Morehead-Cain president, Chris Bradford, joined Catalyze with scholar host, Elias Guedira ’26, to share about the state of the Program after his first year and a half in the role.
Morehead-Cain president, Chris Bradford, joined Catalyze with scholar host, Elias Guedira ’26, to share about the state of the Program after his first year and a half in the role. The president talks about the progress the Morehead-Cain community made in 2022 and what opportunities he sees for the Program in 2023 and beyond.
You can learn more about the Program by viewing the online 2021–2022 Year in Review.
Chris joined the Morehead-Cain Foundation in the summer of 2021 after 17 years with African Leadership Academy (ALA), an educational institution based in Johannesburg, South Africa.
The intro music is by Scott Hallyburton ’22, guitarist of the band South of the Soul.
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Catalyze is hosted and produced by Sarah O’Carroll for the Morehead-Cain Foundation, home of the first merit scholarship program in the United States and located at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. You can let us know what you thought of the episode by finding us on Twitter or Instagram at @moreheadcain or you can email us at communications@moreheadcain.org.
(Elias)
Chris, thank you so much for joining the show.
(Chris)
Elias, thank you for having me. It’s great to be here.
(Elias)
It’s been about a year and a half since you’ve assumed your role as Morehead-Cain’s president. How do you feel?
(Chris)
I feel great. It’s hard to believe it’s been 18 months, to be honest. I feel like I arrived here yesterday, and yet I’ve also built relationships in the time that I’ve been here that I feel that I’ve had for so much longer than 18 months, just as a result of the depth with which I’ve been able to get to know members of this community—scholars, staff, alumni. It’s a wonderful place to be.
(Elias)
What do you feel like has been the most surprising thing about members from this community? Did you have any first impressions that were kind of torn down as you got to meet people a lot better?
(Chris)
Well, the thing that blows me away at Morehead-Cain is simply how pleasant and friendly everyone is. I’ve just had the opportunity to get to know people in ways that I think I wasn’t fully accustomed to, and get to know people early as a result of a shared culture and a shared set of values that have existed here over a long period of time. We just had our Forum, Elias, as you know, and the thing that was so neat is to see members of the classes of the 1970s in conversations with members of our classes of 2020s, and to the see that those classes look very different just because the university has changed in so many ways, but so many of the underlying character attributes are the same. And you see those collide with each other in conversation. And it’s a really wonderful thing to be a part of.
(Elias)
I’m so glad that you’ve had such a positive experience since joining the team. What was your focus or goals when you started and what have you learned, and what do you look forward to learning more about?
(Chris)
When I arrived here, I was personally going through a massive contextual change. I had been living in the Global South. I had been working with secondary school students who were transitioning to university and students who were from a very diverse environment but all across the African continent. I was moving to the Global North, a very high resourced university with students who are primarily from the United States and half of whom are from the state of North Carolina, where I’d never lived before. And so, it was important to enter that with some level of humility and just seek to understand this place and also understand the scholarship program at Morehead-Cain. I have great respect for history and for the institutional customs and norms that build over a period of time, and it was clear that there were so many things that were so strong as a function of a culture that had been built over many years, and I wanted to make sure that I understood that versus simply trying to leave my mark. My success is going to be a function of my being one of this community rather than simply being in a position of leadership in this community. And I hope that others perceive me as having had some success in learning this space. I think I’m still learning this space every day. I’ve enjoyed that challenge immensely.
(Elias)
So as you’ve transitioned from your former African Leadership Academy, coming to North Carolina and really immersing yourself in this space, what have you found to be some very effective ways to kind of get to know the culture of Chapel Hill and get to know the student body better?
