 According to my clock, it's the top of the hour. So let's begin. Let me just welcome everybody. Let me welcome you to the Future Transform. And happy new year. I'm so glad to see all of you in this new and already strange year of 2021. My name is Brian Alexander. I'm the Future Transform creator. I'm the host. I'm the chief CAD herder. And I'll be your guide to the next hour of conversation. I am absolutely delighted to welcome two friends of mine, two colleagues, two people who listen to me with far too much generosity and people who teach me a great deal. I'd like to welcome Eddie Maloney and Joshua Kim. Eddie is at Georgetown University and Joshua is at Dartmouth. So let me just take turns and bring them up one by one. The reason they're here is not only because they're awesome people, they are, but also because they're the authors of a new book, The Low Density University, which is the first scholarly book written about the crisis of 2020 in higher education. It's a fantastic book from Johns Hopkins University Press. If you look in the bottom left of the screen, you'll see a little button where you can click it and learn more. And we'll have them for the next hour just to see what they think and to ask them all kinds of questions. So first let me just bring up Josh Kim and we'll get a chance to start talking. Greetings, sir. Hey Brian, good to see you. Oh, it's great to see you. Happy new year. Happy new year to you. And it's good to see everyone here in this time together. Thank you for coming. I agree. I agree. It's more than a hundred people right now. And Greg Britton just tossed a link to the book into the chat as well. So I'd like to see that. Josh, I have two questions for you. The first question I have is, looking ahead to the rest of calendar 2021, what are the biggest projects and themes for you going forward? Great. So it'll be great to hear what Eddie has to say. Also, we're not used to doing this separately. So I'll start and then Eddie can come in and say really smart things. But first I just want to acknowledge the moment we're in now and how odd it feels in a way to be having this discussion when we're in this midst of this crisis like we've never seen. And I do think to relate it back to the work and what we all do, much of the book, this book that Eddie and I put together, it's about inequality. And it's about the consequences of concentrated privilege and how much COVID-19 both revealed and exacerbated this incredibly unequal society and the injustices that are so inherent. And I think we've seen the outcomes and effects of this in the last few days. And for all of us, this is a time that we very much need to come together and think about the role that higher education needs to play in bringing this country together. And we're so far apart now. So I really do want to recognize what a strange and important time we're in now. Indeed, indeed, I appreciate that. And it's something I'm sure you and Eddie and everybody here will have time to, we have many thoughts about that. Thinking about introducing you to people, one of the ways that you've already revealed yourself is to be a wide ranging and sensitive thinker. Let me ask, what's your current title at Dartmouth? So I'm the director of online programs and strategy, which is a title like, I think many of us now have an higher ed, a completely made up title that doesn't really mean anything and no one ever came before. I think we're very much in a time of higher education reinvention. Brian, the things that you've written about for years, the multiple crises that we're facing. We can talk about economic inequality. We can talk about the decline in the erosion of public funding, underfunding of community colleges, demographic headwinds, which you've been talking about a great deal. So I think I suspect that many of us on this shindig today, whether you're in higher education at a college or outside, you're part of the ecosystem. We're all part of this kind of very strange and disorienting moment where we know that higher education has to be different. But we're not quite clear what that means. We also know there's an important policy element to that. I think a lot of us are looking towards the Biden administration for significant investment in public institutions, particularly community colleges. So that's just a long way of saying that I think we all have sort of strange jobs now in higher ed, in the higher ed ecosystem. Well, that's a really all too accurate way of putting it. And I have to agree. I have to agree. I also wanted to thank you for having the best background of the year, the clean background and the clock reminding us of the time and how important it is to think where we are. Well, won't you hold on for a second and let me bring up your colleague and your co-conspirator, Eddie Maloney. Hello Eddie. Hey Brian, hey Josh, good afternoon everyone. It's good to see everyone. That's great to see you. Did you reverse your camera angle or switch sides of the room? Nope, this is the normal. Am I, which direction am I facing? North, south? Normally I see your bookshelves on the other side of the screen. I don't know, maybe I've been seeing it backwards all this time, didn't know I. Well, happy new year and thank you for coming Eddie. Thanks for having me. It's good to be here. I'm looking forward to the conversation, despite as Josh said the difficulty and the kind of moment that we find ourselves in, certainly a challenge to be in a DC area right now and kind of watch everything unfold a couple of miles from my house. Thank God, that's mad. Are you and George are safe and sound? Yep, everyone is fine. I think we're all doing okay. Good, good. Let me ask the question that I put to Josh a few minutes ago. Looking ahead beyond this week if we can do that for a moment. What are the big projects, the big themes, the big efforts that loom largest for you personally, Eddie? What are you gonna be working on through 2021? Yeah, it's a great question. So I think I would, I wanna come back to what Josh said, which I think is a really important place to begin that conversation about, I think what we're all trying to think about going forward. I think there's obviously this stuff that's immediately in front of many of us as we think about how we prepare for the spring, how we try to make sure that the