 Well, let me begin. Let me begin by introducing the program and welcoming you all to the future in terms of work. I'm very glad to see you and hopefully hear from you all today. My name is Brian Alexander. I'm the former creator, co-host, and chief editor. Wow, I really am very, very glad to meet you once this week's guest. Michael Roth is the president of Wisney University in New England. He is one of the leading presidents in the higher education space. He's a leader as well in liberal education space. On top of that, along with me, he's a humanist who has produced a whole series of books. He's a fantastic teacher, an innovator, and a teacher with technology, and just one of the brightest people in higher education. I'm delighted that you can make time to join us and I'm really looking forward to our conversation. Welcome, President Roth. Thank you, Brian. Happy to be here. Oh, I'm really, really glad to be here. Let me just begin by asking you the question I asked everybody on this program. I just introduced you to some of your titles and some of your background and some of your output. Let me ask this question. Looking ahead to the next academic year, what are the big topics, the big ideas that are going to be the top of mind for you? Well, in my case at Westland, the topics that are coming to the forefront have to do with issues of affordability, making sure that the students we bring to Westland are able to get the most out of their experience there because they have full access to the resources of the institution and acquire little debt or no debt while attending school. I'm also very interested in the continued development of programs that cut across departments and as I've told my department chairs at Westland again and again, if I had my way I'd get rid of all the departments but as they tell me, you won't get your way. Because I do think the most exciting work is often usually done between departments or with interdisciplinary collaboration. So we're continuing to explore how to build interdisciplinary collaborations of an unexpected sort which bring our scientists and artists together or people interested in education and politics. And for the next year, I have to say that I am wrestling with the issue of how to create a proper vehicle so that our students can participate in the next election cycle, which I think is of such great importance. And so we say like many liberal arts schools that we think that civic preparedness is a fundamental aspect of liberal education. And I find myself asking the question of like so given the extraordinary importance of the coming election in a year from now, what are we doing as an institution to empower our students to participate, not just going to vote, absolutely important, but between now and that day when they vote to actually work on campaigns in places where they may make a difference. You know, some students who are in various political parties are, of course, we're not going to steer them one direction or another, but I think it's really important for us to find ways as an institution to help students engage at a level that's beyond testing something on campus or advocating for change on campus. That's also, you know, as important, but the national level in the next year or so will actually create a very different context for everything else we do, depending on how things work out. So I am working hard with some of the people at Wesleyan who do this all the time to think about how we can energize our students to spend time in swing states or work on local elections or however they want to do it, but to really get involved at this moment in American democracy and to make a difference and to learn from that involvement in ways that inform the rest of their lives. That's a tremendous call. I have all kinds of questions on it, but before I pounce, let me just remind everybody, all of you participating, that this event is for you to ask your questions and to ask your comments. So if you'd like to ask President Roth about voting or about interdisciplinary work, in fact, we already had a comment in one of the chat boxes, Michael, which was innovation happens in the interstices, which is quite true. You know, I'd love to hear your questions and thoughts. So again, either just click the raised hand button so that I can beam you up on stage or type in a question in the text box. A quick question about the last point. Is a Connecticut, has the government made any efforts to either enhance or retard student access to voting next year? No, I think the, you know, that there have been, we just had an election yesterday, and actually a young Wesleyan alumnus was elected mayor of Middletown. And there was some grumbling from some citizens who think it's really not fair that students actually place such an important role. But I think that's no one's actually trying to prevent people from voting. Actually, they facilitated voting. And in town, the demonstration, not students, but just all the citizens of the city, skews in a certain way and some person with a Democrat nomination won, which is not the biggest surprise. He is quite young in his 20s still. And so that that was surprising. But I think for our students, what's interesting is they get to see that they can make a difference working on a campaign voting. We have a state representative, a state senator named Matthew Lesser, who actually, I think he dropped out of school at some point thought he'd run for office. I know the story is he didn't expect to win, he had to come back to school. And now, I don't know, it's more than a decade later, he's still in the state legislature now in the Senate. And he's an