(Chris)
Well, one of the ways I get to know the student body is by having people stop into my office. And so, this is a good plug for any scholars who listen to this podcast to know that they can just set an appointment with me on the MCN, as you have, Elias. And so it’s been so fun to have people stop through the office to have conversations. But also, I have a young family, and so that means that we often do walks through campus and will bump into scholars in situ, which has been a really wonderful experience for us. When I take my daughter to a volleyball game, and I run into a group of your classmates and am able to sit with them and have a conversation about their life at Carolina at that time, it’s a really special and fun thing for me.
(Elias)
Right. And going off of that, I just saw you the other day at Purple Bowl up on Franklin Street. What have you found to be your favorite food spots around town?
(Chris)
Well, my daughter would say Ben and Jerry’s, which she knows is run by Uncle Antonio—Antonio McBroom, who is a Morehead-Cain Alum. I would probably say Sutton’s, simply for the historical value associated with Sutton’s. It was one of the first places I went when I got here, and I really enjoy it.
(Elias)
Wonderful. So, Chris, 2022 was a year of transition for just about everyone. What is Morehead-Cain like, post-COVID-19, for prospective scholars? And have you spotted any trends?
(Chris)
This is a great question because I wasn’t here before COVID-19, but I had a sense of a community when I arrived that was tired for a lot of reasons. We had COVID-19, which is just a very difficult environment for any educational institution, and we had COVID-19 here at UNC-Chapel Hill on the heels of a Silent Sam reckoning that, I think, was very challenging for a number of members of our community and our student body. And so, I experienced a community that was tired, and a number of scholars who were hopeful of having a university experience that they really believed in. People were really excited about being Morehead-Cain Scholars, but hadn’t had the opportunity to live the Morehead-Cain experience. This term has been one of the most joyful I have ever experienced in schools as I walk through campus. And I think it’s a function of students really stepping into—both Morehead-Cain scholars and students across the UNC campus—really stepping into the opportunity to be back in college, enjoying their life as a scholar, and enjoying everything that a university like this has to offer because so many of those things were simply not available over the past two years.
And so, this has been a wonderful time, I think, for so many, and I hope that we can maintain that level of energy and enthusiasm about learning, about scholarship, about research, about intercultural collisions, about attending collegiate events in terms that follow. Like, I hope we’ll remember how it felt to return post-COVID, and we won’t take the things here for granted in the terms that come.
(Elias)
Now, over the past year, there have been many conversations around a set of commitments established in 2021. What progress have you seen being made, and how has the community helped?
(Chris)
Thank you for that question. I think this is one of the most important things that I needed to do in the first year, was capture a whole range of inputs, including a survey that so many members of our community, scholars, staff, and alumni contributed to, with respect to important questions of diversity and inclusion in Morehead-Cain. And coming out of that, we recognized that there are a set of timeless community commitments that we need to make, which you can find on the MCN in the President’s Corner section, that will take us years of continuing to grow towards our ideals. One is building intentional community of scholars from all different backgrounds who will thrive together as scholars on this campus and beyond as an intergenerational community. Another is expanding opportunity and making sure that the Morehead-Cain is accessible to the most extraordinary young leaders, regardless of where they are. A third is to foster discourse and learning and really invest in the type of dialogue and learning that comes from intimate conversation and a collision of ideas. And finally, ensuring that our programming is impactful for all young leaders, regardless of their background. Everyone who enters this experience deserves an experience that is college as it should be, and we need to be thoughtful about assessing the quality of our experience for every scholar and understanding where we are delivering and where we might be falling short.
