[00:00:16.02] JASON NABI: Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Jason Nabi. I am the Project Manager for the Futures Initiative. We are so excited to be hosting this event, especially in this magisterial space. So thanks to each of you for joining us today.

[00:00:32.61] Special thanks also to our visiting presidents, our presidents, all of our panelists for being here as well. One quick note. We will have some Q&A at the end. So if you have a question, please use one of the provided note cards to write it out, then pass it to the closest aisle, at which point one of our ushers will collect that note card. You are free to do that at any point in the program.

[00:01:01.23] Also consider writing your name and your email on the card so that if we don't have time to get to your particular question, we might circle back to it later to you directly. So with that, it is my pleasure to introduce to the podium Lori McMahon, UVA's Vice President for Research.

[00:01:21.03] [APPLAUSE]

[00:01:26.99] LORI MCMAHON: Good afternoon, everyone. It's a great day for us today. We will be speaking with several presidents who will enlighten us about the future of higher Ed. So on behalf of the Futures Initiative, I'd like to welcome you today to hear about what's going on in higher Ed.

[00:01:49.93] So a quick background about the UVA Futures Initiative. This was launched at UVA in January under the auspices of the Provost office, and it was supported by a UVA Strategic Investment Fund Award. The goal of the Futures Initiative is to scan higher education horizon and search for ways that UVA can proactively position ourselves to thrive in a rapidly evolving world.

[00:02:17.99] Toward that end, members of the UVA Futures Initiative working group, this was truly a pan university task force made up of representatives from all 12 of our schools, four of our pan university institutes, and several of our administrative and academic divisions.

[00:02:39.61] And we've been asking very ambitious, far-reaching questions about what we might do to achieve our strategic goals and striking innovation and doing so to become the university of the future. Part of that process through the Futures Initiative speaker series involves bringing thought leaders, our panelists today from a variety of sectors to grounds to share their vision of the future and their respective fields.

[00:03:08.71] We are excited to kick off this series with today's panel for its focus on higher Ed futures to be hosting three distinguished presidents from trailblazing institutions. Santa Ono, President of the University of Michigan. Welcome. Harriet Nembhard, President of Harvey Mudd College. Welcome. Michael Crow, President of Arizona State University.

[00:03:36.26] And joining as our own president, Jim Ryan, for what is sure to be an illuminating and inspiring conversation. I think we're in for a real treat today. But before we get to that conversation, I wanted to pause to appreciate the unique significance of this moment today.

[00:03:56.69] It's really hard to think of a time, not even in 1817, when Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe attended the Cornerstone Laying Ceremony at Pavilion 7. So we've never had or almost never had so many presidents on grounds at the same time.

[00:04:19.07] And while it might seem to be an apples and oranges comparison to compare American presidents to university and college presidents, when you think of the sheer collective reach of these institutions and the hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of people they educate, employ, serve, and otherwise impact annually, perhaps this comparison of the leaders of a young America isn't so far off.

[00:04:51.42] Indeed, Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe in 1817 could only dream of what America and American higher education would ultimately become. The states where our visiting presidents today hail from-- Michigan, California, and Arizona, those states hadn't even been formed in 1817.

[00:05:16.83] So in the 200 plus years intervening, it's humbling to ponder just how vast America has become geographically, of course, but also socially and technologically. And how higher education has played a crucial role in the spectacular growth of our nation.

[00:05:37.74] So perhaps it's no coincidence then that our visiting presidents during their time with us on grounds are staying at the Colonnade Club, which nestled between Garden 7 and Pavilion 7 and the academical village is a literal stone's throw away from the historic cornerstone.

[00:05:58.89] In a sense, we are coming full circle today as these presidents are here to join us in laying a new foundation, a cornerstone of ideas, and the possibilities for a monument to the future of higher education.

[00:06:16.32] We know that our mission is to harmonize the concepts of being both great and good. Across grounds, we are continuing asking ourselves several questions. For example, how might we integrate the great of scientific and technological advances with the good of humanist legacies?

[00:06:38.39] How do we align the great of academic research and discovery with the good of public-facing impact? How do we balance the great of fast moving innovation with the good of institutional stability? How might we unify the great of profound scholarship with the good of enabling young people to make their way in a complex world?

[00:07:06.94] Each of today's panelists is poised to explore with us answers to these questions to empower us with ideas and inspiration as we learn from them about the many impressive forward-looking initiatives at their respective institutions.

[00:07:25.69] At the University of Michigan since 2022, President Ono's signature effort has been to deliver a life-changing education, especially in the fields of human health and well-being, civic and global engagement, and climate action, sustainability, and environmental justice.

[00:07:45.55] Through vision 2034, a comprehensive strategic visioning process, President Ono has set the University of Michigan on an aspirational path to imagine what it might achieve in the next 10 years, with a special commitment to defining the overarching goal of a public university to be in service to humanity.

[00:08:08.78] President Nembhard joined Harvey Mudd College last year as president, and she is singularly positioned to lead it forcefully into the future. A renowned voice at the national level for transforming undergraduate STEM education, President Nembhard has been recognized by the National Science Foundation, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine for her expertise in this area.

[00:08:37.13] This makes her the perfect leader for Harvey Mudd College, not only because it is widely regarded as one of the nation's best undergraduate science and engineering colleges, but also because Harvey Mudd distinguishes itself by challenging the norms in STEM education.

[00:08:55.91] Toward this goal, President Nembhard initial focus on inclusive pedagogy, increasing diversity in STEM, and empowering students through campus level infrastructure for civic learning and engagement.

[00:09:12.04] President Crow has spearheaded Arizona State University's ambitious evolution into one of the world's best public research universities. At the helm since 2002, he has orchestrated a dramatic rise in students, schools, people, and programs in order to further ASU's mission to be student-centric, technology-enabled, and focused on global challenges.

[00:09:41.61] In President Crow's 22 years at ASU, enrollment has gone from 55,000 to 144,000, while at the same time, 25 new interdisciplinary schools have been established, including the School of Earth and Space Exploration, the School for the Future of Innovation in Society, and the School of Human Evolution and Social Change.

[00:10:09.56] President Crow has also launched multidisciplinary initiatives like the Biodesign Institute, the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory, and the nation's first School of Sustainability. Finally, our own President Ryan, has ushered into an era of transformative growth at UVA.

[00:10:34.18] Crafting the great and good strategic plan, coordinating the grand challenges research investments, and establishing a new School of Data Science and a new Karsh Institute of Democracy, plus a new Performing Arts Center.

[00:10:52.78] All of this, while making UVA shine as a welcoming beacon of opportunity through initiatives that have heightened the university's affordability and accessibility, that have enhanced undergraduate life and that have fostered genuine community engagement.

