The Academic Senate at the University of California, Berkeley, created the in 1968 to honor extraordinary contributions to the advancement of higher education. Past recipients include former Supreme Court Justice and California Governor Earl Warren, Carnegie Corporation President Vartan Gregorian, former Harvard President Derek Bok, former Columbia University and University of Michigan President Lee Bollinger, UC Berkeley Chancellor Carol Christ, and former Gates Foundation CEO Sue Desmond-Hellmann. This year, the award went to one of our own: , EdD’17, alumna of 91ÌƲ®»¢ of education and human development.
Burns is the founding CEO of the , a network of 19 major public universities whose presidents collaborate rather than compete. They test what works, scale it, and share it with the institutions that need it most. Named one of the by Washington Monthly, Burns has helped reshape how institutions work together to drive student success. Under her leadership, UIA’s member universities, serving more than 600,000 students, exceeded their public goal of 68,000 additional graduates, ultimately producing more than 164,000. The work has been featured on 60 Minutes and in the documentary Unlikely.
Burns formed UIA during her first semester as a student in Peabody College’s doctorate of education program in . In this interview, she discusses her work, her 91ÌƲ®»¢ education, the reputational crisis facing higher education, and what Peabody graduates can do to help.
How do you advance UIA’s mission as CEO?
A lot of what I do is shuttle diplomacy between institutions. I help them recognize that the challenges they think are unique to them are actually shared, and I unite them around a sense of urgency to accomplish something bigger than any one institution could do alone.
I work with presidents, chancellors, and provosts to identify issues that higher education will struggle with in five to seven years, problems people don’t know about yet. After 12 years of operating as the R&D lab for the sector, we’re uniquely positioned to tackle shared challenges and scale solutions across different institutional contexts. That work requires constant listening to what’s happening on campuses and inside our projects and then building the conditions for it to spread.
I build partnerships with national funders aligned with our mission, attracting $45 million that our member institutions match dollar for dollar, work with media partners and journalists to surface and elevate the impact happening on campuses, and engage policymakers who can help translate what we’re learning into broader change.
Here’s an example: right now, institutions are being pursued by AI competitors like Google and OpenAI to sign enterprise-level contracts. Most college presidents aren’t equipped to navigate that decision on their own. There’s so much at stake, including intellectual property and student data, with wide-ranging repercussions. We built a framework that presidents can share with their CIOs to ask the right questions and identify the right solution for their institution.
We know we’re not the only ones facing these decisions. What tools can we build for under-resourced campuses across the country, for institutions in rural areas where leaders are already doing three interim roles? Their students deserve innovative solutions, too.
It’s extremely humbling to receive the Clark Kerr Award. When you look at past recipients, from Earl Warren to Derek Bok to Sue Desmond-Hellmann, these are towering figures. What’s groundbreaking is that this is the first time, as far as I can tell, that the award explicitly recognizes cross-institutional collaboration and student success. That matters.
What does your typical day look like?
I never have the same day twice, which is why I love this job. At its core, my work is about building and reinforcing trust across institutions, then putting that trust to use on projects that solve problems that would otherwise become barriers for the entire field.
I operate at multiple altitudes: funders, presidents, provosts, our UIA Fellows, my team, the media. On any given day I might be on a campus diagnosing what’s getting in the way, meeting funders, sharing what we’ve learned in a keynote, or working with reporters to help our findings reach a broader audience. I collaborate with peers nationally to learn what they’re seeing. And despite everything, I work actively to maintain an abundance mindset rather than a scarcity one. That’s hard right now. Our sector is under attack, funders are recalibrating, and the moment demands that we anticipate what’s needed before strategies catch up.
Here’s a concrete example: other campuses are still wrestling with why D/F/Withdrawal rates are spiking. We just completed an 11-institution initiative, taking a proven model from one campus, scaling it to 10 others, and validating it with a randomized controlled trial. Students who receive a D, F, or withdrawal and then retake a course will pass only 53 percent of the time. Across our eleven institutions, that rate climbed to 83 percent. Now we’re tackling prevention. And we’ve unpacked the intervention at the most fundamental level so any campus can apply it, even ones we’ll never work with directly. That’s the job: solve it, prove it, give it away.
We’re also building a leadership pipeline alongside this work. More than fifty dynamic change leaders have served as UIA Fellows, providing the innovation and change management talent infrastructure the field has been missing. Twelve of our former Fellows have already become presidents, provosts, or system leaders. The network grows while doing the work, creating pathways for people who want to lead complex change inside trusted institutions.
Why did you choose to pursue your doctorate at Peabody?
After nearly a decade working in higher education, I had been racing between challenges and priorities without ever getting the chance to go deep. I wanted to finally sit with the real literature, study the field I had already been working in, and understand why higher education kept facing the same obstacles. I was ready to stop reacting and start learning, at the level of theory and evidence, why these patterns persisted.
