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Mark

The Pursuit podcast appeared on the guest centric show focusing on people and organizations that advance positive change. Positivity can be anywhere and in a time of vast discord. The pursuit of is finding those who championed its causes loudest. Join us as we sit and learn about the pursuits of local leaders in their communities. Let’s go.

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Ryan

Hello, good people and welcome to the pursuit of podcast where it’s truly not us, it’s you. I’m Ryan Buck, artist development for New Leonard Media. With me is the boss, Mark Wilson, President, New Leonard Media. How are you, sir?

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Mark

I’m doing well today, Ryan. I’m wearing my new favorite shirt.

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Ryan

It looks. That’s enough of that. Our guest today is Alison Kadlec, founding partner with Sova here in Traverse City. How are you?

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Alison Kadlec

I’m doing well. Thanks for having me here.

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Ryan

Thank you for being here. It’s really a delight and we were talking a little bit before we started. This kind of leads me into the first question about Selva, but what’s the elevator pitch?

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Alison Kadlec

Oh, the elevator maybe.

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Ryan

The Empire State elevator pitch doesn’t have to be that brief. But when you say this is what I do at a park. Yeah, what do you say? This is what you do.

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Alison Kadlec

Oh, it’s such a good question. This is going to be very useful. So when we try something new, workshop it, you know, workshop it here with you. So I say that I am the co-founder of a mission driven organization that is focused on helping this country actually fulfill its social contract about the relationship between education and upward mobility.

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Alison Kadlec

That’s a terrible catch. So maybe there’s a better one that I could come up with while we’re here together.

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Ryan

We can call it very accurate.

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Alison Kadlec

Okay.

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Ryan

All right. Well, maybe this will help, because from the website it says you specialize in building cultures and climates for innovation in higher education and workforce development. Yep. When you were building this, what was your original definition of innovation in this regard and has it changed at all since?

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Alison Kadlec

Oh, that’s a great question. So higher education in this country is supposed to create avenues for people to better their lives through education. But our structures, our colleges and universities actually weren’t designed to meet the needs of the students that exist today. And so for me, innovation is anything in higher ed or workforce. And when I say college, I mean two year degrees, one year certificate, four year graduate school.

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Alison Kadlec

I think the whole spectrum of learning after high school, anything that is aimed at making our colleges universities work better for today’s students, to me counts as innovation because they don’t actually work particularly well for today’s students.

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Ryan

It’s interesting to me to think about the terms innovation and academia were never really synonymous. Yeah. So was that something that inspired you right off the bat, or was that the place that you could fill? That was a gap that you could fill?

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Alison Kadlec

Well, I started actually as a faculty member, so I started down a path of being an academic and then found that very dissatisfying and as a result of being jaded, I guess by the experience of being an academic, I went in the direction of, Wait, surely we can do a better job with this than what I was being prepared for as a professional to be a professor in a classroom.

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Alison Kadlec

It seemed disconnected from what students actually want and need. So I think that there was a gap in my experience that led me out of academics in academia, but back toward higher ed in this way.

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Ryan

Right. And in what we talked about building cultures, what are your thoughts on the word culture as it relates to academia or even corporate? Does that word belong?

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Alison Kadlec

It’s a good question. I’m not sure. Who was it that said that culture eats strategy for breakfast and organizational effectiveness for lunch and everything else for dinner? I think culture is an overwhelming term for people in a lot of ways, and it’s also an inaccurate term because in any given setting, any given organization, there are always multiple cultures, subcultures and different sort of norms and ways of being.

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Alison Kadlec

So culture is a tricky word. It’s the one that people go to because when I use culture, when we think about it, we’re thinking about how two people actually work together and create an environment in which they do something together, creating norms, but it’s an overwhelming idea. So we’ve tried to veer away a little bit and we talk about culture on the website and we talk about culture as shorthand.

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Alison Kadlec

But it is very tricky because it’s pretty complicated concept in this setting, right? Well, maybe in any setting. Right.

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Ryan

Well, but you achieved your Ph.D. in political science from the University of Minnesota, correct? Yes. And you received your A from MSU, where you focused on political theory, constitutional democracy and English literature.

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Alison Kadlec

Yes.

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Ryan

What was the dream back then?

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Alison Kadlec

I wish somebody had talked to me about the different things that a person can do when you care about things like philosophy or storytelling or the power of narrative to change people’s lives or open people’s minds. But that was not part of any conversation. I was remarkably undistinguished high school student who barely graduated from high school. And it wasn’t until I was in my first philosophy class that I realized that I actually love learning.

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Alison Kadlec

So I started by following what I wanted to learn about, and that slowly narrowed my path toward academics and academia. And I had professors who said, Oh, well, this is clearly the direction you should go. But I think that was one of the problems with higher ed is that there are so many other kinds of ways to make a contribution or do interesting, meaningful things or make a living doing things that you care about related to narrative or storytelling or philosophy or so I didn’t.

