 have the top of the hour, so let's begin. Let me welcome everybody. Let me welcome you to the Future Trends Forum. My name is Brian Alexander. I'm your host, the creator of the forum, and it's Chief Cat Herter, and I'm delighted to see so many of you here today. We have a fantastic pair of guests and an incredibly important topic I'm really looking forward to our conversation. Before we dive in, let me introduce the program, explain what it is, where it comes from, what it hopes to achieve, and then we'll introduce this week's program. So to begin with, you should know the forum is a conversation-based venue. What I'm doing right now, talking to you and showing you a couple of slides, is just the introduction. The rest of the session is entirely about conversation, give and take, argument, sharing ideas back and forth. We've been doing this since 2016, and in fact, we're coming up at our five-year anniversary. Now, one of the things about the forum to keep in mind is that we cover the future of higher education. And in order to do that, we have to cover a wide range of topics, everything from macroeconomics and demography to technology and social justice. And along the way, we get to involve an incredible range of people. We have people who are university presidents, we have provosts, we have librarians, technologists, faculty members, we have students, we have people who are adjacent to higher education and very concerned with it, which is publishers, startup founders, journalists, government officials and grants officers. We're delighted to have this incredible mix, and I think you'll see that as our discussion unfolds. Now, a few pieces of background about our programming as a whole. One is that we are doing this right now, coming up in one year of a terrible pandemic. And this has shaped higher education in all kinds of ways. We've been addressing this in the forum. We've had session after session dedicated to it, and COVID has worked its way into many of our deliberations since. I think you'll see that as a topic today. Another great event of 2020 that impacts the forum and higher education alike is what some call the great awokening or the great awakening about racism and anti-racism that swept the United States and parts of the world last year. We've had multiple sessions on that, and I think we'll see this also come to the fore today. Now, the other topics are uppermost in our programming minds as we look forward into 2021. For the next few weeks, just to give you a glimpse ahead, we're gonna have a session with a rising star in the educational technology world. We're gonna have a session on supporting equity in higher education. We'll have a session on e-learning. We'll have another role with the president of an extraordinary public university on how they managed to reinvent it. And of course, we have our five-year anniversary party. So if you'd like to learn more about these or if you'd like to sign up already, just go to tinyoreal.com slash forum 2021. Now, we can only do this work with the help of some generous sponsors who I'd like to thank before we begin. I'd like to thank NizerNet in New York State, a non-profit that helps that state's colleges and universities use great broadband that also do great professional development work with each other. We're a big fan of their work and honored by their support. And we're also grateful to Shindig because Shindig makes available this technology we're using now. So if you're new to the forum or if you haven't been here for a while, let me just walk you through the technology so you can see how to use it. Where I am right now and where the slide is, again, just for a minute, is called the stage. It's called that because everybody can see and hear everything that goes on stage. This is where our participants, this is where our guests are gonna be and this is where you can be too. I'll show you how in just a second. Now, right below us, if you look around, around you should see in the bottom half of the screen maybe a dozen, maybe 20 individual icons. Each of those representing a different person. Sometimes they're a video feed, sometimes they're a silhouette, but each of those represents one or more people logging in from somewhere. And that's the audience, that's the community, that's the participants' swarm. If you'd like to learn more about a person, you can just mouse over them, you'll get a little bit of data. If you'd like to have a private chat with them, think about it as being an auditorium or you're being over to somebody to whisper to them, just click on their icon. If they wanna talk to you, your two icons will click together and you can have your own private audio-visual bubble. But I said, this was about discussion and conversation. How can you converse with a whole group? Easy, there are a few ways. They're located at the bottom of the screen. You should see a white strip running along it with a few different buttons. On the leftmost edge, you'll see a number. Right now it's 123 and that's the number of participants in today's conversation. If you click that, up will pop two boxes. One is a box that just shows you all the participants. Another one is a chat box, which is a general chat box for everybody having a conversation today. And the chat box is a good place for informal conversation, for sharing thoughts, for floating out ideas that you'd like to ask us. And you can see right now, people are sharing their introductions. Folks from as far away as Saskatchewan, Green