 And I wanted to start by referencing very quickly an answer that I gave to one of our senior faculty just as the day was beginning. He asked about the Livingston property and whether he could move into the house. And I told him the pro was that I'd already asked for that, but he was willing to share. So it would be fine. But we were thinking about it for very, very senior faculty who could just move in there and then kind of hang out with the Columban Fathers and talk about the good old days. But I don't think that's what we're going to do, but it's worth thinking about. So I wanted to start today by just some thoughts. I had written down some notes and then I thought, you know, I think before we get into this, I want to reflect a little bit on our amazing good fortune to be working in the world of higher education. I think that it's one of the things that, because we do it all the time, we kind of take it for granted, but it's really important that from time to time we stand back and just look at what we're doing. I consider it such a wonderful opportunity that I've had in my lifetime to be able to do this. I suspect many of you more or less have my story. Let me just ask a question. How many of you were first generation college students? That's a pretty respectable number, as was I. And I think about how that came to be and my enormous good fortune at being in the right place at the right time. My grandfather was a Scottish immigrant with a sixth grade education. When my father came of age during the Great Depression, there was no possibility of his going to school, to college. So he got a job. It was the depression jobs weren't very available, but he got one, stayed with that for 42 years. And he didn't like his job at all. It was just one of the things that he did as so many people have done over the years where you do it because you have to because you've got to provide for your family. And it wasn't until I came along that I finally got to do something that I truly love to do. And I've taken that a little bit for granted, but that in fact is not the norm. And I hope all of you feel the same way, that you're doing something that you love. And you've all worked very hard to get to this point. And it's important that we not just take it for granted, and it's certainly important that I not take it for granted on your behalf. I mean, I think that one of the sort of the paradoxes of working at a college is that we know that what we do is very, very important in the lives of our students, but we do it as tiny increments. We do it more or less in isolation from each other. We go into our classrooms and close the door, and then what happens is between us and the students. And I will reflect, and I'm sure you have the same experience when I was a full-time faculty member for 11 years. There were days, you know, that it just really, I was on, and I was, it was really great. And the students were going, oh, we get it. And in a sense, there's no one to share it with, I mean, with other than the students. I mean, there was, you can go tell somebody about it, but it isn't the same thing as being there. There's a sense that we're so close to what it is that we're doing that we don't really see the totality of it. We do these things in increments. The sum total of 40 of us teaching a course or a set of courses results in a baccalaureate degree. And we understand that intuitively, but it's as if we're doing this as a series of sort of one-offs. Each of you is responsible for that tree. Each of you is responsible for a course. But I'm going to ask you to stand back from that and see what a beautiful forest we have created with the trees that we are responsible for. And I want to tell you, and I say this in all earnestness, you are really good at what you do. You are really good. And I know this for a fact, because my and I do a reception for the graduating seniors every year, a couple of days before commencement, and the young men and women show up and they're wearing their best outfits. The guys look like they're wearing a tie for the first time. Ladies are all in high heels and dresses. And they're pretty excited because they're going to graduate in two days. But when we talk to them, increasingly we see this. Every year more of the same. They have tears in their eyes because they're not going to be coming back to their beloved Roger in the fall. They're going to go off. And they're leaving behind a world they have come to love. And they love it for all kinds of reasons. And every campus has students that love their campus. I get that. But I've never worked on a campus where the percentage of the students who have that deep commitment to the institution and a deep sense of regard for their great good fortune in having gone to this particular institution where they know they have been incredibly well-served by a group of highly committed faculty and staff committed to the student's success in a way that I haven't seen before when I've been on other campuses. This is a singular place. And so just on behalf of generations of students that you have served so well and the families who are so grateful, I just want to say thank you. I just acknowledge that you are a terrific group of people. So with that as a beginning, now I'm going to go into the bad news. No, no, that's not true at all. I want to actually move into some prepared remarks I had. There are, I think we can safely say this is an extraordinarily exciting time to be involved in higher education. Exciting as in, I wonder if the cliff is going to give way today. I mean, it's exciting in a sort of dangerous sense because we're seeing a world that we haven't experienced for a long time. There's a strong sense of anti-intellectualism in society right now. It's been there before. This is not new. But we're seeing it right now. There's a sense that what we're doing is