Episode 105: Michael Sorrell on rethinking the higher education model

Michael Sorrell, President of Paul Quinn College, thinks the higher education model needs a reboot, and now may be the time to do it.

Listen here, read the transcript below, or click here for the full video version.

George Mason:
Welcome to Good God, conversations that matter about faith and public life. I'm your host, George Mason. And I'm delighted to welcome to the program today, President Michael Sorrell, Paul Quinn College in Dallas, Texas, and Michael, it's so good to have you with us.

Michael Sorrell:
Oh, it's great to be here. It's always a pleasure to be in your company.

George Mason:
Thank you very much. All right, now, we're going to give you the full introduction here. You were voted by Fortune Magazine in 2018 one of the world's greatest leaders. That's a pretty big honor. Oh, my goodness.

Michael Sorrell:
Yes, I tell you that it is not translated into getting me out of any chores around the house, but it's nice.

George Mason:
Very, very good. All right. Well, Paul Quinn College, let's just give a little, a quick background. Paul Quinn College is a school that started during the period of Reconstruction, I guess, in Austin, Texas, the ministers of the African Methodist Episcopal denomination. And they started that school. It is a historically black college and university in that genre and moved to Dallas, what year?

Michael Sorrell:
1990.

George Mason:
1990 succeeding Bishop College in the current location.

Michael Sorrell:
That's exactly right.

George Mason:
Yeah. So, you have been president there since when?

Michael Sorrell:
2007. So, it's been 13 years.

George Mason:
Fantastic. And boy, in those 13 years, have there ever been changes. My goodness. Well, Paul Quinn has become a real model in so many ways and a great gift to Dallas, maybe especially to South Dallas, as not just a place to educate students but as an engine of revitalization for the entire community. So, first of all, let me just say thank you for your leadership and congratulations on all you've accomplished.

Michael Sorrell:
Thank you very much. Really, I'm very, very fortunate to be able to do something I love on behalf of people that I love. So, I do not take it for granted one second of the day.

George Mason:
Not taking anything for granted is actually very much a theme we're all dealing with right now, isn't it?

Michael Sorrell:
Yes, it is.

George Mason:
This COVID-19 period of shelter in place and now the state opening up the county, trying not to open up as much, all those sorts of things, this has a tremendous impact on colleges and universities. And last Friday, the Atlantic magazine published a column by you called... It's titled Colleges Are Diluting Themselves. That was the headline. And tell us the essence of that op-ed. I have read it several times and appreciate your perspective, but I think it's an important one for a wider audience to get.

Michael Sorrell:
Sure, sure. Well, first of all, let me thank you for reading it. I don't take that for granted when you write things that someone will actually read them. But the real point of it is that we as leaders have a moral obligation to the folks who are following us, who we are stewards of, and that starts at taking care of them, right, their health and their safety. And in the higher education space, and I would argue in the larger space, people are rushing back to reopen and rushing back to claim normal simply because they are tired of the sacrifices that are being mandated upon them and to the point where you see individuals really making decisions that are not supported on the basis of facts or science.

Michael Sorrell:
And the article, I really just sort of challenge people and say, "Listen, first of all, excuse me, you have to tell people the truth. You have to say to them, 'If there's no vaccine and there's no widespread testing, our ability to keep you safe is limited.'" And there's this great study by Cornell University, these researchers there, that highlights the issue. They basically say that on a college campus, it is impossible to prevent the spread of an epidemic because of the way they're constructed. So, you're only two to three students away from being in touch with everyone.

Michael Sorrell:
So now, when you think about that, right, this is a disease that is spread through close human contact. The virus is capable of living outside of a human host for a period of time on metal, on rubber. It needs certain things that a college campus has an abundance of to spread. So, as my peers have rushed back and said, "We're definitely going to reopen," and what they're not saying to people is the reason we're doing this is financial because we are afraid that we cannot afford to remain closed.

Michael Sorrell:
And listen, I get it. I do. I mean, I'm president of a institution that is not a wealthy institution, but what we have always tried to do is to honor the faith that people have brought to us, right? We have worked very, very hard to fight the fights that people need fighting, to be frank with them even to the point... I mean, we practice something. We say, "Look, we choose the harder right over the easier wrong without apparent regard to self-interest." And this is that test. So, that's what I wrote about. And it was pretty interesting to see the response that it's gotten.

