 I'll take this one. Welcome, everybody. Thank you for coming. I know you're as excited as I am that we've had one of America's most eminent and interesting journalists on campus really all afternoon. He's been gracious enough to visit with two classes and a lot of our faculty. And so at the risk of wearing him out, we have presumed on a lot of his time. As you think about your questions tonight, you've got a lot of choices. When I think about the people who have joined us for evenings like this, there hasn't been anyone, let's say, eclectic as tonight's guest. And so you've got a wide range of topics on which he's interesting to hear from. So I'll ask, as usual, we've given our guest the option of orating for a while, but he's said that he would be just as comfortable to do this in a question and answer style. So by your leave, I'll ask a few while you compose your own thoughts. But as soon as I see a little line at the mics, we'll turn the evening the rest of the hour over to you. So please show your appreciation for the effort he's already put in and welcome Frank Bruni of the New York Times. So among the countless subjects, Frank, that you have covered, football is even in there. And I noticed as the NFL. I shouldn't say that I'm a big Denver Broncos fan. I know that's not good. But you beat us last year in the playoffs. It's permissible. Don't forget where Peyton Manning went. He's got some. So true. We got some second-ordered Denver fans, and I'm one. But I just noticed as they went through this exercise of cutting down the rosters, I saw some commentary about a multi-position player seemed to be in vogue these days. A lot of them stuck. And you're a multi-position player. If I've ever seen, I'm going to miss some. But you have written books and certainly columns on politics, religion, sports I mentioned. You've been a war correspondent. You have been a movie critic. And intriguingly, you have been a restaurant critic. How does a career like that happen? Is this sort of a nature or nurture question? Were you just determined to not be tied to one subject or did entities you worked for just move you around and take advantage of your versatility? A little bit of both. My younger brother always teases me about this. He says, I don't have a career. I have an attention deficit disorder, which is true. No, I've been very lucky. Early on when I got into journalism, I sort of decided and I don't know what led me to do it or to have that kind of presence. But I thought the best thing you can do with the passport that journalism gives you is travel with it anywhere that your bosses will let you. I mean, I mean that metaphorically. And so I just resolved early on that I wanted to use the opportunity of being a journalist to experience as many different things as I could and I would just keep pushing at the doors and if my employers thought I was suitable for that and would let me do it. And that's the way it worked out. And I remember, I worked at the Detroit Free Press before the New York Times. That was where I wrote about religion and AIDS and gay issues and was a movie critic for my last couple of years there. And when I got to the Times, I remember someone saying to me, we don't hire people for jobs. We hire them for careers. And I thought, well, that's a really pretty line that they probably roll out on everyone. But it turned out to be true. They, at every turn, they gave me the opportunity to do different things, to do more things. And since it's my nature to rove like that, I just always said yes. And in the column now, it appears you have a roving portfolio. Right. When they gave me the column, they said, now you can sort of in the span of one month be as diverse as you've been over the last 15 years. Well, you're fun to follow because no two consecutive columns are on the same topic, it seems. I hope so. It's interesting. You've written several books, but the recent one, of course caught the eye of a lot of people here. It's a topic both generally and specifically of interest here at Purdue University, given our nature as a land grant school as a public university. And I'm guessing, and I'm hoping that a large number of attendees tonight have read it. Those who haven't are gonna want to. Where you go is not who you'll be. And you have had a hard look and a critical look at the way parents and students choose colleges, the way colleges invagle them to choose. And you've cautioned about some things, not to look for elite reputations, rankings, high sticker prices. What should today's students be looking for? I think college, if it's within your economic grasp, and I wanna start out there because I wish more kids had the ability to choose college without worrying about the dollars and cents and whether that's all going to work out. But if you do have some economic freedom agency in the wiggle room, I think the best way to choose college and the way I see far too people choosing college is to think about how you're gonna complete and grow yourself. I see far too many kids automatically going to a school close to home, automatically going to a school because all of his or her peers have gone there and it offers that sense of the familiar and the sense of continuity. And I think college should be more disruptive. One of the things, one of the reasons I'm a big fan of universities like Purdue is you have a scale here and an automatic socioeconomic diversity here that no matter where you're coming from to come here, if you want to use a school like this to become more fluent in diversity, to explore crannies and byways of your intellectual life or your social life that you haven't before, you can do it because it's all here. But that's what I really think people, I mean kids and their parents need to have conversations about what of the world do I already know? And am I going to a college that's gonna show me facets and sides of the world that I don't know because if college isn't gonna make me a bigger person, why am I going in the first place? You used a phrase that I thought was terrific but I wanna make sure I understand it and again that you get a chance to share it. I used it a while ago, I may not understand it myself. Yeah. Well on the off chance that you do, you said that you thought a lot of the students and their parents suffered from a failure of boldness. And I thought that was kind of an eye-catching phrase but just to make sure that I captured its meaning what would you have in mind? Well I think they take the path of least resistance. They go with the familiar. They follow their friends to a school that in too many instances is just an upsizing of the high school they came from. They've really just, they've enlarged the stage without diversifying it at all. And then they get there and again they kind of think how do I get through this most smoothly? How do I get through it without incident? How do I get through it without any danger of a bad grade? And there's so much of life ahead where the price of mistakes gets a lot higher. And