Bay, Oberlin, Castleton, a lot of Northern people, as well as folks from Houston, from Alexandria and from Virginia. Now, next to that button, on that white strip along the bottom of the screen, there are two key buttons to know about. One of them is a raised hand and one of them is a question mark. If you click on the question mark, up will pop a little box into which you can type your question or comment. And when the time is right, we'll flash that on the screen for everyone to see and I'll read it out loud so everyone can hear it. Now, if your video camera is on and you'd like to join us up here on stage, easy. Just press the raised hand button. That tells me you'd like to join us. And when the time is right, I'll press another button on my end and you'll join us up here on stage so you can have a face-to-face conversation. Now, those two buttons, that question mark and the raised hand, those are the usual ways people participate by throwing out questions and ideas and please use them throughout this hour. And if you're nervous about it, don't worry. We're really glad that you're here and we look forward to learning from your questions and ideas. And we're also grateful to Shindig for making available the technology to use it on. Now, last couple of notes, we're grateful to our supporters on Patreon. If you haven't been there, Patreon is a crowdfunding site that lets you collaboratively fund an ongoing project. In this case, it's our project to explore the future of higher education. So people go there to patreon.com slash brianalexander. They donate as little as a dollar a month to help us keep all the lights on and keep all the machines happy. People on this screen here give $10 or more a month. We're enormously grateful to them and they are very, very kind and thank you. Thank you to everyone at Patreon. Again, you can join them too. Now, all of that is an introduction to this week's fantastic pair of guests. I'm absolutely delighted to be able to host two professors in the liberal arts college world. These are professors from the Midwest. Beth Benedict is from DePaul University. Stephen Volk is from Oberlin College. They are incredibly bright writers, scholars, teachers and activists who have thought deeply about how we can change the liberal arts college and university for the better. And I'd really like to welcome both of them. So first, let me bring Beth Benedict up on stage. Hello, Beth. Hi. So good to see you. Thank you for coming. Well, thank you so much and delighted to be here. Are you at home in Green Castle or in the surrounding area? I am, I'm in Green Castle. Excellent, excellent. Now, when I ask people to introduce themselves, we have a particular way of doing it. We ask you to explain what you're gonna be doing for the upcoming year. What are the big projects and also what are the big ideas up in the most in your mind? Yeah, well, thank you again for this opportunity and thanks to all of you for coming. I'm really looking forward to the conversation for the chance to have such an organic conversation. So I guess by way of answering both of those two pieces together, I wanted to start by just sort of suggesting that everything that I do and have been doing and will continue to do is basically informed by my desire to want to empower individuals to feel connected to their learning and to their communities. And I'm most passionate about creating really relevant, exciting, authentic learning spaces for kindergarten through college students. Spaces that bring lived experiences to the center and then give people the chance to really have autonomy for their learning. So in 2010, that's sort of where things begin. I hope it's okay to give you a sense of what I have been doing because it informs what I am doing now. I was super inspired by Dave Vigar's TED Talk, which he won TED Prize for establishing an organization that's called 826 National and it's in San Francisco. And when he gave his TED Talk, he finished with this wish that was called the once upon a school, which, and here it is, I just wanted to hear it in its entirety. He said, I wish that you personally in every creative individual and organization you know, will find a way to directly engage with a public school in your area and that you'll then tell the story of how you got involved. So that within a year, we have a thousand examples of innovative public-private partnerships. I heard that and my head kind of exploded and it's fair to say that pretty much everything that I've gone on to do since then was inspired by that wish. So the first, and there were two pieces of that that were so important to me. The first was that sort of the clarion called action for both individuals and organizations to get involved with their communities. Specifically, he was talking about public schools and that's where my real passion lies. And the second part of his wish that was so important to me was the urgency that he sort of addressed and tried to pull in and educate those efforts to a larger audience to try to kind of build on this collective visioning process. So those things kind of were like an epiphany for me. I heard that wish and I went on to start a nonprofit organization called The Castle which works with schools in Putnam County, Indiana to create a culture of project-based and art-integrated learning. So we kind of created a learning community that had all participants involved from deposit students and faculty to the partner schools to community artists to community partners