 Let me welcome everybody. Let me welcome you to the Future Trends Forum. My name is Brian Alexander. I'm the host, the Forum's creator, and your guide and cat herder for the next hour. I'm absolutely delighted to welcome President Saul Jimenez-Andoval. He's Interim President at Fresno State University, part of the California State University System. And we're bringing him in here for a couple of reasons. One is he's brilliant and fascinating. And another is that we are very, very interested in how presidential leadership can change the future of higher education. We've hosted a couple of presidents before from very different institutions, and now we get to take a look at a public university in a very big system that's doing a lot of interesting work. So let me just bring President Jimenez-Andoval up on stage. And there you are. Welcome. I am. I'm so glad to see you. Thank you for making the time for us today. Yeah, I'm very pleased to be here, and thanks for the honor. Oh, it's my pleasure, believe me. You know, we like to ask guests all kinds of questions to introduce themselves. And as academics, we often have long introductions. So we think we figure out the perfect question for an introduction, which is to ask you, what are you going to be working on for the next year? Now, what's going to be taking up the most time and what's going to be top of mind, the biggest ideas? Really, the top of mind is fall 2021. How do we repopulate safely? We're currently waiting for guidance from the state government to see if we can reduce from six feet to three feet. The social distancing that that we're currently following here as a state. That's going to be a huge game changer for us. We're able to change that to three feet. That's one part. The other part, though, is what about mental health? How do we deal with the mental health of our students or faculty and our staff? Moving through this pandemic has been front and center in my mind. How do we move with the fact that none of our freshmen know what it's like to be on a campus at Fresno State? They don't know what it's like to be at a university. Also, you know, what is it like to reconfigure, reconceptualize teaching and learning, producing knowledge and consuming knowledge as well? What have we learned from all of this process right now about resources that we create within ourselves but then that we've collaborated with each other as well? I've learned so much about different disciplines, you know, coming together. They might seem disparate, you know, one from the other, but at the end, they're merging together these fascinating fields that I think are the fields of the future. So all of these things, I think, you know, go towards what does the future of Fresno State look like in an area where 65% of our students are first generation, in an area where it's an agricultural, it's the agricultural center of California. It's the most productive county in the US as far as agriculture is concerned. What do we do about the sense of community while at the same time we innovate? How do we keep the traditions that are near and, you know, and dear to our heart, but at the same time, how do we keep on innovating in a way that we directly interface with industry as well? So these are a lot of thoughts, I know, and each one of them, you know, ramifies into, you know, a lot of issues as well. But that's really where I am right now more than anything. Well, that's fantastic. That's fantastic. That's exactly what we, and that's terrific stuff. Friends, I have all kinds of questions that I would love to ask, but the purpose of the forum is for you to ask your questions. So again, just remember you can either click on that raised hand button to tell us you want to join us up on stage for video or you can click the question mark. And some of you have already done this. Oh, my gosh. So before I can even finish my sentence, people are putting in questions. All right, we've got one coming up here from Rosalind Gentry, who is a professor at Colorado Tech. The mental health of students and staff is so important. How do institutions work in a matter that takes the mental health of its constituents into consideration? That's a great question, and I really appreciate that, Professor. We did a series of fast surveys with our students because I really wanted to know what the pulse of our students were. I was very concerned with our students being in the virtual mode and then all of a sudden having 10, 12% of them dropping out because they could not keep up with virtual modality. So right from the beginning, we saw two fundamental things that are really important. One, our students felt proud and connected to the university. They felt proud and connected with their professors. They felt like they could reach out to their professors with clear questions about the material and they could get clear answers and clear help on that. So that portion of it was pretty strong. The other part, though, was really enlightening. And the other part led us to believe that students were craving for the informal situations in which we can just engage with each other, not necessarily in our fields, but I can remember being a professor in the classroom, being there 10 minutes ahead of time, setting up my books and my PowerPoint and whatever it was I was going to present that day. And then students would stream by and I would just simply scan, a really fast scan of the room and say, what's going on with your chemistry? How did you do with your chemistry midterm? What about that essay that you were working on for Professor X, Y and Z? Or what's happening with your child? And that is so valuable. That is what is valuable because that established the scenario or the framework from which to say we are a group, we are a unit and