#217 Dr. Bridget Burns: Changing Higher Ed from Turf Wars to Teamwork — Part One
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Who is Dr. Bridget Burns and what is her mission in higher education?
Hi, everyone. Welcome to our show, Chief Change Officer. I'm Vince Chen, your ambitious human host. Our show is a modernist humility for change progressives in organizational and human transformation from around the world. Today, I welcome Dr. Bridget Burns from the University Innovation Alliance. Bridget and I met at South by Southwest when we were on the same judging panel for startups in education technology. That was a time before COVID. Many changes have occurred ever since. Bridget has navigated these changes firsthand in higher education. She's now leading a university innovation alliance focused on improving graduation outcomes for students from low-income families, a mission tied closely to her own background. In this episode, we'll explore how she convinced 11 schools to work together shifting the paradigm from competition to collaboration.
We'll discuss the resistance to change because of poorly designed processes and how improving these processes led to much greater acceptance. We'll talk about the importance of empathy, curiosity, and ownership in driving change. We'll also cover how AI is reshaping education and the challenges institutions face in integrating this technology. Lastly, we'll explore the crucial transition from education to employment and how her organization is helping students achieve better life outcomes. Sit back and enjoy this unfiltered conversation packed with insights and practical advice. Bridget, welcome. It's been a long time since South by Southwest.
Yeah, I'm happy to be here. And it's been a wild ride since then, South by Southwest EDU and now across the world.
What personal experiences shaped Bridget Burns' view on higher education?
Yes, the world has changed so much and so quickly in the past couple of years. We'll deep dive into many of those changes in your space, higher education. But first, I always start with the guest. The focus is on your change journey over time. So let's begin with that.
My journey has been one where I started with humble beginnings in rural Montana. And higher education really was transformative for me. I grew up in a very low-income family. in an environment that felt like a cul-de-sac of racism, homophobia, misogyny, all that stuff, right? Very rural America. And getting out was super important. Getting to college, just making it there was a huge priority. And then college itself, higher education was just fundamentally life altering. It created incredible opportunities for me and changed my perspective of myself and the world around me. And so that's where it really begins is I got hooked on higher ed because it was so important in shifting my own opportunities and my experience. And so that's where I fall in love with higher education.
When I was a student still at Oregon State University, I was a year and a half after arriving there, I was elected student body president. And a year and a half after that, I was appointed to the State Board of Higher Education in Oregon, which is a really rapid transition for a 22-year-old. And so I was involved in the hiring and firing of my first college president at that age.
How did Bridget Burns transition from student leader to education reformer?
And that was when I started, I learned, I went from being a user of higher education to being aware of the complexity and challenges around governing and leading and seeing universities as organizations, as in some cases, a business and that My complaints as a user were not because somebody had planned those problems on purpose. It was actually organizational dysfunction. It was funding challenges. It was all these other things. First, I'm hooked on higher ed. Then I go from being a user to understanding how to oversee an institution. I end up being on the board for, I think, seven institutions at the time. And later I started working at the university system and became the chief of staff. And that really turned me on to the problem of competition in higher ed and universities not working together, not collaborating. And I just was really frustrated with that. This I just could see that they all should be on the same page, that we're all working in the same direction. We need to work together for the at the time I was in the state of Oregon, which is where I live now.
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Chapters
6 chapters
1
Who is Dr. Bridget Burns and what is her mission in higher education?
0:13–3:05
2
What personal experiences shaped Bridget Burns' view on higher education?
3:05–4:48
3
How did Bridget Burns transition from student leader to education reformer?
4:48–9:00
4
What challenges exist in fostering collaboration among universities?
9:00–14:32
5
How was the University Innovation Alliance formed?
14:32–17:25
6
What strategies did Bridget Burns use to unite university leaders?
17:25–30:54
Speakers
2 identifiedMore from Chief Change Officer™: Ensemble
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