Podcast
Podcast
- 15 Feb 2023
- Managing the Future of Work
Gregory Washington on the relevance of George Mason
Bill Kerr: It’s late 2022, and American higher education is under pressure. It’s little wonder, given the overlapping economic, social, and political crises playing out in the U.S. Beyond the philosophical and moral debates about the role of the university in society, the institution’s function as an engine of opportunity is in question. More than ever, universities are being graded on workforce development, contributions to local and regional economies, diversity, and innovation. As their remit expands, how can university leaders navigate these challenges and engage with their many constituencies?
Welcome to the Managing the Future of Work podcast from Harvard Business School. I’m your host, Bill Kerr. My guest today is Gregory Washington, President of George Mason University, Virginia’s largest public university. We’ll talk about the school’s business and skills training initiatives and its commitment to diversity and upward mobility. We’ll also talk about what it means to be an educated citizen. Dr. Washington, welcome to the podcast.
Gregory Washington: It’s great to be here.
Kerr: Dr. Washington, let’s begin with a little bit of your personal background. Like most university administrators, you made a switch at some point from an academic career into administration. So tell us about that transformation for you.
Washington: I was the first in my family to go to college, and my mother had me at a very young age, and the images around my neighborhood in New York City were not of successful individuals who came through an academic path and got a job. I was fortunate in that I had individuals in my life that at various times steered me in a proper path. And oftentimes, those individuals were in educational institutions, whether K–12, whether it was a coach who came from a college—I played a lot of sports and the like. I wandered into a university and started to do extraordinarily well, and was, again, tapped on the shoulder by a faculty member and really convinced to pursue graduate school. And I did, and wound up getting a PhD and became a professor at Ohio State University. I had been a professor for probably eight years or so, and a new dean came in, and I did what faculty tend to do when there’s a newcomer into the organization: I went into the office to complain. I had a five-page document that outlined, here are all of the problems at Ohio State that need to be fixed. And I sat down with the dean, and he took a look at the list, and he said, “I’m going to get back to you.” Within two weeks, I got a call that an associate dean’s position was open and that the dean personally wanted me to apply. And so that’s how it works. You go in to complain, and you wind up with work. I became the associate dean for research at Ohio State for the College of Engineering. When that dean left, I became the interim dean there for a few years. And I took a permanent deanship at UC Irvine, which that success led to me being president here at George Mason.
Kerr: No one to blame but yourself, I guess, in that transformation, but it’s quite the story. You were announced as the president of George Mason University before Covid, but you went into office after the pandemic had started and was in perhaps its worst phase. Tell us also about those early stages of the pandemic, and how did that impact your entry into the university.
Washington: Oh, it was impeccable timing. So I choose the job in February, and lo and behold, by March, pretty much every institution in the country was shut down. It wasn’t just the pandemic at that time. Throughout that summer is when we had the challenges with George Floyd. His death occurred during that summer, and the week before I started, you had the pandemic that was raging, but you also had a racial reckoning in the country that was raging, as well. And I remember I had a list of the major decisions that I needed to make my first week on the job, and they literally went from, are you going to open the campus, or are you going to lay off 400 people? Three hundred students marched to the statue of George Mason and threatened to tear it down because George Mason was a slave holder. What are you going to do about the name of the university? I mean, these were really difficult questions to deal with day one. I began to treat it like a research problem, get as much understanding as I could about these problems, because I had a fiscal challenge on top of that, in that a large campus like this had 52 retail establishments, many of which were not open, had not been open for months. We were literally paying these vendors to remain on campus. We were losing somewhere in a neighborhood of about $100 million over that first year. And so putting together plans for dealing with all of those issues simultaneously was difficult. It’s probably the biggest academic challenge I’ve had in my life. Suffice it to say, we did really well with them. I’m really proud at how we managed those, but they were difficult.
Kerr: So let’s bring it forward now two and a half years, and you’re the president of Virginia’s largest public university. How do you define the highest priorities that you hold and bring to the university? And can you tell us some of those high priorities for you right now?
