 Good morning, everybody. My name is Wendy Morgan and I am working for Hypothesis which is hosting the social learning summit this year and It is my great pleasure to welcome you to the event today. Thank you so much for Joining us and I just want to point out a couple of housekeeping details before I introduce our keynote speaker and And the first housekeeping detail is that if you are having a little bit of a hard time with technology, you could try using the Chrome browser. That might give you a better experience. And the other thing is in the lower right hand corner of your screen. You might see a low definition high definition button. So if you are having technical difficulties, you could press you could go to low definition and that might be a better experience for you as well. I also want to call attention to the fact that there is a chat channel on the right hand part of the screen and there's a Q&A channel. In the right hand part of the screen. So if you ever have any questions, you could put them in the Q&A channel. And that will especially be true at the end of the keynote when we will have an open question and answer Session with Dr. Devorah Lieberman so you can put your questions for Devorah in the Q&A channel. And we are here to help you with anything that you want to put in the chat or the Q&A channel all day long. So without further ado, I am going to introduce Dr. Devorah Lieberman, the president of the University of Laverne. I have known Devorah for more than 20 years and it is my absolute pleasure to have her keynoteing today. Devorah was the founding director of the Center for Teaching Excellence at Portland State University. And she went on to be the provost and vice president of academic affairs at Wagner College. And now she is the first female president of the University of Laverne. And I wanted you all to have a chance to hear Devorah speak today because Devorah has one of the most insightful minds about higher education and faculty that I have ever encountered. She's going to be talking to us today about leadership in this pandemic age and these unprecedented times. And I can't wait to hear what she says. And so without further ado, I'm going to hand the stage over to Devorah. Thank you so much, Devorah. Thank you, Wendy. I want to make sure that everyone can hear me because I'm looking at the chat and Steve Chenoweth says we cannot hear the speakers. So I'm one of the speakers, obviously. Can somebody put into chat if you can hear me? I can hear. Oh, my gosh. That's wonderful. Yay. Excellent. This is not a course in active listening, but I feel completely confirmed and validated because you can hear me. Okay. And this is a new platform for me. So as I share my slides, I have my someone, my best friend from IT who's here to help me. So before I share my slides, I want to make sure that I give a little intro about myself and Wendy. So as Wendy Morgaine said, we met more than 20 years ago, maybe 25 years ago, when I was a faculty developer at Portland State University. And one of the things that I've carried with me my whole life, authentically, is sort of Maya Angelou's philosophy that people may not remember you, I'm paraphrasing, for what you've accomplished, but people will always remember you for how you make them feel. And I try to accomplish a lot, but I also try to focus on everybody being special and everybody having talents and everybody should be recognized for what it is that they do and what they do well. So what I want to say about Wendy Morgaine is when I met her 20, 25 years ago, she was a graduate student at Portland State at Portland State University in Portland, Oregon. When I met her, she made such a beautiful impression on me because she made me feel like I was special and that I was having an impact on others. So a couple of weeks ago when Wendy called and asked me if I would please do this keynote address to all of you who are attending this related to hypothesis. How could I say no to someone who I remembered so vividly because of how she treated me and how she made me feel. So I just want to say, Wendy, thank you for a 25 year relationship. I look forward to many more years together. And thank you for asking me to do this. So lesson number one is you can accomplish a lot, but how you make others feel authentically will make all the difference in the world. And the other thing that I'm going to, you know, Wendy said she read an article that I'd written about how to wear bifocals during a post pandemic period. And if I said to our students today about wearing bifocals, they would probably say, I don't really know what bifocals are because I think that's a generational thing. But when she read that and she said, this is what our, this would be very good for the audience. One of the things that I really want to emphasize throughout this relaxed conversation that I'm going to be having with you is I believe more than anything else that there are it's successful leadership and significant leadership. And I don't think there's any literature on this. This is just my own personal philosophy. When you're in a job and you have certain expectations that need to be met, whether you're a faculty developer and you're supposed to be doing things with IT, or how to do assessment or how to write a good syllabus or how to deliver hybrid face to face and online, whatever your portfolio is, you're measured on those expectations in the portfolio. I would like to add that we only live on this planet, I believe one time we only have one life and it's great to be a successful leader. But what I'd like to ask you to think about through this talk and then as you leave this talk and you go on is how one, can you be successful? As we live in this and I called it a post pandemic, but I don't even think we're not through the pandemic. So through and beyond the pandemic. How can you be successful? But more importantly than being successful is how can you be significant? And you can define significant any way you want. I'm going to talk about that in just a couple of minutes. But please think about how can you be successful in your career? But more importantly than success is how can you be significant with your impact on others? And if you could measure both at the end of my life, I would like to be measured on how significant I've been, not just how successful I've been. So with that, I'm going to I've never used air meat. So please be patient with me. I'm going to go to I'm going to talk myself through this. I'm going to go to share screen. Then I'm going to go to share screen and I'm going to click in the middle of the box share. Okay, I have it with me. And now I'm going to go down here. To the PowerPoint. Sorry, don't judge me, everybody. And now I'm going to go to slideshow. Okay, now I can't see the chat. So I'm hoping you can all see