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
It turns out leading a complex bureaucracy with a multi-billion dollar footprint is like really complicated and hard. And that it's also hard to be a human doing that. These people are humans, right? And so I had to do a lot of the weaving of the relationship because they don't have time to get to know each other.
They would come to a meeting every three months and they were interested, but I don't think that they would have kept going had I not been able to weave together. a sense of perspective between them and for them to know that, hey, Michael Crow struggles with that thing, too. Or President Chancellor Wilcox, they're having that same issue at UC Riverside.
And in fact, here is a here's some anecdotes from that experience that makes them realize that maybe there's other value in working together beyond just teaming up to see if this works. It's actually, wow, it would be nice to have some allies, some buddies. And that was a really big part, I think, that I played.
And then also forming the prospectus, which was basically the strategy and what we were going to do. And getting 11 college presidents and chancellors in 11 states, running institutions over 25,000 students.
to sign off on a document that was so significant, including a data sharing agreement and agreeing to match all the money that is raised was really, it required a lot of trust building because there's no way that any one person can read every single line. But for me, I had to, and I had to come up with this consensus-based document and how this organization was going to operate.
And when I first got to, you talked about like the kind of entrepreneurial aspect of it. When I first got to ASU and met Michael Crowe, He told me I was a bureaucrat and that I was going to need to become an entrepreneur if I was going to do this. And we were going to have to break out that bureaucrat. And boy, did we.
I don't think I... I wasn't already... I had some entrepreneurial tendencies prior to this. But it just required a willingness to throw a lot of spaghetti at the wall and figure it out and ask for a lot of help and advice from people. But just sitting with the stories that I had to surface of the campuses and the weaving between of what they had in common.
And then also what the sector really needed to see from that. leaders that would be fundamentally different than everything they'd seen before. Because at the time, higher ed was obsessed with college access, which is just get more people in. That was the strategy.
And the other theme was under-matching from President Obama, which was basically that low-income kids could get into better schools, but they just don't know it. And both of those things are right and fine for that time.
But they are missing the biggest problem, which is that there are literally millions of students who are never going to go to college if the higher ed doesn't change how well it does, how well we serve those students.
And that there are millions of people walking around who went to college and the only credential they have is a student loan because they failed out because the institution was never designed for them to be successful. And just like the scale of that and the threat that creates for the future economic competitiveness of this country. And it's a big problem, but nobody sits with it.
It's no one's responsibility to fix that. We all need it to be solved. But when you have college presidents who are hired to run just one institution... And their board holds them accountable to move up and down in the rankings against each other. Imagine what that does. It doesn't make them want to work on the same team and fight for a bigger cause than themselves.
It makes them want to play defense and hunker down and focus only on their institutions. It was a huge challenge to build that. And then also I needed to raise all the money for it to work. And thankfully, the idea was right. The people were right. And they were responsive and excited. And honestly, it's only the momentum has just accelerated from then. Now we have 17 institutions.
And I say that, but I stopped counting back. the number of institutions who were asking to join the alliance at 120. And I stopped counting within six months of announcing the alliance. So it's not a question of we could be massive and have all kinds of institutions, but it was about figuring out who first we needed to actually do the thing to actually accomplish our goals.
of figuring out how to innovate together and scale up what works, hold each other accountable and produce dramatically more graduates, especially from low income backgrounds. But the big challenge I ran into after that was how do you figure out who to let in when you've already built something that's successful? Because then you run into the problem of
People want to be a part of something that's successful. They like the image of it, perhaps. They like the PR and the marketing, and it looks really great. But we need to figure out who else out there is a worker bee? Who else is interested in doing the really hard stuff and not just drawn to the fact that we have been very effective at telling our story and amplifying the importance of this work?
That's to this day still one of the biggest problems I face is that vetting issue of who else to let in because this could continue to grow, but we have to actually deliver on the outcomes while we're doing it.
So I think that a lot of the time we just have no intentional strategy about change. We expect change to happen. And then we don't think about the very human experience of, okay, I come into my office every day. I've worked an entire career with the hopes of being able to see a window. I've worked in a cubicle most of my life.
It's a huge deal to finally have an office that I, maybe I don't have a corner office. Maybe I just have a window I can see. And now you're going to come in here and you're telling me that we're going to be moving our department because we need to do a better job.
We need to combine departments because of a need to do data sharing and also to make sure that we're aligning our systems and process with this other department. What I know.
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