MERCY COLLEGE
Main campus - Dobbs Ferry, New York
Mercy College’s Mercy Success Toolkit focuses on six broad areas of activity, intended to improve student learning, persistence, graduation, and career placement. Mercy College’s academic deans, faculty, and key administrative staff implemented the following strategies to increase student success:
Faculty Excellence: Opportunities for faculty to participate in professional development activities and engage with students outside the classroom
Course Redesign: Redesigned courses, which had typically served as “gatekeepers” to student success, by incorporating necessary math and English supports and remediation
PACT Mentoring and Targeted Interventions: Customized student support enabling the college to effectively monitor student progress and intervene as individually necessary to keep students on track
Choice Architecture: Utilization of Guided Pathways (GPS) for structure, built-in feedback, and support to help students make more informed choices without limiting their options
Multiply High Impact Educational Practices: Expanded active learning opportunities in the classroom, such as internships and project-based learning
Career Landing Paths: Foundation for students to launch their careers through internships, relationships with employers, and intersections between the career office and academic curriculum
‘Is it better to go get better students, or to get better for the students we have? You have to make that choice. Most institutions make the choice of pursuing more academically talented students. This institution made the choice of getting better for the students we have’.
— President Tim Hall
TIM HALL
President of Mercy College
Timothy L. Hall received a BA in Philosophy from the University of Houston in 1978, followed by two years of graduate work in the Religious Studies department at Rice University in Houston, Texas, before attending law school and receiving his juris doctorate from the University of Texas Law School in 1983. After five years as a trial lawyer, Hall became a professor of law at the University of Mississippi, where he later served as associate vice chancellor of Academic Affairs. He then served for seven years as the president of Austin Peay State University in Clarksville, Tennessee, where he helped pioneer the innovative use of technology to support students. Hall became the twelfth president of Mercy College in 2014 and has focused on both increasing enrollment at the college’s four campuses and promoting greater student success. His particular mission has been to reach out to traditionally underserved students in higher education, giving them the tools and technology for greater student retention. In 2015, Mercy College was recognized as one of the ‘Bright Spots in Hispanic Education’ by the White House Initiative on Educational Excellence for Hispanics.4
How has your personal journey informed your motivations to do this work?
Out of law school I worked for a federal judge for one year, and then I practiced for five years as a trial lawyer, which is a pretty intense life. One year, one of my colleagues from the law firm applied and ended up becoming a law professor at Texas Tech University. The next year, three more of us applied from the same small office. One of us went to North Texas to become business faculty, one to Oklahoma, and I went to Mississippi.
After a number of years, I was invited to join the provost office at the University of Mississippi. I spent five years in that role and then made the move to Tennessee, where I was the president of Austin Peay State University. We’d been focused very much on student success and how to help more of our students persist to graduation. After about seven years at Austin Peay, I was trying to chart out the rest of my career. I had a dozen or so years left that I thought I would work, until I was 70. I was trying to understand whether I would stay there. People would have been very happy to see me stay. But I was worried that you couldn’t do the job well for 20 years in one spot, so I started looking for another situation.
What does innovation mean to you in the context of your work as an institutional leader?
When I hear the phrase “change agent” it makes me want to put my hand on my wallet. I have frequently seen situations where somebody comes in with a vision of exactly what ought to happen. When everybody is startled and aghast at the speed of the changes and they complain about not being included, that person says, ‘Well, that’s what happens when you’re an agent of change’.
How did you experience the severity of external pressures on your institution?
In my conversations with the search committee and then ultimately with the board at Mercy, it was clear that the board was very interested in student success. That was a priority for them. They deliberately considered whether they were looking for a president who would be primarily external and primarily engaged in fundraising, or a president who would be predominantly internal to help the institution front itself in ways that would be more conducive to the success of students.
They ultimately opted for the internal president who would be focused on helping the institution frame itself. I was very interested in that work. I had been engaged in it in Tennessee. It’s some of the most important work going on right now. The traditional models of external presidents who aren’t engaged in such work are out. For most institutions there’s a lot of pressure and a lot of need to reframe themselves. That requires leadership inside. That’s what Mercy wanted and that’s what I wanted, so that’s how we ended up together.
The broad context is that higher education over the last generation has increasingly discovered that institutions can be framed in ways that support the success of their student—or don’t. Higher education was generally experiencing more financial stress, so the notion that an institution had the power to do things that would support students persisting, studying, and continuing to pay tuition all the way towards graduation was important. I don’t think there was an institution that could ignore that. The narrow context was that Mercy’s board knew who it was serving and had traditionally served the population of students that experienced special challenges, greater challenges, when it came to persistence and completion.
How would you describe the leadership structure you created?
I have this quotation from Lao Tzu that I learned in high school: ‘A leader is best when people barely know he exists. When his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say: we did it ourselves’. That’s been imprinted on my mind all my life.
I believe that all of us know more than any of us. That means that I lack knowledge, and the only way to get it is to build many bridges to people, so they can help me understand what I need to understand for my role. That means I don’t view myself as the primary decision-maker. I view myself as the person who facilitates decisions getting made because you can’t normally act unless you make some decisions.
In all sorts of everyday business, it’s a matter of getting us to a decision. That means getting the right people talking, and understanding who’s the right person to make a decision if it’s not going to be some collective. This strategy comes from a legal background, where law is very much about understanding appropriate patterns of deference. Who deserves deference? Who is the right decision-maker for this particular point?
I’m not the best person to make all the decisions, I’m simply not. I saw that in law and now at the university. There will be people who come into my office constantly, wanting me to make decisions about the menu for a particular event, or the floral arrangements, or all sorts of other details. I constantly try to convey that I don’t know anything about those matters. We need to get the people who know the most about those matters to make those decisions.