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Alison Kadlec

I had absolutely no vision when I was in college, and I’m still trying to figure out what to be when I grow up. So I don’t know that I ever actually even wanted to own a business. I didn’t realize exactly what I was getting into when we got into Selma.

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Ryan

So I really like the way you framed because I know there’s some kind of adage out there about the value of in you’re consistently pursuing knowledge you’re pursuing. Yeah.

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Alison Kadlec

I love learning stuff. Yeah.

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Ryan

Which is probably the best reason to do it. Yeah. If you think it doesn’t need to be a great underline grand plan. Did you want to be like a night time political talk show host?

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Alison Kadlec

I have never wanted to be a nighttime political talk show host. No, I think I came to a place where, as I got dissatisfied with being in academics, but still cared a whole lot about what educational institutions do and don’t do in a country that aspires to be a democracy that I wanted to figure out how to make good ideas live long enough to actually become solutions to problems for students or for our society.

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Alison Kadlec

But I have never wanted to be a pundit or.

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Ryan

An English degree in college. But storytelling, philosophy, there are applications to these things and maybe even more so giving distinct advantages to somebody in the business world that communicate at that level. Would you think that may be the case now?

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Alison Kadlec

Absolutely. I think that the skills that employers say they’re looking for are actually a lot of those things that you pick up in classes that would be called liberal arts classes. Right. The classes that teach you how to think or teach you how to critically analyze a problem or sort of make an argument and understand complexity, understand lots of different sides of issues.

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Alison Kadlec

Those are the skills we actually need to thrive, I think, in any given career. So it’s been one of the things I was dissatisfied with academia is that this distinction between education for work and education for life or for expanding your mind, those things, that’s a false dichotomy. Those things go hand in hand.

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Ryan

Really. We did have another conversation for this podcast with somebody who was bringing artists into their organization. I think similarly, that’s another interesting position to take. Now, the name Sova was influenced by family, specifically your father. Yep. And you said you were not a remarkable student. But was education a big part of your upbringing at all from your dad?

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Alison Kadlec

Yeah, education and being curious about the world and learning about the world and being present in the world was really important to my parents, to our family. So education was highly valued and there was a set of expectations around education, but they were also of a different generation. He was the product of war and abuse and poverty, so he had a different set of constraints on his life.

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Alison Kadlec

I mean, he had a law degree when he came as a refugee and he drove a cab when he got here because there was nothing recognized in the credential that he had. And he was a displaced person after World War Two. And so learning and being curious and being engaged in the world was always a top priority for our family.

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Ryan

Wow. And he was able to demonstrate that enough to you that you recognize that even at a young age.

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Alison Kadlec

Yes, definitely. He also sort of modeled it. He worked his way into a career and into the ability to support his family and to create a really different life for his kids than his childhood. So he he definitely modeled what it looks like to figure out how to make it in the world as it tosses, whatever it tosses at you.

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Ryan

That’s incredible. If you go to the website, you have a partner in the founding of Silver. So you’re obviously the daughter of the refugee of war. And your partner is a fifth generation son of Kentucky dairy farmers, and he was the first in his family to go to college. Yes, which I thought was interesting. How did this partnership come about and were you always looking for a partner?

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Alison Kadlec

Oh, I think I probably was always looking for a partner, but I didn’t really realize it. I think one of the reasons, again, that I left academics was that it was really isolating. I loved learning with my students and I loved being in community with my students, but it still felt like I was here alone with the power holder, the professor, and they were.

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Alison Kadlec

So there was always a kind of collaborative, something that was missing in that environment. But I met Paul years ago. I had heard that there was a program officer at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation who had a background in deliberative democracy and community organizing. And I couldn’t believe it. And we were connected that way. And he funded some of the work that I led when I was at Public Agenda, and then we just started talking over the years about what we thought was wrong with higher education and what we thought was right and where we thought we could make a contribution.

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Alison Kadlec

And it just sort of stuck.

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Ryan

At one point that it turned into, we should do something about this. Well, that’s the most fascinating thing, because you just mentioned conversations over.

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Alison Kadlec

Year over year. Yeah, well, it happened at a table in Austin, Texas, in a break in a meeting. We were both.

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Ryan

There’s a moment.

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Alison Kadlec

There is a moment.

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Ryan

This is exciting.

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Alison Kadlec

Yes, there was a moment. We were we were we had left a meeting or there was a break in the meeting. And we were sitting together at a table outside in this courtyard in Austin. And I was thinking about how overwhelmed I had been with what I was doing at that time at public agenda that there was just so much.

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Alison Kadlec

And I jokingly said to him, Do you want my job? You feel like I’m burning out, there’s just too much going on. But the work really matters and I’ve thought about who I could hand my job to. And you’re the only person I can think of. Do you want my job? And he was with another organization. He laughed and said, No, I don’t want your job, but what do you want to do?

