 Let me welcome everybody. Let me welcome you to the Future Trends Forum. My name is Brian Alexander I'm your host to the creator of the forum and it's chief cat herder And I'm delighted to see so many of you here today We have a fantastic pair of guests and an incredibly important topic I'm really looking forward to our conversation before we dive in let me introduce the program Explain what it is where it comes from what it hopes to achieve and then we'll introduce this week's program So to begin with you should know the forum is Conversation-based venue what I'm doing right now talking to you and showing you a couple of slides is just the introduction The rest of the session is entirely about conversation give and take argument sharing ideas back and forth We've been doing this since 2016 and in fact, we're coming up with our five-year anniversary Now one of the things about the forum to keep in mind is that we cover the future of higher education In order to do that we have to cover a wide range of topics everything from macroeconomics and demography to technology and social justice and along the way We get to involve an incredible range of people. We have people who are university presidents We have provosts. We have librarians technologists faculty members. We have students We have people who are adjacent to higher education and very concerned with it Just publishers startup founders journalists government officials and grants officers We're delighted to have this incredible mix. I think you'll see that as our discussion unfolds Now a few pieces of background about our programming as a whole One is that we are doing this right now coming up a one year of Terrible pandemic and this is shaped higher education in all kinds of ways. We've been addressing this in the forum We've had session after session dedicated to it and COVID has worked its way into many of our deliberations since I think you'll see that as a topic today Another great event of 2020 that impacts the forum and higher education alike Is the what some call the great awakening or the great awakening about Racism and anti-racism that swept the united states and parts of the world last year We've had multiple sessions on that and I think we'll see this also come to the fore today Now the other topics are uppermost in our programming minds as we look forward into 2021 For the next few weeks just to give you a glimpse ahead We're going to have a session with a rising star in the educational technology world We're going to have a session on supporting equity in higher education We'll have a session on e-learning we'll have another role with the president of an extraordinary public university On how they managed to reinvent it and of course we have our five-year anniversary party So if you'd like to learn more about these or if you'd like to sign up already Just go to tinyorail.com forum 2021 Now we can only do this work with the help of some generous sponsors who I'd like to thank before we begin I'd like to thank nizer net in new york state a non-profit that helps that states colleges and universities Use great broadband that also do great professional development work with each other We're a big fan of their work and honored by their support And we're also grateful to shindig because shindig makes available this technology We're using now so if you're new to the forum or if you haven't been here for a while Let me just walk you through the technology so you can see how to use it Where I am right now and where the slide is again just for a minute is called the stage It's called that because everybody can see and hear everything that goes on stage This is where our participants This is where our guests are going to be and this is where you can be too. I'll show you how in just a second Now right below us if you look around around you you should see in the bottom half of the screen Maybe a dozen maybe 20 individual icons each of those representing a different person sometimes. They're a video feed Sometimes there's silhouette, but each of those represents one or more people logging in from somewhere And that's the audience. That's the community. That's the participants swarm If you'd like to learn more about a person you can just mouse over them You get a little bit of data if you'd like to have a private chat with them Think about it as being an auditorium where you're being over to somebody to whisper to them Just click on their icon if they want to talk to you your two icons will click together You can have your own private audio visual bubble But I said this was about discussion and conversation. How can you converse with a whole group easy? There are a few ways they're located at the bottom of the screen You should see a white strip running along it with a few different buttons On the leftmost edge, you'll see a number right now. It's 123 And that's the number of participants in today's conversation If you click that up will pop two boxes One is a box that just shows you all the participants another one is a chat box Which is a general chat box for everybody having conversation today And the chat box is a good place for informal conversation for sharing thoughts For floating out ideas that you'd like to ask us and you can see right now people are sharing the introductions Folks from as far away as Saskatchewan Green Bay Oberlin Castleton a lot of northern people as well as folks from houston for alexandria and from virginia Now next to that button on that white strip along the bottom of the screen There are two key buttons to know about one of them is a raised hand and one of them is a question mark If you click on the question mark, I'll pop a little box into which you can type your question or comment And when the time is right, I'll flash that on the screen for everyone to see and I'll read it out loud So everyone can hear it Now if your video camera is on and you'd like to join us up here on stage Easy just press the raised hand button. That tells me you like to join us And when the time is right, I'll press another button on my end and you'll join us up here on stage So you can have a face-to-face conversation Those two buttons that question mark in the raised hand those are the usual ways people participate by throwing out questions and ideas And please use them throughout this hour. And if you're nervous about it, don't worry We're really glad that you're here and we look forward to learning from your questions and ideas And we're also grateful to shindig for making available the technology to use it on Now last couple of notes We're grateful to our supporters on patreon if you haven't been there Patreon is a crowdfunding site that lets you collaboratively fund an ongoing project In this case, it's our project to explore the future of higher education So people go there to patreon.com slash brian Alexander They donate as little as a dollar a month to help us keep all the lights on and keep all the machines happy People on this screen here give ten dollars or more a month We're enormously grateful to them and they are very very kind and thank you. Thank you to everyone patreon. Again, you can join them too Now all of that is an introduction to this week's fantastic pair of guests I'm absolutely delighted to be able to host two professors in the liberal arts college world These are professors