Q&A with Robin Cautin: Everyone Works Hard

We sit down with Provost Robin Cautin to discuss higher ed, SHU, the University’s growth, her new role … and the importance of tipping your server.

From the Fall 2022 issue of Sacred Heart University Magazine

By Timothy Deenihan

SHU Provost Robin Cautin ends our conversation with a story I’ll use as a beginning. It’s of a time when she was a kid, a teenager, and she and her brother wanted a taste of independence. They wanted to go to a restaurant without their parents but were reliant upon their father to shuttle them to and fro as neither of them were yet blessed with a driver’s license.

“Dad drove us to the restaurant. We had lunch. A little while later he came and picked us up,” she recalls. “We were in the car heading home when he asked, ‘Did you tip the waitress?’

“The thing was that lunch was more expensive than we expected. And we were kids. And, frankly, we just didn’t know any better. So we had to admit that we hadn’t. He was horrified.” She remembers her father turning the car around and sending the kids back inside to face their waitress. “She was so relieved.”

“Everyone works hard,” her father told them when they were back in the car—and it’s at this point in the retelling that Cautin chokes up slightly at the memory.

In addition to a daughter’s love for her father, Cautin very obviously has a deep respect for her dad. The son of a Brooklyn laborer, he had grown up poor in the city but was a voracious reader and possessed an unbridled work ethic. Indeed, upon his retirement from Bell Labs, five people were hired to replace him.

So it is that a simple admonishment, “Everyone works hard,” lives in Cautin’s memory as so much more than simple advice to always tip your waitress. They are three words packed to the brim with life lessons, saying as much about the way you carry yourself as about the respect you show for others. It’s a softly spoken declaration that doing less than one’s best is doing less than what’s right, and it perfectly stated, in that moment and ever since, that there is no paradox in the relationship between humility and dignity.

Robin Cautin is her father’s daughter, through and through. Immediately evident is that intellectual curiosity and indefatigable work ethic. But there’s more. Most significantly, Cautin seems guided still by that humble dignity—ever certain that humanity is better for each human’s best contribution, ever aware of one’s own role in that dynamic.

So it’s no wonder that Robin Cautin has been such a good fit for Sacred Heart—and vice versa—since the University hired her to serve as dean of the College of Arts & Sciences eight years ago. In the time since, she has overseen the steady expansion of the College, the creation of new graduate and undergraduate programs, new schools and countless new faculty positions. Then, in May of last year, she took on the duties of acting provost. Five months later she was formally named the University’s new provost, making her the school’s chief academic officer and, after the president, the senior member of the University’s executive leadership team.

It’s a role she seems almost designed to assume. That distinctive blend of academic rigor and human empathy Cautin has cultivated from a young age reveals itself in a unique ability to weigh the complexity of, it would seem, everything. A conversation about the cost of education factors in not only line items on the spreadsheet but the tricky balance between an education’s value to humanity and the moral imperative to ensure humans of all means are able to access it. Then there is the double-helix bond of the Catholic mission that founded this school and the catholic mission that drives it—heart and soul, inextricably linked, undeniably singular. Also, with a coming “demographic cliff” resulting from a significant drop in the national birthrate, there is the practical challenge of adjusting the business model for viability without compromising its compass. And then, of course, there is the heady excitement of this University’s meteoric growth coupled with the reality check of growing pains.

“We started as a small commuter school with no residential students, no graduate degrees, a limited number of undergrad degrees and only club sports,” she says. “Today we have more than 30 Division I teams, scores of both undergrad and postgraduate offerings, and more than 3,000 students living on campus every semester.” And still, as Cautin points out, the school remains committed to community in a way that feels new and adventurous—a fundamental part of its ethos.

One contributing factor is the significant number of students whose parents are first-generation Americans. For an uncommonly high percentage of families connected to the University, SHU is the embodiment of that dream wherein hard work and scrappy determination lead to opportunity.

And that’s exactly as it is supposed to be. The school’s founding mission was to provide access to quality higher education for (then predominantly Catholic) families whose immigrant and/or socioeconomic status would have otherwise kept them on the outskirts of such opportunity. Which is why, Cautin insists, focusing solely on the costs of higher ed fails both to recognize the reasons for those costs and to see the ultimate value of the product. Coming from anyone else, this could sound like either political equivocating or an outright sales pitch. But Cautin brings the receipts.

“Prior to, and even well into, the 1990s, accrediting bodies hadn’t really developed the metrics of accountability that are now in place,” she points out. This is, of course, a positive development— a school must now prove its mastery of a subject if it is going to promote and charge tuition for it—but a development with a cost. As accrediting metrics vary significantly from discipline to discipline, “responding to those expectations requires a lot of administrative infrastructure.”

So how do you make higher ed more affordable without cheapening the degree? “If we can make what we do more attractive, if we can make access to the value and benefits of higher education more efficient—through dual degrees, fast-tracking graduate programs, expanding programs appealing to adult learners, those sorts of things—then we are finding a way to innovate in education while serving our students and our community, and still keeping our moral compass,” Cautin says, all of which reflect the mission that founded the school in the first place.

And all of which reflect why Robin Cautin, in her own words, “can’t decouple” her own mission from that of the school. “I feel it. I love the work,” she says in a rush as the conversation shifts from higher ed in general to SHU specifically, and her passion for her role, its challenges and the community she gets to serve is immediately evident. For Cautin, as for SHU, the trials presented by individual and institutional expectations are vastly more thrilling than they are daunting.

“We’re not risk averse here,” she says. “As a person, I can be bored easily. But you can never be bored in a place like this. We’re not clinging to some status quo.”

Indeed not—her own journey serving as some degree of proof of that. When touching upon the movement in every industry to advance diversity, equity and inclusion, and the rarity of women in positions such as hers, she grins, having known the question would be coming. “Being a woman means being asked what it means to be a woman,” she says, recognizing the need to recognize a thing that should in truth be invisibly normal.

“When I started, I thought I was just a dean,” she says. “But that was naïve. I didn’t appreciate the extent to which others saw me. I was just focused on the work.

“I focused on the work,” she corrects herself as way of explaining momentary blindness but, in the process, once again revealing the spirit that makes her so at home here—something only underscored by the empathy in her very next breath. She doesn’t begrudge the work she put in to get where she is or the fact that, having arrived there, she is seen by many as a role model. Instead, quite simply, “It’s part and parcel of being human,” she says.

“We like the familiar. There are biases we all have by virtue of our humanity. The greatest safeguard we have against them is to call them out—to make them visible—and a University is the perfect place to do that.

“We’re at a critical juncture at the moment,” she says, speaking now of the broader landscape the University must navigate, and it’s surely the greatest understatement of the whole conversation. Sacred Heart’s current point of growth might best be compared to that exciting moment of transition from adolescence to adulthood, when vitality courses through your veins and you’ve finally got the agency to act on it. It’s no wonder her thoughts go back to a moment her father was shepherding his family through the same sort of transition the University faces now. That this moment arrives at a time when the world itself is in undeniable flux only adds to its immediacy.

And that’s alright. Because once again the characters of the University and its provost seem inextricably linked. Both are fully aware that the way forward requires more than seeing the best in people, and even more than expecting the best from them. It requires modelling the humble dignity we want and expect to see. If higher ed is where Robin Cautin gets to do what she was put on earth to do, then Sacred Heart is where she gets to be who she was put here to be.

“We’re not resting on our laurels here,” says the granddaughter of a Brooklyn laborer, the daughter of a Bell Labs engineer, the provost of the University.

What she means is: everyone works hard.