Dan Myers is the 15th President of Misericordia University in Pennsylvania. Prior to his appointment at Misericordia, he served as the Chief Academic Officer at American University in Washington, DC and at Marquette University in Wisconsin. Prior to that, he spent 17 years at the University of Notre Dame, where he was a faculty member in the Department of Sociology and Vice President for Faculty Affairs. Dr. Myers was also the director of Faculty Development and Research in the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, and he founded and directed Notre Dame’s Center for the Study of Social Movements. Dr. Myers earned a bachelor’s degree in political science and a master’s degree in higher education and student affairs from Ohio State University before completing a master’s and doctorate in sociology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He is a well-known expert in the study of protest, activism, collective behavior, and social movements. He has published eight books and over 60 articles primarily focused on protest and unrest, the diffusion of social phenomena, social psychology, and urban politics. He is an award-winning teacher and researcher, and was honored with Notre Dame’s highest teaching award in 2007. His research has been funded by the National Science Foundation and the Lilly Foundation. He has served on a variety of non-profit boards of arts, health, and educational organizations.
In a recent interview with Higher Education Digest, Daniel J. Myers discussed his experience with leadership and academic administration. He shared his views on University Growth Strategies, future trends, rapid advancements in technology and changes in teaching methodologies, transformative education, and many more.
Reflecting on your academic journey—from your foundational years at Ohio State University to your transformative roles at Notre Dame, American University, and Marquette University—what key experiences have most influenced your vision for higher education?
Looking back over the 40 years I’ve been part of higher education, I’d have to say one of the most formative experiences was being a first-year college student. My first year was tough. I was experiencing hard adjustments that many college students have to make: being away from my family, adjusting to higher academic standards, breaking up with my high school girlfriend, struggling with roommates, feeling isolated, and so on. I did not get a lot of help dealing with all of that during my first year—sometimes because of choices I made, sometimes because the environment around me wasn’t engaging me well. So, a lot of my ideas about improving higher education come from a drive to connect to students sooner and integrate them more fully into the opportunities in their environment—for social, academic, political/civic, and personal development. At its core, my notion about what I want to do in higher education is to prevent students from having the lousy experience I had the first year and get them quickly into the kinds of experiences I had in the next three years—which fabulously fun and “growthful” in so many ways—from academic to interpersonal to understanding who I wanted to be as a person.
How has your deep background in sociology and your expertise in studying collective behavior and social movements shaped your approach to leadership and academic administration at Misericordia University?
People sometimes joke that studying riots and protest must have been great preparation to be a higher education administrator and eventually a college president. I guess that is because they imagine that you are going to have riots on campus or are at least going to be the target of lots of complaints and protest! Some of that is true, I guess, because understanding how crises unfold and how they can be resolved is certainly helpful in almost any kind of administrative work. But I actually think being a sociologist has been particularly helpful because we are trained to understand, appreciate, and work with complex social structures and local politics, many of which are not as immediately apparent to people coming from other disciplinary traditions. Sociology is also a very broad disciplinary field and one comes into administration already having an appreciation for a huge range of research methods and approaches to generating and teaching knowledge, because our field has interdisciplinary connections with everyone from pure mathematicians to those working on the interpretative edges of humanities, in say, philosophy and English. One of the key challenges of becoming an administrator is that you have to appreciate and work with a broader and broader range of fields and functions as you move up through the hierarchy—sociologists are well-prepared to do that.
Having founded the Center for the Study of Social Movements and led initiatives in faculty development, in what ways do these research and programmatic experiences continue to inform your strategies for institutional growth and innovation?
Founding the CSSM at Notre Dame was a lesson in academic entrepreneurship. At the time I wanted to start the Center, the university was actually in the middle of an effort to reduce the number of centers, to eliminate those that weren’t doing much and consolidating others for more efficiency. They were not really interested in starting a new one at that moment. But I made a deal with them. If they would let me have the Center name, I said that I would run the center for two years with no budget. If, after that, they liked what I had done, they would give me a foundational budget. They agreed and I then set out to beg, borrow, and partner (no stealing!) to produce the resources I needed to get the Center off the ground. In two years’ time, we had developed a social movements training seminar, instituted a lifetime achievement award, started a young scholars conference, built a substantial web resource for scholars of social movements, and secured the editorship of the leading social movements journal. With that record, I did in fact, secure the budget and the Center is still an operating entity today, having become a key node for scholars and activity connected with the study of protest and activism. Today, I look for people who have that entrepreneurial spirit. It is critical to making progress in almost all activities in the higher education space.
