Bo Rutledge, The Transformative Power of Higher Ed

92- 135. Bo Rutledge
Bo Rutledge, Will Bachman

Will Bachman  00:02
Bo, hello and welcome to the 92 report conversations with members of the Class of 1992 at Harvard and Radcliffe. I’m your host, will Bachman, and I’m here today with Peter Bowman Rutledge, who we all knew as Bo Rutledge in college. Bo, welcome to the show. Thank you will. It’s good to see you. Bo, I always start with a question about to tell me about your journey since graduating from Harvard, but I did want to just acknowledge what you, you know, shared with me before we start recording here, that the past three days you’ve been with with your mom. I just wanted to kind of give space, you know, to that. Yeah, I appreciate it. I guess it’s kind of a full circle moment. You know, for those of our classmates who have

Bo Rutledge  00:47
walked the journey of a passing of a parent, it’s a time of tremendous reflection. And so, as you mentioned, and as I shared with you when it started, my mom has been in a in a nursing home in February, since February of 2019, following kind of a life-altering accident, and about a week ago, actually, the day of our twin daughters’ High school graduation, we had arranged for her to watch it online, and my plan was, after the graduation to call her and talk to her a few minutes, put her on the phone at the twins. And when I made that call, I’m not a doctor, and I don’t even purport to have a lot of medical knowledge, but it was clear to me that something had changed and now she’s, you know, she’s resting peacefully. I was up with her the last couple of days. I think she has a few days before she ultimately passes, but it was kind of a full-circle moment. You know, my parents, they came from a generation that made their children’s education the highest priority. It was always the first expense in the family ledger. I don’t fully grasp all the sacrifices that they made to put me through school and put my sister through school to allow us to get out of college debt-free and experience the professional freedom that not everyone has. And so kind of circling back from that, you know, the day that we graduated from Harvard in June of 92 I already then felt called to serve. I wasn’t really interested in chasing the top dollar and the first thing that I did was I went out to California with four suitcases and worked for the governor for $18,000 a year, which went a long way in Sacramento, California. And when I was out there, you know, I had the privilege of meeting a lot of dedicated civil servants, including a lawyer named Larry Bolton, who was one of these kind of lifelong state civil servants who became kind of a mentor to me. My boss was a woman named Kim Belshe, who at that time was the Deputy Secretary of Health and Welfare. She had worked for the governor when he was in the Senate. She was a Harvard grad herself. And in the midst of all of that, I was kind of trying to figure out whether the way to to answer that call to service, ultimately, was to become a professor or to become a lawyer. And serendipity sort of took me to Scotland of all places where I ended two things happened. I ended up getting a graduate degree, and I met the woman who would become my wife. Her name is Birgit. She was and remains a citizen of Austria, and that obviously was sort of the seminal sliding doors life changing moment for me and for her. We had a wonderful year together overseas, and then did three long, painful years of long distance when I had decided I was going to attend law school, and she returned to Austria to complete her training to be a teacher. And mind you, this was in the era before cell phones, much less zoom. And so for those three years, we wrote each other a letter every day. We read the same book, and that was a way for us to keep connected. And I was the, probably the strangest customer that long distance companies ever encountered, because when you were trying to decide between ATT MCI and Sprint, my sole criterion was, what is your cheapest off-peak rate between the United States and Austria? And I remember he was $2 a minute at high peak, and it was somewhere between a nickel and a quarter a minute if you did it at the right sort of interval. So kind of fast forward a little bit. Graduated, clerked for two years, and then did a brief stint in practice, both in Europe, my wife and I were married in Europe in August of 99 and then back in the United States, we actually were in DC on 9/11 about two weeks after we had moved back. She was pregnant, she was teaching, I was practicing and jumping around a little bit after a couple of years of that, when following the birth of our first child, and we were probably at the second proverbial crossroads in our relationship, we both decided to become teachers, so myself as a law professor, her as a foreign language teacher and we’ve been doing that for nearly 22 years now, and in sort of both bringing it back full circle to mom and also kind of this point about service, I think, much in the same way that that my parents instilled in me a appreciation of the value of education, Both as a professor and in 10 years as dean here at the law school, one of my North Stars has been to do everything within my fiber, to help create a group of students who were both inspired by The power of their education, but also to do it in a way that debt, which you know, the cost and of higher education and student loans, are such a kind of recurring theme in our society, that debt doesn’t constrain their professional Freedom or their ability to realize their full potential. And so as I think about kind of this confluence of, you know, mom and dad and the values they instilled in me and how that’s informed the professional and personal choices that my wife made, you know, one of the things that I think we’re proudest of is that, during the 10 years that I served as dean, we slashed the indebtedness of our student body by more than 50% and today, if you were to walk the halls of the law school where I work, more than half of our law students will walk across the stage at graduation without a penny of debt, and what that means in terms of creating a generation of people who feel the freedom that I felt thanks to my parents, has kind of been where it all sort of comes home to roost.