Washington: Sure. It’s interesting, but academic institutions in general have never been under the level of uncertainty and stress that they’re under now. The reality is—from the enrollment cliff, to the demographic challenges, to the issue of the value proposition being in question, to the mental health crises, to the challenging funding model—there are just a whole host of challenges that face universities today. And so what we are doing here at Mason is, we are focusing the institution on providing opportunity and access to as many Virginians and as many people in the country as we possibly can. We’re just not needed to be an institution of higher education now; we are needed to be an institution of higher purpose. We are needed to start thinking about and start directing our students toward opportunities to better their individual lives and their families’—the lives of their families. We’re directed to find ways to help industry do better through research, through engagement and the like. We really are tasked with helping to find, in my opinion, answers to many of the really, really difficult grand challenge questions that not just our states are facing, but literally the whole planet. It makes it easier in terms of prioritizing what degree programs you need to keep and which ones you need to scale down. When you start focusing on providing opportunity for people, it makes the discussions about what tuition will be and how high to set tuition, it makes it easier.
Kerr: Why don’t we dive into a few of the interesting initiatives that you have underway. I’d love maybe for us to start with the Mason Virginia Promise. Tell us a little bit about its origin and its programs.
Washington: The Mason Virginia Promise is a pathway toward an advanced degree or your own business for every Virginian that wants it. And we recognize that many students may not be able to get into George Mason directly, they just may not qualify. But what we’ve put in place is a series of pathways, starting at community colleges. Our ADVANCE program with Northern Virginia Community College right now has more than 3,000 students in it. Students matriculate at more than 100 majors. Over 84 percent of students wind up with degrees on the back end, and that’s more than four times higher than the national average. And so we’ve taken that framework, and we’ve expanded it through multiple community colleges across the state. We’ve also added the secondary aspect that we’ll meet 100 percent of your need. And so, if you come through that ADVANCE pathway, you do two years at a community college, then you’re going to do two years at Mason, we’re going to meet 100 percent of your need. And so we’ve really removed the barriers to success. And let’s say, “Well, I don’t really know if I want to have a degree. I want to start my own business.” Well, there are 27 small-business development centers throughout the state of Virginia. We manage all of them. And we figured out ways to generate revenue in each of those different cohorts, enough to make the programs sustainable. Even if you’re starting your own business, there’s a bit of education and training that you need in order to get there. And we can help provide that, parts of it for a fee, parts of it free through federal programs.
Kerr: That’s great. And let’s maybe then take us back up to one of the more philosophical levels. You’ve described the distinction between a school being selective versus inclusive. So talk to us about how that gets manifested at GMU.
Washington: The idea is, we want to provide an opportunity to as many students as we can, and the idea is for us not to be an exclusive place, but to be an inclusive place. And we know that the outcome of that will mean that you may have some struggles with rankings, you may have some struggles in some other areas. But we think the value that we’re providing to the state and to the citizens of Virginia more than make up for some of the challenges. We’re starting now to challenge the rankings, and we’re starting to have other institutions join us in that challenge. You shouldn’t get a super high premium on rejecting more and more people. In fact, what I can contend to you is, if I can take a kid in the top 50 percent of their high school class, graduate them with an engineering degree, and have them go out and be successful in industry, isn’t that a much better outcome for society than taking the same kid who is in the top 5 percent of the class? And so ranking mechanisms should actually start now to compensate for that. You may have to put a few more systems in place to help them, but on the back end, you get a similar performance once both of those youths are qualified.
Kerr: That segues very well into us then thinking about the goals while somebody’s on campus, and maybe I can start with the four-year degree. Is it still necessary? We have such sweeping economic, technological, and social changes—and we’re going to try to delve into the role of higher education—but let’s begin with the traditional four-year degree. Is that still the right target point, or should we be thinking in other ways toward educating toward workforce and similar qualifications?