very important but somehow not affordable. And so we get into this business of having to sort of justify what we do in ways that are kind of uncomfortable and we haven't really been used to it. There was an article in the Boston Globe on Sunday, an op-ed written by a former president of Harvard, Derek Bach. And President Bach was saying something I think I would certainly agree with him. And there's evidence to back this up. We need a lot more college graduates in this country than we have. We need a lot more because the economy is wanting to absorb college graduates and those college graduates just aren't there. There was a study that came out of Georgetown a year before last that looked at all the jobs that have been created since 2008 when the Great Recession began. And 73% of those jobs require a college degree. So the workforce right now is 36% with a college degree. So there's a lot of jobs that are in a sense going begging. And this is a headwind on the economy. And so there's that sense that we're asking ourselves the question in the collective. How would we do about that? You know, that's not in the game plan. It isn't a situation where there are lots and lots of colleges that's saying, let's go ahead and double the number of college graduates that we have at our particular institution. And yet the society as a whole says, but we need that. And yet society as a whole can't afford it. So we're in this quandary. And so Derek Bach's suggestion was let's put lots and lots more taxpayers' money into the hands of public institutions and have them double down in what they're doing. But that's not a new idea. And it's not one that's going to be an easy sell. But I think the question that I want to pose to us today is what role do we think Roger Williams should be playing as we strike, I won't even call it a balance, but as we consider two different ways of orienting ourselves, we could think about this from the standpoint of what is in our interest as an institution so that we survive and prosper. And we can think about, well, what's in the interest of the broader society? What does society need from us? We've said that our mission is to strengthen society. And our long-term goal is to be the university or become the university the world needs now. So we kind of know what the world needs. The world is saying, well, we need more college graduates. What are you guys going to do about it? So the issue for us is, you know, do we lead the charge? Do we risk being run over? We have to think about how we position ourselves here. And that's something we have to do in the collective. So I realize this year, I'm beginning my 50th year in higher education. So the question for me is, as long as I'm in the job that I have, I have the responsibility of trying to guide good decision-making here. But I'm mindful of the fact that you have a lot more at stake in the decisions than I do because you're going to be here a lot longer. So we have to do this together. We have to think about ways in which we communicate with each other to devise a future for ourselves that we are as much as we can be in broad agreement with. And so there are some ways in which we're going to approach this. I want to give you a little bit of background on this. So in June of this year, the cabinet got together for a retreat where we began to consider these questions. And one of the things, it was a facilitated retreat. One of the things we came up with in this retreat was that if there was one large kind of arrow that we could focus on, one thing that stood out that would say, this is the direction we have to go in, it's the idea of student success. And the broadest sense of that word, student success while they're here, student success once they graduate, what is it that enhances student success? If we have that in the forefront of our minds, we will make more good decisions than bad decisions. So we are going through a process right now where we're beginning to ask some detailed questions about how we take the new mission statement and the goal and forgive the word, but operationalize them. How do we make action statements so that these are not just aspirational statements that look good on a piece of paper, but they become a roadmap for how it is we go forward. On the 13th of October, the Board of Trustees will be having a retreat. And the objective there is to check in with them early on and make sure that what we're talking about isn't at odds with where they want us to go. So their responsibility is to guide at the highest levels the policymaking of the institution. Our job is to inform that decision making, but we can't control it. But it's, nonetheless, we want to give them good information. And as they begin to set the tone and the terms of engagement, then we're going to come back to the campus and talk more about how it is that we create this plan going forward that will allow us to see at any given moment what it is we're accomplishing. And one of the things that I think is sometimes difficult to do because we're so close to it is to see in real time what's been happening. I had a conversation the other day, I guess just yesterday with the Senate Executive Committee and we were just offhandedly, we were talking about some of the things that had happened just in terms of building improvements. And we realized that the people in the room, all of us, nobody had a total picture as to what had been happening. And we thought maybe what we should do is just put together a list that says, hey, these are the things that have been happening on the campus that represent improvements in the infrastructure of the campus. It's not like they don't happen at all, but no one person sees all of them. But with respect to overall progress, the kinds of things that are happening across the face of the university, one of the things that we have done this year