Will Bachman  09:37
How did you accomplish that? As dean,

Bo Rutledge  09:40
well, it was not a straight line. I started in the job on January, 1 of 2015, and for those of our classmates who work in higher education, that was one. I affectionately refer to as the ninth circle of hell. In 2014 and 2015 applications to law schools nationally had collapsed by 40% over a couple of years, and applications to us locally had collapsed by 50% and so that you’re kind of being given the keys to the house at the time that the house is on fire and and a couple of things sort of converged at that point. One was taking that role at a school that I had been working at for five years. I had the advantage of, kind of knowing the values of the institution. You know, having attended private universities for my own education, you develop a real appreciation for what makes a public flagship university like Georgia special and one of my mentors and board members here said is that public higher education is the Greatest engine of upward socioeconomic mobility in our society and so the first thing that was important was to recognize that for the values of our institution, it was critical to hold the line on tuition. One of the things that has contributed to the student debt crisis in our country is an almost drunken addictedness to tuition increases. And so in the midst of that crisis, we said, we will not touch tuition. Tuition is actually lower than it was in 2015 The second thing that we did was we communicated.  Our school, like any college and university is privileged to have a incredibly supportive cohort of alums, and whether those alums give money or provide a student jobs or simply provide counsel to a new leader about the institution, the more that we communicated with them, the more it allowed us to sort of sharpen how we were going to pull Our institution out of the abyss that all schools found themselves in. And I think the third thing was learning how to lead a team of people. You know, we have 125 people who work at the law school, faculty and staff. Folks go into higher education not to make a ton of money. They go into higher education because they care about the impact that they can have on the lives of students. And a lot of those folks really kind of helped us walk through fire to to accomplish what we did. We cut seven and a half percent out of the operating budget on our first 18 months, and 85% of our operating budget is personnel. We invested in revenue generating opportunities, fundraisers, admissions, officers, grants officers, ways to diversify our instructional revenue, and we measured it ruthlessly, just like any other business would measure success, but with those measurements being informed by values. And so, you know, the way some schools measure their success is by the amount of money they’re spending per student, and that’s what fuels, you know, these swimming pools and massage parlors and video game rooms and stuff that schools use in this arms race to try to attract students. And we kind of said to that model, basically, go to hell. Instead, we sort of said, you know, are kids getting jobs? Are kids passing the bar? Is debt higher or lower than it was last year? In the aggregate, on average, percent not borrowing. And over time, we started to see that progress, and that progress becomes very infectious, and like any other organization, you learn to refine your message. And you know, public education is not what it was before 2008.  One of the effects of the ’08 recession was it really caused a decline in the level of public investment in public institutions, if historically, the delta between private school tuition and public school tuition was three to one by 2014 the ratio had dropped two to one. In other words, public higher education tuition was increasing at a faster clip than private which stands to reason given that that the level of public subsidy was declining.  So we needed to find a way to persuade a group of supporters who had attended school at a time when maybe it was, you know, 25 bucks a term, why they should care about it, at a time when it was, you know, $19,000 a year, which is still a bargain compared to, you know, Name your private competitor, but to them, it was like extortionate relative to the prices they were used to. And so to explain to them how they could help a first-generation college graduate, how they could help the kid of a plumber, how they could help a veteran, how they could help a student who was trying to make their way through law school with a family and that that kind of confluence of being true to values, communicating and bringing out the best in your people you know was going to the looking back, was the recipe for success that kind of came out of a crisis. You