this. How do I know that you're able to see this tongue? How do I know that they're able to see this? Okay, I I'm going to just start. Okay, Wendy. I'm not sure this is working. Okay, so I'm just going to get going with this, with the slideshow I presented that I prepared. Okay. DeVora, we can hear you. We can see you and we can see your slides. So go ahead. Thank you. Yay. How do I look? I let my hair go complete. I stopped coloring it during COVID. So don't judge me on my hair or my looks. Let's get to the PowerPoint slide. Thank you, Wendy. So here we go. Wearing leadership bifocals in a post pandemic university. So here's as I thought about this. Here's what I Here's what I want to talk about for the next 20 minutes or so, the who, the why, the what and the when. So I think this is about leadership. This is about successful and significant leadership, who you are and who we are and how your leadership. This is all about a leadership frame because higher education today is not what higher education was five years ago, three years ago, and not what is going to be in the future. So how is your leadership, whatever your role, and if your role was is a professor or a faculty developer or a higher level administrator or a president how is your leadership going to make a difference as we move into this post pandemic world. So I'm going to talk a little about who I who I am and you're going to talk about who you are. I can't see chat so you'll have to put it into chat on yourself and who are we and why is this topic important to us today. What we'll be focusing on in the post pandemic world as higher education, because higher education as I said is changed and people's perceptions of higher education across the country in the world have changed, whether you're in the US or outside the US. When do we use the leadership skills that I'm going to be talking about, and how do we truly lead wearing our bifocals and I think leadership today is different than leadership in the past. So, to spend a few minutes on who I am, who you are and who we are. So let me talk a little bit. I don't want to make this about me, but if you're a leader today and I think everybody in this in this I was going to say zoom room in this air meet room, each one of us is a leader in our own area. We might not lead an entire university. But if you're a professor, you're a leader in your class. If you're a faculty developer, you're a leader on your campus. If you're a higher level administrator at Dean, you're a CEO of your college or your school. So where did those leadership qualities come from. And I believe that the way we see the world through our leadership lens was shaped for us when we were very, very young. And those, how we see ourselves as leaders was shaped by our beliefs, our values and our attitudes. And that's what led to what you are, because everybody has a different, you can read 100 books on leadership and you'll get 100 different definitions. I'm talking today about who you are as a leader and what you think your leadership qualities are and where those came from. So beliefs, I don't want to turn this into a class, but beliefs are basically what you were taught when you were very young by your teachers, your religious leaders by others in your family and your friends. So your beliefs are what you believe are true or false. Your values are what you believe or you were taught was right or wrong. And your attitudes are your beliefs and your values that you carry forward into your attitude about people, places or things. So when I think about, and here I am today a president, was a provost, was a, they had a faculty development at Portland State University and was a professor prior to that. So in each of those roles I had to develop my own leadership qualities based on my beliefs, my values and my attitudes about leadership in higher education. So when I was preparing this talk I thought about where did my view of what a leader should be and what a leader should do because there's doing and there's being. Where did those come from? And each one of you will have different answers to where your leadership sort of shaping your lens for leadership. Where did that come from? And when I thought about this talk, I really dug deep and I thought when I was a child, I grew up in a house, a household, a Jewish household that was not necessarily religiously steeped in Judaism but very culturally steeped in Judaism. So that was very important to me when I was a little girl and my parents would say to me throughout my entire life on Saturday mornings, they would say, Devorah, you have one obligation in life, one. And that obligation is tikkun olam, which is a Hebrew phrase, which means repair the world or heal the world. So as I grew up with every weekend my parents talking to me about what is tikkun olam and your obligation that no matter what you do as an adult, your obligation is to either repair the world, heal the world where you're seeing injustice. So that became my mantra. That became my core for life choices that I made. So as I grew up and then I went to college and got my doctorate with tikkun olam in the back of my mind, I got my doctorate in culture and communication called intercultural communication. And why did I choose that? I chose that because I said, how am I going to make a difference through tikkun olam to heal the world? And in my own little way, I thought I can bring cultures, people of different perspectives, different views, different ethnicities, different religions together so that they could learn to communicate better and get along better and repair differences between either two cultures, two people, whatever. So that became intercultural communication. That became my way of leadership and choices that I made. So the qualities that for me that were defining what leadership was, was what could I demonstrate in my various roles to repair the world. The choices were to get a doctorate in intercultural communication and then to become a professor in intercultural communication. And when I was a professor, those drivers to always think of tikkun olam in my leadership roles. When I was asked by the administration of Portland State University to be the director for the Center for Academic Excellence and the head of the Teaching and Learning Center, I thought about, is this the right trajectory for me to be a leader in tikkun olam and bringing people together? And the answer that I said to myself was, and it was never, money is not a driver for me, compensation, because it wasn't about how much money is this going to, am I going to have a higher salary? It was all about, am I going to have greater impact? So when I was offered the position at the Center for Academic Excellence to be the head of the Center and Teaching and Learning, I said to myself, this is a way that I can have