collectively together, we are going to learn something that is meaningful. And that initial part, that informal hallway discussion, the informal before the classroom discussion of I'm seeing you as a person and I'm asking about how you're doing is what our students were craving the most. It's the informal situations that they told us through these surveys. We want to relate to our fellow students informally and also to our professors as well. So based on that then, I came up with a task force and I didn't want to call it just the mental health task force because that's pretty typical. So being a professor of Spanish and Portuguese, I started to think about alegría and alegría in Spanish means happiness or joy. And I felt that we needed more joy and happiness in just getting to know each other on an informal basis. So then I named the task force the alegría mental health task force. So now people call it the alegría task force and it's spun off by a video that I made from my house, not wearing a tie, I was wearing a polo, I was with my two sons and my wife and we were just talking about how we have dealt as a unit, as a family throughout this process by cooking, by telling stories, by playing with the kids more. So it's not mental health per se, but it's how it is that we deal with the pressures that really alleviate the notion of what mental health is all about. So based on that then now we have a series of events and resources as well. So the very formal part on the one side, but then the very informal part on the other side where we just have events for the sake of being with each other and creating community as well. That's fantastic. I'm blown away by this. I'm partly because I'm in the kindergarten level of Spanish so I just learned another important word, alegría. Yeah. Rosalind, thank you for that fantastic question. And I just, I'm in awe of this answer. And again Rosalind, if you'd like to follow up, please feel free. By the way, if anybody is new to the forum, this is how that question and answer works. You can see we flashed at the screen and read out loud and our guests most generously responded. We have more questions piling in as I say that. So let's get one from Kate Montgomery. Hello Kate. She asks, would you speak more to some of the traditions and innovations that are important to Fresno State University? So there are some traditions that are really important at Fresno State. Traditions that deal with the football, for example, with football is a huge, it brings people together. And on the very first football game that we have, we have both the first-time freshmen and also the transfer students run out with our team together sort of like to say, you know, we're both going to make it to the finish line together. So that's sort of like one of the traditions, right? But there are other traditions that are enshrined within our own disciplines that sometimes we are not aware of. So there are traditions, you know, that we celebrate, you know, on an everyday basis like, you know, the football scenario that I just gave you right now. But other traditions are kind of like counterproductive. I'm from Spanish and Portuguese. That's my field poetry. And within that field, it seems like the biggest lesson that I would always teach my students was the following. It's not whether you're going to encounter defeat. It's not whether you're going to make mistakes. It's not whether you're going to encounter disappointment. Or it's not whether you're going to encounter somebody telling you you're not good enough because all of these are glass ceilings, you know, that are being put upon us on a daily basis, right? It's whether or how you're going to bounce back. It's how you're going to respond to this defeat or to this embracing the suck, you know, like Brene Brown says, right? Or how it is that you say, I'm going to embrace the situation and learn from it. So that was like the biggest lesson that I would give my students. But in reality, we are also trained within our disciplines. And this is to your point, right? What are other traditions that oftentimes we're territorial to a fault? We're territorial because I don't want to acknowledge or I want to learn, for example, as a Spanish and Portuguese professor of poetry about the commonalities that there might exist between English poetry of the 19th century with 19th century Spanish and Portuguese poetry or French influence or the Italian or the Portuguese or the African or the Asian traditions as well. So it seems like there's this, there's this sort of like tradition to territorialize ourselves and perceive us each other as I'm part of this club, I'm part of this tribe, but you're part of the, you know, you're in social sciences therefore you're not a humanist or you're in the sciences, therefore you don't understand the concept of music and art and you know, whatever else. Whereas in reality, knowledge to me is a comprehensive holistic approach to becoming yourself and to becoming human. So more of that is needed at our institutions. How do we, how do we collaborate cross disciplines and leave some of that traditionality behind and really innovate forward by collaborating with somebody like, for example, criminology and art? If we have the biggest major at Fresno State criminology with 1800 students who want to go into either the police force or, you know, everything in between, I want those students to understand Shakespeare. I want the students to understand painting. I want them to understand music so that they're able to empathize, you know, within their career. So more of that is needed, I think within our universities nowadays. That's a fantastic question. And as a, as a humanist with an English left degree, I'm going to hold back. I'm going to hold back and not talk