and will do it every year going forward from now on is prepare a report card that gives you at least a flavor of the things that have been happening so that you can see at a glance what it is that the university has been up to. You will know some of them, but you won't know all of them. So having them in one place that you can just look at and say, okay, that's good to know. And if you have the three years in a row, you begin to understand just how much the university is moving. So even though it seems in real time that you're watching the grass grow and the grass doesn't appear to be doing very much, you realize periodically, yeah, the grass is a little longer than it used to be. So we've got a report available today that you can pick up on your way out. We have lots of copies and just see the report card for this year. We'll do another one next year, but this will be a way of sort of monitoring our progress and guiding what it is that we're doing so that we don't get lost along the way. So I'm going to check my carefully written notes because I've wandered all over the place here. And I need to see where I am. I think one of the things we should do is recognize where we've had some success. So we've had quite a bit. I mean, I think my concern at the time that I arrived, I picked the great good fortune of arriving the year that the high school graduating class was the largest in the history of the country. And then right after I got here, it started to go down. I don't think those are cause and effect relationships, but nonetheless. And so we've been watching this downhill going on ever since. And it's particularly acute in New England and the upper Midwest, but for us, New England represents about 70%, 75% of our students. And so we're seeing a shrinking pie going on in New England. And the question that we had or I had at the time that I arrived was, how well positioned are we to succeed in that kind of competitive market? And the answer was not as well positioned as we should be. We were quite expensive in terms of our net costs. And we didn't seem to have enough of, excuse the word, of a brand that people saw how we differed from other institutions. And so we set about, through that affordable excellence initiative, to rectify that. So control the costs, put more money into financial aid, make certain commitments about locking tuition in for four years when people come. So they understand what their costs are going to be. And then push, push on the value proposition to say what you get here is a very deep dive into project based learning and into very close interactions, positive interactions between faculty and students. And that's been a bit of work, but it's fair to say right now that it's now working pretty well. And the litmus test was this year, because for the first time, we raised our price. First time in five years, we've raised our price. And we still had the third largest freshman class in our history. So that says that we're competing pretty well in a tough market. We've done this even as we've marginally reduced the discount rate. Our discount rate this year was a little bit below 40%. The national average is over 50%. So we're able to hang on to more of that money that students are paying. And have people still feel they're getting a good deal for the price. We look at some of the statistics, the national average, the six year graduation rate at public universities nationally is 49%. It's 58% at the private schools. Our four year graduation rate has gone from 57% to 64%. So our four year number is substantially better than the six year number at most of the other schools, both public and private. Now there are certainly schools that are doing just as well or better than we are, but we have nothing to be ashamed of there. Nonetheless, this is doing well in an area that schools in general are not doing very well. If you are a parent and you're about to spend a lot of money, most money you're never going to spend on anything except for a house, on your child's education, it's really a challenge because the numbers I just told you, are you making an investment in your child's education or is this a gamble? You know, you'd like to know that you have some reasonable assurance of a good return on your investment, meaning to say that your child will graduate. And so graduation rates become an important criterion in where it is and how it is that parents help guide their child's decision in terms of where to come to college. So it's not something we can ever take our eye off the ball. And one of the things we should be asking ourselves is are we satisfied? Are we satisfied with our graduation rate right now? Could we do better? Should we try to do better? What might that be? It's not a question that we ask in isolation. I'll just mention that the California State University, the largest system of four-year education in the country, three or four years ago, decided it was going to try and double its graduation rate. Now the graduation rate overall was pretty miserable in the Cal State System, but they are well on their way. The Chronicle of Higher Education just published its Almanac edition and they listed the 12 universities in the country that have had the biggest increase in graduation rates over the last five years. And six of the 20 are in the California State University System. So they are a low-cost system with growing graduation rates. Now they're not, generally for most of the campuses, is not where we are, but they're still making that a focal point of how it is they're moving forward because there is that credibility question they have with the public. So you're going to continue to see more talk on graduation rates as something that people are expecting to have happen. So at the very least, we have to have that conversation on this campus. What steps can we take to improve freshman