Washington: Well, it depends on the major. I am an engineer, and I think it would be very difficult in an engineering program to graduate an engineer in, say, less than three years. There are a set of classes that you need to have. Now that being said, there are things that can be done. We are coupled now with a number of high schools, and we’re taking our pathway program, and we’re extending that pathway program down to the high school level. And so we’ve got a high school, a community college, and a university now all working together in order to give students what they need earlier, from a prerequisite standpoint, so that they actually graduate with enough credit to actually reduce the number of years required for a degree. Students have been doing this on their own for years. They’ll take advanced placement classes. We’re just formalizing those agreements and formalizing those partnerships, and for those students that can, we’re putting in place a pathway for them to get to an advanced degree quicker. Those are the kind of partnerships that I think will limit degree time in some of the more rigorous majors: the engineering, the physics majors, and the like. For a host of other majors, we can reduce the time. There’s so much that can be done, especially coupled with industry partnerships, coupled with training and work that you can get during internships and experiential learning throughout the summer. You can cut the time-to-degrees down, for a significant number of degrees, to three years, and that’s a process, that’s a program that we’re actively working on here as well.
Kerr: Let me come at it, though, slightly from a different angle. You’ve described the need for students amidst all of this change to have renaissance skills to compete. So while we’re talking about shoring up and making sure that there’s a lot of pounds per square inch with your time as part of a university, what’s the renaissance skills part?
Washington: Well, look, the reality is that, in order to solve the grand-challenge problems that are in front of us today, you’d be hard-pressed to do it with just a deep knowledge in a single field. You need both depth and some breadth in order to do it, and you’ve got to think about how you will implement the solutions. Oftentimes, the solutions are hindered by socioeconomic issues, not by the depth of the technical area, where you need to have an understanding. Breadth is important. It’s incredibly important, and it’s important regardless of major. Look, if you are an English major, you need some programming skill. You need some understanding of the built environment. You need to understand how things work. If you’re an engineer, you need foreign language skills. You need writing and communication skills. And so, what are you starting to see? You’re starting to see the kinds of individuals that we would talk about as polymaths, because they had an understanding of multiple disciplines.
Kerr: Dr. Washington, you’ve just opened Virginia’s first College of Public Health. I’d love for you to share with us a little bit more about the impetus, and how do you see it serving workforce needs?
Washington: Well, we just got through the once-in-100-year pandemic. If that didn’t highlight the need for public health, I don’t know what will. And the goal there is, really, to focus our program on health equity and to focus our program on distributing knowledge about public health—not just in those areas of Virginia that would be accepting and open to it, but to hit the rural and the urban areas, where public-health-related knowledge and engagement has been incredibly difficult.
Kerr: We’ve got a long list of other exciting ways that you’re working to collaborate with businesses on workforce and economic development: Mason Enterprise, Tech Talent Investment Program, there’s an Institute for Digital InnovAtion [IDIA].
Washington: So let me talk a little bit about what we’re doing with what we call “Mason Enterprise.” As I told you before, we manage the 27 small-business-development centers in our state, and we’ve coupled that with more than 15 other entities to help in the establishment of small business and also technology businesses. We run six incubators. We run the procurement technical assistance offices, the Veterans Business Outreach Center. We have a whole host of small-business incubators in the region. And, really, the goal here is to catalyze the ideas that are coming out of the campus from a research perspective, and to take those ideas and as quickly as possible to move those ideas into product. And we’re having significant success. In 2021, which is our last full year of operation, we had advised 11,000 small businesses in the state of Virginia, and we did that with 42,000 hours of one-on-one counseling and engagement. We had more than 20,000 entrepreneurs take part in more than 750 low-cost or no-cost training programs to help them be successful. And we’ve been able to estimate that we’ve had about a $1.6 billion economic impact on the Commonwealth. I’ll talk a little bit about the Institute of Digital InnovAtion focused all on cyber-based digital technologies. There are a whole host of medium-sized, medium market-cap companies that can actually become the next Amazon—companies like MicroStrategy and Clarabridge and a whole host of companies like that—that represent the next wave of technology. And we’ve put in programs and initiatives in the digital sciences. And what I mean when I say “digital sciences,” I mean artificial intelligence, I mean data science, I’m talking about cybersecurity. We started the first cybersecurity engineering program in the country. So we’ve put mechanisms in place to actually support the digital and cyber needs of those entities from a research perspective. And that’s what the IDIA is all about.
Kerr: So Dr. Washington, I want to circle back to the questions that you raised at the beginning, along with the pandemic, when you became the university president. And there was George Floyd’s murder. George Mason University’s named after a slave holder. And we continue to see big questions about diversity and equity and inclusion in the news, from workforce issues to affirmative action in college admissions. Tell us a little bit about your stance and your leadership around these important topics.