[00:11:12.79] This is but a small sampling of the accomplishments of these distinguished panelists. But what is abundantly clear is that we have before us four presidents who are not just making history, but more crucially, shaping the future. Help me welcome these presidents.

[00:11:35.82] [APPLAUSE]

[00:11:48.48] It is now my pleasure to welcome President Ryan to the podium.

[00:11:53.28] JIM RYAN: Can I sit here?

[00:11:54.07] LORI MCMAHON: You may sit there. Yes.

[00:11:56.31] JIM RYAN: Thank you. Thank you, Lori, for that introduction, which is very kind. And I'm glad you set expectations low by comparing this group to founding presidents of the country. So we'll try to live up to that.

[00:12:09.27] And thanks to the UVA Futures Initiative for sponsoring this event, and especially to Phil Bourne, who has spearheaded this from the beginning. Thanks. The most thanks go to our panelists. It is a genuine honor to be among three of the most accomplished leaders in higher education.

[00:12:28.42] And I'm delighted that you're joining us, and I am eager to hear your view of the future of higher education. I know you all brought your crystal balls. And over the next hour and a half or so, we're going to be able to see what you see.

[00:12:44.88] At first, I want to make sure, is it OK if we go by first name?

[00:12:49.36] SANTA ONO: Sure.

[00:12:50.08] JIM RYAN: OK. Feel free to call me President Ryan.

[00:12:52.71] [LAUGHTER]

[00:12:55.93] So I would like to start with a general question about the future of higher education and how you and your institution are preparing for the future. And you can pick whatever period you like, but I'm not thinking the next few years, thinking 10, 20, 30 years and beyond.

[00:13:12.26] And Michael, I'd like to start with you. You are, in effect, the Dean of Presidents having served for more than 20 years, which is truly extraordinary and deserves round of applause.

[00:13:23.94] [APPLAUSE]

[00:13:29.80] MICHAEL CROW: You just need to stay low and keep moving.

[00:13:33.01] JIM RYAN: You've written about the New American University, so I wonder if we could start there and how that relates to the future of higher education.

[00:13:40.04] MICHAEL CROW: Well, I mean, the premise of that book and that theory on which our university, Arizona State University, is now a prototype after 22 years of effort by our faculty and our staff and our team and our donors and everyone else that's been involved is that the US has been through several very successful evolutionary phases of the development of the institutions in our democracy called higher education institutions that are essential to our success.

[00:14:06.08] So there were the colonial colleges, there was the initial conceptualization of the public universities, all of which were in the south initially, including Virginia, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina. Virginia coming on because they didn't have the religious communities that built the schools that were in the northeast.

[00:14:21.26] And then the truly unique American next two phases, the land grant colleges and universities, including the historically Black colleges that emerged. And then the research-- the emergence of an American Research University.

[00:14:33.23] And I think what happened along the way was that we won World War II. We became this superpower. We began thinking we were educating all kinds of people. And we didn't realize that the country was going to grow to 350, 400, 500 million people, that it would become unbelievably diverse.

[00:14:50.59] And that the old antiquated models of a few students in a classroom with a few brilliant professors would be necessary but insufficient. And so we started out on a task of constructing a University which could have a faculty equal to the faculty anywhere and a student body that represented the totality of our population in terms of its socioeconomic diversity, access, and excellence being the phrases that we use.

[00:15:17.06] And that you could design an institution using technology and using innovations that could become not a replacement for the schools that already existed, but a new version of a university. And we call that the New American University.

[00:15:28.55] We've been at this long enough that we have found a way to do that. We just broke $1 billion of research expenditures, according to NSF calculations, without a medical school. While at the same time, last year, graduating almost 40,000 graduates of the most diverse student body that you can possibly imagine.

[00:15:48.53] And we did that by basically assuming that in this design, different than other designs, faculty members could be projected. So we basically calculated that our faculty, if empowered with technology and innovations on campus, could deal with a large and complex student body.

[00:16:06.23] It didn't mean that courses couldn't be small, et cetera, et cetera. They can be. But that if you did that right, that same faculty could graduate or have two or three more students than they have on campus by using a technology mediation function.

[00:16:20.03] So we built thousands and thousands and thousands of courses and spent hundreds of millions of dollars and built hundreds of degree programs. And our faculty now are projected in a way where we've graduated 100,000 people with college diplomas of the highest quality who were unable to finish college in the system that makes up the United States, where more than half the people that go to college never finish.

[00:16:42.43] So the idea was to basically do the following. The idea was that higher education in the United States has been unbelievably powerful, unbelievably successful, and is wholly inadequate to the future. We need more people to be educated, not fewer people to be educated.

[00:16:58.49] We need more research and discovery activities, not less. We need more and different kinds of institutions. And so we're trying to move to the point of what we call a breakout. So we built 40 new transdisciplinary schools. We just have 15 astronomy majors. We now have 500 astronomy majors. We have 9,000 biology--

[00:17:16.17] JIM RYAN: Meaning 500 different majors in astronomy?

[00:17:18.39] MICHAEL CROW: No, we have 500 students majoring in astronomy. So we have 800 majors at the university, 800 degree programs at the university. So the notion was in the American plethora of institutional types, I used to be a trustee of Bowdoin College, which is a wave one school in Brunswick, Maine.

[00:17:35.21] And so you can have those colonial colleges that are still thriving and still advancing the Americas Greek academies. You can have the great examples like the University of Virginia, which is what we call wave 4 research university.

[00:17:47.34] We're also a research university. And some research universities and some others can then also scale. And that means scale and differentiate. This will be my last point, but I've made this point to some of your colleagues this morning.

[00:18:00.17] The last thing the world needs-- there's two elements to this. The last thing the world needs is more smarty pants at university telling to the rest of our society we have all the answers. You may not graduate if you come here. We're going to charge you a lot of money to show up. And we have all the answers. We got to stop all that.

[00:18:16.08] We got to figure out how to be more connected in many, many, many ways. And we also need new kinds of universities, universities that are not just replicants of each other. Why does everybody have the same engineering schools and everyone has the same political science department and everybody has the same geology department and anthropology department.

[00:18:32.79] And then faculty like mercenaries just move from one to the other, trying to get the best advancement opportunity for themselves. I used to be on the faculty at Columbia University, and we went through this all the time.

[00:18:43.53] So my point about the future is that we need more differentiation, more design to specific sets of outcomes on a national scale, more ability to connect to the people. And we also need new kinds of universities and colleges to emerge.

