 I suppose I might as well disclose about the zombies, is that where this is leading? I'm Jerry Bain for Educause. On June 1st, John O'Brien became president and CEO of Educause. He comes to us from the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities System, where he served as a professor, an associate vice chancellor for instructional technology, a provost, a president, and senior vice chancellor for student and academic affairs, for the fifth largest U.S. system in the country. Welcome, John. Thank you. Why would a college president want to serve as a president for an association for IT professionals? My first love is technology. I mean, when I was a faculty member, what energized me was using technology to enhance my teaching. When I became an administrator, I was working as an associate vice chancellor of instructional technology. So here I have a chance to work at a bigger level to serve colleges and universities all across the country while returning to my first love. I believe that the next evolution of Educause is not going to be brought on by IT professionals talking more to each other. That the future of this next evolution for Educause is going to be IT talking to presidents, presidents talking to IT professionals, IT talking to other leaders across the campus. You've been here a hundred days. That's not a long time. What have you learned in your first hundred days? That's really not a hundred days. Yeah, it's been about a hundred days. I've learned just how complicated our community is. We've evolved over time when we gave the community poll not too long ago and started looking through the responses. Again and again, one person would say, stop doing this. This is a mistake. Please stop, exclamation point. And the next response would say, do more of that. Why don't you do more of that exclamation point? Both of the exclamation points are valid. They're both reflecting strong voices in our community. Diversity of voices. The diversity of voices and the need for Educause, if we're doing our job to serve the whole community. Yeah, we do some things that help with that exclamation point. We do other things to address that. And as a whole, we hope the balance is exactly right for serving the needs of the members. But it's more of an art than a science. So what is it that attracted you to Educause? Educause is an apologetic interest in talking about change. Change is controversial. A lot of people are worried about the changes that are coming. I think Educause understands that change is coming, is somewhat agnostic about the directions it could take, but is constantly interested in bringing together people to talk about what's happening. I think the opposite of change isn't no change. The opposite of change is surrendering the decisions to someone else and waiting to see what other people are going to do. And I think Educause is right in front of that conversation. I think there's risks with doing that. There's controversy in doing that, but it's the right thing to do. There's always concern about IT having a good relationship with the administrators and presidents of a university. How do you feel like Educause can help facilitate that relationship? Educause, before I got here, has been very interested in broadening the conversation with senior academic leaders, with other chief officers across the campus. So it's a vibrant conversation that's well underway. We try to do it through our leadership training. When we've brought folks together for BMI, for example, where I was just in July, campuses are bringing a whole team. I think that's the future is, again, where we don't just bring together IT folks to talk about IT. We bring together a team of campus leaders who can start to understand how IT is interconnected with everything, how IT relies on other leaders to be successful and other leaders better be counting on IT to help them be successful to solve the challenges of the day. When you think about the community, and you mentioned the diverse opinions that you've received, are there any questions that you have for the community? Over the complete breadth of my career at Educause, I will hopefully constantly, in different ways, be asking, how can we serve you better? Period. That's the question. If you're leading an association whose every breath is intended to serve the members that make up the community, that will always be my question. So I hear you have some unique hobbies. First of all, I hear you that you're a black belt in karate. Black belt in karate. Could you tell us about some of the other stuff you're interested in? Oh, well, so I taught this fantastic course with honors course with 15 students. It was called Exploring the Zombie Apocalypse. We looked at zombie films mostly from a lens of anthropology, sociology, human history. And there's a scholar who says that you can learn a lot about a culture by understanding how it scares itself. And so we looked at the films that way and saw zombies as culture critique when they're not eating grapes. That's fun. That's a lot of fun. It was mostly fun and it was a great group of students. I think we're all the best leaders we can be when we have a few other things that doesn't have to be zombies, but something else that keeps us gone.