A newbie president grapples with the pace of the job.
David Tandberg is now six months into his gig as interim president of Adams State University, his alma mater, in southern Colorado. One thing this policy wonk turned college leader has learned: Presidents often must make decisions without considering as much background information or research as they might want. “There’s so little time to dig into the evidence,” he told me when we caught up by phone last month. “The pace doesn’t allow it.”
That’s a stark realization for a guy who, before this stint, spent years producing piles of reports and studies for higher-ed leaders as senior vice president for policy research and strategic initiatives at the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association, and before that as a professor.
His new rhythm has made him consider how Sheeo and other policy shops (and maybe some higher-ed publications?) could refashion what they do. College leaders have to move fast, he noted: “I do wonder about our capacity to get research into the hands of presidents and staffs in a way that is useful.” He has also come to realize that many presidents’ decisions concern buildings, campus safety, and the ramifications of being the de facto mayor of a community inhabited, in his case, by 1,400 energetic 18-to-22-year-olds. “That,” he said, “isn’t heavily addressed in the literature.”
When I spoke with Tandberg in August, he was just two months into the job and reported feeling very new. He still does. Being president of the only public university in an 8,000-square-mile region is “physically and emotionally taxing,” he told me. But he’s finally beginning to adapt to what he accepts as a 24/7 responsibility.
Some of the exhaustion came with this particular interim assignment. Board members asked Tandberg to raise morale on the campus and build back good feelings for Adams State in the region it serves. So his first six months were chock full of dinners with professors, receptions with local farmers, meetings with students, and visits with the vice president for academic affairs to every high school across 14 school districts. He gives props to his wife, Darin, also an alum, for her work on many of the meet-and-greets.
The community meetings have been especially eye-opening, Tandberg said, because they’ve reminded him how crucial this rural-serving, regional public university is to the educational and economic future of the San Luis Valley. Three out of four schoolteachers and administrators in the valley were educated at Adams State, and the local economy counts on its graduates in business, agriculture, and other fields. The decisions he makes as president can affect the whole region, and, he said, “I feel that weight.”
Tandberg has also experienced what every president dreads, communicating to the campus about the death of a student killed in a car crash and dealing with the threat of an active shooter. Thankfully that threat turned out to be a hoax, but first he had to weigh whether to lock down the campus, all the while worrying about the safety of his own daughter at her high school. In a flash, he found himself balancing the needs of his family, his institution, and the community. “That,” he said, “really revealed what it means to be a university president.”
For all that, Tandberg said he’s loving the job — and trying not to compare his rookie performance to that of presidents with five or 10 years’ experience. Once an Adams State track star, he now resolved to make time for running and other exercise and to get more sleep. He hopes those changes will make him more effective in the job. (Don’t we all!)
In any case, the experience should make him better at his Sheeo job, he thinks, but he hasn’t concluded anything yet. I’ll follow up with him next time. Meanwhile, the clock is ticking down on the interim post; the search firm for the next permanent president is well into its work.
Stat of the week: 18 percent.
That’s the proportion of community-college students who were simultaneously enrolled in high school in the fall of 2021. As much as I’ve been hearing about community colleges playing a major role in dual enrollment, the fact that high-schoolers accounted for nearly one in five community-college students still surprised me.
In some states and at some institutions, high-school students were an even bigger factor, as John Fink, senior research associate and program lead of the Community College Research Center at Teachers College, Columbia University highlights in commentary, charts, and a very telling map in this blog post. In 15 states and at 325 community colleges, dual-enrollment students made up more than a quarter of enrollments in the fall of 2021, excluding those for noncredit courses, he writes. And at 31 community colleges, they accounted for the majority.
Dual-enrollment students outnumbered adult students (ages 25 and over) at 299 community colleges, up from 263 in the fall of 2019, and in 13 states, up from three in the fall of 2019.
Are you ready for ‘Shark Tank: Edu Edition’ at SXSW EDU?
I’m thrilled to be bringing our annual pitch-a-thon back to SXSW EDU in Austin, Tex., on March 7. Do you have a company or just a good idea that you think can improve higher ed? Please step up to be considered as a contestant.
As in years past, I and my fellow sharks — Catharine (Cappy) Bond Hill, managing director of the Ithaka S+R nonprofit research consultancy, and Paul Freedman, an entrepreneur and executive adviser at Guild Education — will be putting proposals through their paces before a live crowd of SXSW EDU attendees. We’re not billionaires, so we won’t be offering any investments. But we can promise our informed feedback and a chance to hear from the audience as well.
In years past, we’ve heard some really cool ideas for innovative business models, student and faculty mentorship, curriculum redesign, and preparing students for life after college, to highlight just a few.
If you’re interested in pitching, please use this form to submit your idea. Know someone who will be at SXSW EDU and might want to be a contestant? Please share the form with them. Curious about how it played out before? Check out my coverage from last year. This event is always a lot of fun, so even if you don’t plan on pitching, I hope to see you on Tuesday afternoon, March 7.
Got a tip you’d like to share or a question you’d like me to answer? Let me know, at goldie@chronicle.com. If you have been forwarded this newsletter and would like to see past issues, find them here. To receive your own copy, free, register here. If you want to follow me on Twitter (yeah, for now at least, I’m still there), @GoldieStandard is my handle.