[00:18:57.39] JIM RYAN: OK. You raise a lot I'm going to come back to you. But I just want to clarify one thing. You're not suggesting that all schools should become like Arizona State. Arizona State should be a type 1 example of different types.

[00:19:11.02] MICHAEL CROW: Yeah. So one of the books I wrote about this is called The Fifth Wave. And it basically argues that we need a new kind, another wave of institutional design that will someday be followed by another and followed by another and followed by another.

[00:19:22.68] True to higher education, the earlier waves are all still here. Bowdoin and Amherst and my wife went to Oberlin. Those colleges are fantastic institutions. They're all doing fantastic things. They're not going anywhere. Now they're very expensive. They're small in scale. They're a certain kind of environment.

[00:19:40.34] We need all of these things in a country of this size and this robust set of cultural differences. We just became very satisfied with our self. And I will say one other thing that happened. And so on my desk is a catalog of the University of California at Los Angeles from the summer of 1950.

[00:19:57.79] Their admission standards in 1950 are our admission standards today. We admit every single student that has a B average from high school that took 15 particular courses and has a B. And that means if you're going to do that, you're going to have a lot of students. So if you want to control enrollment, keep raising your admission standards.

[00:20:15.82] Well, we're not going to raise our admission standards ever, that we're going to have that as the qualification and we're going to adjust. Now, some universities have better figured out how to do that, and they better figure out how to graduate students when they go to those universities.

[00:20:27.74] And some of those better be research universities or only elite high school performers will be able to go to a research University and the country will decline over time as a function of that. So we maintain those standards.

[00:20:39.26] And at the time in 1950, in Los Angeles at the University of California, there was no tuition. So at our institution for our students that don't have the ability to pay, there's no tuition. And so we've made this work. But at scale, we've got 43,000 Pell eligible undergraduates attending our institution who have substantial needs to be engaged with us in certain kind of ways. That requires a new design. This is not a system. This is an institution.

[00:21:04.04] JIM RYAN: Right now, yeah, it's remarkable. So, Harriet, if I'm doing the calculations right, you could fit about--

[00:21:11.94] HARRIET NEMBHARD: Oh, don't do that calculation. Don't do that calculation.

[00:21:14.82] JIM RYAN: 1,400 Harvey Mudd's into Arizona State. So a very different model.

[00:21:21.21] MICHAEL CROW: We'll take you.

[00:21:22.09] [LAUGHTER]

[00:21:23.84] HARRIET NEMBHARD: Careful there, Michael.

[00:21:25.57] [LAUGHTER]

[00:21:26.75] JIM RYAN: So how are you at Harvey Mudd preparing for the future?

[00:21:31.49] HARRIET NEMBHARD: Well, I think it is important to situate what is Harvey Mudd as a project, very different than either of these institutions, of which I'm an alumna of both. But Harvey Mudd is interesting project. It's less than 70 years old. It was founded in 1955 after the Cold War, during the Cold War, when there was still a race to put a human on the moon.

[00:21:57.03] There was a recognition that the types of problems that we were facing as a country in STEM would keep coming, and we would need to have an institution that would meet those challenges with a focus on humanity and society.

[00:22:16.65] So Harvey Mudd was established as one of the Claremont colleges. The Claremont colleges are a consortium of seven colleges in Southern California. There are five undergraduate institutions and two graduate institutions together that are about 8,000 students in total.

[00:22:34.98] Harvey Mudd itself is about 915 students or 915 nerds, as I like to say, because all of our majors are STEM, all of our students have STEM majors. And of that, we have 12 STEM majors. That's it.

[00:22:50.34] But the college is structured as 1/3 of the curriculum is based on the fundamentals in mathematics and sciences based on the formation of the grande écoles. 1/3 of the curriculum is on a program of humanities, social sciences, and the arts. And 1/3 of the curriculum is in the major.

[00:23:13.71] We have 8,000 alumni. And so that gives you an idea of the very small, unique scale of the project. But as Michael was saying, we don't need morphism. It is a different project with a different intention.

[00:23:33.60] And as we think about the future at Harvey Mudd, I made the remark that I'd gone to JPL and had a little reception for the 20 or so Mudders who are currently working there. And again and again, as I meet students from Harvey Mudd, they speak about how they were able to really distinguish themselves in their career because they were the engineer who could write or the physicist who could write.

[00:24:06.76] And one of the things that we've thought about and that I've posited is that in a handful of years, that same story may be because I was the engineer who could still talk to humans and relate to humans amid all of the technology that we see advancing.

[00:24:29.26] And so what does that mean for us at Harvey Mudd? When we say our vision is STEM for the world, it really means on two levels. The first level being that we have a rigorous, hands-on, nearly Socratic approach to teaching, very rigorous, difficult subject matter material.

[00:24:55.52] And at the second level, we have an approach that says that we are engaged in this as humans. Wherever you come from in the world, you have another home at Harvey Mudd where people care about your well-being and your ability to be a good citizen.

[00:25:15.83] So in our imagining of the future, it really is about, how do we continue to build out these very intentional, close knit relationships between students and faculty at this 1 to 9ish or so teacher-student ratio, about 100 faculty, 900 students? And how do we use that to advance the very best of what we need to meet the challenges in the world that we see today?

[00:25:46.80] JIM RYAN: Santa, what do you think? President of the University of Michigan in between the two in terms of size, the state's flagship, how are you thinking about the future?

[00:25:56.43] SANTA ONO: Well, just like you, we went through a visioning process and we called it 2034 to decade long vision. And we have an accompanying campus master plan, which is a few decades in length, so that we can strategically allocate resources and build a campus that supports that vision.

[00:26:14.64] I would say that through that visioning process, a couple of things came. And it was really not a top-down. It was sort of a ground up kind of a process where we had about 30,000 inputs from students, faculty, and staff.

[00:26:28.57] And I really believe in shared governance, and that's one of the very worthy commitments that I made when I started. And so we heard a couple of things. One is, as you know, University of Michigan is a comprehensive research university, very large graduate school. And one of the things that we heard was that there was a strong desire to maintain disciplinary strength across not only STEM disciplines, but arts, humanities, the social sciences.

[00:26:55.59] And that's a commitment that we're going to make because each of those, I believe, no matter where knowledge creation goes or wherever the job market might go for critical thinking and for creating an educated human being and citizen, it's really important for universities like Virginia and Michigan to have disciplinary strength.

[00:27:19.45] It may be viewed as a dramatic model, and it is in many ways. But we at the University of Michigan believe that there's a very important place for universities like Virginia and the University of Michigan. So a commitment to disciplinary strength, importance of the arts and humanities to perspective, to intercultural understanding, all those sorts of things we believe.