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Alison Kadlec

What is it that if you could clear everything away, all the clutter away, what would you want to do? And I think I said something like, I want to help really good ideas live long enough to be solutions to problems. And he said.

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Ryan

I had you been rehearsing that or that that just I was fired and off it went?

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Alison Kadlec

I think so. In that moment, synapses fired it off. It went because it was nobody had asked me that. We don’t ask each other, what would you be doing if you could do anything? Where do you really wish you could make a difference? So it was really cool that he sort of lifted my eyes from the immediate thing that I was worried about and said, Well, what is it that you want to do?

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Alison Kadlec

And when that fell out of my mouth without really realizing what I was saying, he said, I think I’d like to build a business around that idea because the world needs that. And we talked about how we observed where change felt like student focused change, where you’re actually trying to remake institutions to work better for real students like change falls apart in the same places over and over again.

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Alison Kadlec

And we had been talking about that for years, but we hadn’t been talking about well, if you could, how would you pursue things differently? What would you do to do a better job with that stuff? So he had gotten to a place because he was fifth generation Kentucky dairy farmer and the first in his family to go to college.

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Alison Kadlec

It took him a long time to get to a place where he was comfortable saying, I want to build a business. I want to build something. Because as he told me where he was from as a kid, like the person that own stuff was was a jerk, generally speaking, right? The person that had the power, the person that was the talent.

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Ryan

Or the.

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Alison Kadlec

Dairy owner in the town patriarch or the boss or the what. Right. And so he had to go on his own journey to get to a place where he was like, wait, it doesn’t actually make me a bad person to want to build something beautiful. So we started talking about the ideas that we had for what we wanted to do, and then he started talking about the how of it, right?

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Alison Kadlec

That was the beginning.

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Ryan

Wow. It’s really incredible that you have a place. Yes, yep. In a moment, which is really extraordinary. I don’t know how many folks would maybe say that or maybe recollect what that spark was, but so that exists to help America fulfill its social contract. And you talked about that before, to provide real upward mobility for more people through higher education.

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Ryan

Can you elaborate a little bit on what social contract means?

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Alison Kadlec

Yeah, from my perspective, we aspire in this country to be a democracy. We say that we aspire to that despite all of the contradictions in our founding in the way that we actually operate. And part of that is that there are the skills and habits and sensibilities that free people should have. Right. And in a country that calls itself a democracy, education is a promise.

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Alison Kadlec

And if you work hard, if you get an education, if you develop skills and competencies and capacities, you can achieve your goals of making a better life for yourself and your family. And it doesn’t matter where you were born, it doesn’t matter who you are. That education should be a leveler. It should level the playing field, and it doesn’t work that way in our country.

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Alison Kadlec

But the promise is there and the promise is really worth pursuing and holding our institutions accountable for making good on. So when I think about the social contract, it’s there is a tacit promise that education will give you a path to a better future regardless of accidents of birth or fortune.

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Ryan

Wow. Well, okay, that was clearly not synapses just firing. There was some thought you may have said before, but education as a leveler. I’d never heard it put that way before. And I think for many years long ago, thankfully, the pursuit of higher education or education was seen as is not a good thing to do or is seen as is upper class or wanting to be better than that isn’t the case as much anymore.

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Ryan

But is there a similar version of that today?

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Alison Kadlec

Definitely. And I think for most of higher education history in this country and everywhere, it was something that only some people had access to Ryan type. It’s only for the people who are born into wealth or into property or into status that you get the benefits of education. But in a country that aspires to be a democracy or calls itself a democracy, that can’t just be reserved for some portion of society, but still, our institutions are colleges and universities sort of function in that way.

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Alison Kadlec

They do sort people in and out of opportunity along race and class lines and there continues to be this tendency in higher education to use that mechanism to sort rather than to create opportunities to lift everybody.

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Ryan

And the name Sylva means owl. Yes. And it’s check, correct?

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Alison Kadlec

It is. It’s also Russian and in Slavic languages it shows up as owl, but it does mean things in other languages too. I learned recently that it means sleep in Swedish and it means a beating or a thrashing in Portuguese.

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Ryan

So when? Because do people think that? So a stands for something so vague?

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Alison Kadlec

They do. They always ask, what is it?

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Ryan

So it’s good to clarify.

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Alison Kadlec

So we say No, it just means owl and check.

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Ryan

What was the inspiration for the name Owl?

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Alison Kadlec

We chose the owl as so in lots and lots of cultures. The owl is a symbol of wisdom, but for us we’re thinking about. We wanted to be reminded that what we were trying to do was practical. And Paul and I both believe that ultimately all wisdom is practical. It’s what you do with it. It’s how you help people do good things together.

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Alison Kadlec

And we wanted to be reminded that we were trying to be wise, and that for us wisdom is about practical experience and what you do with it. And we also wanted to have something that would be a nod to Paul’s rural roots. And so he’s the owl is an ever present feature of rural.

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Ryan

Farms and.

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Alison Kadlec

My friends. Exactly. Yeah, absolutely. So we thought it was a good combination of our two backgrounds.

