 Again, let me welcome everybody. Welcome to the Future Transform. I'm delighted to see you're here today We have a fantastic guest who is covering a really really fascinating topic And I'm looking forward to our conversation. James Shulman is someone that I have known for years and years I have known him in his career working on the art store project He was a founding president and a very very active leader in that in that groundbreaking work and Also for a time I worked with the National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education And we worked with Ithaca, which was part which helped coordinate activity with our store So we were colleagues of a kind I've always admired his work and now what I'm bringing him on here to discuss is his new book Which I cannot recommend highly enough the synthetic University You can find a little link to it in the bottom left corner of the screen There's a little tan color button and this describes an unusual kind of organization that I think can have so much benefit to really help Higher education in ways that we don't really appreciate or talk enough about but it's also fuel for research to try to understand How to make these how to make these projects work and succeed? There is I think no better person to talk about this than James Shulman who is now with the Association of Learned Societies Let me stop talking about him and actually bring him up on stage Good morning James. Hi Brian. How are you? I'm great now that I see you And are you also in California today? Yeah, I'm at on the campus of University California Berkeley, so it's beautiful here. It's a nice to be Excellent excellent. Yeah, it's always disconcerting for me to set foot in California after being away for a while Went to realize that they don't have seasons here and then all the lack of seasons are lovely. It's it's quite a shock James there's there's so much to talk about and I want to begin by asking you to introduce yourself and As I mentioned on the forum, we have an unusual wave of academics introducing themselves Which is by what they're working on in the next year So I'm curious what what topics what projects what ideas are top of mind for you as you look out into 2024 Great. Well, I'm I'm at the American Temple of Learned Societies, which Before I started here five years ago. I knew two things I knew we did something with the societies and we gave a bunch of fellowships and those were all good things and What what I'm really excited about and some of my colleagues are here and my colleague joy our president We're working on a bunch of things that take advantage of this unusual place being in the middle of things We're in the middle of a lot of different flows We have 80 scholarly societies that we work closely with in the maze and social sciences We have funder we work with we have about 43 deans of humanities that we meet with regularly the fellowship programs bring in You know readers and panelists and applicants of all kinds and they're all varied So, you know when you're looking at complicated things like how to sustain the humanities being in the middle of all those flows You know, that's what you need because it's not the you know One just tweak one little thing to keep everything working kind of Hmm. Hmm. What are the it's a fascinating organization and I'm glad to see joy Connolly here from ACLS What what are the big topics that you're thinking about? Are you looking at say trying to reverse the crisis in the humanities? Are you looking at open access publication? Are you looking at the political threats against higher education? What's so what's on your radar? So a few things that I would just highlight and as you say all of these things I mean that the the political situation and the state laws that pen America and ACE have been such leaders in helping us all work on I know some of you they've been on your in the forum You know those it's amazing those lands smack dab in the humanities I mean whose history gets studied whose history can't be talked about whose identity is is not something That some of these laws want us to be able to study so so that's a really it's amazing That's that the humanities are actually going to be front and center of the 2024 presidential race, but they really are Couple of things we have going we are doing we have two great projects and open access monographs So the journal world is big and complicated and huge business But you know the world is not so huge right there are 4 000 humanities monographs published a year Until tweaking the money that's in the system instead of that money just going to buy the book for 200 libraries Have a great project with the university president j-store in the subscribed open model We have some funding from our kdf or an access prize to you know remind people that this is okay. It doesn't hurt It actually can help so so a lot of fun things Excellent excellent. Oh, that's great to see and I'm just so excited to see you bring your talents to bear On this on this great organization Today we're going to be talking about the the synthetic university and a kind of organization that I think I might need Let me just introduce a little bit james, and then I want you to cut loose on this um In your book you talk about groups like the national student clearing house You talk about investor, which is a multi campus or trans campus Endowment group you talk about art store, of course You talk about switchboard, which was a career outfit that came out of reed college You talk about the great virtual class programs and wickets as well as akit Sorry akkadium And you described this one a really clear way um A type of organization that lives outside any one college and provides realistic and mission-aligned solutions to collective Institutional challenges these synthetic service providers are one part of the underdeveloped inter-institutional Infrastructure the colleges and universities need for the cross-pollination of good ideas and the evolution of trans institutional norms How am I doing so far have I have I pinned these down? So I think it's either you you've been to down in those examples are you know very vivid and I'd love to talk about them I think the main thing that I'd emphasize is that You know autonomy is not only prized by scholars by departments and by Presentations it's really what's made you know us higher education the envy of the world for a hundred years and so this The the the real challenge in working collectively is is when Autonomy sort of makes room for some collective action And you know this is not like we should all be teaching the same class or we should