 Welcome, everybody. Welcome to the Future Trends Forum. I'm absolutely delighted to see you all here today. We have a terrific guest, and we're talking about some really, really important stuff, and I'm really looking forward to a conversation. I'm absolutely delighted to introduce President Lynn Pasquarella. She's the head of the American Association of Colleges and Universities, which is a vast membership organization that includes colleges and universities that are doing some form of liberal education in the undergraduate sphere. Some of them are liberal arts colleges, per se. Some of them are big universities and state schools that are trying to do that in different ways. Part of it is just universities and colleges that are interested in improving undergraduate education. AECMU does a lot of great work from workshops to conferences. They publish really, really powerful resources. I can't recommend them highly enough. And Lynn is in charge, and she is someone that I'm just dying to talk to. She's also recently published a book. If you look in the bottom left of your screen, there's a kind of mustard-colored square which has what we value, and that's her new book on how colleges and universities embody and express value and what that means for justice. Now, with all of that, let me just stop and hold my throat clearing, and let me bring President Pasquarella up on stage. Greetings. Hi, Lynn. Hello, and very good to see you. It's such a pleasure to be with you. Are you in Connecticut? Yes. Very good. So you can tell us, what's the weather like there? Yeah, it's beautiful. It's in the 70s, a stark departure from what it's been over the past few weeks and months. Wow, indeed. Well, please enjoy. I hope you can go outside and partake as much of that as possible. President Pasquarella, we have a tradition here on the forum, asking people to introduce themselves, not by looking to the past, but by looking ahead to the future. And so the question is, looking to the next year, what are you looking forward to doing? And that is both what's the stuff you're planning on working on the most and what ideas and concepts are going to be top of mind for you? This is a critical moment for higher education. We've seen over the past eight years, rapid decline in public trust in higher education in general and liberal education in particular. And that's been part of a demographic divide. So Republicans in the past have said that college campuses are bastions of liberal progressivism that are brainwashing the next generation of snowflakes to melt at the slightest abrasion of their sensibilities. They're worried about liberal indoctrination through liberal education. Democrats have been concerned about the costs of higher education, that it's too expensive, too difficult to access. Both agree that higher education isn't teaching people 21st century skills. And so much of what I'll be doing over the next year is continuing our work around restoring public trust in the promise of liberal education and inclusive excellence, recognizing that inextricable link between our nation's historic mission of educating for democracy, which is more important than ever, and liberal education. That's an enormous task. Yes. Working with an audience of 320 plus million people. And I'm so glad you're doing it because this is so, so badly needed. Thank you so much. One of the challenges is that there's a rhetoric that has been fueled by higher education's critics that suggests that higher education and liberal education especially are mere luxuries that we should be focusing on workforce preparedness, narrow technical training to get jobs. And so there's been a shift away from the notion of higher education as a public good to viewing it as a private commodity, tuition and exchange for jobs. We need to push back against that rhetoric to be sure that we need to prepare students for the workforce. But higher education does so much more, including positioning people for success through the mindsets and dispositions necessary to thrive, fostering moral imagination, imagining what it's like to be in the shoes of another different from oneself, which is essential for global citizenship. And pushing back against authoritarian tendencies we saw from Tony Carnivali at Georgetown, his recent research, talking about the ways in which a liberal education in particular creates dispositions toward resisting authoritarian tendencies. How, I have to ask with all this, with all this intellectual scope, what mechanisms are you going to use to conduct this kind of massive counter propaganda campaign? Are you looking at publishing more books? Are you looking at lobbying state legislatures? Are you trying to identify great academics to have them wave the torch in public? What will you mechanically do? Yeah, that's a great question. We are certainly encouraging leaders at all levels of higher education to speak out against some of the overreach that's taking place on the part of state legislators, on the part of governors and governing boards with respect to academic freedom, the free exchange of ideas, what can be taught, who can teach it, who gets tenure, who gets promoted. This is a serious concern for us. We haven't seen this level of suppression of free speech since the McCarthy era. So we're encouraging people to speak out against that. And the last thing we need is to publish more books as a way of furthering our objectives. Michael Sandel and his book on the myth of meritocracy talks about prejudice of the poorly