[00:27:41.45] And so that's one thing that was loud and clear. And we actually share almost exact same building. We were also, even though Michigan wasn't a state at the time, we were founded in 1817. So pretty much the same age.

[00:27:55.13] JIM RYAN: Did a former president found your university, though?

[00:27:58.10] [LAUGHTER]

[00:27:59.55] SANTA ONO: We get up too early for it. We get up too early for it. But that was not a sound. But we have a huge amount of respect for UVA. And I've been a fan for a long time, by the way, because I grew up in Baltimore, Maryland. And remember Ralph Sampson and ACC and all that.

[00:28:16.39] But to answer your question, beyond the disciplinary strength, there are two things that we're focused on, with that as a foundation. One is how we serve Michigan, how we serve the United States. We believe as a public university that we have an important role to make sure that we contribute to the innovation economy to job creation and attraction.

[00:28:40.25] And so innovation is something which is one of the focuses of our current vision. And we think that in addition to creating an environment and milieu where innovation can be supported by students and faculty and students are central to that innovation, we believe that one of our responsibilities is to be part of the ecosystem.

[00:29:03.75] And so we would love to, for example, partner strategically with the University of Virginia. We would love to collaborate with Harvey Mudd and Arizona State because we think that that's important for the national competitiveness and also regional competitiveness.

[00:29:19.42] If you think about, for example, the CHIPS for Science Act and the fact that we're losing ground in the semiconductor industry, for example, it's because we're not meeting the workforce need. And we're not sharing. It's viewed as a competition between regions and hubs and things like that.

[00:29:37.89] And one of the commitments of the vision is to be a partner with other universities, community colleges, other kinds of institutions, liberal arts colleges, but also to be a strategic partner with government and with industry. And I think we can do that. We can do that better. And I'm here because, like I said, I have huge respect for UVA and I'd love to see what we can do together.

[00:30:05.00] JIM RYAN: Thanks for that. I want to come back to the topic of disciplines when we talk about research, but first I'd like to talk a little bit about teaching and the future of teaching. And Harriet, let me start with you. Either at Harvey Mudd or more generally-- And I'll ask all three of you the same question, how do you see teaching changing, if at all, over the next 10 to 20 years in terms of what's taught, where it's taught, how it's taught and when it's taught?

[00:30:36.49] So anything from online education to new disciplines or new courses. It seems like a key feature of Harvey Mudd is the intimacy of the teaching experience, and that seems core to it. But do you have a sense of whether that's destined to change? Is that something you're going to hold on to? Or more generally, when you think about teaching on college campuses, do you see huge changes in it?

[00:31:05.98] HARRIET NEMBHARD: Yeah. I think that there will be huge changes in how teaching is done, how education is delivered. But let me situate this for just a moment and say, I did my undergraduate at a small liberal arts college, one of the Claremont colleges, Claremont McKenna College.

[00:31:30.42] And then have had education and a career across large R-1s since then. And I find myself in coming back to the campus now and taking another look at what a liberal arts education means, it's been very significant for me. And I can maybe describe one experience that perhaps articulates a little bit to your question.

[00:32:03.88] In the second semester of my first year there, I decided that I was going to go to a Harvey Mudd class. And I spent the first week going to the first-- I spent a week going to the first week of our sophomore core impact course.

[00:32:25.79] This is a course that has been recently redesigned by the faculty to be an infrastructure that will allow us to be flexible and teach new interdisciplinary courses as they come to be recognized and needed.

[00:32:45.35] So the way this core impact course works is that, for three years, it's focused on climate. For this first three years, it's focused on climate. And it's taught in the students' second semester of their sophomore year to the whole cohort of 200 students, 228 to be specific. And it's taught by seven professors, seven faculty collaborating to teach this one course. Four in faculty and three humanities faculty.

[00:33:23.40] And that, just on the surface, really bent my mind. I mean, how many times I have co-taught a course in my entire career. It made me twice. We have this very rigid way of focusing on here is your teaching credit, how many courses you teach for the year and so forth that I think precludes a lot of co-taught courses.

[00:33:48.04] But I really saw the power in it when you see faculty coming together focused on teaching and delivering this course, as I said, on climate change. And so this was week 1. First day of class, go in. Here is data on all of the wildfires that have occurred in California over the past 50 years.

[00:34:13.54] Acreage burned, buildings burned, lives lost, source of fire if it's determinable and so forth. OK, now students, turn to your neighbor and write Python code to visualize and map this data. Do, do, do, do. 20 minutes later, the students have mapped 50 years of data. And so forth through that first course, the first class.

[00:34:39.71] The next class, it was OK, now-- humanities faculty are leading. Now let's think about the decisions that are made and perhaps the biases introduced by the data that are not there, that we don't have data on access to capital to rebuild. We don't have an understanding of whether this was a rural community or an urban one and so forth.

[00:35:08.51] And a very sophisticated conversation then, guided by the humanities faculty, to pair these ideas together. And so again, when we talk about 1/3 in STEM or in your math and science fundamentals and 1/3 in humanities, these are not distinct.

[00:35:30.14] The idea is to have fluidity between those so that we are really arguing and synthesizing for the challenge that has to be met in a very broad way. And this, again, speaks to a change, I would say, perhaps especially at universities, a sea change. I have never experienced that in all of my days in higher Ed.

[00:35:55.19] What does it mean to be able to pull that kind of power of teaching in to help students to build their formation as competent STEM leaders and as citizens? And so this is the kind of work that I think will continue to be challenging, that will continue to challenge us.

[00:36:16.43] And what are the things that we'll need to do as a college and I would say indeed as a sector, a higher Ed sector to meet the needs that students have to explore these very complex competencies in new and insightful ways?

[00:36:35.69] And so I think the things that have to change, that continue to change in that type of paradigm could speak to a lot of things that we would have to renegotiate across higher Ed, like I said, from teaching assignments and teaching credit to promotion and tenure, all of these sorts of things that would be underneath that.

[00:36:58.37] JIM RYAN: That's a little bit like bringing interdisciplinary research into the classroom.

[00:37:01.85] HARRIET NEMBHARD: Right. Very much so.

[00:37:03.91] JIM RYAN: Santa, what are you seeing at University of Michigan in terms of how teaching is changing and how you think it might change over time?

[00:37:10.34] SANTA ONO: I think it's an incredibly exciting time. It's going to be a period in the history of education that people are going to note was a significant transformation in how we teach. I'm going to talk to you about two things that we're working on that I'm very excited about, and more importantly, the students and faculty excited about it.