all be using the same system And that's you know that that's really the danger I think of what happens when the cost problem and higher education gets extreme is people just say let's shut this down Let's do the you know the queen sacrifice and let's you know Let's just get one system that fits all because that's all we can afford And so really what this is a call for are the complicated inter-institutional systems and providers and approaches that can You know still keep us doing our mission and still respect the institutional and individual autonomy But do you know make some room for collective action? Which is so it's so so difficult. I mean your whole book wrestles with this question How do you get multiple academics from multiple institutions coordinated you begin with that? incredibly powerful legal ruling against mit as well as other Colleges and universities which really put the kibosh on one form of cooperation You have story after story about the difficulties of inter-institutional competition. You have this great This great anecdote from my friend Kenny Morel from Sinoecus is where he asked a group of presidents What do you prefer to do collaborate or compete and it's clear that compete is the answer But they they can't quite come out and say that directly I'm before we get further in that let me ask what what other institutions or organizations might count for this kind of group would You describe an open source alternative for image manipulation hosting at one point You touch on publishers as well as inter-institutional teaching projects Do all those count as well are the other examples of synthetic organizations? So here's how I think about that Brian like every campus Does some very similar things right and some of those are going to be particularly let's take a campus safety, right? I mean there's There's not going to be one office of campus safety for 3,500 campuses, right? I mean that would that would be crazy It's very local. It's very specific to a campus on the other hand it would be crazy if You know each campus had to invent its own, you know, handcuffs or its own Well, I think system so there are clearly places in everything we do where there's some room for Common, you know common answers and collective solutions and so and I think what's happening I mean and some of the people in the audience know more about this than I do but public private partnerships are growing they're you know, they are with things like error mark for dining services or Bring in real estate investment to help build dorms or buildings and there's a lot of good in all of that, right? But I think the idea of everything being sort of created as a public private partnership including academic things Is you know, it has a lot of risks with it And so the the most I'm talking about has some of the elements of public private partnership But it has a lot more emphasis on the partnership than on the sort of Co-investor vendor What are some of those risks of a public private partnership? Well, I mean so the the classic example would be Consultants right management consultants who I I'm not I've been a management consultant We have friends who are management consultants. I believe in consulting But you know the first thing any manager consultants say is, you know, they'll come in when they pitch something They say, you know, we don't have a template we work with you on what you do But they have templates right and that's fine. There's value in that there's efficiency and effects But if if there are consultants who work with campuses and have very very similar problems Over and over again if they were charging less because of that efficiency of having worked out solutions that would be one thing The you know the pressure on for-profit firms and that's you know, that's fine. That's good That's what the market is really good at is to come up with solutions with Higher and higher margins, right? And so that means if you come up with an efficient solution You don't lower your margins and so so a lot of the organizations that you mentioned at the beginning Have real partnerships in the way that there's benefits or two-way streets to the partnership And it's not all about, you know, how how much can we how many times can we reuse the model and charge the same every time? Well, the national student clearinghouse is a great example of that a really good two-way partnership So is so is art store Friends I I want to stop asking questions and let you ask questions. Uh, please please james go go ahead say a bit more Well, I was just gonna say I mean people know the national student clearinghouse now because but When I was at melin in the 90s, we were working on projects gathering student data For the research that bill bowen and a couple of us were doing at melin And the clearinghouse was just starting and it's an amazing organization But it didn't set out to do what it does now if they had gone into 3000 registrar's offices in 1994 and said hey, we want to build a student called degree verify Where we poke our noses into all your student records that employers can know whether somebody got a degree or not They would have been chased out, you know, you know in screaming fits They actually went to solve a problem that everyone had which was you know in 1994 Sally made it and know if somebody who left the university of michigan was now employed or now A student at the university of Wisconsin so everybody had to pour over these roles of these huge printouts continually And so what they did was to set out to solve a problem that was a problem for the registrar's office Problem for the students and a problem for the lending agency and then when you build something like that that's actually needed Then from there you can do other things That's a great example Your your book is full of stories of organizations that change and mutate over time As they encounter different needs and and different issues Let me bring up We have questions that are coming in again friends If you're new to the form just go on that white strip in the bottom of the screen and either click the raised hand If you want to join us face to face or click the question mark if you want to type in a question Like this one here from our good friend phil katz How would you describe the strength of learned societies today and their role in synthetics? It seems to me they are weaker and less central to shared academic life than they used to be So, uh, thanks phil. It's a great question the um The executive director jim grossman of the american historical association You know reminds us all the time that they don't hire people, right? They