it's hard to see this when you're in college but the price of mistakes at that stage of the game, the price is pretty low. If you're gonna make mistakes, if you're gonna go down dead ends, do it between the ages of 19 and 23. Do it in college but that requires some boldness. That requires some courage to use a word our president likes, some audacity. And I feel too frequently people elect safety. They elect something that's gonna be assured. They follow a script that's been laid out for them rather than inventing one themselves. And I really wish they wouldn't because I don't think you ever truly discover what you're capable of in your strengths unless you wander off script and unless you wander down tributaries that maybe don't look so welcoming at the start. You also had some stunning depictions of another, I would say a set of students and their parents. And these are the folks who shipping young Frank at the age of three to a $30,000 preschool which is supposed to prepare them for a $60,000 K6 which is supposed to prepare them eventually for probably be an $80,000 university experience about time to get there. Some of those stories and people you reported on were almost caricatures but it's a real phenomenon. It's a real phenomenon and I see it because I'm in Manhattan, which is one of the places but when I went around the country talking about the book it was funny how many places thought they were ground zero for this. So I would go to the suburbs of Chicago and people would say well now you're in the belly of the beast, this is where parents really go crazy. And then I would go to Palo Alto and they would say you've never seen anything like Palo Alto. Everybody was convinced that it was the most obsessive, most hyped up, all that sort of stuff. But in a certain kind of climate socioeconomic usually in a major metropolitan area, you have right now no small number of families who dedicate just a jaw dropping amount of money and obsession, outside expertise, all of this stuff with one goal in mind and that goal is getting into a school with the lowest acceptance rate, the most exclusive getting into the school that's turning away the most other people. And there's something a little sick about that being the yardstick for what makes a school desirable on a place that you think you're gonna get a great education. And then if it doesn't happen, young Frank is devastating. I mean, why is it young Frank? Well, name I picked at random, I don't. Young Frank did just fine. But yeah, no, I mean a lot of these, I tell a story in the book and I still, and I've repeated it in settings like this and it still blows my mind, but to give you an example of what happens with the psychology we're creating, there's a psychology lecturer at Cornell University whom I interviewed for the book and I didn't know what we were gonna talk about, someone just said they thought he had an interesting perspective on it. And then I asked him what he made of this admissions mania as I call it in the subtitle of the book and he said, well, let me tell you something, he said, every year I teach an introductory psychology lecture at Cornell University. So we're talking about Cornell, one of the Ivy League schools, but not, but the Ivy League school with the highest acceptance rate, right? It's about 200 students in the lecture. Most of them are juniors and seniors. After that, sophomores, no freshmen, so none of them have just come out of the admissions grinder. They've all had at least a couple years to let it settle. And just out of curiosity, he in the first class of every semester, he says how many of you are disappointed that you're not at Yale, Princeton or Harvard right now? And he said routinely semester after semester, 60, 60% of the kids raise their hands, right? They could not be in a much better situation. They are utterly privileged, utterly blessed through a Cornell and they're still measuring themselves by what didn't happen and they're still haunted by it. I don't think that's good for them and I don't think it's good for any of us that we've created that sort of psychology in people. Six not too strong a word. The mics are waiting, is this our first question? So my question, Mr. Bruni, not young Frank. Frank, Frank, okay. You can call me not young Frank, but Frank is good. Frank the elder. What are your thoughts on the fraternity and sorority system that are so prevalent on our campuses? Yeah, I'll be really blunt. I'm not a big fan of fraternities and sororities and I will acknowledge off the bat that there are many fraternities and sororities that do extraordinary social service and exist in some measure to do that and are wonderful citizens of their communities. But I think college is best used to, as I said before, become more fluent in diversity to meet and mingle with as diverse an array of people as you can because you'll find later in life that we sort of end up getting channeled by the way our communities are structured, by the way our professions are structured. You end up getting channeled into fairly narrow bands of people. So before that happens, make sure you have met and learned from and been enlarged by as many different kinds of people as possible. Unfortunately, most fraternities and most sororities are fairly homogenous environments. And I wish colleges and universities would do more to steer students away from homogenous environments for those four years and to challenge and provoke them a little more. There's a, if I can just add something, it's not, because I don't want to sound like I'm beating up on fraternities and sororities, it's not just a phenomenon of those. There are a lot of schools right now because college has become this consumer good in too many instances and they're all trying to promise the most fun or the most comfortable experience. There are a lot of colleges that are giving kids residential options where you can live only with theater majors or you can live only with fellow environmentalists or only with fellow foodies. I have the exact same reservation about that as I do about fraternities and sororities. First of all, I want to tell you that I really enjoyed your column this morning but probably not for a lot of reasons but the real reason is I could figure out how old you are and you're much younger than I thought you were. So I will call you Frank, Frank. Call me middle-aged Frank. Yes. I've learned something. I'm really curious, as a post-educator, one of my concerns about what's happening in education not only in college but also in elementary and secondary school is this call for a national curriculum. So I'll just, it's a very controversial question. I'll do a double on you. Are we gonna talk about the Common Core? We're not gonna talk about the Common Core because the Common Core could be one national curriculum. But it's not the only one. You're talking a lot about the private IVs and the public school versus the private school and private school kids learn a totally different curriculum than public