 Welcome, Becky, and thank you so much for being here. Becky Blank, as we all know, is an internationally known labor economist and a leader in academia and public policy. She recently stepped down after a long and successful tenure as chancellor of the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Before that, Becky was in Washington, D.C. She served as President Obama's acting commerce secretary, and she led the 2010 US Census as undersecretary for economic affairs. Before that, from 1999 to 2007, she was our dean, and a great one at that. Becky's deanship was a time of tremendous growth for the Ford School. She led the way for our naming for President Gerald Ford for the construction of this beautiful building, for the growth in our faculty, and for the launch of important programs that made us, for the first time, a full service school, offering undergraduate and doctoral degrees in addition to our flagship master's degrees. Becky Blank put the Ford School on the map literally. We, all of us who learn and teach and work here and our alumni, too, are there making communities better. We are the house that Becky built. Becky's entire career has been a model of principled servant leadership, of deep commitment to social justice, and of the power of good public policy. And so I will close with a proclamation. In grateful tribute to Becky's leadership and her legacy, it is my honor as the interim dean of the Ford School to officially proclaim that Wild Hall's central gathering space just outside those doors will from this moment be named the Rebecca M. Blank Great Hall. OK, are we back? We're back. All right. Congratulations, and welcome back to the Ford School. Dean, Secretary, Chancellor, and President Rebecca Blank. I bought one of my copies of your award-winning book, It Takes a Nation. In 1998, when I was an undergraduate student, first interested in poverty and social welfare policy. I also love the Ford School dearly and work here in Wild Hall, known by many, as Celeste said, the house that Becky built. And I'm thrilled that so much of our community life is going to happen from now on in the Rebecca M. Blank Great Hall, which I think we're going to call the Becky for short. It beats Blank Hall. Don't call it that. We've got, I saw at least one member of Congress here. We've got some of your old friends in the room. We've got many of our new faculty, alumni, and some really energized students that are just so thrilled to talk to you. And I'm so thrilled to talk to you. You've impacted my own career, the career of thousands of Ford School students and the trajectory of this place in so many fundamental ways. So welcome. Thank you. So in 1999, you were banging around Northwestern University. You'd just been in the Clinton administration, I think, a leading scholar of poverty and social welfare policy in the United States. I wonder what first attracted you here to the University of Michigan and what had just gone from a program to the newly created School of Public Policy. Yeah, it's a great question. Let me start by just saying thank you to everyone. This has been such an honor. And I'm sorry I can't be there in person, but I'm hoping in mid-December I'm going to be able to stop by. So thanks to all of you. I'm overwhelmed by all of this. So the search committee called me and said, we've identified you as a possible candidate. And I was in the Clinton administration. I was a member of the Council of Economic Advisors. I had only from Northwestern where I'd been running this big research center, and I had a small child. And I said, you know, I'm busy. I'm not interested. And Sheldon Danziger, who was part of that search committee, called me back and said, Becky, do me a favor. And I owe Sheldon many favors and said, come out for a day and talk to the search committee. And that's all I ask. So I did that favor, came out for the day, had a great conversation with the search committee and decided I still wasn't interested. I would do a favor to the school, because I thought the University of Michigan had not been serious about creating the school. They hadn't moved any tenure in. They didn't have any plans for anything beyond this being a program of 40 to 50 students a year in a small master's program. That was a superb program. But that's not a professional school in and of itself. So I wrote a letter to the then provost, Nancy Cantor. And I said, look, the University of Michigan needs a policy school. But they've got to be serious about it, because you're the University of Michigan. And you've got some great public professional schools, and this needs to be on the same level. And here are 10 things you need to do to make that happen. And I sent that off, and I said, fine, I'm done with this. And Nancy Cantor calls me back and says, I want to see you in my office. And I said, I'm working for the president. I'm really busy. Can we just talk by phone? And I had every expectation of what that conversation would be. She'd say, great ideas. Once you do them do this, we don't have any money, but we'll fundraise for you. And Nancy, as some of you know, could be very persuasive. So I came out for the day expecting to say, OK, I'll do this one more day and say no again. And I walk into Nancy's office, and I really learned something from this. And it has affected how I've hired people ever since. So Nancy pulls out my letter, lays it on the table, slaps her hand on it, says, you're absolutely right. We've costed out everything in this letter. It comes to, I think it was like $3.5 million. We're putting it into your budget, and we want you here by the 1st of August. And I'm sitting there saying, shit, I'm going to have to take this job. And it really taught me that if you want someone, you don't nickel and dine them, and you don't negotiate