don't hire people They don't make jobs. They don't determine how many tenure-track jobs they're going to be they don't What they can do is they can convene and they can legitimate um, and uh There's a third thing. I forget. I'll have to maybe jim's on here But anyway, but so, you know, these are incredibly valuable The strata of higher education. There are so few things that reach a queen and and the the learned societies have They reach across in their membership. They reach across in their councils of department chairs as all you know, I mean so much of the action around You know changes in reward structures or in hearing and curriculum are at the departmental level And so having those councils of chairs incredibly valuable for cross pollinating good ideas Now that said, you're you're right in the sense that they're struggling because research funding is diminishing money to sponsor people going to conferences money for That recognizes release time for people who are an editor or president of an academic society That's drying up and so but we all lose if we don't have those cross pollinating Um platforms and so I think you know, they're they're so important. They really are I mean as we all know I mean the basis of academic freedom in this country is that the experts themselves Define what's legitimate in the field not the politicians right and yet those norm-setting communities really are You know overlap highly with the academic societies and so that that that capacity to judge What is legitimate work? It's so important Well, that's thank you james. That's a great answer Phil, thank you for the good question. This is an example of a text question, by the way If you're in due to this Now I just want to say it's chapter five or chapter six. That's about possibilities of intercampus teaching James has a bunch to say about the scholar of these societies there We have another question that's come up and this is from our good friend up in Madison, wisconsin, uh john hollandbeck and john asks this I see the problem starting of course credit being accepted at all campuses This sunk our small attempt to new mexico to offer a high level classes to multiple campuses How do you propose getting camp and then he gets cut off? Um, uh, I I think that but I think you can see where he was going with that. Um, What uh, you know, how does how does that play a role here? Well, it's a great topic because it also highlights the tension between autonomy And uh and collective action, right? I mean what should my you know Intro to economics class at this institution count as an intro to economics class at some other institutions I feel like that progress some progress has been made with this with the renewed attention over the last decade on community college transfer It's one of the great things that's come out of the student success movement Is to realize that you know realization that articulation of course credits is you know Has been such a horrible You know disadvantage for students and for first society that invest in in education and then the students and needs people to Get through the system So the work alumina and people like that on on bringing that and the work of individual campuses that have formed partnerships Where students go in and they can do things in advance knowing what courses are going to transfer and what aren't I mean that that kind of sort of I hate to use all the military metaphors, but that hand-to-hand Combat of of schools working together and then intermediaries like you know the college board I mean they had to deal with it with ap credits and um You know credential engines started by lumina and things like this that are working on how to make sure that that wastage doesn't happen But you know, but everyone's gonna play like all those people who want to cross their arms and say no No, no my courses and like that other course You know, you have to realize that we're actually all in this together John in the in the chat continued and he said it's a it's such a boring seeming problem But campuses only seem to trust their own faculty Yeah, I guess what one of my theories of change is that Everybody's got to be involved right and so and it's and we got to be working on all fronts simultaneously So yes, you have to be working within the norms of the institution and the the vertical institution that you're part of But you have to be working horizontally And diagonally because I mean changes so hard and we're all so busy and they're you know It all can just stop because something else comes up, right? That's a that's a great answer and again As always john, thank you for the really really good question friends we have The the q&a box stands open for you and of course as you can tell James here is proof that you don't have to have a beard to be on the stage So you can you can join us at any time just click the raised hand button and we'd be glad to to host you on the stage I have I'm afraid a broader question and that's that's one of the major themes of the book, which is that A lot of these synthetic organizations try to improve the operations and the experience of academia But also they're trying to grapple with cost containment And you have this great great line Um, I can't pull it up right now, but it was that campuses have no internal constituency devoted to cost reduction or cost containment um And the the second or sorry the last two chapters of your book you You do this blindingly great work where you're really blazing a trail trying to figure out how to establish A ecosystem that can help campuses do this, but but i'm struck by this. I mean how It it seems like an intractable problem if if campuses don't have any Intrinsic reason to want to reduce tuition reduce free, uh, would you reduce fees reduce costs? How how can you create such an ecosystem and have it be accepted within this academic ecosystem that you've talked about? So sadly sometimes things have to get worse before they get better and things are getting worse in a lot of ways I mean the You know the the cost of higher education I mean as people in this forum know that there's a difference between cost and price But the cost of doing all the things that we're doing and all the things that we're expected to do Right to prepare people to be hedge fund managers and to be documentary filmmakers and to be nurses and to be You know to be engineers. I mean all the careers all the Unfunded mandates all the regulatory responsibilities the big time sports and the big time parts I mean there's so many demands made on university colleges and universities And there's so many creative people faculty