012 Deciding Before You Know | Wheaton College President Philip Ryken

Phil Ryken had believed for years that Wheaton College's signature orientation program should be required for every new student. The research was there, and he saw what it could mean for Wheaton. 

But that meant scaling a high-connection, immersion program from 200 students to 550 in a single year. And that, in turn, meant recruiting 45 additional faculty members, asking them to give up two weeks of August and solving problems that didn't have easy answers. And yet, Phil made the change.

This conversation covers what COVID made possible, what he did with criticism about moving too fast, and how he and his wife rode bicycles all over the city to meet up with students at a key time. 

Phil also talks about where the hardest decisions arise, what he wishes someone had told him before he became president, and one piece of conventional leadership wisdom he quietly ignores.

Dr. Philip Ryken is President of Wheaton College in Illinois, a Christian liberal arts institution with $206 million in revenue in 2024.

Transcript

Introduction and Context of Leadership Decisions

Adam Jeske 0:04

Nonprofit CEOs and presidents are constantly making consequential decisions, often under pressure or in isolation. I'm Adam Jeski, the Nonprofit CEO advisor, and this is the Nonprofit CEO Podcast, where CEOs talk about the decisions they carry. Today, our guest is Dr. Philip Reiken, president of Wheaton College in Illinois. Phil, welcome to the show.

Philip Ryken 0:26

Yeah, thank you, Adam. I appreciate what you do to encourage people that are in these key leadership roles. It can be lonely at the top, as they say. And we do benefit from learning more about the decision-making process of others. So appreciate what you do, and thanks for an opportunity to be on the program.

Adam Jeske 0:44

Great. Thanks, Phil. Tell me about a consequential decision you've made while you've been president there at Wheaton College in Illinois.

Philip Ryken 0:51

You know, when you first asked me that question, asked me to think about that question, I chuckled a little because I feel like I make lots of little decisions, but so many of the decisions on a college campus get made by others. And so a lot of my role is really a supportive role to the people that are in key leadership roles across campus. Uh higher education is very complex. We're one of the largest employers in our county. We manage hotels, we run a restaurant, we do all, you know, we you know have an investment portfolio. We do all these things. And we don't need the president making decisions for most of those things. But one that definitely came to mind is our decision as a campus to take a legacy college transition program, which has been at Wheaton since the 1960s and has had very different names over the years. But it originally was a wilderness multi-week

Consequential Decisions at Wheaton College

Philip Ryken 1:46

program for students to get ready for their college experience through strenuous physical challenge. And that program has changed a bit over the years, and it was often a program that maybe 200 or 250 out of 550 incoming students would do. But since coming to Wheaton College in 2010, I had thought, wow, if we could take this program and expand it to the entire incoming student body, which had many obstacles to it. But we made a decision uh following 2020 to make our passage orientation program, as we call it, uh mandatory for all new students. And it's one of the decisions I can definitely say that was my decision. I'm the one that said, this is the time to do this, we're gonna go for it. And it it was more of a top-down decision than I usually make. Uh, but that's that's one I'd love to talk more about.

Adam Jeske 2:50

That's an interesting one. I have some familiarity with that uh program through family members. Tell me what was around contextually that made it the right time. And maybe that's both external to the institution and internal to the institution, but as context for the program.

Philip Ryken 3:10

Yeah, so just briefly on the program, we bring our students to campus really two and a half weeks before classes start. And they have a mentored experience. Um, and I can talk about what that experience looks like, both with an upper class leader and with a faculty member. And it's a small group of around 10 students. They have some challenging activities that they uh attack as a team, but the key to it is a faculty mentoring relationship. And students are talking with their faculty member about what is the good life, what does it mean to be in a liberal arts institution, what does it mean specifically to live in a Christian community? I mean, they're from their very first moments in college, they are talking about very important life skills. Uh, there's an intellectual formation to it, and we had research showing that this was a phenomenal difference maker for college experience. Very strong databased affirmation of the program, particularly what it did for student retention, for their flourishing from their first year of college all the way through. We knew it was one of the best programs in higher education for college transition. You know, and I had thought, oh, we we've got to offer this to everybody. And we had a kind of problem on campus because we we did

