Page 12 - BusinessWest May 12, 2025

EDUCATION >>
School of Thought
Outgoing WNE
President Talks
About ‘Getting
to the Other
Side’ of Current
Challenges
BY GEORGE O’BRIEN
“A shift in the market.”
That’s how Robert Johnson,
president of Western New Eng-
land University, chose to describe
the current state of higher educa-
tion, knowing this is a huge understatement.
Indeed, colleges and universities were already
under great amounts of stress due to declining
enrollments, rising costs, weaker bottom lines, and
mounting questions about the cost and value of a
college education. And that was before the Trump
administration started what the Boston Globe and
others are calling a ‘reign of terror,’ pressuring insti-
tutions on matters such as DEI policies and efforts
to curb antisemitism with threats involving every-
thing from the cancelation of grants to removal of
schools’ tax-exempt status.
“I don’t think higher ed has ever been
through this — I’ve been in higher ed
35 years, and I’ve never seen anything
like this.”
“It was already a fairly rapid pace of change, and
what’s going on at the federal level is merely accel-
erating the pace of change, creating high levels of
anxiety,” said Johnson. “I don’t think higher ed has
ever been through this — I’ve been in higher ed 35
years, and I’ve never seen anything like this.”
But, at the end of the day, and in his opinion,
this is just ... a shift in the market, or another shift,
one of many that higher education institutions have
faced over the years, decades, or centuries, depend-
ing on how long they’ve been around, said Johnson,
who referred early and often to the proverbial ‘other
side’ of this current shift.
“I don’t want to call it a ‘new normal,’ because
I think we’re creating ‘normal,’ and it’s going to be
different,” he said. “What that ‘different’ is ... who
knows? But I think we must remain agile enough
to change with the times. My perspective is simple;
Western New England
University President
Robert Johnson
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