Paul J. LeBlanc, who transformed Southern New Hampshire University from a small, struggling private college into an online-education powerhouse with more than 150,000 students, will step down as its president and chief executive at the end of the academic year. More than a mere presidential transition, his departure represents the end of a chapter in contemporary American higher education.
In 2003, LeBlanc took over as president of a traditional liberal-arts college with about 2,500 students in a corner of the country that had the demographic odds stacked against it. He went on to make it one of a handful of so-called mega-universities — institutions, including Western Governors, Liberty, and Arizona State Universities, that have used online education and mass-marketing outreach strategies to build enormous enrollments. In doing so, colleges like Southern New Hampshire inspired copycat efforts among their peers, which have seen mixed success.
In announcing LeBlanc’s departure on Wednesday, Winnie Lerner, chair of Southern New Hampshire’s Board of Trustees, wrote in a statement that “we can’t do justice to Paul’s myriad accomplishments.” She also credited his challenging ”the conventional wisdom that has long defined higher education, allowing hundreds of thousands of underserved students to advance their educations and careers.”
Having run a tech startup for a publishing company in the 1990s before serving as president of Marlboro College — and inspired by the Harvard University scholar Clayton M. Christensen’s rhetoric about disruption — LeBlanc was poised to embrace nontraditional approaches at his new job. Southern New Hampshire pivoted toward strategies and tactics long considered unconventional in traditional higher education, including many associated with for-profit colleges. If recent high-school graduates were increasingly scarce, how about focusing on adult students? Online classes allowed the university to reach far beyond its geographic recruiting area. Spending millions of dollars on advertising, including television ads, helped that outreach succeed.
While in hindsight that approach looks like a coup, at the time it was a huge gamble. In one oft-repeated anecdote, LeBlanc walked out of a Board of Trustees meeting early on and told administrators who had accompanied him that they had effectively just bet their jobs on the strategy’s success.
LeBlanc recently indicated that he might have his eyes on other horizons. On a June episode of the podcast Reimagining the Future of Higher Education, he said that he had delegated “more and more of my day-to-day operational responsibilities” to Lisa Marsh Ryerson, the provost, in order to focus on the university’s explorations of artificial intelligence. “I don’t know how many more chapters I have at age 65 in my career,” he continued, “but it would really be nice to … the sort of next, maybe even final chapter, to really try to reshape what can higher education look like and a much more enlightened understanding of how Al could help us be better at what we do.”
Southern New Hampshire said in a news release that LeBlanc would take a yearlong sabbatical to “research and write about AI’s impact on the work force and learning.” Lerner also announced that Ryerson would succeed LeBlanc as president. She formerly served as president of Wells College, in Aurora, N.Y., and as president of the AARP Foundation.