spring is as effective, as engaging, as meaningful as possible for our students while we still find ourselves in a complex hybrid of in-person, remotes, high flex, hybrids, asynchronous, synchronous modes and trying to make sure that that experience for our students and for our faculty is as meaningful as possible. But I also think many of us are trying to think about what that post-pandemic moment looks like, what the new normal becomes, how we think about higher education, whether that's post-pandemic because we're living with the pandemic more successfully or it's post-pandemic because we've somehow addressed this better and we're trying to understand how we respond to the lessons learned from this moment, from these, what will be at that point, probably 18 months maybe, 14 to 18 months of time or that we've spent trying to think through this new, this new normal or at least this period of time. And what that means for us as we move forward, you know, I think is on my mind, it's on Josh's mind, we're trying to write another book along those lines, we're trying to think about what that looks like to imagine the future of residential education that brings together a lot of these pieces and tries to understand how we respond to and learn from this moment. But it also, I think, is an opportunity to try to think about where we are right now, to think about the questions that Josh raised around equity and access, which are crucial, but also to think about what kind of brought us to this moment in our country and some of the kind of polarization that we have that requires us, I think, to probably fully interrogate some of our expectations, assumptions and our understandings of people who think differently than us and that's part of the job of higher education is to really try to tackle and unpack assumptions that we all share. My sense is that going forward, we're gonna have to do that in two ways. We're not only gonna have to help at a curricular level, think about what it means to help our students unpack assumptions and kind of start to reinvest in new ways of thinking, but also at the higher ed level, just as kind of institutional and as a kind of ecosystem of schools, colleges, universities to really unpack some of the assumptions that have driven higher ed forward for the past few hundred years. And so that I think is part of the job as well. And so both that kind of contents and at a structural level, we have a lot of work to do to unpack, to deconstruct assumptions and to try to build something that plays off of, leverages, understands where we've come from, but also offers a new kind of future. That's really well said. I'm tempted to say, well, thank you for coming. And I mean, everything from our assumptions, our structures, our curriculum, to what we think about higher education seems to be all up for grabs right now. And we're really thinking this very carefully. And we just commend both of you for this book, Love Density University, as well as your previous collaboration on innovation while in education. Those books give all of us good tools for the future of the world. Friends, I have a few questions to put to an author, but I would like you to start circling your questions as well. If you've had a chance to read Love Density University, to spring off the belt, if you haven't had to respond to what our authors just said or what you've heard about the book, this space is all for you and your questions and thoughts. And before I could say anything more, we already have a question. This is from Michael Meeks, coming to us from Louisiana State, which is probably pretty comfortable right about that. Michael asks us briefly, what do you believe is the major purpose of higher education? Is it about the experience, solving polarization, learning, wondering what they mean to deliver a meaningful experience? 15 seconds each. No, 15 seconds each. All of the above. Fantastic question. Yeah, it's a great question. I think there are pithy, maybe obnoxious answers that each of us could give about what the purpose of higher education is. It's complex. It's a complex system. It's trying to accomplish a lot. It's the president of Georgetown University likes to talk about higher education in three ways, which I think are actually useful and meaningful. It's the formation of young women and men. It is the creation of new knowledge and it's the contribution to the common good. And that you can extend out in a variety of ways and you can think about what that means in your context and so on. But higher education as a way of both learning of creating new knowledge and then doing good while you're doing that. And I think that that's probably rights. But when you get down to what higher education means for individuals, what does it mean for society? There are a lot of different purposes for it. One that I talk about often, that Josh has heard me talk about anyway often that I think is really important is that it buys time. It buys time for us to grow. It buys time for us to learn. It buys time for us to spend with others. It buys time for us to reflect. It's an expensive time. It's a cheap time at all. It buys time for us to have conversations with people who are often smarter than us and we can engage in both flights of fancy and we can engage in the practical and the purposeful and the philosophical. All of those things become part of, at least in my mind, what higher education is trying to do. So Brian, I'd like to turn that around a little bit back onto this community and really ask a question, what is the role of higher education in this moment? And I have a very specific question to this community here in this moment. We've heard a lot of calls, a lot of really eloquent statements from leadership, higher education about the need to come together and what we saw at the Capitol is not acceptable. I wonder at this time, do we really need to be calling that this president needs to go? Do we need to say unequivocally, this is not acceptable and we need to stand up that we need to invoke the 25th Amendment. He needs to leave. Is this a time to make those kind of strong statements and to really insert ourselves into this debate? And I'd be really interested what you, what Eddie and what everyone in this hour thinks about that, because that is all that I'm thinking about right now. But