to sophomore attention? What steps can we take to improve graduation? These are not new questions. We've been asking these questions for a while, but I'm just saying it's one of the things that becomes sort of front of mind as an issue going forward because it's one of the things that people will use to evaluate us. And it's happening now. I occasionally get these questions. For the most part, parents are looking at other things, including what a beautiful campus we have. There's only so far you can go with selling the beautiful campus. We have to also talk about what happens on that campus. And we have an increasingly better story, but that's just one example of a place that we need to pay a little bit of attention to. We've hired, as you know, our first chief diversity officer because one of the issues that we have facing us is that the people who are coming through the K-12 pipeline right now are not clones of our current student body. They are increasingly first generation, racially and ethnically diverse individuals. Not all of them very well prepared for higher education. And yet they are the people that are there. We have to ask ourselves the question, what is our commitment to serve those students? And how do we go about making that happen? And one of the things that I know I'll just speak personally, I am not personally nearly well enough prepared to deal with a multicultural student body. So one of the things that I'm a Lambert, who's our CDO, is doing, is she has multicultural, something called Multicultural U. It's a semester long course for one of a better way of putting it, in two and three hour blocks, meeting every other week. And the cabinet is going through this right now. We had our first session this morning for three hours. And as the opportunity permits, this will expand to create more opportunities for more people to do this kind of work. I'll tell you at the end of the course, what I think its value will be, having gone through it, but I'm optimistic that this is something that is really going to help. Because the examples we already saw this morning are just a little too close to home, and make me feel a little bit awkward in terms of how well or ineffectively I have been in dealing with people from some very different kinds of backgrounds. One of the things that we have to do as part of our planning process is put together a multi-year budget, and we will be. But the issue with the budget is, well, what are the assumptions that we're making that go into that budget? And one of the big drivers, or two big drivers, what might we be doing in terms of increases in tuition annually? What might be our expectations? Because you need to have that for your model, even if it isn't something you end up actually doing. So we might start by thinking, well, we should be increasing our tuition by at least the cost of living, so we don't sort of slide backward. So that gives us some kind of a metric. But will we have more students? If we have more students, it makes it a bit easier to meet our budget targets. But if we have more students, who are those students? Are they more of the same students we have? That is to say, are we talking about increasing the size of the undergraduate residential population on this campus? Or are we talking about graduate students where the demand on infrastructure will not be as high? Are we talking about people that are coming through the School of Continuing Studies? Is it some of all of those things? Are we talking about current majors or will we introduce new majors? These are things that start to change the nature of the campus, and it's not something that I'm sure you'll be quick to agree that we should do casually. We need to talk this through. What makes sense? And then it's not as if we just control the process. You know, we build it and they will come. There's a real danger in doing that. We know, for example, coming back to something I said a moment ago, that the population of graduating high school students is getting smaller, not larger in New England. And we now are able to project out, since we know how many kindergarten students there are, we can project out all the way to 2032. And what we find is this, that things slow down perceptibly between now and 2023. There is a smaller and smaller class between now and 2023. And in 2023, we fall off a cliff. The numbers get very much less. We'll see about 15% fewer high school graduates in Massachusetts and about 18% in Connecticut. And those are the two primary feeder states we have right now. So for us to maintain our current supply of students from those two states means that we have to be much more effective in competing against the schools that are looking for those same students. So when we think about adding more undergraduates, we have to be realistic about who's out there. This is a population of students that right now is very well-served. I mean, if you're 18 years old and reasonably literate and you've got a few dollars in your pocket, you can go to lots and different places and they all want you badly. If you're anybody else, the options are far fewer. So there is a real question about how it is that if we are going to want to see as a country an expanded number of graduates, you can see where the options are. We could take in more students at the front end, but we only succeed with two-thirds of them. We could try and improve that number so that more people are graduating from the current supply. That would help. But if we do that, there's still not enough. At some point, we have to think in terms of how we reach populations that right now are not part of the world of higher education. And that represents one of those things that I think higher education historically has real problems with. And I mean to insult no one with what I'm about to say because I don't know what your individual position