Season 2, episode 2. September 28, 2025
Originally recorded April 29, 2025
SPEAKERS Dayna Del Val and Dr Tim Downs
SUMMARY
In this engaging conversation, President Tim Downs discusses the challenges and opportunities in higher education, emphasizing the importance of collaboration, humility and community. He reflects on the changing landscape of academia, the value of a liberal arts education, and the need for institutions to adapt while maintaining their core values. Downs also addresses the significance of diversity, equity and inclusion, and the role of leadership in navigating these complex issues. Ultimately, he advocates for a supportive environment that fosters student success and encourages open dialogue.
TAKEAWAYS
- Mediating different realities is essential for shared understanding.
- Checking egos can lead to better collaboration among faculty.
- Higher education must focus on teaching critical thinking skills.
- Liberal arts education provides a foundation for adaptability.
- Community engagement is vital for student success.
- Marketing and branding are crucial for attracting students.
- Creating a welcoming campus environment enhances student experience.
- Navigating free speech is a complex challenge in academia.
- Diversity, equity and inclusion should be approached positively.
- Leadership in education requires confidence and adaptability.
KEYWORDS
higher education, liberal arts, student retention, community engagement, diversity and inclusion, critical thinking, student success, campus branding, enrollment growth, faculty collaboration, student support, educational philosophy, institutional confidence, academic challenges, student experience
Dayna Del Val 00:00
President Tim Downs, welcome to Brave Middle Ground.
Tim Downs 00:04
Oh, thank you. Great to see you, Dayna.
Dayna Del Val 00:06
I’m so happy that you said yes. You may have the busiest schedule of almost anyone I know, so I appreciate that you and your secretary helped me find a good time, particularly this close to the end of the semester for you.
Tim Downs 00:21
Yeah, this time of year, it’s probably like a three-ring circus. There’s some going on from 7:30 in the morning till sometimes eight or nine o’clock at night.
Dayna Del Val 00:33
Yeah.
Tim Downs 00:34
And sometimes, like I was here for four hours on Saturday and about an hour and a half on Sundays. But that’s just part of the drill. You know that it’s coming every year, and you just have to, you know, eat a lot of vitamin B and those little chewables, and I get a caffeine with three shots of espresso in the morning. So…
Dayna Del Val 00:55
Oh my gosh.
Tim Downs 00:56
it’s giddy up. Let’s go.
Dayna Del Val 00:59
Yeah. Well, when I was an adjunct professor at MSUM, my favorite thing about teaching was kind of one of my favorite things about school, which was, if something’s terrible, you only have to do it for 17 weeks, and then it comes to a close, and you start up on something brand new. When I went into the real world after a lifetime of education, I thought, “When does all this end?”
And it kind of doesn’t, that school rhythm really stays with you.
Tim Downs 01:27
Yeah, it does. And you know, when I was a faculty member, there were terms that were just awesome, every class. One is planned, or even better. And then there was one term in particular that if I was a school bus, it had no wheels on it. It was just awful for everyone. In fact, at the end of the semester, I apologized to my students. So finally, one day, I walked into class, it was a Thursday, and I’d had probably the worst lecture I’d ever had in my whole lifetime on Tuesday. And I looked at the students and I said, “You know, I really stunk up the joint on Tuesday.”
And the students that were my advisees, that knew me really well, they looked up went, “Yep, you sure did.”
Dayna Del Val 02:22
Yeah.
Tim Downs 02:23
And then we all laughed. And I said, “Okay, so here’s we’re going to do. We’re going to kind of go over it again, and hopefully I don’t stink up the joint. And then we’ll kind of get back on track and then we’ll move forward.”
And they all laughed and it worked out fine.
Dayna Del Val 02:39
All you can do is the best you can do today and then start again tomorrow. All right, President Downs, I want to go back and start with my first question for you, which is, how do you define middle ground from any facet of your life?
Tim Downs 02:56
So a lot of my job, is to mediate. So it’s mediation of what’s your reality, what’s my reality, and then how do we kind of conjoin our two realities and create that middle ground of shared understanding?
And sometimes you have to go all the way back to the basics of just to say, “Do we agree to this? Okay, do we agree to this?”
And then where you don’t agree, that’s the point of, “Let’s have a conversation to find out. Can we find a middle ground? Can we find a sense of functionality? Can we find a sense of appreciation for what each other does? Because everybody brings talent to the table, and you’re there for a reason. And let’s own what we do well, and let’s own what we know or don’t do well, but let’s leverage each other’s strengths and abilities to then move forward with a higher sense of confidence and purpose.”
So it’s not that hard if you just play nice. So if everybody plays nice in the sandbox, checks their ego at the door, and says, “Yeah, you know, I have no idea what you’re talking about. Can you help me?”
I think we’re always trying to find that higher ground, that middle, like the middle of the aisle, where we come and, you know, just touch fingers. Just need the fingertips to say, “Okay, you’re here and I’m here, and let’s figure out a way forward.”
I gotta tell you, there are things happening on this campus I have no idea about, and I find out things every week. Say “We do what? We got a what?”
“Oh, didn’t anybody tell you about that?”
Like, no. But then I learn about it, and then I figure out how we use it as an asset, and I learn about what people do, and I have a higher appreciation every day for what we collectively do. So I think it’s really about moving things forward with a sense of purpose, appreciation, kind of a humbleness, not a sense of arrogance. I know a lot of people that are a lot smarter than me. You know, just call one of my brothers and they’ll tell you. You know, family is good for that.
Dayna Del Val 05:18
Yeah, they’ll cut you right down to size. Anytime you need them to.
Tim Downs 05:22
It’s a sport, you know, that’s what they do. They’re charged with it. One time, my two of my brothers showed up at my college classroom when I was teaching and wrote on the blackboard. I didn’t see it because it was to my back when I walked in. “My name is Timmy Downs, and I teach good.” Yeah, with a little stick person, right?
Dayna Del Val 05:46
Uh huh.
Tim Downs 05:46
And they’re sitting in the back of the room holding their newspapers up. And I’m like, “Who’s in the back of the room? Well, it’s my brothers. And the students are losing it.
Dayna Del Val 05:57
Yeah.
Tim Downs 05:57
They’re like, “Oh my gosh. What is going on here? That somebody’s making fun of our professor.” And then they found out it was my two wingnut brothers who came to put me in my place.
