Jay Halfond: Your career has balanced time spent on campuses and in leading professional associations. You have either been looking outward from academe or from outside inward. The two different vantage points must have been fascinating.

Lynn Gangone: These were never exclusive of one another. Each venue added to my professional growth. The common theme throughout has been the role of higher education in changing lives.

Jay Halfond: You’ve been especially focused on women in education. We have seen major changes since the 1960s in the presence of women as students, faculty, and administrators in colleges and universities. What are the next stages?

Lynn Gangone: I began my career with a grant to support women in technology and trades in a community college, which led to my lifelong involvement in various women’s advancement projects. Even with substantial progress, we have a way to go to achieve parity and inclusion. I am concerned about a potential backlash emerging against advances made by various groups, including women.

Jay Halfond: We seem to have entered an era of challenging political, financial, enrollment, and societal issues that will test our higher education leadership and purpose. What are your concerns about the future?

Lynn Gangone: Higher education fuels everything. The rockets we send into space, the medicine we take every day, the care for our children, the leadership of our governments.

Colleges of education, especially, have been at the forefront of social movements. They’re suspect right now because many of these social movements are being called into question. We are starting to see legislators go from monitoring and managing what is taught in public K–12 schools to greater state and federal scrutiny of higher education.

Being educated means creating opportunities to think critically and ask questions. Even though the founding fathers didn’t often talk about education, they wanted to be sure the general population was educated—we saw this with westward expansion and the Northwest Ordinances. With the end of efforts to include every child, regardless of background, in our educational system how do we now come up with new ways to make sure that everyone has the chance to be educated? We’re an innovative nation. Our mutual goal should be to create an educated citizenry.

For example, we need to sustain strong colleges of education to create teachers who reflect the diversity of our country. Part of the challenge is we often label our values as “social justice” and other terms that polarize and alienate. Our common commitment is to the lives of every student. And much of what we’re doing can be embedded without labeling. Many more need to be able to join schools, universities, and workplaces that were not initially built for them. We need to focus on how our institutions have been designed and how those designs should evolve to broaden access.

Jay Halfond: Every industry, including higher education, seems to be moving toward consolidation, mergers, bigness, de-personalization, more nationwide, even international.

Lynn Gangone: The small New Jersey independent college where I once worked can’t compete with a state institution like Rutgers, which has more money, more facilities. There are many such colleges rooted in their community, which has helped them survive so far. But market forces have placed some small, even historic colleges at risk. I’ve become a proponent of mergers and acquisitions to save parts of that small college mission. Wheelock College and Boston University, for example, led to one such successful merger. We need to look at how like-minded institutions can work together.

Jay Halfond: BU is launching an executive doctorate in higher education leadership. What training is important for future leaders?

Lynn Gangone: It’s important that anyone who’s enrolled in an executive doctoral program understand what they’re inheriting and where our values come from—and blend both the understanding of the past with our lived experience to create the future. Because of the market forces that we sit inside of, leaders must possess business skills to run complicated entities.

We also need to understand shared governance, especially the role of faculty. Academic freedom empowers individuals to embark in revolutionary research. We should be careful that the EdDs of today don’t fully abandon the research foundation that undergirds our understanding. It is so important that BU Wheelock is undertaking this major step at this critical moment.