I think there are a number of things that over the last year we can point to that show progress in these areas. There are some simple things. When we walk into the spaces, we can see our community represented in a way that reflects the intentionality of our community. We see art from elders in our community, as well as from current scholars in our different spaces and lighting up our spaces and asking us important questions, whether it’s Thomas Sayre’s pieces in the Scholar Lounge or scholar drone shots that are in the Dickson Room. We have questions that we’ve asked in selections that I think have both improved the rigor of our selection process, but have also uncovered places where we’re falling short. One place that I’m particularly aware that we need to do better is attracting rural scholars, for example. When we dig into the data, we see that while we run a process that sees scholars equally likely to progress every phase of our funnel, whether they are white, black, male, or female, if you cut that data differently, and you look at urban scholars versus rural scholars, we see that rural talent is less likely to shine in our process. And we have to ask what it is about our process that might be obscuring talent that we should be confident exists. Because we have a very proud history here of recognizing and attracting extraordinary rural talent into this program, and we can see that across our alumni community. And there’s much more that I think our entire community and listeners to this podcast can find in our Year in Review about our progress in each of these areas. What I want to note is that this work is not work that you undertake in a day or a month or a year or you put out a statement and it’s over. We need to assess our progress on these four big ideas every single year and then craft objectives for the year to come that we will tackle with verve.
So this year, in addition to the rural scholars question, I’m excited about progress that I think we’ll make in two areas in 2023. One is ensuring that we are modeling inclusion for scholars with disabilities for this campus and others. And we have learned so much and enjoyed so much the presence of scholars with disabilities in this community. But we also have seen, as you might have heard on a recent Catalyze podcast which you hosted with Laura and Eleanor, some of the challenges that extraordinary students on this campus face as a result of differing abilities. We need to ensure that we are setting the standard there, and there are some changes that we’ve made to our spaces and changes that we will make—we will have a lift, for example, that we’ll install in the ground floor this year—that will improve flow through the space, a small but important thing. We’re going to enhance our nominating partnerships that can access scholars with disabilities and make clear that we are a place that looks for extraordinary talent with disabilities. And that will be a win for us, and then we’ll also focus heavily on this rural scholar question, and we will, I hope, focus heavily on this question of discourse and dialogue with some initiatives that we’ll undertake, both scholar-led and program-led, in the term to come.
(Elias)
Thank you, Chris. Now you talk about initiatives being scholar-led and program-led, how would you say the Morehead-Cain community, in general, is getting involved with making the Morehead-Cain scholarship more accessible to rural students, particularly alumni and current scholars?
(Chris)
Oh, that’s an awesome question, and I think that we have not yet answered that question as fully as we need to. And if there are people listening to this podcast who think, “I want to be involved in supporting rural scholar identification,” or “I want to be involved in any of these priorities,” I hope they’ll reach out to me directly at chris@moreheadcain.orgbecause we would love to harness scholar and alumni participation in every one of these priorities.
One of the things that I think is so exciting here, Elias, is just the way in which our scholars and our alumni are able to connect with each other. The level of alumni participation at Morehead-Cain is extraordinary, from giving to the program to, more importantly, responding to emails when scholars reach out to an alum with a question, that alum always responds, to participating in the selection process. We have about 500 alumni who invest time in evaluating scholars in different phases of our selection process, ensuring that every candidate is reviewed by a diverse set of reviewers who understand this community, this place, its values. And that’s been a massive source of our success over the past 75 years.
And as we think about these challenges ahead of us, like the rural challenge, it’s going to be a question of how we capture alumni input and engagement that will help us crack that in ways that see Morehead-Cain become accessible to the most promising young leaders in all different backgrounds. And once we’ve cracked or feel we’ve made progress on the rural issue, we will inevitably find another community that we feel we have not appropriately expanded opportunity to. And that will be one that we’ll need to focus on next. And at every phase, we’ll have to find ways to get alumni involved, whether it’s going back to their schools, supporting selection in their local regions, or proposing ideas that can help us break down some of the barriers that might exist for prospective applicants today.
(Elias)
So, Chris, taking into account the full picture and thinking longer term beyond the selection process, what opportunities do you see for Morehead-Cain?
