On Wednesday, May 22, Word for Word, Southern New Hampshire University’s (SNHU) online literary series, was honored to welcome Dr. Paul J. LeBlanc as our special guest. LeBlanc served as president of SNHU and is the author of two nonfiction books: “Students First: Equity, Access, and Opportunity in Higher Education” and, most recently, “Broken: How our Social Systems Are Failing Us.”
Under the 20 years of LeBlanc’s direction, SNHU grew from 2,500 students to over 225,000 learners and is now the largest nonprofit provider of online higher education in the country.
LeBlanc immigrated to the United States as a child, was the first person in his extended family to attend college and is a graduate of Framingham State University (BA), Boston College (MA) and the University of Massachusetts (PhD). From 1993 to 1996, he directed a technology start-up for Houghton Mifflin Publishing Company, was president of Marlboro College (VT) from 1996 to 2003 and became President of SNHU in 2003.
LeBlanc was joined by Associate Deans Jacob Powers and Paul Witcover, and by Senior Associate Dean Derrick Craigie.
The following is Part I of an edited transcript of LeBlanc’s interview:
W4W: Could you share a little more about your background?
PL: As you said in the introduction, immigrant family, youngest of five, and my family immigrated from a rural hardscrabble farming village in Canada in New Brunswick—kind of French Appalachia, if you will. An Acadian family. So if you know Acadians, it’s a quirky little subgroup of French Canadians.
We immigrated to the Boston area. And I spoke French before I spoke English, but I was four, so I didn’t speak a lot. But I learned English and always had my nose in a book as a kid. My mom cleaned homes for wealthy families in Weston, Mass, which is still, I think, the highest per capita town in Massachusetts outside of Boston. We lived in a very working-class neighborhood in Waltham.
She would bring me with her and plunk me down in these beautiful libraries and put kids’ books in my lap. I mean, I still relish the smell of those books and those leather bindings. I remember her vacuuming the houses, hearing her sing—she always sang when she was cleaning. These are some of the warmest memories I have. Love, and care, and books, and libraries, and reading.
I had three teachers who changed my life: Mark Shlafman, Elizabeth Collins and Helen Heineman. Sixth grade, high school and college. I think they loved me. Loved me in the sense that they took the time to really know who I was. They made me feel like I mattered to them. They knew my context. They challenged me. They lifted my sights. They helped me dream bigger dreams for myself. I talk about this all the time, about how we have to love our students.
It was Mr. Shlafman who said to my mother, “Paul could go to college someday.” We didn’t know anybody who went to college, no one in our neighborhood, no one in our extended family. But she held on to that dream. She worked in a factory till she was in her 70s. She didn’t even know how college was supposed to happen. But she had a kid whose teacher said he could go to college, so I almost had no choice.
Elizabeth Collins was a high school teacher who helped me think about colleges. And I went to a very affordable state college, Framingham State outside of Boston. Met my wife. I started at Westfield State, and my father had a stroke, and I moved to be closer to home and finished at Framingham.
Then it was Helen Heineman, who was my undergraduate teacher, who said, “So what do we think about grad school?” I was an English major because again, I love literature.
I said, “Grad school? Dr. Heineman, I was lucky to get out of undergrad. What are you talking about?”
This was back in the day. She literally made a phone call to the chair of the department at Boston College, who was a friend of hers, and said, “You need to find a spot for this guy.” And he did. He gave me a teaching assistantship, which was life changing because I was in the classroom for the first time and I loved it. I was scarcely older than my students. But it was exhilarating.
When I went to UMass for my doctorate, PCs were just happening. Personal computers and local area networks. Digital Equipment Corp. was the Apple of its day and was headquartered in Massachusetts. Ken Olsen, who was the storied CEO, was on the board of UMass. And they tried to get into the PC business and failed miserably. Digital Equipment Corp. was often called DEC. They had the DEC Rainbow—that was the name of their PC. And they just donated a ton of them to the university because no one was buying them anyway, and they took the write-off, I think.
The full-time faculty would have nothing to do with them. Like, “We’re not dealing with this crap. What are these boxes?” So they gave them to the graduate assistants and said, “You figure it out.” And we all taught writing, because that’s what you do as a TA, as a PhD student. So I started playing with it. I was like, this is pretty great. And then a local area network. And I could do things with my students.