[00:37:28.54] One is, about 10 years ago, 2014, the provost of the university, Martha Pollack, who just stepped down as President of Cornell, launched something called the Center for Academic Innovation. It has grown. There are now about 400 faculty that are involved in projects. They're funded by the university.

[00:37:47.53] And they're using all kinds of new approaches, creating new programs, virtual and augmented reality to enhance the learning experience, bring it to life, put a student. In addition to 400 faculty, we have about 50% to 75% of students, undergraduate and graduate are called Fellows. And they're critical to thinking about new ways of teaching. I'll give you a couple of examples in the second.

[00:38:13.70] And the third thing is that we have a dedicated staff of about 125 people. We have about 100,000 square foot facility, about 50,000 is new. And we have steady our Hollywood style virtual reality studios where people can create content.

[00:38:30.54] And so the kinds of things you can do is if you're a music professor, you can create a virtual augmented reality situation where a conducting student can, on the same day, conduct a Berlin Philharmonic and the New York Philharmonic, and they can feel like they're in Carnegie Hall.

[00:38:45.20] If you are an architecture student, you can have a situation where simulation, an augmented reality, you can see what it looks like to actually create a structure with different media and see the pluses and minuses of it, simulate what might happen if you have too much weight in one area or another building.

[00:39:04.43] You can actually go back in history, you can be a history professor and you can go back to ancient Greece and you can have a situation where you're in the midst of a conflict and it brings to life the Iliad, for example.

[00:39:16.95] And so it's really remarkable. So that kind of innovation that students and faculty are driving, not from the administration. We fund it, but they drive it is a game changer. And 100% of our undergrads now have that kind of experience. And we know about 11 million learners globally that experience that through Coursera, which UVA is part of too. We'd love to collaborate with you on that. And the other is artificial intelligence. ASU--

[00:39:49.44] JIM RYAN: I was waiting to see how long that would take for that to come up.

[00:39:52.80] SANTA ONO: We were early adopters to embrace that. I really think it's here to stay. And so the important thing is to really have a whole university-wide conversation. And we did that. We had a committee with representatives from all of our 19 schools really think about what are we going to do.

[00:40:12.85] And so we invested quite a bit into that. And it's pretty exciting. We're going to announce very soon something that's going to be open source available to all students, where you can put in your characteristics-- male, lacrosse player, or where you were born, what you're interested in, what your hobbies are. And in seconds you'll come out with a comprehensive list of all the scholarships that you can apply.

[00:40:36.49] So you can also have, the last thing I'll say is that the students and the faculty have created. So they have-- we've given them the sandbox, all the tools, and they've created something called a 24/7 advisor.

[00:40:49.36] And so you have a real advisor. But if you're an advisor, you're happy because you're not woken up at 3:00 AM in the morning. You have a virtual advisor that can answer a lot of the questions about, should I take this course or this course if I'm interested in be a chemistry major? And I want to go to medical school, even get professor ratings on that.

[00:41:08.44] And so I think it's here to stay. And I think that these are things, if you think about the internet or going from the slide rule to the calculator, those things that we should embrace and the academy should come forward with the right way to use these to augment the educational experience.

[00:41:24.37] JIM RYAN: Michael, you've already talked a little bit about teaching innovations at Arizona State. What do you see on the horizon?

[00:41:32.34] MICHAEL CROW: Well, so it's hard for people to grasp the complexity of the democracy. So the full realization of the democracy is that we have people from every cultural background, every ethnic background, every religious perspective, imaginable.

[00:41:46.55] We have people here from all over the world that have gathered together, and then we decide to cram them through British and English model schools and hope that somehow we can and we get into hundreds of millions of people do that with the great professors standing in the front of the room, which certainly every student should experience.

[00:42:02.78] And so with the first paragraph of our charter being that we'll measure the success of our university based on who we include versus who we exclude and how they succeed, the only way to do that, even in a small school. Size has nothing to do with it. The only way to do that, given the population is to assume the following, and that is that everyone is a learner of abundance rather than a learner of deficit.

[00:42:26.95] That if they have a deficit, it's a function of something that's been precluded from them along the way. And therefore, one has to find a way to personalize the learning to the largest extent possible. Now d sometimes that's with the professor, sometimes that's not with the professor. Sometimes that's with a tool.

[00:42:44.49] And I'll use three short examples. We had a student recently, our first student, because we encouraged now the use of every learning tool that we have, of which we have developed more than 500. Every learning tool that we have on campus, off campus, online, on campus, everywhere, all the tools are applicable everywhere.

[00:43:07.02] So that means then we have tens of thousands of double majors. We just had a student who was actually in my class, the spring of '23, graduate with five degrees in four years. Now people say that's not possible. You're wrong. It is possible. It's possible because we have devised learning--

[00:43:24.90] JIM RYAN: Five degrees in four years? He

[00:43:26.58] MICHAEL CROW: Also won a Rhodes Scholarship that semester.

[00:43:29.25] JIM RYAN: He deserved it.

[00:43:30.37] MICHAEL CROW: No. But what I'm saying, though, is that this kid was not an extraordinary kid. He was a kid who could take advantage of every tool that we had built. So far ultra high performing students, we now have the opportunity for these students to major in Lyric Opera and biochemistry while minoring in philosophy at the same time, no problem.

[00:43:52.74] Using all of these tools for enhanced learning, including new virtual reality tools, all these other kinds, everything that you can possibly imagine. Then a second category of student would be a young woman who I talked with recently who wasn't able to finish high school because she had two babies while she was in high school age.

[00:44:12.49] When our system in our society, it's like, well, too bad. You're up the Creek without a paddle. I'm really sorry for you. And so one person in 10,000 in that category can, like her, be admitted to the Mayo clinic's medical school, which she was after she finished our online biochemistry degree, developed by our biochemistry faculty in our School of Molecular Sciences with every tool you could possibly imagine.

[00:44:37.56] And the third person, which just to put this in perspective, this was a hugely humbling thing for us relative to teaching. I'm a professor. I got tenure at Columbia. I grew up writing and teaching like many of the people in the room. Yeah, OK.

[00:44:51.93] That's not the only way to get things done. It turns out you might not be able to go to school. So this young woman from Afghanistan wrote us a couple of years ago. She said, I found your online universal learner courses.

[00:45:03.84] I took four of them. They're all taught by robots. They're taught by robots developed by our faculty that enhance the learning outcomes. If you take these four courses and you get a B plus or better in the course, you have a 95% probability of being able to do very well in the curriculum at the university.

[00:45:20.50] She hadn't been able to go to school since she was 10 years old, lived in Taliban controlled areas. She wrote us a note and said, I took your courses. I got an A in all of them. I'd like to come to your university. We're like, OK. So we admitted her. We got her out of the country, we got her money, we got her a visa, we got her all this. And then she comes to the university and kicks everybody else's butt.