Dayna Del Val 06:09
Yeah.
Tim Downs 06:09
Mr. Professor.
Dayna Del Val 06:13
Yeah. It’s hard to shake those childhood relationships even when it’s a time to.
Tim Downs 06:18
Yeah.
Dayna Del Val 06:19
Okay, so as I was listening to you, I was thinking about this idea of checking your ego at the door. I’ve had the good fortune to spend time in my career with groups of similarly trained people. So I taught at at NDSU, Concordia and MSUM. I have degrees from all three programs, and I taught at all three programs. So I spent a lot of time with academics. I wrote one year for a cancer survivorship program. So I spent time with cancer surgeons and doctors and radiologists and those groups. I spent almost 13 years living in and amongst artists. And I think it’s incredibly hard to do what you just said, leave your ego at the door, when you are walking into a room of similarly educated, trained, thinking people. I don’t see that happen very often.
Certainly, I’m not seeing it happen from a political standpoint, and we don’t need to go into the politics of it, but, but what I’m interested in is, as the leader of a large institution like a university, how do you encourage faculty to come to the table with their considerable education, experience, thought process, all those things, how do you encourage them to come to the table and yet still check their ego at the door, because it is so counter-productive to show up and sort of throw your education, throw your degrees, throw your this and that around when everybody else at the table has the same thing,
Tim Downs 08:16
Right? Well, you know, there’s a hierarchy in higher education, and if you or I went to what we might declare as an ivy, then sometimes there are people that graduate from those institutions that have that real sense of entitlement. That just because they went to that institution that has this rich tradition of graduating people who become presidents of the United States and CEOs of corporations and all that, that therefore, just by the fact that they went there, they’ve subsumed and they’ve soaked all this knowledge and greatness into their pores, and they are just as great as those who came before them.
Well, I’ve challenged those people, and I’ve said “Not so much.” And it doesn’t go well at first, because, you know, “How dare you call me out?”
So sometimes you have to just call people out, but then compliment then on, “Here’s why you’re here. Because you’re an expert in this, and I need your knowledge on that, but in the meantime, I need you to be a colleague.”
So one of my big areas of learning and instruction and research is group dynamics. So every group is different. If you and I are a member of a group that’s setting up some sort of community project, and there’s five of us, and then one of us leaves the group, maybe moves out of the community, now we have to replace somebody. That’s a whole new group, because each of us has to now learn who this person is and who this fifth wheel is, and how do we work with that person? How do we understand that person? What knowledge do they have to bring to the table? How do we leverage, bridge them and their intellectual capabilities?
So when I get to really difficult meetings, I might have just had one this morning, in fact, that I said, “Look, we around this table are, collectively, we’re designated as the team that has to manage all this from the day they are recruited to the day they say yes, to the day they move into the campus, to the day that they graduate. It’s a cradle to grave operation, and you really want to never let go of them as an alum, a potential graduate student, I said, “So we have to work together.” And then I frame for them everything that we’re trying to do as a university, and everything that I need from every one of them in order for this all to work.
And at one point we were talking about this aspect of the institution, I said, “I have no idea about that, but you do, and that’s why you’re in the room.”
So everybody’s an asset. Part of your intellectual capital, if you could look at it almost like as a portfolio of knowledge and you have to leverage that knowledge. And we all need to say, you know, “I have no idea.” And it’s okay to be totally uninformed about something. You know, we get into these positions and you say, “Oh, well, I have a PhD.”
Well, no, all that means is you have a very narrow band of knowledge that goes very high, but the bandwidth is very narrow. If you’re looking at a frequency bandwidth, it’s really tiny. It’s like one spec on the dial of the old radio dials. So great. We’ve got depth and but how much breadth do we have? The breadth is the individuals that you add to the conversation. So you need breadth and depth.
So if you describe it to people like that and tell them that you value them as a resource. “I’m happy you’re here. Please ask questions. Please tell me if I’m completely out in left field, Save me from myself.”
Actually my first meeting with cabinet here, I said, “Your job is to keep my head out of the chipper, because I will run headlong into something, not knowing that there’s a grinder, like, right in front of my nose. Please help me.
Say, ‘You know you might not want to do that, because we tried that, and here’s what happened.’
Okay, thank you. What do you suggest?”
So there has to be this dialogic, you know, back and forth of respect and understanding that we all are there to contribute for a better solution.
Dayna Del Val 12:45
So higher ed is in an interesting position. I’m an MSUM alum. My undergrad is from there, from a program that no longer exists, the theatre department. When I was there, it was sort of the heyday of what was then MSU. So there were, I think, about 7500 students. Dorms were heaving, classrooms were full. Departments were packed with faculty. I finished in 95 and then I started teaching there probably in 2004, and in the 10 or so years that I taught there, I watched the English department, which was the department I was in, just get smaller and smaller and smaller. And a faculty member would die, and he wouldn’t be replaced. Someone would retire, and they wouldn’t be replaced. And it’s a very different school than it was 30 years ago when I left as a student. But it’s also a very different school than it was even 15 years ago when I left as a part time faculty. What is going on generally with higher ed that there is the first question, this decline? What’s happening with this whole model of a formal four plus year education post high school?
Tim Downs 14:23
So the big issue that I think we’ve all seen is we’ve become so vocationally directed that some students have been told, “Don’t go to college unless you know exactly what you’re going to study, what your degree is going to be, and you know exactly what your career field is.”
Well, that’s such an unrealistic expectation, because you’re assuming that a 17 to 18 year old person really knows anything. I can tell you that just from n of one, me, I knew a lot of nothing. I had a head full of mush as a young male who hadn’t even remotely matured. So you have to look at it and say, “Okay, we have to create a model that teaches them how to think, how to communicate, how to write, how to integrate ideas.”
And that is something we could never give up. So that’s the liberal arts curriculum. And that liberal arts curriculum just gives them a baseline. It’s almost like the seed in an avocado: it’s really kind of important. And that seed is what you then build around. So if you’re looking at the solar system, you have the seed, and then you have the layers around, and the layers are: what else are you going to learn? Well, eventually you’ll pick a second or third major and stick with it. And then you might pick up a minor or two. But then you may just pick up some knowledge and skills that don’t really relate to anything. It’s just stuff, maybe some stuff that you’re interested in, stuff that excites you, stuff that could be your hobby, stuff that you’re not really sure what it is, but it just tingles your brain every time you read about it and think about it. So this college experience needs to be the liberal arts. So we’re holding on to the liberal arts.