on this is. I'm just reflecting how it is that changes happen over time. There tends to be, at any given moment, a sense that the people we're educating right now represent more or less the right population of people that should be educated. Before World War II, it was 5%. We'll educate the top 5%. They will be the leaders. Everybody else will be the workers. Then that became very democratized after World War II. And now, you know, we've got to the point where it's 30 plus percent, 35%. But lots of other countries are educating at a higher rate than that. So is that the maximum we can do or should we be trying to drive that number higher? Because if it's really the case that the economy needs a lot more college graduates, we have to figure out where they're coming from. And that means looking at other places, including the tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, well, I'll leave it at tens of thousands. Somewhere between 80 and 120,000 Broad Islanders have a partial college degree. They are all amenable in theory to getting a four-year degree, but there are very few options available to them right now. Do we want to take that on? Not with the idea that we'd try and get 100,000 students, but the point is that's a population that's not being well-served right now. Everybody's focusing on the 18-year-old high school graduate. So we have to work through this process. And it's not something we can decide in an afternoon based on a visceral sense. It's something we need to look at some data on. So we're going to be putting together a variety of groups of people to look at this and then do this in a very transparent way so that whoever's involved in the conversation knows what's going on, but whoever's not involved in the conversation does as well because this will be done in a way where we can put things on our website internally so that people can access this. And if we need to, certainly open to the idea that in the spring, we could do another one of these State of the University addresses if that's what we're ready to do. But it's really important that we do this together. I don't want people saying at the end, I didn't have a chance to participate, decisions that are made about what was going to happen on this campus. It's very cultured. We're being made in my absence. That's disgraceful. It should never happen. You're right. It shouldn't. So we need to create opportunity for that kind of conversation to go on, but in an organized enough way that we actually get something done as opposed to just talking about it. So that's my commitment to you is to create that kind of an opportunity as we go forward. There are some other things that have gone on. I'll just mention two. One is that as you know last spring, we received a 10-year re-accreditation from NASC. I hope you know that. The previous accreditation wasn't so good. We had a lot of follow-on work to do. It was still going on when I arrived, but this time the maximum award 10 years was given. There were no issues that we have to work on as sort of to fix. There are some things that they want us to work on long-term, including diversity, but nothing that was flagged as a big problem. I was reminded earlier this week that I haven't yet posted that NASC report on our website, and I'll have that done before the end of this week. That's just me. I've neglected it over the summer. There's nothing that we haven't changed our mind on. The report itself was written so well by the people involved, Bob Cole and a bunch of other people, that NASC is now using that as their model going forward to other campuses that are starting their tenure, use the Roger Williams model. They really nailed it. So that was great. We had two grants last year of half million dollars each from the Hassenfeld Foundation and from Feinstein, and then we received just very recently a million dollar pledge from one of our board members who is also an alumnus. First time we've ever gotten a million dollars from an alumnus for purposes of moving forward with what we'll call the new engineering building. So this is by way of recognizing that other people are paying attention to what we're doing, and money is coming from places where it had not come from before in recognition of the quality of the work we're doing, and that's something we can all take pride in because we don't do this as individuals. This is part of the collective that we do, and while all of us have our individual role that we play, it's the collective result of those individual roles being done very, very well that make all the difference. I'll just mention in passing, we continually receive extraordinary high levels of praise from parents who are coming here for open houses or tours or accepted students' days. I've lost track of the number of people who have said to me, this is my third kid going to college. I visited more campuses than I can shake a stick at by far the best we've ever seen, and that's a reflection not just that we have it well organized, but the people they're meeting are people who impress them, and that's all of you who participate in that process. So we're going to reward you by having fewer of those in the future. Brian Williams has figured out how to dial back on the number of open houses and accepted students' days, because frankly, we're in danger of exhausting you, and that's not a good thing to do. So we think we can get away with having fewer of them and still have the same kinds of great outcomes. So back to the issue of growth for a moment. If we grow the campus by adding more undergraduate students, pretty much the case we have to think in terms of adding buildings. We've got to have some place for these students to live, and to eat, and to take their classes, and if there are more students, there are more faculty, and that means more offices. And so part of what we also need to do