of all sorts. And it was really cool, but we weren't really moving the needle on the kind of cultural change that we were hoping to catalyze creating a sort of really energizing, a rich learning space for the kids. So we pulled back a little bit and we've created now an organization that is really looking at professional development and working with cohorts of teachers who buy into the vision. And that was a real lesson to me to work with the people who wanna work with you as opposed to trying to kind of bring people to see a vision that they can see. So that is what I'm doing currently right now is really kind of putting all my efforts into really bolstering that. And then connected to that as a project I'm super interested in the efforts and wanting to really kind of move the needle with regard to cultural transformation and working on a film project with the filmmakers, Joel Fenderman and James Chase Sanchez who are the co-producer of this award award-winning film, Man on Fire. We're working together to create a documentary focused on putting Indiana on the public vision. And it's sort of come full circle because Dave Eggers is the executive producer for that. So that's pretty cool. And we're hoping that we're gonna use that film in the same way that he was kind of encouraging people to use his head wish as a kind of a town, a piece for town hall community functions where all stakeholders come together in a completely non-partisan way to think about how they might invest in public schools super, super excited about that project. And the other thing that I'm thinking a lot about sort of in the Mavina coalition building, building on the book, I would love to work with to kind of create a cohort or think tank if you will of small liberal arts colleges who would love to look into alternative funding models specifically forward or income sharing kinds of models and think about how there might be a cohort and they could pilot that. So that's what I'm doing these days and I'm super excited about it. Oh, I didn't see that. That's so nice. Just a quick question. What was the name of the person who gave that TED talk again? Dave Eggers. Oh, Dave Eggers, the author, right? The author, yeah. Yes, I wanna make sure we got that. That's fantastic. That's so much work. And that's, especially that last bit, we're gonna come back to that right away about the question of alternative funding models and collaboration for small liberal arts colleges. Well, now that we've got you here, hold on one second, let me bring your collaborator, your co-conspirator up on stage and let me add Professor Stephen Volk. Stephen, hello. Hey, Ryan, how are you? Good, good. Are you at home in Oberlin? I am at home in Oberlin watching the snow come down. I think we're getting that snow that was over in Iowa a little while ago. Oh my gosh. Okay, well, please stay warm and dry as best of your ability. Yeah, a little bit. You heard from Beth that we like to ask people to introduce themselves by talking about their upcoming year. So what's gonna be occupying your brain and your time for the rest of 2021? Well, there's a variety of projects. I'll be fairly brief on them. I do a lot of work on immigration, on immigration law. I'm an expert witness on various trials that go on. And so immigration work in this current format will take a lot of my time. So that's one thing. The second thing is the themes that Beth and I developed in the book, as she indicated that each of us, I think both collectively and separately will like to follow. I'm really interested in thinking much more about the tenure model within higher education and whether that's useful or not. I'm interested in thinking about ways in which particularly small colleges but not necessarily can create structures of integration across the universities per se. And then fundamentally, I think part of my work will be devoted to this really interesting question that's developed over the last few years, which is what does it mean that education is now a more significant indicator of voting preference than income? And allow that question comes down to what's an education for? What's an education about? Is it really an economic multiplier? The sort of the earnings premium? Is it about a path towards critical thinking? And is that the way it ties into voting preference in that sense? Or ultimately, is it a means for cultivating a process of democracy, both in terms of what one learns and in terms of the process of how one learns it? And so looking at how these three different elements sort of intertwined or tried to get at why there has been such a partisan division on higher education in general. And much more than that, how to address it? Because we cannot proceed in this manner anymore. It has to come together. We could have differences, but the fact that education speaks to partisan differences, it's crazy. It's just crazy. So those are the things I'm working on. Huge topics, Steven. Huge, these topics. You know, it's immigration, just thinking about all the changes there. When you were talking about integration across a liberal arts college, were you thinking of inter-curricular activities, transdisciplinary work? So it's at a variety of different levels in terms of the curriculum, quite clearly, that there are ways in which, as we discuss in the book, to have traditional disciplines that separate these out doesn't seem to make much sense now. So how do you bring the curriculum itself into integration? Secondly, we have structures