I was like, wait a minute, there’s no penalty for revision anymore. You don’t have to retype a thing. You can cut and paste. And so I shifted from literature to comp-rhet (composition-rhetoric), with a focus on technology.
I got very interested in this question of what happens to the way a society thinks when there is a paradigm shift in technology. I was really interested in the work of Walter Ong, a Jesuit priest who wrote about the invention of the printing press and how it changed the noetic economy of Europe and the world. So yeah, I dove into that work.
W4W: This is something we often talk about in Word for Word, how there is almost never a straight line in someone’s career. You didn’t wake up one day and say, “I’m going to be president of SNHU.”
PL: Oh God no. Sometimes people will say to me, “Did you always want to be a university president?” Come on. What kind of nerdy kid wants to be a college president? You have to be the worst kid in the world. I wanted to be a cop and a fireman like everybody else in my neighborhood.
W4W: I didn’t really understand the importance of the introduction of the PC into your own personal paradigm. But once I heard that, it made me realize that from there through your work with Houghton Mifflin and at SNHU, exploring how to bring cutting-edge technologies to bear in service of our students, and now with AI, it seems that that’s a kind of a consistent thread all the way through your career.
PL: Yeah. And the next chapter of my work post-SNHU will be focused on AI and education. Because I think it too is a paradigm-shifting technology, even more powerful than the arrival of the PC, though you wouldn’t have AI without the computing technology that precedes it. But I think this is going to much more profoundly reshape society.
I think we will be wired differently. You can go all the way back to Socrates complaining about this new invention called writing because he believed, living in an oral culture, that it would make people stupid. They wouldn’t memorize anymore. And if you think about it, where would we rate memorization on the list of cognitive skills that we value today? Not even in the top 10. We don’t memorize anymore. And once the printing press came along, it was impossible to memorize all of the books that existed anyway. So we had to start thinking differently.
That’s when we started thinking in terms of taxonomies and classification. Because if I can’t remember every book, I need to have some way of remembering where to find the book I need. Walter Ong argues that you don’t have Darwin without the printing press, because Darwin used classification and taxonomies to start putting animals in categories, and genus, and species.
Social media has already changed the cognitive economy of our culture. Attention spans are shorter with young learners. We are arguably in a post-textual world. Doesn’t mean writing will go away or the text will go away. But we are in a video-primary world now, a visual primary world.
That’s the thing to always remember. When writing became the dominant form of literacy in the world, orality didn’t go away. People kept talking, speaking, debating, et cetera. And even as video and visuals have come to dominate our literacy behaviors, writing hasn’t gone away. But I think sometimes when people hear me say this, they’re like, “Well, wait a minute, what do you mean we’re in a post-textual world?”
If you think about it, when the web was first created, storage and throughput was really hard. So you had very few images and a lot of text. And now if you go to a web page, what do you have? A lot of visuals and a little bit of text. TikTok and YouTube are the best examples of this. It worries me a little bit, because I have such a deep love of reading, but it’s interesting to think about how will it change the way we think as a culture.
W4W: I take your point completely. Still, it’s good to know that there are still many young people and lifelong learners coming into our creative writing programs who still have that love of the written word and desire to pursue that as a career.
PL: Yeah, for sure. I mean, human beings are wired for narrative. They’re wired for stories. We live in a world that’s obsessed with data, but people aren’t moved by data, they’re moved by stories. E. O. Wilson, the famous Harvard professor, would say, actually, we don’t think, and get our thoughts together, and then tell a story. We actually tell a story in order to think. In other words, even as we are sitting here, he would argue, we are all telling a story in our head about what is happening in this moment.
So story will always be important. But the way we tell stories, I think, is going to continue to evolve and be different. If you were a journalist 30 years ago, you wrote. Today, if you’re a journalist, you write, you podcast, you do video, you do photos and you’re on Instagram. Your toolkit has to be broader.
And I think depending on the aspirations of our students and how they want to take their skills to market and think about their work, many of them have to think about a broader toolkit, even if writing is a central tool that they use.
