these high end universities and high end liberal arts schools are gonna have a sticker price of $100,000 not that many years from now.

And you just wonder how many people can really afford, all in, if it's 50,000 year, it's still a $200,000 commitment to a $400,000 commitment for higher education and that must weigh on you.

- It really does.

I mean, Rhodes, first is one of the better values in liberal arts education, so we're grateful for that.

But as I said, I've been paying three college tuitions for the past three years.

So I'm very glad I am entering my last year of college tuition payments.

I think one of the challenges is that students and parents, frankly, expect more from colleges these days.

When I went to college, and I don't know how many years ago the two of you went to college, it was much more a sink or swim kind of environment.

We didn't have the robust slate of career services that we provide to students now.

We didn't have the mental health counseling.

We didn't have all the student support services.

We didn't have some of the more creative and innovative majors.

And so as you continue to grow and give students and families the services they want and need, that does increase cost.

And Rhodes has been keeping its tuition increases below the rate of inflation.

But yes, thinking about our price tag is always something that's on my mind.

- Rhodes has also seen a number of innovations.

Mike Curb, a music executive in Nashville, made a significant investment in music studies there.

You also have the Henry and Lynne Turley Center there.

What's the outlook for that in the future at Rhodes?

Do you look for more institutions like that?

Do you strengthen the existing ones?

- Well, certainly one of the priorities of my tenure at Rhodes is going to be a capital campaign because every college and university is always looking to generate additional resources to support our students and support the community.

So that will be a priority.

We have incredible faculty members doing extraordinary work, mentoring students of color who are interested in STEM fields, for example.

We have another faculty member who wants to launch an oral history project related to some of the great civil rights figures that are still here in Memphis.

So yes, we're always looking for additional resources to support their work.

And part of my first year will be laying the groundwork for a capital campaign that we can hopefully get underway in the not-too-distant future.

- And I know that there is a huge shift underway in terms of students staying on campus and being part of a campus experience.

It's been a pretty dramatic shift at the University of Memphis.

At Rhodes, I believe there is some student housing now that is further out from the campus proper.

So where is that at?

And how many of your students do live on campus?

- Well, we just this year are moving to a three-year residency requirement.

There's some really compelling research out there that students are more likely to persist and succeed if they have a residential, on-campus environment.

And I think that's why you see students increasingly staying on campus.

So we are in the process of building a new dorm.

Thank you to all our neighbors who are being very patient with us as that dorm is under construction.

And I have to give all the credit in the world to Christian Brothers University.

We had hoped the dorm would be finished in time for move-in in a couple of weeks.

Unfortunately, it's not gonna be ready 'til December.

We're experiencing the same supply challenges that we're seeing across the country in construction.

And Christian Brothers has very graciously agreed to take a small cohort of our students and let them live on campus.

We're really excited about that.

We do also have some dorms just across University, now, on what we call West Campus.

- You mentioned the mental health challenges of COVID.

I was reminded, and hopefully I haven't said this on the show before, but I might have, every once in a while, I get asked to do, speak to students, college students and I spoke to a group of journalism students up in New York, deep COVID, New York, very heavy restrictions.

So everyone was on Zoom.

So there were probably, and these were grad students and there were probably 30 of them.

And even though I had a daughter, I had a son who graduated during COVID from college and a daughter who was mid college during COVID and I saw how, if nothing else, disappointing it was, to do so much Zoom school and to not be on campus and not do their thing.

I was really struck by just how, I don't wanna say out of it, 'cause that seems unfair, but really disconnected the students were.

- I think that's absolutely accurate.

- And I've done a lot of that stuff and I've done it by Zoom even, where kids are asking the whole time and they're asking questions and these young people were not.

And so I just, I think a lot about those sort of traumas.

I think also you mentioned the CBU, I mean, it's probably not a coincidence that both Rhodes, U of M, CBU and Lemoyne-Owen, all have new college presidents, right?

I mean some of that is just timing.

Some of that's all kinds of things, but it was a really difficult time for academics and we don't have to dwell on it, but Rhodes had a tragic incident last year where a student was killed off and it was, again, I talk about Rhodes being an institution for the city, not just the alums, parents and students, it was a blow to the city when that happened.

I mean, first and foremost, obviously to the family.

So Rhodes has had some traumas.

I mean, it really has.

I mean, not to overstate it, but it really has.

So how much was that a part of the conversation when you're interviewing for the job?

And as you look at going into this new year, that is, we hope at least somewhat, COVID free, with all that baggage, all that built up angst and sadness and dislocation and so on.

- Well, we absolutely think about it all the time.

And of course that student and the tragedy he and his family endured is on our minds all the time.

Actually in my prior life, before I went into higher education, was a homicide prosecutor in Washington, DC.

So I've spent a lot of time with families, with communities, dealing with that kind of trauma.

And it's impossible to overstate the ripple effects.