George Mason:
Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So, we'll get to the response in just a minute because... So, you say in the article that the reason these schools are caving in boils down to fear and acquiescence, those two things, so fear of financial ruin, I suppose, and acquiescence also, to just the desire of people to go back to a normal before they really should do so, right?

Michael Sorrell:
Yes.

George Mason:
And so, you're a faith based institution, and you're operating here out of values that are human before they are economic. Okay, so we're human beings before we're human doings, things of that nature. So, these are the kinds of things that are informing you. And yet, what we've seen just this week is another faith based institution, Notre Dame University, announce that they are going back to campus pretty much business as usual, August the 10th, I believe. Now, they're going to finish their semester at Thanksgiving so that they don't have students going back and forth. But nonetheless, there's a major institution, a faith based institution, coming back into business, and other schools are doing the same. And yet, you have a conviction that you need to hold off until the science and the medicine catches up to where we need to be. What sort of reaction have you had from some of these schools that are making a different decision to the article you wrote?

Michael Sorrell:
Sure. Well, I mean, I'm not going to be invited to give the commencement address at Notre Dame anytime soon, right? There will be no honorary degree for me from there, okay? But listen, I understand Catholic culture. My father was Catholic. I went to Catholic schools from fifth through 12th grade. I am a proud graduate of a Jesuit high school. And I understand some things about the Catholic faith, right, that I've always had reason to question a little bit, right? I am not Catholic, right, that there's an element of taking things that the church puts forward with a sort of trust.

Michael Sorrell:
I remember very clearly being in fifth or sixth grade. I guess it was fifth grade. And we were talking about the Pope being infallible, and my question was, "Well, but the Pope was born, right? The Pope has a mother and father, right? How is the pope infallible, and I'm not infallible, right?" I mean, which, I'm not making fun of that. My point is there's just certain things that... And every religion has that, right? There's certain things we take on faith. But here's the thing, my question that I would ask the folks at Notre Dame that they would have to answer in the quiet of their own time is, if football was played in the spring, would they be rushing back to school?

George Mason:
Oh, my goodness, there we go. There we go.

Michael Sorrell:
Let us understand, Notre Dame football is sacred, all right, the idea to people that you would forego that revenue stream, to forego that significant aspect of your culture. The second question I would ask is, how exactly are we going to play football given the nature of this virus? How exactly are you going to maintain crowds? And by the way, I give no one a pat on the back for canceling classes at Thanksgiving. We stopped holding classes after Thanksgiving years ago. It wasn't because of the virus. It was because students couldn't afford to travel back and forth, and we didn't want to make people feel as exiles on their college campus. And so, I just think that we justify things that... Let me put it differently, we use facts as we like to interpret them to justify the decisions that are important to us to make.

George Mason:
Right. Right. Well, your own faith, not a Catholic faith, but nonetheless, a faith that is personal and practiced and real leads you to different conclusions in leadership, but those conclusions are not just about valuing students generally. They're also about how you build them into the institution. So, the motto of your school is we over me, for instance, right? So, at the very beginning of this, when you just begin to scratch the surface of Paul Quinn, what you find is something counter-cultural, that is in a culture that values radical individualism. You are saying the community comes first. That in a place that values personal achievement, what you're saying is loving and caring for your neighbor is the first line of a business for the people that come to this school. So, how do you talk to prospective students and their families about what role faith plays in the values and the ethos of your school versus others?

Michael Sorrell:
Sure. Well, what's interesting to us is that we don't ever sell people on Christianity, right? We sell people on this idea that we have a responsibility to each other, that we over me is our ethos. We have the four Ls of Quinnite Leadership, leave places better than you found them, live a life that matters, lead from wherever you are, love something greater than yourself.

Michael Sorrell:
Now, look, you don't have to have sat in the church pews on 10 years of Sundays to understand that we are deeply faith based institution, right, that we believe these things. And what we tell families is this might not be for you, okay? If you are not open to the possibility that service and loving each other and putting each other to the forefront, that that's uncomfortable for you, if you can't do that, that's okay. There are all these other schools for you to attend, okay? But for us, we are laser focused on teaching people the value of doing for others, the value of just making a sacrifice.

Michael Sorrell:
And what I like to point out to people who are wedded to their own selfishness and to their own self-aggrandizement is that it's almost like, look, I am, if not the most decorated college president in the country, I'm certainly one of the top 10, okay? And all of those individual accolades came from putting other people first. There was nothing that I've done that's me, me, me, I, I, I. This whole feeling... I don't even... My wife teases me because she said, "If you ever want to see my husband become tongue tied, make him talk about himself." She said, "It's almost uncomfortable to watch."