school kids do. I won't go there but because, and therefore they learn different things. Well, do you believe a core curriculum is a good idea especially in this age of diversity and in this age of economic instability I think a lot of people would mean different things by a core curriculum. I mean, there are many gradations and degrees of that. I absolutely believe that there's a certain body of knowledge, a baseline body of knowledge that we should make sure every kid in this country graduates high school with. Certain matters of national and world history, that sort of thing. Whether I would, I don't know that that rises or should rise to the level of a national curriculum but I think there should be some baseline standards that we, if not enforcing them nationally, we should at least have a robust enough set of incentives and penalties which is the way it's typically worked to try to lead everyone in that direction. I often think we understand that defense is a national issue and that is something we handle out of the federal budget because we know that our future as a nation is dependent on that. I think our future as a nation is dependent on how well educated our populace is and sadly history has shown that many locales left entirely to their own devices will do a terrible job and will misreport how well their kids are doing and so we do need some mechanisms and some standards and some baseline requirements nationally to make sure that just by dint of what geography you're born into, you don't receive an inferior education that not only puts you back but that we all pay a price for as a country. So I'll leave, but I'll ask you this. So then should there be national testing? Yeah, I think there should be. Standardized national testing. Well, I mean, again, to what degree? There should be some. Yes, we need to know how kids in Louisiana are doing compared to kids in Washington state. We can get carried away with it. So I'm well aware and I understand that a lot of educators and a lot of parents feel like their kids are spending way too much time in school taking test after test. I believe there's gotta be a way or there is a way to do the right kind of national testing that allows us to know how kids in different areas of the country are faring that allows us to make sure that no one's getting a crappy education but that doesn't turn schools into a day in, day out testing prep and testing siege. And who gets to decide what the questions are? I mean, committees of people who know best and are kind of with the normal checks and balances that are built into that, built into a lot of things. Thanks for the questions. Great opportunity to give a commercial for our next speaker. What happens to be, I think it's next week, and Arnie Duncan, Secretary of Education. He'll have a lot to say about that question. But he has to watch his words much more carefully than I do. But he's agreed to be with us and those are exactly the kind of questions that I know he'll be eager to engage with. Let me ask you this about another really arresting column that you wrote not too long ago, Frank. And it gets at a question that we wrestle with here. Is college about career preparation or about a larger, broader preparation for life? And to the extent it's not all one or the other, how do you find that balance point? I'd like you to tell the story for those who missed the column. You said you were asked to name a transformative educational experience and it took you a minute and then it came to you and it sort of informs that question that I posed. Yeah, I was on the stage like this one and someone much like yourself, not nearly as distinguished and eloquent though, asked me... Also more rude because he didn't tell you the questions ahead of time. No, right. And I was stumped and so it was a very genuine answer. I was asked what was the most transformative education experience. And for some reason in my head popped the image of a professor I had. I went to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and I was an English major and I took a number of classes with an English professor there named Anne Hall. And I remembered in the instant when I was asked that question, just kind of seeing her in front of the class and she was so in love with Shakespeare and this was a Shakespeare class and she would be talking about one of the plays. This was I think a course that was entirely on the tragedies. And she would in talking about it, occasionally recite a line and her whole body would sway. I mean, it was almost, it was sensual on the verge of erotic. And I heard her saying the phrase cordelia stay a little which is from King Lear which was her favorite play and because I obviously have no independence, quickly became my favorite play. And I just remember how when she talked about that line and when she intoned that line, there was something I learned in that moment about just how much freight a few words could carry. And about how closely you had to look at them to understand all the things they might mean. And I felt like in that moment, which was such a gift and I think struck to the very heart of what education could do, I learned that there was a reward to close attention, whether it be to a text, whether it be to a person, whether it be to a binge watching experience on television. And I think that also spoke to what's so important about a liberal arts education. You can't say that spending an hour thinking about and dissecting the line stay a little in King Lear has any direct professional application. But learning to pay close attention to what people say and how they say it, learning that the more attentive you are, the greater the rewards are. Well, I can't think of a single career that that doesn't translate into. Interestingly, shortly after I wrote that column, two great things happened. One was Ann Hall, who didn't remember me. Read the column, she's now at University of Pennsylvania and she got in touch and I went down to Philadelphia on the train and took her out for dinner and got a second column out of it. So this is really good. One column leads to another. And the second thing that happened was, which kind of gets us to the political world, but you know, is I got an email from a Democratic political operative with whom I'm friendly, don't hold that against me. Some of my best friends. Name Joel Benenson, who was President Obama's chief pollster for the 2008 and 2012 campaigns. Now is not only the chief pollster for Hillary Clinton's campaign, but also one of her chief strategists. And he told me that he felt like nothing in his education turned out to be more applicable to and better preparation for being a pollster than his study of Shakespeare in college. And I got a third column out of that, right? So stay a little, not only taught me a lot about language, I got three columns out of that. Yes. Well, for those of us who are fathers of four daughters, King Lear is a little rough on you. Yes. Hopefully all of your daughters were Cordelia-like