staff administrators coming up with ways of fulfilling those many needs, right? so there's all so we know that the The cost it's not there's no it's not wasted money It's that a lot of money's being spent on a lot of things but You know bill bowen my mentor and friend You know wrote in 1968 That the cost of higher education is going to increase faster than the cost of inflation at large because it's a labor intensive industry He knew then and people have known said then Exactly where this is all going and the and he said then you know He said you don't have to be standard and know that it's not going to go well, right? So so it you know we with their things we can do and as long as state subsidies for public education We're helping to subvent all that it was sort and as long as housing prices and housing values We're going up forever and as long as interest rates were zero effectively zero for 10 years We could have a lot of things to cover that up and to pay for those costs Well, that's not lasting right and so we need to we need to figure this out And as you say and when you're talking about that that example with kenny morell and the presidents presidents are hired and rewarded based on making your campus distinctive so and And department chairs and deans the head of incentives to do things that are not about collaborative action, right? And so that we have to tinker with We have the the chat box has been having a lot of really good conversation as as we often do And one of them comes again from From phil cats who follows up and asks this are faculty and staff even trained to understand that those challenges to cost containment Are an essential aspect of higher education You know, it's a really interesting question and you started brian by asking what we're doing at acls I mean one of the one of the things that joy and i talk about often and with deans and with graduate school deans and department chairs Is that it's amazing how little people learn about the enterprise of higher education as they're trained to work in it, right? And does this mean that everybody should do a tour of duty in the deputy provost office? Maybe right. I mean but but understanding I mean there's always a perception that there's tons of money out there that's not being shared with them And understanding what makes this system work. It'll make people good department chairs It'll make people good administrators. They don't make it'll make faculty graduate students who become faculty You know able to be part of the system So that when they want to change things if they want to change reward structures They want to change the you know the the place of of of part-time visiting faculty and and you know non-tenure track faculty and the You know discrepancies and disparities there You have to understand how the place works. So I think it would be great if that were part of what people learned I think that's excellent. Uh, I mean, you know, I'm I hate to get personal on this but I can say I went to the university of michigan and we learned Very little I learned more about how a university's operate by actually being active in the ta union And and leading a helping be part of their job action, which was a great learning experience I would in retrospect. I would love to spend some time in the provost office and the cbo's office This is a Excellent excellent question. So really really important point. Um, thank you james for for clarifying that Our good friend, uh, lisa durf has a question about this point of collective action She asks from a business viewpoint alone Won't all these individual institutions have to team together? Is it just to survive? so, um It's very hard for institutions not to survive It's very easy for them to be in trouble. It's very easy for them to Change things that they thought were part of their mission in order to respond to market forces And yes over the last decade more and more are going out of business, but it's very hard for Non-profit institutions to go. There's a lot of people who care about them There's always some alums who care about them or a state's attorney general so and I guess the other so so They they're they're not very good at dying. They're very good at bleeding and there's a lot of wastage And I think the other part of lisa's question though is won't they have to collaborate? I'm not a huge believer in collaboration. I I love it. I believe in it personally. I like to collaborate, but um, you know the idea that institutions who 99 of their time are competing with each other for everything for students for faculty for grants for public attention Are going to then collaborate freely and happily in ways that you know that work really well It happens in places and their library loan is terrific. There's something in it for everybody So they're definitely places where collaboration works, but for the most part they're competing So the particular aspect of this book, which is you know, maybe splitting here But it's about a set of organizations that actually can bring about change by forcing it from the outside so You know you heard a little bit about art store of this organization that my colleagues and I built for 15 years So that every college didn't you know scan their Crab You know and catalog it and have the general council decide whether they could even use that digital image or so So one of the things that was that I had learned in doing that was you know We had to make sense to the Architectural historians and to the libraries and all the academic computing We had to make sense to the people who we had to convince that this was a good answer In complement to their own local work, right? But the other thing is it wasn't just like mission It wasn't just hey, we're good guys and you're good guys and we're all thinking the same thing It was also we had to be good enough that they would write a check if they didn't write a check a we wouldn't survive But b it wouldn't show that they really cared if they're like sure give us art store We're going to keep doing what we're doing if they write a check so that So that outside sort of mixture of material and symbolic buy-in is Can bring about change in a way that I don't think collaboration really can Mm-hmm. That's that's a fine distinction, but a very very useful one This makes yeah, would you consider j store to be one of these organizations? So j store is you know as we all know an amazing organization and a platform for doing So many things now that I admire so much I the the little distinction that I would make is that when Bill and Kevin started j store in 1993 1994 Campuses weren't about to scan all