In this episode of the IngenioUs Leadership Podcast, Melissa Morriss-Olson sits down with historian and higher education leader Carol Quillen, former president of Davidson College and now President and CEO of the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

Carol brings a historian’s lens to leadership—one grounded in humility, courage, and a deep respect for the power of community and place. Over the course of the conversation, she reflects on her leadership journey from growingup in a small historic town in Delaware to leading one of the nation’s most respected liberal arts colleges.

Carol shares insights about what leadership really means, why she believes it is fundamentally about helping communities create the conditions for change, and what she learned about guiding an institution through moments of uncertainty, including the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The conversation also explores her current work with the National Trust for Historic Preservation, where she is thinking deeply about how historic places can help Americans reconnect with the complexity of their shared history. At a time when public conversations often feel abstract and polarized, Carol argues that standing in the places where history actuallyhappened can open the door to more thoughtful dialogue and renewed civic understanding.

This episode is a thoughtful reflection on leadership, community, and the enduring importance of place in shaping how we understand ourselves and one another.

Key Themes from the Conversation

Leadership as Context Building
Carol describes leadership not as a title or position but as the work of helping a community create the conditions it needs to live up to its highest aspirations.

Courage and Humility in Leadership
Two qualities she believes are essential for leaders navigating complexity and uncertainty.

Listening and Trust Building
How leaders create environments where people can speak honestly, disagree respectfully, and work together toward shared goals.

Leading Through Crisis
Reflections on guiding Davidson College through the COVID-19 pandemic and the importance of transparency when decisions must be made with incomplete information.

The Power of Institutional Culture
Why understanding the history and identity of an organization is critical when leading change.

The Power of Place in Civic Life
How historic sites—from Gettysburg to Monticello to immigrant tenements—help us confront the complexity of American history and foster deeper conversations about our shared future.

Advice for Emerging Leaders
Carol encourages young leaders to focus less on career planning and more on doing the work that is right in front of them.

About Carol Quillen

Carol Quillen is President and CEO of the National Trust for Historic Preservation and the former president of Davidson College, where she served for eleven years.

A historian by training, Carol previously spent many years on the faculty at Rice University and held several administrative leadership roles there. She is widely respected for her thoughtful approach to leadership, institutional change, and civic engagement.

Her current work focuses on the role historic places can play in strengthening communities and fostering dialogue about the nation’s shared past and future.

About the IngenioUs Leadership Podcast

The IngenioUs Leadership Podcast explores how leaders createsolutions to complex challenges in higher education and beyond. Through conversations with innovative and thoughtful leaders, the podcast highlights ideas, experiences, and perspectives that help listeners think differently aboutleadership today.

Where does innovation really begin? After interviewingdozens of college presidents, one surprising leadership habit kept appearing: listening.

When we talk about innovation in higher education, theconversation often centers on bold ideas, new programs, or visionary strategies. But insights from leaders across the field suggest that meaningful innovation often begins somewhere much quieter.

It begins with listening.

Through the IngenioUs podcast, Dr. Melissa Morriss-Olson has spoken with dozens of college and university presidents about leading change in complex institutions. One lessonconsistently emerges from those conversations: before introducing new initiatives, successful leaders take time to understand the people and contexts they serve. They listen to faculty, staff, and students, learning how their institutions really work and what challenges people are experiencing.

Why does this matter? Because when leaders move tooquickly to solutions, they sometimes end up solving the wrong problem.

Listening helps uncover the deeper issues—and the real opportunities for meaningful change.

In Dr. Morriss-Olson’s newest blog article, “TheFirst Leadership Habit of Innovation,” she explores this ideaand shares insights drawn from these leadership conversations.

You can watch the video and read the full article here:

Higher Education Leadership | Innovation | ChangeLeadership | Academic Leadership | Organizational Change

In this episode, David J. Staley reads his latest CHELIP: University Design column, “Interestingness,” inspired by Kenneth O. Stanley and Joel Lehman’s Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned: The Myth of the Objective.

What if the pursuit of clearly defined objectives is actually the enemy of breakthrough innovation?

Drawing on the intellectual journey of urban theorist Jane Jacobs, insights from computer science, and examples from the history of invention, Staley challenges one of higher education’s most sacred assumptions: that learning must always be guided by predetermined goals and measurable outcomes.

Instead, he explores a radical idea — that interestingness, not objectives, may be the true engine of discovery.