[00:45:43.46] So she's like Frederick Douglass, who didn't go to school, or Abraham Lincoln who didn't go to school and who didn't take some tests. But Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln couldn't be admitted to our universities today.

[00:45:52.17] So we took that model now using every tool that you can possibly imagine. We have 30,000 students enrolled in our pathways program that she was on taking our universal learner courses, and we've admitted 6,000 of them to the university. So 6,000 of her are now students of ours.

[00:46:09.26] JIM RYAN: Which is remarkable. So the idea of five degrees in four years prompts a question about, how much time it takes to get an undergraduate degree. Do you see that changing?

[00:46:25.67] MICHAEL CROW: Hopefully.

[00:46:26.35] JIM RYAN: Right. So right now, the four years is the default at almost every institution. Some students can graduate by a year or early in the US. Do you see that going by the wayside and students being able to go at their own pace and finish in the time that makes the most sense to all of them? And do you think that there will be more flexibility in terms of where you actually are taking the classes, even if you stay within the same school?

[00:46:58.93] HARRIET NEMBHARD: Yeah, I do. And again, to Michael's earlier point, I hope that we have a host of institutions that would be able to make-- to have this sort of flexibility from a three-year time to matriculate to less where it's possible.

[00:47:16.21] However, I would say that I don't immediately see us at Harvey Mudd taking that up. We describe it not as a 120 credit hour experience, but a four-year residential experience. All but six of our students live on campus.

[00:47:35.51] And there is a lot of the co-curricular education that is there very much with intention. Everything from your ability to continue being tutored in the outdoor classrooms by your faculty members after class to being able to do-- 100% of our students do research with faculty as they matriculate through. So this is a very different model. And a part of it is also being in community with each other.

[00:48:08.88] So, as I said, while I hope that there will be different opportunities and different pathways, Harvey Mudd, a lot of our focus on the mission of building STEM leaders kind of would lead us to explore in other ways first.

[00:48:25.84] And by the way, as you are a student at Harvey Mudd, again, all of the majors are in STEM. But you'll go into any class and half of your fellow students will be women. We graduate 50% of our engineering majors are women, 50% of our physics majors are women. And so we have these mini foci about what that experience means and what inclusive excellence means in this environment.

[00:48:53.66] [INTERPOSING VOICES]

[00:48:54.27] SANTA ONO: I'd answer on quite a different way. A lot of respect for Harvey Mudd and that philosophy. We're actually attracting completion rates. And when they attain their degree, whether it's a baccalaureate or master's degree.

[00:49:09.30] And we hold ourselves accountable to getting students their degrees as quickly as possible. There's a lot of levers to doing that. One is for the university to reach into K through 12 schools and provide them with more options to obtain course credit before they land on campus.

[00:49:27.11] And second, we really are investing in advising, so fewer people fall through the cracks and so that they can finish their degree sooner. We don't want them to leave as quickly as we believe in the importance of experience, but we also believe in affordability.

[00:49:42.53] It's a real burden for students, parents to pay for every year, every semester of education and books. And so we don't apologize for the fact that we're trying to get kids out of college soon as possible.

[00:49:58.28] I think it's on-- it's something which has eroded some of the trust in society and education. There are too many students who do not finish their baccalaureate degree. We have to--

[00:50:13.96] MICHAEL CROW: This is the point. More than half that starts.

[00:50:16.51] SANTA ONO: We have to seriously explore credit, stackable credit, because if you don't complete your baccalaureate degree but you've finished three years, there are real skills depending upon what your major is that you should get credit for.

[00:50:32.05] And so I think it's incredibly important. And there's-- the last thing I'll say is there's an American Academy of Arts and Sciences Committee that's focusing on really looking at all these places where there are leaks in the pipeline, lost opportunities for articulation with high school, lost opportunities for transfer credit from community colleges or between universities. And I think it's really important.

[00:50:58.36] MICHAEL CROW: I guess what I would say is that the universities are hugely designed for the faculty. Most people don't even know what the word semester means. They don't know why it exists when it exists. They don't know why we don't go in the summer other than farmers used to not be around.

[00:51:13.65] And so what we haven't done is thought about at a different level. So how do we help our faculty to be empowered to now deal with all different kinds of students, rather than self-selection, self-selection, self-selection for certain pathways?

[00:51:28.99] And so I don't think time is the unit of analysis that we should be worrying about. The unit of analysis that we should be worrying about is, what does the person know? And so we have this theory now that we've moved away from and we've moved toward, which is that our job is to produce a master learner.

[00:51:43.98] How do we do that? How do we find a way to produce a master learner? And it will be different in different subjects, but there'll be certain overlapping things. And so what we found is that we changed the nature of our semester, which freed our faculty up immensely.

[00:51:56.80] Our faculty had become unbelievably productive, unbelievably productive. Research, scholarship, community service, students, teaching more students, teaching online, teaching on campus, picking what they want.

[00:52:08.51] We took the semesters and broke them up into six academic modules over the year-- fall A, fall B, which are real things. You can teach your face-to-face class in 7 and 1/2 weeks and be done and go to your lab in Bermuda and do whatever it is that you want to do. We don't care.

[00:52:23.18] JIM RYAN: You have show labs in Bermuda?

[00:52:25.03] [LAUGHTER]

[00:52:26.42] MICHAEL CROW: We actually bought the Bermuda Institute for Oceans--

[00:52:28.84] JIM RYAN: Really?

[00:52:29.20] MICHAEL CROW: Yes, to flesh out the global--

[00:52:32.86] JIM RYAN: Any Virginia faculty here, don't pay any attention.

[00:52:35.33] [LAUGHTER]

[00:52:38.26] MICHAEL CROW: We also have planes and ships in Hawaii and all kinds of other places. And so even those faculty. So we have faculty that are distributed. We have faculty that are all over the place. We have faculty, students that are all over the place.

[00:52:50.20] The notion is, how do you empower this student in whatever time they are able to devote? If they have the resources and they can stay for four years based in all of the glory of the institution, have at it. That's what I loved when I was an undergraduate.

[00:53:06.73] I had two majors and three minors. And it was just like a hugely important thing for me. And there was no way I could have done that in less than four years. But we're obsessed with the clock. We're obsessed with the models. We're obsessed with the faculty being the drivers of everything.

[00:53:21.68] Eventually, and we've talked about this earlier in our group, society is becoming increasingly unhappy with us stuck up people at the universities. So now let's tax the endowments. Let's attack the universities. Let's take away their privileges.

