SEASON 2, Ep. 9 HBCU Innovation: Shaping the Future from Monique Guillory, President of Dillard University

This episode features an interview with Monique Guillory, President of Dillard University, Louisiana's oldest HBCU. She discusses the challenges facing higher education, including the demographic cliff and the need to prove the value of a college degree. President Guillory outlines Dillard's strategy to address these challenges, focusing on a holistic liberal arts education, emphasizing fundamental skills like reading, writing, and critical thinking, and fostering an entrepreneurial campus. She highlights the Innovation Collective, a new residence hall designed to teach students about responsible social media use and content creation. The conversation also explores the importance of entrepreneurial leadership and adapting to the evolving needs of students and the workforce.

This podcast is sponsored by Viv Higher Education

About Viv Higher Education

Viv Higher Education is a Boston-based, female-owned comprehensive marketing agency specializing in higher education. With expertise in strategic planning, creative asset development, and media campaigns, we focus on enrollment-centric initiatives. Our approach is grounded in industry best practices, ensuring precision in reaching target audiences. We have extensive experience in marketing to diverse groups, including high school students, Hispanic, military, LGBTQ+, international students, and online learners. Navigating the complex landscapes of university environments is second nature to us, and we prioritize fostering collaborations that yield mutually beneficial outcomes. With a personable, nimble, and highly responsive approach, we deliver tailored solutions to empower organizations to achieve their objectives.

Website: https://vivhied.com/
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Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction
• 1:23 Monique's Higher Ed Journey
• 2:22 Challenges in Higher Education
• 3:30 Dillard University's Position
• 5:53 Focus on Basic Skills and Emotional Intelligence
• 8:43 Innovation Collective and Social Media Responsibility
• 10:58 Entrepreneurship at Dillard
• 12:55 Leadership and AI in Higher Education

Transcript

Hi, Monique. Thank you so much for being on the show. How are you? Hi, I'm doing great, Suzanne. Thanks so much for having me. I know you're in a lobby at a hotel waiting to go to a Mardi Gras parade, so we feel very fortunate that you are able to still join and then have this interview, and I know listeners will be very interested in hearing about your presidency at Dillard University, which is in New Orleans, and it's Louisiana's oldest HBCU, so very fascinating liberal arts institution, so we'll dive into the institution, how it's currently positioned, how you became the president there.

So before we start talking about Dillard, could you give us a quick overview of your higher ed career, which I know has had multiple stops at different institutions? Yeah. So Dillard actually makes the eighth institution where I've been a part of the executive cabinet. I've done seven HBCUs and one MSI, a minority serving institution, but, seven HBCUs, eight institutions altogether.

I did not attend an HBCU. I always try to lead with that caveat, but I've spent about 30 years at them. So I probably earned a few degrees. At HBCUs, and I just have always been very, committed to and appreciative of the mission of HBCUs and having not gone to an HBCU, but spent a lot of time at them, even in my undergraduate tenure.

I just really appreciate how important HBCUs are to the educational enterprise in America. Amazing. And you're in your first year of your presidency now, and this is your first presidency at an institution. So how has it been going and what's been your focus? Well, this is an unprecedented time in higher education right now, even before the pandemic, higher education was at a critical kind of crossroads where people had been questioning the value of a college degree, how much it costs to attain a college degree, the amount of loans that people had to take out.

And so people have been challenging that and questioning that for some time. The pandemic was not a help to this, the pandemic. Led us to, really kind of hunker down and everybody kind of reassess their lives and their livelihood. And, it really did again, call into question, should people make this investment in higher education?

Do they really need to have a degree? Do they really need to be on a campus to attain that degree? Can they just attend online? So all of these, realities, all of these kind of like pivotal moments have proven to be some challenges to the sector and in my first presidency at Dillard, I am experiencing firsthand what those challenges look like on the campus.

And so it's 2025. We're not only dealing with the fallout still from the pandemic, we're also looking ahead to the demographic cliff. We are in an unprecedented political moment as well. How would you say Dillard is positioned right now among liberal arts institutions and then also among other HBCUs?