their bound journals They were about to build new wings of the library to store them But so that I mean that it might have just been that it was so prescient that even DIY campuses hadn't decided to do this themselves. So that was a a collective action that was taken sort of preemptively And it may well have been three years later campuses We're all going to start doing that and then it would have been the biggest cost savings in the history of higher education Well, that's that that's very very interesting. Um, I I like I like where that that's a This is you are breaking so much ground in in this research and also of course in your career in in developing One of these organizations and now working at a second one Friends again, this is a place for you to ask your questions. I have a ton of them And I would I would be happy to share Share your questions and better the best of all Chris Aldrich in the In the chat has great response james when you mentioned, uh, you know institutions can always bleed It's harder for them to die. Chris has the surgeon's truism. The bleeding always stops Coldest thing I've heard today It's true. It's absolutely true um Well, uh, Chris also follows up by asking this in from the chat Framed, uh, positively and more. Hopefully how much more could educational institutions be doing if they weren't spending all their time fighting the bleeding Yeah, I I think I think that's really the key to Not only why We need solutions like this, but also how and what I mean by that is there has to be There has to be a better answer in In it for the faculty or the staff or the administration then it's This is more efficient, right? This is more efficient doesn't work It just doesn't I mean we're we're mission driven places We spend money on things that are meant to lose money and otherwise we shouldn't be mission driven Institution, right? I mean and so so it's very tricky to know When to you know, so again, so so saying we're going to do this we're going to use this Solution or this shared approach because it's it's more economically efficient is just It's wrong. It's not the right way to do this and you know One of the great things about synaucus is you talked about Kenny morell earlier and that effort Which did so much good and got so much, right? was By work it was faculty driven And so, you know if Kenny does Aristophanes in Greek comedy and how in high school You know, it's Southwestern does Roman architecture You know they they could see by working together. They could teach what they each of them know best They could cover for each other when somebody goes on sabbatical You know that you know all that you know when if you're one or two classicists that um At a liberal arts college even when you have a sabbatical you can't take it Right because you know who's going to cover your students who's going to cover your classes Who's going to help with senior thesis so so the the the The idea of that that they came up with was better than just the diy answer And it wasn't you know, just pave pave it and make it the Walmart of classics, right? It was it was how to work together to come up with a better solution So so to the to the question. Yes, there'd be more time to do things Collectively and better if we're not doing absolutely everything ourselves Well good, and that's that's a wonderful possibility to to keep in mind we have More questions that are are coming in in the chat by the way, uh, Sharon Bailey Talks about other mission-driven institutions, which is Something that does does appear in the book This is a question that we have here from our good friend And scholar, uh, steven airman, who I think is in, uh, maryland today And we just bring him up on the stage or bring his question up on the stage Online learning by many institutions creates opportunities for creating synthetic infrastructure What examples of such infrastructure? Have you seen Help small colleges market courses for example Yes, so online is part of this And we all remember the moot craze of 2012 where You know it was declared that mooks were gonna, you know, solve the cost problem in higher education and solve everything That has not happened and in fact, so I do write about both, um, you know the The parts of teaching shared teaching that mooks got right But there's so many parts to teaching That are so far beyond and so much more complicated than the recording of lectures in the adaptive learning, right? Those are fine things and there there can be a part of Good answers, but you know What are we going to do about grading? What are we going to do about? Office hours, what are we going to do about one to one work? I mean, there there's so many pieces of this puzzle and this is you know going back to the question of the role of societies I mean the societies can really help on this By you know by sharing I mean as they do they They're a venue for people to share syllabi Um, I write about the textbook and how the textbook is actually a synthetic solution I mean, you know Whether or not people get enough credit for it, you know for writing a good textbook as as I believe they should But the idea that every you know, not every campus You know bruised its own textbook, right for every class So we're somehow we've there are places where we've accepted pieces of the pedagogical enterprise that we could do collectively And to do some more of that You know is really interesting and I owe a great debt to one of the anonymous readers from Princeton Press Who my earlier version of the chapter where I do talk about shared classes You know sort of said I think it's a pretty sad world if like You know if it's 100 teachers or a thousand teachers teaching every all the courses for the country and I realized How much I was under appreciating and under talking through all the complexity of sharing classes What what what the reality is is there like 1.3 million teachers in the country in higher education And one way or another in a few years are going to be 1.2, right? They're not we're not going to be 1.4 And so the question is how we get there how we do it in ways that make sense How we do it in ways that keep fields alive and thriving, you know, especially that aren't market driven So I think you know the reality is You know, there isn't money falling off of the federal budget or state budget in the higher education So we're going to have to figure out how to make it a little more efficient do Well, first of all, that's a fantastic question steve and steve always does this and Some of you might remember he was a forum guest talking about his really really excellent new book on the iron triangle