 So, let's start. Let me welcome everybody. Let me welcome you to the Future Trends Forum. My name is Brian Alexander. I'm your host, the creator of the Forum and its organizer, as well as the chief cat herder for the next hour. And I'm delighted to see you all here today because we have a fantastic guest and we also have a very, very important. So, now let me introduce this week's situation and this week's guest. You know that we're all living in this extraordinary time of pandemic. The Forum since March has been focusing very closely on what COVID-19 means for higher education. And over the past month, we have another huge development which is the nationwide mobilization against racist policing and indeed against anti-black racism in general. Now, how do these impact higher education? How do they transform colleges and universities? What possibilities do they open up for us as we look ahead to the next academic year? How do they change teaching, learning, research and service, as well as our very structures and our sustainability? Well, we're going to be doing a whole series of special forum events just on that topic. And to lead us off, I can think of no one more splendid than to bring in Terry Gibbons. Terry is an astonishing Renaissance woman who has a whole series of background story, which is just remarkable. This is someone who is a fantastic athlete, who is also a published political scientist with many books and a lot of teaching under her belt, an academic administrator who's been a dean. And now, because that's not enough, she's also the founder and founding CEO of the Center for Higher Education Leadership, which is a great, great outfit that helps develop leadership capacity and leaders across academia. We're really fortunate to have her here. And I'm just delighted to welcome her. Welcome, Terry Gibbons. Thanks so much, Brian. I want to thank you for having me today, but also, you know, when the whole COVID crisis really kicked off, you were one of the first guests on our own webinar. And that was really generous of you to take the time back then. And so much has happened since then. We are living in way too interesting times. But I wanted to start off by just giving a little bit more background of my own story, because I think it's very relevant for what we're talking about today. I'm a first generation college goer. I grew up in Spokane, Washington. My father was in the military, which is part of the reason we ended up there. I went to undergrad at Stanford University, which is right now just down the road from me. We moved back here five years ago. And I worked actually six years in between undergrad and grad school. So I actually worked in the criminal justice system for about a year and a half or two years for the San Mateo County Release on Unrecognizance program. So that was an interesting experience. And then went on to work for a lobbyist in Sacramento, the California Optometric Association. So I had some experience before I went on to grad school at UCLA, decided to get my PhD in political science. And then my first job was at University of Washington, where I was there for four years and went on to University of Texas at Austin. And there is when my administrative career took off. In political science, I study European politics and immigration policy and the politics of race. And I was asked to start the first Center for European Studies at UT Austin. And so I helped to found that and then was asked very early in my career to be a vice provost. So that was my first big administrative position. And that was like, basically drinking from a fire hose. I had, you know, I had very little background in HR management, accreditation, all these different things. And so really, that was the impetus for me, you know, 10 years later to start the Center for Higher Education leadership, because I realized there was this gap in knowledge for administrators of, you know, how do you go from being a faculty member to being an administrator? And I did attend some of the programs offered by ACE and so on. But you know, I needed something that was kind of ongoing, you know, where I could have a reference to go to and find out, you know, what do I do about assessments? You know, what are all these different things? So so that's part of the reason I started that. But I mean, there's, you know, my career, I actually have written a book about radical empathy, because I wanted to talk about all the different aspects of race that have impacted me over the years. So we can share that later. But it's actually available for preorder now on Amazon. But I mean, the real impetus for writing the book was partly my experiences in higher education, because, you know, so we talk about this Black Lives Matter movement. I mean, one of the big questions is why now? And when I look back on my career and my academic career, in particular, you know, it was always kind of a, there's always the hurdles you had to get through, you know, to get 10 year to get published, you know, and I was an R1 institutions most of my career until my last position was actually as provost at Menlo College, a small business college here in the Bay Area. But, you know, it really struck me how, you know, we've seen all these statements coming out from higher ed institutions. And yet, we aren't really addressing the structural issues which lead to there being small percentages of African American students, faculty and leadership, really. And so, you know, I wanted to I had to take a step back and say, okay, what has been my life experience? Why have things, you know, worked out, you know, people look at me and see, Oh, this very successful African American woman. But, you know, a lot of that had to do with the fact that my parents decided back in the 1960s to that we would be raised in a place like Spokane, Washington. And, you know, there's this whole sense of assimilation. And it's for those who don't know, African Americans are less than 1% of the population in Spokane. But, you know, it was interesting that my parents made that choice to, you know, really make sure that we were in an environment that allowed us to assimilate into white culture. And so that has impacted the rest of my life. And so I've struggled a lot with that. And but also, you know, I've been very much, very active in various, I'm much, very much an activist. And, you know, but I really think it's important as we look at this moment, that each of us take a step back and look at our one of my primary tenets of radical empathy is being willing to be vulnerable. And so for me, that first step was looking at my