Washington: Well, obviously, I was not going to be able to shortchange or to avoid the issue of diversity and inclusivity, A, given who I am, but given the challenges that the university was dealing with, the reckoning that had come to the university just before I started, relative to the origins of our namesake. So I started, literally, upon coming to campus an anti-racism and inclusive excellence initiative. The goal of that initiative was really to take a look at all of our systems, our processes, our infrastructure, and to ensure that everybody had a fair shake. We put that mechanism in place, and that has done extraordinarily well over the last couple of years. We’ve hired somewhere in a neighborhood of 360 faculty over the last two years. The majority of those faculty are people of color, whereas that was not the case previously. We launched our first anti-racism and inclusive excellence research conference attended by more than 400 people, regionally. We had institutions, multiple institutions, presenting a number of faculty and staff from George Mason University. We’ve changed programs, renamed buildings, put in place support mechanisms for students. So we are really making the campus more inclusive. One of the significant outcomes of this is, it culminated in the launching of a memorial to the enslaved individuals of George Mason. So I wrote an op-ed and explained to the community why I was not going to change the name of the campus. To kind of put it in a nutshell why I chose not to change the name, slavery was the economic system of that time, during George Mason’s time. It was really, if you look at the early formation of our country, slavery was a big part of it, right? In fact, 12 of the first 18 U.S. presidents owned enslaved individuals at some point in their lives, and nine of them had them actually working at the White House. Forty-one of the 56 signatories of the Declaration of Independence, and 25 of the 55 men who wrote the U.S. Constitution all owned enslaved individuals. So it was a part of the framework of the day. We could cancel George Mason, or we can use this as a mechanism to put him to work. So I chose to do the latter. What I mean [by], “put him to work” is, could we tell the story of George Mason University and the story of its namesake, highlight his great points with the precursor to the Bill of Rights, and can we also highlight the complexities of the man being not just a slave holder, but a vicious slave holder, and use that mechanism to not just highlight who he was, but to also highlight some of the enslaved individuals who had helped and supported George Mason throughout the years. So we chose to do the latter. We pulled together our students and our faculty. They did research. They found the historical records of a significant number of who the enslaved individuals were of George Mason. We used that information to pull together an Enslaved People of George Mason Memorial, which is actually now integrally connected to the statue of George Mason, right? Even at the base of the statue, we were able to find one of the bricks that the brick masons who were slaves who built George Mason’s house, one of the bricks, the cornerstone in George Mason’s house had the thumbprint in it of one of the enslaved individuals, and that is now the cornerstone of the base of the statue of George Mason, along with the other components in the memorial that highlight some of the enslaved individuals that served him. So it was actually a very, very what I would call academic way to deal with this issue.
Kerr: Dr. Washington, final question as we wrap up here. I’d love just a little bit more of your long-term vision for George Mason University as a launchpad for careers, economic success. What do you want to be the arc of your time as president of the university?
Washington: Well, look, I want us to be known for doing two things. Number one, for providing opportunity to all, to putting in place an inclusive and supportive environment to take individuals from wherever they are, from point A to point B, right? I guess the word would be not just an institution of higher education, but an institution of success, and having that success be defined a little more broadly and loosely than how success is currently defined as—meaning, did you get your bachelor’s degree, right? Some people coming here will get degrees. Some will get education and training that will help them in their businesses. Some will get certificates. So there are a whole host of things that we think we can offer people to help them be successful. And we want to be one of the best places in the country at being able to do that. The second is, we want to be one of the best places in the country for helping people solve the grand challenges of our time. These challenges need people to come forward and offer methodologies and outcomes to help solve them.
Kerr: Gregory Washington is the President of George Mason University. Thanks so much for joining us today.
Washington: Thank you.
Kerr: We hope you enjoy the Managing the Future of Work podcast. If you haven’t already, please subscribe and rate the show wherever you get your podcasts. You can find out more about the Managing the Future of Work Project at our website hbs.edu/managingthefutureofwork. While you’re there, sign up for our newsletter.