The Impact of COVID-19 on Decision Making

Philip Ryken 4:25

have a shorter orientation program at the end of passage that all students did experience. But one of the first uh things that students would talk about was, did you do passage? No, I didn't do passage. And if I didn't do passage, I feel like I've already missed something in college. And it actually, instead of being a unifying thing, was a mildly, I don't know, divisive, maybe too strong word, but it didn't bring people together. It actually created a uh yet one more distinction. What happened was that during our COVID fall of 2020, we brought our students back to campus, but we were under strict social distancing from the state of Illinois. And we couldn't gather 1,200 people in our chapel for the beginning of our orientation program. We couldn't do most activities indoors really at all. So what we did is we we issued every student a portable camp chair, and we dispersed students with their upper class leaders for their traditional orientation program to parks that were in walking distance of our campus, and we're abundantly blessed in Wheaton, Illinois. I mean, we have dozens and dozens of really nice public spaces. And we were intentional about employing some of the methods of group discussion, of group initiatives that we had learned at Honey Rock through our passage experience. And in effect, we said, hey, we need some people that understand how passage works to come down and help us do orientation, kind of, I would call it honey rock style. Um I had uh just a really fun memory of that uh experience because typically, when you gather everybody uh for your orientation, the president speaks to all parents, all students all at once. It's a tone setter, you can cast vision. I wasn't going to have that opportunity, and I wasn't gonna have the opportunity really to welcome people to campus properly. So my wife, Lisa, and I got on our bikes the first day of orientation, and these were these students were scattered all over the city of Wheaton. And we rode around to basically every small group discussion in the city just to briefly say, hey, we're the Rikens, welcome to Wheaton, we're glad you're here, we're gonna make it through COVID. Like it, it brought a real personal touch, but it also helped me see how that day was going and what was happening. And I just saw what it was like to bring some of these approaches to an entire student body, and I came away from that saying, we can do this. And so it was more than just a personal belief that we could do it, but actually people had experienced what it was like to scale up this particular program, which was very bespoke, intimate, small base, but it could be scaled to an entire student body. And I knew we would never have an opportunity like this to make passage mandatory for all students. So that was the catalyzing event.

Challenges and Concerns in Implementing Changes

Adam Jeske 7:17

So that was fall of 2020. When did you go to the all campus, all new students are going to this fall orientation passage?

Philip Ryken 7:26

Yeah, we fall of 2021. And if you know how slow higher education moves, you know that that's a you know, so we had to make a decision. I mean, we probably made a decision in September already that we were going to do this, and then we had a year to figure out how to implement it. But you know, by that point, uh we had figured out how to send everybody home because of COVID. We had figured out how to bring everybody back in COVID. Like we had figured out a lot of things. So here was one more thing to figure out. In a way, it was a bad time because people were kind of worn out from all those COVID season um, you know, demands. But it was also a really good time because we had demonstrated maybe more nimbleness and agility as an institution.

Adam Jeske 8:08

I find myself in conversations like this often thinking about the lessons from COVID. I I really hated 2020 and 2021. Those were not good years for me personally, but I do think that they showed us, oh, things that often have to take a long time, quote unquote, can move really quickly. We learned how institutions can move much more rapidly than we often give us ourselves credit for.

Philip Ryken 8:36

No, that that's true for sure. I had one of my colleagues said, I feel like I've seen Wheaton College change more in two weeks than I have in the last 60 years. So you know, he was being a little bit funny about it. But I mean, if you had told faculty members you're gonna have to do all your teaching online and we're gonna start in a week, that was obviously impossible. You know, there there were many, many unexpected blessings of the COVID season, and we're still dealing with many negative effects from it, but also there were, it did catalyze certain changes. And for us, this is one that was really, really positive.

Adam Jeske 9:13

I imagine in hindsight, you're happy with this decision. You've seen some of the fruit of those classes coming through. Now you're a couple years on, and so you see what a difference it made for those relationships to get cemented right out of the gate for a deep connection with a professor from day one. What were the concerns that you were weighing against the vision you had for it? You imagined some of the positive outcomes, but there must have been concerns, some critics, uh, some of your own misgivings. What was the picture of how this could go poorly and how did you manage that?