to be clear, Gresh, you mean should higher education call for the president? Should leaders of higher education be making strong unequivocal statements about where we are now? We've seen this from some organizations. We've seen this from certainly some political leaders. I'm not quite clear where leaders of higher education or organizations have fallen on this question today. I just haven't been able to keep up because of life, but I'd be interested in talking about that question today with this, if you would allow that with this group here. I think it's a great tip. And let me just put this to, and before I can say anything, we've already had two responses from the chat. We've had one that said, yes, and one said absolutely not. One says, I don't think this is the most important issue at the time. And another says that teaching cannot be neutral. Public intellectuals need obligation to work directly. So let me give you all a few minutes or a few seconds if you'd like to write more in the chat. If you'd like to join us on stage, just click the raise hand button. And I can bring you up to respond to Josh right away or click the Q&A box and type in a comment there. We already have a stack of questions piling up, but this is a really, really crucial one. So let's see, we have more in the chat. A Canadian friend and previous guest of the program says, I think the time to make strong, unequivocal statements was a year or two ago, Steven Downs. Michael Meek says we should listen better. Mark Lentini, Mark, I think we need more from you. I think I just got a fragment of that cut off. Sarah Sangrigorio says teaching is inherently political work with responsibility of scholars to engage in work as a public intellectual, where frustrates me, but there seems to be a disconnect between the business of higher education and the mission of higher education. This task, Karbalri, and please forgive me if I mispronounce your name, asks if not now, when, if not us. Linda J. Goldberg adds, yes, everyone concerned with health of democracy should press for the consequences with the 25th Amendment as the public choices. So rather than impeachment, the 25th Amendment by which the cabinet and then the Congress can rule President Orchard's office and the movement. You've early hit a nerve, Josh, and there are more questions coming in. Mike, a little more responses. Michael Meek takes a counter-review. There's a need of me to have the population that they must bow to our supreme ivory tower position. Mark Lentini's, thank you, Mark. If we got Georgetown's president's guidance to support the common good, college presidents could weigh in on the role of race. That's very precise response. Mr. Barry says, I'm here to think with the future of higher education, and these experts' insights have been exciting and promising models. And she smiles. So that's a sign of topics to address. And Margie Ricks observes the 25th Amendment at this time adds more division. So it looks just as a quick glance. It looks like the majority of participants who are sharing their thoughts support this idea, Josh, to various forms. Some do not, and then there's different ways of thinking about it. Steve Ehrman, wonderful, wonderful person, adds this thought and shows reviewer for us to make this a teachable moment and engagement in the university community and reasoning with evidence about what's acceptable, what's not, or whether the invaders of the capital were domestic terrorists. And before we go on with that, Michael Meeks comes back and asked for the 25th Amendment for Biden-Hunter. Why not wait till facts are in? Emotions are not how we are trained as scientists. And what a great question, Josh. And thank you everybody for a whole slew of answers. And some more are still coming in. Josh, did you, Josh, or Eddie, did you want to respond to those responses? Hey, what do you think, Josh? To me, this feels like a moment where higher education and the leaders of higher education, both at institutions, foundations, leading companies, professional associations, foundations, I think need to take a stand. And to me, what that stand needs to be is clear. I know not everyone will agree, but to me, this crossed lines that were just so far beyond pales of normal or acceptable behavior. So yes, I do. But of course, this is what we do in higher education is we have open and respectful debate as you're modeling, Brian, we listen to each other, to try to bring it back to the book. What Eddie and I were trying to do in 15 scenarios, and it's really nice to have Brian, your editor and our editor, Greg here, as he hears about our next book, but we tried to not say, this is how schools should respond to the pandemic. That wasn't our response. We tried to put up a range of scenarios, 15, and that was Eddie actually got us to 15 and gives the pros and cons and try to get a place for a respectful debate so we could listen to each other, but listen to each other with some frameworks, context, facts, information. So we actually had a conversation where we're all speaking the same language. So it's nice in this environment to have respectful debates, but I think I'm pretty clear about what I think, but again, I'm always listening. Great, that's well modeled. We have one more comment that came in from Emily Daniel Magruder. Certainly we should perform to engage students in close readings and are governing documents in relevant historical precedence. It's interesting to see different disciplines and disciplinary approaches modeled so far. We've had science evoked and now this is literature and history. Rachel Kay Nimer, or Numer, says that one of the purposes of higher education here was to create a well-informed citizenry to help our democracy succeed. Yesterday was evidence of our democracy sliding away. Aren't we one of our goals if we don't speak out? And I mentioned disciplines. Ellen Nuffer offers a law school perspective. Conversations, topics, et cetera, should always relate to the curriculum. How would this be connected to learning goals in particular? So we have a lot of stuff that's with the storm and with questions. Let me turn this back to both of your work, if I can. And by the way, just one more note in case you all aren't impressed enough by Josh and Eddie as thinkers and provocateurs. Not only do they write really good books, but