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Ryan

So when founding a company, that’s one of those things. What are you going to call it? There’s a process. And when you’re doing something like that, did you have somebody looking into these things for you? I mean, beating isn’t bad. You’re beating stereotypes. So there’s a lot of ways you could spend, sleep and beating, but that was it regardless.

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Ryan

Like so far that felt right.

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Alison Kadlec

We did not. I wish I could say that we did research. I actually have this memory of sitting in bed, sort of looking backwards or flipping through a dictionary and thinking and just shooting texts back and forth to Paul because we needed to have a name we’d been planning for about a year and a half, but we needed to actually put a name on this thing.

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Alison Kadlec

And so we were tossing ideas around, but there was not I can’t believe I’m just saying that there was not a rigorous process that resulted in so but we almost named ourselves five under nine because we had five kids under the age of nine between our two families. When we started seven, we had no family wealth behind us.

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Alison Kadlec

And so we were sort of jumping off a cliff with our families. And so for a moment, we thought a.

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Ryan

Lot of interesting imagery there. You know, the two of you hand-in-hand falling. Plummeting.

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Alison Kadlec

Exactly.

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Ryan

Well, five under nine. That is pretty fun. But, you know, I guess you wouldn’t always have five kids under nine.

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Alison Kadlec

Exactly. Yeah, it was a moment in time and we hope that. So it was a little bit more.

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Ryan

It’s so interesting that you because I my next question was what do you mean by all wisdom is practical and thank you for for going into that now prior to founding so that you were the senior VP at Public Agenda. Yes. Anything particularly that you took from there that’s most applicable in what you’re doing now?

00;20;06;25 – 00;20;31;12

Alison Kadlec

Yeah, I think a lot of that work was focused on elevating the voices and experiences of those closest to the problems that we were trying to solve. So really listening carefully to students, listening carefully to faculty, to staff, to the people, not the decision makers and the leaders that make decisions at a remove from the problems. John Dewey said something along the lines of Nobody knows how the shoe pinches like the person wearing it.

00;20;31;23 – 00;20;53;00

Alison Kadlec

So there was something about the work at Public Agenda that was about listening to the people whose shoes were pinching. Yeah, I think that was what some of those principles and also the idea that if you help people, if you create the right conditions, people can do amazing things together. And that was something that we carried that I carried with me into.

00;20;53;00 – 00;20;57;14

Alison Kadlec

So Vogue was a focus on creating the conditions for people to do some good stuff together.

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Ryan

It feels like it was almost incidental research for what you’re doing in general. Yeah. As well. Yeah. So when you have been listed and I’ve always just been curious as a visiting professor lecturer what does that mean.

00;21;10;11 – 00;21;22;05

Alison Kadlec

Oh I mean just as adjunct, it’s like I didn’t have any decision making authority or any power in the department at all. And I was underpaid and I probably didn’t have health insurance, but I taught five courses a semester.

00;21;22;05 – 00;21;28;23

Ryan

It sounds like it’s putting you in your place with that visiting title. Exactly. You’re just visiting. You’re just.

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Alison Kadlec

Visiting. Yeah.

00;21;29;18 – 00;21;34;00

Ryan

Okay. Thank you. That’s just been some. That’s a personal thing. I always wondered what.

00;21;34;05 – 00;21;44;11

Alison Kadlec

Yeah, I think it’s adjunct or contingent part time. But if they want to make it sound better that they’re not paying you enough, say sometimes give it a title. Like I’m visiting from someplace.

00;21;45;16 – 00;21;46;09

Mark

Special guest.

00;21;46;14 – 00;21;47;09

Alison Kadlec

Special guest.

00;21;47;13 – 00;22;12;22

Ryan

I would have. I’d prefer that I if I was in that position, I’d try to change the name if it was just me. What I find really interesting about what Selva and you have honed in on is transfer students. Yeah. And in a June 2021 article on transfer students, transfer enrollment dropped 2.6% from that previous fall. Can you talk about some of the key issues and reasoning for Focus on Transfer Students?

00;22;12;23 – 00;22;15;02

Ryan

Yeah, and why the decline is not a good thing?

00;22;15;13 – 00;22;27;10

Alison Kadlec

Yeah. So transfer matters and even the word doesn’t fit as well as maybe it used to, because most students today take credits from multiple institutions on their way to a credential.

00;22;27;13 – 00;22;27;23

Ryan

Right.

00;22;28;01 – 00;23;06;05

Alison Kadlec

But initially we had a two year community college system and a four year university system. And the idea, at least implicitly and my mom was a community college transfer student who got her did two years in an affordable way, was able to get a scholarship to complete a four year degree. And that promise of being able to get a bachelor’s degree or get an advanced degree without having to shell out loads of cash is a really important promise that we make by saying, All right, you can start at one institution and finish in another and do it in an affordable way.

