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Relational and Collaborative: Professor Travis Feezell on His Career and the MA in Leadership Program

Relational and Collaborative: Professor Travis Feezell on His Career and the MA in Leadership Program

In 1992, Travis Feezell became an assistant college baseball coach and quickly worked his way up to head coach. It was his first leadership position in higher education. At the time, he had an admittedly simplistic view of what a leader should do and be.

“I thought leadership was about command and control,” Feezell said about that period in his career. “I’m going to tell you what to do and how to do it. And, when you break the rules, there are going to be consequences. Frankly, I think it was an utter failure in leadership on my part.”

In the three and a half decades since, Feezell has taken on a number of other leadership roles. He has served colleges, universities, and consulting firms as everything from a leadership consultant to a president and provost. However, Feezell’s job title is not the only thing that has changed over the years. His leadership philosophy has evolved as well and is now much more nuanced, empathetic, and effective.

As an associate professor in Belmont Abbey College’s Master of Arts (MA) in Leadership program, Feezell is now sharing his hard-earned wisdom with the next generation of leaders in every sector.

Real-Life Lessons and the Unexpected Path to Leadership

Feezell’s initially rigid attitude about leadership was shaken when the father of one of the players on the baseball team he coached passed away unexpectedly. Feezell delivered the news.

“What leadership demanded in that moment was a humane relationship with this person,” Feezell said. “He needed to be supported.”

As the player’s coach, Feezell knew he should be among the people the young man could count on. Feezell then decided that he should be there not only for this particular person but for anyone on his team who needed him. It was a pivotal moment that taught him the value of a person-first approach to leadership.

Discovering a Passion for Leadership

Equipped with a new outlook on the role of a leader and an intimate knowledge of college athletics, Feezell became his school’s athletic director. In this position, he got more involved with general college operations.

“I was also running the postgraduate scholarship program for the entire institution, looking at Rhodes scholarships and Marshall scholarships for our students,” Feezell said, adding that he was also involved with running the school’s art gallery. “At the same time, I’m picking up a doctoral degree in higher education and sport.”

During this period, Feezell also taught classes on sports ethics, sports history, and sport leadership at various institutions on a part-time basis. In 2008, he brought his talents to Belmont Abbey College, where he had the chance to teach classes on organizational leadership and deepen his understanding of the field.

“That was my first full-time teaching gig, and I ultimately became a tenured professor,” Feezell said. “Within a year, I was the interim athletic director. Within another year, I was the interim dean of the business school.”

At this point, Feezell was largely filling roles as needed. He loved teaching, but the more he worked on the administrative side of higher education, the more he came to love that, as well. A colleague who was then a college president encouraged him to make the pivot.

There and Back Again: Leaving and Returning to Belmont Abbey

In 2014, Feezell left Belmont Abbey to pursue his new calling as provost and chief academic officer at a university in Arkansas. He then became president of a college in Nebraska.

But while leaving Belmont Abbey College allowed Feezell to pursue new opportunities and grow as a leader, it still held a special place in his heart. When the school needed a provost in 2020, he jumped at the chance to return.

“The spirit of the Benedictine community is the thing that attracts me and keeps me here,” Feezell said. “These are beautiful people, beautifully directed to serve the community. It’s an incredibly special place.”

After taking on the provost position, Feezell oversaw Belmont Abbey’s internal operations related to enrollment, student affairs, marketing, and institutional research. Just as importantly, he helped guide the school’s first steps into the world of graduate business education and expand its online offerings.

One of the programs born out of this effort was the MA in Leadership program, which was launched in 2022. Helping to design this program gave Feezell the chance to put his leadership skills to work in a new way.

Designing the MA in Leadership Program: A Curriculum That Fills a Gap

In deciding which master’s programs to launch, Feezell and his colleagues have devoted much time and energy to figuring out what type of education today’s leaders need. The team decided to launch a Master of Business Administration program, but Feezell believes that that type of program is not relevant to every rising leader’s goals.

“An MBA program tends to have a quantitative bent,” Feezell said. “It grounds people in quantitative analysis, and that’s not for everyone. Some people are thinking, ‘How do I become a more influential, effective organizational leader?’”

The MA in Leadership program was designed to serve students with that question in mind. While the program features a class on data analytics, the focus is placed more on team and change management, ethical decision-making, and effective communication, teaching students skills that, in Feezell’s experience, are essential to leading any kind of organization.