from the midwest Beth Betadix is from de paul university. Stephen Volk is from Oberlin college They're incredibly bright writers scholars teachers and activists who have thought deeply about how we can change The liberal arts college and university for the better and I'd really like to welcome both of them So first, let me bring uh, beth betadix up on stage Hello beth Hi So good to see you. Thank you for coming. Well, thank you so much and delighted to be here Are you at home in green castle or in the surrounding area? I am i'm in green castle Excellent. Excellent. Now when I ask people to introduce themselves, we have a particular way of doing it We ask you to explain what you're going to be doing for the upcoming year What are the big projects and also what are the big ideas up in your mind? Yeah, well, thank you again for this opportunity and thanks to all of you for coming Um, I'm really looking forward to the conversation for the chance to have such an organic conversation So I guess by way of answering both of those two pieces together I wanted to start by just sort of suggesting that everything that everything that I do And have been doing and will continue to do Is basically informed by my desire to Want to empower individuals to feel connected to their learning and to their communities and I'm most passionate about creating really relevant sighting authentic learning spaces for kindergarten through college students And spaces that bring lived experiences to the center and then give give people the chance to really have autonomy for their learning so In 2010 that's sort of where things begin. I hope it's okay to give you a sense of what I have been doing because it informs What I am doing now I was super inspired by david daviger's TED talk Which which he he won TED prize for establishing an organization called 826 national and in san francisco gave his TED talk He um, he finished with this wish that was called the once upon a school which and Here it is. I just wanted to hear it in its entirety He said I wish that you you personally in every creative individual and organization, you know We'll find a way to directly engage with a public school in your area And that you'll then tell the story of how you got involved so that within a year We have a thousand examples of innovative public private partnerships um I heard that and my head kind of exploded And I it's fair to say that pretty much everything that I've gone on to do Since then was inspired by that wish So the first and there were two pieces of that that were so important to me The first was that sort of the clarion called action for both individuals and organizations to get involved with their communities Um, specifically he was talking about public schools. That's where my real passion lies And the second part of his wish that was so important to me was the urgency That he sort of addressed and tried to To kind of dedicate those efforts to a larger audience to try to kind of build on this collective visioning process so those things uh, kind of Were like an epiphany for me I heard that wish and I went on to start a nonprofit organization called the castle Which works with schools in putnam county, indiana to create a culture of project based and art integrated learning um So we kind of created a learning community that had all participants involved From to pause students and faculty to the partner schools to community artists to community partners of all sorts And it was it was really cool But we weren't really moving the needle on the kind of cultural change that we were hoping to catalyze creating a sort of really energizing rich learning Space for the kids So we pulled back a little bit and we've created now an organization that is is really looking at professional development and working with the With cohorts of teachers who buy into the vision And that was a real lesson to me to work with the people who want to work with you As opposed to trying to kind of bring people to see a vision that they can see So that is what i'm doing currently right now It's really kind of putting all my efforts into really bolstering that and then connected to that as in a project I'm super interested in the efforts and wanting to really kind of Move the needle with regard to cultural transformation I'm working on a film project with The fingers to fenderman and james chase sanchez. They are the co-producer of this award award-winning film man on fire We're working together to create a documentary focused on putting Indiana on public And it was sort of come full circle because dav eggers is the executive producer for that. So that's pretty cool And we're hoping that we're going to use that film in the same way that he was kind of encouraging people to use His head wish as a kind of a town a piece for town hall Community functions where all stakeholders come together in a completely non-partisan way to think about how they might invest in public schools Super super excited about that project. The other thing that i'm thinking a lot about sort of in the the veina coalition building um Building on the book I would love to work with to kind of create a cohort Um or think tank if you will of of small liberal arts colleges Who would love to look into alternative funding models? specifically Forward or income sharing kinds of models and think about how there might be a cohort and they could pilot that So that's that's what i'm doing these days and i'm super excited about it Oh, I can see that that's so Just a quick question. What was the name of the person who gave that ted talk again? Uh, dave eggers. Oh dave eggers the author, right? The author, yeah Yes, we're gonna make sure we got that. Um, that's fantastic. That's so much work and and that's uh And I especially that last bit. We're gonna come back to that Right away about the question of uh alternative funding models and collaboration for uh small liberal arts colleges Well now that we've got you here. Hold on one second. Let me bring your collaborator your co-conspirator Up on stage and let me add uh professor steven vogue Steven hello Hey, ryan, how are you? Good good. Uh, are you are you uh at home in overland? I am at home in overland watching the snow come down I think we're getting that snow that was over in iowa a little while ago. Oh my gosh Okay, well, um, please stay warm and uh dry as the best of your ability A little bit You heard from beth uh that we like to ask people to introduce themselves by talking about their upcoming year So what's going to be occupying your brain and your time for the rest of 2021? Uh, well, there's a variety of projects. I'll be fairly brief on them I do a lot of work on immigration on immigration law. I'm an expert Witness on various trials that go on and so Immigration work in this current format will take a lot of my time So that's one thing the second thing is their themes that beth and I developed in the book As she indicated that each of us I think both collectively and separately will Will like to follow i'm I'm really interested in thinking much more about the tenure model within higher education and whether that's useful or not i'm interested in thinking about ways in which Uh, particularly small colleges, but not necessarily can create structures of integration across the Universities per se And then