 Before I begin, if we might, can we hold space for the times that we are in, for those experiencing conflict in Gaza, in Israel, in Ukraine, in Russia, and in armed conflicts around the globe, I wonder if we might just take a moment of silence for those people. So, that moment of silence, and thank you to New America's Public Interest Technology University Network and the BU Faculty of Computing and Data Science for having me here to speak. So, I've warned you now that this is less of a keynote and more of a provocation. We'll see. But I think we're in a space where we need probably some provocations about what it is that we wanna be, what it is that we wanna see, and how we want things, especially in the United States, but around the world to continue to go or not go with respect to how technology and people are interacting with each other and how we interact with each other in total or by ourselves. I'm gonna ask to talk briefly about the role of universities in democracy. This topic is ongoing debate, right? It is, especially now in the United States, especially as we enter into an election season, both, or all of the local, state, and federal levels. And the questions are what value, and I would ask, add worth, what value and worth, and I would also say benefit our universities to society. It's a question that keeps coming up. And perhaps, rightfully so, I don't think we, as university laborers, university workers, always tell the best story about ourselves and about our role. More importantly, I think at times we forget that not everybody goes to college. To a report from the Education Data Initiative found that in the United States in the spring of 2022, so last spring, total college enrollment was at 16.2 million students. That's a little more than the combined populations of New York, LA, and Chicago. We know that the United States has way more cities and towns than New York, LA, and Chicago. I know I might shock some people that that's the case, but it's important to note, or how about this? So the US Census reported in 2021 that those people who reported to be older than 25 years of age, 10.5% had earned their associate's degrees. Around 23% in change had earned their bachelors and another 14% in change had graduate or professional degrees. So that's around a total of 49% of US residents who were counted anyway or who turned in the census had some or completed their studies in college of those 25 years old and up. That leaves a significant portion of people who did not complete their college studies or didn't go to college at all. And this is not to report statistics othering people related to college and college completion. This is, however, to make us think about who's left out of conversations sometimes like about public interest technology and about what we think is in the public interest versus what actually might be in the public interest. And more than that, those folks too are taxpayers. So we kind of have a duty of persuading them that their money is going to useful subjects. We also perhaps have a duty now, now more than ever of making sure that what they see and what they hear about what's being taught on campuses, who's doing what on campuses is or is not true quite frankly. There's an ongoing discussion on Twitter or X. I'm gonna say Twitter sometimes or X sometimes. But you know what I'm talking about. Amongst faculty, particularly humanities faculty, often maligned, often called into question in these conversations about what use is a humanities degree, right? So the debate centers on this now ubiquitous question of worth and value and benefit, especially of some majors and some classes even. I don't know if you saw it the other day. Someone, a person with a very high Twitter following posted, oh no, they're teaching witchcraft at the University of Edinburgh, where really it was a master's program, a master's level program about how the occult is a significant part of history. However, how it's framed is a totally different thing. And she called into question, what is the value of learning about witchcraft? And so some humanities faculty have responded and as many X or Twitter discussions go, I think many people were talking past each other. In this iteration, one faculty member stated that they in general have no problem with making arguments about the worth of their major program that they teach in. In this case, I believe he was in English. For him, he taught students how to write, how to communicate, and how to engage with prior literature. As is almost always the case on X or Twitter, another faculty member chimed into the conversation, oh no, not in direct apply, so there was some sub-tweeting happening. And he dismissed outright the need to defend what he does as a humanist. Why do I have to make the case for English degrees? Why do I have to defend English as a subject of worth or the humanities as a subject of worth or the social sciences as a subject of worth? Sometimes, he argued, it is good or at least perfectly okay to do or study things that have no inherent value. And he posted an article about the worth of pointless things. So I don't particularly have a side here. I'm a communication scholar, I also went to law school, so you can argue about that. As a general matter, I don't think university programs are worthless. Maybe some aspects are not for me. You've tried out classes and you thought, perhaps I'm not gonna study this, whatever the case may be. At the same time, I think it's imperative that faculty, staff, students, and administrators defend the worth of humanities, social science, agricultural schools, public health, engineering, and other fields and the institutions that house them. But perhaps not for the reason that you think and perhaps not in the ways that you think. Universities and the majors they house and many of, if not all, of the initiatives they implement should be defended because of what they mean for how we govern. And here I'm not talking about how we vote. I'm talking about how we govern ourselves. This is the choices that we make on a daily basis that add up to how things are the way that they are. And this is important. So I come at this from the First Amendment person or having to have studied the First Amendment a lot. Michael John defended the need for freedom of expression in the United States because he said we want an informed citizenry so that they can make the best choices. And that choice for him originally was in voting. At the ballot box, you need to be informed. You need to make the best choices. But that would leave open only protection for political or politically oriented speech. Later, he added to that the worth of literature and art and other things. Why? Because that's how we self govern. It's not just about the ballot, but it's about all the things that we do in society that adds to what society is. We're saying democracy is important. I'm saying yes, democracy is important, but how we govern ourselves is just as important if not more important. And so Ronald Daniels, who's the current president of Johns Hopkins University in his 2021 book, What Universities Old Democracies, he said that there are four major areas that universities can or do assist in the democratic state, how they can help. Number one was social mobility. So universities fueled the ability of students and their families to become socially mobile and to have different opportunities than