Dayna Del Val 16:23
Thank you
Tim Downs 16:24
We’re not compromising them. Because if you have a good liberal arts background, that ability to think, write, communicate, integrate ideas, look at the globe and say, “What the heck is going on out here? How do I make sense of it locally?” Then you’ll be fine.
You will be able to change jobs because you’re a good thinker and a good writer and a good communicator and someone that knows all those things about the human dynamic in groups. You will succeed. You will be able to retrain your brain into some vocation that you didn’t even know existed, and maybe it didn’t even exist when you were in college, because vocations vaporize, and then you go, “Uh oh. My company just dissolved. What am I going to do? Pretty sure I can’t go to work on Monday, they all just said, ‘Goodbye.’”
So how do you transform yourself? It’s those baseline skills that will get you through life. There was one guy that I worked with on a grant project. He had a PhD in English literature, and he was a Vice President of the Digital Corporation in Massachusetts. I looked at him and say, “So there’s got to be a little bit of a story here. You’re an English and British literature expert, and that’s what you wrote your doctoral dissertation on.” And it was from someplace fairly reputable, like Oxford.
“And now you’re working as the Vice President of Business Development for a corporation that builds computers.”
Dayna Del Val 18:02
What did he say?
Tim Downs 18:03
He said, “Well, I know how to think and I know how to communicate, and I know how to get people to work together. And I know how to work with other divisions of the company, and it’s just kind of that simple.”
So we have to hold on to the core and not become hyper vocational, but allow the vocational tracks to be there while we’re still sustaining things.
So you’ll be excited about this, we just passed and approved a minor in acting and production.
Dayna Del Val 18:40
Well, that is a step in the right direction.
Tim Downs 18:44
Does that make your heart feel warmer?
Dayna Del Val
It does!
Tim Downs
But it wasn’t me. I went and talked to some faculty and said, “You know, I like the performance dimension.”
I’m a communication person, which kind of has a performance dimension. Now I am not a thespian. Nor do I project to be one. But I know the communication and the performance dimension is important in life. When you’re presenting ideas, it’s kind of presentation skills. It’s communication skills. Whether you’re at that professional acting level or you have any interest or not, that’s kind of up to you. But we realized, and the faculty got together and said, “We think we can reinvent it and build it back out in a way that makes sense for us and we hope for the students, and build an enterprise back that makes some sense.”
So that’s what the faculty are charged with doing, and I’m real proud they did.
Dayna Del Val 19:38
That’s fantastic.
Tim Downs 19:40
I hope it blows up and gets really big.
Dayna Del Val 19:41
I hope so, too. It’s such a loss for that institution to have no theatre program, not just because it’s my alum program, but because it was such a pillar in this community. So I’m delighted to hear that you and Ryan Jackson and other people have figured out how to make that happen.
Tim Downs 20:04
How did you know? So the thing is, when you take text, so it’s the English people, it’s the production people, it’s the communication people. And then you might throw in a little bit of the psychology and popular culture. There are five or 10 disciplines that are going to train someone’s brain to be that really good communicator. Somebody that’s intentional, that understands the performance dimension. The educators the School of Education do this. They teach you how to teach; that’s performance.
Dayna Del Val 20:39
Yes, it is.
Tim Downs 20:39
Classroom is performance. So it’s here, but it’s in pieces, and now we can start to integrate it together and say in a different way, “It’s back.:
Dayna Del Val 20:50
Yeah, I’ve said my entire adult life that my theatre degree is hands down the best degree I earned of my three. And you better believe at no point during getting that degree did either of my parents ever say to me, “Boy, this just really feels like you’re going to land a huge job when you get done with this degree!”
But the skills that I learned, my ability to think on my feet, to adapt, to listen, to respond, to play a character, to be in community, to think independently, all of those things—the same things we say you learn on a football field—you learn on a stage. It’s just you’re probably not going to get a traumatic brain injury.
Tim Downs 21:34
Which is good thing, because that’s why I quit playing football.
So my dad was a marketing management major. Went to post World War Two University of Missouri, and then he was in sales.
Dayna Del Val 21:49
Okay.
Tim Downs 21:50
And he kept saying to me, “What do you do with a communication degree? Don’t you know how to talk? You know these smart alec comments, and what are you going to do with that?”
And then I started to explain it to him. Finally, I have my doctorate. I’m a dean of a college. And then he finally admitted to me this kind of worked out.
Dayna Del Val 22:12
Well, I’m glad he was around for that! That was a nice payoff. It was a long game.
Tim Downs 22:16
It was a moment. But for a longest time, he kept saying, “So, what are you doing? Come on, you should just go into business.”
And I almost did twice. I almost quit grad school, and I had a series of interviews with a big printing company, but I kept saying, “No, I’m still not done with higher ed.” So here I am.
Dayna Del Val 22:37
Well, I think it’s probably going to work out for you. I think you can probably trust it now.
Tim Downs 22:44
I think it’s stuck. I think I’m gonna hang out and just see how this plays out.
Dayna Del Val 22:49
So I was interested, in doing a little bit of research about you, that you have a pattern, from what I could tell. You walk into a new institution and suddenly, freshman classes start to grow, and retention starts to happen, and energy starts to build outside of the walls of the campus. And I’m wondering what that is for you, because I’m seeing it happen at MSUM. Just for the audience’s perspective, I’m a member of the MSUM Foundation Board, so I get some insight knowledge, but not a ton more than your average person in the community.
But when you and I were recently at a meeting made some reference to, you had bought a—not you personally, the university—had bought a billboard right on the other side of the river into Fargo, and when that lease came up, NDSU snapped it right up. And I had noticed that we’d had this billboard, and then it was gone. Well, now I have to tell you, since you brought that up, I am friggen’ seeing Dragon billboards all over the place, and that is a new mindset.
I think for a long time there was this model of, “Well, we’re here, and people know our work is good. We don’t need to tout it. We don’t need to put people’s faces in it. If they if they want to come, they’ll come.”