of employment across the institution that tend to be seen separately. So faculty, for example, will develop a course, develop a curriculum and develop a course. And what we do in developing a course, as all of you know well, we consult our past practice and we read our books and things like that. But in consulting that course, why don't we bring in people from student academic learning? Why don't we bring in people from residential life? Why don't we bring in the advisors from across the campus? Why don't we bring in coaches from athletics? All of those will help us understand how to best construct and connect a course. And then on top of that, quite obviously, how do we bring students into that process of creating a course and creating a curriculum? So that's what I mean by integration. Wow. So that's not just interdisciplinary, but also across domains as well as across professions and across just every institutional divide that we have. And then particularly when you're talking about small liberal arts colleges, which are embedded in communities, how do you bring the community in as well? Because not to have them as part of that conversation is not every course quite clearly, but many courses. Really, it's not just that it doesn't make for a good course, but it limits the possibilities for everyone to really engage in that kind of learning. And what we're seeing nowadays with such a division, often between colleges and the communities that surround them, is how to bring those together. And there's a variety of ways. And one is, what kind of education are we doing that can really prosper the community, that can make the community a part of that conversation? And I can see this comes full circle to what Beth was talking about in terms of wanting to engage with the local community, which is appropriate because if you look, friends, on the bottom left of your screen, you should see a kind of yellow or tan colored button. If you press that, up will pop a link to our guest's new book, which is the Post-Pandemic Liberal Arts College, Manifesto for Reinvention. And I strongly recommend grabbing that because this is an important book for the liberal arts college world. And being at the liberal arts college world statistically is a small slice in American higher education, but it's one that punches way above its weight. It's enormously influential far beyond its numbers. And it's really a special part of higher education that America has developed almost completely on its own. And of course, one of the great things about you, for which I have a lot of envy, is you both got a rave review in Teen Vogue, which is something which I've gotten and I'm looking forward to at some point. And I'll be happy to explain that at some point. But let me just ask, to begin with, in your book, you have all of these brave ways of rethinking about where the liberal arts college could look like, what it could look like and how it could function. But one is this idea of re-kepting with the community. On the one hand, this seems almost counterintuitive if we think about the ivory tower idea in general, but also as liberal arts college world is a kind of separate space carved away from the world, often in geographic isolation. It sounds to me like you're connecting with people who are arguing for the transparent university or what Kathleen Fitzpatrick calls the generous thinking where the cloistered university in college gets to interact with the local community. Say more about that. How can the liberal arts college world interact with that community in a positive and progressive way? Beth, do you want to try that? I mean, to me, that's one of my favorite things to think about. And that was also sort of the moment of epiphany when I heard Dave Eggers' speech, which is sort of that sense that so many of us are in colleges where we have those town-bound issues, right, where it seems that we have this cloister as we're suggesting to put up cloistered campuses as campuses on the hill. And what strikes me and what struck me sort of this really is that, A, we have a responsibility to those communities that we're the code of hospitality, this such that we are members of these communities. And so it doesn't make any sense to me sort of intuitively that we wouldn't be investing in our communities. At a very, very deep fundamental level, listen, these are our homes. So it's about creating homes that we want to live in, and that we want our neighbors to live in, and that we want to live kind of too. There's also the very real, in my view, the very real sort of sense. And again, my lens is thinking about to move it between kindergarten and college students, right? And the way that the high stakes testing culture has completely failed everybody in that regard as far as I'm concerned and created these learning spaces of learning that are compartmentalized and fractured and not at all autonomous, right? So the kids from the moment they enter into kindergarten, they have no, they have control over what they're learning, how they're learning, and how they should care about what they're learning, right? And so, and when I started to make that connection to my own kids at the fall, right? I think about them as my kids. And I think about how little control they have had in the past and continue to have in the college experience. That's when it becomes to me really, really, really necessary to start to think about the continuity between what's happening in the community and what's happening