Yeah. So we, share the same struggles with all institutions with the reality of the enrollment cliff. I just had to explain to some of my students in a town hall because, you know, we've had to increase their housing fees and whatnot. And they're like, well, why don't we just increase enrollment? Why don't we just bring in more students?

And then we'll have more money to spend. It's like, well, it's not that simple. And I had to explain to them what the enrollment cliff is and that we've kind of known this was going to happen, probably since about 2007, 2008. You know, when we could see all of the changes in demographics in the census data about the birth rate and when birth rates are declining, we know we can project out, 20 years to see what the college age population is going to be like.

So we've been aware of it, but unfortunately, higher education is not quick to respond or pivot to the realities. Of even its own sector. And so we have just not been very prepared with how we are going to maneuver through these changes and through this reality. So it's all of us. I mean, we have the University of New Orleans, which is a public institution right up the road from us, and they have a 40 million deficit, and they've had to do layoffs and furloughs and things of that nature.

But I think this environment really just does underscore for us how important an education, higher education actually is. And it's an important challenge for us to hear within the sector that we have to prove the value add. We have to prove to our constituents, to prospective students and their families that a college degree is indeed worth the investment.

And we have to show them that through the earning potential of prospective students and what happens with our graduates that even some college makes a difference for students, even if they aren't able to complete the degree, just having some college makes a difference with their earning potential.

Yeah, I think there are presidents all over the country who are now in a position of a changed role of the presidency, and they have to educate stakeholders about what it means that the demographic cliff is coming, figure out how to make fiscally responsible decisions and really think about things like differentiation and competition.

so it's a different role, right? The role of a college president now than it was 10, 20 years ago. what do you think makes Dillard different in this competitive environment? And what are you telling prospective students and their families about why they should use Dillard specifically? So, you know, I've been talking a lot during my first year about going back to the basics, returning to the basics.

And what we want to do at Dillard is really reinforce the importance of a holistic, comprehensive liberal arts education. When you graduate from Dillard, you need to know how to read, you know, and that might kind of go without saying, but we know nationwide, college students are not reading the way that they used to.

And that's largely because of social media. It's largely because of technology and whatnot. We just don't prioritize reading comprehension skills. And that lack of skill, that lack of the capacity to read complex information and discern and distill the material, understand what there is to comprehend in this material, that is a gateway to critical thinking.

That's a gateway to a deeper sense of knowledge. So we want to make sure that our students have. some basic skills covered, they read well, they write well, they speak well, they have a basic understanding of data. So we are looking at strategies like a competency based curriculum to make sure we're not going to just assume because you finished 120 credits at our institution that you can do these things.

We should be able to assume those things, but unless we are explicitly teaching students this, they may not attain these skills. So I want to be very deliberate about these things. I know I'm a former journalist, and I always prioritized writing, and I'm confident that my writing ability is what helped to get me where I am today.

So I think that these fundamental skills are really critical to drill down for our students. And then these are the skills along with emotional intelligence, you know, the things that happen in the classroom. That's the hard skills. That's the knowledge set. But on the other side of that is emotional intelligence, making sure our students have.

The self regulation, the self awareness, and the capacity to get along with people from different cultures, from backgrounds that are different from their own. And we know that hiring managers and workforce really prioritizes this. 📍   100 percent and those are skills that the liberal arts are especially equipped to provide.

That critical thinking, that emotional intelligence. And that will allow not just the students to navigate the future, which is increasingly uncertain, but also us as leaders on higher ed campuses to navigate an increasingly uncertain future. Correct. We're focusing on entrepreneurship and the entrepreneurial campus.

So I want to dig into that a little bit more. Because I know you have some unique things going on at Dillard, notably the Innovation Collective, which is an initiative, a residence hall, right, for upperclassmen that's opening in June. Can you tell us a little bit more about that? Right? So, you know, we want to be responsive to our students and acknowledge and recognize that our students are very different than we were when we were students.

And just how important social media and media information is to our students and that we want them to understand how it works. So the innovation collective is our newest residence hall. It's traditionally called a living learning center where, you know, we recognize that education extends beyond the boundaries of the classroom.