about 19th century poetry. It's 10 things. Let's do it. Maybe at the end, maybe at the end. Okay. Thank you for asking a great question. And President Jiminez Sandoval, thank you for answering both in a way of recognizing the traditions but also trying to get past them. We have more questions that are just coming in like mad about this. And one comes back to your question about diversity in your student body. This is from John Warren. You have a high level diversity with your students. Are there some things you do around shared values and inclusion to increase a sense of community? That's a great question. We do have a very diverse student body at Fresno State in the, Fresno is the ninth most diversity in the United States and within Fresno Unified, which is the largest district within our region, more than 120 languages are spoken by our students. So that gives you an idea of the layers of people who have settled in this fertile land of the Central Valley and who call this, you know, their home. Within that then, we are an HSI, Hispanic Survey and Institution and we're also an ANAP-PC as well. So we're both of that. And what my journey has been at Fresno State, I've been a professor, I was a professor of Fresno State in 2000. And then after that, I became the chair of my department. And then after that, I became the dean of the College of Arts and Humanities and then I became the provost and I'm the interim president. So you can see that I have a pretty deep understanding of the region and of what has happened to the region within the last 21 years that I've been here. But this journey that I've had at Fresno State, it's also a journey of discovery for me. What does it mean to be a diversity-focused university? A name and officially HSI, ANAP-PC, but more than anything in spirit. Sure, we have services. We have a lot of services for our students and these services really convey a sense of belonging to our students from all walks of life. But what I want more than anything is to address how do we come together in a moment in time where I say to you, Asian-American colleague of mine, I see you and I see the trajectory and the tradition and I see the history of oppression and exclusionary acts, et cetera, et cetera. But I see your contributions. I see your beauty. I see the beauty of your values. I see the beauty of everything that you bring to the table and make Fresno State a rich place in which we can all be together. So I want to focus it on two areas then. One part is the services to our students. Absolutely, I'm there. Student Affairs is fundamental to our mission. But the other part is how do we embrace the identity fully and completely that we are a multicultural community of people? And I'll give you just a tiny brief example. I was hiking with my two sons, 13 and 15, where we're in the high Sierras. And then all of a sudden my younger son said, hey, Papa, look down there. They're having a birthday party. And we looked from down to a place where there was a picnic table and then there was a cake. And then right next to the cake, there was a tree. Then right next to the tree, there was a piñata. And then the people who had the piñata and the cake were Asian-Americans. And I just stopped all of a sudden. And I told my two sons, we have to take this moment in for the beauty of it that it represents. It is one people taking the traditions of another people and saying, I see you and you belong to me as much as I belong to you, right? So it's sort of like it's the celebration of who we are as Americans moving together holistically by appreciating what we each bring to the table. That's what I want to focus on. I want to do the services, but I really want to focus on this spiritual, if you want to call it like that, right? On this identity of who we are as an institution more than anything. Let's see if Martin Buber and I, Val, that kind of friendship. That's, again, John, thank you for that great question. John's a director and associate prof at George Washington University. And thank you for the fantastic answer. We have a video question coming up. So I'd like to beam the asker up on stage. Great. Let me make sure this works. Hello, this is George Station, a lecturer at the Cal State. Monterey Bay, hello. Oh, great. Hi, President Jimenez-Sandoval. I'm welcome. I see. So Ryan knows that I tend to bring two questions so long. And so if we have time, I'll try to ask both. But it's related to what you've been talking about. And I know you've talked about some of your humanities faculty background and how you've engaged with it in your other roles. But please say more about how you bring this into the room with your senior leadership when you're discussing today's higher ed issues, including any post-pandemic planning. And if so, how you do that and do you feel any personal or professional conflicts? And I'll follow up, but maybe if we can get started with that, how you bring that faculty background into the room with your senior leadership and how that's going. So that's a great question. I truly, truly appreciate that question. Anything and everything I do goes back in my mind to the magic I saw in the classroom. That's it. I can remember seeing my students coming in as freshmen and thinking to themselves, I'm an imposter. I shouldn't be here. The buildings are too tall. And this campus is just way too big for me and I'm not going to make it. Whereas I, as a professor, would see them and would say to them, I see your talents and I see your struggles. And those same struggles that I see in you are actually your strengths. How can we take all of that which you have inside of you that is hurting you or that has hurt you in the past? How can we take it into your head and then really put it on its head and say, we are moving together