00;23;06;22 – 00;23;28;28

Alison Kadlec

But it doesn’t work that way for students. It’s not working that way. And so I think I got into transfer stuff because of listening to transfer students. I had the chance to conduct focus groups with transfer students in Indiana about ten years ago, I think 12 years ago. And just listening to story after story of students who were saying, I had this idea that I could afford to do this and make this work.

00;23;28;28 – 00;23;49;17

Alison Kadlec

If I started here and went here. But it was such a broken road for them that it ended up a lot of lost time, a lot of lost money. But even more than that was sort of losing hope in the possibility of actually being able to achieve their goals. Transfer is really important because it’s a path for economic mobility for people.

00;23;49;17 – 00;24;01;23

Ryan

And I’d heard you talk about a particular class called Power and Choice, and that’s a fun one. How many good classes are missed because they’re not transferable? And you think students are missing out because of that?

00;24;02;15 – 00;24;21;28

Alison Kadlec

That’s an interesting question. You know, I hadn’t really thought about it like that because when I was I loved my class, power and choice that I taught. But nobody ever asked me to think about where it transferred or if it would transfer or if it transferred, if it would apply to somebody’s program. As a faculty member, I should have been asking myself that.

00;24;21;28 – 00;24;43;00

Alison Kadlec

I should have been having some of those conversations. I think you can have lots and lots of great educational experiences in lots of different ways and places that should be acknowledged at every step of a student’s learning journey, so that everything that I’ve done as a student gets applied toward my degree. So I don’t want to see anybody missing out on any great opportunities for classes.

00;24;43;00 – 00;24;49;13

Alison Kadlec

I want those systems to work so that wherever students acquire learning, it’s honored and acknowledged.

00;24;49;15 – 00;24;52;21

Ryan

Right. You started this pursuit around 2016.

00;24;53;13 – 00;24;53;29

Alison Kadlec

Yes.

00;24;54;06 – 00;24;58;15

Ryan

So where are you now compared to where you thought you would be?

00;24;58;15 – 00;25;27;28

Alison Kadlec

Oh, wow. Well, I have learned more in the last six years than and again, I love learning things. And so that was one of the reasons to even do this. But I’ve just learned so much. The team, it’s over. We learn every single day more about what it means to navigate this field that we’re in. So I couldn’t have imagined that we’d be where we are right now, actively working in lots and lots of different states on issues.

00;25;27;28 – 00;25;51;25

Alison Kadlec

Having established a presence, I didn’t have the imagination for any of that. I wish I could say I saw it all coming in. I knew how it all come together, but it’s really surprising to just work and learn and improve and fail and get better. And then just look around one day and say, Wow, we have an organization like that’s cool.

00;25;52;23 – 00;26;17;08

Ryan

That that is a grand realization for sure at some point. But what’s really fascinating to me about somebody in your position, in your role is you’re in an organization that is talking about tough stuff, but it’s about positivity. It’s about good things. How do you establish and I know we talk about not liking this word, but how do you establish the culture at Sova and what is it like to create that?

00;26;17;08 – 00;26;18;26

Ryan

Because it’s two different things.

00;26;18;27 – 00;26;40;06

Alison Kadlec

Yeah, that’s such a good question. And what leaps to mind is that it’s actually up to all of us. It’s not. While Paul and I set the table and create the conditions, the culture at Sova and what we are doing is co-created by all of our colleagues and we have team members in lots of different states, but we’re values aligned.

00;26;40;06 – 00;27;05;07

Alison Kadlec

So I think it starts with sharing values about the ability to make positive change in the world and then to create conditions for people to pursue their own excellence in the context of that work. So I’ve learned so much from our colleagues and I feel like the people that we work with on our team, our team members, they’re the bearers of the culture of Sova and they’re co-creating it with us.

00;27;05;07 – 00;27;12;25

Alison Kadlec

And so I feel like it’s not something I can set, it’s something that we have to let evolve by empowering the team.

00;27;14;16 – 00;27;25;22

Ryan

In a 2013 talk to the North Carolina Community Colleges on engaging stakeholders and building teams, which you’re intro to that really funny.

00;27;25;28 – 00;27;26;17

Alison Kadlec

Oh really.

00;27;26;18 – 00;27;29;20

Ryan

Because you were like at right after lunch, I was so happy.

00;27;29;20 – 00;27;30;13

Alison Kadlec

That you.

00;27;30;18 – 00;27;48;27

Ryan

Asked for the spotlight and you really leaned into it because I get it. That spot after lunch is the worst. And so I first have to, if I was wearing a hat, to take it off to you to say, really well done. That was funny. I got a laugh from that and you mentioned the Marx Brothers film Horse Feathers and the song.

00;27;49;00 – 00;28;08;05

Ryan

But whatever it is, I’m against it. So, again, really well done. But you were saying with that dealing with complacent or antagonistic attitudes and maybe apathy even, do you find that mentality is present or have regained any momentum in the last five years? I’d say.

