Bay Path University

9 www.baypath.edu Since the beginning of her career, Bay Path's provost, Dr. Melissa Morriss-Olson, has been intrigued by the potential of this brave new normal and what it takes to develop and sustain innovation in the face of so much ongoing change. "In the 90s, I did my doctoral dissertation on successful college management practices," she says. "I studied the financial performance and management practices of 100 small colleges over a ten-year period. These schools looked similar at the beginning, but by the end of the decade, some were wildly successful, some experienced little change, and some had declined. The burning question I had was, 'How do you account for the difference in performance; how is it that some but not all were able to pull together the courage, ambition, and skill to improve and become more resilient?" One of Dr. Morriss-Olson's key findings, repeatedly confirmed throughout her career, is that many institutions are shortsighted in their strategy. In financially challenging times, the temptation to "cut one's way to an improved bottom line" is tempting. And yet, institutions that focus exclusively on cutbacks rarely succeed. Even in tough times, it is essential to invest in new ideas and in the future, says Morriss-Olson. Her results found that most successful schools possessed "an innovation mindset." They were highly opportunistic and outward looking, with a focus on diversifying program mix and revenue streams and strengthening key operational areas, such as admissions and fundraising. They had leaders who were visionary and highly adaptive. She calls them "chaos pilots," a term first coined in 1991 by Uffe Elbaek, founder of Kaospilot, an innovative business school designed to teach students how to lead through uncertainty. She also saw that many institutions—and those who ran them—seemed ill-prepared to meet the challenges they were facing and would continue to face. "I went through a traditional higher ed leadership doctoral program (Loyola University of Chicago), and while I thought it was an exceptional program, my experience working in small, resource-constrained institutions—and that's been my entire career— revealed a disconnect between my doctoral preparation and what I was actually experiencing as a professional in the trenches," she explains. "This whole question of how do you lead and manage in the midst of disruption; how do you cultivate an innovative mindset, while moving an institution forward? It's just not something anybody teaches in the traditional higher education doctoral programs." Tapping into her passion and experience in helping to build nimble, resilient institutions, MMO, as she's affectionately referred to by her Bay Path colleagues, envisioned a doctoral program that would prepare professionals by giving them both the mindset and skills to implement bold new solutions for the evolving higher ed landscape. In mid-March, when the specter of COVID-19 emptied lecture halls and turned tight-knit seminars into remote Zoom chats, thousands of colleges and universities scrambled to reinvent the college experience for the students suddenly exiled from their campuses. While the coronavirus has wrought monumental and unprecedented disruption to higher education, including rising costs, shrinking populations and head-spinning technological transformations, many have long forecasted the end of the campus-bound academic business model, while trumpeting the need for a "new normal." More than 30% of all enrolled students take at least one course online.

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