own story and saying, you know, hey, you know, you got to go to Stanford, UCLA, you know, you were a professor, but, you know, all along the way, there have been compromises that have to be made. You know, we your is there's like this constant I call it my back, you know, background tape in my head, there's this constant way that we have to function in this these spaces. That is, oh my gosh, you know, if I say this certain thing, how is that that other person going to respond? It's like, you know, when you're black academic, and you walk into that room, and you're on a committee, and it's all white people, you think, okay, how are these people going to react to me? And, you know, how do I have to function in this space? And so there's this, you know, this psychic issue, not psychic, but psychological issue, you're constantly dealing with this, this background tape of how do I function in these spaces, you know, how, and, you know, there's also overt issues that that we have to deal with. But I mean, just wanted to kind of put that out there as an introduction that, you know, even though I've had a very successful career, there, it's, you know, part of the reason I left academia wish to work on these issues, right? I mean, I have the Center for Higher Education and Leadership, but to help other people understand, you know, how to, you know, it's in the part, it's how being able to be ourselves in these spaces, and being able to understand what are the challenges, and how do I manage the expectations, not only of others, but of my own expectations. That's a fantastic introduction. And that brings up a whole series of ideas. Friends, I'd like to ask Dr. Givens a few questions. But again, this is a form for you, for your questions and thoughts. She's already summoned us to the spirit of radical empathy and vulnerability. You should know that I think the two of us will be very, very comfortable in supporting you in your openness and vulnerable and your individual vulnerabilities. I have so many questions, so many questions. And one of them is thinking about 2020, looking at the past couple of months. What, how do you see higher education responding to this really widespread social mobilization? You mentioned a series of statements. What else is higher education already doing? Well, you know, it's really interesting, because what is important to me is to see that students are stepping up and actually, you know, making demands of their administrators in higher ed. And I've seen that in various institutions, including here at Stanford. There have been my protest marches by students. And it's interesting because I think part of the people are asking you why now, I think it's partly because of the COVID crisis. So just to take a little step back before I answer your question is, I think we have to understand everybody has been quarantining, sheltering in place. And then we had the trigger was the combination of George Floyd and the Central Park incident with the woman calling the bird watcher. So it was a combination of things, but also just a sense of it's time. And so, you know, that I think for a lot of students, for a lot of faculty, it's really time to start addressing these issues. And if we can have this sense of solidarity within the coronavirus, we need to have that sense of solidarity in our higher ed institutions and everywhere really, I've been really heartened to see how many people are stepping up and you know, being part of the protest, but it has to go farther than that has to be has to be action. So what I'm seeing from many institutions, besides, so we've seen the statements coming out from presidents and provost and so on. And, you know, saying that they're in solidarity, that they understand the issues. I mean, there's obviously the police violence issues, but you know, we have to talk about structural racism. And if as higher ed institutions, we aren't dealing with structural racism, then we aren't going to address the underlying problems. And we know what the issues are. We don't have, you know, very high percentages, compared to their population, the broader population, you know, especially in our one institutions, the higher higher, the elite institutions, you know, we don't have the numbers of students or faculty. And actually, I just want to mention, I'm very excited to see that that UC has hired their first black president of the UC system. And, you know, it's those kinds of things that have to happen in order for us to, and, you know, the question is what is he going to do now as a leader to make sure that UC is more open to African American students and faculty. And so, you know, I address these issues a lot in the work that I do. So even before all of this happened within, I'm a political scientist, so within political science, I regularly do workshops with department chairs and leaders on how to promote and hire black faculty. But it really starts with the students, right? If you don't have the graduate students, it's hard to hire the faculty and the faculty have to get promoted. And so that we have to make sure we have an entire pathway. And that students feel welcome, you know, that's something I really tried to focus on. And, you know, one of the things I'm really emphasizing with Chell and all the work I do is that we need to become more student centered. And that means focusing on student success, making sure students succeed. And, you know, we have to deal with the students we have, you know, and so I'm seeing more institutions starting to develop student success programs that can address issues that students face coming from different backgrounds, and not just African American, but, you know, students from immigrant backgrounds. And, you know, we could have a whole hour long discussion about what's going on with foreign students and international students. But I will leave that to the side for now. You have at least one book on that subject. Yes, exactly. So, but I think the answer is, you know, it's individual to each institution to a certain extent. But, you know, I know that the faculty and students that stand for an alumni, myself included, are calling for a new center, or sorry, African American Studies Department. And I was happy to see when I was at UT Austin, we actually did develop a center, we had the Center for African and African American Studies, but then eventually that turned, they also developed a department. And part of it is we have to understand that because of structural racism, the, you know, the story of African Americans has not been told in this country, you know, how many people are