I was already making an impact as chief of staff for the Oregon University System, but I wanted to pause and zoom out rather than stay on the same path. I was fortunate to serve as an American Council on Education Fellow, shadowing Arizona State University President Michael Crow for a year, which gave me a broader view of the landscape and turned out to be the perfect precursor to my time at Vandy.
It was wild timing to be starting my program during the public launch of UIA. I vividly remember starting the day in meetings in the West Wing and catching a flight to Nashville to make it to class on time. It was exhausting and invigorating at the same time. For the first three years, I used the literature and learning from my academic work at Vandy to directly inform what we were building at UIA.
How did your doctoral education shape the way you think about systems change and innovation?
My education in the LPO program fundamentally shaped how I think about systems change. I can recall specific courses that influenced my work in vivid detail, and their impact shows up in everything UIA does.
An early lesson about the difference between coverage and transfer of knowledge shifted how I approach the diffusion of innovation, and that has become an area of true distinction for UIA. No one in the field does diffusion as well as we do. I say that not to brag, but because it is genuinely all I care about. Not whether we get more press or create more things, but whether what we share is truly useful to the field, and whether people in under-resourced institutions can take what we learn, apply it, and help their students. True transfer. That lesson from Peabody directly influenced our theory of change.
My quantitative and qualitative methods courses were equally essential. Now I oversee evaluators and build evaluation strategies for every project. I use that training constantly. Without my doctoral education, I likely would have created something that looked like other collaborative or intermediary organizations. But because I was going through this rigorous program while building UIA as an—at the time—one-person team, we ended up with something genuinely responsive to what the field needed.
I won’t pretend it was easy. I don’t recommend launching a national organization while pursuing a doctorate. But the training made an enormous difference in everything I’ve done since, and I carry it with me every day.
What was it like taking weekend classes with other working professionals?
It was so enriching that I can’t imagine getting an Ed.D. without that experience. Everyone had to show up in person over weekends, which was incredibly difficult. I’ve done online learning, but there’s something fundamentally different about being in the room with people that way.
Each person was doing something completely different: a K-12 superintendent, a college administrator, a nonprofit leader. It was an intentionally designed, highly curated cohort. Most of the learning comes from your peers. You see how a superintendent adapts instructional design ideas, how someone running a national nonprofit adapts them, and you become vastly more aware of the full landscape of how education shows up and needs to change. It was invaluable.
What unfinished work in higher education keeps you most motivated?
What keeps me motivated is a simple question: What does America need in 2050? What does each state need in 2050? How many plumbers will we need? How many doctors, teachers, engineers? What kinds of pathways have to exist so that students can move from education into real economic mobility? How do we align talent and opportunity at the state level so that communities thrive? That is the next frontier. And it is exactly where our work is headed.
For the first decade, we measured success by degrees. We set a public goal to graduate 68,000 more students than projected. We reached 164,000. That matters, but the scoreboard has changed.
It is no longer enough to confer degrees. We have to move the needle on post-college mobility. We have to ensure that students can translate education into stability, homeownership, family security, and long-term opportunity. The public is not asking for abstract arguments about the value of higher education. They are asking whether their children will be able to build a life. They want to know that, regardless of what happens with AI or economic disruption, someone is thinking seriously about the future. Policymakers are not positioned to do that. They are consumed by immediate crises. That is the void universities should step into.
If we want to shift public opinion, we do it through action. We lead on the future. We convene cross-sector partners. We align education with workforce needs without apology. We design pathways that connect learning to real opportunity.
The promise of higher education is activating talent. Geniuses are born everywhere. The capacity to solve the problems of 2050 is sitting in classrooms right now. Our job is to bring that talent forward.
Public skepticism is not irrational. Higher education is expensive. Too many people enroll and never finish. Too many graduates struggle to translate their degrees into mobility. We have been too elitist and disconnected from the communities we serve. We cannot dismiss those critiques. We have to listen to them. Adapt.
Workforce alignment is not a betrayal of our mission. It is core to our mission. People invest in education because they want the chance to take care of their family, to have a great life. And millions who need what we offer still are not getting it. What we do is too important to let defensiveness get in the way of progress.
The future requires us to do better. To listen. To partner with communities. To align talent with the real challenges our states will face. To lead where others need us. This is the opportunity. To step into the long term. To design for 2050. To rally institutions not just to survive disruption, but to lead through it. To prove our value by activating talent and solving real problems. That is what higher education is for. And that is what keeps me motivated.
How do you hope Peabody graduates will help carry this work forward?
Peabody graduates are exactly the kind of leaders this work needs. They understand policy, systems and how to lead change inside complex institutions. They have learned in community and built relationships across disciplines. That preparation maps directly onto what it takes to scale innovation, connect completion to real mobility outcomes, and help institutions evolve in ways that serve students and communities well.
The opportunity in front of higher education right now is enormous, and we need a generation of leaders who are ready to step into it. I am genuinely excited about what they will build.