and not gonorrho like that. On their better days, yeah. Maybe, do we have a question waiting? Please. I really enjoy your columns. Thank you. You opened up the sports store, so I want to ask a question about the Washington professional football team. Uh-oh, Redskins. I would, I don't use that word. When will their name change and should it change? You know, I understand both sides of that one. I think it should change. I think less is lost than is gained by changing the name. I have no idea when it will change. I have no more insight into that than you do. I think the name should change. I don't find the people who feel invested sentimentally in all that and keeping it the way it is, I don't find them outrageous and ridiculous and they don't make me super angry, but if it were up to me, I'd change the name. I don't know, how do you pe- I'd love to see a show of hands. How many people would change the Redskins' name? And would not? Well, if this room has sway, it's done, right? Yeah, that settles that. Hello, Mr. Bruny. I'm glad you can come for me today. We're on our first name. It's middle-aged Frank. Okay, never mind. My name is Richard. Yeah, I think you can come today to produce a place where diversity is valued, being my fact that I'm personally from China, million China. So my question today is not about diversity, actually, it's more about one of the most experiences I had to produce that transformed me completely, which is Christianity, Christian fellowship I joined. Especially yesterday, I heard the news from Yahoo about Kim Davis. It's just hearing from me. I kind of touched a lot by her. So my question today for you is, do you think on college campus, or just in the world generally, do we need more progressive Christians or general people who seek to adapt to change, who seek to interpret Christianity, according to modern philosophies and assumptions, how to make Christianity more livable, or do we need more conservative Christians or general students who stick to their faith, who stick to their principles and what they believe in? Thank you. I think we need to have respect for both. I don't think it's up to a college or to me to kind of direct whether you want progressive Christianity, which would mean very different things to very different people, or whether you want conservative Christianity, and what does that mean? Does that mean biblical literalism? Does that mean Christianity coupled with conservative political impulses? I think we need to have respect for all of that. The issue with Kim Davis is the issue that many of us have with her is not that we don't respect her right to believe what she believes. I don't respect her decision as a public servant whose job is to execute the laws of the land to decide that there's one law that she's not gonna... She can go to church on Sunday, or she can go to church every day, and she can hold on to her belief about same-sex marriage, and she can rail in her heart and in the pew about what's happened in the public square, but she cannot pick and choose as a matter of what her job is, which laws to follow. Thank you, and I wanna say one more thing about Kim Davis, which I think strangely has not been said enough. Let us not forget that there was a time in this country, not all that many decades ago, when there were states where interracial marriage was illegal. If Kim Davis had gotten into this by denying marriage licenses to mixed-race couples, I don't think that anyone would have be having any debate about this. So why it's okay for her to single out same-sex couples when we've moved to a point where the law of the land is different? I don't see why that's okay. So while, just thank you for a very interesting question. Just to press the point, though, to follow up, did you feel the same way about mayors who refused to enforce the sanctuary laws as they were on the books, and for instance, about illegal immigration, or the referendum produced, popularly voted, rules about gay marriage that applied in California and other places? Did you write? In a way, a California question, I understand, I'm sorry. There were people who declined to, who went ahead and granted licenses in contravention of the law as it stood at that time. I don't remember that. Did you have the same view? I don't remember that situation super well, but those licenses, at the end of the day, those licenses, they granted were worthless because they couldn't, I mean, they had no legal weight because they were, so it was more of a symbolic gesture, and they weren't refusing, they weren't denying anybody anything and what they were doing was sort of more symbolic and ceremonial. Sanctuary cities, I have to admit that's not an issue that I'm super up on, but if you are, as a local official, bucking what is clearly a matter of state or federal law, yeah, I have a problem with that. Resignation is probably the better question. I believe that we have systems in place for a reason, and I understand Kim Davis' complaint or not her complaint, but the complaint of a lot of people is the Supreme Court sort of short-circuited a lot of those systems, but the Supreme Court does that in instances, that is part of the system. Thanks, so we're, oh, great, we have more, please. So as a person that obviously speaks to mass audience, do you believe that if you're going to take that position to speak, that there should be some sort of limit to how much? Because especially with, we were talking about, a lot of hot button social issues, and just a particular example, the love wins hashtag. And there were some people who were posting it over and over and over on the day that the ruling came through. Do you believe that there's a certain point where that can be out of taste, or there should be a call for moderation? I'm kind of not clear what you're asking. I mean, I don't think we should ever say you can or cannot post a hashtag on Twitter or on your Facebook page. If you believe that love went on that day, and you want to say that as many times and as loudly as you like, I mean, that's the essence of free speech. Similarly, if you believe, as Kim Davis does and many other people do, that common sense and decency lost on that day, you should have decency lost hashtag and you should do it as much as you want. I mean, that's the essence of free speech. Where we get, I have no problem with any kind of volume or plenitude of that, where we get into trouble, is when people go beyond exercising their right to speech and believe that they can circumvent the law or invent a law for just themselves. But no, as far as your expression, no. I mean, I would prefer that people express their views and make known what they want to make known in a way that's constructive, because I happen to be a fan of compromise in government and a lot of things. I'm a fan of common ground, and one of my greatest worries about our country is that the sort of balkanization of the media and of entertainment and of the internet has led us to have fewer points of common reference