saying, oh my God, I didn't know this and I didn't know that. I mean, Juneteenth, so the fact that we had Juneteenth come up and, you know, and to be honest, I didn't learn about Juneteenth until I moved to Texas back in 2003. And that was my first exposure to Juneteenth, having grown up in, you know, they didn't celebrate it in Washington state. I actually did hear somewhat about it living in California because they celebrate it in Oakland, but I didn't really know what it was and so on. And so, you know, part of it is how do we, I think higher ed has to face the fact that we need to be incorporating and it's not just a race issue, it's just our real history, you know, and, you know, in political science, you know, it's not a question of, you know, are we teaching that class on African American history is like in the US history class, how is, you know, are we talking about our history and around race, you know, and in sociology, you know, every, you know, it's harder obviously to stem fields, but, you know, we've got to get more African American students into the stem fields. And so how do we make them welcome? How do we pull them in? You know, they need role models. I mean, there's so many things that need to be done. So I think higher ed institutions are starting to recognize, you know, they need to have those role models. It's, you know, that's a more longer term thing. You can't just turn around in a year and, you know, hire all those faculty, but they do need to be supporting graduate students and making sure they have, you know, I was one of the reasons I was successful at UCLA is I had a great fellowship when I was there and that led to my job and the own jobs. And if we understand that higher ed is really a place of networks and people talking to each other, then that's where we really have to start taking action. And that's where the individual, each and every one of us has to start talking about these issues at an individual level so that then that bubbles up into the decisions we make when we're forming those committees, when we're doing those hires. We have a that's a fantastic answer. And again, another series of fantastic topics. And you can see this is already having impact because a whole series of questions have just started coming up. And I want to raise one of them from Sarah Sangregoirio, who asks, excuse me, do you have any guidance for those of us who want to amplify the voices of students and faculty who are people of color without invoking tokenism? Right. And then, you know, obviously that's a problem and it's something I've dealt with throughout my career. So, you know, it's about attitude, right? It's about, you know, yes, we want to hear your voices, but not over one of the hard things that you have to balance here is, yes, we want to hear the voices of our faculty and students of color, but you don't want to make them the ones who have to do the work for you. So before you start amplifying those voices, make sure you're doing the work and you understand, you know, it depends, you know, what, where are you asking to amplify their voices? You know, are you doing the work to understand the broader issues? And so let's talk about, you know, hiring, you know, are you including student voices and hiring processes? I mean, there's so many different ways this can be done, but, you know, I talk about hiring faculty, you know, don't just hire, if you can, work across a campus and do a series of hires, you know, you have to create the kind of environment where people want to be. And, you know, if I walk into a department for an interview and I see that I'm going to be the only black person there, that's hard. But if I know that there's, you know, cluster hire, I mean, a lot of institutions have turned to cluster hires in order to make sure that they're bringing in a group of faculty rather than just one. I mean, unfortunately, we're in a situation where, you know, because there's so few black faculty in some places, it's hard to, you know, especially at this time when budgets are shrinking and so on. But I think the important thing is make sure you're not just tapping one person. Make sure it's not always the same person. I remember even at Menlo College, he had one really outstanding African-American student and he was always getting tapped to do things and and, you know, he didn't mind it for the most part, but he could see, you know, it was tokenism. And so you have, first of all, you know, you have to say, look, I understand your story. We really appreciate you. You know, ask him if there's other students who should be brought in, you know, if you want to get him on a committee, make sure that you are have looked around to see are there other people we can incorporate. I mean, it's really hard thing to do. But like I said, the most important thing is understanding the broader context. What's happened in the past when we've done this kind of work? You know, how have we, if we have not been involving people of color, you know, what are some different mechanisms we can use to do that? Maybe we don't ask them to be on the committee. Maybe we just ask them to suggest other people. So, you know, there's this thing called emotional labor that I talk about in my radical empathy book, which is that people of color are, you know, there's this added burden to what we do on a day to day basis because we, you know, we're, like I said, I could be sitting in a committee meeting and the issue of race comes up and everybody's head, you know, turns towards me. It's like, Terry, how do we, how do we deal with this? And, you know, to a certain extent, you know, we're in a situation where we're just going to have to do some of that work. But the important thing is to acknowledge it. And to, you know, so if you, you know, if there's only one person of color you can ask, just say, look, I'm sorry, you're the only person we can ask. And I understand this looks like tokenism, but we really do want your input in this situation. That ameliorates a lot of the issues, because if you can at least acknowledge that you understand, you're asking a lot of me and, and I mean, and that's something that administrators across the board need to do is to, I mean, we, I see these stories all the time, you know, oh, you know, I, I'm, as a black faculty member, I have all these students to mentor and blah, blah, acknowledge it, give them credit for it, you know. I mean, if nothing else, let those faculty and people of color know that you acknowledge that they're doing this extra work. Well, thank you. Sarah, that's a really, really good question. And, and