Will Bachman  16:42
mentioned that one of your two goals was to, I mean, the one of them was, you know, reducing the debt load. The other one was inspiring students. And I’m curious. I imagine that you tried various things to help inspire students with that spirit of service. What were some things, if any that you tried that didn’t work, you know, that you thought, oh, this would, you know, this would inspire students. But you tried it and say, Oh, it was kind of not a very successful experiment. And, and what did work, you know? So, yeah, that’s a great question.

Bo Rutledge  17:20
So in some ways, I would, I would probably, I would probably bifurcate that between higher ed before COVID and higher and after COVID. The let me, let me start with the number one failure. The number one failure was in the late spring, early summer, of 2020, in the thick of the pandemic. I am, by nature, kind of a glass-half-full person and so even in the midst of the pandemic, you know, I always tried to be the eternal optimist, and trying to Be the eternal optimist where people are worried that their loved one is going to die, is not a recipe for inspiring people. It’s a recipe for making them feel like you don’t get it. And so that that experience taught me that it’s important to blend inspiration with with empathy. My point at the time was trying to be, you know, that part of being a lawyer or any professional is, is, you know, have having sort of the ability to sort of see through a crisis, and I still believe that, but, but there’s a time and a place to communicate that and that that was not the time for me to do that. What is, what is more successful than than anything else, and I think it’s what makes higher education distinctive, is when you can personally connect a current student with someone with whom they can identify, who is an older mentor. So and there, there are infinite there are infinite variations in that, as I mentioned earlier, in. One of our real projects was to support first-generation college graduates who in any given year make up about 10 to 15% of our student body, and for about five years now we have guaranteed financial assistance up to a full tuition, plus scholarship for every single one of them. There was a young man. This is, this is now a pre COVID story. There was a young man in the fall of ‘15 named Marcol. And Marcol was the one who really taught me this. He came from a town named Box Springs Georgia. And I would bet that none of your listeners have ever been to Box Springs Georgia. It is a one-street-light town in sort of Southwest Georgia, and I remember having dinner with him and our other Black Law Students in the fall of 15 and just making get to know You conversation. And I said to him, how did you decide to go to law school? And I’ll sort of give you a quick trigger warning here, his answer was pretty graphic, but I think it’s important that people hear it in his own words. And he turned to me, not sitting two feet away from me, and looked me in the eye, and he goes, when I was 10 years old, a drunk Doctor cut up my mom and my mom got a lawyer, and the lawyer got a settlement, and my single mom, raising us in a trailer, said to that lawyer, you take the proceeds of my body, and you get my Sons the education that they could never otherwise get.   Now, you hear something like that from a mid 20 something, and your natural inclination is to want to do everything you can to help him. Now, one of the things that I mentioned earlier, which I think is true about any school, including ours, is that we have a remarkably diverse, incredible set of alumni, and in this case, just up the street from Box Springs, Georgia is another town called Columbus, which is the seat of several publicly traded fortune, 100 companies, and the CEO of one of those companies and his wife are very closely connected to the university, including the law school. And so sometime after that conversation with Marcol, we had an occasion to have a reception where that couple was there, along with some of the nation’s most successful trial lawyers who have their offices in that city and he met them.  , Again, young kid raised by a single mom in a trailer meeting individuals who are worth eight nine figures, and they took him under his wing. They supported him. They were with him when his mom died. They took him shopping for his first suit. They helped him buy a wedding ring for his fiance, and now he’s graduated and thriving in practice and working for the former president of the State Bar. So if you want to really know how to inspire the next generation, if you if you want to know what makes higher education truly special in a world where we can’t and shouldn’t take it for granted, where training for professions could easily be apprenticeships, where most people in prior generations and societies couldn’t even afford or attend college. It is that unique bridge that higher ed allows to be created between two people who otherwise might never come into contact, but because of that common affiliation they have with their alma mater, both can shape the life of a young man like Marcol, but also give a powerful sense of fulfillment to people like that couple that I described, and others who poured themselves into that young person because of that common affiliation that they had. So that’s success, and it happens every day.