In This Episode

• Why Jane Jacobs’ “directionless” intellectual wandering shaped one of the most influential urban thinkers of the 20th century

• How experiments in artificial intelligence reveal the limits of goal-driven design

• The paradox of innovation: why the stepping stones to major breakthroughs rarely resemble the final outcome

• The hidden cost of learning objectives and overly structured curricula

• Why students who feel “undecided” may actually be operating from a deeper intellectual instinct

• The case for reimagining Liberal Studies as a major in “interestingness”

Key Ideas

1. Greatness Cannot Be Planned
Many transformative discoveries — from microwave ovens to airplanes to early computers — emerged not from direct goal pursuit, but from exploratory work aimed at entirely different problems.

2. The Danger of Objective Thinking
Ambitious goals can create tunnel vision. When we fixate on outcomes, we may overlook the very stepping stones that would lead us there.

3. Interestingness as a Compass
Novelty acts as a detector of possibility. Interesting ideas open new pathways — even when their ultimate purpose is unclear.

4. Are Universities Designed for Discovery?
With tightly defined learning objectives and structured degree pathways, are we unintentionally suppressing intellectual exploration?

5. Not Having a Plan Can Be a Very Good Plan
For students drawn to curiosity rather than credentials, exploration may not be aimless — it may be the most innovative strategy of all.

About David J. Staley

David J. Staley is an Associate Professor in the Departments of History, Design, and Educational Studies at The Ohio State University and serves as an Honorary Faculty Fellow in Innovation with CHELIP. His research explores digital history, historical methodology, and the intersection of technology, scholarship, and the future of higher education. A prolific author and curator of digital and physical exhibits, Dr. Staley brings a deep interdisciplinary perspective to conversations about innovation and institutional transformation.

A Question for Listeners

Are our institutions designed to produce graduates with objectives — or graduates with curiosity?

What might change if we structured higher education around interesting questions instead of predetermined outcomes?

In this latest epsiode, Dr. Morriss-Olson is joined by Van Ton-Quinlivan, Founder and CEO of Futuro Health, for a powerful conversation about purpose-driven leadership, systems change, and what it really takes to build opportunity at scale.

Van’s leadership journey began “behind the starting line” as a child refugee from Vietnam, and that lived experience continues to shape how she leads today. Over the course of her career, she has led across private industry, public higher education, and the nonprofit sector—most recently founding Futuro Health to address one of the most urgent challenges facing theU.S. healthcare system: the growing shortage of allied health workers.

In our conversation, Van shares how Futuro Health was launched at the start of the pandemic and quickly grew into a national workforce ecosystem operating across multiple states. She explains why workforce development must be treated as a team sport, bringing together employers, educators, and community-based organizations to create reliable, equitable talent pipelines.

We also explore Van’s leadership philosophy more deeply—how purpose unlocks courage and “fierceness,” why influence matters more than formal authority, and what she has learned about credibility, feedback, and navigating leadership spaces where women are often underrepresented. Van offers practical insights on building coalitions, listening to critics, and knowing when the window is right to push for meaningful change.

As we look ahead, Van reflects on the future of work, the impact of demographic shifts and caregiving demands, and how technologies like AI are opening new possibilities to redesign education and workforce systems for today’s learners—not yesterday’s assumptions.

This episode is a must-listen for leaders working at the intersection of education, workforce development, healthcare, and social impact—and for anyone seeking to lead with clarity, courage, and purpose.

Check out Van's podcast, WorkforceRx here: https://futurohealth.org/current-press/press-podcast/ 

This episode features a brief video reflection introducing a recent CHELIP blog essay by Melissa Morriss-Olson, Ph.D. that examines one of the quietest—and most consequential—forces shaping leadership culture: silence.

The video frames the essay within a broader exploration of why innovation and change so often stall in higher education. Rather than focusing on a lack of ideas or commitment, it points to familiar leadership habits that make uncertainty, risk, and discomfort difficult to sustain. The reflection then turns to an even subtler dynamic—the unspoken rules leaders learn about what feels safe to say and what does not.

The accompanying blog essay, The Cost of What We Don’t Talk About in Leadership, explores how silence becomes embedded in leadership culture over time. Leaders learn to read the room, soften language, and avoid naming persistent patterns in the name of professionalism or stability. While this restraint may feel responsible in the short term, the essay argues that it often comes at a cost—diminishing clarity, slowing learning, and quietly sustaining unresolved challenges .