over little details. You decide what they need to do the job well, and you give it to them. And that brought me to the Ford School. And there were so many opportunities laying on the ground. It was just exciting. But until the university made that commitment, I wasn't willing to come as dean. But once they made the commitment, it was a great job. And I enjoyed almost every minute of it. That was a really great answer. I have to say, I thought that was like the slow question we were going to have. So you get here, it's the School of Public Policy, and in a fairly short amount of time, it comes to be named after President Gerald R. Ford. You have been along. Tell us that story. How did that happen? Yeah, well, that was not my idea. That had been in the air for a number of years. And then President Lee Bollinger would want it to make that happen. I know a lot of the faculty thought that was right. And in my opinion, I wanted the school to be on the same level as the Kennedy School and then Woodrow Wilson School. And that meant being named for a president and a major political figure. And there was really only one. And President Ford was still alive. So we had to negotiate that. We needed his approval. And there was really no disagreement among anyone that this was a good idea. The disagreements, the political negotiations came over the fundraising. Because of course, we wanted access to some of President Ford's associates. Even we were a new school. We didn't have a lot of alums with much capacity, as the Development Office says. So we had to negotiate, particularly with Gerald R. Ford Museum in Grand Rapids. Because of course, they were fundraising from exactly that same group. And that was somewhat delicate at times. President Bollinger was helpful on that one. And we finally came to a clear agreement. And we had a wonderful event at the president's house, hosted by President and Mrs. Bollinger that Mr. and Mrs. Ford came to. And the rest is history. President Ford came quite regularly in those first two years. And that really helped. That really made this the Ford School. So you met President Ford on a number of occasions and I think traveled to his home. So most of us in the room, we know him from history books and the statue and portrait in the Rebecca M. Blank Great Hall known as the Becky. So tell us about him as a person and what was it like to get to know him? So I'd spent some time in D.C. I knew what a lot of D.C. high flyers were like. And Gerald Ford was not like that. He had never quite drunk the Kool-Aid from the corridors of power. He stayed really a person from Grand Rapids and always looked to D.C. with a certain eye of these people are a little strange at times. But I found him, he was just a delightful person. And in some ways his signature action was the pardon of Richard Nixon, something I vehemently disagreed with when it happened when I was in college. And came over time as I think I became more sophisticated to realize it was the only way to bring the country together and to move forward. And Gerald Ford was the sort of person who that was what he needed to do and that was going to cost him his next election. That was what he did. And I wish we had a few more politicians like that right now around Washington D.C. I remember the naming event we had a press conference and Lee Bollinger opened it up and then said questions. And there was complete silence. And I had just come from the White House and President Ford had obviously spent a good amount of years there. He leaned over to me and he said, it's not the White House press corps is it? I mean, that's the type of guy he was. It was always a pleasure to interact with him. And Mrs. Ford was equally gracious and lovely. It's one of the things that I don't think anyone will ever not be proud of the Ford school name. It's far better than being named for a donor to be blunt. You never know what's gonna come out of someone's background. President Ford's background was pretty much a public book. And there's not gonna be any embarrassments coming that way. It's a name to be proud of. We have John Chamberlain in the audience, an old friend and colleague I think. Hey John. The BA program that you two worked on to launch has now graduated 14 classes. So I was gonna invite John just to talk a little bit about what it was like to start a new program and then invite you to add additional comments as well. Sounds good. John? Okay. It's interesting to be where we are in this great building with the BA program and all the rest and thinking back over when did those ideas start? And I remember not long after Gerald Ford lost the election Jack Walker, who was the director of the Institute of Public Policy Studies thought, we can get some money out of Congress to name this place after Gerald Ford. At the time we were a pretty small program without any real clout and it didn't go anywhere but we thought about it at the time and not long after that, some of us were who'd been teaching in the MPP program and thought you could do a great undergraduate version of this and that also didn't go anywhere because we didn't have any money. We weren't big enough. We couldn't appoint our own faculty. We had no classrooms but those seeds got planted and eventually when Becky got here, both of them bloomed like crazy. So we're now in this building. It was not long, I think probably after the turn of the century when Becky, you know, I think raised something about an undergraduate program. Other people have those. Why don't, could we do it? And lots of us thought that was a really good idea. Some of the faculty thought it weren't sure they needed to teach undergraduates. They had doctoral students and master students but a small group of us got together and sort of studied what others did and came up with