again, thank you, Terry, that's a really, really useful answer. I mean, you have to imagine people who are, are paying careful, careful attention to this and already making adjustments for their plans. We also have a whole more questions are bubbling up, and I want to bring up one of the video questions. And this is from Tom Hames, from the Houston area in Texas. Tom, good to see you. Good morning or good afternoon. Yeah, we have kind of a weird opposite parallel path there in that I did my undergraduate work at the University of Texas at Austin, but I did my graduate work where, where Brian is right now at Georgetown as in, in German and European studies. But I have a completely unrelated question as I think about some of the systemic things that we're dealing with right now. And I wanted to know, I wanted to see if you could speak a little bit to your perception of the intersections of, of race, and I don't want to say poverty, but income, income inequality and pushes to get students back on campus, which, you know, my analysis tends to think is going to disproportionately impact those who, who are more vulnerable for a lot of reasons. And I'm not just talking about higher ed, but I'm also talking about K-12, the news this week where the president is apparently trying to force school districts to reopen by dictate whether it makes sense for them or not. And so I'd be curious to see what your, your views are on the, on the, on those intersections. Yeah, that's a great question. I'm so glad you raised it because actually it's something that's very much on my mind. I have, well, my older son's in college, but my younger son is in high school and I also work, I'm on the board of several organizations that work with youth in East Palo Alto, which is a low income area here. And I am extremely concerned because if you haven't been following this in K-12, what's happened as institutions have gone online, some students have just disappeared because they live in homes that, you know, they just don't have a laptop or internet access. And even though the schools here at least are, you know, and some of the big companies have been offering, you know, Chromebooks and things like that. They, you know, there's, if you've got five people in a house with, you know, two bedrooms, how do you manage, you know, that time and space and so on. So this is a huge, huge, huge issue. And you're right, that intersection of poverty and race is very high, the correlation there. And, you know, it's hard because this is such a novel situation. We have a novel virus. It's a novel situation. You know, nobody had contingency plans really in place for this. And unfortunately, this is going to be the way things are for a while, regardless of what the president wants. There's always going to be for the next until we we're not going to eradicate it. So for for the foreseeable future, we're going to have students who are going to have extra needs because of this. And so what is going I think that, you know, we're going to have to see, you know, school districts are now working on their plans for how to deal with these students and higher ed, of course, is as well because, you know, think about the community colleges that, you know, the here, the state colleges, San Jose State, the places like that, that are mostly commuter schools. That's another situation where race and and, you know, well, sorry, I'm sorry. I just like I've had too many I things tumbling. They all interconnect in really weird ways. And we're seeing this as we put the system under stress. We see these intersections under stress and we and they become more visible. It's a question of whether we acknowledge them or not. I think that, you know what, I would just love if people would do a better job of acknowledging because, you know, and if I have to be fair, the school districts here have done a really good job. You know, they were focusing on, you know, basic needs initially. Let's make sure we're getting this the kids who anybody who needs it lunch and breakfast. So that's so the initial focus has to be the basic needs. Let's make sure the kids are eating and we have a safe place to stay. But that's true for grad, you know, first for graduate students and graduate students are kind of are being ignored to a certain extent. I'm very grateful to my friend Utsubik Knight at the University of Alabama and Tuscaloosa, who's been, you know, working on providing food for graduate students, because so many of them are reliant on summer jobs and, you know, RAs, all kinds of things, you know, funding that they aren't getting now. So I'm sorry, I'm making the issue more complicated. But, you know, the the reality is we have to focus on basic needs initially and make sure, you know, I know too many college kids who, you know, even my own son, I mean, he doesn't have to worry too much. But, you know, he hasn't been able to get a summer job. Right. You know, all those jobs, campus jobs that have disappeared and there was controversy over whether, you know, students who had campus jobs are going to continue to get paid. So I guess, you know, unfortunately, because we're in the middle of a crisis, we're going to have to focus on basic needs first and make sure, you know, people are eating, people are having a place to stay. Because, I mean, I just think about when I was, you know, I wasn't, I didn't have a whole lot of money when I was at Stanford. If this had happened when I was at Stanford, I mean, I relied on that summer campus job. I lived on campus over the summer. You know, it's hard to find an apartment. You can say I didn't go back home because there were no jobs in Spokane for somebody my age. And so my heart goes out to all these students, both in K through 12 and higher ed, who were struggling. And we have to focus on this. And I think some of the, you know, big foundations are going to have to step in and help provide some funding around this because, you know, in the short term, it's just going to take too long for Congress to take action. But I do hope eventually Congress will take action and focus on some of more, some more of these kind of basic needs issues and helping institutions make that transition, because I do believe online and remote teaching is in our future for the next few years. Yeah, absolutely. And that's the technical issues. I teach at a community college. And I mean, I see this firsthand in terms of what my students are doing in order to connect up. I have people who are taking class on phones and I'm like, I don't know how you do that. And, you know, I, you know, I think it would be a good