educated as the last acceptable, well, the stigmatization of the poorly educated as the last acceptable prejudice in the United States. We need to look at the ways in which our language contributes to that stigmatization, that those who haven't had access to higher education or choose not to engage in higher education are somehow lesser. There is this notion of colleges and universities as existing within an ivory tower as the willful disconnect from the practical matters of everyday life. And so we need to begin by demonstrating that our colleges and universities are anchor institutions, illustrating that their success is interwoven with the psychological, social, economic, educational health well-being of those in the communities in which they're located and those we ultimately seek to serve. Indeed. Well, thank you for more arguments for this and thank you for those examples. And hopefully we can contribute in our small way with this hour today. Friends, I have all kinds of questions for President Pascarilla, as you would imagine. But the forum is here for you and I would love to hear what you would like to ask. How can we address this political divide? What would you like to see done? The forum is for you. We already have one question too, which I'd like to put up. This is from John Hollenbeck who asks, providing or not providing the skills, competencies, et cetera, implies that these are things that can be transferred or withheld. Should we not focus more on learning to live in a pluralistic democracy? We should. We believe that the skills that are fundamental to liberal education, the capacity to think critically to write with precision coherence and clarity to anticipate and respond to objections are essential to our democracy thriving. But it goes back to those habits of mind as well. Instilling in people a capacity to imagine that some of their most fundamentally held beliefs might actually be mistaken. To listen critically and with understanding. Liberal education can help people to discern the truth in this ostensibly post-truth era while being mindful of the dangers of ideological filtering that needs to take place not only in the classroom, but in the world. There's been this false dichotomy between workforce preparedness, preparedness for citizenship and what takes place in classrooms. So we need to show that they are essential to one another. It sounds, forgive me for saying so, but that sounds more like a kind of humanities pedagogy. You're describing what we might think of as out of the domain of political science or sociology, as well as history and perhaps communication. I mean, is this actually more on the side of the less quantitatively demanding side of the curriculum or is there also a role for STEM in your vision? STEM is essential to it. I was on a commission put on by the National Academies of Arts and Sciences and we looked at the ways in which we could integrate STEM with the arts and humanities and social sciences. The report that resulted was called Branches from the Same Tree. And it's from a quote by Albert Einstein who said in the face of rising fascism and authoritarianism in Europe that all arts, all sciences are branches from the same tree. We need religion. We need science. We need the arts in order to deal with the kinds of wicked problems that we're facing. In my book, the first chapter is devoted to moral distress for physicians talking about the ways in which none of the technical scientific training that they had as physicians helped them when it came to deciding how to allocate scarce resources who should get the last ventilator, whether they should put the hand of a dying patient or go tend to somebody who might survive how to deal with students, not students, with patients who didn't have trust in the medical community. And so these are the kinds of challenges that we're going to have to confront in the future that aren't resolvable through narrow technical training but require an interdisciplinary broad perspective that liberal arts brings to bear on issues like this global pandemic, global warming. What should we do in response to an attack on Ukraine when there's a possibility of nuclear weapons and war be just given the proliferation of modern weaponry? How are we going to handle the food and shelter insecurities that were unveiled in response to COVID-19 as colleges and universities pivoted to online and remote learning? And how are we going to address the expansiveness of the digital divide? I'm so glad to hear you say that. All of that last one about the digital divide is particularly dear to me as a person. First of all, John, as always, thank you for a very, very productive question and Lynn, thank you for a wonderful, wonderfully rich answer. Friends, if you're new to the forum, that's an example of a text question and I'll give you another one right now that's coming up from our wonderful friend and author, Tom Hames. And Tom asks, how much have the institutions and mechanisms of education which are rooted in industrial age production thinking created this disconnect? Can we fix that without reforming systems of learning? They certainly have contributed enormously to the state of higher education today. We have created silos and we have had a system of ranking and sorting. And so at ACNU, we encourage a learner centered approach where each student takes responsibility for learning. And instead of viewing excellence in terms of how people perform on high stakes tests for which we already know the