excellent legislator. I should say that one of the things that happens when an alumni finances these roles, they have to show that they are at least impartial. These of the university. So it's not as if we're getting somebody to do our bidding, not at all. But we are pleased to see how our young alumni can make have real success in the in the electoral system. Because that energizes participation. People not just running for office but working on campaigns. Last year we did micro grants over fall break during the midterm elections, giving people basically pizza and gas money to go and knock on doors and competitive races, various places in the country. And quite a few people did it and they wrote up their reactions. And of course, when you knock on doors of campus, you discover people with much wider range of views than you might fight on campus. And I think that was just educational for them. And I think, again, our job is not to give them four years of campus politics, which then stay as an isolated object of nostalgia when they graduate, but actually give them the habits of participating in the civic dimension in the public realm, which they can continue to do after they graduate. That's terrific. I have questions before I could say anything. Our wonderful forum crowd has its own questions. Okay, just flash a few of these up on the screen. I'll read them out loud. The first one is from the excellent Robert McGuire who asks, you mentioned full access for students when they are there. I suppose you mean affording to attend is just one part of the equation, right? And yeah, access after admission. It's a great question. And I have to say that I've been slower to recognize this than I wish I had been, that whether it's food insecurity or just not understanding, let's say how to get an internship or other things that affect student performance. And I think it's Professor Jack who's at the Harvard School of Education has written powerfully about this recently about his own experience at Amherst College as a low-income student, that there are many ways in which the college is a full scholarship plus room and board. It seems like a lot to the administrator, right? And it is a lot to the administrator. But to the student, if you're homeless when you're not in the dorm, that's a real problem. If you're working three jobs to send money home to your grandparents or your parents, that creates a different realm of issues. They won't even go to the infirmary when they're six. They don't know actually it's free. And I think I'll speak for myself. I didn't understand some of the nuances of that for a while. Now it's a challenge because America is today so unequal that you can't replicate the experience of a rich student for a poor student. Rich students are going to do a lot of things that a lot of people can't do. So we can't try to replicate that kind of privilege, but we can provide access to the tools that provide students upon graduation with access to economic mobility and meaningful work. That's a very, very thoughtful, sensitive answer. Thank you, Robert. That was a terrific question. If you want to follow that up, Robert, please let us know. We have another question from the awesome Steven Ehrman who asks, to encourage more interdisciplinary teaching and research. What steps are you taking? You're considering. And then he follows us up by saying he's asking about sustained interdisciplinary work, not just interdisciplinary projects. Great question, great question. You know, Wesleyan has a long history of interdisciplinary work going back to the 1950s and they set up colleges of social studies and letters way back then where people would be not just encouraged, but really required to teach outside their fields. There's a lot of team teaching. The departments were broken down into these interdisciplinary units. And those are going strong. So when I came as president in 2007, I thought the best way to commemorate the 50th anniversary of these colleges was to create a new college. So we did. We created the college of the environment under the direction of a biologist Barry Chernoff. Barry had in mind that everybody in the college and the environment would have an environmental science major plus another major. So it could be environmental science plus economics or government or anthropology or dance or music or film. And then he would bring these people together in a research environment when they get to be juniors and seniors with an outside scholar and also faculty would give them release time to work on projects together. And it goes from carbon taxes and the economics of that kind of policy to landscape painting. I mean, each year is a little different. And you get people who normally don't talk about their work together to talk about their work together and to try to write something together or produce a performance. And as also to let them continue their own work, let's say in economics, not bought by these broader conversations. So you may sustain money. It's not a secret. You need to get money so that these programs aren't an afterthought. And so what I try to do is raise money for centers and programs so that faculty and students know where the resources are. And my sense is, generally speaking, it's not always the case, but generally speaking, departments function by seniority. The oldest person gets the resources. Interdisciplinary programs function by who has the best idea. And that to me is coming from a design in art school in California before we're saying that that's the way to do it. You want to get people the possibility of iterative work because they have a good idea, give them resources, see