also somehow on the side, Joshua writes roughly 700 columns an hour per inch at higher ed. And so I just want to recommend that you follow his columns because they're always, always good and thoughtful. Let me connect your question, Josh, with how Eddie made this out. If one of the goals of higher education is to have this public good, there is hopefully a good time that we give people the time to respond, to reflect, to think deeply, and to learn in ways that are often very time consuming, like learning a language or learning mathematics or not something that can be done overnight. Do these two contradict each other? Would our response be, as a token character says, too hasty, would it go against our temporal nature? Or is this crisis so unusual, so striking, and so meaningful that we should speed up our clocks? You know, I think I share Josh's opinion on this generally in terms of taking a stand and needing to be clear. I think there's a kind of moment that has a, you know, we're in a kind of emergency space right now, a very short period of time. I think it's a different question and a different problem that this was to extend out in a different kind of way, whether it's the 25th Amendment or it's an impeachment that's quick and clean, but something that actually tries to make sure that the person who is causing the reputable harm to our institutions is not able to do so in the same venue, in the same format. Seems like a different kind of problem than do I have an opinion about this person? Do I have an opinion about this person's politics or style or tone or something? And that the fact that he seems willing to try to burn things down as he scurries out is I think it's just a different kind of problem. And so not to me that dissimilar that when we had to go into emergency remote mode in the sense of we had a problem, we have an emergency, we need to make a decision quickly. And it's not necessarily a decision that we would normally make under different kinds of circumstances. So part of the answer that I would make to your question, Brian, is that, you know, sometimes we have the luxury of time and college, I think, you know, and this is a privileged position to argue for in many respects, and I recognize that and I would always want to complicate it. But that luxury of time is not something we always have and college is often a privileged space. And so to recognize that, that it's not always the same as the needs or the immediacy that might be in front of us in a difficult and challenging moment. Thank you. That's not an easy answer. I would just also say, you know, this is complicated, it's complicated for all of us. And I think it's, you know, we all, I'm sure have versions of different politics and different ways of thinking about this. I do think it's the job of higher education to try to unpack that. And I do think it's the job of higher education to try to push on our assumptions as the word I used earlier, and I'll continue to use it. I think we all approach what we think is right and what we think is wrong from a collection of experiences and stories that we tell ourselves and have been told in ways in which we interpret what's happening in the world. And it's important for us to turn that lens on ourselves as much as it is we find ourselves turning it on, others that we disagree with, that in many respects is going to be the challenge of trying to figure out how we work together, come together. If there's any hope of creating some bridge between the divide that we find ourselves in this kind of tribal moment, it is going to be that we recognize some commonality and we're willing to say that we don't know everything that we're not necessarily always in the right and that we can be as myopic in our perspectives as anyone else, even when we think and feel we are fully justified and right in everything we're doing. Because everyone on the side that we're not on thinks the exact same thing, thinks they are justified for in the ways that they believe and we often just take the arrogant position that we are the ones who have the truth and that's problematic as well. And so it's not a great place to be, but it is an illustrative place in many respects for the value of higher education and what we need to do in order to unpack this moment and break it down. There was an interesting post by David Brooks so I rarely agree with beyond kind of a surface level statement of something but every time, there's all sorts of problematics in my politics with his, but a couple of weeks ago about education and whether or not education could help us get to a place where we could address some of the challenges that we're facing and in particular he raises the issue of diversity and that training and education doesn't necessarily help people become better responsive to issues of equity and diversity, but it's a very, very narrow and limited notion of education that he's working with. Education as a kind of didactic model that is trying to tell people how to think, which is the problem that we often have in the politics that we spouse. We try to tell other people how to think rather than trying to help people listen and unpack and explore. And I think Josh's point that's where we need to be and that's what we need to be investing in an education. But David Brooks in the New York Times this morning. It was last Sunday, not this past Sunday, I think that's right, yeah. Thanks, I'll look for that. As shocking as it may be, I'll look for that. Yeah, no worries, right? A whole stack of questions have come in and one video question. So I'd like to bring in Todi Sindalar who's from the MDH Institute of Health Professions and Instructional Designer there. And Pony has a question, let me just bring it up on stage. Hello, sir. Hi, can you hear me? I can hear you. Hi. So I was brought into the world of higher education in my career, which is the only world that I've worked in professionally, strongly believing in the role of higher education in reducing inequality, perhaps starting with kind of thinking about economic inequality and job opportunities. But the more I look into it, I guess I get very cynical and despair about kind of historically how much higher education has been either complicit or active in propagating inequality. And I think I get particularly cynical about the role