I think one of the great positives of Rhodes is what a wonderful and supportive community that it is.

I, of course, was not yet here when that happened in October, but the way the community rallied to support one another and take care of one another was just incredibly inspiring.

But yes, it continues to weigh on us as we think about how we rebuild community, how we support our students and how we support our faculty and staff who love our students and were also incredibly traumatized by what happened.

So yes, it's definitely something we think about, but so many colleges are dealing with this kind of trauma right now.

It's just as crime rises across the country, we are certainly not alone.

- Yeah.

I mentioned the other college.

Have you met the other college presidents?

- I have.

The Memphis Business Journal had a wonderful reception for all of us last week and we all got together and met each other.

And it's interesting that we're all new.

And I think that's a reflection of the fact that, frankly, a lot of higher education leaders were exhausted after the pandemic and decided it might be a good time to step down, so we're seeing a lot of transition.

- Yeah.

And we will try to get.

Just so I'm sure there's a U of M alum was going to, send me an email saying where's the new president.

We are reaching out to all those new presidents to get them on over time, over the course of this year.

Let me bring Bill back in.

- With that in mind, Rhodes has had this long-term reputation as a liberal arts college, and people have tended to, I think, forget that in the last decade or so, that definition of liberal arts has come to mean an education program.

It's come to mean healthcare programs and it's come to mean research as well.

Looking over liberal arts colleges in general, where are they in terms of the subject matter that they teach?

And what's the future like for that?

- Well, I think liberal arts colleges focus less on the particular academic discipline, philosophy or political science or business or whatever it might be.

We really think about the skills we're teaching students.

Are we teaching them to think critically?

Are we teaching them to be able to engage in civil and respectful dialogue with people who might disagree?

Can they communicate effectively, orally and in writing?

Do they understand numbers and big data, which is increasingly becoming a big part of the world?

So we wanna make sure our students have those skills, no matter what subject area they pursue because we're really trying to equip them, as I said earlier, to be able to adapt and innovate and grapple with any job that might come their way down the road.

It used to be that our parents would go into one employer and stay there for 40 years and retire with the gold watch.

That's incredibly rare now.

Students on average have between 10 and 20 jobs over the course of their career.

So we really need to give them the skills to be effective in all of them.

- So then how do you counsel that student?

Do you put an emphasis on, we know that you will probably change jobs a lot more than your parents did?

I mean, how do you approach counseling a student?

- Well, when I talk to students, I always tell them to try and think about where you have individual challenges.

Are you afraid of public speaking?

Well, join our nationally ranked Moot Court program.

Do you need strength in writing?

Continue to take English courses so you can strengthen writing.

Are you afraid of computer science or big data?

Challenge yourself, take the risk now because the best time to fail is in college, right?

Rather than when you're out in the work world.

So I really encourage students to take a hard look at where they think they could use additional support and then jump in with both feet and do the very best they can in those subjects.

- So it's not the emphasis that I felt and probably we all felt to choose a major, pick the track you're gonna be on and then stay on that track.

- Well, students certainly pick a track, but again, I think you wanna take a look at your education holistically.

I was a history major, which I'm sure my parents thought, oh my goodness, what is she gonna do after she graduates?

Well, I went to law school as a lot of history majors do, but no, I really encourage students pursue the subject that you love, that you're excited to read about and write about and focus a lot of time and attention on over the next two years, as you're a junior and senior, but also think holistically across the curriculum about how you can acquire the skills you're gonna need to be able to adapt.

- Over the last, however many years it's been, STEM, STEM, STEM, STEM, everyone talks STEM.

STEM is an emphasis on, I'm gonna do it wrong, Science, tech, engineering, and math.

There's no liberal arts in STEM.

Some people talk about STEAM and put the arts in there.

How do you, I will say I went to a liberal arts school, the science stuff was kind of over in a corner.

It was a lot of history.

It was a lot of philosophy.

It was a lot of English.

I mean, how do you all balance out the science, math, you mentioned math and big data before.

Is that, how do you emphasize that appropriately?

When I think some people think of liberal arts being, that's kind of a couple requirements you knock out your freshman year.

- Well, Rhodes actually attracts a very high percentage of kids who are interested in pursuing a career in one of the STEM fields.

And I think that's because of the incredible strength of the community here, the medical community.

They know they're gonna have the chance to do an internship, potentially do academic research.

So we have students who are really excited to pursue those fields.

And unlike many liberal arts colleges, we also have a business major and that's one of our more popular majors and quite a lot of students pursue that.

One of my dreams hopefully is to really expand our entrepreneurship offerings because a lot of our students are gonna start their own companies.

And if we strengthen that program, I also think that's a wonderful way to serve the city of Memphis.

If our students can be paired up with a burgeoning entrepreneur and help them bring their idea to fruition, that's a win for the student and a win for the community.