Well, clearly nobody wanted to come because enrollment was tanking, which is a national trend as well, but really tanking for MSUM. What are you doing that tou are kind of this rain maker with students?
Tim Downs 24:45
Well, it’s a team effort. So when I I interviewed, and I saw it was a place that had gotten too quiet, to your point. You can’t be quiet if you’re in any business these days. I mean, if you’re an internet furniture sales company, and the one that we’ve used, my wife and I Mary, is Wayfair…
Dayna Del Val 25:10
Oh yeah.
Tim Downs 25:10
Now if you click on one of their things,
Dayna Del Val 25:14
Oh yeah, you’re in for life,
Tim Downs 25:15
Yeah, it’s like a giant octopus. It’s all over you, and there’s suction cups on your face, and they’re not going away.
Okay, so what we have to be as a university is we have to be telling our story about how awesome we are. So when I interviewed, I told people, I said, “This place has gotten too quiet. The enrollments are dropping because some people don’t know you’re here.” Because I could say “you” instead of “we.”
Since I got here, I said the same thing, and we have rebranded ourselves on campus. But how you use your brand, and how you make your brand come to life, and how you tell your story, and how you almost get obnoxiously aggressive, that’s the way you stand out in the field.
Dayna Del Val
Yeah.
Tim Downs
Because it’s a crowded space, and it’s everybody you’re competing againsts, so my belief, and this started when I was a dean, starting in, boy, a while ago—over 20 years ago. And I went to the Academy of Marketing, Association conference, and I was trying to figure out, because I was at a place called Emporia State University, and our graduate programs were dying. And I was charged with making them larger. So I took it on as this is a marketing issue. It’s creating an identity, creating a demand for your programs. Because people perceive the value of your institution is really high.
Now, the people that knew Moorhead knew it was really high, and we hadn’t really compromised that, but it gotten smaller because we hadn’t been aggressive to tell the story and say why you should come visit.
So I’ve kind of refined my skills, but I also have to rely on the people in admissions, people from the region, people that know the students, because I’m not from around here. And then we hired a new vice president who is ramping this whole thing up. Dr Trainer, he’s just doing a killer job, but he’s got everybody starting to pull on the rope. So when anybody comes onto this campus, they are swooned upon and just like, “Hi, welcome to Campus. You’re here visiting. So what are you here for?”
I mean, I’ll just stop mid sentence, and I’ll just start talking to them…
Dayna Del Val 27:52
Yeah.
Tim Downs 27:52
and they’re looking at me like, “Who’s this weirdo talking to me?”
And I’m like, “Oh, well, I’m the president of the University, and I wanted to personally welcome you to campus.”
Well, their face changes then.
Dayna Del Val 28:05
Yeah.
Tim Downs 28:05
And everybody’s starting to do this. So we’re getting infectious. I mean, when I Ibought a new car when I got here, and obviously it’s red,
Dayna Del Val 28:15
Obviously.
Tim Downs 28:16
I’m getting the person at the dealership to show me all the all the things, all the buttons and what they do. And she goes, “Oh, why did you move here?”
And I told her why.
And she goes, “Where’s that?”
Dayna Del Val 28:26
What?
Tim Downs 28:29
I said, “Excuse me?” I said, “You know, Minnesota State University Moorhead?”
She goes, “Where’s that?”
“Like, how long have you lived here?”
She said, ”Twenty years.”
Dayna Del Val 28:39
What?
Tim Downs 28:39
Yeah, I didn’t think that was possible.
Dayna Del Val 28:45
Oh my gosh. I’m shocked by that.
Tim Downs 28:48
It may be the biggest anomaly that we’ll ever find. I may have found the total outlier of all outliers, but it shook me to the core, and I said, “Okay, now I know.”
Dayna Del Val 28:57
Yeah.
Tim Downs 28:58
And we’re just going to assume that that’s the baseline, or that’s the midpoint of perception. And we’re going to drag everybody’s brain into our screen, and they’re going to look at us, they’re going to see us, they’re going to know us. They’re going to know why we’re here. They’re going to know why we’re a community partner. They’re going to know why you should, if all else, just come visit to have a benchmark to decide “That’s where I don’t want to go.”
Dayna Del Val 29:25
Sure.
Tim Downs 29:25
it’s kind of a tricky little strategy. Just come to see if we’re not the one. And then they come and they go, “Wait a minute, you might be the one.”
Like, I know. That’s why you gotta use a little trickery.
Dayna Del Val 29:38
It’s a little rope a dope.
Tim Downs 29:39
Yes. The Moorhead Scholars Program,
Dayna Del Val 29:43
Yeah.
Tim Downs 29:44
I mean, we found a way to make this work. Right now, we’ve got twice the number of people coming from Moorhead High from last year. Well, that’s not…
Dayna Del Val 29:57
No.
Tim Downs 29:58
And when they stay, they may bring a friend, and that one may not be on the Moorhead scholars. So it levels itself off in terms of revenue. But we’re building up the institution. I was down at St Paul talking to the House Committee on Higher Ed and people from Winona, one of the representatives from Winona came up to me and goes, “So tell me about this. Moorhead scholars thing?”
It’s a statewide buzz. What the heck are they doing? And that means that we’re in their head. And I call it rent free.
Dayna Del Val 30:40
So just for the audience, Moorhead scholars means if you graduate from Moorhead High School with a 3.0 GPA, is that what it is? 3.0? You go to MSUM for free. You must have to pay housing and books, but your tuition is free.
Tim Downs 30:55
Tuition is free. You pay fees, okay? And you pay, you know, if you live on campus and books and food and all that.
Dayna Del Val 31:03
Incredible.
Tim Downs 31:03
We’re doubling the size of our class that comes out of Moorhead High. The day it was announced, three other school districts contacted the superintendent of Moorhead and say, “How did you do that? And how can I be a part of that?”
Dayna Del Val 31:18
Wow.
Tim Downs 31:19
Well, then we redirected them to Dr Trainer, and we’re working with them. The community of Alexandria contacted me personally. I had a phone call with then. I said, “I can’t give it to everybody, but what you need to do is you need to go out and talk to your community and your Community Foundation,” which they have. And I said, “See if they will cover that gap between what the Minnesota Promise pays, what’s Minnesota North Star Promise, all that and we’ll get them here.”