George Mason:
Yeah, very good. Well, you've been able to make this decision about how you're going to proceed with campus life and remaining online partly because you've already prepared for an eventuality like this. So, the argument you make in your op-ed piece is that it's time for us to use this to rethink the entire higher educational model, right? And you are one of nine U.S. work colleges, right, that changes the understanding of how students finance an education. So, let's talk a little bit about what a work college is, the only historically black college that qualifies in this category. And at the end of this process, your goal is that no student have more than $10,000 worth of debt with a degree in hand.

Michael Sorrell:
Yes. Yes. So, we think that higher education needs a reboot, okay? And it needs a reboot because effectively, we are preparing students for a society that no longer exists. And that, to us, is problematic. In all fairness, we don't think any problem is ever permanently solved, right? We think because of the pace of change, the way that things are evolving, you have to accept the fact that you're going to do the best you can do for today, but let's equip you with the tools for you to be able to continue to thrive in a different environment.

Michael Sorrell:
So, first thing we did was we said, "Well, if we're going to build a school from scratch, what do we think would be important?" We thought experiential learning is important, giving people an opportunity to develop a skillset that they would not normally get. We said, "What's also important?" Well, holding down the cost of attendance is really, really important. And so, we need to be able to give people more for less. We said, "All right. How do we do that? Well, we're going to have to incorporate students into the day-to-day activities of the institution. All right. The work college allows us to do that."

Michael Sorrell:
Now, we created a brand new model of the work college with the urban work college where students work off campus as well. Because in America, something like 75% of our students work more than 20 hours per week, and most of that work occurs off campus. So, instead of stressing people out, we said, "Well, what if we bring all of the work piece of this in-house and we found the job for the students, help manage the schedule, and all of that, so people have the ability to reclaim a little bit of their lives back?" We cut tuition and fees by $10,000 so that we could try and help people not go into lifelong debt because 80 to 85% of our students are Pell Grant eligible. So, they were borrowing that money, okay, or their parents were borrowing the money, or their grandparents were borrowing the money. So, you were looking at generations of families going into debt in the pursuit of this college education.

Michael Sorrell:
So we said, "All right, we cut the price. We alleviate the need for that to happen. But what if we gave people more value for their educational dollar?" And so, what we do now is you come to Paul Quinn, and we cut tuition fees again this year down to 12,000 in anticipation that we're probably going to have to go to school online, right? And it didn't make sense charging people the same thing that we would have charged them if they were on campus. So-

George Mason:
And you refunded money as well this semester.

Michael Sorrell:
Absolutely. We did. Because that's the right thing to do. Now, there's some people like, "Well, it would have been nice if you'd just given us the cash." And we're like, "Well, I hear you. But if you're going to come back to school, how about we just give you a scholarship?" We gave the graduating seniors back money, but we said, "Look, take the scholarship, right, because otherwise, you were going to have to borrow this money. So, why don't we keep you from having to do that?"

Michael Sorrell:
But you get your subject matter education at Paul Quinn. You get what you major in. Then, you get your experiential learning. If you're there for four years, you get four years of experiential learning through the work program. And starting in the fall, every year, you pick up a credential, a digital credential that you can use that allows you to be competitive in the workplace. You can start with a Microsoft Office certificate. You can learn how to code and everything in between so that that way, if you look up and you say, "You know what... " Because I was a government major, right? If I had decided, well, I don't want to be a government major. I don't want to do what government majors do. I don't want to practice law. Then, I did internships, but many of my internships were in business, were sales and trade or investment banking. Well, I don't want to do that. So, I would have the credentials and the certificates that come along to give me another option, which we think is important.

George Mason:
Fantastic. All right. Now, you mentioned seniors. So, Friday, you published this piece in the Atlantic. Saturday, now, Saturday was a day. All right. So, let's talk about Saturday. I want to know how it all came to be. I want to know what your role in... Because you had a role in this. You had a part. And what we're talking about is this HBCU commencement that was a nationwide commencement service essentially. And President Barack Obama, I love calling him president still. I'm sorry. I can't help myself.

Michael Sorrell:
I'm with you.

George Mason:
There's a certain whimsical longing that Saturday really represented to me. I'm sorry. I shouldn't be political here, but it is what it is.

Michael Sorrell:
You're not by yourself, okay?