greater impact on more people. And it was through teaching and learning. And I still believe that was a very, very good choice for me because I could have a broader impact then in the classroom with students, which I always loved, but I was always thinking about tikkun olam and scope of influence and impact. So my leadership trajectory was not necessarily a planned ladder. My leadership trajectory was when other people actually saw things in me that and offered me opportunities to do other things. So when I was a Portland State and I was doing the faculty development, I was asked by a national leader to be in a group of 13 that was a national group, and it was called the Project for the Future of Higher Education. And the man who asked me to be in the group was another president of another university, and he gathered these 13 people and he said, our job for the next three years was all voluntary with our regular jobs at our universities was to focus on the future of higher education. And I bring that up because this person saw something in me reached out to me and said, would you be part of this prestigious group? While I was in the group, one of the other 13 people in this group was the president of a university in New York City. And he said to me, I'd like you to consider being the provost at this institution. I had never said, oh, I want to be a provost. He saw something in me that I hadn't necessarily seen in myself because I said, well, I'm at Portland State. I'm having the scope of influence. And when he said, I'd like you to consider this, I asked myself, is this on the path of tikkun olam? And will I have a greater scope of influence? And will I learn as I'm in this other position? So that brought me to New York City. And then after I'd been there for eight years as provost, I got a call from a search firm and they said, we'd like you to look at the presidency at the University of Laverne. And I said, I'd never heard of this university. And they said, well, let me send you the prospectus for this university. And in the prospectus here and the universities in Southern California about 35 miles east of Los Angeles. In the prospectus, it said this university was founded in 1891. And it was founded by a Christian denomination. And I said, oh, wow, that does that fit with my Judaic upbringing and with tikkun olam. So when I read the prospectus, and this is, I don't want to take too long on me because it's about you, not about me, but this was a critical moment in my choices for my own profession and my own leadership. When I read the prospectus for the University of Laverne, it said in 1891 when the Church of the Brethren founded this university, they founded it on four values. And this is what started the prospectus. This university was founded on that every graduate from the University of Laverne would be committed for the rest of their lives to civic and community engagement, diversity and inclusion, lifelong learning and ethical decision making. And I said to myself, I said to my husband, oh my gosh, if this university is actually doing what they say in writing that they have been doing, this is how we wanted to raise our own children. This is tikkun olam at its best. I'm interested. So I came out for the interview, and I said I'm really mostly interested in meeting the students at this university. So I see if they're living those values and if it's part of the water that this university is swimming in. Well, I flew out here, did not expect to be offered the position, met with the students, found that these students were living those values that founded this university and accepted the position. What made the biggest difference to me was the values, absolutely, but the student body. This student body at the University of Laverne, 60% of the students are Hispanic, about 6,200 students overall, about 60% of the students are the first to go to college and their families. We have about 70% of the students are students of color. It is the most diverse private not-for-profit institution in the state of California, and it is making a difference in the lives of thousands and thousands of students. These students didn't necessarily know they were going to go to college, and they came to a university that gives them those values and a career path so that they will return to their communities and lift their community. That to me is tikkun olam. So that's a lot on those first three bullets and my trajectory, and I'm hoping that you're thinking about your leadership qualities, what drives you, and what has been your trajectory. Has it been to just follow a path? Has it been to be successful? Has it been to be successful and significant? What does that mean? And as you continue on your paths, how are you going to position yourself to be authentic with what you think are your leadership qualities? What are your drivers and your continuing trajectory? That's a second bullet, and because I cannot see the chat, please put into chat anything that you want about your leadership qualities and your drivers. The third bullet, how can we as a profession of educators and people to support educators, how can we be leaders? How can we do it independently and collectively through this post pandemic world? And the one thing I know is that none of us can do this alone. When we say we're leaders, are you a leader alone? Or are you a leader that is influencing others so that you have an army, a team that's moving forward the vision that you have? And is it your vision or is it a shared vision? I believe as we go into this through the pandemic in this post pandemic world in higher education that I said earlier is different than it's ever been before. That we need each other, we need each other more than ever before so that we can do things together and we can adjust what we're doing so that we serve this country better, the world better, our students better. Aligned with the mission of each of our institutions. So why is this this topic so important to us today as I said higher education has changed. This is all my own opinion based on what I read every day and the data that are available to us. So I broke this down into three areas actually for but the first three, the external perception of higher education today is different than ever. I believe than ever before the when I say and you've got public institutions, you have private nonprofit institutions like the University of Laverne. So Portland State is a public institution. What determines a public institution? Most public institutions were created by the states and the legislatures and they've got they are finding they have they're helping to be subsidized by the taxpayers and they're non religious. The private institutions get like Laverne get no money from the state. None the any money that comes from the state will go to students who