According to Feezell, “Leadership is messy, complex, and it can be nasty at some points. It’s motivational and collaborative.”

Returning to the Classroom Full Time

During his time as provost at Belmont Abbey College, Feezell had continued to teach when he could. In 2024, he decided to step back from administration and start teaching full-time again. Today, MA in Leadership students can find him teaching Leading Effectively in Nonprofit Environments and the introductory Foundations of Leadership course.

“I think students come into that class thinking I’m going to teach them how to command and control,” he said of Foundations of Leadership. “I try to spend a significant amount of time just saying I’m not sure that’s what leadership is about.”

Feezell and his students talk about principles such as motivation, celebrating employees’ achievements, and modeling behavior as a leader.

“The other thing that becomes an emphasis in the class is the notion that leadership is a relational activity,” Feezell said. “We don’t lead things, we lead people. We’re in a relationship with them.”

Bringing Meaning and Connection to an Online Format

Feezell’s belief in the relational nature of leadership informs his approach as an instructor in the online and asynchronous MA in Leadership program. In addition to reaching out to students individually, he also uploads a video each week so students can respond to him or each other with their own video.

“The video might be on the topic we’re studying, what’s due that week, or I might be posing a question,” Feezell said. “There is constant conversation.”

Feezell also often asks students to apply their new skills to case studies and exercises about situations they might face as leaders. Students then discuss each other’s solutions and share insights based on their own experiences.

“For me, learning happens in the engagement both with the material and also the conversation that’s happening around it,” he said.

However, Feezell knows he is not alone in his efforts to engage with students in the MA in Leadership program. He is proud of what the program has become and how his colleagues continue to make the students’ experience impactful.

“Sometimes master’s degrees revolve around earning a credential,” he said. “I get that and understand it. Maybe that’s what attracts people to some of our programs at Belmont Abbey. But I think students are transformed by our programs. They can be changed for the better and become better leaders who have better self-awareness.”

Become the Forward-Thinking Leader Your Organization Needs

In the MA in Leadership program at Belmont Abbey College, experienced instructors such as Travis Feezell help students transform into leaders who can navigate any obstacle effectively and ethically.

In as few as 12 months, students in the program complete coursework that covers values-based and servant leadership, strategic decision-making, organizational behavior, and other principles they can take to any industry. Designed for working professionals, the program is delivered in an asynchronous online format that balances convenience with depth and personalized support.

To find out more about the MA in Leadership program, request information from Belmont Abbey College today.

Recommended Readings

Belmont Abbey College Launches Graduate Certificate in Catholic Educational Leadership
Belmont Abbey College Launches Ten New Specializations in a Fully Online Business Studies Undergraduate Program for Working Professionals
What Can You Do With a Leadership Degree?

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How classical education can be an antidote to AI

By: Thomas Varacalli
Originally Published by Religious News Service

(RNS) — In his 1939 essay “Learning in Wartime,” C.S. Lewis posed the question of whether it was still worthwhile to study while one’s country was at war. His audience was full of young men with a sense of foreboding for the safety of their country, the lives of their friends serving in the army and their own possible enlistment.

As a Christian thinker, Lewis answered in the affirmative, arguing that it was very appropriate for men to continue their studies while they could. “Life has never been normal,” Lewis writes, and therefore, the belief that education should occur only in times of normalcy is unfounded. No war can ever eradicate our pursuit of truth, meaning and happiness. Therefore, he argues, these should be pursued vigorously, even during times of imminent danger.

The advent of artificial intelligence brings similar feelings of foreboding and disruption. Some Americans fear they might lose their jobs to AI. Teachers, parents and administrators are urgently discussing how AI might change the classroom. Some view AI as a harbinger of welcome efficiency, whereby students can avoid the thankless grunt work of memorization and other tasks, enabling them to use their newfound time for more creative output. Others fear that AI could unleash a lazier, less literate society, more dependent on technology and less likely to engage in independent thinking.

While the future remains unknown, I’m more inclined to credit the less optimistic AI prediction.

I do not fear AI, nor do I doubt that AI can have some benefits. But I think AI is more likely to harm education than help it, even if it is used simply as a supplementary tool to a traditional education, and I fear the level of trust some are placing in it. There are certain educational pillars for the young — such as grammar, memorization, composition, recitation, discipline, endurance and the general trial and error of solving a problem — that reliance on AI and its shortcuts is likely to weaken.