a proposal that got reworked probably over a three or four year period. The last period of that being how are we gonna make the money side of this workout? But it really enabled us to think about what is it that the MPP program does that could be done at the undergraduate level without it becoming so specialized or a total professional degree or something like that. And we realized that our core curriculum, which how to think politically, how to think like an economist, how to do some data, all of that could be done at the undergraduate level. Where the idea was we would teach it with public policy and social issues, important issues at the core of it. How did you think politically about a problem? How'd you think like an economist about the problem? What data do we have and what could we do with it? And as that got together we figured out the other thing we would do is to make sure that students see this as, this is how you think about public policy, not how you get half a degree in each of several social sciences. And we did an undergraduate program, Public Policy 201, which we continue to do, which Paul started. And it involved Paul as the ring leader and then inviting faculty in from some from the Ford School, some from public health, some from elsewhere talking about a particular problem and what are the institutions that matter? How do you think about them? What are the politics of that? What keeps policy proposals from moving forward that everybody has developed? And that course attracted a good crowd, it continues to attract a good crowd. Faculty have rotated through it over time and I think it provided a way to say this is what the curriculum in the BA program will do is that you will take some economics and political science and statistics. You will also take courses to focus on particular policy areas. So we had policy seminars and students could, you know, pick a focus area if they cared about the environment they could specialize in that. And eventually we got it going. It was working fine. I remember after the first year having a bit of a discussion in the faculty meeting and since Sheldon's name has come up once before I remember Sheldon's raving about the experience he had had in a policy seminar he taught. And that got more people to line up outside your door saying that sounds like fun. And since then most people have, you know. Paul's a good ring leader. Yeah. In general. Becky, anything you wanna add about the undergraduate program before I ask you about the building? You know, this is a program when people ask me about leadership. I use it as an example of the importance of persistence when you have something that you think is really needs to get done. It took me eight years to do this. The program opened the year after I left and I worked on it for that entire set of seven years. And I kept being told no by a variety of people in the administration. LSNA, not to many people's surprise was opposed to us opening an undergraduate program. You know, and we were proposing this selected junior senior program. They were afraid we would scoop up their best students which they didn't want us to do. To be blunt, that was one of my objectives. So I just took their hesitations. And I think we've actually done a pretty good job of that. I don't know if Terry McDonald is in the room or not. But certain provost told me, look, this isn't the right time. LSNA is too opposed. We don't have the money for it. I actually think there was someone named Paul Carrato said that to me once or twice too. But, you know, I kept pushing it and we kept tinkering and you can't be stubborn about this. You can't say this is how it's gonna be and this is what we want. So we kept changing our proposal in response to the criticisms and the concerns and finally got to a point where I don't know if people got tired of me or we got the proposal to the right place, but we got permission to move forward. I think in my seventh year, and I just say, I have to thank John and everyone who worked on that for that entire period of time. But if you hadn't been persistent, despite being told no, because it was the right thing to do, the right thing for the Ford School, given you're at a university where the biggest program is undergraduate, you wanna be part of that. And, you know, Michigan has great undergraduate students. So that was real victory and I've been delighted to watch that program grow and thrive and provide a great education to so many students. It really has grown and thrived exactly as you described and we have terrific students. So when you became dean, I think where I'm sitting right now was the site of Mel Levitsky's old fraternity house. Now we're in what I think of as the best building on campus. So tell us about the construction of Wild Hall. Are there any favorite stories? When did you realize maybe Lurch Hall wasn't cutting it anymore? Any painful stories that have become funny over the years? Well, I think it was clear that Lurch Hall wasn't ideal from the very beginning. You know, just when we were spread out, we were in two other locations in addition to Lurch and Lurch was too small. We didn't have classrooms. We didn't have any hangout space for students. So this was one that I have to give a big shout out to Lee Bollinger. He was the one who said, agreed with me we need a new building and helped it move forward. And Lee was the one who selected the architect, Robert Amstern, who gave us just a magnificent building. I also have to call out Mary Sue Coleman, who after Lee Bollinger left, really helped us complete the whole project. And Paul Caron is provost, put some money into it. And that was important as well because we had not done fundraising at that level before. And of course, Sandy and Joan Weil helped put us over the top on this