have financial need. None come to the university because we're private. We don't use taxpayers dollars. The private for profit institutions, the dollars from the profit can go back into the institution and go back to the shareholders or the owners of the institutions. So there's different ways that money comes to the public's the privates. So at the University of Laverne are we are tuition dependent as we say enrollment dependent our revenue, our profit comes from the tuition from our students. It all comes back into the institution. It doesn't go out to any shareholders or profit or owners. The privates completely different story where the money goes back to the owners. So the external perception of traditional higher education undergraduate and graduate. There's more skepticism today about higher education than ever before. And the skepticism has to come comes from what is the value of higher education. And today you have the Amazons and the Googles who have their own internal universities. They don't give degrees. They don't have to be accredited. But they a lot of high school students and I call them so does students over traditional age who didn't necessarily go to college. They are choosing they're called the adult learners. They're choosing not to go to college or not to go back to college because they can make as much money and have a career path. If they go to an organization where they get certifications and badges etc within that company like an Amazon. So the percent years ago when I went to college I was told you need to go to college because that's what you're supposed to do. And you will end up making more money than someone who doesn't go to college. That's not necessarily the case today. And people are asking it what is the value of higher education. Well I'm in higher ed obviously like you and I believe that the value of higher education is immeasurable. But I also believe it's not knowledge for knowledge sake. It's also preparing us to be successful in our own careers. So point number one there is a shifting perception of is the value and the cost of higher education worth it. And people are asking that we also have an upcoming cliff as we call it that there are fewer students graduating from high school. So there are fewer students going to college. The adult learner who is going to return to college to complete their degrees are not coming back because they're getting jobs and they're getting well paying jobs. And you've got this competition that we've never had before here in Southern California. We have ASU. We have Southern New Hampshire. We have Western Governors. We have more for profits than ever before. And there's more money being put from the state legislature into the public's than ever before. So there's a very big question in the world about the value of higher education. It's up to us to demonstrate that we have value. And I believe we do. And that's why I'm in this profession. The internal perception of higher education within our own campuses. I think especially through the pandemic that people are saying our faculty and our staff is what's the value of me staying in higher education with the great resignation. We are having a very hard time holding on to our employees in technology, in advancement, in HR, in all the areas outside of the actual delivery of the education in the classroom or virtually. So there's an internal perception of do I want to stay in higher education? Is there value in me staying in higher education? Could I have more significance and success if I'm not in higher education? So I am worried about this internally and it translates to the word morale. When I hear faculty and staff saying our morale is low. I'm saying what does that really mean? And I think morale, if you could translate morale, it has to do with feeling appreciated, being compensated well. And at this combination of imbalance when we talk about our work at the university and our lives outside the university having that balance. So I think internally we're facing another battle, not a battle, but we're facing another pivot point of our perception of our own value appreciation and being compensated well. So here we are. And I keep saying the phrase wearing our bifocals for the needs today and the needs long into the future. Each one of us on this in this air meet room. We I'm asking you to please put on your bifocals and as leaders be considering what are the needs today? What are the needs long into the future? And I those first bullets that I mentioned about our external and our internal. Everyone is looking at leaders every day and each one of you is a leader. So externally, what are you doing today and long into the future to be sharing with the greater community outside of your institutions or your organizations. The significance and the impact and the importance of higher education. You're part of the narrative. You're part of the message for what you're saying to our external audiences. And I am out every day talking to external audiences about the importance of higher education. And one of the themes that I talk about is something we made I made up called the brain remain. Everybody talks about the brain drain and that is losing people in your region. I talk about the brain remain. And for students, 90% of our students come from this region and our students come from the undergraduate programs. Bachelor's they come for our master's programs. They come for our doctoral programs. We're the most comprehensive private institution in this catchment area. So I'm out talking about the brain remain and the importance. So our students come from this region to the university. They get a degree. They have a career path. They go back to their neighborhoods to lift their neighborhood. And for me, the brain remain is critical for helping all of our regions to advance and to lift and to be better economically, socially, etc. So part of your job, I believe, as a leader is to be sharing that same kind of narrative with your external audiences. Your leadership role internally, I cannot emphasize enough how important it is for a leader to be consistent, to be uniform and to be predictable. And your role as a leader internally is to do whatever your portfolio says you need to be doing, but to also have this. I don't mean false optimism, but an optimism that you share consistently with everybody at your university in your organization about the importance of higher education today and long into the future. And the third bullet, the sustainability of our institutions. There are mergers. There are acquisitions. There are institutions closing on a daily basis. If you're in an institution that has that is a private not for profit and has fewer than a thousand students and your students are middle and low income and you're dependent on their tuition. It's hard