because you are going to learn from this. You're going to embrace this and move together with a new set of eyes that education will give you. And I can remember building the confidence of my students slowly with that first essay that had a lot of feedback but it was constructive feedback. I would say, I see a lot of potential here because what you are doing is you are writing yourself into your essay. It's not just an assignment that I give you. But more than anything, what is it? It is an exercise of identity building for yourself because only you can write that one sentence that you will give me. Only you can write that one thesis that you will develop in that one essay. It goes back to forensic linguistics, right? Or forensic writing, right? How is it that each one of us chooses syntax, words, everything else in between paragraph formation, ideas, and it's only mine? It's my fingerprints, my writing. So slowly I would build my students and then at the end I would see them as seniors just ready to take on the world. And I would see, at graduation, the St. Mark's Center which holds 15,000 spectators filled to the brim of one student bringing 13.6 individuals to celebrate with her or with him that they had graduated. It was the grandmother and the parents and the sisters and the cousins. Everyone was there. And that drives me. So I bring that to the cabinet. I bring the student-centered approach from the perspective of empowering faculty to inspire. I see that student success is based on two fundamental pillars in my mind. One pillar is a sense of belonging, student affairs, clubs, organizations, services. That's very fundamental. But the second part, it is belonging in a classroom. It is saying to herself or himself, I'm getting a B in calculus and guess what? It's tough, but I'm going to make it. Or I'm getting an A in writing and it's tough, but I'm going to make it. This combination of these two, that's what gets us to the finish line more than anything. And that's what I bring to the table together with Athletics, of course, which brings us all together from all backgrounds and from all ethnicities, right? From all different demographics to say, hey, that's our team and we're going to cheer for that team to make it to the finish line. So, okay. So as I hear you and appreciate these comments and I'm wondering now for the, I know that I feel so that means that everybody up the line through the president must also feel this conflict between everything you've just said about a rich liberal education and the drive for a credentialed workforce and the economic engine of California and all the other stuff that we know is part of the CSU mission. So, my second question is really about that, but since the other topic kind of split in, let me also ask how can you bring all that in as well as what we need to do in terms of all the stuff that's on all the campus and the chancellor's website about anti-racism in the wake of last spring and summer's events, but also obviously what's going on in the country this week that frankly you and the other presidents and the chancellor are probably thinking about how to address even right now. It's, you know, that part of it is extremely difficult on its own without also having to worry about a credentialed workforce in a rich liberal education. Yeah, I believe that our liberal education needs to be retooled, but not necessarily in the way that many think. I believe that we need to retool in making our students conscious of the value of what our liberal education represents. I don't want to have students who graduate and say I'm not prepared for the workforce because that means that they don't understand what's in their toolkit. It means that they don't understand how to, for example, combine fields of knowledge that are intricately connected to each other. And I'll give you just a brief example of that. When I graduated from UC Irvine, I had to take a class in evolutionary biology as a humanist and I was taking that because it was just required of me. So I learned all about Darwin and I learned all about, you know, a lot of books and I graduated back then without knowing how to use that within my own humanistic conception of the world. Only years later, did I realize the Darwin's notion of evolution and becoming is the same notion of evolution and becoming that we humanists espouse with writing and thought processes and everything else. So to go back to your question then, do we give up liberal education? Absolutely not. That's what makes us unique. And in the liberal education is where we find the idea of the individual. Is where we foster and hammer out, right? Slowly, the idea of this is who I am and this is who I'm going to become within society. I'm going to inhabit my place in society. That journey of discovery, that journey of becoming, it's also a journey of anti-racism. It's also a journey of educating our students in ways of becoming anti-racists and in ways of saying to ourselves, we have a history in the US. We have a history in California, a very specific history in California. What is this history and how do we learn from it to move beyond these conceptions of these are the skills, this is the liberal education and they cannot come together. I think on the other hand, I also think about how we graduate our students and then all of a sudden we say goodbye to them. You have a B.A. in Spanish literature. See you later or see you maybe never. That's wrong. What we need to do is say, you have a B.A. in Spanish literature. That's great. Guess what? We have stackable certificates for you in order to learn how to teach A.P. Spanish. In order to learn how to teach advanced grammar, how to teach the renaissance, how to teach anti-racism within the curriculum of Spanish literature. So