and fewer points of consensus. But that said, I would never restrict how often and how passionately people can and do express themselves. Okay, thank you for the question. Over here. Hi, my name is Sabir. Thanks for joining us today. I'm enjoying this. My son is here in the audience with me. My question, given the versatility of subjects that you have worked in, in my observation, the society that we see around us, and not just U.S., but maybe globally, is becoming anti-intellectual at a very high speed and more into sound bites and like you said, the balkanization. The technologies that we're supposed to bring us together, you know, when first of all, have been used or have just, incidentally, made us more polarized so we can seek our own point of view and just say, well, there it is, I'm validated right there because some guy said so. Do you think our colleges are doing enough or maybe, to put it bluntly, maybe are part of the problem where they've become industrialized enough that it's not about festering various intellectual thought versus, you know, we'll get you into a job? Do you think our colleges are helping that cause or are basically just part of the same, right, that everybody else is? That's a great question. Thank you. Well, for starters, you've touched on something that I've written about, that I think about a lot, that I speak about a lot when I'm in groups like this. I'm usually concerned about exactly what you're concerned about, which is that technology and the internet and social media and these things that could be used to broaden our worlds and open up the universe to us as never before. In fact, the way 95% of people use them is to curate the most narrow, self-affirming, echo chamber experience possible. And we can't control what people are doing at their computers or with their hundreds of TV channels. We can talk about it and try to kind of tell them why we think that's a bad idea. Colleges aren't the root of the problem. Colleges aren't the main contributor to the problem, but I do think colleges are places that can, as other places, cannot push back at this. There's an opportunity for college administrators to engage in a sort of social engineering that doesn't exist at lower school levels and won't exist later in life. I think colleges should require that students take more courses than they do and not let them treat the course offerings the way they do the internet and only follow the social media feeds that they agree with. I think colleges could be geographically organized so that there was maximum interaction between different kinds of students and perspectives. Because this other tendency exists and there's no way for us to really restrict it in a country where we believe in free speech, I would like to see colleges take that problem by the horns and really push back as best they can. Good, thank you. Over there, maybe? Hi Frank, thank you for coming. My name is Namisha, I'm an MD-PhD student, so in my field, technical education is incredibly important. And I agree with you that diversity education is very important, especially, again in technical fields, working with teams, seeing patients, all that kind of stuff. But how important do you think it is for students to balance that technical expertise that they get at the university and that education with the diversity education that is so important? By diversity education, you mean like liberal arts stuff or also just kind of meeting different kinds of people? Both, all of it. I think it all has to go into it. Listen, I would never say, and I don't believe, that college can or should be a purely intellectual experience. I mean, I would that we lived in a world where everyone had that sort of ability to not care about economics or what was gonna happen the day after they graduate, but we don't, and I'm a realist. That said, if people approach college as too much of a technical education, as too much of a vocational education, they're ignoring the fact that we don't really know with confidence what's gonna happen to the job market. We're ignoring the fact that technical skills change all the time. I mean, the ones that can be parlayed into a profession, I mean, science advances, you have to be retrained and all that, so the one thing you can count on is learning how to learn and cultivating a sort of nimble, adaptable intellect so that as the economy changes in unpredictable ways, as the job market changes in unpredictable ways, as what science can do and what technology is capable of outpaces what you learned at this static moment in time, you at least have the right sort of character, flexibility and intellect to continually reinvent yourself because I do think we're living increasingly in a world where people will reinvent themselves two, three, four times over the course of their professional lives. Thank you. Hi, Frank. Also, I don't know if I'm on a first name basis, but I'm Mitch. You write about it. Thank you. Frank, I'm studying to be a journalist, actually, so I admire your work an awful lot and I just wanted to say thank you for all you do. My question is about, I guess you said, you talked a bit earlier about how college should be an experience of putting yourself out of your comfort zone and exploring, I guess, places and people that you wouldn't usually be around. And I'm an international student, so that's sort of... Where are you from? I'm from Australia. Oh. Yeah. Anyway, I had a transformative experience myself when I came here for exchange and I ended up liking it so much, I said, oh, I kind of want to stay. And I feel like I wouldn't have found out a lot about myself if I hadn't put myself so far out of my comfort zone that I traveled to the other side of the world. And so I was just wondering if you thought and... It's a long walkabout, right? Oh, yeah. Boomerang doesn't come back if I throw it here. But no, I was just wondering, and this is also a question for, I guess, for Mitch as well, but do you think exchange should be something that is a little more encouraged? I know it's encouraged, but you know what I mean? It's a very important thing, I think, to go somewhere else and sort of experience something new while you're young. And I know a lot of people who haven't really even considered it. And so do you think there should be more of an emphasis on that in college education? I'm gonna let you take it first because I didn't talk, talk, talk. Well, thank you and bravo. You know, we believe that fervently. And in fact, one thing that I learned about Purdue, there were so many things that I was thrilled about. One thing that seemed obvious we needed to improve was exactly this. Only 16 or 17% of Boilermakers had even a brief international experience while they went through this university. We're out to at least double that, really, the goal, when we get there, we'll raise the goal. And we have established a program, it turned out that a modest stipend, which we now offer, it's basically enough to get somebody there and back, was enough to