answers, ask them to engage in problem solving with respect to the unscripted problems of the future for which we don't now know the answers. And that excellence reconceived as a process requires that we assess students at the beginning, middle and end of their education with respect to the learning outcomes, some of which I've identified. And it encourages institutions to move away from notions of students who are college ready to what it is to be a student ready college. What that means in terms of providing not only access to higher education, but a place of welcome and belonging. We know about the mental health crisis that is spreading across higher education at all types of institutions. My colleague, Sia Bercheldin, talks about the ways in which cognitive bandwidth is reduced when students are suffering from food and shelter insecurities, impact of racism, sexism, homophobia, ableism, all of these factors are being brought to bear now on students. You can't worry about your next biology exam if you think you're going to get beaten to death because you're living in your car, or you have to take care of your children or parents or grandparents. You know, I think about the digital divide again, 68% of students living on tribal lands don't have access to broadband. 30 to 40% of Latinx and African-American students report not having enough access to the internet to be able to further their education. So what are we doing? We have to revolutionize and reimagine higher education at this time to ensure that we not only focus on compositional diversity, which is itself being challenged and will be, I think, a further challenge when the Supreme Court makes its next ruling on affirmative action, but also on auditing the practices we have in place that identify the systemic barriers in our own institutions to achieving the condos of objectives we have to promoting innovation, excellence, and equity in higher education across all types of institutions. When you say compositional diversity, you're referring to the student body and role that a given institution? Yes. Very good. Tom has a gift for asking very deep and provocative questions and, Lynn, you clearly have a gift for answering them splendidly. Thank you both. Now, if you're new to the forum, let me give you an example of beaming someone up on stage. This is Lynn Sibulski who has a question. So let's just put her on the stage, put the spotlight on her, and let's see how this goes. Hello, Lynn. Hello. Can you hear me? Very well. How are you doing? Wonderful. Always nice to meet another Lynn. Thank you. I'm outnumbered by Lynn's. It almost never happens. So my background is in college financial aid and specifically student loan debt reform and finance reform. So I'm always looking at education from the perspective of where can we get money and what does that mean in terms of going into the higher education system? So I'm interested in hearing your thoughts. Hypothetically, let's say businesses started offering college scholarships more often as a way of, you know, promoting their business and marketing and so on and so forth. How do you imagine colleges reacting to that in terms of, you know, here's this scholarship money, here are these students who are potentially wanting to work for these businesses someday and build relationships and now you have businesses coming in and saying, well, I'll give somebody a scholarship if they take a class that features this or if they major in this. How would you foresee schools shifting to either expand conversations with businesses or expand conversations with students? That's such a great question and I think it is in part the future of higher education. We have to be more intentional about partnering with K-12 business and industry to create opportunities for students. You know, there's been a push toward apprenticeship models, embedding career services into the academic curriculum as opposed to viewing it as completely ancillary and this would provide a pathway to do just that. I expect the reaction will vary at some institutions. There's been a good deal of support for this. I mean, I think about Bates and their Center for Purposeful Work. I was at Mount Holyoke, we started a program called LINC that was intended to connect curriculum to career but I also know that there are institutions where faculty will resist and say, this is the corporatization of higher education, this is the last thing we need to do. We don't have control, we want autonomy over the curriculum. What's happening now with legislators provides new reason for concern about outside control. But when I was at Mount Holyoke, we started a program in data science with funding from MassMutual that gave us money to hire a number of faculty and to provide pathways for students. Thank you. Well, Lynn, that's a great question. You know which Lynn that is. In fact, Lynn, can I keep you on stage for a minute for that question? Sure. And then thank you for the answer. You can see we cover quite a range of ground and again, also if you're new to the forum, we're very nice to you if you'd like to join us on stage. You don't have to be named Lynn in order to participate. Gentlemen, you don't have to have a huge beard either so we're welcome to all of you. We have questions coming up like mad and here's one from the splendid Chris Mackey who asks regarding public engagement, what's most urgent right now? Finding new ways to reach people who undervalue PSE or persuading the post-secondary education community to speak and