what happens, and then start over next year with another team. So we created the College of the Environment. Now we added three more interdisciplinary colleges in the last five years or so, eight years, College of Film and the Moving Image, College of East Asian Studies, College of Integrated Sciences, and that's pretty interesting. Just tell me the difficulty of studying your own department. You manage the problems. So if you're doing genetics, you have to be doing some computer science, too. Or if you're doing molecular biology, you're likely to be doing things with chemists. And so we created the College of Integrated Sciences to give resources, research money advising to people whose work is, doesn't have to be squeezed into a department, but proudly wears the banner of multiple disciplines. And I think that I haven't had to steal the money away from the partners to do that, so they haven't been hostile to it. And I think people have seen the proof in the pudding. They've seen that good work is coming out and they want more of it rather than retrenchment towards silos that are usually less interesting anyway. So a key piece of this is that you funded these new colleges externally to the pre-existing ones. Yeah, on the whole, that's the case. In College of the Environment, the faculty members actually have a very good fundraiser, too. Oh, nice. And we have a Center for the Humanities. It's been around since 1959 also. It was then the Center for Advanced Study. And in the early 2010s around there, they had an endowment. After 50 years or 350 bucks, somebody sold a painting and kept the money in a drawer, I think, in the director's office. And with the help of the Mellon Foundation, we were able to build a $6 million endowment. So we're a small place. That's enough money actually to provide a base of operations and experimentation. And I have to say, it's not like the president of the university should have any say in the content of these programs. And I don't. I go to the Center for Humanities regularly and I'm regularly annoyed by what's happening. And that's good, right? I'm supposed to be. As I get older, I'm getting more get off my lawn mentality. And it's great that they have an endowment with all seriousness because it doesn't depend on the people in the administrative chairs anymore. So once you create these funds, whether they're endowment or just long standing resources, you don't have to depend on the interest of the president or the provost or dean. You can really work with the active researchers and teachers in the field with the resources available to do this interesting stuff. That's an important point. Thank you. Thank you. For everybody else, let me just remind you that it's really, really easy to ask questions. And in fact, as I typed, as I said this, someone just added another question. If you would like to join us on stage, just hit the raised hand button. I can beam you on stage. In fact, speaking of which, we have a question from Leslie Harris. Just bring this up. It's from Bucknell. I'm wondering how these colleges interact with the existing departments. Do they offer team taught courses? Do they offer courses not already in the curriculum? Yeah, that's a great question. So it varies. They're not all the same. So the old ones, the College of Social Studies and the College of Letters, they have their own curriculum. But what they have in common is they're three-year majors rather than two-year majors, as most of our majors are. The people enter after their first year. And in at least, I think both cases, they don't have grades for a significant amount of time. They have outside examiners. And there's a significant amount of team teaching. In the College of Letters, there are faculty appointments specifically in that interdisciplinary program. And there have been for a long time. College of Social Studies, it's really the faculty culture of when it got started. The department said, every year, history will give someone to that college. And every year, philosophy will give someone. And predictably, that has not always gone smoothly. Sometimes people don't want to do it. Sometimes there's personality conflicts. But on the whole, it's worked well in the sense that the students get a cast of teachers who are predisposed into disciplinary work and have classes that otherwise did not exist in the curriculum. Right now in the College of the Environment, Charles Sebert, the New York Times writer and a journalist poet, is there working with a group of faculty and students on the ways in which non-human animals communicate. It's something he's worked on a lot. And there's a literary critic, a sociologist, and a bunch of students working together. And the things they come up with otherwise they wouldn't be there. In film, many of the courses were there already, but they were able to bring together a major and a minor under one roof and also include lots of people who are teaching film courses who are in the languages or in history or other places that were kind of just disparately scattered around the curriculum. So it varies a little bit. What all of these have in common is that they take seriously the function of what I call cohort building so that it's not just if I'm an economics major, I may have some friends in economics majors that may take some classes with them and not with others. But if I'm in the College of Letters, let's say, I actually take one class each semester and 15 people for my academic career, we take our exams together. There are all these bonding moments where you come together as an intellectual community. And I think that happens in film as well because everybody has