00;28;08;18 – 00;28;42;21

Alison Kadlec

Well, change continues to be really, really hard. And I think some of the things that look like apathy or some of the things even that look like outright hostility when it comes to changing systems, long standing systems is fear of loss and there’s grieving that is comes with change. And I think we have not turned the corner on helping our colleges and universities actually work in ways that are aligned with what students need.

00;28;42;21 – 00;28;47;07

Alison Kadlec

So there’s that mismatch. So there’s still change, it’s still hard.

00;28;47;14 – 00;29;01;15

Ryan

So I’m very fascinated by your positivity and your resilience because it almost feels like as we’re talking, this is an insurmountable task. How do you stay motivated to keep this going now?

00;29;01;15 – 00;29;27;24

Alison Kadlec

Man, it is hard and it’s funny. Today is a particularly hard. This week has been rough at work with just difficult work. I think what it comes down to is that there isn’t really a choice there. It’s not I’m not doing the work because we know that we’re going to be successful. In fact, we have more setback than definitive wins in our work, but we do it because we have to.

00;29;27;25 – 00;29;40;21

Alison Kadlec

The alternative is doing nothing and not contributing where we can. And I think that’s part of it is just not sort of tempering your own expectations. Like, we don’t think we’re going to solve everything, but we’re going to fight.

00;29;40;26 – 00;29;41;19

Ryan

Going to give it a shot.

00;29;41;19 – 00;29;42;05

Alison Kadlec

Yeah, we’re gonna give.

00;29;42;05 – 00;29;45;11

Ryan

It a shot. And the glory is in the effort.

00;29;45;16 – 00;30;05;07

Alison Kadlec

Yeah, it’s in the small wins and they are sometimes the winners are so tiny they’re hard to see, but those are big deal because they build other people’s will for change. We show each other what we’re capable of, one little step at a time, and it’s sort of that Myles Hart and Paolo Ferrari thing about making the road by walking.

00;30;05;07 – 00;30;07;08

Alison Kadlec

It’s just sometimes it’s one foot in front of the other.

00;30;07;13 – 00;30;25;18

Ryan

You’ve given a lot of great nuggets already. This is should be a paid episode, to be honest. Also in that 2013 talk, I really liked what you said and I quote, Most people underestimate their ability to influence the human pieces of the puzzle so they look for easy fixes. Yeah. Do you still feel that?

00;30;25;18 – 00;30;49;13

Alison Kadlec

That’s absolutely. Absolutely. I think people don’t they don’t appreciate how much power they have. So this is back to your culture question. People think that culture is something that happens to them or that they are. But every single day in our organizations, in our work, in our lives, we are either reproducing or we’re challenging the way that our culture is operating.

00;30;49;13 – 00;31;09;26

Alison Kadlec

And I think a lot of people don’t own the power that they have because the critical you’re a faculty member or an advisor or a provost or there are people above you that are constraining what you can do. There are people around you constraining what you can do. And I think people tend to think, well, I don’t have power to make change, but.

00;31;09;26 – 00;31;31;26

Alison Kadlec

But you do. And so helping people own the power that they do have is really important. The other side of that is helping people think about like resist the pull of wishful thinking and easy answers and quick fixes and magic bullets and technical solutions. If we just did X or if we could just get the right technology, it’s like now there’s no easy way out of this.

00;31;31;26 – 00;31;34;26

Alison Kadlec

We’re actually going to have to do the work together.

00;31;35;20 – 00;31;36;11

Ryan

But that’s okay.

00;31;36;18 – 00;31;37;16

Alison Kadlec

And it is okay.

00;31;37;17 – 00;31;39;26

Ryan

Especially the way you put it. Doesn’t sound scary.

00;31;39;26 – 00;31;41;11

Alison Kadlec

Yeah, it’s all right. We can do it.

00;31;42;07 – 00;31;53;21

Ryan

I find fascinating. Again, we kind of talked about the differences between education and business, but how much time and energy do you spend on issues or challenges because those two concepts are adversarial.

00;31;54;14 – 00;32;19;21

Alison Kadlec

Oh, education in business. Oh, interesting. I don’t know if this is exactly an answer to it, but I don’t think of those things as adversarial. I think of them as connected in ways that aren’t totally appreciated. And you know, like one of the things that we have learned in our work itself is that you can have great ideas and you can have great evidence all day long.

00;32;19;21 – 00;32;40;06

Alison Kadlec

But if you don’t have the structures, including the business plan and process around that to make it work, then that great idea isn’t going to it’s not going to go anywhere. It’s not going to live long enough to actually do what you want it to do. And in that sense, I don’t see a tension. On the other hand, I think it is a lot easier in a lot of industries to make a living than it is to make a positive difference.

00;32;40;06 – 00;32;55;11

Alison Kadlec

We have been really careful along the way about interrogating every step of the way what we’re doing to make sure that we are not taking on work or doing work that doesn’t stand a chance of making a positive difference for students.