induce a lot of students to study internationally. And so the number's up dramatically and we're headed for that doubling goal. I think we can get there another couple of cohorts. But yes, we quite agree. And I'll say two more things about it. With full respect to your homeland, I'm always happiest when I meet a student who's going not to Australia or Britain or Ireland, although I think that's swell, but to somewhere really alien to their experience, to Africa, to Asia. And somewhere where the language is different. And so we don't require that, but we do encourage that. And the last thing, and Frank's sort of got to this, we are blessed to be an international campus, about one in six of our undergrads, more than four in 10 of our graduate students. Yet we don't do a good enough job of fostering the interaction and all the learning that can come from that. I tell our freshmen every year, don't miss this chance, you could learn. We want you to study internationally, but you could learn as much from the student in the next room if you make a small effort as you might from the next lecture you attend. So we thank you for the chance to state our enthusiastic agreement. Thank you. Yeah, do you want to jump on that? I concur not just because you're my host, I concur with everything he said. Yeah, I sometimes feel like it's a cheat when someone says I studied abroad in England, I'm like, oh yeah, right. Yeah. I just said I was brave. No, but I just wanted to add to a couple of things that I guess if he's doing Mitch, I'm doing Mitch. Everybody's doing Mitch. Everybody's done. It's interesting, I think it's hugely important and when I bang on as I frequently do about how much I dislike the U.S. News and World Report rankings, I point out that actually if you do buy access to the rankings in the website, there's a lot of information on it that's interesting that doesn't influence a school's ranking. One of the things is you can find out for every school what percentage of kids at that school go abroad to study for at least a full semester. And I've often said to when I talked to secondary school students, I would want to choose a school that had more rather than fewer of those students because A, it suggests to me that my fellow students have an intellectual curiosity that's gonna benefit me and B, they're gonna come back to campus with those experience and those stories much like you have international students here that you're not being, I mean you are one of them, but that you're not taking full advantage of your education if you're not making a point of meeting them. My niece, my eldest niece, just finished her first year at Johns Hopkins. She's now entering her second year. And the most exciting thing I heard from her, I mean not that she was most excited about, but that I was when she began there, was when she told me that her roommate was from Nigeria. And I thought that's what education should be. Thank you very much. Thank you. Hello Frank, I have a question about how technology is changing journalism right now. I see that a lot at the New York Times, like videos accompanying certain articles or visualizations that help you understand what's happening within a story. So how does new technology change how you produce content and work? And how is the New York Times taking advantage of all this new technology to produce new content in the future? It's changing journalism in what we do a lot. Part of what it changes is the metabolism of it. So now the way people consume news since they can get news on their smartphone, on their tablet, as they're traveling around, nobody wants to know what happened yesterday. Everybody wants to know what happened 30 minutes ago. So what you see at the times is you see stories being updated frequently. You see all of these byways of the website, like in politics there's this thing called first draft. And that's where things that are not full fledged stories but that are a couple of paragraphs that can tell you what happened just now that hasn't yet made its way into a full story rendering. On the opinion side it doesn't affect me a lot but for instance with the first Republican presidential debate. Instead of doing a traditional column that day or in that span of the week, I watched the debate, wrote as I watched and I had something, I had an opinion column about the debate, up on the web I think 20 minutes after the debate ended. That's something that wouldn't have been doable nor would people have been looking for it five years ago but now it's more par for the course in the way that more of us are operating. We're doing as much as we can with video. It's very expensive to produce. It's hard to get the right people to make good video. So we're doing as much as we can within certain budgetary constraints and then we've certainly gotten much more sophisticated with graphics and photos but I don't know how many of you read the times online but we've done a couple of signature projects that have combined like video as you read. There was one recently done by Ian Urbina about piracy and other things, high crimes on the high seas. The first one we did was called Snowfall, about an avalanche. Those are extremely technically challenging and expensive to produce so we can't do as much of it as we'd like but we're moving to do more and more of it. Well currently the internet's kind of blurring the boundaries between say cable and newsprint journalism, like how you consume that. So do you view the Wall Street Journal as a say five or 10 years as a serious competitor with like CNN or MSNBC within those similar markets? Well the Wall Street Journal is a different kind of thing because A, they still devote the lion's share of their resources to business news and reporting and they still have a customer base that's very heavily tilted that way and also toward a conservative political audience. So I don't think the Wall Street Journal is trying to compete with CNN. I mean if they are, I'm not really aware of it. Thank you very much over here. Hi, Frank, nice to meet you. Name's Jacob, you can call me Jake. Uh, no. In your craft, words are really important and obviously I think very influential. I think political correctness is a new sort of buzzword that's come to the forefront recently and rightfully so. Do you feel that this has affected you either one way or another? I know a middle ground is always hard to reach but do you feel sort of shackled by it? Do you feel like it's important for the diverse audience that is in front of you? How do you feel like political correctness and in the new ways it's coming to light is affecting you? Well I mean people mean different things by the phrase political correctness and that phrase has been around for a while but I think what you're referring to is the latest iteration of it we're seeing where it affects all of us in journalism because there's a quickness to offense and there's a quickness to negative interpretation that I think is not really ideal right now and yet you have to