#359 Bridget Burns: Breaking the Higher Ed Hunger Games—Part One
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Who is Dr. Bridget Burns and what is her background?
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.
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.
What inspired Bridget Burns to focus on higher education innovation?
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 transition from student leader to higher ed system architect?
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
8 chapters
1
Who is Dr. Bridget Burns and what is her background?
2:56–4:03
2
What inspired Bridget Burns to focus on higher education innovation?
4:03–4:48
3
How did Bridget transition from student leader to higher ed system architect?
4:48–6:20
4
What challenges exist due to competition in higher education?
6:20–9:00
5
What is the University Innovation Alliance and how was it formed?
9:00–15:43
6
How did Bridget convince 11 universities to collaborate despite competition?
15:43–19:57
7
What role does trust-building play in university collaboration?
19:57–24:12
8
How did Bridget shift her mindset from bureaucrat to entrepreneur?
24:12–30:54
Speakers
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