Philip Ryken 9:48

Yeah, well, this was definitely a decision that had countless practical obstacles. And I'll just mention a few of them. And actually, you would get a longer list from certain people on campus who had to do more of the implementation. And I think this is an example of why you need to be careful about making hasty decisions where you haven't had an opportunity to consult with all the stakeholders.

Navigating Stakeholder Perspectives

Philip Ryken 10:15

Now, sometimes when you do that, people are throwing up all kinds of objections and it's super discouraging. And there is a time for saying, like, I know we've got a lot of obstacles. Nevertheless, this is what we're going to do, so let's figure out how to do it. We had to recruit a much larger group of faculty, so you had to have strong faculty buy-in. We need 40, 45 faculty mentors to take two weeks right before school starts, in most cases off campus, either in northern Wisconsin or in the wilderness of Wisconsin or in Chicago, at a time when many of them have their own families that are getting ready for school. Like there's there's a it's a very high commitment that we require from faculty. So, and and we can talk later maybe about how we overcame some of these obstacles, but that's an obstacle. Just even the logistics of figuring out how you're gonna house 550 students. So housing 200 or so students when you're not at maximum capacity at a camp facility, like that's achievable, but now make it 500. How are you gonna do meals? How are you gonna do accommodations? What spaces are available? How are you going to recruit a sufficient number of student volunteers so that you can have preferably two upper class leaders for each of your passage groups? Now you're recruiting 90 students, 90 students who, by the way, the most promising recruits could have been students that did passage in 2020, but we didn't do passage in 2020. So you've actually had an interruption in your flow. Like, so some of them are um were issues of scale, some of them were issues of motivating and mobilizing people that need to, you really need to commit. It's something that takes a big commitment, not a small commitment. Um, and then lots of practical specific questions like, okay, what about students who need physical or other accommodations? How do they fit into this and what place is there for them? What about families that can't afford to give up these two weeks of summer income of student work? Is it required? Is it optional? Now, what about credits? If it's required, will it be credit bearing? And what do you need to incentivize prospective students and their families to feel great about this transition? What about scholarshipping? Because we have not wanted to have a sort of extra program that only students who come from families with substantial means have the opportunity to access. We want it to be a level playing field. The only way to do that for a like a college transition program is to have scholarship aid. So where will that money come from? Then

Reflections on Leadership Challenges

Philip Ryken 12:53

you also have to figure out if this is in the curriculum, that's under the purview of the faculty, and the president can't just say, let there be a credit. Then you also have to figure out how that credit relates to financial aid, which depends on whether those first two weeks are part of a semester or not. Like there were just lots of things that were very complicated about that. And that's just a short list just to kind of illustrate it.

Adam Jeske 13:23

And so as you were navigating that, tell me about the, I imagine, listening process to students, faculty members. Uh there's probably other constituents, you know, in that laundry list that you just gave. Um, and then so that's one, how did you listen to constituents as you were making this decision? And then also, where did you turn for other perspective and advice? Were there people who had navigated something similar that you were able to tap into?

Philip Ryken 13:54

On the last question, not so much, because this is a unique program. So this I definitely do consult with other college presidents on a variety of issues. I try to not pester the same president all the time. And I do think about, okay, for this issue, like who's really okay, I know somebody that's really good in this area. I just really respect what they do. And I think one of the things I really love about higher education is the collegiality among schools and among college presidents. And I mean, if a college president reaches out for anything, that's way up at the top of my priority list, you know, figuring out 15 minutes to talk and consult on something, like whatever I could do for another college president, because that's the kind of support that I've received. In this case, though, most of the experts for how to do the implementation were already on our campus. So it was a matter of tapping into their expertise. I do think, and I'm sure there are people who would say on our campus, that decision was made without sufficient consultation with the people who were actually going to need to carry it out and really taking into account the burdens that they were going to have to bear. And so I accept that criticism. I also think this was an instance where the goal was so big and the opportunity was so massive that we just had to go for it and figure out our way through all of those different obstacles. And I think in most of the cases, we needed to convince people this is worth it. We needed to convince faculty this is worth it because of the not just what it's going to do for our students, but it did matter that you could show research that this is helping student flourishing, that it helps you in the classroom. So that first year, when I had a faculty member