to think about sustainability. So institutions are merging their affiliating they and I'm not saying that's good. I'm not saying that's bad. But for long term sustainability, we have to all look at all the options so that higher education doesn't just survive, but it thrives and it serves our students and our regions. So I'm saying we need to be wearing our bifurcals today for today and long into the future so that we can help our institutions and our organizations be successful. So how do we do this? Well, for me, as a leader as a president, I'm always saying how can I have more empathy. So empathy, listening to others understanding where they're coming from, you cannot over communicate. Communicate, communicate, communicate. I talked about leading alone and leading together. If you're leading alone, do you have any followers? If you're creating a shared vision as a leader talking about where we are today and people get stuck in where we are today as a leader having the vision and gathering your followers and your partners so that you're leading together. And as hypothesis talks about connection is critical and I couldn't agree more. Connect, connect, connect with your students, with the people on your teams, with the people across your campuses, with your greater communities. And trust if you're consistent, you're uniform and you're predictable, the trust that others have of you will continue to rise. I always say trust takes years to build and it can be lost at the speed of light. So and I'm not perfect. Oh my gosh, not by any means. And I have lost the trust of some people at various times. And then I think about why did that happen? Well, I did not meet their expectations. I either did not empathize enough. I didn't communicate enough. I was leading alone rather than gathering others around me and maybe I wasn't connecting enough. So the minute I know that I've lost somebody's trust. I'm always trying to be very strategic how I can gain that back. And when I'm wearing my bifocals and thinking long term and engaging them to be part of this long term vision. I use empathy communication leading together connecting and always trying to build the trust. So when do we use these leadership skills and wearing our bifocals? I think as I just said in the last slide that we most of us probably work on a team. So how do we always share our vision, listen to others and gain their confidence in our teams? So at the University of Laverne, I'm the president. I have a president's cabinet, which are all the vice presidents. And then there are the deans and the departments and the administrative. So each I use the word bifocal vision and confidence with the entire campus. So everybody knows this. So everybody I try to encourage everybody on their teams to use their bifocals. As the leader of the team to get the team to say, here's where we are today. Here's where we're going into the future. The second bullet is each one of us reports to somebody above us. Whether you report to a supervisor, you report to a dean. I report to the board of trustees at the university. So it's critical that I just don't wear my own vision and where we are and where I think we should go. With the people on my team. I'm constantly and it's, I think people forget this more than anything else that the people above you. You have not above like they're more important, but the people to whom you report. Those individuals need to be part of your vision and you need to be part of their vision. So you have a shared vision. What I, I see the greatest issues arise, especially personnel and interpersonal issues when a supervisor doesn't understand what the vision is for the people that report to them or vice versa. So I can't emphasize enough how important it is to manage your team and to manage up with your supervisor as well. And then communicating as much as you can with your audience, with your campus, with those outside your team, so that you're building a campus wide shared vision. So for our board of trustees at the university, the vision that I brought to the university that was not brand new, but it was built on the vision for the 119 years prior to my arrival. I bet I'm in my 12th year. So now we're 130 years old. The board of trustees leads the university. And together we've created a vision that the board has endorsed and it's for its bifocals it's today and into the future. So those four bullets, your team, your supervisor, your entire campus. And if you report to a board, then all of these four bullets, if this whole, then if you have a shared vision, I think you will survive long, long, long into the future. And you not just strategize, but you implement. I say it's a journey. It's iterative. It's not sequential. There's no beginning and no end. So as I said before, if I've lost trust from somebody, I need to rebuild that trust together. So this visioning, it's not stuck in stone. It's dynamic. Your bifocals are always changing. Every year when I go to my optometrist, I say, you know, do I need to adjust my glasses? I'm saying the same thing to you. Do you need to adjust your glasses as we go through this pandemic for what we're doing now and long into the future and pivot, adjust. Don't give up hope ever. You're the leader and people are depending on you. So the critical junctures for leadership when I was wearing my bifocals. Oh, and there's a picture of our campus with four of our students. So I said on March 13, I'll never forget that day, March 13, 2020, I sent out an email to the entire campus and I said, because we have the Laverne campus, then we have nine regional campuses throughout Southern California. So I said to these 6200 students and the 1200 employees, I said, okay, March 13, everybody go home and you probably had something similar at your institutions. And I said, everybody go home and you will be virtual starting next Monday. Everybody was like, oh my gosh, she's been saying forever go online. And now we really have to do it. So but my emphasis was safety first quality educational delivery, financial stability and confidence, confidence that my leadership was going to get us through this. And I thought we were only going to be two or three weeks in this virtual for two years, we were pretty much in lockdown here in Southern California, two years. So that message of safety, quality delivery, financial stability and sustainability, and please have confidence in my leadership. That was my message. And as I said, you cannot over communicate everything I did every email every month I had a state of the university. So I could talk about the safety, the delivery, financial sustainability, and please have confidence in where we're going. The bifocals I was wearing throughout the whole time was, oh my gosh, what's our budget going to look like? What's our enrollment going to look