take it into account because if you're trying to say something serious and meaningful and constructive, the last thing you wanna do is shoot yourself in the foot by doing something that even if it's just two percent of people are gonna find offensive even if you think they're finding it offensive is a little bit hypersensitive and ridiculous. You don't want the conversation about what you're doing to be derailed by that. It's just a silly distraction to invite so I think about it a lot. I don't think about it in terms of being shackled, I think about it in terms of not being foolish and being careful and making sure I don't undercut the main thing I'm trying to do by wandering into a bit of bramble that I could have avoided. Thank you, Jake. He and I just call him Jay now. I was the first person to know. Because we're more intimate than you and I. It's a very good question, so let's go over here. These questions are great, by the way. Really, wow. My brain hurts, sorry. Ask me what food I eat or something. Well, this is gonna kinda take it in a different direction. Oh good, or I think so. Yeah, it is good. So my major is organizational leadership and supervision. It's now in the Purdue Polytechnic Institute. And being someone that's very heavily involved with that with, I think it's really pushed that leadership is a huge thing and something that I've learned in the years is that I think isn't really stressed a lot is that sometimes, if everyone's a leader, like that's not, first of all, that's not possible because then everyone's leading and then no one's, like you can't be a leader without followers. Sort of rob the word of its meaning at that point. Right, exactly. And so I guess my question to you is what are your thoughts about not necessarily being the leader but having the courage to be the first follower in that sense, so like coming up to, so like if someone's leading something and they're like, yeah, I wanna do this and then all of a sudden they're like, oh, no one wants to do it, but then having the courage to have, to be the first follower in that sense. Well you sort of, I mean, if we're gonna talk about leadership seriously, not just because I'm talking too much, but I'd like to hear from Mitch. Because you're looking at someone who governed the state and there's the president of the university and all that sort of stuff. All I can say is, all I can do is echo back what you said. I think you raised an interesting point which is I think it can take as much courage and maybe more character to be the first follower than to be the leader. I think that's a great point. I think it's a great question and the Polytechnic Institute, I hope will break new ground really in a way that the College of Technology has been pursuing for a long time. You know, leadership's becoming a little blurred these days. We know that a lot of the most important work in any realm these days is done by teams. Leadership may rotate. You may be the follower on today's task and you may be the most expert, the most credible on the task that comes along next. So do you think Donald Trump's gonna be a good rotator? Afterwards asked me, one distinction, maybe the only one I take out of this life is that I actually, maybe one of the few people had a chance to say, Donald, you're fired. But anyway. You can expand on that story if you like. Well, he had a license temporarily for a casino in Indiana when I got elected and they were trying to rush it through a midnight decision thing and we said maybe not and we took a closer look and decided they weren't what Indiana needed. So I said, Donald, you're fired. And he said, and he said, Mitch, you're a loser. Well, you know, like the stop clock, he's right now and then, that'd be one time. But I hope you understand what I'm saying. I think it's a very good point and we're certainly in many, many ways here, not just in your college, but I think trying to foster the skills of collaboration and teamwork and in whatever lies ahead for you and I'm sure it's gonna be a great career that I predict there'll be lots of occasions when you are a strong second or third or member of the team and there're gonna be occasions when you are looked to for leadership. So please be ready. Okay, so we've got, uh-oh, I was gonna say we've got three and three minutes. So I think you've been waiting the longest and if you can keep the question short and we can spill over just a little, we can accommodate everybody. We better stop with those right after David there. Hi, I'm also a student studying to be a journalist and I'm graduating soon. So I wanted to ask about the technology again and like how do you see it kind of affecting students in their writing capacities? Like, because I have a minor in creative writing and I've noticed when I'm taking classes on journalism writing for newspaper, like the errors that we see, like learning how to do like the inverted pyramid and like in the real world, which obviously I haven't seen yet, do you see a change happening with students graduating and coming with all these technologies that they're using? Well, I see a number of changes and they're not all just related to technology. A lot of them are related to the marketplace, the journalistic landscape that has grown around technology. So you mentioned the inverted pyramid. Some people may not know what that is. That's what you learn in news writing 101, which is that you put the most important stuff, and then you kind of like widen it as it goes along the who, what, why, where, and the lead of a story. There's not a lot of news written that way anymore. So the entire journalistic landscape and economy has changed and we've moved and are moving ever more rapidly into a kind of European model where we don't have as much objectively rendered, deliberately flat, neutral news writing and we have an enormous amount of commentary. And so what I notice is that students like you, having come of age when the internet has more of that, tend to write in a kind of looser, more personal, more free-associative way. It leads to some writing that's better than I ever would expect from students your age, but it also leads to some sloppiness because if there are no rules and everything is just how you feel it, that can much too easily become an invitation to disarray. So just to add quickly to that, so for somebody entering into the journalistic world, do you see that like possibly hurting them? Like having that more like not as much grammar and all of those strict rules. Well, not, I mean, not having grammar will always hurt because I mean, I'm a stickler. If I look in my outbox and I notice that I sent an email with a T-H-E-I-R where I meant the T-H-E-Y apostrophe. I mean, that's 10 minutes of my day ruined as I sulk about it, you know. I believe that God is in the details and God is in grammar. I mean, I really think that it's a reflection of discipline, it's a reflection of caring, it's a reflection of taking the time to be informed and prepared and there are enough fogies