Lessons Learned and Quotes for Leadership

Philip Ryken 15:40

come to me, like maybe even the first day, but certainly within the first week, we had done the passage transition program. Now students were back on campus. They were starting their regular classes. And a faculty member said to me, we had a phenomenal discussion in our first class session. My students are today where typically we wouldn't get to until after fall break. So when faculty just, if I if we could just get to the point where we could do this and experience it, people would experience the benefits. But another big part of this for faculty is their opportunity. We we give them actually a decent amount of space and time on passage to interact with faculty colleagues. And one of the things they appreciate the most is the opportunity to be with faculty colleagues. But there are other things, and we had faculty members that had been doing this program for a long time and could say to their faculty colleagues, if you've never done passage before, please come do it with us this year. Every year I say, Oh, how can I do this? You know, it's in August, like it's tough to do. And then I sit down and within 24 hours with my students, I'm reminded, this is why I teach, this is why I do what I do. So that would just be one example, really mobilizing and motivating faculty with the benefits for them and for others of this program. And then with families, maybe that had questions, it helped us to be able to say, look, if you really need to opt out of this, you can get a waiver. You don't have to do this. But we want your son and daughter to be with his or her entire class and have this experience. By the way, this is the most inexpensive credit hour you will ever receive in higher education. It's so low cost for the value of what you receive. And there are scholarships available. If this is at all a hardship for your family, here's how you apply, and here's what the price will be. Like, we needed to just get people to the place of saying, okay, this is worth it. Or, or at least, I don't know if this is worth it or not. I hear you telling me that it is worth it, and I'm I'm willing to, you know, try with you. So though those were some of the hurdles we had to overcome.

Adam Jeske 17:38

You've been president for a while, uh maybe 15 years or so.

Philip Ryken 17:42

Yeah, this is uh my 16th year at Wheaton College in this capacity.

Adam Jeske 17:46

Yeah.

Philip Ryken 17:47

And before that, a decade on the Board of Visitors and Board of Trustees. So it's yeah, it's more than 25 years in leadership roles here.

Adam Jeske 17:55

And so as as you think specifically about the 15 and a half years since starting in this role, what are the areas of the role of college president where you find the most challenging decisions needing to be made?

Philip Ryken 18:13

Yeah, so really good question. You know, uh Joe Stoll formerly served as president of Moody Bible Institute and then of Cornerstone University in in Michigan. And he said to me early on, you know, congratulations. From now on, the only decisions that you're gonna have to make are the hard ones. Because if they were easy to make, other people would be making them. There is something to that.

Surprises in the Role of College President

Philip Ryken 18:38

To me, all of the hardest problems that you have in any leadership role are problems involving human beings, their people problems. People's weaknesses, their finitude, as well as their fallenness, their limitations and the mistakes they make, how they respond. Like that's always going to be the hardest thing. And some of the hardest costs in leadership are the just relationships that are broken because for one reason or another, you've made decisions that people feel are adverse to their interests. It's people problems. Now, and there are plenty of other challenges, regulatory, financial. What makes those problems hard to work on typically does have an interpersonal or human dimension.

Adam Jeske 19:23

Well said. I sometimes make the off-handed comment that people are the worst, which is sort of like a theological commitment. It's a it's a belief about humanity, sort of a doctrine of our fallenness. And, you know, I I am a person and so I'm included there. But yeah, we the human human landscape, the human dynamics are where most of the stickiest things arrive. Well said.

Philip Ryken 19:49

Yeah, and I think I mean people are the best too. I mean, you know, as a Christian, I believe human beings are made in the image of God, and that that gives us a special place in the universe, and there's a beauty, but there's also a brokenness. Um I I won't have this verbatim, but Pascal has a nice comment about how splendid humanity is, even in its ruins. Um, and um people could probably Google that and find something close to that somewhere in Pascal. But um that makes it very important as a leader to see the best in people. I find it very helpful to believe the best about people's motives, and particularly when you know people on a leadership team are frustrated with somebody, maybe even within the leadership team, just to point out let's not forget the strengths that this person brings to our community, and then also to have as much empathy as we can have, because some of the temptations that people are falling to are ones that are tempting for us as well. So I think if you really understand the human condition as a leader, you could only respond in empathy.