(Chris)
As I came in here, one of the questions I was asking was, we’ll have our centennial in 2045, and where do we want to be, and what’s the impact that we hope we will have had on the world as an organization and as a community in 2045, at the 100th anniversary of the establishment of the Foundation. And I think that there are a set of questions that we have to ask ourselves in order to wrap our heads around Morehead-Cain in 2045. One is, how do we want to see this program evolve such that we are identifying and investing in and empowering dynamic leaders who will shape the future over that time frame and beyond? And that includes continuing to expand opportunity in our admissions process and identify the most extraordinary leaders, as we’ve just described, but it also includes shaping the future of the program itself. How do we want to see the program evolve, and what are the opportunities we see to deepen leadership development of every scholar over the course of your time in the Program?
The second question is, how do we think about Morehead-Cain as this platform and the set of things that we’ve learned how to do so well? We run an admissions process that I think would be the envy of any highly selective college or university in the world, in terms of the number of eyes that we’re able to put on every candidate, the range of things we’re able to look at, the ways in which we’re able to use information at our disposal. And we run a program that I see as college as it should be. Every scholar goes through a series of escalating challenges and ensures that they have an extraordinary university experience. We have this amazing network, and we have this very powerful brand, particularly in the state of North Carolina, where, if you walk into high schools, you can see signs celebrating Morehead scholars going back to the 1950s. And how do we use those assets, beyond just our financial assets, to maximize our impact? And there are a number of ways in which we can think about these things. So on the first, when we think about the program and the future of the program, one of the things that I hope we will do a little more deliberately in the years ahead is articulate for scholars the outcomes that we hope to see.
One of the weaknesses I see in tertiary education is we organize ourselves around the acquisition of credits and majors rather than the articulation of a set of higher order outcomes that are essential for lifelong learning and leadership. And I actually think we have a number of implicit outcomes that we care about. We want to foster explorers. We want to build every scholar with the capacity for personal authorship. We want to help you articulate for yourself a sense of purpose. And we see that as a result of the amazing things our alumni are doing across a whole range of sectors. But I think we would help you manage your own university experience better and help us ensure outcomes for every scholar if we could actually do a better job of articulating what those outcomes that we seek are and how our programmatic investments lead to those outcomes, how can we assess our progress? And so that’s one place where I think we need to get stronger. And I think if we get stronger in that area, we set a model for how the university more broadly could get stronger in this area. And that’s exciting for me, too.
Second, when I think of us as a platform, there are low hanging fruit ideas that I think we need to tackle with gusto. I’ve been very aware in 2021 and 2022 that I’m not sure that there has been a worse time to be a school teacher in the United States of America. As I looked at what happened in Uvalde, for example, and I think about and we see the exodus of teachers from the profession. This is a profession that develops leaders for our society, right? How do we play a meaningful role in the lives of educators? And we have extraordinary scholars who know extraordinary educators. And a very low hanging fruit thing for us to do is simply thank extraordinary high school educators for the work they do to prepare leaders every day. And in so doing, I think we can also help those leaders in these classrooms all over North Carolina, all over the United States, and the world understand what Morehead-Cain is, and funnel more extraordinary scholars from all different backgrounds into our program. So starting this year, as you know, we’ve asked every scholar to tell us about a high school educator that shaped our lives. We’re also giving every semifinalist this opportunity, and then we will be giving Morehead-Cain Impact Educator Awards to all of these hundreds of educators across the state, nation, and world who are having impact on young leaders, hopefully creating a sense of celebration and adding some respect and joy to their work in the classroom. But we will also, beginning with educators in North Carolina, give them the opportunity this year to apply for Lovelace Fund Discovery Grants, small amounts of money that they can use to explore things that can help them prepare the next generation of leaders better. But in so doing and communicating this opportunity, we communicate the way in which we think about education at Morehead-Cain and how opportunities like the Discovery Fund can unlock next levels of learning and help people understand what the opportunity at Morehead-Cain and UNC is in more detail. So this is a small thing. I’m grateful to some alumni who have provided the funding for us to undertake this pilot, but it’s an example of us using our platform in a way that hopefully increases our impact on the state, nation, and world, but also has a positive effect on the future of the program by bringing even more extraordinary candidates into Morehead-Cain in the future.