is to have a physical master plan that cites the buildings that are yet to be built. So the announcement that came out I guess today or yesterday about the acquisition which has just happened of the Livingston property across the way at least gives us some more property on which to think about how best to use it. But the reason we're not talking about how to use it, because we haven't had that conversation yet, that needs to be part of the master planning exercise that we'll be doing. And yet we have things that are underway. We've had two master plans in the last 20 years that never quite got to the point where they were formally adopted. So Edgar Adams and a class of students did a terrific job back in 2002 of getting a really good look at the campus. It had I'm sure value at the time, but it wasn't something that was adopted by the board. And then we had another. A firm came in about 2007 and 2008 and that report got tangled up with the departure of the board chairman and the president. And so again never went to the board for formal adoption. So we've got good material here and the plan is that we'll have a program run out of the School of Architecture this spring with a visiting firm of architects that will again guide a process using students and faculty to run a formulation for a master plan. Whether that will be the master plan or whether we'll have to do some carry on work we'll wait and see. But we're going to start by using in-house expertise. Now that doesn't answer the question of the siting of the second engineering building. And I'm not going to try and deal with that today, but I'm going to say today to you that two weeks from today in CAS 157 at three o'clock hour we will have a formal conversation, presentation Q&A on the siting of this building which at the end of last spring became controversial. It started as an annex to the engineering building on the north, I'm sorry, on the west side toward the parking lot. Architects said, we can't do that. A lot of ledge there. We're going to have to swing it to the other side and that's how it got to be parked on the east side of that building. And then we couldn't connect it to the engineering building because that connection was going to trigger requirements of bringing the original building up to current code. And that was a lot of additional cost without, we thought, a great deal of added benefit. So it became a freestanding structure. But it is the laboratory building for engineering. So it's not like you can park it anywhere and it'll do just fine. I mean, to maximum benefit, it should be very, very close to the engineering building. But not to anticipate the conversation. It'll happen in two weeks. I'll have the architects who did the design work present their material and then we'll just open it for Q&A. But that's not something I ever want to do again. I mean, we should be not making one-off decisions about where to put a building. We should be looking at it in the totality and saying, here are the buildings. We anticipate building over the next 10 or 15 years and here's where we have building sites available and here's where they should go. It doesn't mean it can't be revisited in some fashion but we're in danger of saying, we'll pick the best spot we have for building X and then when we have building Y, well, we've already used the best site. So now we have to find some other site and now we end up making decisions in the long run, make it look as if there was no planning at all. The buildings just arrived like mushrooms and popped up wherever they happened to be. That's not a good model for how to do business. So the consultation that we did last year where the engineers wasn't enough, we should have had a broader consultation with more people. I apologize for that. That was not a deliberate oversight but we'll take a step back and we'll see what options available for us right now and we'll make a decision and then go on but the plan will be that we'll actually have a plan for the campus as a proper by the end of the spring semester. One of the issues that we find is diversity is a problem from the student perspective in the absence of diversity among faculty and staff. So I was at what they call the fireside chat that the students had organized last week, two weeks ago, to just to hear what they had to say and one young woman, a young woman of color, stood up and said, I'm about to graduate and in the four years I've been here, I've had one person who looks like me standing at the front of the classroom, one woman of color. And she said that's just not good enough and I understand that and we've said very deliberately to diversify faculty, staff and students in that order in the goals that we have for this university but I got to recognize that the students turn over about 30% a year and the faculty turn over at the rate of 5% a year so it's really hard to go ahead and match that up. We've got to do better, we've pretty got to do better and in the administration as well, we just have to do better and that's what we're committed to doing but it's not easy and so that's not an excuse but it's something that we have to have as part of our applying process. We cannot continue to use students as the point of the spear. We can't diversify the campus on the backs of the students exclusively. We've got to do this with faculty and staff and that's easy to say and hard to do but it's just something we've got to take on. There's a part of all this that I haven't yet addressed and I'm going to do it quickly because I'm going to leave a little time for Q&A but all of this is going on against the backdrop of changes going on in Washington that seem to be affecting our lives in different ways every week and this is very disconcerting because what it does is it takes the known and turns it into an uncertainty. The students with DACA understood that they