Adam Jeske 20:55

Well said. Yeah, don't let me wallow in my in the on the brokenness end of the picture. Uh that takes me into our lightning round. You already started into one of the questions that I like to ask. Uh, Phil, are there other quotes that you find coming to mind frequently as you go about leading at Wheaton College?

Philip Ryken 21:16

Yes. This would have been an even better question if you had prepared me for it. So we we've got a few things that we say at Wheaton College. Some of them come from my predecessors. So V. Raymond Edmund was president of the college in the middle of the 20th century. Um, he liked to remind students, particularly in October and February when they were starting to have finals, it's too soon to quit. So it's too soon to quit. You know, persevere, that's a good word for us. Also, another phrase he had, which our our trustees will sometimes latch on to don't doubt in the darkness what God has shown you in the light. So if you had a conviction, a decision you made, you felt strongly this is the right thing. To do, and you're starting to encounter difficulties or problems, don't just all of a sudden be doubtful about it. No, you had a clear conviction that this was an important leadership decision. I mean, an example for me is the decision our trustees made, and I was on the board at the time, but I was, you know, pretty new and definitely deferential to the wise, wiser uh trustees around the table. But in uh 2008, the stock market crashed in early October. Our decision to build or not build a new science center came up in the middle of October. And the trustees just felt a strong conviction we absolutely needed to have this building. We needed to trust God to provide the financial resources. Now, that that took a while and it was a long story, but it was absolutely the right leadership decision. And it had, you know, it had had to do with having confidence about, you know, what in this case, what they believed, you know, a direction that God had had led them. Um, what are other things I'm always saying to my team? I'll probably think of some later in the lightning round.

Adam Jeske 23:03

That's fine. If that if something does come back up, feel free to to insert it. You have a unique long-term relationship with your institution. Um your father was uh president there. You served uh as a trustee in advance, and then you became the president. What do you wish someone had told you before you took the president role?

Philip Ryken 23:31

Yeah, you know, not much because we operate with such a high level of transparency between administration and board at Wheaton College. There were very few surprises for me. But one that was really was a surprise almost on day one is my long-serving, wonderful provost, Stones, had a Parkinson's diagnosis, which he had been sitting on until the transition was made. So that was, you know, obviously concerning for his health. He was able to serve highly effectively for another five years after that, but um, that was one thing that stands out. One of the biggest surprises for me has been how many legal issues there are in higher education. I mean, hardly a week goes by without needing to consult the college's general counsel on this, that, or the other thing. I'm probably surprised by the quantity uh of that. I also think some of the things that you somebody could have told you you might not have wanted to know anyway. So I never expected this to be a role that would not involve significant hardship, public scrutiny, criticism. That's just my understanding of what leadership involves. I've experienced it much more intensely here, all of those, you know, leadership challenges. Um, but I don't know that it would have helped me at all to say, to have somebody say, like, no, here are the exact challenges you know you're gonna face.

Foundational Books for Leadership

Adam Jeske 25:00

Phil, tell me about a couple of books that have been foundational for your leadership in this role.

Philip Ryken 25:07

Yeah. So, I mean, I'll I'll just throw away two easy ones and then answer the question the way you're asking it. So, I mean the Bible formatively for everything, but also for me, uh the Trinity hymnal, which is the hymnal I grew up with. So I think you learn a lot of your theology through singing, and that's deeply formative. Um even some of those phrases from great hymns of the faith are meaningful at various uh seasons of leadership. I think I learned the most about leadership from narrative that calls for courage and sacrifice and decisive action. Some of that for me would be um the fantasy literature of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. Those are lifelong formative books for what it means to be a person, what it means to be a servant, what it means to be a leader. In terms of leadership books, a couple I really like. I really like American Icon, which is the um the story of Alan Malally coming from Boeing to Ford Motor Company. It's extremely well written and really shows what holding people to a standard and inviting people to make their problems your problem so that you can help them with their problems. There's a lot to learn about leadership in that book. I also really like Doris Kearns Goodwin's Team of Rivals, but I also really like her book on leadership. It's got the word leadership in the title. She takes four presidents, both Roosevelt's Lincoln, and Johnson, and she kind of intersperses the narratives with how did they define a problem, how did they deal with a crisis, what happened afterwards. So it's a little bit of a leadership laboratory, and that's another book that I really like that I I find helpful in a in a leadership category.