[00:53:37.31] Let's cap the salaries of the NIH grants. Let's do this and this and this and this and this, and they're just warming up. Why don't we go after four or five Ivy League presidents and execute them in public? And so-- politically.

[00:53:51.97] And so that just happened within the last six months. And there's more of that on the way. That's all a function of our inability to be focused sufficiently on what our real job is, which is empowerment of the citizens and the democracy to be successful. The fact, they are the means, not the end.

[00:54:11.00] JIM RYAN: So I want to come back to that and the point of flexibility. But I'm going to turn to research for a second and talk first about disciplines which has come up before. So one of the oddities that I've seen in higher education is there is a contradiction between how much we emphasize interdisciplinary research and how universities are organized.

[00:54:32.31] So everyone talks about collaborative research, team science, how important it is to bring experts from different disciplines if we really want to tackle these thorny challenges like climate change.

[00:54:45.99] But then when you look at how universities are organized, they're still organized by schools and departments and disciplines. And if you look at how someone is supposed to most of them. I know. So this is a footnote for-- an asterisk for Arizona State.

[00:55:03.29] And then if you look at tenure standards, new faculty are told you're going to be judged based on your own independent work. So they're talking about cross-purposes. And in the meantime, you see a proliferation of interdisciplinary centers and institutes.

[00:55:21.61] And so clearly, there's some tension. And I appreciate the idea that it's impossible to have interdisciplinary work without having disciplines. So it may make some sense. But I am not sure it can last.

[00:55:36.58] If the answer is, well, we need to create a center every time we want to bring folks who are studying the same topic together, what does that do to departments? And is that really sustainable? Yeah, I really think it, sounds like you have the answer.

[00:55:51.30] SANTA ONO: Try to do both. So when we thought about this, like I said, and we decided to admit to the breadth of our disciplinary strength. And someone I talked to at UVA just earlier today said that's really important because if you're a mathematician or you're an immunologist like I am or a philosopher, you tend to go to those meetings.

[00:56:11.04] And that critical mass to speak about this field is incredibly important to me as an immunologist. If I didn't go to the immunology meetings, then that field is really, really fast and I'd miss it out. So the way we solve it, this is the last thing I'll say real quick, is I did an experiment at University of British Columbia.

[00:56:32.08] We created this research building the size of a couple of football fields. And we said, here are all these benches, here's all this core equipment. Choose where you want to go, whether you're an immunologist or a chemist or a biologist or whatever. Choose where you want to go.

[00:56:48.42] And they came together as interdisciplinary clusters around topics. So they might be focused on juvenile diabetes or pancreatic cancer or whatever, neurobiology. And so they clustered, even though they had different disciplinary homes for research collaboration. But guess what? We thought maybe they would just stay there and not go back to their department. Opposite.

[00:57:13.58] Actually, their attendance at the departmental meetings were not because they knew if they weren't there, they would miss out in the milieu and the reinforcement of being within the Department. So I think--

[00:57:24.50] JIM RYAN: So you think it's sustainable--

[00:57:25.97] SANTA ONO: You can solve it by space, but you can also enhance the disciplinary strength by maintaining that community as well.

[00:57:33.45] JIM RYAN: But do you two agree?

[00:57:36.81] HARRIET NEMBHARD: Well, I think if we're going to really support faculty in their interdisciplinary work, it has to not rely on the heroic efforts of the one person who keeps things all together. And there has to be some systematic way that we recognize that work for most faculty on the tenure clock. This is our tenure track.

[00:58:04.96] This is really a part of the academic progression. What can we do to enhance and support their work as interdisciplinary scholars as they go through the organization? So some of the things that we've really focused on at Harvey Mudd have been, in some ways, very technocratic things.

[00:58:24.49] Looking at the faculty notebook to be the PNT criteria, referred to as the faculty notebook, and to be very specific about giving recognition for interdisciplinary work in ways that would be supportive of the faculty.

[00:58:41.08] Similarly, as we look at our budgets, to be very intentional about supporting with resources these interdisciplinary efforts. So those have been some of the things that have been undergirding those efforts so far.

[00:58:56.08] MICHAEL CROW: I think what I would add quickly is that we decided that the last thing the world needs is another generic public university doing the same thing that the other 800 public universities are doing and doing inadequately, net, net overall.

[00:59:09.94] There are some exceptions-- a few dozen exceptions. But beyond that, there's a number of performance issues. And so having said that, we said, OK, why don't we rethink the logic? So not everything is as simple Don Stokes Pasteur's quadrant fight between the four realms of science. I mean, it's a-- so we said, is it OK for us to have exploration as one of our science areas?

[00:59:36.25] Yes, How about outcomes? Yes, how about just pure reductionism? Yes, how about pure creativity? Yes. So we decided to allow schools to evolve in directions where they broke down their departmental barriers. And so we now have schools that are focused on outcomes as their objective.

[00:59:53.23] So they're not in the medical school, which is an outcome oriented design school, but they're in other areas-- like sustainability and ocean futures and conservation futures, the new school that we're designing. We've started 40 of these and did away with 85 academic units along the way, all with consensus vote by the Academic Senate.

[01:00:12.83] JIM RYAN: So you're moving away from the disciplines to a certain--

[01:00:15.43] MICHAEL CROW: Well, no, what we're moving toward is the world doesn't need more disciplines only. So a person then, therefore, can write in multiple disciplines, be recognized in multiple disciplines while also advancing in these new areas.

[01:00:29.17] So in our School of Earth and Space Exploration, that process has allowed us to increase the number of majors attracted to exploration as opposed to geology or as opposed to astronomy, attracting many more people to the program, attracting much more investment, philanthropy to the exploration objective, attracting much more research funding.

[01:00:52.45] We have a 10x increase in the research funding and research expenditures in that unit. And many more majors than we've ever had, more diversity than we've ever had. And we have the degrees, the traditional degrees-- geology and astronomy and astrophysics and astrobiology.

[01:01:06.49] But we also have a degree in space exploration and space strategy and all kinds of other things filled with all these students in these faculty who want to learn in that modality. So for us, I'm not suggesting everyone has to do this.

[01:01:19.07] But what I am suggesting is that most places are too rigid. Here's a story as I left Columbia. So one of the things-- I was the founder of a thing called the Earth Institute at Columbia, and among other things that I worked on. And I helped get a new environmental biology and evolutionary program going.

[01:01:35.33] And I remember as I left, it was like one of the first new departments in 50 years. And as I left, they said, finally, you're getting out of here so we can get rid of that thing. And so I will note that it's still there 22 years later.