at that level. And the level of creating learning spaces where everybody feels connected, they understand why they're learning more, they understand what they're learning is for, in their own skin, right? So that's what I think is at stake, is that if we lose our sense of what learning is for at a very individual level, which means understanding that you're part of a community, that no one is working the vacuum, you lose everything. You lose the capacity to learn. And that's where I think we are right now with the sort of talk mentality to high stakes that the culture has turned into. I think that's at the heart of where we are right now. And why I so desperately feel we need to transform the culture of higher education to create a culture that feels energized with the culture of buying across the board. Everybody wants to be there. That is a community development issue to me. So on the one hand, we have the high stakes testing environment, which is isolating and atomizing not only between individual students, but between communities. And on the other hand, we have a possibility of a truly creative learning space. And that's the transition we have to make from one to the next. That's a very, very powerful move. Steve, please add more to that. So I think one, I mean, time down kind of splits are very old been around with us for a long time. There's a variety of reasons for them. One of the things that comes up clearly in small level arts colleges often our students come from families that are better off than the communities in which we're located. And so there is a kind of, one would say almost natural resentment of students who will drive better cars than the people in town have. And if we are not honest about that, and if we really don't understand our own privilege from which responsibility flows, then we can't address these. So there's a variety of ways in which we can do this. We do some of them at Oberlin. We invite people into our classes. There is an elder community, Kendall, that is free to take classes as long as our faculty members agrees. And this I think might also speak to some of the demographic challenges that we face as traditional age students go down. But having older citizens, older being my own age or younger, in the class was incredibly important for the kinds of conversations that we could have. So integrating people from the community. We also allow high school students to take courses at the college for no cost. And so those are different ways on an educational sense that we could do that. We also provide a lots of ways in which we work with the local colleges, which we work with local businesses, which we provide a sort of energy environmental dashboard that works for the entire community. So as long as we think about removing those walls and seeing the ways in which we, the liberal arts colleges benefit from this integration with our communities, then I think we could begin to address the suspicion that many more conservative areas have about what they see as liberal arts colleges. That's terrific. I'd like to start to build on that. If it's okay, I completely agree that those walls, those walls are there, they feel inaccessible between town and home. But part of what makes it necessary to break down those walls is to start to see that there's a reciprocity, I think between those communities and between the communities in which we're living and the community of the colleges that we're presenting. And one of the things that I felt really sort of excited about in terms of the way that the CAS operate that as an external sort of service provider to the partner schools was that students, depositors, and faculty had to think about the relevance of what they were doing in their own classrooms and create learning experiences for the kids at the partner school. And that made a difference when they went into the schools. No one came, there were very many opportunities for the kids to come too to class. But what we really need, I think, was that we were going into the schools themselves. So the burden wasn't on asking people to come to our space, right? The gesture was to going to their space. And to try and think about what it would look like to think about the university model as more fluid. So it's not just the campus, but it's an idea. And something so, I think, beautiful about the liberal arts model that then becomes an ethos, right? So it's collaborative. It's about creative problem solving. It's a sort of essential interdisciplinary model thinking about looking at the world through different lenses that is then doesn't have to be owned on a particular physical campus. It's an ethos. And I think that I'm really excited about thinking about how you break down this sort of physical walls. I've heard this refer to you sometimes as the permeable university or the porous. We have a bunch of questions coming in. And friends, please, my job here is not to be the interrogator, but to be the emcee. And so if you have any thoughts and responses to our guests have just said, please hit that little raised hand button to join us on stage or click the question mark. And already there's some question marks that I'd like to bring a few of these up. So to begin with, this is one from, let's see, from David Holmuk at Harvard Business School who asks, historically, natural science was not in liberal education. Now, general education requirements include natural science as well as the social science in the humanities. Given the digital present