like me out there that if you spell poorly, if you have poor grammar, people will make assumptions about you based on it and it's just silly to lose points in an arena where you don't have to lose points. Let me state it to you positively as I have to thousands of young people by now, if you do master a reasonable facility with the English language to speak it and to write it in a reasonably articulate way, you will set yourself apart. People will think you're smarter than you are because it has become increasingly rare and I say that as jib-a-dail, wow. So go for it, you're all you're doing the right thing over here. We just kind of touched on like the whole issue of like a stepping down on its comfort zone and embracing like diversity and Purdue has a great diversity of, like President Daniel said, we have one sixth international population and as an immigrant American who isn't an international student, I observe that we have great diversity but the inclusion of this diversity is not as well facilitated. So how can students at Purdue, especially in a state that's nearly landlocked but we have this great resource to students all over the world, how can we promote the idea of inclusion within this entire like atmosphere of the campus? Well, I mean you can, I mean whatever organizations, for instance, you're a part of, you can make a big effort to reach out. You can make a big effort to reach out as corporations frequently do when they're behaving well. You can make an effort. No, and some of them behave very well. Some of them many corporations were far ahead of the rest of the country on things like immigration reform. Well, they're still ahead of the rest of the country on things like immigration reform and same-sex marriage and stuff like that. But I mean, you have some agency here. I mean you yourself are a member of this community and whether it's the organizations you choose to take part in, the contribution to make to those organizations which includes the effort to bring people in from the outside, to bring a diversity of people in from the outside. You have a say in this. And as a kind of consumer of the Purdue experience, I mean I haven't kind of looked at a booklet or whatever, but my guess, what I love about schools of the size of the scale is my guess is there are an array of activities, organizations, clubs, special seminars, et cetera, that if you really took a serious look, give you any number of opportunities to go inhabit a milieu that is not your own and to go do something that you have no idea if you're any good at. And like I said earlier, I don't need to repeat myself. Like if you're gonna fail, fail now because the price of failure becomes higher the older you are. And by the time you're middle-aged, Frank, the price of failure is enormous. Thank you for a great question and for choosing Purdue. Dr. Sanders. Thank you. I was wondering in your travels and in your interviews, what have you heard as the best suggestions for fighting the increasing regard for a college education is merely a credentialing experience and as a corporate training ground? The best way to fight it or? Yes. I don't know. I mean, I'm trying to do my bit by flapping my gums on a stage like this, I'm trying to do my little bit, but I think the best way to fight it is for all of those of us who know otherwise to explain that, to tell our stories and to kind of make people understand, I think sometimes learning and college learning takes on a sort of fussy connotation in people's lives and they don't realize how much of their everyday lives involve the kind of intellectual exploration that college is all about. Whether it's the way they're surfing the channels at night, whether it's the book they're reading, all of that is about marinating in ideas and language and all those things that college at its best exalts. Great, thank you. Hi, I'm a senior in agricultural communications and in my senior seminar class, we've been discussing on whether or not communications is a crafter of profession. So my question is, with what you do at the New York Times, do you see that as a crafter of profession? That's a great question. I don't, I guess it is a craft, I don't see it that way because that feels overly self-conscious and precious to me. So I guess I kind of experience it in my bones as a profession, but I think almost any profession is only done best when someone brings to it the passion and the care that they would lavish on a craft. Holding the question, or got a quick one? This question goes to both of you. What would you do if you could right now to engage the students and the faculty and staff in defining goals for this university to better this university into the future? Well, I'd like to think, I believe, and that's an organic conversation that goes on all the time. We don't suffer here, thank goodness, from a bashfulness among faculty, students, or staff, here from people on an absolutely hourly basis. And that's a great thing. And so I think it grows organically. Now that said, if you're gonna get something done, you can't be talking about it perpetually. And so we have staked ourselves to several major projects, but as we advance those, we're thinking about the next one, the next one. You can expect to hear this fall about at least one or two more big initiatives. And they have bubbled up, in this case, largely from their entirely faculty generated, but it's just been my conviction and experience in more than one job. This world particularly, if you tread water, you will sink. And as a university, we've got to be moving forward. We're gonna make, when you do that, you're gonna make mistakes. Not every judgment and every initiative will be a bullseye. But higher ed, I think, in too many places, in too many cases, has been almost reactionary and it's almost ossified in its attachment to the way things have been. And so we are certainly trying here. We are trying to involve everybody who wants to say in figuring out how this great university can be even greater and more relevant tomorrow, whatever tomorrow brings. Please improve on that. I can't improve on that. So I'm gonna defer that to you. I just wanna say, I wanna thank everybody for coming out. I wanna, I guess we have a lot of times readers here. We appreciate that. And I would just say, I really hope everybody does appreciate what an incredibly special environment you have here. And for the students in the audience, the years go by really quickly. You're not gonna get these years back, rummage across this landscape with all the energy and enthusiasm you can and pluck every shoot of grass and flower that there is to be plucked. Well, I hope that everyone here enjoyed that, the fraction as much as I did. I would observe that we consumed really more than our allotted hour and I can't believe this. He's gonna get out of here without answering a single food question. So we'll have to have him back sometime and deal with that. But for now, we'll you thank Frank Bruni for a great talk. Thank you.