like? What what's going to happen with the academics? Can we continue to raise money? And what's going to happen with the morale for the campus? But because I had the budgeting enrollment, the academics at the core, the fundraising, the morale of the entire campus, because I was keeping that right in front of me. And for the long term, we together as a campus began to build a shared vision of where we were going to be long into the future. So the lessons I learned through all of this, train your teams to wear their leadership bifocals. Communicate often, honestly, authentically and inspirationally. People, if you come in and say the ship is sinking, oh my God, we're in deficit this year. I'm not saying to not tell the facts that are not pleasant, but your job as a leader is to be honest, authentic, and to inspire because everybody's depending on you. Prioritize your communications so that health and safety comes first. This is my priority, student success and support, equity for personnel and policies, and institutional sustainability. If we can't sustain our institutions financially, then we're health and safety is not important. Students aren't important because we won't have an institution. So you have to have those first three. But if you, everybody says, I had a faculty member who said to me, but we're not for profit. So why do we have to operate in the black? It's okay to operate in the red. Well, here at the end of the day, you're still a business. So how do we keep our business alive, but focused on what it is that is our core mission? Always manage up, keep your supervisors involved and informed. I cannot emphasize that enough. Your leadership, for those who are looking at you, if they see that you are working very well with your supervisor and your supervisors, they will have more confidence in you. Finally on this, language matters. Always select language that is respectful, inclusive, accessible, supportive, and inspirational. If you use ad hominem language, if you tear people down, if you gossip, if you create little clicks, it will work against you. So I'm asking you as your leader to always be thinking, am I being respectful? Am I listening to all voices and being inclusive? Am I accessible to people? I'm too accessible. That's one of my weaknesses. But accessibility is critical. Am I being supportive of those around me? And are they looking to me to be inspirational? So very quickly, the current example of me wearing bifocals at the University of Laverne in 2018, 2019, we did our last strategic vision. And we called it the 2025 strategic vision. Then COVID hit. So now we're taking the 2025 strategic vision, which is on our website. And you can absolutely go and look at it. And I don't want to take too much time because I see it's 950. But that strategic vision, we can't throw it out, but the world has changed because of COVID. So we are now in the middle of what we're calling a sustainability plan. And that sustainability plan is aligned with the strategic vision. And it has to do with how are we going to implement incremental initiatives, bridge initiatives and transformative initiatives that align with our vision, align with the mission of the university, but make sure that the revenue is much greater than the expenses. So it can't be just to grow and increase our student body, which is part of the plan. But it also has to be about what are we going to do less of? What are we going to stop doing? And how are we going to reallocate so we can absolutely meet our transformative, our bridge and our incremental initiatives? So I don't want to spend any time on this. This was our 2025 strategic vision that has to do with who we are. And at the bottom are what are the incremental, the bridge and the transformative initiatives so that we can absolutely build our sustainability plan to do those incremental bridge and transformative initiatives to be here for not just 130 years, but for the next 130 years. So now I'm going to take, Tom, can you help me? I'm going to take down my sharing screen. So I have my IT person here help me to say that again to minimize the power point. Minimize. Oh, minimize my PowerPoint. Great. Okay. And now stop sharing right here. No. Where is that to me? Right here. Let's see one more. No. No. Stop sharing. Stop presenting. Oh my gosh. Okay. I'm I tell me you could hear me that last 40 minutes. Okay. Wendy. Are there questions that you want me to answer in the next couple of minutes. Thank you, John Jordan from Fresno State. We heard you. Yay. Okay. I'm going to look and see. Oh, thank you, Nellie Deutsch. Nellie, my mother's maiden name was Deutsch. So I feel very close to you. Thank you. It was great. There is a question in the speaker chat and I can read it aloud to you. Okay. I can answer it. Yeah. There's a quote on the Laverne experience program website. And the quote is real learning cannot happen in a vacuum. Can you talk a little about that program. And your ideas about students learning socially, especially as they relate to issues of equity. Yeah. And I'll do it very quickly because I see. You're probably going to be going to your next session soon. And this came from Portland state. When I was at Portland state. I was indoctrinated and to Coon alum. It was, it's resonated with me that at Portland state, when you drive into the city of Portland, it says let knowledge serve the city. And that became sort of the mantra for the campus. How can what we're doing on campus enhance our community. So fast forward to the university of Laverne. And the concept of civic and community engagement, which was one of the founding values of the university. That became part of our first year experience, which is called flex for the freshman Laverne experience. It became part of solve the sophomore Laverne experience. And the part of the senior capstones. So it's all about connection between and among disciplines. But every one of the classes has to have a community based component or students. It's not just, you know, doing community service. That's beautiful, but it's not, it's not enough. It has to be connected to who you are, your own reflection and the courses that you're studying and the major that you choose or may choose. So that when you're doing community engaged work, you're enhancing the community. You see the impact and you're also enhancing the learning that you're having in your classes and you're connecting yourself to with the other students, with the community and your disciplines. So that's at the core. And because we're such a diverse, unbelievably beautiful Hispanic serving institution, federally designated, that is part of the water we swim in at the undergraduate in the graduate level. Wendy, next question. Wendy, can you read me the next question? Okay. I don't know if you can still hear me. Oh, Wendy's back. Yay. This