Rather than assigning blame, the reflection emphasizes clarity: what becomes possible when leaders are able to speak honestly about the realities they are navigating. The video serves as an entry point into a larger conversation about leadership culture, candor, and the conditions required for meaningful change.

📖 Related blog essay: The Cost of What We Don’t Talk About in Leadership
🎥 This episode accompanies a short video introducing the themes behind the essay

In this episode of IngenioUs, host Melissa Morriss-Olson is joined by Dr. Lisa Vollendorf, President of SUNY Empire State University, New York’s first and only public online university.

Dr. Vollendorf shares a deeply thoughtful and values-driven conversation about leadership in higher education at a time when access, equity, and public purpose matter more than ever. Drawing on her own journey—from growing up in a small Colorado town to leading a national model for online public education—she reflects on what it means to lead with integrity, empathy, and urgency.

Together, Melissa and Lisa explore how leadership is shaped by crisis, why integrity is a leader’s non-negotiable anchor, and how institutions must rethink long-standing structures that unintentionally exclude learners. Lisa also offers powerful insights on women’s leadership, ambition framed throughimpact, and why student-centered design—not institutional tradition—must guide the future of higher education.

This episode will resonate with presidents, provosts, deans, faculty leaders, doctoral students, and anyone committed to reimagining higher education in service of all learners.

In This Episode, You’ll Hear About:

• Why integrity is the one thing leaders always control

• Lessons from leading through large-scale crisis and community trauma

• The importance of decisiveness and forward momentum in leadership

• Why ambition often looks different for women leaders

• Rethinking online education, access, and student success

• The future of public higher education as a democratizing force

About the Guest

Dr. Lisa Vollendorf is President of SUNY Empire State University, where she leads New York’s first and only public online university. Empire State University is designed to meet learners where they are, recognize prior learning, and expand access to affordable, high-quality education for studentsof all ages and life stages.

About the Host

Melissa Morriss-Olson is host of IngenioUs and author of IngenioUs Leadership: Creating Solutions to Wicked Problems in Higher Education. A former provost and longtime higher education leader, Melissa focuses her work on leadership, innovation, and designing institutions that unlock humanpotential.

Subscribe & Connect

If you enjoyed this episode, please follow IngenioUs, leave areview, and share it with a colleague who cares about the future of higher education.

In this episode of University Design, David J. Staley reflects on the ideas behind his new book, The AI Symposium (Innovation Press, 2026), using this month’s column—and its accompanying recording—as an opportunity to explore a provocative rethinking of AI, dialogue, and learning in higher education.

Rather than revisiting familiar debates about banning AI or defining its “ethical use” in the classroom, Staley invites listeners to step back and ask a deeper question: if large language models were explicitly designed to generate language, what does it really mean to treat that function as a problem? And what new possibilities emerge if we stop defending against AI and instead design with it?

Drawing on the work of David Graeber and Mikhail Bakhtin, this episode reframes thinking itself as dialogic—something that arises between voices rather than inside isolated minds. From this perspective, the traditional student essay begins to look less like a timeless measure of understanding and more like a historically contingent form of assessment.

Staley introduces The AI Symposium as both a conceptual experiment and a pedagogical provocation. In the project, multiple large language models are prompted to engage directly with one another in sustained dialogue, with the human designer acting as a “procedural author.” The result raises unsettling and generative questions: Can AI participate in dialogue in a meaningful way? Does dialogic exchange suggest a form of synthetic understanding? And what might this mean for how we assess student learning?

The episode ultimately looks forward, imagining a future in which students design and host their own AI symposia—selecting participants, framing questions, and interpreting dialogue—as a richer demonstration of understanding than the traditional essay.

In this episode, you’ll explore:

• Why debates about “ethical AI use” often miss the point

• Dialogue as the foundation of human thought

• The limitations of essay-based assessment in an AI-enabled world

• The concept of the human as “procedural author”

• What happens when AI systems engage one another in dialogue

• How the symposium could replace the essay as a primary form of assessment

This episode accompanies David J. Staley’s University Design column and is inspired by his new book, The AI Symposium, which expands on these ideas and their implications for education, technology, and the future of thinking itself.

In this short audio reflection, Dr. Melissa Morriss-Olson shares the thinking behind her recent CHELIP essay, Why Innovation Fails: Reflections From Where I Sit.

Drawing on her lived experience in senior leadership roles and her ongoing work with higher education leaders through IngenioUs, Dr. Morriss-Olson reflects on why innovation so often stalls—not because of bad ideas, but because of how institutions respond to uncertainty, risk, and discomfort. She explores the pull toward consensus-building, risk avoidance, and waiting for perfect conditions, especially in a moment when leading change feels harder than ever.