one. Yeah, you know, the building itself, like every building, the costs went above and beyond where they should have been. And you had to value engineer. And I know I had a group of three people working with me on this. And it was Sheldon and John Chamberlain. And I don't remember who the third person was anymore. Well, you know who you are out there. And, you know, we did this value engineering and we had to make a trade-off at, this was quite near the end of the whole design process. And we needed to take almost a million dollars out of the building because the costs had ballooned for a variety of reasons. And there was a group that wanted to get rid of the slate roof, which was very expensive, but would last for 100 years. And you could put on a much cheaper roof, but it was gonna be replaced in 15 years. And the architects, both at Michigan and at Robert M. Stern just said, this building needs a slate roof. It won't look right without it. The other alternative was the HVAC system where we had cost controls in every office. So everyone control their own, sorry, cost controls, temperature controls. Everybody control their own temperature. And I unilaterally, you could all blame me, faculty members unilaterally made the decision that we were gonna put a temperature control in every third office. And I knew that would create issues for some faculty. I also knew once the building was built, no one would know they'd been an alternative. But that kept us our slate roof. And I have to say, I think that slate roof is an important part of the building. So speaking of Sheldon, Sheldon and Sandy are both here. And of course, my office is in the 5100 suite at the top of the Grand Staircase where the poverty center has always been. And Sheldon likes to say that was originally gonna be the Dean's suite, but that you thought the Dean should be closer to the student body in the center of the community. And that he was more than happy to take the 5100 suite. So I'm taking this opportunity for you to either confirm or refute his story. You know, do I confirm or deny? Yeah, I do confirm that. I thought it was really important the Dean be in the middle of the school and not floating somewhere up above it. You know, so that every time I walked out of my office, there were students, there were faculty, you know, you were in the midst of everything that was happening. And I think it made the Dean feel a lot more accessible to people around the school as well. So yeah, we put our office at the third floor and I couldn't, I don't know how that's working. The left asked the last, but I thought it was the right thing to do then. And it worked well for me. So you arrive here and you have to lead fundraising, like a lot of fundraising. Maybe for the first time, you have to oversee a major construction project, maybe for the first time. So in addressing current and future leaders in the audience, did you have all of those skills, all of that stuff figured out before you came or did you have to learn some of it along the way? And if so, like, how did you go about doing that? Yeah, a lot of learning by doing here. You know, I had a great mentor for the fundraising which was the university development officer. And I am blanking on our last name, Susan. Help me out. Pardon? Yeah, Jerry may have followed her, but Susan was the first one. And one of the early things I did was drive to grant graphics. Susan Freylin we're hearing, right? I'm sorry. No, there's some discussion about who it is. Susan Fagan, Susan Fagan, F-E-A-G-I-N. Yeah, we, and Susan went with me to talk with the people at the museum in Grand Rapids about the naming of the school and about fundraising. And we spent the whole car ride three hours up and three hours back with Susan tutoring me in fundraising and particularly fundraising among individual donors. You know, I'd done a lot of foundation and government fundraising for projects but I'd never done individual donor fundraising which is quite different. And it means establishing relationships and really even friendships and persuading people of your vision about what's going on. So Susan was great at helping with that. And then she was followed by Jerry May who many of you know because he only recently retired and Jerry was really helpful as well. And you know, part of this was steering some donors at the university who were interested in public policy my way, despite the fact, the schools they came from were not happy about that. So someone like Granny Weaker who many of you knew was someone that they steered towards us because of her interests. And she was a great friend and contributor to the school. So you know, there was a lot of learning by doing there which I've used extensively in my most recent jobs. Same things through a building, a building. I found it fascinating, the architectural process, the design process, even the value engineering process. I just hadn't gone through that before and we had great university architects and of course a great if someone demanding outside architect. And that made this just a wonderful learning process and I know a bunch of us went through it together. And again, it's one of those skills that I have used extensively in more recent work at Wisconsin. So, you know, but like all of these things when you become dean, your main activity has been a faculty member and you haven't done any of this before. So you have to be a fast learner and you have to be curious. And you have to have a great team around you. And I had all of that. And so we got a great building. So because you didn't have enough to do, the PhD program that you were a part of developing is like nothing else in the field, combining policy training with disciplinary studies and economics, political science or sociology. It's been a huge success. Tell