investment. One of our local school districts is buying Chromebooks for every student so that they're prepared one way or the other. And but, you know, that's that's someone uncommon, of course. So but just to throw another wrench into it, you know, I've had people argue that not going back to school impacts people of lower income. Absolutely. For the reasons that it's free daycare. And if they have other jobs that are, you know, and they tend to have the more marginal jobs are the ones that people still have to leave the house for. And so, you know, that's speaking from a position of privilege to me, my my wife and I can both comfortably work from home. But that's not the case for, you know, a lot of other people and certainly not a lot of my students or their parents. And so what do you do? I mean, how do you balance that? How do you teach, you know, we have trouble managing our kids. I have three kids in high school. We have trouble managing our kids and we're here. I agree. Yeah, thank goodness my college student is able to manage himself. But, you know, just my son has a five or four plan and that his high school didn't really do anything to help us with that. And so I've been reaching out saying, hey, you know, my son needs extra help. If you don't know what a five or four plan is basically for kids who have learning disabilities, you know, so, you know, and I was just talking to a friend about this the other day. It's like, what are we doing for? Again, adding more complication. What about all the kids who have IEPs and five or four plans and need extra help and need tutoring? And and so I know our school district is planning to have, you know, kind of socially distant study halls and things like that. Another idea, and since this is a future transform, if institution, if, for example, colleges aren't going to be having in-person classes and we know it's less dangerous for younger kids to be together, why couldn't we do more social distancing by using college classrooms and and, you know, other spaces, churches, things like that take to make sure the kids are, you know, spaced apart enough. I mean, it's it's out there idea. But if, you know, I know near my kids, my son's high school, there's a church that probably isn't being used. You know, could they use their space to have more social distancing, things like that. But, you know, these are really difficult issues. And I, you know, I believe me, I feel for the people in K through 12, especially because, you know, we already know there's overcrowding, especially so, you know, this is another one of those instances where race plays a role. So in in school districts that are in lower income areas, there's a lot of crowding, you know, they don't necessarily have the spaces to be able to get, you know, and and the parents need the schools to be running. And and believe me, that and it's not just the K through 12. I hear this from a lot of college don't forget about the staff needs there because we all know that teenagers behave perfectly responsibly of left to their own devices, right? Yeah, I'm going to vacate. Thank you. Thank you for a really, really good question. And and I really appreciate learning, you sharing more about your own work right now above all, since you're in the Houston area, please stay safe. Yes, please. Thank you. Yes, we're we're trying to stay on our own as much as possible. We're lucky can do that, right? Yes, keep doing it. Keep doing it. Tom just mentioned, among other things in his great commentary, he just asked about staff. And we had a question about staff that came in through chat, Terry. So let me just ask this out loud. Actually, this is from Joyce Ogburn, wonderful librarian who says, don't forget the staff. There are more staff than faculty on campuses. That's right. You can interact with them a lot on a regular basis as well. So I guess I mean, that's an observation on a question. But I guess if you might because if we pulled us back into the context of and I don't I want it's not just black lives matter. I mean, I'm really aware, especially, you know, here in place like here in California, Texas, so on, almost everywhere these days, we have new people of Latino Hispanic descent who are also being really heavily impacted. I mean, when I look at here in San Mateo County, when I look at the numbers for COVID, the largest population in terms of testing who's who've been infected so far is our Latino Hispanic population. And so luckily, they're not, you know, in terms of deaths, those numbers are lower, you know, and but, you know, we don't know how that's going to play out for the long term. And, you know, of course, they're from lower income areas, they're doing a lot of the jobs that we don't hear much about, including working in hospitals, working on campuses, you know, all these different jobs. And that's where, you know, we unfortunately jobs are because of the that we already asked, you know, the kind of intersection between between race and social economics status. A lot of these jobs and these front lines slash essential jobs are being done by people of color. And so we have to keep that in mind when we talk about, I mean, this idea of, I was just passing by the elementary school that's near my house and they are having some summer programs, partly because they need to have space for these kids whose parents have to work. And so but out there, this was like at five o'clock in the evening, they're out there people out there cleaning the playground, you know, disinfecting the tables and the playground equipment. And, you know, I was just like, oh my gosh, you know, these people are on the front line. And so I definitely do not want to forget these people, everybody from our librarians to our people doing the landscaping to cleaning rooms. I mean, this is going to be a huge topic. If students are going to be back in dorms, you know, how are they going to make we know how these kids are when they're in these dorm rooms? How are they going to keep them disinfected and clean? And then it's going to take staff. I've been people who joked about them dorms being the cruise ships for academia. We had not a question but a comment from the excellent Wesley Dees in response to something you and Tom were just saying, which was that question, but our homeschool co-op meets in a church and it's just informed us that we'll not renew the contract until in order to protect their members, which yes. And, you know, I've been hearing news of other spaces as well that are, you know, not allowing, I mean, you know, we know, you know, right now events are being canceled