act more effectively together. I'll be pulling put that back on the screen so you can see it because that's a very, very rich question. Yes. We need to do both, clearly. I just attended the inauguration of the new president of Olin College of Engineering, Gilda Bevere, and got to see students presenting some projects that they had been working on. They were working at some visual prompts on computers and trying to figure out ways to translate those for individuals who were visually impaired using a whole range of technologies. And I was thinking about their presentation in relation to a presentation I saw from students at Worcester Polytechnic Institute and they were working on the erosion of coastal lands. Soil erosion was creating dramatic problems for people in the region. And so they did a study. They met with residents to try to convince them to engage in certain behavior to prevent further soil erosion. The people they talked to didn't believe in global warming. They thought that climate change is a hoax. And they said, you're just trying to raise our taxes. You're not trying to do anything for us. And so it was a lesson to the students who were mostly engineering students. It requires more than scientific training to be able to achieve your ultimate goals. It requires the capacity to speak across differences but also to create trust. So I mentioned we're in this post-truth era. Facts don't matter. Indeed, we know now from studies that when incontrovertible evidence is provided to individuals to show that their beliefs are false, they tend to double down on those beliefs rather than inject them. And so what's required is to create a sense of kinship, to create a sense of community and shared belonging based on shared experiences that are grounded in place. And that requires us to be out in the community to not just have our research disseminated among ourselves as scholars but to convey it in a way that's understandable to a broad range of individuals but also to partner with those individuals in the co-creation of knowledge to take advantage of local epistemologies. And so it is truly a bilateral relationship. Chris, that's a very, very probing question and I think, Lynn, your story about Worcester is a great one and that matches my sense both the WPI and the city of Worcester. Chris, I hope this gives you a direction for an answer. If you'd like to follow up, please either just type another question or click your raised hand because your question is a lot going on for it. Thank you very much. Lynn Sibulski, if I could branch this over to you just for one second here, what your namesake just described had to do among other things with relationships that are financial, that a lot of community colleges of course are very closely connected to their local community, hence the name, as are quite a few campuses that really take talent-gallon relations very seriously. Is this kind of outreach one way to build up more and more financial aid and other forms of financial support both for students and institutions? I'm trying to figure out what is the best way to reach out and try and figure out different types of financial aid. Not because I don't think solutions are possible but because they just take so much time. Anything that is a federal program has a whole legislative process that it has to go through. We do have things that are good that exist in the private sector but in the private sector you also have competition and you have that potential for corruption that kind of goes unfettered until things are in a really toxic place. I'm looking towards businesses and individuals even who would want to say hey, I want to contribute to someone's college education. Maybe we shouldn't be looking at businesses that have a benefit program where we're paying for debt that people already have. Maybe we should really be shifting the focus on employees who want to attend college and for businesses that can't afford a benefit program that covers everyone who wants tuition reimbursement is there still a pathway to say hey, I have these two or three employees and I want to contribute something. That way I think it kind of makes for a community focus and I would love to see ways of having businesses and individuals look at the needs in their communities and say how can we support the students who are here, how can we get people to be educated here and then stay here and then give back to the community and I hear students would be more likely to do that if their funding came from their local communities rather than from just out in the government somewhere. That's a really good point. Thank you, Lynn. There's a lot going on here and back to Lynn Sibulski back to Lynn Pascarella we have a response from John Hollenbeck about your story and he asked or he recommends we need to go beyond climate change denial to see what the real problem is and I'm wondering is that something that a school like WPI could do? Can they prepare students for that kind of engagement? Do you think this is a hoax? Why is that? That's absolutely right because before we can speak across differences we have to understand the source of those differences where this mistrust is coming from what are the fundamental beliefs that it's basis and yes WPI can do that they have changed their tenure and promotion system to recognize the contributions of faculty in the communities the structures for tenure and promotion now for the most part recognize grants, research, peer reviewed journal articles books but not the