In this episode of Rocking the Academy, co-hosts Roopika Risam and Mary Churchill talk with Yves Salomon-Fernández, president of Greenfield Community College in Greenfield, Massachusetts. We talk with Yves about her leadership in community colleges, insights from rural colleges, and challenges to diversifying the presidency in higher ed. Find us on Twitter: @roopikarisam, @mary_churchill, and @PrezYves.
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Music Credits: “Come Right Here” by Tendinite, licensed under a Creative Commons 4.0 CC-BY-NC-ND license.
Mary Churchill: [00:00:00] Rocking the Academy is a podcast that's changing the future of higher education. Your hosts, Mary Churchill and Roopika Risam, bring you conversations with the very best truth tellers who are formulating a different vision of the university. Do they rock the boat? Yes, but in doing so, they rock the academy.
Rocking the Academy is sponsored by Johns Hopkins University Press, publisher of excellent books on higher education.
Roopika Risam: [00:00:35] On this episode of Rocking the Academy, we chat with Yves Salomon-Fernández, the 10th President of Greenfield Community College in Massachusetts. She previously served as President of Cumberland County College in New Jersey and Interim President of MassBay Community College in Massachusetts and has taught as an adjunct professor at Boston College, Northeastern University, Salem State University, and Cambridge College. Salomon-Fernández is a staunch advocate for reinventing higher education in the age of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. She has been recognized as a leader on issues related to rural innovation, workforce development, and women's leadership. In 2018, she was named one of the Top 25 Women in Higher Education by Diverse Issues in Higher Education.
Yves, thank you so much for joining us today. We're really excited to talk to you about your amazing experiences in academic leadership. And our first question is, you're currently president of Greenfield Community College, so how did you get here? What led you into academic leadership in community colleges?
Yves Salomon-Fernández: [00:01:44] My past has been really unconventional. I look very different from your typical community college president or your typical college president, period. I ascended to the presidency via institutional research, which is a very rare path for presidents in the two- or even the four-year college realm. And I never aspired to be a college president. It actually took a few years of having my mentors say to me, “We see you as being a president”--my background and the totality of my experiences--they kept on encouraging me. It took a good three years before I really started seeing myself being able to do the job and being in this role.
Roopika Risam: [00:02:22] What do you find most gratifying about what you can do as president that you weren't able to do in other roles in institutions?
Yves Salomon-Fernández: [00:02:29] As president, I have an opportunity to influence the mission and the direction in ways that I wasn't able to before. Coming up in institutional research, having been a Dean and Vice President of Institutional Research or Planning or Assessment, I always had that total institution look. I always had a sense of how things were going but [was] not really…able to influence any particular direction in a way that was as meaningful as I thought that I could, given the perspective that I thought I brought. So, being the president, I'm able to pull all of that together and also to look outward and to look ahead and to say, “This is where the economy is going, this is where the labor market is going, this is where the job market is going, this is where the demographics are going. And how do we work together with the faculty, with the staff to understand how we need to elevate our pedagogy, elevate our program offerings, elevate our student support services to be able to meet the demands of students today as well as students tomorrow.” In the community college realm, it also is part of our mission to influence workforce development and the regional economic vitality. So, as president, I'm able to do that.
Mary Churchill: [00:03:41] Beautiful. Building on that, this is your third presidency and you've been in urban settings and in rural settings. I'm interested in hearing more about what's different about rural community colleges and are there insights from your work in rural community colleges that could benefit the whole sector?
Yves Salomon-Fernández: [00:04:00] Oh, I really like this question. So, I grew up mostly in urban spaces. I'm originally from Haiti, grew up in Port-au-Prince, and spent the 12 years after we moved to the U.S. living in Boston. But what I've found is that I really appreciate and enjoy working in rural settings. Rural communities have a lot of grit, and they're resilient. People also tend to be very resourceful. That is seen in the high levels of small business entrepreneurship that we have. Rural folks tend to just roll up their sleeves and get it done. At GCC [Greenfield Community College], here, we have some of our faculty members and some of our staff who have to tend to their land and their animals. They have farms, and they do that before or after work. We also have a very vibrant and booming creative economy here in the Pioneer Valley. There aren't a ton of job options in most rural areas, and rural communities are graying. And often, some of the young people have a yearning to explore the big city, and we have issues like transportation and access to the internet that are real impediments.
I think it's in the DNA, if you grew up in a rural area, to be more creative, to be problem-solvers. And folks are not afraid of hard work. As an immigrant, I really relate to that. And the characteristics that I think folks elsewhere can learn is that sense of “we can do it together” and a deep sense of collaboration and having a shared vision that we're all, in multiple ways, contributing to that, whether at the college, whether on our farms, whether in our side gigs--as the gig economy is growing. We can all see how these translate for our students, and we relate to them firsthand. So yes, there are lots of unique characteristics of rural communities that I think can be helpful to different types of communities.