fundamentally, I think part of my work will be devoted to this really interesting question That's developed over the last few years, which is what does it mean that education is now a more significant indicator? of voting preference than income And allow that question comes down to What's an education for what's an education about? Is it really an economic multiplier? That's sort of the the earnings premium. Is it about a path towards critical thinking? And is that the way it ties into voting preference in that sense? Well, ultimately, is it a means for cultivating a process of democracy? Both in terms of what one learns and in terms of the process of how one learns it And so looking at how these three different elements sort of intertwined or tried to get at why there has been such a partisan division on higher education in general And much more than that how to address it Because it can't we cannot proceed in this matter anymore. It has to it has to come together We could have differences But the fact that education speaks to partisan differences. Yes, it's crazy It's just crazy. So those are the things i'm working on huge topics. They're huge. Do you stop? Immigration just thinking about all the changes there when you were talking about integration across a liberal arts college Were you thinking of uh inter-curricular activities transdisciplinary work? so It's sort of right at different levels in terms of the curriculum quite clearly that there are ways in which As we discuss in the book to have traditional disciplines that separate these out Doesn't seem to make much sense now. So how do you bring the curriculum itself into integration? Secondly, we have structures of employment across the institution that are tend to be seen separately So rather so faculty for example will develop a course Uh developed a curriculum and develop a course and what we do in developing a course as all of you know Well, we consult our past practice and we read our books and things like that But in consulting that course, why don't we bring in people from? student academic learning Why don't we bring in people from residential life? Why don't we bring in? The advisors from across the campus. Why don't we bring in coaches from athletics? All of those will help us understand how to best Can construct and connect a course and then on top of that quite obviously How do we bring students into that process of creating a course and creating a curriculum? So that's what I mean by integration Wow, so that's not just interdisciplinary, but also across domains as well as across professions and across Just but every institutional divide that we have And then particularly when you're talking about small liberal arts colleges, which are embedded in communities How do you bring the community in as well? Because not to have them as part of that conversation is not every course quite clearly, but many courses really It's not just that it doesn't make for a good course But it limits the possibilities for everyone to really engage in that kind of learning and what we're seeing nowadays with Such a division often between colleges and the communities that surround them Is how to bring those together and there's a variety of ways and one is What kind of education are we doing that can really? Prosper the community that can make the community a part of that conversation And I can see this comes full circle to what beth was talking about in terms of wanting to engage with the local community Which is appropriate because If you look friends on the bottom left of your screen, you should see a kind of yellow or tan colored button If you press that up will pop a link to our guest's new book Which is the post pandemic liberal arts college Manifesto for reinvention And I strongly recommend grabbing that because this is an important book for the liberal arts college world And this isn't and being at the liberal arts college world Statistically is a small slice in american higher education, but it's one that punches way above its weight It's enormously influential far beyond its numbers and it's really a special Part of higher education that america has developed almost completely on its own And of course one of the great things about you for which I have a lot of envy As you both got a rave review in team vote Which is something which I've gotten and I'm looking forward to at some point And if I'll be happy to explain that at at some point, but let me just ask To begin with in your book you have all these brave ways of rethinking about where The liberal arts college could look like what it could look like and how it could function But one is this idea of recanting with the community On the one hand, this seems almost counterintuitive if we think about the ivory tower idea in general But also as the liberal arts college world is a kind of separate space carved away from the world Often in geographic isolation It sounds to me like you're connecting with people who are arguing for the The transparent university or what kathleen Fitzpatrick calls the generous thinking where the the cloistered university and college gets to interact with the local community Say more about that. How can the liberal arts college world interact with that community in a positive and progressive way? best you want to try that I You know, I mean to me that's one of my favorite favorite things to think about and that was I was also sort of The moment of epiphany when I heard a beggar's speech, which is that sort of that sense that So many of us are in colleges where we have those town issues, right? Where it seems that we have this close service or suggesting to put up with their campuses as campuses on the hill and um, what strikes me and what strikes me sort of this really is that Hey, we have a responsibility to those communities that that were you know, the pot of hospitality This is that you know, we are members of these communities And so it doesn't it doesn't make any sense to me sort of intuitive that we wouldn't be Investing in our communities. Um, I did at a very very deep Fundamental level this is either our home. So it's It's about creating homes that we want to live in and that we want our neighbors to live in and that we want to There's also the very real in my view the very real sort of sense and again My lens is thinking about to move it between kindergarten and college students, right and the way that the high stakes testing culture Has completely failed everybody in that regard as far as I'm concerned and created these learning. Um It's created spaces of learning compartmentalized and fractured and not at all autonomous, right? So the kids from the moment they enter into kindergarten, they have no they have control over what they're learning how they're learning and how they should care about right and so And and when I started to make that connection to my own kids at the park, right I think about them as my kids and I think about How little control they have had In the past and continue to have in the college experience That to me really really really necessary to start to think about the continuity between what's happening in the community and what's happening at that At that level and the level of creating learning spaces where everybody feels connected you understand why they're learning what they're learning they understand