to make a film and they're a junior or senior year and you can't make it by yourself. So if Brian's making a film, he needs somebody to carry the equipment and Roth will carry the equipment for Brian. But when I'm making my film, I'm gonna turn to Brian and say, what are you doing this weekend? And everybody crews for each other. And that creates a culture of collaboration which I think is really important to all of these interdisciplinary colleges. So it does expand the curriculum and it expands research opportunities for our students. Well, that just sounds fantastic. And yeah, I teach a digital video storytelling production and that's always, always collaborative. Speaking of collaborative, we have a few more questions that have just come in. And as always, once we get going, it's hard to stop. So let me just bring a longtime friend and supporter of the program, Tom Haynes from Texas. Let's bring him on stage. Hello, Tom. Can you see me or hear me? I can see and hear you. Hello. So question I have for you is that as you went into these new programs and these interdisciplinary programs, you're obviously, shall we say, forging new ground, plowing new fields. What kind of process do you have to figure out what's working and what's not? And how do you iterate? I mean, these sound like big ocean liner ships, not little speed boats. And so I'm always curious about organizational change. Yeah, that's a great question. So I think that we've been able to innovate with some instigation from the top, from the president's office, from me, and then some resources. And then I have to find hospitable faculty who actually think this is a good idea and not just interested in the extra, little extra money for two semesters. So in the college and the environment, Barry Chernoff had this idea. And when I did a call for, I did it when I started, it's a long time ago now, more than 12 years ago, I did a call to the faculty for new ideas. And I said I would pick, with some help of consulting with faculty and students, I would pick three or four things that we're going to work on for five years. And I always remember, faculty members said, what if my idea isn't one of those three? And I said, well, we're not going to do it. And she looked at me like I was insane. And I said, okay, I'm going to propose, I worked on Hegelianism for a long time. So I said, I'm going to impose the Hegelian Institute at Westland. And if it doesn't go, you can't raise money for it. No one at Westland can raise money for it. And this was a shock to some people. It seemed to me just a definition of what it means to have a priority. But for many people, they were under the illusion that they could go off and raise their money. And they didn't really do it, but it was an illusion. And it was really a distraction, I think, from getting stuff done. Once the college environment was up and running, people then came to see me say, oh, I'd like to do this. I'd like to do that. And I'd have to try to test the waters. I'll give you another example. It was both down and up. When I came from the California College of the Arts, very strong design programs and architecture program, and I was surprised Westland didn't have a design program. And the reaction I got made me think that the folks believed I was talking about had to decorate an office. And we worked very closely with IDO at CCA and other really interesting companies. I thought it was perfect for a liberal arts college. But when we went around and talked to faculty and I had a friend that I dispatched to do this, they were very reticent. They did not want to design an engineering. No, no, no, so I had to wait, actually. And I went around the country with talking to engineering pedagogues and talked to some design innovators who were all very encouraging. But it was when a younger group of faculty got tenure, and then I was able to get some grant money to do this, not a lot, just a little bit to see if it would work. Then suddenly a kind of guy in chemistry who said, well, actually, I do material science. I could teach that course. I usually teach it from ideas to projects. I could also teach it from projects to ideas. And I have a person in physics who said that. And then that person in design who said that. And suddenly we had our, you know, you only need a handful of people to get something started in a small place. Weston has 3,000 undergraduates, roughly. And so suddenly we, you know, it was five years of not happening. And then a little money, a few younger people getting tenure. And I think the example of these other colleges, now that's not yet a college. That's just a minor, but it'll be a major very soon. There's a lot of interest. And so I think that the change comes from, I think, having a senior administrator who actually want change, having faculty and something to open change, and having board and owners who trust the administrators enough to give them funds to try to see if something works. Then your question was also, how do you know it works? For me, it's enrollments, the production of new knowledge, whether it's exhibitions that get reviewed, positively, or papers that get accepted into scientific journals. And depending on the program, they should set the criteria for success when we start it. So that we know after a few years, whether it should be sunset or it should be extended. You all know this. I'm sure that at university, it's very good at starting stuff, not so good at killing things. And so we're trying to, be a little bit smarter about that, that not everything we start has to last. It could lead to something better, or it could just be, you know, you got a bad idea. We talk