W4W: How do we maintain a balance between digital tools and our tactile environment? How do we not get lost in the digital?
PL: My hope for AI is that we will integrate it better into our day-to-day life. My bet is that it’s going to be with some form of glasses as our key piece of interface between us, the physical world, and our AI assistant. I think we will all have one.
Just two days ago, I got my Ray-Ban Metas. [PUTS ON GLASSES] So this is the new Meta Glasses—they look pretty much like regular glasses. They have a camera. And I can look at something and ask Meta. You can’t hear it, but it’s telling me it’s ready to go. So I can look at something and say, “What is that building? Tell me the history.” And it will give me the history.
So imagine if I am gardening and I’ve got my glasses on. I can look down and it’s like, ooh, am I planting these bulbs correctly? I’m a novice gardener. And I can ask AI, “Is this how you plant the bulb?” And the AI can take a look at that, go, “No, no, no, you’ve got to turn it over. That part’s got to stick down.”
Now, that feels to me like a really healthy way of engaging the technology and not using it to escape the world but, in fact, to move through the world differently and more effectively. Imagine you’re working on a story and it’s set in Germany in 1933. Normally you would need to do a lot of research to get the details right. But now, without even looking up, I can ask the AI “What was the main boulevard that ran through Berlin in 1933, the one that would have led to the Ministry of Defense?” And the system will just tell you.
With AI, you’re going to have a research assistant at your side. It will be interesting to see to what extent people start using it to do first drafting based on their prompts. And then the writer’s craft may be heightened.
So you will have to be good at two things. Can you get really, really good at the kind of prompts that give you better content? And then are you a good enough writer and reader of your own writing to look at that and say, “Oh, not good enough,” and then start making it your own? The craft is going to change, for sure.
W4W: Writing is so profoundly linked to the action of doing stuff with your hands and your fingers. Drawing, too. All this stuff is tactile. Even on computers. Now we’re moving into a space of prompts and revision of AI-generated content rather than direct composition. AI can even respond to spoken input. So maybe that tactile dimension will be gone altogether.
PL: One of the Roman rhetoricians counseled his students to write on clay tablets so that they could revise. Don’t chip away at a stone, because then it’s literally set in stone, right? All of our technology tools change the way we work and change the way we produce. I’m going to guess that most of our students are using a keyboard and not writing with a pen and paper. If you do that, you pay a much less hefty price of revision. Revision is just easier because I don’t have to retype. I can literally cut and paste. That’s easy and fast. So your production becomes different.
I write to think. So I labor to get to the thinking, and then I have to edit pretty dramatically because, usually, I finally get to my discovery at the end, which is not where you usually want the main point.
Somebody in the chat said, you know, if you use AI, isn’t this kind of like plagiarism? I think we’re going to have to rethink these questions. These notions of plagiarism and originality are themselves complex questions.
It’s tempting to say, “No, no, no, none of our students should use AI in their work.” But these are the very tools that are going to make them more productive and get them jobs. Something like 70% of employers say they would not hire a candidate today who doesn’t understand how to use AI in the job. So I think every department, every dean, every department chair now has to look at their curriculum and say, “What changes? What are the tools that my graduates will be expected to use? What will be the tools that will make my graduates more powerful?”
I’ll choose from a different field and go back to my glasses analogy. It takes about 10 years to train a doctor and well over a million dollars or more. It’s a long time. And we don’t train enough of them. There are not enough doctors in America right now. There are whole parts of society that don’t have access to a good doctor. And even if you have privilege, if you have a good medical plan like SNHU’s, you still have a wait, quite often, to see a doctor.
David Autor, the labor economist at MIT, imagines a future where we will use AI to channel all that expert knowledge the doctor has. Because if you think about what your doctor is trained to do, it’s high expertise in prediction. So if Jacob comes in to see me, my job is really to reckon, as Chris Dede at Harvard says, to really listen to his symptoms, how he’s presenting, start to make some predictions about what this is likely to be, order the right test to weed things out, kind of narrow in, then talk about that, really nail it down, and when I’m sure, then my next thing is to reckon the best course of treatments and make predictions about what’s going to work for him.
Well, he’s a young guy. He’s pretty fit. Maybe this treatment is a little harsh, but he can stand up to it because he’s healthy and fit. It’s all reckoning. It’s incredibly expensive to do.