So steve thank you and james. Thank you for that for that great question or that great answer which brings to mind a question from me, which is I'm hearing this debated a lot in A lot of different kind of places often I think from humanities faculty Where they believe that the solution to this problem of cost Is to basically pump up state and federal support Um, you know, john warner from inside higher ed has a whole book on the subject siva vaihan nathan At uva. You think that this is the clear solution Chris newfield a wonderful friend of our program a great scholar has written that he thinks this is what's coming up That we're about to experience a cultural shift away from privatized thinking towards public oriented thinking But you're you're pretty skeptical about this both in person and in the book Do you think is there any chance that we could increase public funding and public support for higher ed? Still, I I don't know enough about about real politics To say whether how liable it is I I can first say that I would totally welcome it I mean, I think it's much needed much deserved and it would be wonderful I don't you know, we just saw what happened with trying to make community college free Uh for students. I mean I I don't I don't see huge subsidies rolling out in any direction now that said There are things we can do and so when when I look at the west virginia situation I mean, I can see lots of things that I wish had gone differently with the administration You know and the state and the building of buildings and their enrollment projections and all kinds of things. Um On the other hand, I think we also we in the humays and we in academia You know continually need to make a case for support. We need to show that we're valuable You know ron daniels book about what university is oh democracy. It doesn't mean everything should be applied It doesn't mean that all research should be immediately I'm a huge believer in basic research and the pluralism of what kind of scholarship we should have But that said when there's public interest among scholars and among students At doing work and having it rewarded that is publicly engaged or publicly accessible That's a good thing. You know the world will care more about the academy if they understand what we do We got to keep doing that. We can't give up Um by the way james just because I'm gonna keep singing your praises. There's um in the chat There is a quick discussion about college sports and I just want to say as I say to everybody The book that james co-authored with bill bowen The game of life is for me just one of the great books of higher education ever and that's that Classic groundbreaking book about college sports using actual data And I can't recommend it highly enough. So if you haven't read it grab a copy right now We have more questions coming in james, uh, and one of them comes from our friend Mark Corbett wilson and he asks where the students fit into all this We've been talking about external stakeholders. We're talking about faculty and staff But where does students fit into the synthetic organization ecosystem? Yeah, it's really interesting because the students Amazingly have so little voice in all of us, right? I mean it's wild I mean, they're the ones who are writing they and their family They're writing bigger and bigger checks right and and and they're not happy about that And so put aside, you know the the hyper selective places where you know They could fill their classes 10 times over with full pay students who would pay more than the than the sticker price Right. I mean there's there's so much competition to get in but within the rest of the system One would think that there'd be more pressure from students and families about the cost problem I don't think they know where how to work on it. Like so divesting from fossil fuels They know how to work on right they know that there's an investment committee and they know that there are managers and there are ESP managers and their managers who you know Can deploy their money in ways that are more environmentally, you know thoughtful and respectful So they that's a problem. They know how to work on the cost problem They're basically told this is what you've got right and so they need to find I mean student We need to we need to find not on them We all need to find a way for the student voice And the student voting with your feet to be a little more effective that this is not okay. And yet we get sucked students family faculty administrators get sucked into the rankings, right? I mean Yeah, that incident with came around the president's is so important because basically what he was saying is Hey, look, we've got this great collaborative effort here. Does this does this make you all look good and their answer is no Their answer is I'm supposed to be able to brag that I have the best classics department You know in in mississippi or the best classics department among liberal arts colleges With an enrollment of this or I have the best classics department or we move from having The fourth best classics department to the second and so I think what we need to do is give students a way Of sort of saying here's what we need, right? We need a good education. That's not just career preparation certainly career preparation We need the things that we we want, you know that the market isn't going to protect for us But we also just can't let the cost run up forever You know endlessly so but but that's on us to figure out how to have enough solutions that they can find their policemen Well, that's a really wide-ranging answer James. Thank you. Thank you I've got a blog series by the way where I'm tracking which university will be the first to crack six digits for annual fees So I think it's about two years out And that that may be they may pull back from the brink of the symbolic brink, but Not for long Yeah, now the pressure is too great mark. Thank you for the vital question And we have one question from our good friend Tom Haymes coming to us from the Houston, Texas area and Tom asks do our academic decision-making mechanisms have enough flexibility to create evolutionary change? What do we change about that? Will it take a hard crisis? whoo So everyone should go read Brian's book Brian from a callister last name Brian Rosenberg. So Brian has a wonderful book that is out just now 17 years as president McAllister and talking just about you know, really candidly about the challenges about about change curricular change reward structure change Getting faculty that encouraging faculty think differently. You know, I I work with faculty chairs deans You know