about encouraging failure. It means we have to fail sometime. Right. So I mean, that's the key with design is you have to know where to make that, where to make that left turn and understand and have the program be flexible enough to where you can go, well, this is working and this isn't. We are going to throw everything out, but maybe we need to make a slight realignment. You know, the thing of YouTube starting out as a dating service, right? Yeah. No, I think that's a really great point and helping faculty, especially the younger faculty, understand that pivoting is a good thing. You know, it's not a mistake necessarily that we encourage revision. Right. And that's a positive thing and trying to model that as well, to show that the administration is on their side. Actually, we're trying to do this in the same way. I mean, they don't really need my ideas. One thing a president can do is raise money in ways most faculty can't. So I'm conscious of the fact that I have ideas and I like my own ideas. I mean, but really, what I can do as a president is come back with some money to help people do their own ideas. Right. Well, speaking of ideas, we have another question coming in. Tom, thank you so much. That was a great question. Let me welcome Roxanne, one of the long-term funds in the program and also a fan of yours, President Roth. Yes, I am. Oh, my goodness, thank you. Hi. I was one of your students in your course, How to Change the World, a few years ago. I'm the Google Glass girl. I'm happy to see you and excited to ask you how I've changed the world and what are your thoughts on how technology can change the world as a university professor in a couple of ways with your faculty and your students. How do you feel that going forward with, you know, pedagogy and innovating virtual VR and artificial intelligence will affect us? Wow, great question. Sorry, guys. I didn't pack that up too neatly, but... No, that's a great question. So I'm afraid I don't have a great answer to that question, because I see my role really as enabling people who know a lot more about technology than I to experiment in ways that... Let me just use the phrase human-centered technological innovation, like human-centered design. I do think that AI underscores what should always be at the heart of a liberal education, which is not the exchange of information. I mean, people have confused liberal arts education with saying, I took X, you know, I took philosophy, right? I learned about some art history. In other words, and what they mean by that is, like, I can do IDs, you know, I look at a painting and I say, oh, that's Monet, or I listen to some music and say, oh, that's Brahms and that's my liberal education. Well, that's silly, because my phone can do that. And so what we wanted to be able to do is use technology to help create an environment in which students can use their imagination to ask questions that haven't yet been asked by either their faculty members or sometimes their fellow students. And sometimes that will come, I'm sure, though I'm sure only abstractly I haven't experienced these things, but with immersive technologies and with other forms of pedagogy that leverage the technology's ability to liberate the imagination. I put it that way because I do see, and I feel like just an old guy does know a lot here, but I do see that for many of my students technology is an excuse not to use their imagination. So they can, you know, depend on technology to get a quick answer or some information. So in my, I teach a rather large class now this semester on virtue and vice from Confucius to Spike Lee. And I ban technology in a classroom and I cold call on people and I'm like a very old fashioned in a way and I keep people on their toes in a face-to-face environment with 75 people. At least that's what my goal is and that doesn't always work. And I want them to be able to entertain ideas that they would otherwise find either irrelevant or insulting or outrageous to entertain those ideas and to, and by entertain I mean pay attention to them in such a way as to see clearly why other people find them so compelling. And that gives our students the experience of intellectual diversity. Now I know that technology can do that too or technology can facilitate that just by connecting people with different kinds of ideas but I do, I, you know, I kind of aim at intellectual diversity and the confrontation with difference as a vehicle for expanding one's imagination and insofar as technology can do that that's a wonderful thing because I do think changing the world in a positive sense will come from liberating the imagination giving people more access to compassion and care and more imagination about how to direct that compassion and care. Thank you. That's a fantastic, rich answer. I'm a mindfulness educator and co-temporary to mindfulness and I saw in one of the poetry and mindful books that you were referenced and talking about liberal education and the book that you wrote about why liberal education is important and how has that idea resonated with decreasing interest in liberal art at the university? That's a good question. So I'll try to just say quickly that about five or six years ago I wrote this book called Beyond the University Why Liberal Education Matters and I argued for what I just described which is that liberal education shouldn't be just you check off a bunch of boxes saying what you took but liberal education should develop habits of mind and spirit that allow you to pursue lifelong learning in a way that has an impact on the world beyond the university. I call the book Beyond the University because I always tell my students