what they're learning is for In their own skin, right? So that's what I that's what I think is at stake is that if we lose our sense of What learning is for at a very individual level Which means understanding that you're part of a community that no one is you know working the vacuum You lose everything you lose the capacity to learn And that's where I think we are right now With the sort of box mentality that to high stakes that the culture has turned into I think that's at the heart of where we are right now And and why I so desperately feel we need to transform the culture of higher education to create a culture that feels Energized with the culture of buying across the board. Everybody wants to be there The community So on the one hand, we have the high stakes testing environment, which is isolating and atomizing not only between individual students, but between communities And on the other hand, we have a possibility of a truly creative learning space And that's the transition we have to make from one From one to the next That's a very very powerful move Steve, please please add more to that so I think one I mean time down Kind of splits are very old been around with us for a long time. There's a variety of reasons for them One of the things that comes up clearly in small level arts colleges is often our students come from families That are better off than the communities in which we're located And so there is a kind of One would say almost natural resentment of students who will drive better cars than the people in town have And if if we are not honest about that and if we really don't understand our own privilege From which responsibility flows then we can't address these So there's a variety of ways in which we can do this. We do some of them at Oberlin We invite people into our classes. There is an elder community Kendall That is free to take classes as long as our faculty members agrees And I and and this I think might also speak to some of the demographic challenges that we face as as traditional age students go down, but having Older citizens older being my own age or younger are in the class less Incredibly important for the kinds of conversations that we could have so integrating people from the community We also allow high school students to take courses at the college for no cost And so those are different ways on an educational sense that we could do that We also provide lots of ways in which we work with the local Colleges, which we work with the local businesses, which we provide a sort of energy environmental Dashboard that works for the entire community So as long as we think about removing those walls And seeing the ways in which we the liberal arts colleges benefit from this integration with our communities Then I think we could begin to address the suspicion That many more conservative areas have about what they see as liberal liberal arts colleges That's terrific. I I'd like to sort of build on that if it's okay I completely agree that those walls those walls are there They feel inaccessible between town and but part of what makes it Necessary to break down those walls is to it's to start to see that there's a reciprocity I think between those communities and between the You know the the communities in which we're living and the community of the colleges which we're presenting And one of the things that I felt really sort of excited about in terms of the way that the cast Operators an external sort of service provider to the partner schools Students deposits and faculty Had to think about the relevance of what they were doing in their own classrooms and create learning experiences for the kids at the partner school And that made a difference and they went into the schools. No one came There were there were very many opportunities for the kids to come to talk But what really need I think was that we were going into the schools themselves So the burden wasn't on asking people to come to our space, right? So the the the gesture was to going to Their space, you know and to try and think about what it would look like to to think about the the University model as more fluid, right? So it's not just the campus But it's it's idea and something so I think beautiful about the liberal arts model That then becomes an ethos, right? So it's collaborative. It's about creative problem solving It's a sort of essential interdisciplinary model thinking about Looking at the world through different lenses that is then doesn't have to be formed on a particular physical campus It's an equals and I think that that I'm really excited about thinking about how you break down the sort of physical physical walls I've heard this refer to you sometimes as the permeable university or the porous We have a bunch of questions coming in and and friends, please my job here is not to be the interrogator But to be the emcee And so if you have any thoughts and responses to our guests have just said please hit that little raised hand button To join us on stage or click the question mark and already there's some question marks And I'd like to bring a few of these up. So to begin with this is one From let's say from david holma at harvard business school who asks Historically natural science was not in liberal education Now general education requirements include natural science as well as the social science in the humanities Given the digital present and future when will liberal arts add applied science to liberal arts? So let me start on that first. I think The issue of what courses are taught in liberal arts colleges Have not as much to do with natural science or applied science as the method in which one interrogates that process So for example, I can't imagine a course on Accounting at a liberal arts college and yet we offer all sorts of courses on economics I can and already what we're seeing are courses in the health sciences which relate to a series of a sort of Public health problems of the coordination between science and ethics All of those kinds of approaches of how to think about and apply science like nursing for example At a liberal arts college. So, you know one very brief story. I was asked some years ago to consult at a medical School in the midwest and the dean there said what can we do differently? And I said are you placing all your residents in the programs that they want? And he said, yeah, absolutely. And I said well part of what you're probably not getting is the fact that when your doctors get On to the floor They're not going to be able to talk to other people because they haven't learned how to consult They're not going to be able to take advice from their nurses because they learn hierarchy They're not going to be able to do this kind of work Because that's not what has been learned and that is what precisely you learn through a liberal arts college Which is not the subject matter per se But the way in which you integrate it and work with others to arrive at conclusions and approaches Thank you. That's a that's a great answer. Um, and again, that's a that's a really really good question David, thank you for it. And friends. It is that easy just to type in a question and ask Let me let me now demonstrate the video method Because we have a longtime friend of the program coming to us from the houston texas area This is tom hams, and he has a question