So we’ve got to work together to intentionally land these students in a place where they will be a better fit, where they will grow and develop. An institution our size is perfect for people from smaller towns that haven’t been, you know, living in the big city. We are the perfect transition to wherever they choose to go after they graduate from college. We’re the training ground, we’re the finishing school, and we do an awesome job.
So it’s getting that energy out in the community. People go, “Well, I think that kind of makes sense.”
“Well, yeah. So when are you coming to visit?”
You have to ask for the sale. Now, that’s one thing my dad taught me.
Dayna Del Val 32:29
Yep.
Tim Downs 32:29
My wife, Mary was a nationally ranked sales person in pharmaceuticals and medical supplies. She said, “If you don’t ask for the sale, then they’re not going to give it to you.”
Dayna Del Val 32:38
Right? Absolutely, I said all the time when I ran the nonprofit I ran, “If you can take the no, you can make the ask. Because if you don’t make the ask, it’s a guaranteed No,
Tim Downs 32:50
Yeah. Or is that no, or is that no, not, right now?
Dayna Del Val 32:53
Right. Yeah,
Tim Downs 32:54
You know. So you have to be tenacious,
Dayna Del Val 32:56
Yes.
Tim Downs 32:57
And you’ll get more people just because you’re a little bit tenacious, maybe a little brash, maybe a little arrogant, you know. But it’s really building around the core of confidence. We are confident that you will have a great experience here as a student. You will learn, you will develop as a human to become that high functioning young adult. And we tell these stories, and people say, “You know, we should go visit.”
I’m like, “Yeah, you should.”
So it’s about confidence. And the other thing that happened that’s awesome is the campus has more confidence in itself now.
Dayna Del Val 33:31
Yes. Yeah.
Tim Downs 33:32
Because that had kind of gotten to a midpoint where it wasn’t confident itself, and it was kind of recursive on itself, because as enrollments drop, confidence in itself dropped. And so we stopped that, and now we’re building that back up. So people are saying, “No, you should come here. We’re pretty darn good. In fact, we’re really good.”
And have that edge of confidence. And that makes people say, “You know, either they’re really obnoxious and crazy or maybe they’re pretty good.”
Dayna Del Val 34:01
Yeah.
Tim Downs 34:01
So it’s working.
Dayna Del Val 34:04
Okay, so I want to go back to a bigger issue. And I promised you, when I invited you on, that I would not corner you into any political conversation, because I’m not interested in getting you in trouble with the people who, you know, sign your paychecks. But there is a real crisis at the higher ed realm across the country of First Amendment rights. There’s this cancel culture, which, you know, ebbs and flows.
There’s, there’s some places that are seen as too liberal, and so a conservative speaker isn’t welcome. Some places are too conservative, and so a liberal speaker isn’t welcome. Students are, in some cases, kind of the tail wagging the dog. And in other cases, students are afraid to speak out because of repercussions. Where do you stand as someone in a leadership position on navigating a very tricky time in our history around the freedoms and responsibilities of a university?
Tim Downs 35:27
Yeah, well, we talk about this in the system. So there’s 33 presidents, there’s chancellor and all the vice chancellors, and so we’ll get in a room and we’ll talk about these things. And the reality is, there’s a lot of misinformation out there of what is education. So we need to remind people that, “No, that’s not true. I am not I’m not here to be indoctrinal to anybody.”
I don’t want anybody to think that I’m a liberal or a conservative or a member of this society or that group or whatever color you want to wear. I want you to just be a person that’s a good thinker, that’s trying to navigate to learn who you are. That’s what education is all about. So the liberal arts, I mean, I was in a state very close to here, and I was actually called to the Senate Higher Education Committee, and they wanted to know, “What’s this liberal arts thing?”
Dayna Del Val 36:28
That tells you why we need more liberal arts, right?
Tim Downs 36:32
Yes. So, you know, with the letters SD,
Dayna Del Val 36:32
I was going to say, just to clarify, it’s not the state I live in. It certainly could have been, but it wasn’t.
Tim Downs 36:42
Oh, it’s a little south.
Dayna Del Val 36:44
Yeah.
Tim Downs
So what we didn’t know is that they expected us, each of the seven Presidents, to come in with a formal presentation. What we were told is that they just wanted to come and talk to us, so we all showed up ready to have a good conversation, and then they turned and said, “So we look forward to your formal presentations.”
I didn’t offer to go first, and thankfully, I have sufficient communication skills that I wrote my speech quickly and I wrote it down and I said, Here’s what it is, everything I just said earlier, think, write, communicate, understand, the world, history, economics, literature, culture, language, all that integrates into someone that is a learned person who can then decipher through all that we’re experiencing at any point in time, and hopefully cultivate and lead groups and individuals themselves or their families to make good decisions, to be judicious, to be maybe civics minded, for example. So we understand there’s three parts of government, and there should it should be like a three legged stool, so it stays balanced, and we work together, and somebody may start legislation, and then somebody may determine that it’s not legally defensible, and then somebody may refuse to sign the final bill that maybe got through the House and the Senate. That is the type of things that we have to be doing, and we have to keep doing, and keep talking about ad nauseam, so we don’t lose our way, and that’s why higher education is a more difficult place to be than it’s ever been. It’s almost like we’re defending the basic premises of man and woman, and people need food and air to survive. So we’ve got to stay true to what we do. We have to remind people, for example, a theory does not change the world. It is a point of knowledge. So in this same state, and in other states like Florida, they have gone in and said, “You can no longer teach Critical Race Theory.”
So at first, when this happened, full disclosure, I didn’t know what it was.
Dayna Del Val 39:01
I didn’t either when it first came out.
Tim Downs 39:03
I’m like, what is that? And I have a PhD in the social sciences, but I don’t know what is that. So I went and read. Oh, okay, so I see how the theory has been used and maybe misused to create itself as a weapon to challenge all the hierarchies and traditions of government. I see that.
But, you know, that’s one interpretation and use of the theory. It doesn’t mean the whole theory is bad. And guess what, even if it’s the worst theory that you could have ever concocted, all of its premises and its axiom and its theoretical paradigms are wrong. It’s a theory that you can use and say, “Well, let me tell you why it’s wrong.”