Will Bachman  24:59
Tell me. So what do you understand now about higher education institutions after being dean for 10 years that you did not understand even when you were a professor at a law school, what did that experience teach you, either about economics of institutions or the difficulty of shaping the culture, or why administrative expenses keep going up compared to faculty expenses or or any topic What? What did that experience of being dean teach you?

Bo Rutledge  25:33
So that’s a great question. The first and most important thing that I would sort of say, because, again, I’m a glass-half-full person, is that, is that the higher ed affordability crisis is absolutely fixable. I believe that in my fiber, and I’ve written in Bloomberg for what I think the recipe is to do that, and I can sort of unpack that later if you want. The second thing that I would say is that the student loan industry, is kind of a mixed blessing. It allows people to have access to an institution that otherwise they couldn’t afford. And it’s funny talking to alums who are in their 60s and 70s, when, when student loan, when the student loan market didn’t really exist, and you know they either worked or they lived in a trailer, or they borrowed money from family, or they didn’t go.   So the one hand, it’s overcome that access problem. On the other hand, it’s created a massive moral hazard for the institutions, because it’s always easier just to kind of perennially raise tuition two or three perecent distributed across your student body, and then, kind of fiddle from there. The third thing that I would say is I want to put sort of for-profit schools to one side because, because they’ve got their own pathologies, but the vast majority of higher ed institutions in the country that most of our classmates will be familiar with ultimately boil down to sort of two forms. They’re either government agencies or there are nonprofits, and one of the things that both of those organizations have in common is is there are not clear ownership lines. There’s not a clear sense of accountability to a board or to shareholders, and I don’t, I don’t mean to overstretch the analogy, because I think there is a risk of higher ed leaders talking in too much corporate speak. But to your question about one of the things that I learned as a dean, that I didn’t know as a professor, is that you have to figure out for yourself, what are your accountability mechanisms? What are your constituencies in a world that you don’t have the simplifying structure of you’re hired and fired by the board, and your fiduciary duties are to shareholders. And so those are probably the three things that I learned that I didn’t know, even when I was sort of on the front lines as a professor. I

Will Bachman  28:55
want to shift gears a little bit Sure, and ask you, what were some of the books that you read with Birgit at the same time? Do any of them stand out?

Bo Rutledge  29:08
Okay, so Birgit, as I said, was from Austria, and she was a English and American literature major in Austria. She wrote her master’s thesis on Toni Morrison. And so our routine was over the three years, we would take turns picking the books, and so we read all of the Toni Morrison books, and that’s one of the things that I love about her, is she like, like our partners, introduces to things that we never would have encountered otherwise. You know, she, she introduced me to the entire Toni Morrison oeuvre/   There are kind of two other books that stand out. One was an amazing book called Time’s Arrow by Martin Amis. And it’s funny because I remember when I was at Harvard, we took this class called thinking about thinking that was taught by Robert Nozick, Stephen Jay Gould and Alan Dershowitz. And it was basically a lawyer’s, a philosopher’s and a scientist’s perspective on common issues. And I think it was Gould, God rest his soul, who introduced us to the concept of Time’s Arrow, which was essentially the presumption in science as to the unidirectionality of time. So when I heard about this book, I’m like, Cool. Stephen Jay Gould times arrow. I’m a law student. I don’t I can’t recommend great literature the way that my wife can, but, but I know times arrow so Time’s Arrow is this, turns out, this amazing book about the Holocaust. And what it does is you imagine the horrors of that era. But what Amis does is he tells the story in reverse. So instead of the gas chambers incinerating people, he flips the narrative and basically says there’s this amazing figure who sort of comes back from the dead and creates these machines that pull ashes out of the air and produces people. And it was just so it captured, for me, more than anything else I’ve read the horrors of the Holocaust, but also bespoke this incredible literary style that that Amis could literally bend to Time’s Arrow and tell the narrative backwards. And the other book that, that I remember standing out was by the Japanese noblest Kenzaburo Oe, and I can’t remember the title [editor’s note:  the book is A Personal Matter], but it was about the the narrator’s having a child with severe, crippling Down syndrome in his wrestling with the question whether or not intentionally to end his child’s life in order to spare him a lifetime of pain and misery. Um, and I think I can’t remember if Oe won the the Nobel Prize around that time, but it was just a it was just a very vivid insight, and it may even have been autobiographical. I think it I think it was autobiographical because I think I subsequently read up on Oe and the fact that his child survived, but it was just an incredibly gripping glimpse into the author and narrator’s struggles about his his duties as a parent in a situation of unspeakable misery and watching his child suffer.