perhaps they would have statistically. There's also civic education. Universities can teach young adults the techniques and practices of democratic citizenship, right? There's also facts and expertise. Of course, you know that universities house many experts on many different subjects and that can help shape public policy and also help to engender trust in our various institutions, including science and media. And then there's pluralism and that's universities can bring together people from different backgrounds and can model for students how to engage across their differences. In general, I agree with these aspirations or maybe more than aspirations, but I might offer a provocation of how might we execute these things. And it's based on a program that is quite old now, but very important. It's been very important to the development of the United States. Very important to the development of universities in the United States. And when I think about PITUN and the network and the aspirational network of networks, I think this could possibly be a way to go. So I would ask PITUN and PITUN members to take a lesson from the land grant universities. I know that PITUN is full of both public and private, large and small universities, but I think the cooperative and translational nature of what land grant universities do and have done can be quite beneficial for what PITUN and public interest technology as a whole wants to do. So I am the product of two big old land grant flagship public universities, University of Wisconsin and the University of Florida. And these flagship land grant universities use the power bolstered by policy of the land grant to make a difference in the local, in the state and in the country and ultimately the world. So both of those universities have faced or are now facing uncertainty and unexpected change at the same time the mission has remained the same even if plans have slightly changed. So in general, the land grant mission is to use the university. Usually most prominently seen in colleges of agriculture and our schools of life sciences or environmental sciences. And this is where extension educators, extension and cooperative workers actually went over the time I thought, good. Would translate findings from university research into actionable steps for, if you're in the school of agriculture, farmers, fishers, ranchers, among other community members. So in the state of Florida actually with 67 counties, it's more than just the rural counties that get extension workers. Extension workers are in the city doing urban education as well. Things like technology, things like STEM, things like financial literacy. All those things that we have deemed in the public interest, these extension workers in cooperation with each other are doing this kind of work. Some of you may be familiar with 4-H, prominent program, don't hear about it as much anymore I don't think, but 4-H, hands, heart, head, health, prominent program established by the USDA to empower young people through mentoring and hands-on program based on science and health and civic engagement. That's land grant programming. So the establishment of the land grant school is not above criticism at all. The land grant law, the Moral Act of 1862 and then followed again by the Moral Act of 1890 provided land and later cash to states to establish colleges focused on useful sciences like agriculture and military science. But the caveat was without neglecting the other classical parts of a traditional education. Further, the land granted to the states with the first Moral Act came with the removal and deceptive treaties with indigenous communities. The second Moral Act was less land and more dough or cash and it focused on the former Confederate states and it prohibited the use of race as an admission criteria unless the state created a separate university for black students. So this was the impetus for many state public what we now have as HBCUs in the United States which recently the federal government found to have been chronically and perniciously underfunded to the tune of $12 billion. Make a note of that. So despite these and other criticisms and the lasting influence that the establishment of these laws, how we got land, how we got money has had as a general matter the pursuit of the land grant meant that there was an exchange happening for the state and university to receive and keep the significant acreage and money it got from the federal government through the state. It had to be beneficiary, it had to have value, it had to be worthy. This meant that ag was a natural fit because the benefits were expressed. You could see if I send ag educators out to tell about a new way of farming I can see the productivity, I could see the yield happening but more than that it showed the governors and the governed that the university was taking steps to meet the public interest. The face, the express public interest. It is in the public interest for example to increase farm yields. It is in the public's interest to stave off plant disease and fish kills and these offer reportable benefits. In fact, according to a study in 2018 the land grant mission was one of the drivers of the United States becoming a economic powerhouse. How do we translate this to Pitt? I should also add one that land grant is translational. We translate research to the public for the public interest. It is also cooperative and Florida, I keep saying Florida, that's where I live, I keep saying Florida is because there are more than one land grant institution. There's Florida A&M University, there's University of Florida and also there's a little bit of FSU there too but all three of those land grant institutions work together, their extension workers are networked in the various counties around the state. I think that is another aspect that Pitt could take into the future. So what I'm saying is what universities can play or the role that universities can play in democracy is going back to not necessarily the bad parts of policy but the beneficial parts of policy that are already there, already in play, already there is infrastructure for. And also I would add that agricultural workers and educators like those in land grant institutions have the opportunity to be on the ground and I wanna leave with this but they have the opportunity to be on the ground to actually, we talked about the public interest, we actually need to know what that is. It is one thing for me to do research and say, wow, we should adopt this technology or this technology is bad or this is how we get rid of disinformation or this is how disinformation spreads so I'm going to teach you how to stop it. On the ground, how that looks might be a totally different thing. It is important to have this loop of feedback hearing from the people that we are attempting to assist. So my provocation is this, can we take extension and make it a part of Pitt? Can we take what we want to do with public interest technology and make that be a infrastructure for spreading what it is that we say we wanna spread using this network of network of networks, right? So for me, the role of universities in democracy is to meet the public where it is. And that's why I think the land grant mission is so special but I also think that it's useful for a community like Pitt UN. That's my provocation and I'd like to hear what you all have to say as I walk around here. Thank you. Thank you.