how do we conceive the B.A. or the B.S. as the first step towards a lifelong journey of becoming and learning and becoming engaged with our institutions as well, combined with what you're saying, which is critical right now, how do we directly engage with history and then learn from it? Yeah, that's great. And thank you so much. I'm going to just note for the record that my bachelor's was in physics. I didn't use it for 14 years, but the two philosophy classes that I took as electives probably started serving me immediately. Even though they were not required, they were electives. So I really hope we can retain some of that in the drive to do some other things during and post-pandemic as well. Brian, thanks for bringing me up. And Mr. President, thanks for the comments on this. I appreciate you. Thank you. Always a pleasure to see you, my friend George. If you're new to the forum or you're new to the Shindig technology, that's how a video question works. So if you'd like to follow George and be beamed up on stage, just press that raised hand button. But meanwhile, in the meantime, we have more questions coming in. And again, thank you, President Timonet Sandoval for a very, very great answer. My pleasure. We have one coming from Sally Mariamu. I'm sorry, Mariamu at Portland State. And she asks, what do you mean by reconceptualizing the work at the public university? Could you give some examples or elaborate? Yeah, that's a great follow. I appreciate that, Sally. How can we present ourselves to the general public and let them know the breadth and scope and value of our institution? That's one part of it. And within that one part then, how do we then as an institution retool within ourselves and innovate as well? When I have been taught and when I have been trained in a very specific field. So I was rewarded throughout my educational career because I was able to produce something that within a specific field was highly rewarded. I was able to write very specifically about a very specific period of time within Spanish literature. So how do we then retool that and say, can I branch out a little bit into other fields? How is it that my skills, my training, is speaking directly to today's market, to today's industry needs? How do I come up with a class specifically on leadership that deals with the greatest lessons of leadership from across the spectrum? Can I take, for example, Cervantes? Can I take Cervantes and then combine him with Shakespeare? Can I take Shakespeare and combine him with Maya Angelou? How can I string together one class that I would like CEOs or I would like lawyers or attorneys to understand, hey, stop and smell the roses. This is what it's all about and I'm going to teach you what leadership means to me based on these great incredible authors from the past. So that's one part. The other part, though, is how do we brand ourselves? How do we come up with a value of what we have to contribute to society? I think oftentimes people see institutions of higher education and they don't, they see them as, you know, athletic events. That's great. That's awesome. It brings us together. We create community in cheering for a team. But they don't really understand that, for example, within the Fresno region, 60% of our administrators in elementary schools, junior high schools, high schools, et cetera, et cetera, 60% of them have degrees of higher education, masters of or an EDD from Fresno State. That means something. How do we convey to them what direct impact we have within our society? So two things then. On the one hand, how do we make connections beyond ourselves because that's what our students are doing. It is no longer the time that a student is going to graduate from Fresno State or any other university and then they will be at the one initial job for like five or 10 years. They go into that job and then within two years, a new horizon opens up or a new opportunity opens up. And at that point, it is the tools that Professor George from Monterey Bay is talking about these liberal arts tools that are creative that work outside the box that are going to kick in and say, hey, I think I can retool myself, redefine myself, and apply for this position because I have the right leadership aspirations. So how do we do both, right? How do we innovate within ourselves on the one hand? But at the same time, how do we convey the breadth, scope, and deep value that we provide society on a daily basis? Hold that thought because we have a question came in that develops a little further. I want to make sure that we can pounce on this at this time. This is from Kenan Solonero. What do you think the lifelong learning path where adults can come back to the cultural worship experience after having been in the workplace? So when they cross that horizon or when they see that horizon, they then turn to Fresno State to cross it. Right. That is exactly it. I think that goes back to the earlier point that I made. It's not graduating our students and saying goodbye to them and say, you know, see you never. It's how do we do two things with our alumni? Number one, engage them with stackable credentials or engage them with just fun classes that will enrich their lives. It doesn't have to be that I get, you know, one certificate from you that says that I took a class, a series of classes that is now going to make me more marketable in HR. Although that would be good, right? To see how across the board we could come up with like a series of four classes that give you the tools and the talents to be an effective HR manager. So and on the one hand, but on the other hand then, how do we engage with our alumni who are two years into the workforce? Four years, 10 years, 15 years and ask them the basic question. What tools did we provide you? What