As university presidents heighten engagement with lawmakers, Samford’s Beck A. Taylor said there’s a need to approach the state and federal government as crucial donors.

Taylor touched upon his two decades of higher education leadership during an appearance on the “Saturdays at Seven” podcast, part of the Christian Scholar’s Review’s conversation series.

“The way I think about our state government and our federal government is they are among the largest donors,” he said. “They don’t see themselves that way, of course, and we don’t really see them like that. But if you were to list the entities from whom the university receives either direct or indirect financial benefit, certainly the federal government would be at the top of that list.”

Federal research grants and student aid programs funnel millions to many institutions. States augment with additional need grants and other financial resources. “If you look at our state governments as essentially backers of our programs from that financial sense, then we should be spending a lot of time with them and encouraging them about the positive outcomes of the institution,”  Taylor said.

Describing relationships with policymakers in Congress and state legislatures as more transactional—operating under the premise of “I can give you this if you’ll give me that”—Taylor said they’re nonetheless crucial to the financial stability of higher education.

“It’s not my favorite thing to do. I’d much rather work with donors that have a more charitable mindset,” he said. 

“Any president of a university these days needs to be at least comfortable with the idea that it’s going to be a big part of their role, cultivating and strengthening those (government) relationships.”

Other takeaways from Taylor’s appearance on the “Saturdays at Seven” podcast:

• Arriving at Samford’s Brock School of Business in 2005 and becoming, at the time, the youngest dean of an accredited business school in the nation at age 35:

“I really give Dr. (Tom) Corts and Samford huge kudos for taking a chance on me. Really taking somebody who probably didn’t know as much as they probably thought he did and really investing in him as a young administrative professional. Together we got a lot accomplished.”

• Making his 2010 move from the Bible Belt to the Pacific Northwest—perhaps the most unchurched region of the country—to become president at Whitworth University:

“If people went to church in Spokane, Washington, it was because they really loved Jesus. There was no social capital. There was no benefit from identifying as a faithful person or as a Christian in that environment,” he said. “So leading a Christian university in an environment that was, at best, skeptical of and maybe at worst, a little belligerent toward all things faithful or Christian, that was certainly a change for me.”

• How Taylor's economist’s background benefits his university leadership: 

“I consider myself to be a classical or a neoclassical economist. As a micro economist I could go back really far in history and talk about some moral philosophers. But probably the first modern economist that I read as a young student that really resonated with me was Milton Friedman—somebody who really modernized and formalized the study of mathematical models and economics. Reading Friedman really convinced me of the predictive power of economics and the opportunity to understand how incentives matter in human behavior and how we can formalize that through various rules, laws, mathematics. Economists can have quite a bit of power as it relates to having a slightly different perspective on how a policy or a rule or a decision might impact a larger system.

“It’s not that different from my job as a CEO or a university president. So often I’m presented with several ways the university might structure its rules, policies, procedures, things like that, and I think as an economist. While I don’t have 100% foresight, I can often see the peril or the perils in certain policies if they were to be enacted. I think that gives me a little bit of a superpower, if you will, to be able to say, well, OK, how do we ameliorate that perverse incentive? Or how do we take care of people who might be marginalized because of this particular policy or rule?”

• On the need for higher education institutions to reinvite the Church into their campuses:

“I remind people all the time that, but for a handful of examples and literally a handful, every private college or university in this country was founded by the Church and for the Church. And so almost every private college and university can trace its roots and its history back to a faithful group of people who thought it was important for their communities to be blessed by an educational institution for all the reasons we talked about earlier.

“Sadly in the 20th century, as you know, many institutions began to jettison those relationships. And now, depending on how you count, there are just a fraction of institutions left that really take very seriously their relationship with the Church. Universities are not churches. We serve the Church in important ways, I think, and here at Samford, we do that in a variety of different ways.”