Will Bachman  33:35
Tell me a bit more about the contours of your you know, Journey outside being a outside of being a law professor about what else has been going on with you,

Bo Rutledge  33:47
let’s see, it’s a good question. So I think one thing that has been pretty definitional. Well, maybe two things. One is, I have had the privilege for nearly 30-40, years of traveling extensively, both personally, but also professionally. And so to kind of give you two reference points here, I mentioned earlier that after Birgit and I were first married, we spent the first couple of years living and working in Europe, where we were based in Vienna, Austria. And I was practicing law at the time at an international law firm where Vienna was kind of a locker room where you sort of went where the places and the clients needed you. There were two places that I had to go that really stuck with me. One was Budapest Hungary, and the timing of this is important. This was in 1999-2000 and. When the Berlin Wall had fallen, Hungary was a relatively nascent liberal economy, and I was working on a case involving the privatization of the Hungarian cement industry. And so, you know, you’re part of one of these teams of lawyers that speak different languages and come from different traditions, and the case was over, and we had one of these sort of rare days where, you know, you’re spending most of your time in some city, in and out of hotel rooms and law firms, and you’ve got, like, a day to just be and I was going through Budapest with one of my counterparts. His name was Zoltan and I remember saying to him, as we were in the square in Budapest, I said, Zoltan, I realized you and I were both in college when the Berlin Wall fell, and I know that Hungary played a critical role, because that was the country through which a lot of East Germans were going as the as the Iron Curtain was crumbling. And I said, I remember exactly where I was in Dunster house my sophomore year at Harvard, when the Berlin Wall fell. And I said, What did you do on that day. And he said, I sat on the front steps of my student house in Budapest, and I read Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations. And I said, you’re kidding. And he goes, You don’t realize he goes the day before. If I did that, I would have been swept up and never seen again. He said, I have people classmates whom I assume are dead because of the ideas that they wanted to learn about and could not do so in public. So that was one two. About a year later, I spent the better part of a year in a town called Ostrova, which is a factory town in the Czech Republic. We were working on a case involving a steel mill, which is kind of the factory that fed the town, and our client was a the general manager of the factory, a guy called Pretsch. And Pretsch had been the general manager of the factory during communism and after communism, and I remember going and meeting him for the first time. And he did not speak English. I didn’t speak Czech. And so we communicated in German, and one of the first things I said to him was, and mind you, just to situate it for you and our classmates. This is, I think, the fall of 2000 maybe the spring of 2000 fall 2000 That’s right. I said, I’m your lawyer. Whatever you tell me, I will keep in complete confidence, and I would go to prison before revealing your confidence and and he looked at me, and he was like, You’re joking. Right in his mind, lawyers were part of the apparatus of the state, and if he told me something that I thought the state needed to know, that I would turn around and tell the Czech government. And it took a couple of months, but eventually he came to trust me in a way that you know, I think you and I would take for granted with with a lawyer today. So that would be sort of one, and the other two would be in in my my current job.  I’ve also traveled to a lot of countries to teach and and it’s always fascinating to go to places like Poland or India where their university traditions are, in some ways historically very rich, but in other ways still very nascent, right? I mean, you know, if you really given, given all the Harvard is going through right now when Alan Garber and John Manning talk about the great American research university being one of the true crown jewels of a liberal democratic republic, they are 110% correct. But if you go to Jagiellonian University in Krakow Poland. Or you go to Jindal University in Sonipat, India, and you talk to the people who are building those universities, and you talk to the students there two things ring out. One is they are inspired by our system of higher education here, and two is that the students and their families are profoundly aware of the sacrifices that they are making in order to realize the benefits of an education that many kids in India would never have, and it’s just, you know, to sort of bring it back home to those four years we had together at Harvard. I think one of the interesting things about dedicating your professional life to higher education is it really anchors for you where our alma mater and our system of higher education, of which is it is a part is Situated in the larger world and other countries systems i