had a commitment from the federal government to protect their rights in exchange for registration. They could continue their education, everything would be fine and now that's suddenly very much in peril. Transgender individuals were told you're now welcome in the military, love to have you here and now changing presidents say well okay that's going to end. So of all the groups out there we choose to exclude you. We'll just take one stripe in the rainbow flag and tear it out. That group is no longer welcome in the military and what does that pre-sage as to where else they're not welcome? We've got moving goalposts with respect to Title IX. This is, we anticipate, we don't know yet but certainly it's up for grabs. Will there be a change in direction in terms of the evidence test used to adjudicate claims of sexual assault as far as the campus is concerned? It feels like we've already done all those things. We went through that, we had an answer and now it's being challenged again and what else is going to happen we don't know but the sum total of that is that the students I think as a whole are rattled much more than they have been in recent years. The Black Lives Matter issue has not gone away but in top of that we have all these other issues going on. And so the thing that I would ask of you is that you make a real effort even more than you normally would be doing this year to keep your students close, to try and understand where they're coming from. They're struggling with this. They do not have a lot of perspective. You know, reality is here and now. They don't know, they don't think in terms of everything that we think of, they think of as being history and so they don't, they didn't lived it. All they know is today and their world is being turned upside down or their world, their friends is being turned upside down or their families. I mean we have six DACA students but we have a whole lot of people who have friends and relatives who do not have proper paperwork and they're very anxious and we have people who are friends of people so it becomes an issue that is really much broader than it might first appear. And they're confused and they have certainly, I've heard from several students who've asked that I be more visible which I've said absolutely. We need to hear from you more often. Okay, you will. But I want to share that with you. I just, I think that the more that we are seen as being in tune with our students the better and the way to do that, I just like to ask this of you. You know, if there are things that you can do even if it's just one a semester where you're going to a place where you are being seen by the students, you're going to a play, you're going to a sporting event, you're going to the cafeteria, not, but you have to pick your hours, you're a place where or you're going to these open mic I'm sorry, these fireside chat things that are being held once a month. Places where the students can see that you are concerned about their issues, it would really help a lot. I don't want to ask one person to do a whole lot. I'd like to ask everybody one thing and just one more than you normally would do because this year in particular it's going to count. And what we know is that the campuses that are particularly focused on ensuring that the faculty and staff have their arms figuratively wrapped around their students are the ones whose graduates have the strongest feelings about that campus. And the group that does this better than everybody are the HCBU's. They don't always have the strongest students but they have enormous loyalty because there's that sense of shared purpose that they just do better than anybody and that's been validated by Gallup Studies and it relates entirely to how it is that that the university itself is committed to their individual success. So let me come full circle. I want to reiterate that colleges and universities serve as the vehicles for expanding and transmitting knowledge for the betterment of society. I think we know that. But they also function as the repositories of knowledge, thought, wisdom, and moral and ethical tenants accumulated by humans throughout the ages. We are society's critics and its champions. We aspire to make the world a better place. We protect, advance, and enhance the values that guide our nation. And never in recent times has this work been more essential and never in recent times is more under siege. It's not enough that we educate our young people through lecture and demonstration. We must also be seen as standing tall in the defense of what we know and believe to be true. Educational opportunities must be deepened and expanded, not narrowed and constricted as some in leadership positions are now advocating and our values must be spoken of more openly and with greater passion. We cannot allow a thousand years of hard-won enlightenment to be snuffed out on our watch. And so I urge that the faculty and staff of this university working together commit to becoming the model institution for our region and our nation. We can do this. I have every confidence. So thanks for coming today. I'm happy to take any questions or talk with you afterwards. But I appreciate you taking the time to be with me today. Just look for hands. Anybody with a question or a comment? Yes, Lauren. So Lauren's question is the apparent conflict between a smaller high school graduating class in New England in the coming years and any ambition we might have to expand our students. Those are trends moving in opposite directions. And so it takes a certain amount of puts but I think we can do that. But my point, my larger point was we need to make conscious decisions about what we're doing. And I'm not sure that that is the best way to go but at least we have to ask that question. For example, there are certain programs that we don't now have that we could have that would