Mary Churchill: [00:05:49] I'm thinking of the challenges and opportunities you face as the leader of a rural community college, and while some might assume that it would be behind the times, I almost feel like you're at the edge of the future of community colleges, and you're seeing things potentially that are coming for other institutions in the sector, but you're seeing them in a kind of more exaggerated way. Is that fair to say?
Yves Salomon-Fernández: [00:06:14] Yes, I would agree with that. I'd say we're growing at a faster rate than the rest of the country--rural areas across the country. We are seeing our young people leave. So, I think, in some ways we're seeing the rise and the integration of technology and automation--running farms, doing functions that typically a human would have done--and so it's increasing the productivity, the efficiency overall, of the farm and clearing a path for folks to do other work that only humans can do. In many ways, it accelerates the rate at which these changes are happening because we have to adapt. We have to evolve if we're anticipating labor shortages. So how do we become creative and meet those needs in a number of ways? We are at the cutting edge, and in Franklin County, in particular in the Pioneer Valley, we have developed great aptitude for thriving in the creative economy.
Roopika Risam: [00:07:02] Are you finding that rural community colleges are able to create possibilities for people to remain in their communities?
Yves Salomon-Fernández: [00:07:11] Absolutely, absolutely. And, I think, when you look at the generation of farmers today, we have a lot of young farmers. We have a good handful of students here who are enrolled in our sustainable agriculture and renewable energy programs or our food systems programs who are also farmers. And these are students or graduates who are in their 20s, who are operating their own farms, who are concerned about climate change because they see how that affects them directly.
In a lot of ways, we are at the cutting edge, and folks are seeing what we can do differently. And the new generation, I think, across the country is much more aware socially, politically, environmentally--and they want to be different stewards than we have been, and the prior generations. Yet, while young people are interested in seeing what city life is like, we're seeing in a lot of instances, people are also coming back. And we're also seeing the level of congestion in cities, the cost of living in cities, the cost of housing in cities--those are also drawbacks. So, while it might be very tempting, very alluring to go check it out, after a while, you start thinking, maybe things weren't so bad back home.
Roopika Risam: [00:08:21] So, as you know, Yves, I'm interested potentially in a leadership career. I'm curious about what you see as the biggest challenges to diversifying the pool of college and university presidents? How can we overcome that?
Yves Salomon-Fernández: [00:08:33] I think we need to grow the pipeline. I think this is both an exciting and daunting time to be a community college president. I think it's better in community colleges right now than it is for small private liberal arts colleges with small endowments. I think it is an exciting time. If you are a problem-solver, if you have an asset perspective rather than a deficit perspective, this can be a really exciting time to help evolve the academy, to help evolve the academic enterprise.
So, if folks are interested in that, I would definitely recommend that they get a broad perspective. I would say one of the things that really helped me was to have that broad perspective. And my academic background is also varied--so, I have the mix of the liberal arts and the more technical social science and statistics. We need folks who can be great problem-solvers and who can look at issues and who can look at moving the academy across the entire spectrum of the institution, not just from the perspective of academic affairs or student affairs or whatever their path may be or their area of responsibility might be. It's scary. It's fun. And it's a time to do things differently, to take some risks, to fail and learn and also to succeed. I think community colleges have an incredible role to play right now in helping to achieve more equitable outcomes and prosperity for all Americans as the country is changing demographically, as our colleges are changing, and as we are also seeing changes in the future of work.
Mary Churchill: [00:10:12] Excellent. So, Yves, you kind of just touched on a hopeful future and during this entire conversation, you've been hopeful. You're very much an optimist. But as you know, higher ed in general and society are facing many challenges. So, what gives you--from your vantage point as community college president--what gives you hope for a different future of higher ed?
Yves Salomon-Fernández: [00:10:35] You know, I can mostly speak for my college and the community college segment in general, and what gives me hope is the level of creativity that I see. I know a lot of my colleagues are aware that the demographics are not in our favor, and that they're also cognizant of the changing future of work. And we're all working really hard to adapt to the new external context, both for what we can see and what we know will happen. So, for me, I'm excited and I'm hopeful because there are enough of us who realize that we need to evolve. And we need to be more mindful of our long-term sustainability and our ability to live our mission for the communities that we serve as they are changing. That gives me hope.
Are there pockets of complacency? Of course. On the whole, however, I think there is a prevailing sentiment that we need to evolve. And some of us are bolder than others--and I'm just very lucky that at Greenfield Community College, at GCC, the culture is to take risks. It's something that's preceded me. It's always been the culture here. And I find it really exciting. So, we're owning it, and we are all living that side of our identity more boldly than we have in the past. And it keeps me really hopeful. It makes me really excited that people are willing to look more broadly and step out of their comfort zones.
Roopika Risam: [00:12:10] You have been listening to Rocking the Academy. Rocking the Academy is sponsored by Johns Hopkins University Press, publisher of The College Stress Test: Tracking Institutional Futures across a Crowded Market by Robert Zemsky, Susan Shaman, and Susan Campbell Baldridge, available where books are sold.