I think of the whole institution as predominantly like that. I’m not the best person to make a decision about whether some particular faculty member is scholarly productive in a discipline outside the one I know. That means I will always defer to other decision-makers unless I have some reason to think that something’s broken, or unless somebody has to step in to cast a deciding vote.
Appropriate patterns of deference are crucial to helping the institution work. When you respect other decision-makers, that helps you lead more in your sphere, rather than when you appear to be somebody who’s going to do it all yourself. Nobody respects that. They will put up with it if they have to, but nobody respects it. People respect the notion that I don’t purport to know everything, that I will not try to make every decision, that I will respect other decision-makers. And that I will in fact encourage a place where we try to make, as much as possible, decisions collectively. I want a context where the greatest sin is not failing; it is not learning from failure. Failure is inevitable to progress.
How did you frame your vision for this work? What was the story you told about why this was important?
I aspire to be a “servant leader”, and that means I don’t just fix the problems I see, but I’m able to be directed and focused by the people in this community towards the problems they see.
I come with the presupposition that one has to earn the right to speak persuasively. The most common way that occurs is by engaging with all the institution’s constituents by listening very, very carefully to them so that they are not only inputting, but they are full partners in the work. While I was in Tennessee, that’s the path I pursued, and I’m pursuing the same path here. It’s more difficult here because we have multiple campuses. I probably spend a couple hundred hours a year in listening sessions with every academic department and every staff division, trying to hear what people perceive as our problems and our challenges and our opportunities.
I know that listening is an act of respect, but it loses a great deal of its value if people discover that there’s no action that follows. The action piece is very, very important.
Every institution has a mission, and my experience most places is it doesn’t mean anything because it’s in a book someplace high on a shelf. Mercy’s mission is spoken about constantly. It informs and guides things on a day-to-day level. People will say, ‘I’m not sure that’s consistent with our mission’, or, ‘This is what we have to do because of our mission’. Mission, especially understood to serve traditionally underserved students, is always at the forefront of Mercy. In fact, this is one of the things that drew me because most institutions that I’ve been a part of have this implicit notion that the solution to most of our problems is to get better students.
One of the things I was listening very closely to when I started interviewing with Mercy is whether that’s the kind of president they were looking for, a president who will find better students and gradually migrate away from the demographics they currently served. I was very happy to discover that they clearly understood, no, that’s not the goal. We understand getting better not as getting better students, but as getting better for the students we have. That’s what getting better is about, and that’s what they wanted: a president to help lead the community to get better for the students we have.
Mercy College Visual Case Study
Executive Leadership
Before stepping into his role, President Hall ensured he was aligned with the board of directors, that his leadership efforts would be focused internally to help the college redefine itself in service of student success. He delegated decisions to those who knew the most rather than relying on the traditional organizational hierarchy, and he encouraged a culture that could embrace failure in service of learning.
Spark
The board mandated President Hall when he joined to focus internally to improve student persistence and completion, specifically for their student population, which faces greater challenges with academic success.
Sense-Making
President Hall spent his first year identifying innovative grassroots efforts scattered across the organization that aligned with best practices in the field. He provided a framework to unite them as strategic priorities to enable focus, collaboration, and experimentation across the college.
New Vision
‘Defeat Demography’ was Mercy’s transformative rallying cry. This slogan refocused the college to improve its services and student outcomes, versus the traditional focus of “improving” the caliber of students accepted into the college.
Team/Mandate
A clear and cohesive strategy enabled teams to act “in sync” across departments. President Hall enabled innovation across the college by prioritizing and funding distinct pilot programmes and by granting teams a high degree of autonomy. Collaboration was encouraged through team design and incentives.
Iteration
A culture of innovation continues to spread as learning-from-failure (rather than hiding it) becomes an organizational norm; pilot programmes scale naturally and rapidly through successful engagement of faculty, staff, and students.
Mercy College Mercy Success Toolkit
FACULTY EXCELLENCE
Faculty can participate in professional development activities and engage students outside the classroom.
CHOICE ARCHITECTURE
Utilizing Guided Pathways (GPS), students receive structure, built-in feedback, and support to make more informed choices without limiting their options.
MULTIPLY HIGH IMPACT EDUCATIONAL PRACTICES
Active learning opportunities are expanded in the classroom, such as internships and project-based learning.
COURSE REDESIGN
Courses that typically had served as “gatekeepers” to student success were redesigned by incorporating math and English supports and remediation.
PACT MENTORING & TARGETED INTERVENTIONS
Customized student supports enable the college to effectively monitor student progress and intervene as individually necessary to keep students on track.
CAREER LANDING PATHS
Students are provided with the foundation to launch their careers through internships, relationships with employers, and intersections between the career office and academic curriculum.
Who They Serve
Mercy College students hail from diverse backgrounds and are largely first-generation college students.
Providing Access
Mercy College admits students based on a combination of academic achievement, leadership potential, extracurricular activities, and ability to contribute to the campus community. Standardized test scores are optional to their application.
Enabling Success
Mercy College’s Mercy Success Toolkit is a set of strategies focused on six broad areas of activity, intended to improve student learning, persistence, graduation, and career placement. These strategies were designed to scale to all Mercy students rather than a subset considered high-risk.
4 ‘The White House Designates Mercy College a Bright Spot in Hispanic Education’, Mercy College News, 22 September 2015, https://www.mercy.edu/newsroom/white-house-designates-mercy-college-bright-spot-hispanic-education