session will go. Hi, Debora. I was just asking the audience if they had any questions. And so this is a great time for folks to put their questions in the Q&A, because we do have a little bit of time for questions. So here we go. Penny Shreve from Barstow Community College. Oh my gosh, Penny, we need to partner Barstow Community College and Laverne. We're not that far apart. So you said, what is SOTA stand for again? Students over traditional age. So 18 to 21 is considered Tug, traditional undergraduate students. And then you have SOTAs who are 22 and above. And that's the population that sort of falls through the cracks, the SOTAs. People call them adult learners. And I think we're all adults. So I call them SOTAs, students over traditional age, because we want those, that student body to know that higher education is available, accessible, and will help them professionally and personally. So I say SOTA, students over traditional age. Okay, that was a great question. Thank you, Barstow Community College. Okay, I'm not seeing any other questions. There was one other question, DeVora, that is, how does your compassion fit into your idea of leadership? And there's another question in the Q&A chat, but I will let you, I'll stop and let you answer this one first. Okay, so the, how does compassion fit into my leadership? That's a great question, because I try to lead with my head in my heart. And I, my heart gets very heavy when, here's an example, a small example, maybe two or three weeks after we went virtual and we didn't know how long we were going to be virtual. I came up to campus and I said, I wanted to make sure the buildings were still standing. I walked into my office. There was mold in my coffee that was still on my desk, because nobody had been here for three weeks or a month. And I went to the parking lot and there were about 15 or 20 cars in the parking lot. And I was like, what are those, what's going on? So I went to the cars and every car had a student in the car. And I would knock down the windows and I said, what's going on? And the students said either they had no, they had too many people at their homes so they didn't have access to the computer or the Wi-Fi to access their online classes or they were homeless and they had nowhere to go. They were sleeping in their cars, they were on campus and they were accessing their courses from their car where they were sleeping. So leading with head and heart, I guess, I said, oh, this is impossible. So I said, you, anybody who's homeless or housing insecure, we're going to provide you space in the residence halls. So we retained one of our dining hall staff and we brought back a couple of our residence hall staff. And 150 students moved into the dorm the next week. And so I don't know how smart that was financially, but we could not let those students be living in their cars if, so then I started raising money for those students so that we could afford to have them lay, not lay, stay in the residence halls. So I think leading with compassion, but with your head so that you have to look at the bottom line of the institution, but it can't just be all about the money. It also has to be how are we going to support the mission and the students and the faculty and the staff who work here. So it's with love and also your head. Hey, Devora. So there's another question from an instructor viewpoint. How can we help our students become better and stronger leaders inside and outside of the classroom? Oh, my God. I love that question. So let's say you're teaching, I'm making this up, statistics and you'd say, wow, there's no, how does leadership fit in with my course on teaching statistics? I think that every single course that we teach, Tikkun Olam has a element of that course where we are inspiring our students to become leaders no matter what they do and no matter what they choose. Leadership's for good cause and leadership's just me to make our world better. And that may sound kind of naive, but our jobs are to educate students to make the world better through the skills that we're giving them. So if you're teaching a statistics class, I would say, okay, use the statistics skills that you're teaching them, use the activities around how to learn data and statistics and have your homework and the activities having to do with the community and something with statistics so that they're using the statistics to be leaders in the community. I know that sounds vague, but there's so many ways that you could do that with every single class that you teach. And you don't have to call it leadership, but you know you are teaching them to be confident, strong, visionary, supportive leaders for their entire community. That's great, Deborah. There's another question that has a couple of parts. So first of all, how can we counter the trend of anti-intellectualism and political views that higher education is a form of indoctrination? And the second part is, how can we use compassion, optimism, and bifocal vision to help change some of the rhetoric around higher education? Oh, my gosh. It's my time up. Okay. The first one is, you know, it's very easy to talk about intellectual and anti-intellectual. I always come back to what's our core and I don't want to label intellectual, anti-intellectual, the rhetoric. I always come back to what is our core mission? And for me, our core mission is to educate our students to become very, very successful and civically engaged community members. So the minute we start labeling intellectual, anti-intellectual, are you Republican? Are you Democrat? Higher Ed is a waste of time, all of that. Then I don't want to get into that debate with individuals because you can't win it. Everybody has their own view. So I always come back to that our job is to help you be successful financially. So here's one small example. A U.S. News & World Report has a new category called social mobility and they looked at what are the predictors and the predictions and the projections that your students, what is their socioeconomic? Are they going to graduate? And do they go out and get jobs that lift their families and their communities? And this last year in the entire country in U.S. News & World Report for social mobility, the University of Laverne ranked seventh in the country, the number one private institution, or the first private institution for social mobility. How did that happen? I think that happened because we stayed focused on who our students are, what our students needed, how we could lift our students and how we could prepare them for successful careers and to be typically engaged post-graduation. And I think that's why the University of Laverne ranked so high in social mobility because we've stayed focused on that vision and that mission. Thanks so much, Defora. So you probably remember that Hypothesis is