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Being president of a major public university is the most political nonpolitical office around.

I think the most important leadership lessons I've learned have to do with understanding the context in which you are leading. Universities are places with enormously distributed authority and many different sorts of constituencies, all of whom have a stake in that institution.

Leadership is happening, but it's not coming from the leaders of the old institutions. Everywhere you look, you see these extraordinary, sparkling new initiatives that are under way.

As a university, we're not focused on bringing about huge reforms - that's not our role.

In the long run, we need to build a leadership force of people. We have a whole strategy around not only providing folks with the foundational experience during their two years with us, but also then accelerating their leadership in ways that is strategic for the broader education reform movement.

I think there are too many bosses in Washington telling Nashville Diesel College and Harvard University how to run - how to run their campuses, and I'd like to reduce the number of Washington regulations on higher education and keep this marketplace of wonderful institutions among which students can choose; that's oriented toward job growth.

There has been a growing consensus across the country - from statehouses to the White House and the halls of Congress - that we need to take dramatic steps to improve our secondary schools.

From the outset, the Obama administration has recognized that building a robust skills infrastructure means building strong partnerships with community colleges.