bring with them additional students. There's a certain confidence that we may have or not have about how well we can penetrate the market. I don't want to just say, well, that doesn't work. We're just not going to consider it. The bigger concern for me frankly is that adding more residential students immediately increases our cost for infrastructure. So whatever financial gain we get tends to get offset by the need to build those buildings. And I'll tell you in the short term, if I say to Jerry Williams, where's Jerry? There he is right there. Jerry, I'm thinking about going out for a $50 million bond issue. What do you think? He is going to lose his Green Apple lunch right there because we don't have that kind of bonding capacity. But it's something we might be looking at a little further down the road because those bonds, our current bonds, will begin to be retired in 2025. And one of the things we have to think about, we can't make a decision now to do something in the fall. Brian Williams will tell you, we need to start announcing what we're doing to high school sophomores. So we're three years out at any given moment. So this is just looking the long view, Lauren. So you're right in what you're saying. There's an obvious conflict between those two issues or two factoids. But it's something we still need to put through the mill. Anyone else? Yes, Brad? Yeah, I think we could run ourselves ragged trying to chase the newest trend and become nothing more than a reflection of the interests of students and parents at a particular moment in time. The parents have been very focused in recent years on making sure their kids get a good job. They are not paying attention to the fact that we just have had as a country the best job market for recent college graduates in a decade this past spring. So in a sense, they're behind the curve on this one. They're still looking for something that we're saying, well, that's no longer an issue. Our students are getting jobs. That shouldn't be where you're focusing on. And whenever I say to them, what you should be asking is how will your child end up having a great life? A good job is part of a great life, but they're not synonymous. There's much more to it than that. And they do that by being a well-rounded individual, meaning they're well-grounded in the liberal arts, and besides which, the liberal arts are the foundation for adapting to the kind of changes that'll be coming in the job market in the future. Whereas if you over-specialized today, you're just left high and dry in the future. So sometimes we have to come at this a bit more obliquely, but I'll tell this group, I have no interest in seeing us diminishing our support for the liberal arts. I think it's a mistake, and it's one that we have come to live to regret. Now, we still have to pay attention to how we make the bottom line work, but those are not incompatible, is what I'm getting at. Anyone else? Yes, I'm sorry. Oh, Sue. You say that there'll be incoming discussions about the student resources, every direction that we might look at, not just in terms of graduate, but other areas that will be different. So is that going to be part of the conversation? Well, I think it has to be. I don't want to do this in a half-baked way and say, well, we left all these things over there on the side because it was kind of too messy to deal with. I'd like to take advantage of the fact that we've stabilized in a way. I'm not nearly as worried about next fall's enrollment as I've been in recent years because I think we've finally established that we've got a good track record, and I think the people in admissions, enrollment management and marketing in general, our Crackerjack team, I have great confidence that working with the schools and the departments, that we will be doing the best presentation we've ever done to prospective students this coming year. And I think we'll penetrate that market very effectively. But so it allows us to look not just at our toes, but at the horizon. What is it we're trying to get to and why? And that's a decision that is so big, it needs to be shared as broadly as we can with the people who have a stake in this campus, which is all of you. So I know I'm going to get lots of guidance from the Senate, Sue, and I'm looking forward to that. I truly am. Yes, Joe. We're at the front end of that one, Joe, that the Livingston property will be part of the master plan process. There are certain things that would make sense over there and there are some things that don't. And so we have to think through what is the best use of that. And we also have to determine how many building sites do we really have on this campus. You know, we've got certain agreed upon setbacks from MediCom Avenue. There are height restrictions that we've agreed to. These are agreements that we may try and negotiate and change if we think they're in our interest. I don't want to assume that the status quo is what we have to work with, but we have to ask those questions now so that we are making the best decisions we can with the opportunity we have. That property across the street, if I were to say, let's build fraternity row over there. I'm pretty sure the Columban Fathers, among others, might say that's an incompatible use and that is zoned residential right now. So the town would have something to say about it as well. So we don't want to rush into anything, but it will be part of the consideration as to how best to use the land that we have to meet the needs that we have, I have determined to have in terms of siting of additional buildings. And we have to do that in order. I mean, we have to decide some issues about campus growth and where it's going to happen, how we handle the budget, and then where we put the facilities if we need additional facilities. It's four o'clock, I'm going to let you go. Thanks so much for being here.