every day and you know, I really don't think that they're they're people who are just denying all this I think there are people it's a really insidiously constructed system that is so amazingly change resistant, right? I mean so so I think what has to happen is I think I mean and again back to Kenny and and his colleagues in greek and roman studies um You know, they saw that the field wasn't going to thrive if if they just like Batten down the hatches and put their head in the stand and said we're just going to keep doing what we're doing You know, they're they were going to be placed by you know itinerant scholars because they were cheaper and blah blah blah and there would be so many So I I think you know, I think in the same way that faculty members Especially in the mays have seen that their students a lot of their students really aren't getting academic jobs I mean, you know, even at the most elite places I think that's waking them up to say, hey, you know, maybe some change is needed Maybe some change in graduate curriculum and graduate admissions is needed You know, because we're not serving our students well and we can no longer just you know Cheerfully point to the anecdotal, you know student who got a tenure-track job We have to realize that we need to do some work on this So it's not easy and and it's a great question because you know it People who are in a good place are sort of like I'm in a good place. I'm just going to write it out But they they don't want to write it out. They don't want the future of their fields to be diminished by all this Yeah, yeah, ah Should uh tom always asks great great probing questions and and james as always that's a fantastic answer um We have uh friends. We're running out of time. We've got about 11 minutes to go So if you have more questions and comments, this is uh, this is your time and if you're um Chatting away in the chat box. Let me know if if any of your ideas have come up to full fruition become a real question Or if you want to join us on stage, uh, happy to do that um, a question came up from uh, some folks, uh, who couldn't make it today Uh, and one of them is our good friend, uh, don shawless and he asks about to you and edx Now, I know you wrote a bit about uh edx in your discussion of mooks Um, and I'm I'm curious. What's your assessment? What's your take on to you right now? They're pretty large, but they they're they're buying stuff, but they're having problems What do you think about them as one of your intermediary organizations? So I don't know the people involved and so I don't I I'm about to say something that sounds disparaging and I I don't really know enough to You know paint it with as clear a brush I will paint as with that brush though The mode of work that to you and other opm's are in and that is Um, they're doing something very difficult. I write about eab in the book uh too and and student success, you know Consulting firms all of these firms are doing something very hard They're doing something that is capital intensive. So it's not like You know, I mean I think and that's I think a lot of what edx found out that you know to do this You need to have a really good business model because it's not cheap to do well I think what happens is when you know, do you to use a big public company eab is a big Got by private equity So to do a lot of these very difficult things you need capital and you need shareholders, right and so When I think about the edx purchased by 2u it doesn't make me happy Right. I'm now maybe the the money the results from that sale will you know Harvard and MIT will undoubtedly do good things with it But a lot of institutions contributed edx and contributed courses a lot of faculty members Were brought in that this was going to do something that was really you know opm's Again, I think it's I don't I'm not saying every college should build its own online platform Not at all but you know, but a but a public company opm You know it has a lot of incentive to build program To do the marketing of programs that may or may not be beneficial for students and while they might create some Happy spillover money for institutions that they didn't have before not really sure that's what we should be doing Thank you, that's a really really great nuanced answer and don as as always Thank you for your questions and thank you for your work all this Something has come up in conversation as I was describing this session with a lot of people Let's camp by email and slack and and so on which is that Two two topics seem to be uppermost in mind among university leaders, but also among faculty A bunch of topics, but two of them really stand out. One of them is DEI and its full complexity But the other is AI and apparently these have to be abbreviations in order to cite them, but I'm wondering is that is this an opportunity for synthetic organizations Or have synthetic organizations already appeared which can help universities and colleges deal with both diversity equity and inclusion As well as the you know, gigantic potential of artificial intelligence So I think the work that's going on right now around defending DEI work anti-racist work It shows that the need for collective work there now. It doesn't mean that again, there shouldn't be a chief You know DEI officer for higher education Across the system, but what it shows and one of the things that's really powerful about What pen america and a c and and some of our member societies are doing working To combat these state laws that are about DEI, but they're also just about intruding on You know on on the autonomy of higher education and on academic freedom What it shows is that we don't have Collective infrastructure for working on these issues. So we're now in a defensive posture So everybody so provost and presidents and deans And chief diversity officers who are being, you know, suddenly hit with these laws These state laws and having to change their language and having to change their work work that we've all invested so much Time in moving the economy forward But we've you know, we're we're all working so close to the bone in terms of resources all we can do is like react and so I I have no doubt that there's more things that we could be doing to make the case and you know and to highlight ways that You know equity work and and inclusivity has enriched all of our work in our fields and the education of our students But we are you know, again making that case on a school by school basis And I think they're certainly on a policy level You know ways that we could make that case more collectively to the society who votes for these state