 HBCU Dodgers Radio, I'm your host, Jared Carter. Welcome back to our presidential series conversations with esteemed leaders from historically black colleges and universities nationwide. Today, our distinguished guest is Dr. A. Zachary Faizan. He is the president and CEO of Edward Waters College, the pride of Jacksonville, Florida, with a great announcement today, approval for a new program and something very distinctive for EWC. So, Mr. President, pleasure to have you back. Well, pleasure to be here. Thank you so very much for this opportunity. Appreciate you, Jared. So, big announcement today in the area of academic development, a new online program and the first online program coming to Edward Waters. Talk a little bit about it. Yes, yes, yes. We are so excited that we put earlier last week, as a matter of fact, SACCOC approved Edward Waters College to launch its first ever online degree program. So, we'll be, we've been approved to offer a bachelor of business administration degree as a concentration in organizational management. And again, this is, you know, our institution's first ever academic program to be delivered via an online platform. So, we are just really, really excited about all the opportunities that this pretends for us, for our institution. That's got to be not only just a major gain for Edward Waters, but something that most, if not all colleges and universities are looking ahead to doing in the next years to come, which is how do you expand and perfect online curriculum delivery? Because that's just the wave of the future. For schools and presidents and board members who may be out there listening, can you kind of, I guess in summary, walk through what it takes to establish an online program? Because I think that a lot of students and alumni feel like, oh, just start an online degree program. And I would imagine it's not that easy, particularly when you, one, got to set it up and two, have to have it approved by your accreditors. Or can you kind of walk through what it takes to do that? Right. Well, first and foremost, you've got to have the faculty that have the credentialing and the vision to pull together what the curriculum is going to look like for an online program. And then, of course, as a corollary to that, you've got to have the IT infrastructure to be able to effectively deliver that program. It's one thing to say you have an online degree program, put that out there, but reputation is everything. So once you've said that you're gonna offer this program via a distance learning or online platform, you've got to have your eyes dotted and teased crossed because that first impression is the best impression that your constituencies and your customers, if you will, students that you serve are gonna have about the institution, about the program. So after you've kind of done that, then you've got to write the prospectus. You've got to get that prospectus into SAC-COC. They have to vet it, they have to approve it. And then after that, hopefully you keep your fingers crossed and SAC-COC looks favorably upon your prospectus submission. And in a nutshell, obviously it's much more granular, the more granular details, but in a nutshell, that's kind of the process. So yeah. Why the focus on business? There are a number of strong programs that Water has, but what is it about the industrial footprint in which the school sits and the city's needs and your strategic plan for the institution, what things led to the decision being made for business to be the first focus of the online degree program? Right. So, namely, business with our largest degree program, we also did some internal study and actually have engaged a third party higher education and research institute program that helped us to do some market studies, not just here in Jacksonville, but nationally. And we were able to ascertain that business and all of the attended occupations that are available through students that are earning degrees in business, particularly in organizational management is an area that would be one worth our investment given the market demand in terms of job needs as well as market demand with regard to what students are majoring in. So that kind of is what kind of undergirded the decision making process with regard to choosing business for the launch of our online degree programs. And again, when we looked internally, we also did some internal surveying among students and we said, hey, if we were to offer a program that was purely online, which one would you have had the most interest? And again, in partnership with our third party partner that helped provide us some research, business was one of those that kind of rose to the top. So again, since it was our largest major and we already had some strengths in that area, we paired our existing strengths with what the research devolved in terms of market demand. And so it just was kind of a perfect marriage and a perfect fit for us to launch this initial online degree program in business administration. And this new program is just the latest in a really fast paced rollout of a lot of different things happening at Everwood Waters. This accompanies new announcements about peer reviewed journals and research space and opportunities for students and faculty on the campus. Talk a little bit about the burgeoning or I should say the emerging eminence of the research imprint at EWC. Indeed, indeed earlier this month, we also held kind of along those lines our first HBCU research conference on HBCUs. And as an outgrowth of that, Everwood Waters College produced its first ever peer reviewed journals. So we produced the undergraduate journal on research across the disciplines as well as the HBCU journal on research initiatives. I'm gonna make sure that I get two copies of those to you, Jared. But this is, it was a great initial event. We welcomed students from all over the country as well as faculty from all of the country to participate in this inaugural event here on our campus. So we were just really, really excited to do that. And again, as we burnished the reputation, the accurate reputation of our institution and continue our trajectory towards emerging eminence, certainly what we're producing on the academic side of the house is integral to that growth as evidenced through these two new peer reviewed journals that were produced right here at Everwood Waters College. So there's this big focus obviously on academic development, research and academic development. And this still within your first year in leading the college. What is it that that gave you the foundation and the faith that, hey, there are a lot of positive things that we can do here. Academics is where we should start. Yeah, well, I will share that, academics is the lifeblood of what it is that we do. We are an institution of higher education. And so while all of the corollary programs around student affairs, around advancement, around athletics are integral to what we do. Our primary mission, of course, is to educate the students that we serve. And so we wanted to make sure that we provided or rather that we really focused primarily on the enhancement of our academic enterprise. And we're still uncovering, discovering and recovering in that regard. As you mentioned, this is our first year, a first year of this administration. And so this is just the very beginning as we look to really recast and reinvigorate and reinvision what the academic program looks like here at Everwood Waters College. Listing it to a place of eminence and enhancing our overall academic competitive profile. What's the reaction been from your student body, your faculty, your alumni? It's one thing to have a plan in mind, but then to see it come to fruition, what have your stakeholders said about how these developments are playing out and their pride in them? Well, our stakeholders thus far have been very pleased. And I think that part of it is that stakeholders want to have a voice. They want to have a platform as a new administration comes in and shapes its vision. I think we spoke some months ago and I was sharing with you then that everyone was pushing me as a new president. Mr. President, tell me what your vision is. Tell me what your vision, tell me what your vision. And my pushback was reflexively that vision is nothing but an illusion without money and a plan. And so what we needed to do was to really coalesce all the different stakeholders to listen and hear just kind of what our strengths are, what our weaknesses are, where we can capitalize on existing pockets and spaces of strength and then kind of collectively sit with the pathway that's going to be going forward. And that's what we've done. And this new launch of our first ever online degree program is an outgrowth from that. So we're really, really excited and our stakeholders are very, very excited because they were given an opportunity to give voice and have platform in the pathway that we're moving the institution. So just to wrap it up again, really great news for Edward Waters. Can you tell us where we can learn more information about the program, how people can sign up and more specifically how people or where people can go to donate to the School of Business to help expand that enterprise? Certainly, certainly. You can visit us at www.ewc.edu. We actually just launched a brand new website in January. There's a donate now page there and certainly there will be on the front page there more information about the newly approved launch of the first ever online degree program at EWC. Come join us. We are emerging as Florida's destination institution of emerging eminence. And we certainly want folks that are interested to please, please come and be a part of the great work that's going on at Edward Waters College.