[01:01:48.13] HARRIET NEMBHARD: I'd like to add to that, Michael. I mean, I think that, that approach gives at least a couple of to-dos. I mean, I think it means that we need more experiences for graduate students to have access to these opportunities in these schools and these types of schools.

[01:02:06.29] And we talked about perhaps some ways to have some exchange experiences. But I think it also means that we need to get-- I think we need precision on how we hire interdisciplinary faculty and bring them into our organization as well.

[01:02:25.22] Right now, there's still a lot of faculty lined by disciplinary area and such. And I think that approaching those two parts of the pipeline, if you will, also in ways that facilitate the interdisciplinarity are important.

[01:02:38.51] MICHAEL CROW: So one visualization I have for this is there's the reductionists who are boring into the understanding of nature in every possible way down to the finest subatomic particle. And then there's the systems-level thinker, a discipline like sustainability, which is boring up to get the broadest interconnected thing. We now produce both of those.

[01:02:58.88] And it's not a wise thing for a person on the upward screw to try to go to a reductionistic department and hope that they'd have any chance of success because they'll be annihilated. What we have now is a way for our PhD students and our faculty are moving in both directions. And it's a conscious, planned thing on our part.

[01:03:21.35] JIM RYAN: So I have a lot more questions to ask you, but I want to make sure we leave time for audience questions. So someone is collecting questions.

[01:03:37.70] HARRIET NEMBHARD: From the questions, it looks like we might have homework, guys. [INAUDIBLE] exciting to see all the cards flying around.

[01:04:01.82] MICHAEL CROW: The first question is, why did they let you on this panel?

[01:04:04.29] [APPLAUSE]

[01:04:06.98] JIM RYAN: And next question is, who do you mean by you?

[01:04:09.45] [APPLAUSE]

[01:04:10.70] MICHAEL CROW: There you go.

[01:04:14.27] JASON NABI: So it's only dawning on me, the irony at this very moment, that the requested method of delivery for the Q&A was not in and of itself very futuristic. But thank you. Thank you. There's a lot here. And I'm thinking that we will have time for one.

[01:04:31.94] [LAUGHTER]

[01:04:33.37] But this is wonderful. And we will read each and every one of these and circle back to you. This question seems to be more of a choose your own adventure. So it looks like take it one direction or the other.

[01:04:51.34] One, what is the most existential threat we will face in the next decade? And what will be the role that higher education plays in addressing that threat? And/or, what excites you most about the future?

[01:05:06.60] [LAUGHTER]

[01:05:07.92] And how does this affect your vision for the future of higher education?

[01:05:13.44] HARRIET NEMBHARD: Yeah, go for a hot planet or AI? Which way you want to--

[01:05:17.65] MICHAEL CROW: I would say accelerated technological change with no mechanism for our society to educate quickly enough for people to stay up and keep up with it before they begin to lose context.

[01:05:30.06] JIM RYAN: That's the threat or the opportunity?

[01:05:31.81] MICHAEL CROW: It's the threat.

[01:05:32.34] [LAUGHTER]

[01:05:33.54] HARRIET NEMBHARD: And the opportunity.

[01:05:34.86] MICHAEL CROW: It's both.

[01:05:35.86] HARRIET NEMBHARD: I like it. Like I said, well, I think this is very encompassing. What we're really focused on is helping-- have you all heard of the book Generation Dread? I recommend it. It really taps into the anxiety that a lot of the students of college age have right now about the planet that they are inhabiting.

[01:06:01.12] And I think it's very important for us to be able to listen to the students and help them to navigate their way through solutions for a warming planet.

[01:06:15.03] SANTA ONO: I would say, looking back to when I was in college a long time ago, we're just trying to figure out how the immune system works. It was a black box. A lot of things were black boxes back then.

[01:06:26.94] And if you think about what we know, what a sophomore at the University of Virginia now knows, it's quite far advanced from what we knew back then. It's a credit to what universities have done. Much of that occurred in universities like the University of Virginia. Now things that we only dreamed about are going to happen. There are drugs that are being generated that will reverse diseases that are chronic.

[01:06:55.82] We can now edit genes. We can now take cells and propagate them in vitro, put them back and repair diseases that result from degeneration. It's remarkable. So I'm going to end with an optimistic note. I can't wait to see what the students of today can do with the knowledge that didn't exist when I was their age. And the last thing I'll say is that we hosted Barack Obama when I was in Vancouver.

[01:07:24.71] HARRIET NEMBHARD: He was at Harvey Mudd, too.

[01:07:26.90] [LAUGHTER]

[01:07:28.07] SANTA ONO: And it was--

[01:07:29.27] MICHAEL CROW: An issue.

[01:07:30.12] [LAUGHTER]

[01:07:32.51] SANTA ONO: Jefferson founded UVA. But what he said at the end is looking at the mountains, because you can see beautiful mountains there. And he was talking about all these difficult challenges, geopolitical challenges that are real. But what he said is I have a belief in the future of civilization because of the quality of the youth that are at our universities. So something optimistic.

[01:07:57.32] [APPLAUSE]

[01:08:03.09] JIM RYAN: Well, I would underscore that point and I want to thank all the panelists. And I'm sorry, we didn't get to more questions. But I want to turn it over to Lori to say a few closing remarks. But please join me again in thanking the panelists.

[01:08:16.42] [APPLAUSE]

[01:08:27.96] LORI MCMAHON: I'm sure you now understand why I equated these four outstanding presidents to Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe. So please help me congratulate them again on a great panel.

[01:08:40.75] [APPLAUSE]

[01:08:47.08] And I just wanted to share a few of my thoughts and the lessons that I have learned today. And hopefully, you heard the same messages. So there are several important points here that we heard. So serving students in varied, diverse way is our job.

[01:09:07.55] There are so many learners, and innovation and teaching includes being flexible and finding many ways to engage with our students and to deliver education. And we must be inclusive. Inclusivity is important and personalized education is critical for all of the learners that we have the responsibility for educating.

[01:09:32.45] We must provide opportunities for students and faculty to be the drivers of innovation, that they have to have opportunities to engage and to interact. And that collisions are important in driving that innovation. And the question that we heard was about fear. What is the biggest threat to higher Ed? But we also heard a positive spin on that question, too.

[01:10:02.00] But it seems to me that many of us have some fear of the future. And so when we have fear of the future, we may not think hard about how to get to solutions. So being inspired by the future is where the Academy comes in.

[01:10:21.45] And we, in the Academy, are in an extremely privileged position. Ultimately, it is our responsibility for not just predicting the future, but we must work to create the future. Thanks again, and we hope to see you at the reception. Thank you, panelists.

[01:10:43.95] [APPLAUSE]