It’s a point of knowledge that you use as a baseline, maybe to say that’s the worst theory that anyone could have ever concocted. And maybe it’s not, maybe it’s the best. I don’t know, but as soon as we start saying you can’t teach this theory, then one of the examples I use is, what are the political scientists going to teach? Are we going to stop teaching Marxism? We’re going to stop teaching about communism? Are we going to stop teaching about socialism? You just go all the way down this continuum. However you want to build your continuum of different types of philosophical frameworks for government and politics. And I said, finally, one day I just said, in fact, I said it to this South Dakota Legislative group, “A class in political science might only be one week.”
Dayna Del Val 40:36
Yeah.
Tim Downs 40:36
Because you’re only teaching one dimension, when, in fact, there are others that we can learn from, and then uses a points of comparison, a benchmark, to then say, you know, parts of this might have some viability under these circumstances, and parts of them don’t, but we as society need to pick and then be consistent with how we implement and how we do what we do. Again, kind of falling back to integrative thinking, critical thinking, decisive social change, so all these things.
So, yeah, I get kind of worked up because we as society, collectively are charged with saying, “Wait a minute. Time out. No, we cannot marginalize voices.” Because if you watched Scott Pelley his last comment on 60 Minutes this past weekend…
Dayna Del Val 41:33
I just thought it was incredible.
Tim Downs 41:36
I sat there with the largest chill going down my spine.
Dayna Del Val 41:39
I did, too.
Tim Downs 41:39
I mean, I thought I was in a freezer box.
Dayna Del Val 41:42
Yeah.
Tim Downs 41:43
To think that the federal government has said a merger between two media companies can only transpire if—now, what I don’t know yet, because it hasn’t been really publicized—what was the if?
But back to your original question, the freedoms, the freedom of the press means the press is free. And as a government entity, local, state, federal, you pick, they have freedoms. And as soon as we barter away freedoms, then we’ve destroyed the basis of our Constitution that our forefathers built, and they admitted it was imperfect. It is. That’s why you have things like the Bill of Rights. That’s why you have things like legislation. You know, because we learn as we go.
But the reality is, we’ve got to lean hard into this and say, “Are you sure that that’s where our country should go? Let’s talk about that.”
Let’s not blindly follow whomever or whatever, as if everything will be fine, because then you get down 5-10 years later, and you go, “Wait a minute. Did I miss something?”
Because all these freedoms are gone. How I deal with this is Tim Downs, human. Citizen. Do I go out in the public and have a conniption? Well, I’m trying not for the institution to get called into question for what we do, because I came out and said, “Well, did you think about that?”
But I would like us all to think about that, and let’s really lean into that so we can intentionally, you know, manage our country. One of the reasons why I’m an educator is I want to do a good job preparing the next generation to run our country.
Dayna Del Val 43:36
Yeah.
Tim Downs 43:36
So I can retire,
Dayna Del Val 43:38
Yes!
Tim Downs 43:38
Some day sit on my front porch and not worry that they’re going to screw it up.
Dayna Del Val 43:44
Yeah.
Tim Downs 43:44
Because they didn’t learn how to think.
Dayna Del Val 43:46
Right.
Tim Downs 43:47
How to communicate. They didn’t learn how to debate, you know? So it’s all those things, and it’s a messy space that we’re in right now. A lot of our freedoms and our premises of who we are as a country are being challenged, and I think it’s going to get real interesting.
Dayna Del Val 44:06
So this question may be more specific than you want to answer. This conversation won’t air until the fall, but we’re having it in the spring, and Harvard just yesterday, changed their Office of DEI to community and something else, a much more generic term, after coming into substantial conflict with the current administration.
You have a DEI program. You live in Minnesota. Minnesota is an infinitely liberal state on the whole, not entirely, but on the whole. What does someone do in the face of a $2 billion bill? Um, you know, I’m going to hold this money over your head. Despite being the richest and in many ways most important university we have in the country, what could they, should they, be doing? Do you have any thoughts on that that?
Tim Downs 45:19
Well, so what we’re looking at is we make a promise to our students, because I can’t speak for Harvard, I could only imagine the circumstances that they’re in and the debates they’re in, and it’s a messy space. I’ll just leave it.
Dayna Del Val 45:39
Yeah, yeah.
Tim Downs 45:40
But for us, our mission, our vision, our strategic initiatives are all about every student that wants to come here you’re, as soon as you’re admitted, then you belong. So it’s more of a psychology, admitted, belong. Now, how do we set you up for success? How do we create all the support safety nets for you? How do we talk to you? How do we make sure, whether you’re from across the globe or across the state, or somewhere in between, that you feel supported? So as you feel supported, you’ll succeed. It’s a basic premise, support and feeling of support, asking for help, being an engaged learner that’s trying to develop themselves because I can’t do it for them, then you’ll be okay.
But when we look at diversity, those three letters DEI have almost become a dirty word in some people’s minds, and it’s like, when did that happen? Five years ago, everyone held it up and said, “Look at that. That’s awesome.”
Everybody got on the DEI train, including major corporations that have Vice Presidents of Diversity. So now what are they going to do? I’ll leave that in the parking lot.
But for us, we’re leaning into, how do we manage our students and the life of the student, and letting them know as soon as you’re admitted, you’re part of our learning community, and what that means is we will do everything humanly possible to support you. And some of our students, I mean, we are not Harvard. You know, Harvard, if it’s a student that is from a really challenged, economically challenged family, Harvard has the capacity to say you don’t have to pay tuition, because we’ve got, I don’t even know how many billions,
Dayna Del Val 47:28
Like 17 billion, or some unbelievable number.
Tim Downs 47:31
It’s a lot of zeros,
Dayna Del Val 47:32
Yeah.
Tim Downs 47:33
So they can take a whole bunch of their students, probably a quarter of their student population, and say you don’t have to pay tuition. We want you here, so therefore you have to pay for your residence halls and, oh, by the way, we just gave you work study jobs. So that’s just accidentally, it’s the same amount. So you show up 10 hours a week and work, and you don’t even have to pay. So maybe all you do is pay for your food. And you have to do that anyway, whether you’re in college or not, persons must eat. So, so that’s a pretty good deal.
But we don’t have that. But the psychology is whatever we call it. That group, that space, those positions, it’s all about the belonging, support and student success. So we’re leaning hard into that, the commitment, the philosophical commitment. If you are here, what can we do to help you succeed? You have to ask for help. We will do everything humanly possible. I will not take your test for you, and some areas you probably wouldn’t want me to. Do not put me in that calculus class. I never did well.