We can now equip nurses, who are much faster to train, et cetera. Imagine they have those glasses. Imagine they’re sitting with a patient. They have all the foundational skills. They know how to take tests. They know how to put a PICC line in your arm. They often have better human skills than doctors do. And now they can basically work with the AI to have depth of knowledge, better than the best-trained doctor. The best-trained doctor has practiced for forty years and has seen 20,000 patients. That’s what they’re trained on. They’re trained on 20,000 patients with all their biases and the limitations that one life can have.
AI is trained on millions and millions of patients and hundreds of thousands of doctors. And there’s growing evidence now that when you put a human in the loop in medicine, it actually produces worse results. So it’s tempting to say, “Well, OK, they can use AI, but I want my doctor to look at it.” That might actually give you worse results! So that’s one profession, nursing, that’s going to really be different. What happens when we talk about writers and writing? It’s going to be a fun ride.
W4W: What inspired you to start writing books?
PL: During the pandemic, obviously, we were all sort of hunkered down, and I wasn’t traveling at all. So I had time for a change. Weekends. And while it was incredibly busy, I mean, those first two years, there was no playbook for anyone leading an institution at the time. And it was incredibly exhausting. But it was exhilarating in its own way from a leadership perspective.
But I had been writing short form. I did a series for EDUCAUSE Review that won a Magazine Article Award. I write a lot on my blog. And I write to think, so I love to write and always have. I paid my way through part of college as a journalist; I was a stringer for a newspaper. And so I love storytelling, and I love to write.
What I found during the pandemic is I finally had a little bit of breathing space to start to pull together a lot of the things I cared about in terms of higher ed and rethinking the system. So the first book, which was “Students First,” is really a book about system change, rethinking the system of higher education. Finding, for example, that tying students to time is a kind of structural inequity for low-income students, because they have less time and less control over time. So when you build a whole education model on time, you inherently disadvantage some people.
But in the middle of writing that book, I got stuck. I’m usually a pretty fast writer. And I was talking to a little circle of readers that I send things to. One of them said to me, “Well, why are you stuck? What are you struggling with?” And I said, “I’m stuck on a question that I posed to my wife when I came down from looking at a blank page screen for a while. And the question was, ‘Can higher education learn to love its students again?'”
I told this to this reader, who said, “Why don’t you take a break and just try to answer that question?” So I started writing, and I wrote like a fiend, furiously. I would write from 5:00 in the morning till 7:00 at night, not stop for lunch. My wife would bring me a cup of tea and a power bar for lunch. I ended up writing six chapters what later became the basis for the book “Broken.” And when I finished it, I actually got back to the first book and could write again. But I had to unblock first—that unanswered question was taking up my psychic space.
When the first book was done, I went back and wrote “Broken.” That book was a delightful exercise of talking to really smart people about how to fix our social systems of care. K-12, higher ed, health care, addiction treatment, these are all systems that are meant to lift people up in some way or another. And yet in America, they so often dehumanize the very people they are meant to serve. They often dehumanize the people who work in those systems as well. Think about burned-out teachers, or nurses, callous social workers, et cetera. So that’s how I came to write those two books.
W4W: Have you considered writing fiction?
PL: I fantasize about it. I think it’s a higher-order skill than writing nonfiction. I like to think I’m a reasonable storyteller. A lot of people’s first novels are about a world they know, and mine is higher ed. And there I’m so intimidated, because I think Richard Russo wrote probably the single best higher ed book ever, called “Straight Man.” We work in a quirky industry. It has no end of entertaining characters and possibilities. I imagine characters murdering other characters for their tenure spot and all kinds of good stuff like that. But I don’t know. We’ll see.
Interestingly, one of the things I heard a lot from people who read “Broken” was that they really liked my willingness to talk about the times I failed as a leader, or struggled, or I got it wrong. I don’t know about you, but I’ve learned more from my stumbles than I have from my wins. I’m pretty sure Joseph Campbell did not have an archetype that was like the hero who gets it right all the time. The least interesting story ever.
This concludes Part I of the interview with LeBlanc. Stay tuned for Part II.
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