into early 2021. So live events, things like that. So yeah, even though we would hope that we could, you know, there were would be other spaces we could use. I mean, this just shows how difficult it's going to be to, you know, to be able to, you know, get to any kind of face to face. I, you know, with each passing day as the numbers go up, I'm just more skeptical that we're going to be able to follow through. And I think, Brian, you were talking about that right now, what is it 65 70% are still saying they're going to have higher ed institutions are going to try to go face to face. So and then with the issue coming out with international students that puts even more pressure on higher ed institutions. So I think it's going to take, you know, kind of a movement. I mean, we did the Black Lives Matter movement, but we have to, we're going to have to step up and say, what do we really want for our kids? And I know there's a lot of conflicting feelings about that. Because we want them to be able to be in school for the social encyclopedia. I mean, there's a group of pediatricians who came out saying, you know, these kids need the social interaction and so on. But how do we do it in a safe way without having a ton of money put into this? This this connects with the whole series of questions. And I feel kind of like you mentioned drinking from a fire hose, holding the fire hose back international students. And we had a partner from Donald Clark from from Scotland. Let me just put this up. And I'll ask the vast majority of international students are from minority backgrounds, primarily Chinese and Indian. But also from cash cow rich backgrounds, does this create really create diversity? Or does it exclude the poor? Well, I'm a yes and kind of person. So I believe we should have these people here. But I also think we should make sure we're providing the right access for all of our students. So, you know, I don't think we should exclude people because they happen to have come from a wealthy background. But I also think we need to make sure we're providing space for, you know, that's why I mean, this is a big debate, you know, in the public school systems, right? Where they were talking about the University of California system this morning and how many international students they have. And, you know, it's hard to get into the UC system. I live here in California. I know how hard it is for my kid and my older son wasn't able to get admitted into UC and, you know, he had the most stellar grade. So it wasn't a surprise. But and he's not poor either, you know, I mean, we're able to afford privacy for the most part private school tuition. But that it brings in a broader, I'm sorry, raising a broader philosophical question of who should be admitted. And why I mean, you know, it's there's been a longstanding, you know, tradition, if you want to call it that, but, you know, practice of letting in international students and they do bring a certain kind of diversity. So the question is, you know, what what types of diversity are we talking about? And, you know, if we want some kind of balance, you know, I certainly, you know, when I went to Stanford appreciated. I mean, the first two people I met when I walked into my dorm, or a guy from India and a guy from Pakistan. And you know, the resident life had a sense of humor because they had them rooming together. Green, right? Yeah, well, yes. Yes, indeed. So so that was interesting. I had not only did I never met anybody from India and Pakistan before, and on top of it, I learned a little history. Speaking of history, and thank you for that excellent answer to all great, great question that we're going to be returning to both in the UK and the US repeatedly. We have a question from a good friend of the and long time friends of the program from George station from the other end of California. I hope you don't mind from Monterey Bay. And let's put George up here. And hello, George, how are you doing? And can you hear me all right? Perfectly. I had to do a last minute switch to get to a quiet space. There's stuff going on outside here. It's great. Okay, good. So, cherry, thank you for your comments so far. I've got 10 questions. I needed to keep it down. Yeah, so I can keep it to a two parter. I want to do comment and double down on everything that's been said about staff so far. We have our few black faculty and our more black staff meet regularly. And at our last meeting, we found out that one of our stalwart housing staff people, they literally went and found another job. They got ahead of the curve because they were concerned about fall, right? And every loss is a loss. So that's I just want to people to keep that in mind. But my question is really more stratospheric. It's about faculty and admin relations and admin and exec relations. So that's why it's two parts. Some of my best friends again, you know, and I was in that mixed neighborhood upbringing that you're describing maybe a little more so in Omaha Nebraska. So some of my best friends are admins. And the issue is that the admins external to the Cal State system, I have better relationships with than with one or two exceptions, and they know who they are. Then then admins within the Cal State system. And I think this is one of the issues that maybe, you know, you have some intentions for your leadership Institute. The issue for faculty is that we can't speak frankly. We rarely can we have a full conversation with administrators within our own system. We can at the level of labor management relations, that kind of thing. And Cal State has a strong faculty union. That's great. You know, and a good thing, because we were ahead of the curve on Black Lives Matter and so on, as you probably know. But now it's tough to have the conversations anyway, but maybe tougher within the system when administrators are at will and cannot speak frankly, with a couple of exceptions, like the bravest of our inclusive excellence, you know, administrators and so on, we happen to have one. And our campus is really fortunate. So the other thing is that even when administrators agree, they can't take it in a completely open and honest way to their execs, their provosts, their presidents or chancellors, because they're at will. So what can we do about both of those? One is faculty to admin. The other is admin to exec. Appreciate any thoughts you have. I have a lot of thoughts on that. I'll try to keep it brief. And somebody had earlier talked about the kind of faculty admin relations. So I'm glad we came back to that. And, you know, for me personally, I've been a provost. I know