and future, when will liberal arts add applied science to liberal arts? So let me start on that first. I think the issue of what courses are taught in liberal arts colleges have not as much to do with natural science or applied science as the method in which one interrogates that process. So for example, I can't imagine a course on accounting at a liberal arts college. And yet we offer all sorts of courses on economics. I can and already what we're seeing are courses in the health sciences, which relate to a series of sort of public health problems of the coordination between science and ethics. All of those kinds of approaches have had to think about and applied science like nursing, for example, at a liberal arts college. So one very brief story I was asked some years ago to consult at a medical school in the Midwest and the dean there said, what can we do differently? And I said, are you placing all your residents in the programs that they want? And he said, yeah, absolutely. And I said, well, part of what you're probably not getting is the fact that when your doctors get onto the floor, they're not gonna be able to talk to other people because they haven't learned how to consult. They're not gonna be able to take advice from their nurses because they learned hierarchy. They're not gonna be able to do this kind of work because that's not what has been learned. And that is what precisely you learn through a liberal arts college, which is not the subject matter per se, but the way in which you integrate it and work with others to arrive at conclusions and approaches. Thank you. That's a great answer. And again, that's a really, really good question. David, thank you for it. And friends, it is that easy just to type in a question and ask it. Let me now demonstrate the video method because we have a longtime friend of the program coming to us from the Houston, Texas area. This is Tom Hames. And he has a question also about interdisciplinarity. Hello, Tom. Hi guys. So my question is this, is that we've seen a lot of innovation and explosion of teaching modalities because of the pandemic. And I was wondering what you guys saw as far as opportunity particularly in your world going forward for you who got to stimulate an explosion of time and space, which gives you whole new ways of dealing, of approaching the problems of interdisciplinarity or even interinstitutionality. So where we could have complementary things going on between institutions, things like that. Just wondering what you're seeing and what you're thinking and how that could contribute to the kind of work y'all are doing. I think that's a great question. If I could start, I'm not teaching this, I'm not teaching this here, but last semester, I went in the shutdown. So it was March 13th. I will remember forever that date. That's gone my brain down. And I went to the virtual model. And how weird and Kafka-esque and surreal that really was. And it was so striking to me that, to me, there were two sort of responses to that. There was the one response where some of the students who felt that the structure and just the physical presence of being on campus, that everything had been moved away from them and they were really, really floundering and really sort of despairing. There was another response that to me was very telling which were the students who felt like they were liberated because they didn't have to deal with the sort of the politics of the classroom any longer, right? So they could all of a sudden start to take learning on their own. It became something that they could own. And the idea sort of, you know, in this sort of the fluidity of time and space that you're referencing, right? It was something that they could really start to become connected to. And just by chance, not by chance because it's the stuff that I teach all the time but I was teaching a class on existentialism and I was teaching another class on the legacy of Kafka and Nietzsche when this shut down. And we were like, oh my gosh, I mean, could the universe have handed us a more relevant example of any of that? So to me, it's all about relationship building in the classroom and really the content is only useful when it's in that it's useful, right? So it's only useful if it's connected to the world around us. So I was a kind of a perfect chance for the students to then be able to look at the world around them. Oh, there's Kafka. Oh, there's Kafka, right? You know, oh, here's a moment where we're all sort of sitting around waiting trying to figure out what we're gonna do with our next moment. Oh, there's back it, right? And it started to make deep connections to what they were learning content-wise and the way that the world was like really announcing that content matter. And all of a sudden the learning became so much more visceral even on the screen and I'm a very touchy feeling kind of person. And so I would never have chosen go to a screen to a virtual kind of platform. It's not in my comfort zone, but what I realized was if the relationships were already there and if you've created a space where everybody feels comfortable kind of taking risks and challenging themselves to make the learning matter, the platform doesn't really matter. And that was kind of my big takeaway. I stopped being scared. Exciting to think about, and I think what you're doing, Brian, here is a really beautiful example of a kind of learning platform where the learning is really organic and relevant in real time. I think there are just,