of our kind of elite prestigious schools and kind of their role in that. So I guess I'm just, my question is kind of like, how real are our elite schools that kind of take up a lot of space in our culture? I always think about how much ink gets spilled over Harvard versus, say, community colleges in general in the newspapers, and that are we even on the path to being real given how much at those schools is limited in terms of access, in terms of cost, and in terms of the culture that's replicated in those places? That's a great question, Josh. Yeah, it is a great question. And Eddie and I struggle with trying to think about the whole spectrum, the whole ecosystem of higher education and given how diverse it is. I'd say a couple of things to that. I mean, the first thing is that it's clear that nowadays people bringing up these questions are both professors, but also people like you, non-faculty educators, people from all different roles who are coming into higher education in the middle of the higher education education mission, get into it for reasons like you've got into it because believe in the mission, believe that higher education is an engine for opportunity. And then our really starting to question, is higher education, is it an engine for reducing inequality, or is it a system for propagating a very unequal system to make you. And I think this is a question that has been asked for a long time. The difference now is that more of us who are in more diverse roles are asking that. So I appreciate Brian giving up space, a stage, literally for people like us to come in and debate that. I guess the second thing I'd say is that for all of our schools, what makes up our schools are people. Like without the people, the schools don't exist. So I would look to broadening this conversation with as many folks as that many different types of institutions as possible. And I do have hopes with the Biden administration that their Department of Education will start to actually be a convener to bring folks from community colleges and research institutions and all types. We saw that a great deal with the Obama administration and over the last four years, that's totally been gone. Like the Department of Education has played no role in bringing our community together to try to advance that. So to bring it back to policy and where we are now, I do think that this is an opportune time to really address some of the questions that you're asking. Thank you. Thank you very much. I'm really glad you asked that. Friends, if you're new to the forum, that's how video questions work. You can put that easy to bring people up. So if you'd like to join us and follow in Tony's footsteps, just click the raised hand button. But there's also a stack of Q&A buttons or Q&A questions here. So I'd like to make sure folks get a chance to ask these. So let me start bringing up a few of these. One of these comes from April Weyland at Austin Community College. And Austin asks, I'm aware of significant discrepancy in my institution between the demographic composition of our student body and that of the faculty today. How pervasive are such discrepancies nationally? That's a great question. One of you might have a better answer than I. I actually don't know the data at that level of detail between the faculty demographics and the student demographics at every institution. So I couldn't quite say. But my guess is that given the previous question, which I think was an excellent question, a lot of the people who are teaching at all levels of institutions throughout the country are coming from a smaller or select group of institutions. So they're probably already going to, at least intuitively, I would say they're already going to be different generally than the demographics of the institutions that they happen to be teaching. And unless you're only talking about that kind of small elites, higher educational kind of space, where there's just like insular kind of exchange between people who are learning there and teaching there. Yeah, I would say that's pervasive. And just to riff on the question and bring it back to the book and COVID. Eddie and I, we spent a lot of time trying to understand the unequal and unequal effects of the pandemic on people in our community. We talk about students who have the least advantage. Students were carried the most weight and the most challenges with remote learning. We also talk about faculty and just how much for adjunct faculty, for faculty who are not tenure track, those faculty are, of course, disproportionately women, disproportionately underrepresented minorities, and how much more of the burden that they've borne during the past nine months. We also just know this that for faculty who are women who have really had these dual kind of roles of keeping everything going and so much of the household stuff. And that's true for everyone, but certainly it seems disproportionate with women. So I think we have real structural inequalities that COVID is really exposed to a great extent. What you're seeing at your institution is I think the national story. Yes, I think just to add, there's a couple of differences as well. If you can think that growing proportion of students or first generation college students, whereas a lot of faculty and staff are not, that faculty tend to be wider in the population, roughly the same in terms of Asian backgrounds, but less Latinx, less Black, less Indigenous, at least in the United States. There may be a geographical difference as well. I'm not sure about that. Great, great question. And friends at a meta level, if you're new to the forum, that's a great example of a text question. And we have more examples coming, including one from a former guest and longtime participant, Kelly Walsh, the College of Westchester. Kelly asks, what are your thoughts on what might be the most meaningful, long-term changes to our institution that will arise from what we've experienced during the pandemic? Very likely the pandemic. I'll be interested where Eddie says we're talking about almost nothing, but this question as Eddie and I are trying to scope out our next book and trying to get the proposal ready for Greg, who I see, we're working hard on that. So I think that is the question of the hour, is what we will take away, what higher education we'll learn from