And I think there are questions for us to ask about other investments that we could make that could not only enhance that core of scholars in the Morehead-Cain program, but also have a broader beneficial impact on society. And if there are alumni or scholars who are listening to this, and they think, “Hey, I’ve got an idea of something Morehead-Cain might be able to do that could both enhance the core and maximize our impact on the world,” we’d love to hear it.
(Elias)
Thank you, Chris. I was really excited to be able to finally thank one of my teachers, and thank you for trying to make college more as it should be, as a place where we’re able to pay back to those who served us.
Okay, we started talking about exciting ideas in the future, but we also started this conversation by talking about the importance of understanding our past. How do you think about the purpose of Morehead-Cain in this continuum?
(Chris)
One of the inspiring things for me before arriving here was reading the trust indenture that John Motley Morehead III wrote to establish what was then the Morehead Foundation. Because he wrote something that, a statement that I think is timeless. He said, “The most important investment that can be made for a people is that which is made in the education and training as leaders of those who have been endowed by their creator with the capacity for leadership.” And that is what he sought to do with his resources. And many of our alumni will probably recognize that sentence as something that they heard at their Fall Banquets or their Senior Dinner, because it’s something that we have repeated time and again here at the Foundation. And so, why do we exist here at the Foundation? Why did Mary Cain make a gift from the Gordon and Mary Cain Foundation to Morehead and make it Morehead-Cain was because Gordon Cain had made his money through leverage in private equity and believed in the leverage of leadership. So why do we exist? We exist as an organization to develop leaders who shape thriving communities. And we are investors who invest in leaders because of their impact on communities. And as we think about the future of the Foundation, we need to think about, first, how do we develop leaders who can positively impact their communities? But second, how do we use ourselves? And how do we use our resources and these assets to maximize our impact on those communities themselves? The thing about the teacher idea that I just described, for example, is that it’s not a significant departure from what we’ve done. It’s a very inexpensive way, a thing for us to do on our existing platform, to thank people who deserve to be thanked for the role they play in developing leaders and shaping communities. And it also improves our ability to identify leaders who we can develop to shape communities. And I think there are lots of opportunities like this as we think expansively. And I look forward to working with all of you to think about how we invest ourselves, our time, our resources in ways that maximize their impact on this university, on the state of North Carolina, on the United States, and on the world. I think we’ve only scratched the surface of what we are capable of as leaders because leadership is the most important investment that can be made in the future of a society.
(Elias)
Thank you. Chris, one of the things I’ve noticed during my time at Morehead-Cain is that everybody emphasizes Morehead-Cain being a center for catalyzing change. In fact, the theme of the Catalyze podcast is action movement and bringing about change. When faced with obstacles, hardships, or challenges, is there a song that you listen to that motivates you to keep you going?
(Chris)
This is a great question. Obstacles, hardships, or challenges? Well, when I have to get fired up, or when I have to start a day where there’s a big day, like the Forum day, my hype song. So you will typically find that I’m listening to Curtis Mayfield or James Brown. The Super Fly soundtrack, “Get Up.” Those have been songs for me for many, many years. Day to day, going true to my roots in South Africa, I do actually listen to quite a lot of Afrobeats, so Wizkid or Davido, but those are less hype songs for me and more kind of a soundtrack of our house and our life.
(Elias)
Chris, is there anything else you would like to add before we close out?
(Chris)
The only thing I’d like to add is to repeat something I said before. I learn through conversations with members of this community every day, and my office and inbox are open. I welcome the opportunity to schedule a time with any scholar over the MCN. And I’m grateful, Elias, for your time and for your curiosity and for all of your engagement both here at Morehead-Cain and across the UNC community.
(Elias)
And thank you so much for joining the episode today, Chris.
(Chris)
It’s been a pleasure.