This audio clip is intended as a brief companion to the full essay.

👉 Read the full blog article here:

We hope this reflection resonates and invites you to think differently about what leadership and innovation are asking of us right now.

What does it mean to lead with authentic mission alignment in today's complex higher education landscape? Dr. Christina Clark, the eighth president of La Roche University, knows the answer intimately—because she's living it.

In this conversation, Christina shares how growing up as an "army brat" in Alaska and the Philippines instilled in her the leadership fundamentals that guide her presidency today: service, accountability, and the courage to stand for what's right even when standing alone. Her father's daily reveille call—"it's another day in which to excel"—wasn't just a wake-up routine; it was the beginning of a leadership formation that would spandecades and continents.

As a classicist scholar, Christina brings a unique intellectual framework to presidential leadership, using contextual thinking to see beneath surface issues to underlying institutional challenges. She opens up about her intentional journey from faculty to the presidency, the importance of knowingwhere you can flourish as a leader, and why the exhausting presidential interview process at La Roche left her feeling energized rather than drained—a clear signal she'd found the right fit.

We explore La Roche's innovative approach to preparing students for the Fourth Industrial Revolution, including embedding AI literacy certificates across the curriculum and requiring AI competency in every capstone course. Christina also shares what sustains her personally—from nightly conversations with her mother to morning dance sessions that reconnect her with who she was before becoming an academic.

Whether you're an aspiring president, a sitting leader navigating unprecedented challenges, or simply curious about what authentic mission-driven leadership looks like in practice, this conversation offers both inspiration and practical wisdom for your own journey.

Key Topics:

• Growing up in a military family and learning leadership through service and accountability
• Finding authentic institutional fit: Why mission and values alignment matters

• The Pacum in Terris program: Putting your money where your mission is
• Classical scholarship and contextual thinking in leadership
• Navigating the journey from faculty to presidency with intention
• Strategic advice for aspiring presidents: Know yourself, know your environment
• Personal sustainability practices: Music, dance, family, and daily gratitude
• Preparing students for the Fourth Industrial Revolution: La Roche's AI literacy initiative
• Building institutional pride and raising your university's profile
• Creating a legacy of strong shared governance and mission strength

About Dr. Christina Clark:

Dr. Christina Clark is the eighth president of La Roche University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. A classicist by training, she brings more than 20 years of experience in Catholic comprehensive institutions to her first presidency. Dr. Clark's leadership is shaped by her formative years as the daughter of a U.S. Army officer, living in Alaska and the Philippines, whereshe learned the values of service, ethics, and representing something larger than oneself. Her commitment to mission-driven, values-based education guides her vision for preparing students to be global citizens who work for justice,peace, and the common good in an increasingly complex world.

Connect with La Roche University: Website: www.laroche.edu

About IngenioUs:

IngenioUs explores the leadership journeys of transformative women in higher education. Hosted by Dr. Melissa Morriss-Olson, each episode features candid conversations about the experiences, challenges, and insights that shapevisionary leadership in today's colleges and universities.

Host: Dr. Melissa Morriss-Olson, Provost Emerita and Distinguished Professor, Bay Path University | Author of "Ingenious Leadership" | Founding Director, Center for Higher Education Leadership and Innovative Practice (CHELIP)

In this episode, David J. Staley reads his latest University Design essay, “Underemployment,” a timely and compelling examination of the rising underemployment of college graduates in the United States.

Drawing on Peter Turchin’s framework of “eliteoverproduction,” national labor market data, and comparative insights from global economies, Staley explores the widening disconnect between higher education and the jobs available in the current workforce. He highlights striking statistics—from the underemployment rates by major to the top U.S. occupations that do not require a college degree—and argues that the problem lies not with college-going students, but with an economy unable to generate enough high-skill jobs.

The episode challenges listeners to consider:

·      Is underemployment a temporary labor marketfluctuation or a chronic structural issue?

·      What happens to college enrollment and socialstability if the trend continues?

·      Should workforce development simply respond tothe current labor market—or design a better one?

·      And what new mission might colleges anduniversities embrace to combat underemployment?

Staley ultimately proposes a bold idea: Universities should not only educate future workers but actively catalyze the creation of high-skill economic opportunity, shaping a labor market aligned with the talent they cultivate.