COVID-19, where we will actually go from here and are we truly at an inflection point? I just wanna throw it over to Eddie to say some things about that. Thanks, Josh, I appreciate that. So I think the argument, well, I know the argument that we're trying to make and the argument I think that kind of lends itself broadly speaking to what we need to think about as we move into the kind of post-pandemic world in higher education is that a lot of the things that we see happening as significant challenges to higher education, the value proposition, the cost challenges, cost inflation challenges, the value proposition in relationship to cost, but also in relationship to the experience and the education that students are getting. So kind of thinking about the potential for students who are going to be coming into a workforce dominated by AI and so on and try what higher ed's role is in trying to prepare students for that and then thinking about questions of equity and diversity and thinking and access and trying to understand the inequities that continue to be developed in our education and trying to understand higher educations and relationship to a changing workforce and clearly now a changing understanding of civics and our responsibility to each other in society and so on. All of those as a set of significant challenges changing demographics and so on, I think are things that we all are recognizing or we're all trying to struggle with. And one of the things that we learned in the pandemic moments, I'm sure there can be a phrase for this moment soon that we're gonna all grab on to, but one of the things that I think we've learned is that what all is said and done, and Josh has used this analogy when you kind of brush away the dust from the kind of skeleton that you're looking at and trying to understand, it all kind of comes back down to teaching and learning. It comes back down to the relationship between educators and students. And my sense and the sense of, I think the book that we're trying to put together is that the problems that we see the higher ed is facing writ large. All of the ones that I just mentioned briefly by name can be addressed in part, not necessarily wholly, but can be addressed in part by a renewed attention and emphasis on teaching and learning by understanding learning at the core of what institutions are trying to accomplish and trying to do. Doesn't mean that that's the sole solution, but that we can't solve those problems without understanding how we're teaching our students and how our students are learning. We can't address them in meaningful ways without actually trying to invest more deeply in what it means to have rich teaching and learning experiences. And then everything else that we do in higher ed is important. I mentioned buying time and certainly the co-curricular experiences and the entire context is important as well and all I need to be part of it. But we've invested a lot in those without necessarily paying as much attention to the teaching and learning space. And we think that that's key. And so it seems maybe potentially obvious and there are a lot of things that follow from that but things like what's the role of digital in higher education teaching and learning as we move forward? What's the role of the institutional structures in relationship to teaching and learning? What's the role of institutional strategy around growth if it actually takes into consideration teaching and learning and so on? Those are the things that we think are I think fundamentally part of the next stage here that it's a renewed emphasis on teaching as the core of what we do in higher ed. What should be an obvious point but I think often gets lost. That's fantastic, what a great step forward. What a great if you will silver lining that we would focus more on teaching and learning. Let me say nothing about that except to thank you for that wonderful answer because we have more questions that are coming up and I'm trying to put them together into shapes that are especially well suited to each other. This is a question from Steve Ehrman. Steve, I'm glad that you can be here for this. He asks, does your institution's curriculum make it likely that most or all students have to grapple with civic engagement? I guess I have to question obviously Josh and Eddie for you but also for those who would like to add more what kind of responses you see. I'll just start here but would be get, I mean, Eddie and I both come from liberal arts institutions and many people today are from institutions, liberal arts institutions where that's core into the values of what an education is. And I think one of the things that Eddie and I talk about is while we very much hope that higher education prepares our students to be gainfully employed. I have a daughter who's a junior in college and one who just finished and I want them their college education to lead to employment but we don't wanna get to a point where we're an education that is broad and engages the kind of questions that Steve's asking. We don't wanna have that be just for the privileged few. And the worry that we have is that the way the trends are going that a liberal arts education will be for only the privileged minority and that we're not doing what we need to do to invest as a society. And just to bring it back to the present moment I think this is one thing that happens if you don't make these investments in education at every level you end up with this polarization that we have. We don't have what Eddie was talking about, a generation, a population that is trained to listen to each other to try to make evidence-based decisions to think broadly to take other perspectives. There's a real danger. So I do hope we grapple with this as a community. I wonder if that effect will be a little, we're still in the middle of things, but to think about if we have more college curriculum, more university curriculum, do more of that. Well, also, yeah, hopefully, I also think we'll start to see some change in what it means to actually educate people to think in civic minded ways. So for example, I think we're all in many institutions trying to understand what the role of data literacy happens to be in the curriculum. It's not something that probably plays a significant role in a lot of institutions, but will probably need to. And