us about the development of that. How did that idea come to be? Well, you know, that was one of the things that I was quite adamant the school needed. It needed to be more than just the master's program. And a huge shout out here to Mary Carperin because Mary put the proposal together that went to Rackham and got approved. And she worked and then ran the program for the next number of years. So if Mary's in the audience, she deserves a round of applause for the PhD program. She and I talked about it a lot, but she did all the hard work on it. The vision here, and it wasn't anything any other school was doing, is that public policy itself is not a discipline. Social science disciplines of political science and economics and sociology are surround public policy and it calls upon those disciplines to analyze and think about policy issues. And so we didn't want a standalone PhD program. We wanted a integrated PhD program with the first rate social science programs that the University of Michigan already had on board. And that had to get negotiated with those departments, with LMS, with Rackham and Mary did all of that heavy lifting, as I recall. But the result was this program that as I said to a number of students many times, we want students who, when they go out, are gonna get a letter saying, this is as good an economist as anyone else graduating this year. But they even have more. They have all this additional training on policy issues. And that gives them a leg up on everyone else. So an example I'll use, and I think he's actually on, is Jern Metzdera, who admittedly was one of my advisees joined in the economics program. And Jern is a tenured faculty member at Columbia, but has gone in and out of the US Department of Education. He's currently was hired to create the role of chief economist in education and is in that role in DC right now. And we'll be going back to Columbia to teachers college and it's done some really superb research and publications as well. And being able to do both, that's a skill not everyone has, but those are the skills that we wanted to create in that PhD program. And you can look at a whole bunch of the graduates who look just like Jordan and they've done this wonderful intermix of policy and research and really made contributions to the public good as a result of that. And that was the point of the program. Jordan, one of our distinguished graduates and as you say, currently, once again serving at the highest level of federal government. Becky, we, I think as you know, Paul Caranth is in the audience, another longtime faculty member who I also believe has done every administrative job at the University of Michigan. So over the course of your tenure, the school grows by leaps and bounds. We've continued to grow based on the foundation that you and so many of the faculty here today put into place. Yet it continues to be a place with the tight-knit community. So Paul, I'm gonna invite you to just say a few words about what it means to keep that community feeling while you're also growing like gangbusters. Yeah, so thanks, Luke. Hi, Becky. Hey, Paul. I can't imagine, by the way, that I ever really said no to a proposal of these because, you know, I'm smart enough to know that the right answer to anything that Becky says to do is yes, so. I think you said not now. That's possible. So Luke is right to put his finger on this idea that there is a sort of way in which people are part of a tight-knit community, even though the community is so large that, you know, actually it's not what we think of as a, you know, it's not a small tight-knit community. It's a large one. How do you do that? And I don't know, but I have some thoughts. So going all the way back to the 1970s when there were, you know, 20 faculty all part-time and 40 students and we somehow, you know, we're in that world. The director then, who was also the director who had the idea many years later to push on President Ford as a prop, as a helper in making the program work, Jack Walker, he used to ask, he would go around to the faculty and he would say, whenever anything came up, Ips gives you more. So if the faculty member thought that they were gonna get a better deal at the political science department, Jack would say, how do we make it so they get a better deal in Ips? Ips was the Institute of Public Policy Studies, which is the predecessor organization. And students got to be in on this too. We were competing with the rest of the university for being a place where good applied social science could be done, and we were inventing the idea that this was a way to think about policy. And we, Jack's view very much was, you get the best people working on it, you know, it'll happen and you wanna make that happen. So this idea Ips gives you more than after Jack, Ned Gramlich, you know, Ned Gramlich's idea of part of his idea about being a dean was to challenge the students to basketball games, we were a smaller group then. And you could get hurt doing that, but that's a different matter. But so we're trying to, and so there's this notion that coming to the office, coming to Ips should be fun. And we had a tradition that built up somehow of an annual holiday party. And the holiday parties, you know, they were actually pretty good. The students took seriously the idea that they were gonna put on a show, and the faculty did as well. And there was this sense of we're all part of something that is made up of different pieces that look somewhat different from each other. That's a very good theme for both public policy and public affairs generally. We're gonna be able, we're gonna do that, we're gonna do that everywhere you turn. And so people, people used to be called Ipsters. They've now transitioned, no one's an Ipster anymore. They're 40s, right? And I think