did we do well? And what are our areas of opportunity? And of course, you know, when, when the, the polls have come out on this, I think there's a poll that's out there that says that Provost believed that 94% of their students are fully equipped to go into the workforce. And then the flip side of it, of course is that the students believe 62% of the students believe that they were not equipped well enough to enter the workforce. So only 30, 70% think that, you know, they're well equipped to it. So how do we make that come together, right? One with the other more than anything. How do we conceptualize the tools that are in the tool, the toolkit of our students and say to them, here are, here are, here's the connection. You took evolutionary biology because guess what? It's going to help you as a writer to have a sense of, of, you know, becoming evolution within your own thought. So for instance, the state becomes a kind of lifelong learning liberal arts experience. Absolutely. This is fantastic. And, and, and friends, we have more questions that have come up and a couple of them are, are in a more technical nature. And I think this is a good time to bring them in. We have one from Kiel, hello Kiel who asks, what do you think of alternative credentialing like Google certificates and its threat to the higher ed business model and to enrollments? I do think that we do, we do need to pay attention to what, what they're doing because if Google does something, it's not like we can say, you know, oh, you know, we're secure enough in what we have to do and whatever else. So, and that, that's really what my point is. We can no longer afford that we will have hundreds and thousands of students at our doorstep wanting to come to our institutions because we believe that an educational journey is transformative. So I do believe that we also have to be competitive. I do believe that we also have to say, we have to, we have to market ourselves as good if not better than what Google is doing to, to its brand name. When somebody hears Google, when somebody hears Amazon, when somebody hears, you know, Nike or whatever else, immediately a whole host of like really positive things come to mind. Sometimes negative things as well, but for the most part is overwhelmingly positive. How do we come up with a strategy that says to our constituents who have already gone through this or who don't know about us as well, this is what we give you. This is what the value is. So it goes back to the sense of value on the one hand, but then on the other hand, it also goes back to the sense of innovation. How do we innovate within the Academy when the Academy is very, very, very difficult to innovate? And I'll just give you just a brief example. I graduated in 2000 with my PhD, but the professors who taught me graduated with their PhDs in the 80s. So how current is my PhD? And of course they were all doing current research and everything else, but everything sort of like happens, it takes longer to happen within academia. We are very slow to adapt and we're very slow to change because if I change, that means that 15 years of my teaching or 15 years of my publishing has to be all of a sudden redefined. Or suddenly my identity is inherently combined with what I write. And I don't wanna say that, guess what, I was wrong in essay number one and number three and I'm going to redefine what I said that. It's quite difficult because it's an identity issue more than anything as well. And it's personal in the very core. Do you think the events of one year ago when higher education rapidly flipped online, where CSU took a major lead in that? I mean, do you think that should give us some inspiration for academia's ability to innovate? I think we have innovated, Brian. I think we have gone to a point where we cannot go back to where we were in 2019. And I think the challenge now is how do we keep innovating? What do we do, for example, with a million hours of video that Fresno State has produced in teaching? How do we incorporate that to a new model of teaching where if I were in the classroom, I would tell my students the following, number one, listen to my video, number two, read the book and then come to class. And when you do come to class, I'm not going to discuss the plot anymore because that's a given already. That's what the video told you already. Now I'm going to engage with you in a high-powered level of what's a theoretical underpinning of this argument? How do we apply it? What's its value? How do we move forward? Where are its flaws? How do I teach Derrida to my students, right, in a way that they actually understand Deridian thought, the level where they're not struggling through the sentences, but now they're proficient in the language and they see through the structurality of structure. That's a very impressive outcome to have. But we take one step back. Describing your million hours of video, we have a question from John Henry Steitz that follows specifically on that point. Is a colleague of mine in Georgetown, or he says, do you think that synchronous remote instruction is a lasting pedagogy post-pandemic or is it just a stopgap during the pandemic? I don't think that that will go away. But I do think that we need to come up with a medium point that is the sweet spot. I don't think that full synchronous works well for my population of students, for the 65% who are first generation and 35% who are second, third, fourth, fifth generation bulldogs. It is simply not going to work. And I'll give you just a brief example of that. Writing is fundamental to Fresno State because every freshman has to take writing. And we have data that says that if a freshman takes a writing class, the writing class that she or he has to take and gets a D or an F, they only