George Mason:
Anyway. So here, I'm imagining Paul Quinn College and commencement ceremony being one of the really big events in your annual calendar probably because I'm going to guess that many of your students are first generation graduates from college. And so, this is a huge achievement. This is not necessarily expected. They're going to be denied this opportunity. So, this is true for all the historically black colleges and universities who decide to get together and have one big commencement. So, how did all that happen?

Michael Sorrell:
So, it's just so funny. I was literally sitting at the desk that I'm sitting at right now talking to you. And it was a Saturday morning and the Dallas Morning News, Sharon Grigsby had written this great article about the school and about what we were having to deal with, having to send the students home, and the pain of students missing commencement. And one of my seniors, Jennifer Fletcher, had talked about how brokenhearted she was. And then we had another student who effectively my wife and I have adopted. And she was talking about how devastated she was. And originally, I was sort of like, "Listen, guys, you're still getting your degree. You're going to get an opportunity to walk. It'll just be next year." And none of that was making them feel any better, okay? You know what? I could have used some coaching on my delivery I guess on that one.

Michael Sorrell:
And so, I'm sitting here, literally, it was like 9:00 AM on a Saturday morning. And I'm sitting here at my desk, and I'm just looking out the window, what I'm doing now. And it occurred to me. I was like, "You know what? We can't be the only school where students are feeling this way." I said, "What if we had a national commencement celebration for all the HBCUs and we give everyone a chance to have a community experience?" And I called my wife into the room. I said, "Hey, I've got this idea." And she's looking at me. And she says, "Huh." She says, "Well, how'd you come up with it?" I was like, "I don't know." I was like, "I literally just, I came up with it." And she's like, "Is this how you... " I was like, "Yeah, I'm telling you. It just... " Right?

George Mason:
It's a God thing.

Michael Sorrell:
It is clearly a God thing, right? I tell people all the time, "Look, we are so far past my natural abilities at this point, okay?" All right, so I call up some friends of mine, and I say, "Hey, I have this idea. What do you think? Would you be supportive of it?" So, one of them was Thasunda Duckett who's from the DFW area. She's the president of JPMorgan Chase's consumer banking division. And I call a good friend of mine, Oris Stuart, who's part of the executive team at the National Basketball Association. I called some other HBCU sector leaders. And everyone's like, "This is a cool idea." And once JPMorgan Chase and once the NBA signed onto it, we just took off. And in five or six weeks, we put all of that together. And we had 78 institutions participate, over 27,000 graduates, and about a million and a half people have watched the ceremony. I mean, it exceeded my wildest dreams. I was incredibly humbled by it.

George Mason:
And President Obama, how did he come about as being a part of that?

Michael Sorrell:
I will tell you, I always sort of hoped that we could get him, that when I thought about, since who would be the perfect speaker for this moment? He'd be the perfect speaker for that moment. And so, we had several entrees to him. I have some relationships through Ron Kirk and some others, but what got us was there was a gentleman at JPMorgan Chase who was good friends with their comms person, Obama's communications person. And he pitched it to the comms person who took it to the president. And the president said, "Yes." And I didn't know whether we were going to get sort of like that two minute, "Hey, great job." He gave a commencement address, and I was sitting there just like, "Wow." It was incredible.

George Mason:
Yeah, and even more so than the high school one that he did, right, which he did that evening as well, which was beautiful. Well, that's fantastic. Well, really, we were really proud of you and of that effort. And we always are, Michael, here in Dallas. Those of us who are awake enough to know what's happening in the whole city know what an influence you are and what a force for good. And we're just grateful and in your corner, and I want to talk a little more about all of this in the second episode, but thank you for your time with us on Good God.

Michael Sorrell:
Well, thank you.

George Mason:
Thanks so much for continuing to tune into Good God. We've enjoyed having these episodes produced, over a hundred of them now, usually in a studio, but now, we're doing so through computer technology in this time of social isolation. We're all trying to be careful with one another, but we also want to be careful to cultivate our spirit during this time, not to be discouraged, not to be despairing, but to be encouraged, and to encourage one another. So, thank you for tuning in. We hope you appreciate these as much as we enjoy being able to offer them to you as a gift.

Speaker 3:
Good God is created by Dr. George Mason, produced and directed by Jim White, social media coordination by Cameron Vickrey. Good God, conversations with George Mason, is the podcast devoted to bringing you ideas about God and faith and the common good. All material copyright 2020 by Faith Commons.