that's kind of cool that everybody, and I actually sort of think back to conversations with President Ford, back when we were building the thing. He would think that was kind of cool too, I think. He liked the idea of being a 40. And our dean keeps in touch with the entire faculty and student body every week, sends out, here's how things are going, email. That's unusual in an academic program, to put it mildly. And here it's real, it's natural, people expect it. What's the latest Bolton from the administrative wing going to be? And there's a sense always of amyability, right? And amyability really gets you past a lot of hurt if you can make that work. Now that's where I punt and say, so how do you make that sense of amyability work? I don't know, but the idea that it's part of the organization's mission to be a good place for the people who are in it to be. So they say, you know, I'm going to the office today and we're gonna do cool stuff. And I like going there and it's better than other, that was the PhD program is a perfect example of that. We got students to come and study public policy in a serious scientific way that didn't, you know, there wasn't an econ program or a political science program in the world that would do that in the same way we could. Ips could do, not Ips, the Ford School could do it. The Ford School could give you more and you get Jordan among others. So, but it is this sense, in leadership, in management you build places that are attractive to the people who are gonna make them work. That's the key. Bravo. Becky, anything to add? You know, that culture was deeply embedded in the Institute for Public Policy Studies. And when we became the Ford School, I think everyone was concerned that that culture continued with us as we grew and changed. And it was part of the concern about the undergraduate program that if you brought in a whole bunch of undergraduates would that change this dynamic in some way. And, you know, we worked to try to set it up so it didn't. And from what I hear tell, I don't think it has. But, you know, all that whole culture built over the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s that benefited the Ford School from its very beginning. And it's easy to lose that type of cohesion and very hard to build it back. So, you know, I'm always delighted when people tell me that's still there and people still feel that. And they're all 40s now. Yeah, 40s. I've got three final questions for you about leadership and speaking especially to our students who are going on to careers. So my first one is that you left the Ford School to serve in the Obama administration, eventually becoming acting secretary of commerce. And I wonder if you could just tell us about the experience a number of times of transitioning from the academy to government, from government to the academy. In particular, what is it like to be in roles that require both technical expertise and political savvy? Yeah, well, I've three times left academia for temporary government jobs and then come back. You know, given my interests, which are very policy oriented, going to DC was invaluable to understanding that process. And particularly given there were times I wanted to advocate for certain things. Having been in the DC process helped me know how to do that. I always thought my time in DC enriched my research. It gave me a sense of what some key questions were that no one else was thinking about because they weren't in those conversations. They were often their academic seminars. So I wrote some of my best papers after leaving the Clinton administration and coming to the Ford School because I had a couple of ideas that other people didn't have. So, you know, that going in and out, if you have an interest, a serious interest in policy as well as in research and academic thought, intellectual inquiry is a fascinating way to build a career. And I'm not the only one who is fortunate to be able to do that. But, you know, it's been a lot of fun and, you know, learning how to politically navigate DC. It's not unhelpful when you're running a university much less running a small unit in a university. Everything at some point comes down to a certain amount of political negotiation. And you learned that well in DC if you're doing your job right. I wonder if there's any lessons in leadership as dean in government, as chancellor at Wisconsin that you've learned the hard way or mistakes that you made and had to deal with. Anything you could offer for students or early in their careers? Well, I can certainly give you some lessons on leadership that I think I've learned and haven't always followed, but try to. One is when you're leading an organization, you've got to have a vision about the opportunities, where it can move forward, what it can be, both realize about, you know, realistic about what it is and what it's shortcomings are and realistic about what are the opportunities sitting on the ground that you should pick up and run with. The vision is number one. You know, number two is having a team because, you know, as chancellor at Wisconsin, I'm not the one who did the work, right? Others had to do the work and I needed a team around me who were really good, who agreed with the vision, who could implement, who could move things forward and the ability to build good teams, I think is one of the best signs of whether someone is really an effective leader. And the third thing I would say, which I've mentioned already, is persistence. When you have an idea, you think is right and you want your organization to work on it. You've got to be realistic. Some ideas, you can't be stubborn and some ideas aren't good and when you've got to realize that you've got to drop them. But if it's a good idea, it rarely gets done fast, right? So you've got to really