all about social reading and social annotation. And one of the questions is about the Jewish tradition of the Talmud and commenting about that as a form of social learning. Just not you might be able to... Wow. As a form of social learning. Well, I'm not sure exactly what that means. However, every Saturday morning, so two things, every Saturday morning my father would sit with the three children, myself and my two brothers and there was a book called Pure Kayabot which comes out of the Talmud and Pure Kayabot are sayings of ethics from the rabbis for the last 5,000 years. And he would read one of the sayings and one of the sayings was Tikkun olam and he would say to the three children, what does that mean to you? And we would discuss it for, I don't know, 20 or 30 minutes and then he would say to the three of us, my two brothers, I was the baby, the only girl, how are you going to demonstrate Tikkun olam with each other for the next week? And then the following week, next Saturday, the three of us would sit at my father's feet and he would say, okay, how did you demonstrate Tikkun olam this past week with each other? And we would talk about it and then he would read the next saying which would be something like there are four kinds of people, who are easy to anger, easy to forgive, quick, fast to, not easy to anger, fast to anger, fast to forgive, fast to anger, slow to forgive and the permutations of those four. And then the next week, we would come back and he'd say, how did you implement that in your life? So that became, that was normalized for us. It was every Saturday morning. When I came to the University of Laverne, I believed so deeply in interfaith, people coming together from different faiths. So now we have weekly wisdom and we have a faculty member who meets with students and he reads the pure care vote to the students of all religions so that they can begin to sort of normalize, have those conversations for themselves. So I think those kinds of conversations and it doesn't have to be the pure care vote. It doesn't have to be too long, but it's the values that come out of interfaith that will make us all appreciate each other, get along better and have the skills to do the same after we graduate. Now you know way too much about my child, Wendy and the rest of you. That was great. There is another question that is about your advice about practices that books can use to really know who the students are in their course, especially if it's a larger course. A practice like surveys was suggested, but I wondered if you had some other practices that you would recommend? Hmm. Well, I'm putting on my faculty development, my faculty developer hat. And especially because I teach, I still teach and I taught face to face since I've been here and now virtual. And I always try to make space and place for students to feel they can talk to me, talk to each other, trust each other because part of the, I call it classroom like we're physical, but part of the learning environment is not just learning what's going to be on the test, but learning how to learn and learning how to have those same qualities that I mentioned, empathy, communication, understanding, be consistent, uniform and predictable. So if we can have students and we have to create the space in the place so that our students can get to that point because as we know, students who drop out are students who feel like they don't belong, not necessarily that they can't afford to go to college, but that they don't belong. And it's our responsibility to create those spaces and places in the classroom and outside the classroom where everybody says, you know what, this is where I belong. And if a student is not saying this is where I belong, we have to step back and say, what more can we do so that every student, every faculty, every staff member says, this is where I belong and I don't want to leave for more money or a different position necessarily, even though there's nothing wrong with career advancement and going to other institutions. That was my faculty development hat, Wendy. I miss those days. Okay. Oh, thank you, Amanda, as an educator and a parent. Both. We live in all those worlds. I'm glad people are putting in the chat what they do in their classes as well. So, Devorah, we have just a few minutes before we're going to wrap up at 10.15 and I thought I would just ask if there are any practices that you would encourage people to use in their own faculty development work to lead with compassion and lead by wearing bifocals? Wow. Well, Wendy, I would say that the more vulnerable you are is not a bad thing because during COVID, I was scared to death but I didn't ever say I'm scared to death but I was like, oh, my gosh, I have the weight of the world on my shoulders and I told you every three weeks to a month I had a state of the university with 800 people on the Zoom and I would start saying I, none of us know where this is going to take us but we have to go there together. I'm worried, I'm anxious but I know that we can do it as a campus and if you did that same kind of thing in your classroom with your team so that you're vulnerable, honest but they're looking at us as leaders to lead them through with them with a shared vision, I just think the more honest we can be and confident and the other thing is I don't want to end on a negative note but one thing I've learned in all these years is that everybody is going to see you as authentic not everybody is going to trust you not everybody is going to believe you and some people want you gone but if we only focus on those and not believing in ourselves and the confidence and the authenticity and the vulnerability then we are not going to be effective because then you're going to try to please everybody but today I have to put on my armor at the beginning of the day I have to put on my armor and say I'm not going to please everybody but I am going to lead with authenticity compassion empathy and knowing that sustainability has a very big financial component so that we can all get there together okay it's 1014 Wendy I just want to thank you so much My email address is dliberman at laverne.edu and if you have any follow-up questions part of my accessibility is that I will respond to every email that you send to me so if you want to come to campus or if you want to establish some kind of a relationship just email me and I'll be there for you Thank you so much, Deborah We really appreciate your comments this morning and I want to welcome everybody who is here to go to the lounge between sessions if you want to chat with folks Our next session starts at 1030 and you can view the schedule at the top of the screen and join a session at 1030 So thank you everybody Drop any comments or questions in the chat or in the Q&A and we'll see you at 1030 Bye everybody, thank you