kind of work that we need to engage in if we are going to push back against the mistrust in higher education if we are going to increase equity if we are going to serve as public intellectuals and so it will require not just working within our institutions because I know I certainly value this work when I was a faculty member at the University of Rhode Island it was recognized at the University of Hartford it was recognized not so much at places like Mount Holyoke but it didn't matter that I supported it what matters is that your colleagues and the disciplinary societies of which faculty are a part value this work Thank you, that's a good contrast for those two New England schools Lynn Sibulski let me give you a break and let you climb down off the stage thank you for joining us you can see friends this is all about the conversation and so we'd love to hear more and more of your thoughts about the post tenure and we had a question about that from our great friend Sarah Sangregorio she is a PhD candidate at Montclair State and we just bring up this question now which is what are your thoughts on post tenure review as a way to regain public trust? I think most institutions have some sort of post tenure review once you're tenured if you ever want to get promoted to full professor from associate professor you need to be reviewed many places review full professors either three to five years after they've received promotion to full professor so I think it's an anomaly to suggest that as the state of Florida has and other states that we need to enforce this because it doesn't take place that's just not true it's part of that false narrative that's chipping away at public trust in higher ed so I don't think there's anything wrong with post tenure review and in fact crediting bodies look at whether there is such a thing in terms of ensuring quality of standards well thank you that's a really really good answer thank you very much for the question everybody else again the podium stands open if you'd like to join us on the video side and the Q&A box stands open if you'd like to join us in the textual side and in fact let me just quickly share in the chat a chart this is from the website 538 showing the divergence of republican and democrat views towards science which really shapes I think in many ways some of the backgrounds that we're just describing and the question here comes from our friend Michael Meeks at Louisiana State and Michael asks how do we balance the left-right faculty population or does it matter if our goal is to build public trust and encourage real discussion and debate, empathy to understand why others think we certainly have to have a diversity of perspectives that are offered in in the academy if we are to train students to think critically that doesn't mean that we have to present false views but diversity of institutions in higher education diversity of viewpoints is one of American higher education's most significant strengths it's challenging because we hire people who tend to think like we do as faculty members we don't hire people with radically divergent views it's more important to provide a forum I think for a diversity of views and I'm an advisory board member of the heterodox academy where we are focused on ensuring that there are diverse perspectives brought to bear in higher education and in all discourse well that's a group I've been approaching for about a year and a half to appear on our program so if you want to put in a good word I'd love to see that absolutely I can do that for you Michael, does that help answer? Does that give you a sense of it of academia as a place where the left-right balance can be struck and wrangled over I'll just let us know with another Q&A question or join us on stage let me just add that I think about these issues all of the time especially in relation to what I was teaching I was teaching courses in medical ethics philosophy of law I taught critical race theory at a range of institutions and at a variety of levels and I talked about abortion and reproductive rights whether there was a right to die should euthanasia and assisted suicide be legally permitted I talked about the death penalty and the use of medical professionals in that whether society's failure to protect people from preventable harm mitigates when the victimized become the victimizers questions of death and the meaning of life and I always presented a variety of perspectives I didn't teach by defending my own views in fact students always assumed that their views were my views because they figured well I'm smart and she must agree with me because you know so that I would have felt it a failure if they knew my views and so I think most professors are attempting to present a diversity of perspectives and provide students with the skills necessary to draw reasoned conclusions but the fact is the very way that we frame the questions what's on our syllabus will reflect particular perspectives, political, social economic perspectives well it's tricky I mean if some academics would respond by saying we are in a crisis situation right now and I believe that I'm not as interested I'm ventriloquizing here I'm not as interested in having students engage with multiple viewpoints because I think some of those multiple viewpoints are dangerous and they might be for example in climate science well I don't want to give a space for climate denial or it could be for gender identity I don't want to give a space for transphobia or if we're talking about