- You mentioned support services for students and I couldn't help but think of, and I think I've asked your predecessors, I've asked every college president about how, when I went to college, I went really far away.

There was a phone down the hall, I called my parents, told 'em I got there.

I called 'em a couple weeks later.

I called 'em once a month.

I mean, they were not particularly aware of what I was doing at college.

And I kind of set my kids off in a similar way other than, their cell phones make it different.

I talk to parents of my generation and younger generation who are very, very involved with their kids' class selection, their grades, their papers, has that been a shift?

I assume you've seen as you've been in academia and as a parent.

And how do you, I mean, some of that maybe is good and some of that's maybe really super annoying.

[all laughing] - I mean, I dunno, how do you manage that?

The helicopter parent dynamic.

- Annoying is not the right word.

I would say even as.

- This is why you're a college president and I'm not.

- Even as a law school dean, I had parents not only call me on the phone, but literally show up in my office.

And on the one hand, I think it's wonderful that parents are involved with their kids, supportive of their kids.

But on the other hand, a sort of common concern you hear expressed about the youth of today is that they lack resilience.

And I think it's so important for parents to be able to step back, let their kids figure out a problem, figure out how to resolve a roommate conflict, figure out how to address a disappointing grade and move forward on their own.

We hear a lot about helicopter parents.

One thing that I'm seeing even more is what we refer to as bulldozer parents, right.

They try to just eliminate any obstacle in their child's path and I really don't think that serves the child well, right.

When you're 25, you're gonna have to figure out how to deal with your landlord on your own.

So I do encourage parents gently, and it's hard, I have three of my own.

I'm always thinking and worrying about how they're doing, to really let their kids try and figure it out for themselves.

- Just four minutes left here.

- And that is a function of the difference.

I mean, the way that we would've gone about solving those kind of problems is different and it's not better or worse.

It's just different.

- Right.

- College students today are different.

They look at the world differently, agree or disagree?

- I think they look at the world maybe differently in some ways.

But I think the common thread that we see is, one, students who care really deeply about making the world better.

And two, students who are hopeful and optimistic that they can do it, that they're getting that sort of inspiration and energy from their college experience and really want to go out and try and impact the world in a positive way.

And I think that thread has been constant since the couple of decades ago that I was in college myself.

- Go ahead, Bill.

- What's been the impact of, I won't call them movements, but I'll call them organizations, like Teach for America, Report for America, which is involved with our organizations.

Those aren't things that are necessarily exclusive to one college or university.

- No, I mean, I think those are examples of organizations that really wanted to try and give back in a different and innovative way.

Obviously Teach for America is not without controversy.

I don't know as much as about Report for America, but they've done a wonderful job in addressing the teacher shortage.

And indeed it may have been in The Daily Memphian in the past couple of days, I read that K-12 education is facing an unprecedented teacher shortage that literally there are schools in Texas who are going to four day school weeks because they don't have the teachers to staff the classes.

So if an organization like Teach for America can step up and make a difference and provide an opportunity for a first job for a student coming out of college, I think that's a win-win.

- The legal profession's in a, just very much in the news in the last year.

And I won't ask you to comment on any of these things I'm gonna mention, but you know, between the January 6th hearings and the prosecution of people who stormed the capitol to Supreme Court changes including a Rhodes alum who's relatively new on the court to potential prosecution of former President Trump as Congress moves through this.

How do you, again, without asking you to comment on those, 'cause that's not fair, but the profession, how's the profession doing?

How does the profession of law look right now?

- Well, interestingly, starting in about 2010, we saw a real decline in interest in applying to law school.

Applications went down nationwide about 40%, but in the past three years, we have seen a huge rebound and interest in going to legal education.

And I think that's because of all the things that you mentioned.

Students see that law really makes a difference, that the legal system is important and something worth defending and something worth being a part of.

So I loved my law school experience.

encourage students to consider it.

And I think that we'll continue to see that interest.

- You mentioned just before the show, you were a classmate of, I mentioned former President Barack Obama.

- Yes, Barack Obama was also a member of the Harvard Law School Class of 1991, making the rest of us feel wholly inadequate, but he was a wonderful.

- Did he really?

Or you just, is that in hindsight?

- Well, people, no.

I mean, he was absolutely lovely and wonderful.

We were on an organization called the Harvard Law Review together, which meant we really did spend many hours a day together working on this journal that we put out.

People always say, did you know he was going to be president?

And of course you don't know that any individual is gonna be president.

It's like being struck by lightning.

But if someone asked the question who in your class was most likely to be president, we all would've said him.

He had that charisma and leadership ability right from the get go.

- Thank you for being here.

I really appreciate it.

Welcome to Memphis.

Thank you, Bill.

And thank you for joining us.

Join us again next next week.

If you missed any of the show, you can get the podcast on The Daily Memphian site, iTunes, Spotify, wherever you get your podcasts, or get the video WKNO.org.

Thanks and we'll see you next week.

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