Challenging Conventional Wisdom in Leadership

Adam Jeske 26:57

Those are some good ones that I've not read. So thanks for those tips. Is there a piece of conventional wisdom that you ignore in your leadership?

Philip Ryken 27:08

Uh probably. Uh there's one I'll just point out this isn't quite fall into that category, but it's something important to me. So some leaders know exactly the outcome that they want and figure out how am I going to get to that outcome? I don't do that very often. Now, the it the example we've been talking about is definitely that. I saw this big goal, we needed to go for it institutionally. Let's go for it and figure out how to get there. What I more typically do, though, is ask myself the question: who is the right decision maker? What's the best process for us to make that decision? Because I so I'm process-oriented rather than initially outcome-oriented, partly because I think if you have a good process, people can live with the results even if they don't agree with them, if they feel that they've been heard. And also, almost always you get much better input, you know, from uh along the way, and you get a better, you get a better result and you get better outcomes. There's almost nothing that I do. I mean, even the things that I think I'm a good writer. I think many people would say I'm a good writer. There's almost nothing that I write that gets out into the public sphere that doesn't have other people look at it and improve it. That's true not only of published books, but even important memos for campus. Like there are going to be improvements from others. So I do try to work, you know, quite collaboratively. Conventional wisdom, yeah, I don't I don't know what else would fall in that category. Well, I I guess I'll say one other thing. And you sometimes hear kind of advice don't get too close to the people you work with. I mean, there are some good reasons for saying that. Certainly, people that are not in the exact same role you're in can't fully understand the burdens that you bear. You need some supportive friendships beyond that, as well as colleagues to consult with. We we all need that. But I do think, you know, good teams come from more intimate relationships. That's maybe particularly true in the Christian community. We like to pray for one another as a leadership team and for what's going on in our families and be supportive personally in various ways. Of course, that becomes very challenging if you've got to make tough personnel decisions, if you've got to tell people things they don't want to hear, which sooner or later we all need to hear things we don't want to hear. But I think you want to do that out of the strength of the relationship, um, not treating it a bit more standoffishly. So love the people that you work with.

Adam Jeske 29:33

That's good. Dr. Philip Riken of Wheaton College, what do you love about what you do?

The Joy of Working with Students

Philip Ryken 29:41

What I love about what I do is the students of Wheaton College. And that started for sure as early as age, for sure by age four. You know, the heroes of my childhood were the college students that were in our home, babysitters. We ended up, we then, I was in fourth grade, we started traveling pretty frequently to England for entire summers, and those students were my big brothers and sisters. I just believe in what uh God does in the live in the lives of Wheaton students on campus and does through them as they become graduates in the world. And I just really love our students, and I I that's a focal point and priority for me that I want to orient our campus towards as well. I want our faculty and staff to love our students as well. So that that's maybe at the core of my leadership. Uh, I also love the complexity of this work, and it touches on so many things I enjoy. If you're in college communities, there's music, there's art, there's science, there's athletics, there's worship. Um, I love going to evening lectures, just everything about a campus community. There's just so much to experience here. And if I were not president on a college campus, I would want to be close to a college campus where I could be involved in some way.

Adam Jeske 30:58

Phil Riken, thanks for joining us on the Nonprofit CEO podcast.

Philip Ryken 31:03

Thank you, Adam. And thanks for the chance just to reflect. And uh good questions, I'll probably still think be thinking about the right answers to afterwards.

Adam Jeske 31:12

And if you are listening and know a nonprofit CEO or president who's carrying something significant, send them this episode. And if you want more of the patterns I'm seeing across hundreds of conversations with CEO conversations, uh you need the Nonprofit CEO briefing at nonprofit CEO.com. I'm Adam Jeske, the Nonprofit CEO Advisor. Thank you for what you are leading.