have 12% chance of graduating in six years. So if my writing grades take a dip, which they did because they were all synchronous, many of them were synchronous, that's a problem for me. Because that means that now I have a population of freshmen that needs to be helped, empowered to believe in themselves. And now we have a task force that is going to take care of that, that specific, you know, that specific writing section. But to your point then, I don't think that within our liberal arts education, we can claim that we are providing a liberal arts education without the experience. And it goes back to the surveys that I spoke about at the beginning of our session. We need the informal experience. It's not just a piece of paper that says I graduated from Fresno State. It is a piece of paper that represents a whole host of experiences behind me that deal with my own peers and with my professors and with, you know, how I got involved with internships and how it is that I had an aha moment and said, I'm going to become her or I'm going to become him. It's really about that. And I don't know that we can do that as effectively or effectively within the synchronous world. I think the sweet spot will be Tuesday, Thursday classes. Great. Tuesday you will meet, you know, synchronously, but Thursday you will be asynchronous. But we need, within my population of students, they need that connection with their instructor. We've had this as a theme for the past year on the forum, this sense that asynchronous education is in many ways preferable for people who don't have access to blazing fast internet. And for people who are not nth generation students, John Henry, thank you. That's a great question. And I hope perhaps, John, this fall, I'll actually get to see you in person. We have more questions coming in. And we also have 10 minutes left. So if you want to join us on stage, just, you know, click the raise hand button. This is probably our last chance. We have a couple of other questions that really speak to Fresno State. One of them comes from Karen Bellignier, who asks, given the local nature of public institutions and the growth of online options, how do public institutions balance the emphasis on serving the state and online learners? Online learners can be national or international. I'll put that back up on the screen so everyone can see it. Sure. So the question deals with, you know, how do we internationalize our campuses without really, as you say in English, throwing the baby out with a bathwater, right? Without sacrificing the local population. And that is a very good question because, of course, as you all know, our international students are deeply valuable to our own educational experiences at Fresno State because on the one hand, they provide a different perspective to our students, many of whom have not gone beyond the Valley. So with their being, for example, involved with someone, you know, in the classroom or engaging with someone in the classroom who is from the Middle East or who is from, you know, China or Japan or South America or Mexico or any other part of the world, they do open their eyes to greater possibilities of thinking and collaborating and et cetera, et cetera. At the same time, I think public universities' primary mission is to empower their own communities. And within Fresno, the Fresno region, 80% of my students stay in the region after graduating from Fresno State, 80%. Wow. That's a huge, huge impact that we have in the community. So it's not like, you know, we graduate our students and then that's it. It is the one university, the one, and we have other universities in the area as well, but it's the one university that truly permeates every facet and every, you know, aspect of life within the Fresno region and beyond. So can I in good conscience say, I'm going to bring on, you know, 15, 20, 30% of international students in order then, you know, to one, provide that experience to our students, but to provide, you know, larger revenue for the university as well because it's also a revenue issue. I don't think that in good conscience, I could do that. My primary fundamental mission is my commitment to the region and how it is that this region benefits from Fresno State and then vice versa. How it is that we receive students from all kinds of backgrounds and then within, you know, four or five years, they graduate and then they become the leaders that really uplift and raise the quality of life for everyone within the region and beyond. When you say region, how big is that? It's about 150-mile region more than anything. To the south would be Bakersfield, which is our sister university. To the north would be Santa's Laws, which is the other CSU University. And then to the west would be Monterey Bay, which Professor George comes. That is primarily our region right there. So it's a four-county region more than anything. And this four-county region produces about close to $20 billion in agricultural production. Hence, you know, the most productive region within the U.S. would be our region as well. Thank you. Thank you. And thank you for answering that great question, Karen. This really, this question of local versus state versus transnational is very, very important. Yeah. We have a couple of questionnaires who have follow-up questions. And one comes again from Sally Muriamu at Portland State. And she asks, how do you see your desire for cross-disciplinarity with the demand for students to leave with specific skills? I have both of those as innovations. Are they complementary or not? I think they complement each other perfectly, Sally. I think our students, for example, in our engineers, I'll take our engineers as an example, they want to go into the workforce with very specific skills and very specific