Dayna Del Val 48:40
Me neither.
Tim Downs 48:41
So let’s understand that, and we can reframe it, and leaning away from the three dirty letters, but still doing the same thing. So we’re doing that, and it’s going to be okay, because you don’t have to rely upon those three letters to frame what you’re doing. You just do what you do, because it’s your mission. It’s the core of your existence. It’s your philosophy. We’ll end up in the same place with students that are here; they’re happy and they’re succeeding and they graduate. So we’re leaning more into that.
Dayna Del Val 49:19
So I appreciate that, and I hear what you’re saying, and I wonder, what is the psychological, and you can’t possibly know this‚—it’s more just a query—but what is the psychological impact if you are someone who would have fallen under the DEI umbrella, either because of, you know, gender or sexuality or race or a myriad of areas, and we’ve just kind of universally collapsed saying we’re here. Now I get you’re not collapsing it, but, but there is a difference.
I mean, when someone says to me, “Well, you understand that mankind represents everyone.”
You know what I have to say to that? “Screw you. It sure does not. I am not a man.”
Tim Downs 50:13
No.
Dayna Del Val 50:14
Mankind does not encompass anyone but men. If we’re a place that says everyone belongs, but we can’t talk about differences, which I’m not saying MSUM is saying, but just in general, at the corporate level, at the university level, at the K-12 level, if we are unwilling to stand up and say, “You know what, this does matter.” Where does that leave us?
Tim Downs 50:43
Yeah.
Dayna Del Val 50:44
Societally?
Tim Downs 50:45
So I would spin it on you.
Dayna Del Val 50:48
Okay.
Tim Downs 50:49
Instead of focusing on the diversity and all the different ways people can define themselves, let’s focus on the person and who they are and what they bring to the community. Think of it as this: I call it this all the time. Some first time I said, people looked at me like, “What’s he talking about?”
So a university is a community. We got a whole bunch of people that live on campus. A whole bunch of us, including me, I eat on campus. A whole bunch of us that come and go. And there’s a whole bunch of us that work here full time, part time, whatever. So we’re kind of this intact community. We’ve got boundaries. You drive down the street and there’s light poles with little flags that show our branding. We’re a little neighborhood. We’re a community. And the whole point of the community is learning. So if you’re this learning community, then who’s a member? And let’s talk about them being a member and celebrating their membership. So you can add a dimension, because you’re the only student here, and I don’t even know why I’m picking this country, from Croatia.
Dayna Del Val 51:59
Okay.
Tim Downs 52:00
We might have five or 10. I mean, I don’t go and look and say, “Where are students from?” I’m just happy they’re here.
Dayna Del Val 52:06
Yeah.
Tim Downs 52:06
So let’s say you’re the only one. So just the other day, I was at the International Student bazaar where they were showing, like, food and dress. And I went to every booth. I was like, “Oh, that’s your food and that’s your dress!” I’m like, “That is so cool!”
So I was asked by the media, why is this important? I said, “Because we’re bringing the globe to our students. So now they are more global, because we have 160 global students.”
I tell the global students, “From wherever you’re from, you have a big job. You have to educate the students from here about out there, and they have to educate you about here. And between the two of you, you’ll have a better global perspective, and maybe you get a new best friend from Croatia.”
And that’s a good thing, because as we cut down the barriers that are mostly psychological in the world, we all just realize we’re people who need to be loved and need to be appreciated and we have lots of needs, and whomever fulfills those needs, you know, whether it’s you’re my employer and you pay me because I do a good job working, or you’re my neighbor, and we have barbecues every Sunday. Whatever it is, creating a sense of community is what it’s really about. So let’s focus on things like community, support of each other, and it kind of gets rid of some of this stuff, which can be distracting. I’ve had students say, “Oh, what do you do here?”
“I’m the president.”
“Oh, no, you are not!”
“I am!” Pair of jeans and a hat on. I’m just a person who has a job but also is here to support people for the great job that they do. And I’m thankful for all the students that chose us, because we’re just a community, so we’ve got to think that way and celebrate everybody for who they are as well. It’s a different spin on what you’re saying.
What you’re saying is true, but I’m trying to lean into the positive side of it. Let’s do a positive dimension, because if we only look at differences and marginalization, we can end up in a dark place.
Dayna Del Val 54:33
I definitely agree with that, and I appreciate the positive spin. I hope that people who don’t look like you and I do which, you know, we sit at the top of the heap for no reason beyond the fact that we both probably burn faster in the sun than your average bear. But I hope that everybody feels that, because I just I think it’s a really hard time to be anything other than what some people in this country are saying is the only people we want here. And that just is not true. It just can’t be true.
Tim Downs 55:14
Most of us are from somewhere else.
Dayna Del Val 55:15
Yes.
Tim Downs 55:16
You know, my mom’s side of the family was from Scotland. My dad’s side was from Ireland. My mom’s family came over in 1730 and landed in North Carolina and migrated all over the southern tier of the United States. My dad’s side of the family ended up in Chicago working in the rail yards. You know, it wasn’t a glamorous lifestyle. Kind of build yourself up from nothing, but who is really from America? Rhetorical question.
Dayna Del Val 55:42
Yeah.
Tim Downs 55:43
Yeah, so let’s be respectful of everyone. There’s always been a dominant culture, or a dominant tribe or a dominant group. Since the dawn of man, one had a bigger bone and hit the other one with it, and there was dominance. It’s human nature. But I think these are the things we teach in higher education. No, that’s not the way to lead through life. Lead differently. Lead integratively. Lead with respect. Lead with, you know, treating people well.
Dayna Del Val 56:19
With curiosity.
Tim Downs 56:21
Curiosity! Just asking why, and not knowing the why,
Dayna Del Val
Yeah.
Tim Downs
Or the how, or the why. So, we have a big challenge in higher ed to do all this, and some days I have no idea what we’re doing, because there’s so many moving parts and the and the game keeps changing. But we have to talk to our students and make sure that we’re resonating with them. We also have to tell them no occasionally, because we are the older people in the room, and coach them on why they might think differently. They can convince us otherwise, but that’s why you’re a learning community. I learn from them how better to serve them, but they need to learn from us how they can work within our structures to develop to be a good, strong intellect that’s going to contribute to society. So it should be a little give and take.
