On Dec. 19, 2025, Oberlin College announced that Josh Nolan, then interim general counsel, would assume the role of Vice President, General Counsel, and Secretary, succeeding former General Counsel Matthew Lahey who departed the College at the beginning of the fall semester. Prior to joining Oberlin, Nolan was the Co-Chair of the Higher Education group at Bricker Graydon LLP, a Cleveland-based law firm. Through his career, he has worked with and advised nearly 100 higher educational institutions. Nolan also served as interim General Counsel of Oberlin in 2021 and 2022, and has worked with Oberlin as an external counsel in the past. As General Counsel, Nolan is charged with being the chief legal officer of the institution, handling all legal matters related to the institution.

This interview was edited for length and clarity.

You were a higher education attorney for many years. Why did you choose to leave the world of law firms and join Oberlin?

This is my 29th year working in higher education. Before I was an attorney, I went to graduate school to do student affairs work, and I worked in the dean of students office for a small college. So working in a college environment is part of my soul. I am sort of a mission-driven person, and for me, Oberlin speaks to this idea of the common good. Coming to a place like Oberlin, you are serving students, and you’re serving employees, and the goal is to make sure that you are helping them meet their highest potential. 

How is being an in-house counsel different from being an external counsel?

Personally, it’s not a huge change. Having known Oberlin for a long time, there’s a relationship shorthand. So knowing the folks that work here, knowing the issues that are here, makes part of that job very similar. 

One of the things that’s different is working on expanding the Office to be more visible. I have a relationship with folks who have worked with me over the course of 10 years, but I have to do more in terms of getting out to meet students, being more visible on campus, and making sure the office is more present. It’s about how to make sure you’re going out and saying, “Okay, what issues do you all have? How can we be helpful in solving them?” It’s a privilege to be able to be out and engage with folks in a way that’s not constrained by the billable hour. 

Over the course of your career, what are the changes that you have noticed in higher education law?

Higher ed is the second-most-regulated industry in the United States, second only to healthcare. When you look at the volume of regulations that apply to running a nonprofit institution, it’s the complexity ­— the reporting requirements and the breadth of knowledge required to stay informed — that makes it so challenging. You have had a sort of explosion of those requirements, not just at a federal level, but at the state level. Changes in statutory arrangements mean that you have to be both learning a new area of practice all the time and teaching other people to spot these new issues. So the regulatory complexity is huge, and that’s really been increasing over the last 20 years. That’s where you see the explosion of training opportunities, and people who are specialized on a college campus to deal with accommodations issues; or in HR, it could be working with out-of-state employees; or with distance learning. All of those things require certain levels of specification. And so that explosion also required attorneys to find ways of saying, “Okay, how am I constantly educating myself on what’s new?” And so there’s a core set of skills that you develop. 

What challenges do you anticipate Oberlin will have to deal with given the more antagonistic legal environment for higher educational institutions?

I would say the challenges for Oberlin are really about making sure that, above all, there’s an ethic of care. If there’s a change in enforcement with Immigration Customs Enforcement, or where there’s a change in the regulatory environment, it’s a question of, “How do we find a way to understand what the concerns of the community are? How do we take care that we are meeting the needs of the community, and also providing both an education-related response in a way that is proactive and compliant?” 

Ultimately, the idea is that the institution should weather all of those storms, and to do so is to make sure that you’re taking care of the community members who are here, but also setting up systems that are resilient. I think one of the challenges we run into for Oberlin is that we also have to be a thought-leader. So it’s not just enough to be reactive, it’s not just enough to sit back and wait for someone to bring a legal issue to you or a problem. You have to find ways of being proactive. What I like to call it is preventative law. The idea is, you are fighting those issues ahead of time, and understanding how different departments work. And so a lot of the work that we do is translation. It’s saying, “Here are the things that are coming. Here’s how they might impact your operations. How do we best serve you?” 

One concern for community members is how clearly Oberlin communicates with them about these legal issues. How do you balance that communication with protecting the legal interests of the institution?

Unfortunately, we have to be in a regulatory regime. It’s a question of, “How do you humanize compliance?” So, how do you talk about what areas might need to be modified? Bathrooms are a good example of this. Are there ways to restructure bathrooms to comply with the law and also provide spaces for individuals to access the bathrooms that align with their gender identity? So there’s the problem-solving component. You get the problem-solving component on the front end: How do we shape the law so it doesn’t have a negative impact? But when it does come out, and we can’t change the text, how do we come up with creative solutions to to meet as best as we can the needs of our students and our employees? And that’s a balance point. On all things, we must have a great deal of empathy, because that’s how you do your best work, which is that you’re able to understand the concerns of folks that are impacted by whatever decision, and to find a way to breathe life and voice into it.