Will Bachman  41:23
Yes. Bo, turning back to Harvard, yep. Are there any courses or professors that you had that continue to resonate with you?

Bo Rutledge  41:34
Yes. So probably the person who is top of mind right now is Michael Sandel. You know, a lot of us took Moral Reasoning 22 justice, but I’ve actually been in touch with Professor Sandel a good bit recently because I started teaching a course this year, actually, to undergraduates called moral dilemmas and and the rationale for the course goes something like this. Number one, we often hear today that there is a real inability to have hard conversations about divisive issues in America’s classrooms. And I, I acknowledge that perception exists, but I fervently reject the proposition that we are beyond repair. In some ways, I think one of the greatest professional obligations of those of us who have the privilege to work in the industry right now is to is to responsibly and professionally take the risks to create those spaces in our classrooms. And so Professor Sandel’s justice class was very much an inspiration for constructing a class on moral dilemmas where we talked about the end of life, we talked about capital punishment, we talked about when, if ever, it is appropriate to keep secrets or even lie for the sake of national security, when, If ever, is can public safety justify the override of civil liberties? And I will tell you, through the entire semester, we had a rich debate and discussion, and things never went off the rails with that incredible group of 24 kids. So Sandel, I’ll always be grateful to and I would sort of add to that Dennis Thompson. He taught and Stanley Hoffman taught two classes in my senior year, Thompson taught political ethics and public policy, and Hoffman taught ethics and international relations. And those two, along with Sandel’s, course, very much, has shaped a lot of my thinking about how I try to equip our counterparts in 2025 with the toolbox to be able to sort of confront ethically nettlesome issues. The other two people who sort of stand out are Paul Pierson and Mark Peterson. They were both in the government department. I worked for Paul as a research assistant for two summers, and he really just kind of taught me how to have faith in my ideas. You know, one of the things that I think is interesting about Harvard is it is simultaneously incredibly intellectually intimidating but also liberating. It’s intimidating in the sense that you’re surrounded by really smart, accomplished people, and it’s liberating in the sense that you realize that we all put our pants on one leg at a time, and you know, we all do stupid stuff and embarrass ourselves a little bit of college, and that’s part of growing up. But. But, but Pierson taught me how to have faith in my ideas. And Peterson taught me how to write. He was my senior thesis lecturer, advisor. He ripped my thesis to shreds, but, but the end product, he deserves all the credit in the world for, you know, teaching me that, you know, if I if I’d gotten that far driving in fourth gear, that there was a fifth gear in me that just needed to be brought out. And I care so much about Mark that when I became dean, I had him come out here and give a lecture to the university for all of his research on the American healthcare system, which is what I wrote my thesis on because I wanted, I wanted my students to see the through line between somebody that had an impact on me, and hopefully let them catch a little bit of fruit that fell from that three.

Will Bachman  45:57
Bo, for listeners that want to find out more about your writing and your research and your teaching and what you’re doing. Where is the best place for them to go online?

Bo Rutledge  46:08
Well, I’ll start by saying I have no social media presence whatsoever. I just never, I guess I’ve reached the age where I’ve become a Luddite and I and I started to tell my students to just get off of it. I think it I’m a I’m a firm believer in the anxious generation theory, but I do have a webpage at the University of Georgia Law School, and that sort of says nice things about what I’ve written and what I’ve done, but suffice it to say, if any of our classmates find themselves anywhere near Athens Georgia, they should give me a holler or shoot me an email. The email address is on the website, and be lovely to see them.

Will Bachman  47:00
Fantastic. Bo, thank you so much for joining today. Thanks. Will