legislators Who and then in actually was So I guess and we would In that arena would Lobbyist groups be an example of this, you know academic lobbyists who are fighting in state legislatures for us Yeah, you know one of the things right. It's so funny. You've done this. You've written books Um, and many of the people are It's only at the end of the book that you realize all the things that you really meant to say And you should have said and what it means and one of the things I realized and I still probably haven't Emphasize strongly enough in the book in writing the book I was writing about a particular mode of mission driven and market supported organizations that can bring this kind of change, right? and then I got through it what I realized is they're just part of like A desperately needed inter-institutional infrastructure I mean, I think of things like the university through university innovation alliance And I think of things about that like the council on library and information resources And I think about and I think about what you're doing I mean, these are things that bring people together across their busy days in their vertical institutions And that you know, some of them are service providers. Some of them are norm settings Some of them are collaborative, you know, some of them are cross pollinating things that work I mean one of the things I really admire about the ui university innovation Alliances, you know, they're they're like saying what really works. We're not all going to invent these things There's too much to do here. So I think so when you when you when you ask about policy and you know and Lobbyists, I mean we work with a group called the national humanities alliance that you know, that does lobbying It lobbies, you know on Capitol Hill and it makes the public case for the humanities I mean these this is these are really important organizations because otherwise everyone's left to do everything on their own Hmm. That's more and more of these. I mean I just I know you have lots of spare time on your hands, James But um, you know, you should put up a google doc of a directory of these groups Um, I mean in in our in our 57 minutes of conversation You've you've really shown us more and more of that you've you've illuminated a whole stratum of higher education ecosystem that that works in these fields um Well, the things that people mad at me from all sides is Somebody is bound to reduce this book to saying this guy hates autonomy hates academic freedom Things we should all buy, you know, our academic courses, you know off the rack at staples And that's not at all who I am But there, you know, there is also a treacherous middle ground where we all have to you know, figure out some things we can do together Indeed indeed. Let me let me ask one wrapping up question What would what would higher education look like the world of colleges and universities at least in the us What would it look like if we really expanded the universe of synthetic organizations? You know, what if we took these more seriously and uh invested more in them and really grew out that ecosystem What might higher ed look like and say five or ten years? I think it would look Very much like how it looks now just a little better, you know, just a little better We're you know, the this this kind of work Is not there's not going to be one synthetic service provider that solves all the problems It's not going to slash the cost of higher education by 25 But if we can slow the rate of cost increases and we can do so while making you know While preserving all the things that we care about that the market may not care about You know, that's that's going to be really good And you know, it will make the public case for higher education better And uh, it won't it won't you know magically transform the system But I I used to I used to write about renaissance literature I used to believe that magic was the key thing and now I believe in the magic of getting real things done Magic getting real things done and you've done so much including spending a delightful hour with us Thank you. Thank you so much James for for being with us. This has been a terrific conversation What what's the best way for people to keep up with you? What's the best way to find what you're working on with acls? Uh, so I'm I'm posting stuff sporadically on linkedin, but our work at acls No, we have a great director of communications heather mangrove. Do you want to get on our uh, our list? She's she she's publicizing the various things we're doing the people we're working across all all parts of the sector On uh, institutional change. So definitely go to our site and get on our list and can I make one last plug? Please everyone should read brian's book, you know, we On climate because this you know, we all have to get involved in this and brian does a beautiful job Oh, thank you so much. Thank you very much. I thought you were going to refer to brian rozenberg And I was going to say next week we're hosting him on the forum Um, which will be great, but but thank you for saying that my publisher. Thanks you and you are of course completely right Um, please enjoy the rest of your time your afternoon here in the in berkeley and thank you again Please keep up the awesome work james Great. Thanks everyone And friends, I just need to wrap up with a couple of quick comments But one of them is to say thank you all for all these great questions and comments. Uh, this has been a real real, uh tour Through a higher education from an unusual angle that I think Illuminates a lot of the ecosystem and helped us think about it in really really productive ways If you want to keep talking about this on social media, here's my updated slide Just use the hashtag f tte wherever you are There's my handle on twitter along with the schindig events if you want to add them There's me on mastodon brian olexandy You can find me on threads and on blue sky and of course on my blog If you'd like to dive into our previous sessions where we've talked about All kinds of ideas that came up today from economics of higher ed to faculty autonomy Please look at our our whole archive. It's good a tiny url.com slash fdf archive Uh, if you want to look at our sessions coming up, we have more and more topics the changing landscape of online higher education And next week as james said the resistance to academic change just go to forum the future of education dot us Thank you again all for uh being a wonderful Discussance. It's been a pleasure thinking with you. I hope everybody is well safe and sound Take care of yourselves and we'll see you next time online Bye