what it's like to be in that position. And, you know, I I would prefer to give the benefit of that. But I also know there's problems, for example, between provosts and presidents and provosts and governing boards. That's not as much of an issue in the Cal State system, because it's the other regions are kind of far away. But in a lot of private institutions, you know, the governing boards have a lot of influence. And unfortunately, there's very little diversity on governing boards. And I know that's becoming more of a topic. But, you know, I'll be honest, I had to leave academe so I could criticize academe. I did not feel comfortable speaking out the way I do now as a provost or as a vice provost or as even a faculty member. And, you know, as a faculty member, even as a vice provost, I was very outspoken by also felt by the time I left my job as vice provost, I was walking around with a bunch of knives and spears and all kinds of stuff in my back. I felt like I was walking around and I could hear the knives clanking around in my back because people didn't like the fact that I was honest and would call people on the carpet. And, you know, you get labeled as, you know, the angry black woman. It's not about anger, folks. It's about justice and doing the right thing. I mean, I was, I could tell you some stories. But I think it's just, it's hard, right? I mean, how do you get around these issues of the, you know, my, I remember when I got tenure, my husband was like, Oh, now you can do anything you want. Like, no, because guess who is the same people who gave me tenure, the same people who are telling me whether, you know, if I'm doing enough publications, if I'm, you know, if my teaching is okay, you know, I still have to total line to a certain extent. And this is part of the problem with higher ed more generally is we claim, you know, that you have academic freedom and all of that. But we've seen people who've been punished for being up to outspoken. And so I think we need to really emphasize the importance of not just academic freedom, but the freedom to talk about working conditions and, you know, why people are leaving. I mean, I saw several of both female and people of color leave my department when I was at UT Austin, because, you know, they just weren't getting the support they needed. And there's so many different ways that, that, that, you know, these things happen, right? It may not be that there's any direct or blade. This is why I say we have to talk about structural racism, because it's not just Oh, you're going to get a slap on the wrist. If you say something we don't like, it's like you're not going to get the same kind of funding somebody else does, you know, who's toes the line, you know, you might not get that next promotion, you know, you might not, you know, be there are goodies sometimes other it's not nor the norm, but, but, you know, it's, it can be very scary trying to, to develop those things. I think what you know, it needs to start from the top down. We have to have members of governing boards, presidents, provost, who, I mean, I'm a firm believe I want faculty, I wanted faculty to tell me what they thought because how else am I going to know what's happening on my campus and I really feel badly for leaders who aren't willing to hear the truth from their own faculty or at a minimum, even if it's not, you know, it's their opinion, listen to people's opinions for God's sake. I mean, if you want, the thing I found what was most important as a leader is even if you don't like what people have to say, you still have to listen because that is there, you have to acknowledge their feelings and this is, I mean, I can bring it back to my ideas around radical empathy. First of all, you have to be vulnerable and understand yourself, but then you have to be vulnerable and be willing to hear, you know, everything from the people below you and you don't want to get overwhelmed with you, but you want to be known as a leader who values integrity, who values values the truth and who wants to hear from the people who you're working with from your these are your colleagues, not just the people you're over. And it's interesting because it's also I'm going to speak a little bit for the administrators because a lot of times, you know, they get, you know, I was, oh, you're going to the dark side. It's like, I've been a faculty member. I know what you guys are dealing with. I'm doing the best I can. So sometimes you got to give them the benefit of the doubt that they are doing, you know, I was doing the best that I could when I was a vice provost and a provost. And, you know, I need you need to be supportive. Obviously, when you see your administrators doing something good, be supportive, say thank you, you know, and vice versa for the for those leaders out there, you know, make sure you acknowledge people. So, you know, acknowledge each other when you're doing the right thing. And if you disagree with what they're doing, let them know. But, you know, it has to be a two way street. So and we create too many barriers for that. So I'm hoping that going forward because of this crisis, because of the Black Lives Matter protest, because of the way that faculty and students are stepping up and saying, we need to be doing these things, you know, that we understand that there's this need for advocacy, and that we understand that we need to be supportive. That's a incredible answer. Great. Thank you. I wonder if there's a like a single thing, because we're kind of on an accelerated timeline getting to mid August or end of August. Is there like a thing that we're not doing at either faculty, administrator, exec that you wish we were doing that we could even start a conversation between now and, you know, mid August when we're going to be going full bore and we won't have as much time to talk. Graduate students, I know you guys don't have that many in the CSU system. Yeah, we don't. But but some of our campuses do. Yes, they do. And we need to be talking about graduate students and what's happening to them. Because I think there's a lot of discussion about helping undergrads and and, you know, faculties and we aren't we need always need to do more. But I think we're forgetting about the graduate students and their needs and what's happening to them. Yeah, great. Thank you. Thank you, Terry. And thank you, Brian, for taking the question. Well, of course, thank you for asking the question. You're the one who did the work. I'm just thank you, George. More labor. OK. We have there's a lot to talk about. And I'm conscious of time. I don't want to I don't