I don't care if you have a great time while you're on campus I do care that you leave the campus that you leave empowered as a W. Du Bois' word empowered to take what you've learned as a resource for future learning and do stuff beyond the university. I just published a book in the last few months called Safe Enough Spaces where I try to underscore how intellectual diversity and being open to challenge and leveraging free speech enables the kind of liberal education that I described in Beyond the University because I really think today there's a kind of wave of thinking that seems to indicate we don't have time for a broad education and we don't. The economy's too winners take all to allow for breath and context but what I see on the contrary actually is that the people have the big winners in this economy they go to these fancy schools where they have a very broad education they want their children to go to those places and so I see no reason not to have a pragmatic liberal education and not one where you just say I'm proud because I know what a Monet looks like but because I know how to use my education in the contemporary world a pragmatic, a pragmatist education that's based in breath and context and I want to argue for that because I do think that if we don't have such an education we actually will accentuate inequality we will condemn people to narrow or narrower lives because they've had a narrower education. That's a great difference. Thank you so much and when are you going to teach another course on Coursera? Are you going to teach another course? I love to teach on Coursera all students. You know what? What's been disappointing for me and this is a bigger subject is that Coursera used to really be cohort based I got to know the people who were going not all of them of course but some students going through the course at the same time so every morning I would look at my bulletin board and I see people who are reacting to things and as Coursera changed its business model they just became on demand everybody takes what they want to come and go and as a teacher I have little contact now with the community of learners or the student in the classes I'm disappointed but I haven't figured out what to do about my disappointment because those early days of MOOCs when everybody was some people hyping and others were despairing I actually was just saying it's a cool way to teach because I'm meeting all these people from all over the world who are seriously studying the stuff that I care about and helping me learn about it too but I feel like in recent years I have not I haven't found that same reciprocal learning that was there in the beginning and I should think more about how to deal with that Thank you so much Thank you Thank you, Roxanne That sounds like you heard it here there's a new need for a new kind of online class called maybe called the Roth MOOC If you're new to the forum if you haven't experienced this before bringing up guests like Tom and Roxanne is what we do that's that easy to join us for video Speaking of which, we had more questions came in and we had a few folks who couldn't make it here in person for schedule conflicts and they wanted to share some questions so let me just read these back This is one from the awesome Joellen Parker who asks How can liberal arts education best prepare students to understand the issues raised by big data, AI, and other digital forces? Well, I think an interdisciplinary approach is called for I think we have to understand the the way the technology works in some basic form and we have to understand how it has emerged from specific social and political conditions that privilege some kinds of markets and some kinds of privacy and foreclose others and I think we have to provide our students with the analytic tools to understand what's at stake when they participate in technologies that have access to intimate parts of their lives and when they think they're making use of a technology that may in fact be making use of them so I think liberal arts education shouldn't be technophobic in any way that it and it should be to we'll say again, as I said before to the last question to liberate or open the imagination I'll give you one example at Wesleyan we have a bunch of folks working on mapping projects with artificial intelligence and other forms of mapping that and visual representations of spatial relationships and networks that really show patterns that historians, sociologists and others just had and made visible before and they couldn't do that without the technology but the technology is very much in the service of the questions these scholars are asking rather than leading them only to ask questions that the technology lends itself to so I think that that seems to be a good path for integrating the breadth of liberal education with the tools that increase the power of one's analytic capacities I'd love to follow up on some of those mapping projects after this call, especially if any of those are publicly available. Sure thank you, that's a really powerful answer, it sounds like the way the digital humanities work we had a question from an author who was very excited to hear your on, this is William Moner who says that you had written a forward to an edited volume called redesigning liberal education and he says that in that forward you wrote about the pragmatism of Dewey, Adams and Du Bois and it makes him wonder whether and how the small liberal arts colleges can really connect back to those roots especially given the fierce and expensive competition for the four-year traditional student. Well I do think the affordability issue is really a big one