00;32;55;22 – 00;33;09;13

Ryan

Wow. On that note, it’s I’m fascinated by how you go out and get work. How important is assessing engagement, for example, in a potential client? What’s your philosophy in in finding partners to work with?

00;33;10;02 – 00;33;14;10

Alison Kadlec

It’s so it’s really interesting. We haven’t I feel like I need to knock on wood and there wood around here.

00;33;14;20 – 00;33;16;02

Ryan

Underneath the table. Absolutely.

00;33;16;02 – 00;33;37;12

Alison Kadlec

You’re right. We haven’t we’ve never done any marketing of any kind. And part of it, I think, and we look at wind and we analyze like, where did our projects come from and what do they lead to? But we have a lot of work that comes through established working relationships with people that we have proven that we’re willing to be shoulder to shoulder.

00;33;37;24 – 00;33;57;21

Alison Kadlec

We don’t come in with the answers. We come in and we listen first. So there are things that we do as a matter of practice that I think has made us attract give to clients and partners in various places because they know that will be shoulder to shoulder with them. They know that we’re going to be listening, that we’re going to be respectful.

00;33;58;04 – 00;34;07;07

Alison Kadlec

So there’s there’s just some things about how we do our work that I think has led to people wanting to work with us, which is really cool and I hope it lasts.

00;34;07;07 – 00;34;27;04

Ryan

As do I. As you think about your journey up at this point, I’m sure you’ve had folks who guided you and educators that were profound to you. Was there any advice you were given along the way back in the day? Maybe that just sounded insane at the time, but now is 100% accurate.

00;34;27;04 – 00;34;49;28

Alison Kadlec

My mom said, Do what you love and the money will follow. And that did sound crazy to me at the time, but I also did wander and do the things that I loved and bartended and waited tables for a decade while I was in grad school. The other side of that visiting professor was waiting tables for years and years.

00;34;50;05 – 00;35;14;09

Alison Kadlec

You know, it was a pretty underfunded operation. That whole graduate school experience. But it did lead to these interesting paths. And I remember saying to my mom at some point and another conversation that I was really anxious. I think I was 18. I said, I’m really anxious about all of the unknowns, about my life. I feel like I’m supposed to have something figured out and I don’t have it figured out.

00;35;14;09 – 00;35;34;05

Alison Kadlec

And there’s so many different ways to go and every decision feels like it’s a big one. And she handed me a 20 page document. It was a little journal that she had kept from when I was born to when I was five. That was just like little anecdotes about me as a toddler. And she said, Read this. And I took it and I read it.

00;35;34;05 – 00;35;54;18

Alison Kadlec

And it was such an unbelievable relief because it turns out that I didn’t need to worry about who I was going to be. I was who I had always been. So there were things in this that were just like, I am who I was when I was two years old. That’s weird. How did that have so ordinary? Yeah, that was very cool.

00;35;54;18 – 00;35;56;05

Alison Kadlec

It was a huge gift for her.

00;35;56;17 – 00;36;09;00

Ryan

Well, yeah. I mean, we’re given advice from folks along the way, including our parents and and those are probably biggest realizations, especially when you have your own kids, when they’re going, yeah, they were pretty right about that.

00;36;09;10 – 00;36;09;19

Alison Kadlec

Yeah.

00;36;09;20 – 00;36;21;24

Ryan

Just took that, that bit of perspective on this journey in this pursuit with Sarah, has it made you look backwards and see any gaps in your own education? And would you have done anything different?

00;36;22;03 – 00;36;44;14

Alison Kadlec

Absolutely. I would not have done a Ph.D. and I would not have listened to the people that told me that I could only be an academic based on what I said I was interested in. And I might have done a gap year. I think I might have done a lot of things differently if I knew that there were different to do it right.

00;36;45;08 – 00;36;46;10

Alison Kadlec

So yeah.

00;36;47;12 – 00;37;12;27

Ryan

I know this may seem like a pretty pedestrian question, but maybe not. Looking at the landscape of education the last two years have affected the youth very intensely. Mental health challenges. Aside from everything else, is there more? That is because of the last two years that are barriers to you. Are there less? I don’t have the statistics, but college admission rates, are there less people?

00;37;12;27 – 00;37;16;26

Ryan

Even going to college? And what are your thoughts on that?

00;37;17;03 – 00;37;41;19

Alison Kadlec

Yeah, I am very worried about what is happening to enrollment particularly from students from historically and persistently marginalized and minoritized communities. And so we’re seeing an exodus. So there is a decline in public confidence in higher education in this country that’s been going on for some time, where there are really legitimate and important questions being asked about the value of college.

00;37;41;19 – 00;38;13;01

Alison Kadlec

But there’s also widening equity gaps and opportunity gaps that are coming with this recent period in time. And it’s extremely worrisome. But it’s also encouraging to see more colleges and universities caring more about the mental health of students, the full array of needs that students have so that it’s not just about show up and sink or swim. It’s actually if you want to create the conditions for a level playing field for people to achieve their goals through education, then you actually have to care about the whole student, right?