that sense of data literacy will have a significant impact on how we think about our engagement at a civic level because so much of what we're doing is informed by information that's coming through algorithms, the information that is being filtered through different kinds of data structures. And without that sense of data literacy, we actually don't have a good sense of civic engagement that we might need or might think that we're actually helping our students understand if we're giving them, you know, a relatively archaic notion of civics today. Ah, that's a good point. There's a sting in the tail there, about archaic curriculum. But to follow up on the liberal arts angle, we have a question from Whittier College, the other end of the continent, and Andrea Rain, who asks liberal arts college, liberal arts is a part of a higher ed that's been in crisis for some years. And correct, it's only made more intense by the pandemic. What kind of recovery or new directions do you foresee for liberal arts institutions? Thank you, Andrea. Yeah, it's, well, partly the reason it's been under attack and it's been declining is this, I think, growing sense that the relationship between higher education and the workforce is necessary and crucial. And so they argument that it's really about creating a kind of vocational model of higher education that is giving students the experience and the expertise they need to go out and get particular kinds of jobs. And those jobs have narrow skill sets in many respects. They could be highly technical, they could be incredibly complicated skill sets, but they're generally relatively narrow. I think there are plenty of people who've made this argument, so this is not me. A Unespoke Robot Proof is probably a good place to go to take a look at this, but this idea that in the future, those narrow skill set jobs, those ones that are highly technical, for example, that require certain kinds of expertise in math and engineering and so on will be more likely to be adopted by AI rather than some of the skill sets that are more aligned with liberal arts. And so we may find ourselves at this particular moment in time at a place where liberal arts is devalued, but we will need to get back to a place where we understand that that is probably at the core of the kind of educational experience that will make students, that will allow students to be productive, to contribute to society in ways that cannot be taken over by machines. My beliefs, that's one argument. I think even if that's not the argument and that's not the sort of dystopic direction you wanna take the future of the workforce, you can, I think, look pretty carefully at different countries that have adopted highly STEM-based curricula for their institutions of higher education and have left to the side the liberal arts and the humanities in ways that have come back to be incredibly detrimental not only to the success of the students, but the success of students in those STEM fields. They're not as well-rounded and not fully understanding questions of ethics and philosophy and core issues of history and civics and the things that are fundamentally humanities-based than their poor developers, their poor engineers, their poor scientists, and those are things that always should be part of, hopefully, we agree, any education, even if it's focused in kind of less fields, less associated with liberal arts institutions. In that case, let me take the moderator's privilege and insert one of my own questions very, very quickly. Do you think that the results of the past few years' crisis, the political crisis, the epidemiological crisis, the social crisis, do you think that we will become more interdisciplinary as a whole? I mean, this is a big, big macro question. What do you think we will dig in and become even more of a digital discipline? So I'd just like to bring this to the current moment. The vast majority of all students who are educated in a liberal arts tradition go to public institutions. And I don't think we can underrate what happened in Georgia just yesterday that with the Senate now being 50-50 and the chance that Biden's policies can actually have a chance of moving through, there's this opportunity for public higher education to get significant investments, which means significant investments in liberal arts education. It doesn't quite answer your question, but I do wanna get to this that I really do think all of us in this space and in higher education have a responsibility to advocate that this happens. We actually, the table has been set, but it won't happen unless all of us actually really push it and advocate to get there. So it really does come down to funding in a way and our public institutions have been so starved of funding for so long now that these values that we all hold in common, it's very difficult to push forward with no money. Michael Meeks asks, how do we pay for it? Get is now insane. Well, that was my privilege, but let me withdraw my privilege because we have better questions that just come in. I'll make sure we get in before we're almost out of time. Nina Huntsman at EDX, where she's a VP of learning asks, how do we work faultfully against the false dichotomy between low-density vocational and high-density liberal arts so that we can avoid reifying the current privileged access to the humanities? Nina, it's good to see you. Yeah, I think that's an important question. I think you start to draw important relationships between the two, why they both inform each other. And as Brian was saying, kind of an interdisciplinary approach becomes possibly the most successful approach. We can show why liberal arts are important to the more technical vocational and why the vocational become valuable for people who are invested in thinking in the kind of core liberal arts. So how do you do that? Well, through education, I think is how you do that through creating curricula that actually are intentionally trying to understand the relationship between the two of those rather than segmenting them off. I mean, in some ways it's as simple as that and it's as complex as that, as anyone who's tried to think about curricula at any institution knows that's not a simple thing to do. But we find ourselves in this moment where we might be able to... I hate to think about terms like leverage and