and trying to attract students to any expensive college these days given the demographics is going to be increasingly challenging for schools I think our job is to figure out how to make the ideas of Adams and Jane Adams and John Dewey and Dewey and Du Bois how to make them as relevant as possible in the present, I do believe they are relevant and all three of those pragmatist thinkers would say that's our job, I mean we can't just say you should read John Dewey because John Dewey was great and he's important and he's not a Dewey in answer, we have to show what's vital and why it works and what's empowering about it I find the students I mean that's a pedagogical issue, you might say it's a marketing issue, I guess that would be to make it crass and in some ways it is a marketing issue but it's a pedagogical issue, I mean I teach this course of first year students, you know we start off with Confucius and we get on Aquinas and you know I know that's most of them that's not what they came, that's not why they're at school, that's not their thing and my job is to make this stuff seem very exciting to them and when I started teaching this kind of material 40 years ago or 35 years ago it wasn't so hard, not because the students were better or more open, it's just because I was closer to them in age and I understood them better and now that I'm a different relationship to them, I have to find other ways to make these thinkers real to them I do think they are real, I mean I think they are powerful and help us sort through some issues that face educators and institutions today but we have to show that the students are empowered by their time and university, I for one don't think there's any good reason to keep people at school for four years and I introduced a three year program at Wesleyan some years ago now but most people don't want it even though it saves them so much money people like being in college so my attempt it hasn't worked as well I thought it would but I think there we have to experiment with ways of giving people an authentic and powerful college education but outside of the eight semester framework I think that eight semester framework is purely convention and doesn't have any pedagogical grounding I think we may get past that I think so this is the first time anyone besides me has praised Jane Adams on this program so I just wanted to note that because it's a great thing then we had another question from the awesome Phil Katz this is kind of related to the previous question which is how do you make a non-elitist argument for the traditional liberal arts so the liberal arts should not should they do belong to everyone but there's a sense that they might not so how do you make the non-elitist argument for liberal arts belonging to everybody well that's what I try to do beyond the university I think it's a pragmatist argument so I with all kinds of college students and big publics community colleges high schools fancy schmancy places and I think it's the distinction is between the old argument of liberal arts as a canon that you kind of get to master or at least wear as a badge that you've read all that stuff you know that's not the argument for liberal arts that's going to work that is an elitist argument it just shows you I'm in the club I've read here's my play little bitch here's my Aristotle bitch and you know that's not I don't think it should work I think it should what should work is that the issues that the enduring questions that the philosophical tradition has wrestled with remain vital for people today and so giving some people a sense of context and political and ethical context for whatever they're interested in studying seems to be democratic so Dewey said you can have a liberal education approach to auto mechanics you can have a liberal education just as much as you can to piano I mean I took piano lessons in college it's very technical you know they weren't really interested in the history of the instrument I was just learning how to play chords and scales now a liberal arts approach or a liberal education approach would actually give you some sense of context of politics and ethics of history of geography and I think that giving somebody who's going to be an auto mechanic or a bartender or an operating machine in a factory would give you a sense of how what they do fits into a larger patterns in the world it's radically democratic because they deserve to know how they might think about where they sit in their world in relation to others just as much as some guy who doesn't have to work and could sit in a hammock and think about such things because someone who is unemployed by economy, redesigned by automation perhaps well it might be you might be unemployed because it's redesigned because of automation but I think saying that that person doesn't deserve or won't be interested in understanding how what they do fits into larger patterns whether those patterns include the arts or sociology I mean everybody will have their particular slant and of course some people won't care that's true but to imagine that most people don't care because they're dumb or something is not anti-elitist you know the absolute anti-elitist that's anti-democratic right there thank you thank you that's a really really good answer and I think that's a good forward looking answer as well we have one more question from a podcaster and speaker Michael Johnson who asks a very direct question looking forward again he says why do we need so many colleges and universities in America I think because we have so many different kinds of people in the United States and I think it's a strength of the U.S. education