decolonization I don't want to give a space for pro-colonial attitudes and that becomes a strong argument for a class which is actually clearly aimed at a programmatic intent would you respond to that kind of thinking? well and we can't make any progress as a society in working toward shared solutions if we don't understand the other points of view and so this is some of the controversy on college campuses that I talk about in the second chapter of my book on freedom of expression where there's often attention between providing a safe and equitable learning environment that is free from spigmatization and psychic harm and the foundation of American higher education which is the free exchange of ideas and the unfettered pursuit of the truth but that doesn't mean that we have to entertain arguments that we know to be false and it doesn't mean that we need to tolerate hateful speech in the classroom or in the extramural community there's a difference between academic freedom and first amendment issues we have to maintain the integrity of our disciplines and the institution itself whose mission it is to further knowledge so it's an important question but I think we can do both that's a very tricky balance to strike thank you I admire the way you answered that we have another question Michael makes follows up and he says really John Haidt book I think he means John Haidt from heterodoxy faculty not being able to be open and honest in the classroom compared to decades past your thoughts if I can ventriloquize again Michael correct me if I'm wrong faculty feel that they cannot be as open and honest in the classroom now as they used to be Michael let me know if I'm wrong on this and then you know the book I think am I wrong? Yes, yes I think that's absolutely correct there is a sense I know from my own experience some of the books that I used in teaching the course materials I would not use now because they would be seen as inflammatory so I used Randall Kennedy's book the title of which the N word I mean uses the word and it's a defense of the use of the word and I used it in philosophy of law in the context of free speech debates I would not use that now because I know that there would be protests and I think there are good pedagogical reasons not to use it but I would still defend its use under certain circumstances and there are many other instances of that we know especially in states where there are legal prescriptions against the teaching of critical race theory or other divisive concepts or divisive concepts or there are prescriptions against talking about gender identity issues that faculty are chilled they are also chilled in classrooms that are on campuses where there are open carry laws I would be reluctant to speak about many of the issues I taught for years in a state where a student might have a gun in the classroom Absolutely Michael I think I think you are both agreeing that faculty for different reasons will have more reasons not to want to share their thoughts and more reasons not to do that thank you for that question that makes everything you are talking about so much more challenging and so much more difficult I am curious Michael I think is touching on this as several of us have today there is the idea that higher education is rampantly the domain of political correctness this is the argument you were hearing especially from the right that it has become a massive indoctrination camp for progressive ideas or for extreme ideas depending on who is talking but my sense is that you argue that liberal education as we see it now is actually a space for an incredible multiplicity of ideas and many many voices but now I am trying to paraphrase your entire book and that is just going to be what can you give us a bit from chapter two here about this how are we actually doing liberal education are we actually a massive or a willian indoctrination camp or something else going on I think there is something else going on what is going on if you are a politically conservative student who is steeped in religious ideology you are not going to feel comfortable at a place like Hampshire college say one of my sons attended Hampshire had a great education there but he had a politically progressive institution he might choose to go to a different institution and in the same way he wouldn't feel comfortable at Liberty University he wouldn't feel free to say the things that were on his mind because he would be afraid of being viewed as an outlier or creating enemies so we need to think about as I mentioned earlier the great strength of American higher education in terms of diversity of institutional types with small residential liberal arts colleges faith based institutions women's institutions and community colleges research ones and HBCU's HSI's tribal colleges and in those places I have found that there is a genuine free exchange with respect to competing points of view but there are also missions and values reflected in the community so you have policies and you have practices but there's also a culture that is beneath that and the values are often reflected in the unwritten culture that's a very good point that strength is little appreciated I think in the U.S. that's the extraordinary institutional diversity that American higher education produces a circle of 4,000 colleges and universities there's a lot of variety going on there friends we're coming close to the end of the hour so this is your last chance to get in a question and because nobody else has put a