also about interdisciplinarity. Hello tom Hi guys so My question is this is that, you know, we've seen a lot of innovation and and explosion of teaching modalities because of the pandemic And I was wondering what you guys saw as far as opportunity particularly in your world Going forward for you who not to stimulate an explosion of time and space which gives you whole new ways of dealing of Of approaching the problems of interdisciplinarity or even into inter institutionality You know so where we could have complementary things going on between institutions things like that Just wondering what you're seeing and what you're thinking and how that could contribute to the kind of work y'all are doing I think that's a great um, if I could start I'm not teaching this this I'm not teaching this here But last last semester I went in the in the shutdown. So it was march 13th. I will remember forever that day that's gone Down and I went to this virtual model um and how weird and bafka and surreal that really was um, and it was so striking to me that uh to me There were there were two sort of responses to that There was the one response where some of the students who felt that the structure And just the physical presence of being on campus That everything had been moved away from them and they were really really floundering and really sort of despairing There was another response that to me was very telling which were the students who felt like they were liberated because they didn't have to deal with the The sort of the politics of the classroom any longer, right? so they could they could all of a sudden Start to take learning on their own it became something that they could um an idea of sort of You know in this sort of the fluidity of time and space that you're referencing, right? It was something that they could really start to Become connected to and just by chance not by chance because this is the stuff that I teach all the time I was teaching a class on existentialism and I was teaching another class on the legacy of Kafka and Nietzsche when the shutdown I was like, oh my gosh. I mean could the universe have handed us a more relevant example of any of So I to me it's all about relationship building in the classroom and really um The content is only only useful when it's in that it's useful Right, so it's only useful if it's connected to the world around us. So I Was a kind of a perfect chance for the students to then be able to look at the world around them. Oh, oh, there's Kafka Oh, there's Kafka, right? You know, oh, here's a moment where we're all sort of Sitting around waiting trying to figure out what we're going to do with our next moment. Oh, there's back it, right? so and um and started to make deep connections to what they were learning content-wise And the way that the world was like really Announcing that content matter and all of a sudden the learning became so much more visceral even on the screen and I'm like very You know touchy-feely kind of person and so I would never have chosen go to a screen sort of To a virtual line of platform it's not in my comfort room But what I realized was if the relationships are already there And if you've created a space where everybody feels comfortable kind of taking risks and challenging themselves to Make the learning matter the platform Doesn't really matter. Um, and that was kind of my big takeaway. I stopped being scared Exciting to think about and I think what I think what you're doing grind here Is a really beautiful example of a kind of learning platform where You know where the where the learning is really, you know organic and relevant and in real time I think there are there are just there are ways to to continually in the moment Students to recognize that what they're doing has resonance And that's our obligation as teachers to be doing that And you can do that on a screen or you can do that in the classroom But the first thing is a commitment to want to make that learning relevant Um, I heard kathy davidson aac and you last week and she says absolutely beautiful Beautiful, I encourage everybody to read her book in the medication Because she is such a proponent of this kind of thing, but what matters most is building those relationships And then the platform follows She is and she and kathy davidson was a fantastic guest in the forum Last year and we'll be bringing her back Because that's what you've heard her hear first This summer depending on our schedule But that sense of relevance is is is vibrant steve. What do you think? Yeah, let me just add two quick points What that was saying because I agree with that One is I think what the crisis has told us has everybody switched to online is that it's actually not easy If you just take what you've done on the class and switch it online, it's not the same thing You're going to have lots of problems. So that's one thing. The second thing is Understanding that you could also understand that you can get so much more out of it when you do bring in all these resources And so it it makes sense to sort of leverage what you've gone through in this period And come out of it with the lessons for the new going ahead So who do you bring into your class? What kind of resources can you bring in? How do you? How do you really make use of an entire world? That was cut off from you before how do you bring in the author of a book that you want to read in class Into your class right all of these things at the same time And yet understanding that one of the things that I think we miss terribly is social connection And so you can't just build social connection You could do some social connection online, but it also increases are the importance of understanding Of how you make that social connection Yeah Yeah, no, I mean I uh the thing I'm I'm thinking about uh really, you know I what I did in my class for instance is I have a librarian Who I've embedded in my canvas shell as a teaching assistant Okay, and she does some sessions on her own But she also is a resource for the students that's in the class with them That they can get to and of course there's a wide range of people that you could do that with I would it it's for lack of time and Infrastructure that I don't do more of that But the thing that occurred to me based on that experience is I could bring brian into my class. I can bring people from wherever into my class If it's relevant and that needs to be part of the discussion and you know, he doesn't have to fly down to texas and Although I'd love to see him But uh, he doesn't have to fly down to texas and all the expense and time and effort that evolves with that He can just beam in right just like i'm beaming in right now, right? That's he used his metaphor. Well, thank you. Thank you. Tom. We have a whole stack of people with questions But yours is great. Thank you and be well by the way Tom and uh and best you have a a german connection. Uh, tom did a graduate work in the german government and is fluent in german So you guys can connect We had a couple a couple of quick comments came in rather than questions. The splendid ala levine Uh mentions that there was a project at phoenix college, arizona in the 1990s To connect school kids and senior citizens in an online space. It was called k to bray And I will share that out on on twitter, which is a great thing to find