even silver lining phrases like silver linings and whatnot, the opportunities that we find ourselves to create change from. But certainly it's a moment to be reflective. It's a moment to think about where we are and what we're missing because things are changing and will likely change going forward and if they're going to change, ideally leaders who are at institutions that may be vulnerable or maybe want to be innovative and forward thinking should be doing so intentionally rather than reactively and should be doing so with an idea that there are some values that they want to invest in, even if those values are differentiating themselves from other institutions which may very well be the possibility. I think it's the case arguably anyway that the large majority of our institutions follow fairly limited models of what higher ed could be and maybe that will change and therefore you could get to a place where you could start to break down that dichotomy. But it's a hard thing to shift and I'll just take it back to the point where I started. It's a hard thing to shift because of time. Time is expensive for buying time and you want to do a lot in that time and how you do that and how you actually get students to make choices that allow them to see that complexity as hard. Well said. Thank you. Both of you. One quick question. I just put this into the chat. The discussion in the chat box and the questions that have come in and the questions have been extremely proliferating. There have been so many of them. We can't get to them all today. If anyone objects to me publishing them to the web as a blog post after this, please let me know. I can anonymize names easily but I don't want to lose all the richness. We will of course have a video conversation. We'll put it in the chat or directly contact me directly. We have a question that comes in from the suspended Christine Wolf-Eisenberg. She clarified the question so I'm going to put it quicker. In response to the impact of the pandemic and the structural continuity of approaches, do you anticipate any long-term changes to how these students are prepared to act in the jobs? As she qualifies this place, she's asking will our emphasis shift more towards teaching as opposed to primarily exclusively research? Is that worth reading? I'll try to just quickly. We're running out of time. Christina, thank you for that question. Good to see you. None of this is set in stone. The answers to those questions will depend on conversations like this where people like us who have our stakeholders or some impact on how this is done answer that question. So who knows, right? But what will determine this is how we all decide together as a community what higher ed needs to be coming out of COVID, coming out of the Trump four years, coming out of this moment that we're in now. And this is incredibly consequential. I certainly hope so. I think Eddie and I are fighting for that change to happen. But again, it will take these ideas getting some purchase in the marketplace of higher ed, marketplace of ideas that is higher ed. Which I think that's the challenge, right? So what happens after this moment? What happens over the next year or two years, three years and so on? It's going to be very easy for a lot of institutions to just regress to a norm. Even if that norm is different than it was in 2019, it'll still be kind of has the potential of kind of pulling back to some assumptions of where things need to settle that do not require a lot of change. So PhD students continuing to be taught to do research and scholarship and not to teach at all. But we have an opportunity to try to think differently and to see some momentum that has been built up toward change but also a huge population, basically the entire population of faculty and students who've now had an experience that we can build on, that we can try to learn from, that we can do better in in ways that we have never have been able to reach this many people and potentially acknowledge change in this kind of ubiquitous way without this, so as sad as that is. What makes me the opposite of sad but quite happy is that you will have been sent past the guests and all of you involved in this conversation have been ferociously good participants. This has been a high octane, high intellect, provocative, thoughtful, reflective and very useful conversation all in one hour. I'm deeply grateful, deeply impressed. We have more questions and more comments to come. But first, I want to thank you, Josh. I want to thank you, Eddie, both, for doing it fantastic. Let me ask, what are the best ways to keep up with both of you these days? Josh, I'm pointing people towards your column and inside higher ed. Is that where most of your brain is online these days? Eddie and I write together in that space as much as possible as well. That's good. Eddie, is your collaboration with Josh both in books and on inside higher ed columns the best way for us to find you? I never, ever, ever leave this chair. So I think it's really easy to find me. I'm here 24-7. I haven't left since March of last year. We can't find you there in person. We can't see. Well, thank you both. Again, thank you, everyone, for just a fantastic start for the year. I really appreciate this. But don't go, because I have to point out that I am going to publish the unasked questions and the chat box after this. But also, I just want to draw attention to where we're headed in the next few weeks. So just to remind you again that if you like the Future Transform, we have more content coming in the next two and a half months. So you can see all this good stuff, so go to tinyworld.com slash forum 2021. If you want to join our book club and keep talking about this fantastic novel, there's the link for that. If you'd like to keep talking about these issues, the question of curriculum, the questions of inequality, the questions of the impact of the pandemic, and so on. Here are all kinds of venues for us in the social media. And if you want to go back into the past and look at our 235 recordings, including ones featuring Josh and Eddie, just go to tinyworld.com slash FDF archive. And above all, please, everyone, stay safe. This is an extraordinary time. I'm grateful to you for sharing the time with us and sharing your thoughts. Please take care and happy New Year. Bye-bye.