stay with it, bought it out and stick with it and don't get discouraged by the resistance. Persuade people one by one, build the team who could do it and, you know, get it ready to launch. But, you know, you got those three attributes of vision, teamwork and persistence. You'll get a lot done. So did you ever sleep and, you know, did you ever get tired through all these roles? Or is that not in your constitution? You know, I've always been a high-energy person and you take on jobs because they excite you, right? You know, one of the things I loved about being dean and I loved even more at Wisconsin is it was a different job every day. You know, things have come at me at Wisconsin that I'd never thought about before, like how do you remake a university in the midst of a pandemic? And, you know, that's what makes these jobs fun. In my, I get bored easily. And, you know, these are not jobs you get bored on. There's always something new to think about. Always a new challenge. Sometimes they're easy. Sometimes they're incredibly difficult. But always, always interesting to work on. I think we might have a question from a student in the audience. So while that, oh, here we go. Maybe introduce yourself quickly and... Hi there. My name is Guy Roslivan and I'm a Wiser Diplomacy Center Fellow. So I know that the Ford School is very strong when it comes to social policy. But in recent decades, the school has increased its focus on international policy, international relations and international affairs in general. I was just wondering how are you involved in bringing more depth to international policy and why was it important for you? Yeah, you know, the school when I came was primarily known for domestic policy and social policy. And it was very, very good at that. And it had a small, strong, but small group of really first-rate foreign policy people. You know, if you're gonna be a full school of public policy competing at the international stage with an international and certainly a national reputation, you have to be strong in both areas. And we hired some great people, both faculty and non-tenured faculty, Melavisky and Susan Walts, for instance, two examples who really brought international knowledge of different types and foreign policy knowledge to the school. And I know the school has continued to build that. You know, you just, you know, and one of the aspects of this is increasingly domestic and international policy or intertwine. And you can see that in the newspaper every day. You can't do one without doing the other and you need knowledge both. So it's great to see the Ford School grow in the international area and build its reputation as well. Becky, my last question, as you have gone from different jobs and different amazing challenges, I just wonder, did you have a sense when it was time to go from one thing to the next or did opportunities present themselves and you evaluated as you went along? Yeah, it's a little of both. You know, I explicitly made a decision after seven years at the Ford School. I had done everything on the list I sent to Nancy and a little more and it was very clear I needed to create a new vision for the next seven to eight years or I should move on and let someone else take over in leadership. And, you know, I admit I was ready for something else. So I resigned without something else in hand. It's probably the only time I've done that. Went to the Brookings Institute as a visiting fellow and then ended up in the Obama administration. In other cases, things have come along and it felt at that time like, you know, it is time for a change and this is a really exciting opportunity. So, you know, I spent nine years at Wisconsin and took another job, which I've ended up not being able to go to. But, you know, again, it felt like this is the next opportunity. This is a great opportunity. It fits my skills. And after nine years at Wisconsin, it's probably time for new leadership there too. So, you know, it's a mix of both. Moose offering you a great new job and where are you in your pattern? It is important to stay at an institution long enough to make a difference. And that's at least five years. And in many cases, six, seven years. And too many people job hop in these leadership positions. It's not good for the institution. They don't make enough, you know, you can't change anything in two years around a big bureaucracy like a university. So, long-term 10 years really matter for getting things done. And, you know, it's one thing I feel good about both that the Ford School and at Wisconsin that I stayed long enough at each place to make a difference to get things done. So, but then there also is the time to leave and picking that time is an important skill too. Becky, I've so enjoyed this. I know the audience has just been enraptured by everything you had to say. I've learned, I'm gonna go write down some notes from things I've learned for my various roles. And I think you mentioned perhaps a visit at some point. We adore you and are so grateful for everything you've done and would love to see you at any point. And, you know, we'll be out now in the hall in the Becky with cupcakes that I think will have a logo on them if my notes don't deceive me. And coffee. So I wanted to give you just one second if you had any other things that you wanted to share. I just wanted to say thank you. It is so good to see all of your faces even if at a distance and in a very large screen. And I do hope to see you in person in mid-December. I'm just deeply honored by this. I came out of the blue, I wasn't expecting it. And, you know, it means a lot coming from people who are such close colleagues and in many, many cases continue to be close friends. So thank you for this honor. And I hope the cupcakes are good. Ha, ha, ha. All right.