And brent anders adds community of inquiry is vital teaching presence presence and social presence must also be addressed Um, but I wanted to bring up. There's another question here from uh, greg bear Uh, who I think of as a science fiction writer, but he spells his name a little bit differently Uh, greg asks to what extent is the liberal arts model that you're describing Fueled by the fact that both of your campuses have incredible endowments In the case of overland college close to one billion. How does that translate to a tuition driven college? Um, well, we are tuition driven I mean in a huge extent. We are tuition driven as Most colleges are so I I do think the Perhaps a question is public but it's private in terms of funding, which is an important issue But you know one of the one of the challenges That we have to come down to what do we define as a liberal arts college? And there's a variety of definitions We could have in terms of the kinds of courses we offer the kinds of majors that are there the fact that is not purely applied Uh, that it combines breadth and depth in terms of majors and and general The rest of the education or all of the education in that sense. So there's all those factors, but the particular Feature of a liberal arts college that I think we drew off in In our book is the fact that it's residential And that it's both residential and relatively small the footprint that we're talking about Allows you to walk across or bike across campus in five ten fifteen minutes as opposed to Driving for half the day to get to the other side of the university of michigan And so it's that Which really forms the base to Of this a tuition allows a lot of this to happen But it's incredibly expensive as everybody knows I think the crisis that we face at liberal arts colleges as well as in higher education in general Which I don't have to inform all of you about is a crisis of cost And the cost is not necessarily I would just sort of add one thing on We tend to think of the cost as primarily a function of the tuition continued to rise And much higher than the cost of living But I think we have to look at it much more broadly in the fact that There always used to be a sort of margin that you had to make up between what your salary or wage was back in the 1950s, for example, and what a cost would go to college And so maybe you took up a loan or maybe you worked after school or things of that nature As wages have remained stagnant for over 40 years The space between those two has grown incredibly large And so unless you begin to think about this as a public matter Wages and where our wages are and the ability inability to keep up with the cost the actual cost of education You can't begin to to start to solve this I think Thank you. Thank you. That's a great great answer. And as a university of michigan graduate three times over I appreciate what you just described And I've actually walked that that distance We have a pile of questions coming in and I want to make sure that everyone gets a chance to to bring them up We had questions from another great friend of the program Phil Katz who works at the council of independent colleges And he asks Slash us on the screen These are important critiques, but not all new How do they account for the successes of liberal arts colleges in the past? Despite high stakes testing talent gown splits, etc. What changed? Good question. I think I will I think Beth has been having connection problems and so Yeah, so hopefully you'll try to get her back on or she'll get back on while I begin to answer that What changed in terms of so liberal arts colleges In many ways represented I think Brian sort of began by this sort of We always are punching above our weight in terms of the The impact that our graduates will have On the world what's been changing now is that again, I think the the sort of cost price function Has changed and that when you are beginning to move into 70 and 80 thousand dollar duitions That really has made a change before and it also there's a political There's a political environment. I think in which Higher education in general and liberal arts education in particular has been seen by a Fairly large sector of the u.s population with greater suspicion And perhaps that's because it costs too much and perhaps that is because an argument is being made That is not really training people for the future Which I don't think is actually the case in the sense that the the sort of earnings Premium for colleges is there and it's quite evident So we must be doing something right in that but there's also a political element, which I think has changed in which liberal arts colleges are seen as indoctrination grounds For a particular viewpoint, which I think is both Exaggerated But there's some element of the truth there that becomes very important to address How do we become or recapture those kinds of elements that we had before The final thing that I would say on that question because it's really a good question And it's very complicated is that the demographics of higher education in general and of liberal arts colleges in particular Is changed from what it was in the 1960s or the 1950s and I will often get from alumni this sort of sense of Oh, why can't they be like we were perfect in every way? We are different colleges We are trying and to a certain extent Succeeding in bringing in a much more diverse population than we had before We're not all white men. We're not all white men and women We are trying to be diverse and with diversity comes a series of questions That if we really want to take it on seriously For example, how do we make spaces that are actually welcoming to an african-american population and to students of color in general? Those are questions you don't ask if you are an all-white campus and there are questions We raise now which are quite serious in terms of the changes between Then Well, thank you. That's a very I love how many different domains that covered in just a few In just a couple of minutes and I appreciate especially the challenge of diversity Let me make sure that we and thank you for the question Phil, which is a very powerful one We had another question has to do with liberal arts tradition And then we need to poke forward a little bit and this comes from another colleague in another liberal arts college This is scott vying at frankly in marshal college. He's the library director Now he the question is in two parts. So let me just flash the first part on the screen. I'll read the second one There's a lot of tradition in liberal arts while trying new things is a large part of innovating It's often harder to figure out what to stop doing or how to let go of programs or other elements of what we do Any thoughts or advice on that part of reinvention? That's great. I'm I'm so sorry that the the connection with that that seemed to Cut up because I know she would like to Address this as well, but let me just start and hopefully she'll come back There is I think what we found in our work is that there's a certain A structural conflict that's developing between liberal arts colleges Which have a tradition in certain disciplines disciplines often formed in the 19th century And the kinds of questions which our students are facing now and which we as a society face And if you build up a german department