In this time of uncertainty, we should look to Lewis as our guide. Lewis’ defense of education was not antiquarian. He didn’t encourage his students to continue their studies simply because that was what previous generations had done. He wanted his audience to continue learning because it was better for their souls. Centered on the pursuit of the true, the good and the beautiful — a reflection of God’s own nature  — genuine education was directed to a higher end. If his students were to be drafted, and the prospect of death loomed even larger, then they would be able to face death armed with a good education. To Lewis, this meant a classical education.

In its substance, classical education consists of the seven liberal arts: the trivium of grammar, logic and rhetoric and the quadrivium of arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy. Grammar describes the world through the symbols we call words, making all the arts communicable. Logic disciplines our reason to decipher between true and false, so that we can make rational, rather than emotional, decisions. Rhetoric teaches us how to persuade, so that we can engage in political life civilly and peaceably. The quadrivium, meanwhile, explores number, space, harmony and order, coming to know reality in its truth, goodness and beauty through essential, knowable structure.

In its aims and essentials, classical education is the best that a student can receive. It is a comprehensive education because it consists of both a distinct perspective on human nature alongside a sophisticated, matching framework for the liberal arts. Classical education upholds an objective reality knowable through human reason. It affirms a right and a wrong, a good and a bad, a true and a false. Ideally, it inspires virtue through the witness of moral teachers and through a culture that habituates students to courage, moderation, prudence and justice. It upholds the rationality of human beings and teaches that the passions and emotions are subject to reason. And in contrast to today’s increasingly common assumption that diminishes the dignity of personhood, classical education views human beings as a composite of body and soul, with the soul as supreme. Just as there is order in the universe, students must find order in themselves by developing their intellects and wills to act in accordance with nature.

The Christian tradition grounds classical education even more deeply: Human beings are made in the image of God. Our capacity for reason, moral judgment, creativity and love is not an accidental evolutionary feature but part of our created nature. Education therefore cultivates gifts that belong properly to persons, not machines.
When we consider what AI lacks in light of this, the prospect of bringing the technology into education becomes troubling. AI doesn’t know the truth; it merely compiles data, which may or may not be accurate, from the range of texts at its disposal. It cannot possess wisdom or moral judgment. It does not reason. It has neither intellect nor will. It does not even have the sentience of an animal. Lacking both body and soul, AI cannot wonder or understand; it cannot pursue or comprehend any of the seven liberal arts.

Following Lewis’ example, I want to avoid antiquarian arguments in expressing my skepticism about AI. I don’t oppose it on the grounds that it is new, or that it represents a departure from previous ways of learning. I want students to receive the best possible education, and I am concerned that AI shortcuts will impoverish learning. After all, it is better to know how to spell a word unaided than to need technology to spell it. It is better to memorize the state capitals and be able to recognize them than to be ignorant of basic geography. It is better to compose a five-paragraph essay from scratch than to need structural tips from a bot. It is better to spend the time learning long division (even after several mistakes) than to rely on AI to make the calculations. It is better to sit still in class, reading a paper book, than to stare at a screen with its inbuilt distractions, and it is certainly better to read a book than to access an AI summary.

If students who don’t use AI in school need to use it in future employment, they will have the immense benefit of knowing how to do tasks both with and without AI assistance, as educated adults know how to do long division with and without a calculator. And as AI disrupts job markets, those who can reason well without its aid have the most to gain. 

What makes AI so dangerous is that it appears to be wise, rational, volitional and sentient. As human beings, we are too easily duped into attributing these characteristics to what is, essentially, only sophisticated pattern recognition and reformulation. To think critically and probingly about artificial intelligence, we need first to have adequately reflected and contemplated our own nature. Classical education is the way in which we, as human beings, can best come to know ourselves. Therefore, as Lewis warned us, let us not be too distracted by the manmade noise of our era, but instead direct our gaze to those things that are eternal.

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Professor Bennett Quillen Featured on WalletHub

Professor Bennett Quillen was recently featured as a finance expert in WalletHub’s article titled, Best Second Chance Credit Cards. This article features experts weighing in on credit cards designed for individuals who are rebuilding their credit score.

Read what Professor Quillen has to say.

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