00;38;13;09 – 00;38;29;11

Ryan

Right Can you speak to the most proud accomplishment you’ve had with a client? The biggest breakthrough one thing that stands out where you maybe have physically patted yourself on the back and said, We did something.

00;38;30;01 – 00;39;01;03

Alison Kadlec

That’s a great question. And the thing that comes to mind is every that we have work to actually listen to students themselves and help policymakers or leaders or others actually listen to students themselves are the those are the most satisfying moments because those are the voices that are least often heard by leaders. So it’s more like a through line of things that we feel proud when we elevate the voices of learners.

00;39;01;05 – 00;39;23;15

Ryan

That’s amazing. Even the things I hope, you know, you’re proud of and I hope you feel that you’re doing something amazing and you tell butts to wrap up a little bit from the 2013 talk, have you learned anything further about starfish anatomy? Because you struggled a little bit with that metaphor. I was just curious as being a learner.

00;39;24;00 – 00;39;25;24

Alison Kadlec

Where they’re more about faces are, okay.

00;39;25;29 – 00;39;26;23

Ryan

Do we know? I don’t.

00;39;26;23 – 00;39;35;27

Alison Kadlec

Know. Don’t I have not learned more about starfish anatomy, but that image has stayed with me protecting yourself, clinging to the right.

00;39;35;28 – 00;39;55;22

Ryan

It’s a very, very good one. And you are an author? Well, you are an author. You have published a book on John Dewey called Dewey’s Critical Pragmatism. I’m a big fan of his decimal system, but tell us one crazy, unique thing about him that we might not know other than I think he went to the University of Michigan, right?

00;39;55;29 – 00;40;03;29

Alison Kadlec

He was at Michigan for a while. That was a glorified book report. It needs to be said that while it was published as a book, I do think of it more as.

00;40;03;29 – 00;40;14;01

Ryan

Booker Boris, can you buy an Amazon.com, not a sponsor of this show? It’s so impressive. But what’s something about him that our listeners might not know about John Dewey?

00;40;14;05 – 00;40;52;01

Alison Kadlec

He wrote so much. He wrote 60 some books and a thousand articles, and his writing is really dense. But he made it clear that he learned more from playing with his kid than anything else. I think the thing about Dewey that’s so cool is that he was grounded in the human experience and I mean, sort of going back to the practical wisdom as something practical, I think it’s super cool that somebody that wrote that much and was that big a thinker actually learned most from playing with his kids.

00;40;52;02 – 00;40;56;00

Ryan

Wow. So any plans for another book at any time?

00;40;57;12 – 00;41;17;10

Alison Kadlec

I would like to write something that is useful to people, but I think that might be a ways off here. But I do like the idea of something maybe not a book, but something that can actually put wind in people’s sails to do the good work that they’re trying to do that we’ll see.

00;41;17;18 – 00;41;26;01

Ryan

Well, already think you’ve given a lot of inspiration. And is there anything we haven’t touched on that you’d like to share with our listeners related to so far or otherwise?

00;41;26;24 – 00;41;43;22

Alison Kadlec

I don’t think so. I just want to thank you for your podcast. It’s wonderful. We listen to a bunch of episodes on a road trip recently, and it’s such a cool idea to focus on positivity. To be anchored in this area, in this part of the world is just really dig it. So thank you for what you’re doing.

00;41;43;22 – 00;41;54;04

Ryan

That’s our plan. It’s our pleasure. And how can anybody support or even donate to Selva if that’s something that you offer? How can one support Silva?

00;41;54;09 – 00;42;15;26

Alison Kadlec

Interesting. So reach out to me. It’s weird when you say donate, I think, wow, I’m more interested in if people have skills or ideas or things that they want to do or ideas or stories about their own educational experience that can help us think better about what we’re trying to do. Reach out, reach out to the website.

00;42;15;26 – 00;42;34;08

Ryan

Sova.org is the website correct? Yep. And I cannot thank you enough for your pursuits and for all those who pursue along with you, ensuring positive change in higher education and sharing. America is providing real upward mobility for more people through higher education and then some.

00;42;35;08 – 00;42;35;29

Alison Kadlec

Thanks so much.

00;42;36;05 – 00;42;43;24

Ryan

Again. Thank you so much. And to our listeners, thank you all for listening and thank you for pursuing the positive.

00;42;43;24 – 00;43;15;18

Mark

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for joining us again on the Pursuit of Podcast, The Pursuit of Sova. For more information, please check out sova.org. New Leonard Media has had the pleasure of working with Sova on some projects and I will tell you that they are the real deal. This organization is here to truly help make sure every single voice is heard when it comes to affecting positive change in higher education policy.

00;43;16;03 – 00;43;26;12

Mark

Check them out, show them some love. And as always for all audio visual podcasting inquiries, check us out at NewLeonard.com