Bridget Burns
speaker
389 appearances
6 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard May 2025
Bridget Burns’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
But but here are the seven institutions, limited resources, potentially millions of students, millions of people to be served. And I just kept seeing elbows thrown and I kept seeing unnecessary. It was just really difficult to get universities to be on the same page. So this is when I really fall in love with the just the tension between competition and collaboration in higher ed.
And then I go through a transition where I had heard all of these things about innovation. I'd been I was ready to transition. And I just wanted to know if innovation and higher ed was real or if it was fake and marketing and PR. And in the state that I live and the institutions I've been working with for the past prior decade, I didn't see real innovation.
I thought that all this messaging I saw out there, you know, I was just curious about it. And so I left and I was able to be an American Council on Education fellow, which is like baby president school. And you shadow a university president for a year.
And I happened to get the chance to shadow Michael Crow, the president of Arizona State, which is a very transformative experience because he's the most innovative leader in higher education. And to have this background of understanding the difference between the student perspective and how to run these institutions, I've really seen this tension around collaboration and competition.
And now I see this other dimension, which is why are some institutions able to drive change and why are some not? And is it like, why do I go to institutions and I went to more than 50? And I would ask the senior leaders about what they were doing that was interesting and innovative, but I would also ask what an institution near them was doing.
And I noticed that nobody had an answer to that second question. And so it, for me, unveiled that there was a real diffusion of innovation problem. Like, we don't know what other people are doing. We don't know if what we're doing is any good. We don't know how to copy what other people are doing. We don't know how to scale it. There's not a method for scale, like all of that.
And so all of those things combined really lead to where I am now, which is by the conclusion of my ACE fellowship, the idea of the University Innovation Alliance was Michael Crow's. And I happened to show up with a unique skill set of telling presidents what to do and organizing them and supporting them. because I was the former chief of staff for the university system.
And so building the University Innovation Alliance was the ultimate kind of, it was like the ascension for me. It was merging this focus on user-centered design and thinking about the perspective of students and why the student experience is not what it needs to be. The complexity of overseeing institutions, especially in a climate that's rapidly changing,
rapid innovation and figuring out how to get universities to work together and try and accelerate innovation by collaboration. So the University Innovation Alliance is what I launched by the end of my ACE fellowship. And I've been for 10 years now at the UIA. I'm the CEO. And to describe what we do is...
It was founded by a group of university presidents who decided to unite around a shared sense of urgency that we were doing a terrible job as a country when it comes to graduating students, especially from low-income, first-generation, and student of color backgrounds. And we have 4,000 to 7,000 universities, depending on what you measure.
And it sure seems like a lot of repeated experiments and tinkering in silos. And so this group decided to band together to see if we could move faster and that going it alone was a waste of time, energy and money. And so this is the culmination of all of my prior background into one experience.
And I have the privilege of helping the most innovative universities hold themselves accountable by working together and driving rapid innovation, prototyping, scaling to try and solve student problems. And we've been able to, over the course of 10 years, we've been able to produce over 150,000 more graduates than we were
on track to at even stretch capacity when we formed and uh 89 more graduates of color 41 more low-income graduates so it's been wildly successful um because of i think the willingness to hold the tension between competition collaboration innovation and how you get universities
to really be serious about the painful process of change and the painful process of redesigning what they do around the students they need to serve.
It originally wasn't my idea. It was Michael Crow's. And he had already found the 11 total. So it was him and 10 other presidents. But I will say there was a baseline commitment to a willingness to figure that out together. And I think at the time, these presidents, they were willing to see. And they signed up for the chance to figure out how they would do this together. And I think that...
They had a shared interest in addressing the scale question, and ultimately they realized that they were all wrestling with the same challenge of needing to improve outcomes for populations that we've historically failed. But when I got involved, it was not moving as quickly as it should, and it was because these people had not really spent time building relationships together.
And I was willing to actually fly to each of their campuses and spend time. If there's anything distinctive about me, it's that I'm an incredibly curious person. I find people fascinating. And just from a human interest perspective, but also I find just all of this work is just endlessly interesting to me.
And I find watching leaders figure out like how they lead, how they drive teams, how they advance, how they... These jobs are just so fascinating and difficult. And so... Each of them was like its own case study that I could observe. And what my job was at the time was to get this moving. And the way I did it, though, was because through my
like deep curiosity about them, I could see that they had the same problems and they didn't know it. And there was no way they were going to come to that conclusion because of the architecture of the sector. Higher education is highly competitive. It is hierarchical. We are all a bunch of people who are trying to prove ourselves to each other with our pedigree and our publishing and our rankings.
And it's just very much set up that the rewards and trappings pit you against others. And as a result, there's very little, space to share about shared problems and to really understand that maybe it's not you that's the problem. Maybe it's actually that these systems are problematic in their design. They were not designed around students.
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