Earlier this month, the Journal of Business hosted Dr. Elizabeth Cantwell, new president of Washington State University, for its most recent Elevating The Conversation podcast.

The Elevating The Conversation podcast is available on Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, Spotify, and elsewhere. Search for it on any of those platforms or the Journal's website to hear the entire conversation, but for now, here are five takeaways—edited for space and clarity—from the episode, which runs just about 45 minutes.

1. Higher education is in the midst of change. We are in the middle of this kind of interesting shift from all in-person modality, what I call butts in seats with a sage on the stage in front of you, to something different. We have a little bit of a sense of this, because the pandemic pushed us so quickly into online learning, but I think that's still going to shift and change. 

Some things will be best delivered online. Some outcomes will still be best delivered with people. We have a lot of really interesting, almost experimental work to do to make sure that as technology changes things, we are doing the best we can for our students and the outcomes that they need to get.

As we see social norms—and I'm talking really globally—change because of the availability of screens, people's capacity to interact socially is different when they're 17 years old today than it was 20 years ago. So, we absolutely have a role to play in not just transmitting knowledge. You could theoretically go online and do a little bit of cross checking to make sure what you're learning is true and pick up facts. What you can't pick up is how to operate in a world of human beings. And that I think we have an obligation to continue to provide that not just to 17 to 25 year olds, but to anybody that needs it. 

2. Multi-campus approach is still best for WSU, but community insights could be beneficial. I do think it's time for us to do what I think of as a design process, that involves the communities where we have campuses. 

We need to say, what are the needs going forward for the next 25 years? And are we set up to meet those needs? And if we're not, how do we make some shifts to make sure that we will meet those needs? In a community that's not the mothership campus, what are the job needs? What are the workforce needs? We are, as a land-grant university, really heavily focused on meeting workforce challenges.

Our motherships focus on the national and global brand and reputation that we need to have. But it's always useful when you have campuses that are not the main campus to ask, are we serving the community correctly and well?

3. University research provides opportunities for broader community. I think it's an enormous value economically to have research institutions.

I call them research enterprises. In my mind, I think there's a research enterprise that intersects substantially with the teaching and learning enterprise. Not just because the faculty do both, but because our students are immersed not just in classroom learning, but also in some version of a research project at some point.

It's not the same thing as doing an internship in a company, but it's very similar in terms of the skillset that it delivers, especially with research programs now that are team based, learning team-based skills that we use in the normal workplace.

I frankly think that we should be thinking that all of it can be spun out into private enterprises. It's just that some of it takes 50 years to go from the ideas that we're working on in the laboratory to a commercial product. And some of it can be spun out to our local communities in a year or two.

A lot of those examples today are in the fields associated with social research, mental health research. Alzheimer's research, health research—a lot of the kinds of things that go on at the medical campus here in Spokane, which are focused on delivery to the community fairly quickly. Cities like Spokane benefit economically from a research portfolio. 

I always say, though, don't walk away from the stuff that's 50 years away, because it really can become the lifeblood to a community like this, which in 50 years may be very different than it is today.

4. WSU plans to reduce its budget by between 1% and 10%, and austerity measures are in place. The 1% to 10% range is really trying to position all of our business units, our academic units, our operating units, to have the thought process of what-if. What if it's just 1%? What if it's 10%? What are we gonna do, and how are we gonna do it?

Probably more importantly, what are the most important things to bring up to the president that we need to protect? I don't think we're gonna end up at 10%, but we don't exactly know. We know the state is having financial challenges. We don't know what the budgets are gonna look like for the universities just yet.

I think we're marching down the path of somewhere between a 4% to 6% reduction. So this is really a managerial discussion, not a leadership discussion. I want all of my units to be able to tell me the variety of ways that they're thinking about doing this, so together, we can make strategic choices.

Some of the austerity measures that you've read about are just normal things you would do to slow down the expenditures, so we have a little bit of a moment to then do this strategic thinking. And we're not constantly hair on fire. 

We're also just beginning to go, okay, this is the moment we're in. It's not like, two, three, or four years ago. It's a moment where we have to think about what we're not gonna do, what's extremely important to protect, and a very few new things that we will do.

5. University president turnover has increased as the job has become more complex. The job of being president of good-sized universities is the most complicated leadership position in the country today. They're more complicated than a lot of positions you can think of because, whether we like it or not, we bridge the social-political. We bridge the outcome of hard work, in terms of research. We bridge the care and the highest hopes of our young people. That landscape was simpler even 10 years ago than it is today. 

So it's a little bit of, we get tired of death threats. But it's really more that if you're serious and you take every aspect of what you're doing seriously, you're trying to make sure that we are doing the right thing for our communities. We are building the right infrastructure. Eighty percent of our budget is human beings. How are we bringing them along in this kind of very rapidly shifting work environment? How do we really pay attention to the needs of our students? Those needs are not the same as they were a decade ago, because they are graduating into a very different work environment. It's exhausting.

I do think that the way that we can hold down the fort in these kinds of positions for longer is to do a little bit of rethinking of the position. My own approach is I am not the Imperial Queen. I ask for and genuinely need the grace of the entire community so that when it comes to difficult decisions, which happen daily, I have not only the information I need, but I have the emotional backing of the community. And I think asking for that, and to some extent maybe receiving that, makes it easier to stay in place for a long time.