sets of knowledge at their disposal. At the same time, we have to let our engineers know what the power and value of admiring Van Gogh, of admiring Picasso, of admiring, you know, classical music or contemporary music from Africa or, you know, whatever it might be. We have to let them know how it is that our fields are not in opposition in the least. Our fields are completely complementary because the human experience is not one that says, I'm an engineer and therefore I don't appreciate art or therefore I don't appreciate the classics or therefore I don't appreciate the social sciences which teach us so much about coming together as human beings. I think it's an engineer that is imbued within the social sciences that will go out, you know, and say to herself, I'm going to come up with a public project that brings people together in a public space that embraces a sense of community. So how do we then, it is our job right now more than anything to defend general education number one, but number two, to make connections within general education and say to them, you are taking these fields of knowledge outside of your own field, not because it's a requirement, but because it's a benefit to you because it will augment your skills, you know, in ways that are unimaginable. That's a fantastic answer. That's a great complementarity indeed. And Kate Montgomery wanted to follow up and she's also following up on an earlier comment. Have you considered the opportunity for innovative partnerships of industry like Google or Amazon? Usually complementary, but not competing roles in educating society. We have. We have. I think more than anything right now, what we need to understand is that industry is complementary to a liberal arts education. We need to understand that industry hires people who have a university degree in much higher rates and then they will hire somebody who does not have this degree. And we have to understand also that industry is not seeking so much for the basic skills, you know, that a programmer will have or whatever else. What they're looking for is malleability, flexibility, emotional, you know, acumen. They're looking for this for these human skills that transfer over to creativity when you connect them with the hardcore skills that they're looking for as well. And for the most part, I will venture into saying the following. They will hire somebody who has mature, high level human skills without necessarily having all of the right tools or the right skills, the hard skills over someone who has checked all of the boxes on all of these hard skills but has very few human skills. That's really where our power lies in the future of education more than anything. That's a great answer to a fantastic question. One quick question just coming from John Warren. I want to make sure that we can answer this before we're out of time, which is do you have any publishing programs at Fresno State, perhaps within the library? We do, we do. We have quite a bit of publishing programs actually. I'll give you an example of one of them. We have a quite large among American population at Fresno State. They came together and they came together because they wanted to, they wanted to write themselves. So we have quite a few groups of individuals at Fresno State working on publications that really speak to their own communities but then come together and share with each other what it is that they're publishing on a semesterly basis. John, good question. I hope that helps and perhaps we're going to find you relocate from George Washington to Fresno State. The only thing that happens on the forum we do this whole time, but the only thing that happens on the forum is that we're completely right out of time. Is that right? Is that right? Exactly. President, this has been a delightful conversation. Thank you so much for thinking with us and for addressing each of our questions so deeply. I really appreciate that. I'm truly honored at the opportunity and I'm truly honored at the audience that I had these just incredible engaging questions. I appreciate you and we're in this together for sure. Indeed. Thank you. What's the best way to keep up with your work at Fresno State? Should we just keep going to the Amazon page or are you going to be active on Twitter or elsewhere? I'll be active on Twitter in the future for sure. For now, I'm an interim president and I'm focusing on other things, but yeah, for sure I will. Well, let us know when you jump and we'll be glad to hear your word. Thank you again. Thank you. Thank you. Friends, before we go, I just want to mention a couple of things about where we're headed and I just want to echo President Jim Nezandoval's praise of you all because these are fantastic questions. Just looking ahead for the next few months, just to repeat where we've got a couple of great programs coming up, more than a couple. If you just go to tinyorl.com slash forum next, you'll find out about our data analytics sessions or sessions on accreditation and closing campuses and racial equity. If you'd like to keep talking about these questions about how do you do the liberal arts at a public institution? How do you balance a student's desire for a specific degree with interdisciplinarity? We have all these venues for discussion including on Twitter. If you'd like to go back into the past and examine, for example, some of the other sessions that we've had with other university presidents, just go to tinyorl.com slash FTF archive and you can dive in. They're all there. And in the meantime, thank you all for being with us today. I really appreciate all of your participation, all of your thoughts. It's March 2021. Above all, let me wish you well, the best of health and safety. Take care and we'll see you online next time. Bye-bye.