question up in the last five seconds I'm going to take advantage to ask a question which has to do with technology and I'm curious what role do you see technology playing in liberal education it's a big question for example do you see the idea of the digital liberal arts really taking hold where you see more people more students receiving more education both from the practical side of how to make digital stuff as well as on the multiple disciplinary viewpoints on how to think about the digital world or do you see the digital environments accelerating some of the problems that we've been talking about so far so just declining faith in higher education and I'm asking to look ahead a little bit to the far future say September how do you see technology the digital world intersecting with liberal education there are so many ways in which we must integrate technology into liberal education just in terms of the ways that we just learn how they communicate with one another and liberal education is essential to informing the use of that technology you know like I mentioned my son Spencer I have twins his twin brother Pierce is in television and film production and one day Pierce came into the library of our house at Mount Holyoke when I was president there and my husband John who's an entomologist was reading in a book on bugs and Spencer was working on his PhD and he has a PhD in African American studies so he's working on his thesis and Pierce comes in and he says this is the most dysfunctional family on the planet I don't think so but what do you have in mind he said you know you're sitting there wasting your time we could be out in the world doing things this is a beautiful day let's go out and do things I'm pretty sure that you have some things to do in terms of studying too he said yeah but it's a waste of time they're just trying to get our money loser courses how is this going to help me to take a course in small group communication intercultural confidence what all I want to do is be behind a camera and so as luck would have it Pierce's first job out of graduate school was with the Jerry Springer show where he quickly learned most dysfunctional family on the planet and he called me from the show one day and he said mom I finally get the value of a liberal education I understand why I needed to take this courses in small group communication intercultural confidence because I just spent the last two hours after going out to get ties and cigarettes for the talent talking to them about their backgrounds about what they're doing how they got here and he said now I get it but why didn't any of my professors ever tell me why I was needing to take these courses and so there was a recent study that came out inside higher ed on how more than 90% of faculty understand the value of general education and liberal education but very few of them think that students understand it we need to do a better job at being transparent about why we're asking students to do what they're doing otherwise they are going to see college as a waste of time there was no doubt that Pierce was going to stay in school but imagine not having the money to pay tuition and thinking I could get a job immediately as he could have in his industry why should he stay and the arguments about you know the long term investment paying off and aren't very compelling when you don't have a way to feed yourself or care for your family so I think we need to do a better job at explaining why we have the curriculum that we have and what it will do in terms of students long term goals with respect to success in work and in life well thank you that's a great story and of all all programs to work on it could have been a discovery channel documentary about turtles, no I had to be a Jerry Springer show, the most extreme, thank you that's a really really good answer I think we're going to have to cut this short by just a couple of minutes thank you everybody for your excellent questions and your excellent comments today it's been just great to hear from all of them, if you would like to keep talking about these issues if you'd like to dive into what's going on with trying to convince people either that climate change is happening or to have multiple points of view in the classroom or to try to get people to take higher education more seriously and support it more strongly we have the kind of conversation on Twitter just use the hashtag FTTE or tweet at me Brian Alexander or at Shindig events or if you'd like head over to my blog xander.org if you'd like to go into the past and take a look at our previous discussions about this because we've touched on all of these issues in previous sessions just head to tinyurl.com slash FTF archive and make sure you subscribe now we have more sessions coming up scheduled covering related topics everything from educating for democracy what the climate crisis means for academia, public higher education digital forward design what that is what Web 3.0 is just go to www.futureofeducation.us and you can learn more if you've got something you want to share with us publication projects and triumph please just shoot me a note in my email and I would love to hear from you so I can share it like I did early today and in the meantime again thank you all for the excellent questions for the excellent comments thank you for your attention and thinking it's always great to be thinking with you together in the meantime take care of yourselves all of you be safe and we'll see you next time online bye bye