Education continues when students are in their living spaces and their gathering spaces. And so in the innovative collective. We want to teach students about how to use social media responsibly, how to use it responsibly with respect to what they understand about it, how algorithms work, you know, that you're seeing all these things that you agree with, because the algorithm knows what you agree with, and it just spoon feeds you more things that align with your own perspectives.

So you need to be a little bit more aggressive and determined to seek out other perspectives that are different from your own. So, you know, we are also encouraging our students in the innovative collective to post on social media and how they should do that. teaching them about posting on social media, making responsible content and whatnot.

One of the things that we're going to do with this first inaugural class moving into the residence hall, we're going to have a competition for them to decorate their, dorm rooms and show them how to decorate their dorm rooms responsibly, help them understand the material that their walls are made of, what they can put on their walls to not damage the walls.

And so we'll have two awards one for the best room for its decoration, and then the second would be for the best content. So leaning into those things that students like, you know, and not resisting them, not fighting them, but showing them how to do the things that they want to do anyway. I love that.

And it sounds like as part of that, there's not just going to be responsible leadership skills that come out of it, but also they're going to help sort of promote the initiative, right, by the content that they create. Um, I love that as a marketer. Brilliant. there is a statistic, that I came across and that I know you also watch very closely, which is that, African American entrepreneurs often choose entrepreneurship out of necessity and to make ends meet and very basic.

Ways when other ethnicities choose entrepreneurship as more of a wealth building, activity or choice. So that's a concerning gap. And I'm curious to hear about Dillard as an HBCU and how you're addressing that gap on your campus. Yeah, well, you know, one of my favorite things from my own formative years was Schoolhouse Rock, right?

And there was a, segment called Mother Necessity, Where Would We Be? and, you know, out of need often, we are compelled to think outside of the box. we are challenged to be able to make a way out of no way. And that is a constant refrain that you'll hear. At HBCUs that we will figure things out.

And this is part of the reason why HBCUs have been so innovative because we have not been provided the same kind of resources that most institutions can just rely on on a regular basis. And so just by their very nature, HBCUs tend to be very entrepreneurial, but that's not enough. We have to do more in the reality of the current moment.

So one of the things that I think about as Dillard for an entrepreneurial campus is, the ability for students to choose their own curriculum, for them to lean into the courses that are interesting to them and that they want to learn more about, for faculty to start thinking about themselves more as coaches and facilitators rather than the sage on the stage.

We have to be more malleable and adaptive to the reality of the environment that our students are learning in. And I think that those are important hallmarks of an entrepreneurial campus. Absolutely. Yeah, that sounds like choice and pursuing your own interests and then getting coaching and doing that and funneling into something that can be productive for you in terms of career outcomes.

Right. Sounds like something that more campuses should embrace for sure in curriculum design and campus life design and all of that. flipping it to you as a higher ed leader a little bit and the cabinet that you're leading as well. What does um entrepreneurial leadership look like to you at this critical time in higher education?

Well, I challenge my cabinet and all of my school leaders that we always have to keep growing. You know, we cannot rely on the fact that we earned a Ph. D. 30 years ago, and we're subject matter experts in our own disciplines. I'm challenging my senior leadership, even my staff. What are you going to do different?

How are you going to challenge yourself? How are you going to evolve? What new thing are you going to take on? I'm trying to get all of my faculty to have just a basic understanding of AI, because I think they need to know how AI is changing the disciplines that they're currently in. In as much the same way that we were required to have certain computer literacy skills when we were going through school, I think our students are going to have to know AI and how AI is applied to different sectors.

And so these are some of the things that I'm challenging our senior leadership to do. It's no longer a time when people can just rest on their laurels. They have to constantly grow, constantly learn and evolve because that's what the times require of us. I love that, especially because I know that a lot of higher ed leaders are very uncomfortable with the idea of AI in the classrooms or AI being used by students to complete their work.

So I love that you're embracing it and that you're challenging your team to think about it in an entrepreneurial way and embracing that uncertainty. 

Thank you so much for taking the time to talk with us and good luck at your parade that you're about to thank you so much. If I saw you out there, I throw you something. Thanks. Thanks, Suzanne. I appreciate it.