system at the tertiary level that there are so many different kinds of schools I think there isn't an American higher education system exactly because there's so many different kinds of places we may have more than we need you know we probably don't need these big for-profits that make money by just loaning money that's guaranteed by the government to students I'd love to see them eliminated but I'm sad to see a Marlboro college go I'm sad to see because I know kids and we all do that was a school that saved them that was a school that found their family their tribe whatever you want to call it and I think that you know rather than push put people through a cookie cutter finding ways to keep those schools vital and stop this corrupt support of these other institutions that the for-profit institutions that only exist as finance schemes to take federal dollars that are meant for loans and use them for tuition for people who never can complete their degree and if we had a decent department of education instead of trying to collect the money for those places they would close them down but instead of seeing these small colleges that actually have problems of economies of scale to be sure not getting the help they need to solve the economy of scale I mean that really is the issue for places like Marlboro and Hampshire unfortunately they walk up to the issue too late and maybe not so Hampshire I don't want to maybe they'll figure it out but it is really a hard problem but you know there are lots of enterprises in America that have figured out that the problem of scale and in relation to the possibilities of craft and whether that's on Etsy or whether it's in craft beer or bourbon I mean when I was growing up there seemed to be only a couple of handfuls of varieties of beer now they're a gazillion here might be of a certain spirit say why do we need so many kinds of beer I think it's wonderful now can you actually imagine an educational system that is I don't know if bespoke is the right word it might even be used by people but that is flexible and that is amenable to different kinds of students and that can be networked in a way to solve the problems of scale so that we can have individualized or nearly individualized education I'd love to see it I don't know how exactly to achieve it you can imagine a public system that had many small colleges that under the public realm rather than just these big mega universities with that you know are also hotel and football organizations but now I'm getting on track that's a fascinating idea so for UMass having what three campuses having you know say 15 and each one has a very very narrow focus the craft focus as you said and yet you network their procurement and their back of the house functions so that you can there really isn't a problem there but it's a problem that some enterprises manage to solve especially if the quality of what they do the education they produce is really high then you know I mean not all schools deserve to survive but there are many of them that do but they haven't had the kind of business help that will make them sustainable I see what you mean well that's a really rich answer a wide ranging answer and I can see that reflects a lot of experience you've had at the helm of Leslie for that question friends we're at the top of the hour we have about 90 seconds to go so the time has flown by I can see why your students admire you so much President Ross let me just ask people can keep up with you in a lot of ways on the screen there should be a couple of widgets for people to grab your most recent books because somehow as an instructor and as a president it's remarkable we can follow you on twitter which is emerald78 are those the best ways to keep up with you yeah I have a blog on the Wesleyan website as well oh great it's called rock on Wesleyan and so I gravitated towards twitter from the blog over the years and then there are those Coursera classes the modern and the postmodern and then which is two parts and then there's the how to change the world and you know those are free and easy to access via the Coursera platform if people are interested in those video lectures well thank you for those and that will give people a taste of what you're thinking and at the pedagogical level and the philosophical theoretical level um president thank you so much I really really appreciate your being here it's really generous of you to share your thoughts and it's been very very helpful for I think all of us thank you very much well thank you it really was a pleasure such good questions and I'm grateful that you included me of course absolutely thank you now don't go away friends I have to introduce you to what we're doing next week because we never stop moving we always have more things coming up so next week we have we shift grounds to talk about the flip classroom and how the flip pedagogy can work best we have a math professor from Grand Valley State University Robert Talbert who'll explain his learning and showing us what he discovered in his most recent book now if you want to also check out some of our previous programs you can just go to tinyurl.com slash FTF archive and look back over the next four years if you want to keep talking about everything that President Ronald has described everything from your disciplinarity to the future of liberal education to how small colleges can survive and large colleges change we're all over social media so just head to our groups on LinkedIn and Facebook join our Slack channel or just join us on Twitter in the meantime thank you all for being such a great community these wonderful questions and a great lesson. Bye bye.