or a russian department or Whatever kind of a department with a certain number of faculty spaces in it It becomes harder to Modify and change in terms of the curriculum that you have right so I think you know There are some Some colleges which are simply addressing that problem by getting rid of departments and getting rid of faculty which I cannot I cannot really condone I think more of the issue and what is the tradition In liberal arts colleges is not necessarily the curriculum in terms of what are our Students and what are we teaching but how are we getting how are we working with our students to develop an ability to think And you could do that a certain way in a german class That really doesn't respond to the liberal arts tradition and says you I'm going to take what's in my brain and put it in your brain And you'll learn it and there's certain ways you can do it In every single class that we have in the curriculum that makes use of wider Uh resources that we have that connects to other courses Why isn't german connecting to the film courses that we have why isn't it connecting to the literature courses that we have Why isn't it connecting to different kinds of communities? And so I think there are ways of using the the traditions within the disciplines But really focusing on how is it that our students are learning and how are we developing? That the the the ability to learn critically analytically ethically morally within all of these classes and within any of these classes I think that's come back. Yay The dangers of technology right there Well, we're glad to see you again and and then that gives you an opportunity to answer Our next question because we have so many coming in and I'm also very conscious of time But this question I think is almost built for you Beth this is uh from a student at purdue university So not too far from the world And this is joseph ching who asks my university is consolidating 16 departments into six within our liberal arts college citing budgetary restrictions How do liberal arts programs increase their value proposition within universities? Now that's not a liberal arts college or a liberal arts university That's a liberal education program within a broader university. Um, but still perhaps we can we can speak to them Well, I think purdue you're perfectly situated to be doing that because purdue is fantastic with regards to thinking about Trying to create this sort of innovative really relevant really thoughtful models of education. I was actually talking to a colleague of yours Who has started the boilers for education program? and And it's a really neat interdisciplinary program that is thinking about how do you bring together stakeholders from all across the university who really care about education You really care about trying to Help the surrounding community and the community at purdue to think about What's that? What's what's valuable about that education? So I think I think the work is doing the work And showing the impact right so if you create if you it through that consolidation you're creating these very strong programs that are intentionally built to Communities community engagement right thinking about how the disciplines in the way that they're interacting with one another the way they're sort of Developing those relationships cross disciplines If you're really intentional about the way that you're doing that and you're also thinking about how that plays out With regard to future opportunities, right? That's really really key What are those? What are those interdisciplinary connections that you're making? How are they going to translate? How are they going to transfer? to What you're doing after you're asked to do and I think that's a value proposition right there that everything that that is being Kind of advocated for and both a liberal education and liberal arts education Are precisely those those marketable skills that you're going that you're going to want to be putting into place after After university, right? So I think that's really the value proposition that that what liberal education is asking You to do is think about the transferability of your skills Asking you to think about the accessibility of those programs Asking you to be thinking about how they very directly translate between theory and principles and I I think you got yourself a winning proposition That's a great and joseph. Thank you so much for the great question I hope that answers it and we we wish you the very best. Please stick around. We'd love to hear more from you Transference and moving between domains with between disciplines moving between Across boundaries seems to be a theme that's emerged today We have a even more ambitious form of that that comes from jackaline metziani And she asks in particular you steven vogue, but also I think both of you could you speak to the future of international education? For example with the chinese national security law, how can colleges support their chinese students? And of course liberal arts colleges have a lot of international connections Oh boy, that's That's a complex question in in the specificity in which you provided Yeah, I have some experience with that in that Not this last year, but the previous two years. I taught over the summer in china and was very conscious of of how to gear a course of that would be Instructive and help students think without running into any problems So on the larger sense of your question. I think it's very clear for a number of years That liberal arts colleges and high tuition colleges at one level if they don't have a huge endowment Are becoming more and more dependent on international students for a variety of reasons and one of the hugely problematic aspects of that former trump administration was it's It's cutting down of those ties and cutting us away from the world in that in that context And so I think in many ways I look forward to two different things happening in relation to international education One is the return of international students without so many problems visa problems Back into To our campuses where they can become a part of the conversation Which is a worldwide conversation if we have learned nothing from covid Then we have learned that it is a global issue and that like many issues The only kinds of interactions and solutions will be global And so bringing international students here is one thing and the second thing I have now been teaching From home in china Is how to bring it goes back to the first question of how do you bring those international resources? Those groups of international students into your classes and your classes into their Into their classes and I'm not just talking, you know language classes But every sort of way in which you could have interaction is extremely important I think colleges Have a role to play in terms of making sure that we do stand for intellectual integrity And that becomes important when universities are considering programs abroad which might Pose limitations on how they teach. I think we have to be ethical and moral In upstanding academic traditions and practices I'd like to thank you Both for that very very good question Jacqueline i'm always Eager for the global perspective and steven. Thank you for that Very passionate answer We only have a couple of minutes left and i'm afraid