In light of current global challenges and evolving educational paradigms, what do you identify as the most critical opportunities and hurdles that higher education institutions must address today?
The vast majority of higher education institutions are struggling with enrollment issues and the financial challenges that come along with that. Those challenges, in turn, have both produced and exacerbated a sense of waning relevance among many people who might be consumers of higher education. To date, most of the attempts to address this have focused primarily on recruiting students away from other schools. That is a zero-sum game that might help individual institutions, but does not address the problems of the industry—which needs to seek out new markets of students who are not planning to access higher education and show how that experience is going to worthwhile, accessible, and welcoming. As our traditional market wanes, we can’t just steal from one another to fix things—we have to go beyond to find new markets and alter “what we offer and how we offer it” to make that work.
With rapid advancements in technology and changes in teaching methodologies, how is Misericordia University adapting to foster innovative learning environments and remain competitive on a global scale?
Misericordia is a school that has made its reputation by providing a highly personal, thick, on-campus experience. It is a specific style of higher education that works extremely well for many students. At the same time, we have also seen a growing desire for distance education and hybrid delivery models that make the high-touch elements of the educational experience harder to produce. We are constantly thinking about how to engage students in those important ancillary experiences, even when they are not on our campuses. We are also building high tech classrooms that will allow students who are not onsite to participate in classes right along with those who are sitting in the classrooms. We have had one such operation happening in our Speech Language Pathology program and it has proven very successful, so we will be outfitting additional classrooms with that technology this summer.
Your career uniquely spans rigorous academic research and high-level administrative responsibilities. How do you balance these dual commitments while ensuring that each enriches the other?
As one moves further into high-demand administrative responsibilities, it becomes harder and harder to maintain research activity and even to monitor developments in one’s field of study. But, I have always attempted to keep some research and teaching going in my portfolio of activities. It is not only refreshing to be engaged in the activities that I loved so much as a faculty member, but it also keeps me aware of the experiences of faculty and students as they develop and change. And that is essential knowledge for those steering a college or university. That said, presidential duties are indeed very time consuming and I know we hope people will forgive us when we can’t be as present as we would like!
Looking ahead, what future trends or shifts do you anticipate will define higher education over the next decade, and how is Misericordia University positioning itself to lead through these changes?
In addition to the enrollment cliff that is coming in the U.S., the questioning of the value of higher education has become a very troubling issue. The objective indicators still show that higher education is a great value. Recent independent studies show that 4-year degree holders will earn $1.4M more dollars over their career than those who do not. But people do not realize that and they believe that increasing tuition and loan debt are eclipsing the benefits (both material and non-material). Those things together mean that the story of higher education is not being told well—either by the popular media or by higher education institutions themselves. In fact, some studies indicate that higher education is more affordable today than it was in the recent past. We need to invest more effort, time, and money in telling that story and connecting with our communities in ways that demonstrate very clearly what we really do and the benefits that our students accrue.
On a more personal note, could you share a motivational experience or insight from your journey that has continually inspired you to champion transformative education?
On the most personal level, I can clearly say that my higher education experience transformed me. I grew up in poverty—there is no question about it. But I went on to college, received support through Pell Grants, Loans, work study, and private scholarships. That support allowed me an experience that set me up for success. I had to work too, though. During my undergraduate years, I had all kind of jobs from being a night security guard, to being a cashier at a beer drive-through, to being a janitor at a typewriter factory. All of that combined to allow me to succeed in my undergraduate program and eventually earn a Ph.D. at one of the best graduate programs in the country. And it inspired me to work in an industry that changes lives, helps people bring out their full potential, and be a different kind of positive presence in their communities. Seeing the success of those students and all the contributions they make through their work and civic involvement inspires me to keep pushing higher education toward its transformative potential.