Dayna Del Val 57:20
Yeah.
Tim Downs 57:20
So it’s a messy space. It really is. When I was at Cal State, Los Angeles, I was a minority on campus, so this is where I learned a lot of this. Probably 70% of the campus was nonwhite,
Dayna Del Val 57:38
Okay.
Tim Downs 57:39
Fourteen-fifteen percent was international students, so I was really a minority. So I would go into class, and I would ask them, you know, “What do you think?”
And one day, we’re doing a demographic analysis. Who’s in the room today? Because it was a communication class, and having this audience analysis is important. Who am I speaking to?
So we get all done, and the board has all its columns on it, like a census. And there’s one column that’s blank. It was the white column, and I looked at everybody. I said, “There are no white people in the room? No Caucasians? No European whatever?”
And this one young woman, who was Hispanic, looked at me and she said, “No, just you gringo.”
And I my eyes got really big, and then I burst out laughing. It was one of the best classes I ever had.
And I said, “So are you telling me that when we’re talking about things, I have to represent the opinion and the worldview of the whole white population?”
And she goes, “Yeah, welcome to my world.”
I said, “Oh my God. I will never forget this.”
And at first nobody laughed, and then I laughed. And then they all laughed because they thought, “Oh, this is going to end poorly.”
It was one of the most valuable lessons I’ve ever had, because it was just phenomenal.
Dayna Del Val 59:10
I only taught international students freshman English. It was a regular freshman English class, but it was all international kids, so I was almost always the only professor who really knew them, because it was a small class, and they were in these other large lecture classes. And it was definitely the only class where they were not alone in their international-ness. And so I was often the only white person in the room as well, and it was such profound learning for me. Semester after semester, I say all the time. It’s the most global way I could have gotten to know the world, because they were so generous with my really pretty stupid American view about many, many things. They were very generous with me, and I learned a lot.
Tim Downs 59:57
Yeah, my ignorance is rampant.
Dayna Del Val 59:59
Yeah.
Tim Downs 1:00:00
I mean, it was just Yeah, but I would learn something about a country and a culture and how they ran their communities and how their economy worked. In fact, we’d have them all give presentations about whatever they consider to be their culture.
Dayna Del Val 1:00:18
Ah, yeah.
Tim Downs 1:00:19
The hardest kids to say, what’s their culture? Kids like me,
Dayna Del Val 1:00:23
Yeah, yeah, we don’t really have a culture, which is shocking,
Tim Downs 1:00:27
Right? I mean, you might, depending on if you’re from an ethnic group.
Dayna Del Val 1:00:31
Yeah.
Tim Downs 1:00:31
But you might not, yeah. Over the years, it just kind of gets diluted, and it’s gone,
Dayna Del Val 1:00:36
Yeah.
Tim Downs 1:00:37
I mean, we had students from Cambodia that would talk about the Pol Pot regime,
Dayna Del Val 1:00:44
Yeah.
Tim Downs 1:00:44
And how communities were structured, and slavery and just stuff that was horrifying,
Dayna Del Val 1:00:53
Yeah.
Tim Downs 1:00:54
But then what they would also do is they would tell us stories about how the verbal narrative, the storytelling is what held their culture together over decades and centuries.
Dayna Del Val 1:01:05
Yeah.
Tim Downs 1:01:06
I thought, “Wow, that is awesome.” It was all this narrative that nobody gave up on, and it was intergenerational.
Dayna Del Val 1:01:15
Yeah.
Tim Downs 1:01:16
Pretty powerful stuff,
Dayna Del Val 1:01:17
Yeah.
Tim Downs 1:01:17
And so if you’ve never heard about that, you’d be like, really, you know, my aunts and uncles and grandparents told me stories, but this was intentional.
Dayna Del Val 1:01:25
Yeah.
Tim Downs 1:01:26
Everybody knew everything going back hundreds of years. Pretty powerful stuff.
Dayna Del Val 1:01:32
Yeah, absolutely. Okay, my final question for you, President Downs. We’ve talked about middle ground, but the third word of my podcast is brave. So what makes your position in this time at MSUM brave?
Tim Downs 1:01:50
I’d say we can’t blink. We have to keep doing what we do. We’re knowing with certainty that it’s for a good cause. So there are people that are questioning pretty much everything about higher education, how much it costs? What are we teaching? What are they doing? Are they learning enough job skills? You know, all that. So we have to be really tight, and we have to say, “Okay, this is what we’re doing, and this is why.”
And thankfully, if you think about it, the accreditation process has made us collect data for the last 40 years. So I think we’ve got a lot of data, and we can show, because we did this and because we did this, student success went up 20%. Therefore if the student plays along and works as hard as we’re asking them to, and we work equally hard to help them, the probability is this investment that you’re making in higher education is going to have a return.
The saddest day for me is when I hear of students that have dropped out and they have student debt and they have no degree.
Dayna Del Val 1:03:01
Yeah.
Tim Downs 1:03:02
They’ve actually harmed themselves.
Dayna Del Val 1:03:04
Yeah, they have.
Tim Downs 1:03:05
It almost would have been better, not really, but financially, if they didn’t go to college.
Dayna Del Val 1:03:09
Yep.
Tim Downs 1:03:10
And that’s sad. You hope that at some point they can come back, because maybe they weren’t ready for college yet, and they mature and they realize, “Oh boy, I should have finished while I was there.” And they come back. But we have to have that confidence, not that we’re perfect, not that we know it all, because that arrogance that we talked about earlier will get us in big trouble. That’s one of the reasons why there’s this huge ball of energy against us is because of the arrogance. But just know with some certainty that we are making a difference, and the people that we’re graduating are going and doing great things and stay the course. Be adaptable, be nimble, but also know that there’s some core things that you really shouldn’t give up.
Dayna Del Val 1:04:00
Well, this has been a really interesting conversation. I appreciate your candor. I appreciate your bravery having a few questions that could have gotten a little hairy. You managed them beautifully, and I appreciate that tremendously. Dr Downs, have an excellent end of your spring semester. To everyone else, we’ll talk soon.
Tim Downs 1:04:24
Thank you. Go Dragons!