i'm going to have to assert the privilege of the chair here And ask a question of my own and i'm inspired by Comments in the chat including from alan levine And i'm curious about looking ahead a bit with liberal arts colleges both of you Steven and beth have argued for among other things increasing collaboration within liberal arts colleges that roughly 80 to 200 That there are And yet all the pressures that we are facing tend to drive us into increased competition and division You know you mentioned for example beth a very beginning increasing Height high stakes tests and how those are atomizing. We also have the enormous financial pressure Caused in part by the pandemic. We also have the political divides which you know, steven you articulated very nicely as being associated with education We also have coveted and on top of this we have demographic pressures not to mention the difficulty in our financial sustainability And i'm curious A thwart all of those pressures that tend to drive us into division and to competition How on earth are we getting at these small colleges and universities to work together? I think um, I think that's a great great question. Um I hope it's just the process. I don't know which which tends to be my default position But I I think that it's a branding issue for small liberal arts colleges An opportunity in a particular moment where um, what really is about survival? Um, so I mean, I think that that what needs to happen is these colleges need to recognize that they really are This is a do or die moment And and one of the great opportunities I believe that could happen would be in a cohort model where you have a cohort of colleges who have committed to doing a certain set of um Practices, right? So maybe maybe it's it's a it's a it's it's both alternative funding models and pedagogical models It's the relationship between why those alternative funding models are are necessary when you're making these pedagogical shifts But co branding I think is an opportunity for small liberal arts colleges to both be able to double down on their own individual missions And be able to say this is who we are Our identities and also then be able to say this is how we become stronger So I actually see a possibility where I do think survival is at stake for these colleges I also think that if it's done right and you have this kind of collaborative branding uh potential It opens up the possibility for more and more of these colleges to to Just to be creative because it's such a powerful learning model That's when you say co-branding. Um, who would these liberal arts colleges co-brand with other liberal arts colleges or with their community or Other liberal. Yes. I'm sorry. Yeah other liberal arts colleges. They then say, um, so for instance, I'm throwing out the work, you know We are the five colleges that are interested in really creating an income share Model this is something that's never been done the level of small liberal arts colleges But it's being done very successfully in public universities and places like uh produce So if they if there's a piloting program, for instance, it allows them to do that It doesn't mean that the five colleges that are part of that cohort all have to have the same mission but those five colleges can say we are committed to To investing in students such that they Go through these colleges that they feel very bought into they see themselves as a fit for And they don't pay anything until they have They have salary of $50,000 at the end of the day, right? So that's a possibility. I see I think that the future is Got to be in coalition building and it's the competition that the scarcity model that's really driving Everybody at this point Thank you. Thank you. That's a really great stuff. Thank you Steven you get the last comment, I think Okay, I'll be very quickly on this because we're out of time, but I think Just taking off aware best laughs ended up with this scarcity model that we now have a situation I've just been reading the figures where 100,000 students have applied to get into nyu for the fall 57,000 have applied to get into harvard 54,000 applied to get into stanford And so you have a very small group Colleges they're all competing against each other and they're competing against each other on a certain basis Of meritocracy on on these ranking systems that have said this is number one and this is number two Everyone wants to get into the top I think we have given over a lot of our power to us news and world reports in terms of determining Really where do you want to go to college and for what reason and what that creates? And this is now where the competition comes in Is a move on the part of many private colleges and public to give merit scholarships As a person need-based scholarship because they want to attract the best What's ever defined as the best and the brightest and I think we have set ourselves up for competition When there is an abundant pool of Students who will make superb students in our classes out there And so we need to sort of break that model and establish a way of thinking of ourselves as What is our mission and who wants to come here on the basis that mission? And then how do we make those decisions about that which are not based on You know the hundred thousand who want to get into this one selective college Well, that's a those of you. I don't think either those are polly anish I think those are very sturdy visions that we can look forward to But unfortunately what's in my vision right now is having with great sadness to wrap this up You both have been terrific guests Beth. I really appreciate you wrestling with the infrastructure And and both of you you've given us so much to think about and so many great thoughts We all know how to find your book again If you're joining us after I mentioned it at the bottom left of the screen You should see a little kind of tan or yellow button to it So you can grab a copy of that But how else can we keep up with with your thinking and work Steve? We had your blog right You have my blog. I I try to keep producing on that so you'll be able to get to that That's terrific. And the Beth. How about yourself? Um, you can you can find me at www.bethbenedex.com and then it has sort of almost the projects that i'm working on or Facebook. I love facebook Very good. And then hopefully we'll be able to find you in your new documentary film Yes Well, both of you thank you so much and um, I have to before we close I have to point out where we're headed over the next Over the next month, but I wanted to thank you both again I also want to thank the the Community for asking such fantastic questions throughout. Let me just remind you that coming up We have a whole series of great topics You can sign up for more at timeywarel.com slash form 2021 If you'd like to keep talking about liberal education and collaboration the poorest university Plenarity we have all kinds of venues for that on social media, especially on twitter If you'd like to go back into the past and take a look at our archive of previous programs Just go to tiny world comm slash fdf archive. We're coming up on 250 recordings right now And that brings us to the end. Thank you all for a great conversation in this crazy time Please all of you stay safe and take care of each other We'll see you online Bye. Bye