want to lose people. I wish I ever get a chance to ask you questions. And let me just if I can bring up one more awesome person. And this is the wonderful Sarah who asked a question before and who wanted to follow it up. So let me just bring her up to the to the stage and. Let's have Sarah Sanguario. Sarah, can you see us OK and hear us? Yes, can you hear me OK? So I'm a PhD student. I just started yesterday. And one of the things our program is is very focused on social justice in general. And I'm delving into this to this, the a lot of the systems are on higher education. So my question comes from the tenure and reappointment process. Do you see those kind of weaponized against people of color? Because I just from my oh, thank you, OK. That's the end. Sorry, go ahead. Was that anything to add? Well, I was going to say from my just a few couple of bits of reading that my brains went. So can you kind of speak to that? Yeah, I mean, I've seen this personally in there was a situation in where I was trying to advocate for some faculty and this was probably trying to think when around the time about 10 years ago. And we had a situation that were budget cuts. And so I'm you know, the deans were trying to limit the number of people who actually got promoted intent with tenure. And we had 14 people who went up and seven people were turned down. And all of them were with the six of the seven were people of color. One was a gay male. And, you know, it was just so I mean, I was just it was incredibly disappointing. You know, these are people who had, you know, done top notch scholarship, et cetera, et cetera. And it's not necessarily a weaponization, but it certainly was a signal to me at the time that there wasn't enough support for faculty of color. I mean, I'm not saying everybody should get tenure, but you know, I think if you get to the point of going up for tenure, if you have not been told that there's something wrong or, you know, I mean, I've had my own experiences with this. When I went through third year review, you know, it was very poorly poorly handled in the sense that, you know, they gave me only gave me a couple of weeks to put. You know, nobody had been telling me that I need to be pulling my file together. You know, I had like a couple of weeks and there was a lot of pressure and stress and strain. And it wasn't like I was doing badly or anything. It's just the process was not done well. And that was incredibly frustrating. So afterwards, I had to talk with the department chair and said, you know, if you have a junior faculty member, they need to do something. You need to, you know, you should be talking to them. And this is something regardless, if you are not talking, if you so when you become if you get a faculty job, you know, and there's people out there, we talk about this all the time. So get on Twitter and get on PhD chat and academic chatter, academic Twitter or whatever, because there's weird. We're talking about this stuff all the time. You know, you need to find out even before you take the job. What are the what are the requirements for tenure and promotion? You know, get make sure you get clear guidelines. I mean, it's too easy for departments to say, oh, you know, you need to do and there's nothing written or anything like that. You know, and so you go into the process pretty much unclear. And then if you don't, you know, it's too easy to say, oh, well, you didn't do this in this cycle. You didn't tell me I need to do this in this. You know, I've seen that happen way too many times. And, you know, it's it should be an open communication. It should be you should be getting ongoing feedback. So get some mentors. Ask them questions. Find some people who are I mean, I mentor a ton of people, so I'm not asking for any more mentees. But, you know, I, you know, I wrote my column in Inside Higher Ed for years because I wanted to make sure people understood higher ed works and how, you know, that we don't share with PhD students the whole process of tenure and promotion. That, you know, I didn't learn that stuff until I, you know, I mean, I was vaguely aware of it because I saw people going through the process like the faculty going through the process. But, you know, nobody because it can be different at different institutions. But I know we're we're getting to love it. So I don't want to go on too long, but just ask, ask, ask for the information. Thank you. Thank you so much, Sarah, for that really good question and good luck. Yes, your program needs you and and Terry, thank you for that for that terrific, terrific answer. I hate to say it, but we're we've been going at top speed and we've hit a whole bunch of people that great questions. And I'm just I'm just I hate to wrap things up, but I have to. Terry, what's the best way to keep up with you? What's the best way to follow your work and your organization's work? Right. I'm at Terry Givens on Twitter. I go on. I'm on LinkedIn a lot. So just luckily, I have an unusual name. So T-E-R-R-G-I-V-E and it's just Google that. You'll find my website. There's a link to my company, higher edleads.com. And I see that last comment from Tom, administration, searcher, sort of teaching and learning, not the other way around. I agree 100 percent. So please reach out and follow me on Twitter, follow LinkedIn. If you want to email me, I'm just T Givens at higher edleads.com. I'm happy to talk to you and especially please check out higher edleads.com. And we are doing a lot of work trying to save some of these small private liberal arts colleges these days. So if you are a small private liberal arts college, reach out because I want to work to save a lot of those institutions. Oh, good. Good, good, good. Well, please, everyone, please follow Dr. Givens and join me in thanking her for wonderful comments and questions. I'm really glad you made the time and I'm just glad to partake for an hour of your extraordinary career. Thank you so much. Thank you. Have a great day. Don't go away, friends, because I've got to point out where we're getting for the next week. We have starting, in fact, tomorrow on our Thursday special, we have Chris Newfield, a return guest. He was with us in 2017, the world's best scholar in public universities. They'll be talking with us about public universities as they change under the impact of anti-black anti-black racism, anti-racist activism and COVID-19. We are out of time, so we're going to wrap things up right now. But again, please join us and thank you all for your questions and comments. In the meantime, please stay safe. Yes, please. Bye, bye, everyone. Bye.