 Good morning everyone. As things have it, we're having a little bit of technical difficulties. So Ron Pressman, who is our CEO, is unfortunately stuck in traffic, I should say the CEO of Institutional Financial Services, which is the group that Christina Kudlow and I represent. So we are going to go to Plan B. So I am going to read some remarks that Ron would have done and we're going to engage in a wonderful conversation with these two wonderful women that are sitting behind me. So first and foremost, thank you. Thank you all so very much for your brine hospitality here at Texas A&M San Antonio. It's a pleasure to be here. My name is Maureal Alina. I am a senior director in the fine engagement and national advocacy group and I work very, very closely with Dr. Mattson on a number of things, but most particularly as she sits on our Hispanic Advisory Council. So thank you again. Thank you again. Let me go ahead and again welcome everyone. We are so grateful that Texas A&M San Antonio for hosting the Power of One event sponsored by our diversity and inclusion team at Unite, which is the Hispanic Latino Employee Resource Group of TIAA. What I wanted to underscore is if you are a TIAA employee and we have all of our employees connected via Webex and you are not participating in an ERG, we want to definitely encourage you to check out the ERG available to you. Now remember, it's about being inclusive, so you don't need to identify with a certain group to be a member. It is my pleasure to introduce our guest speaker, Dr. Cynthia Damatsen, who is the president, as you know, of Texas A&M San Antonio, one of the fastest growing universities in Texas. Dr. Mattson also serves on the TIAA Hispanic Advisory Council, composed of our most trusted advisors as we look to deliver the best possible experience for our Hispanic customers. This includes developing products and services to address the financial needs of the growing Hispanic market, defining opportunities and responsibilities in serving the Hispanic community. Dr. Mattson has over 20 years of experience in higher education with a track record of accomplishments that support campus growth, including faculty and student success, economic development, financial stewardship, and broad-based entrepreneurial leadership. It is my pleasure now to hand it over to our CEO and president of Institutional Financial Services, Ron Pressman. Ron, it's all you. Thank you for filling in, Marielle. I've actually been listening in to your comment. I apologize for the fact that I was a little bit late, but you were doing such a wonderful job. I almost was encouraging them to just let me, you let you go ahead and finish up. All I really wanted to do was to add my welcome and to thank very much Dr. Cynthia Tanyante Mattson for joining us today. She, as you know or about to know, will be in dialogue with TIA's Christina Kutla. Christina is the senior managing director of Institutional Retirement, and in addition to Christina's many leadership roles in joining TIA in 1997, she has served on the Department of Labor, ERISA Advisory Council and was recognized as TIA's working mother of the year by Working Woman magazine. We're really proud of that and proud of Christina. She currently serves on the board of the Council of Independent Colleges and chairs the board of Almaty Collaborative Arts, a nonprofit organization that tries to create and facilitate artistic collaborations between African and American artists and the American artistic institutions. I actually am not sure how Christina finds time to do all this, but she manages to do it with a level of excellence that's just incredible. So Dr. Matts, Tia Tanyante Mattson and Cynthia will be discussing topics of critical importance, such as how an organization can build a diverse and inclusive culture and how we cultivate leaders from all sectors of our society. So with apologies for my tardiness, but great, great thanks to Marielle for filling in so well and seamlessly. I'd now like to welcome Dr. Cynthia Tanyante Mattson and Christina Cutlett to the dialogue. Thanks very much. Thank you so much, Ron, for that welcome, and we all know how New York works sometimes with traffic, so we totally understand. But again, thank you so much for the introduction, and it's a good morning. It's probably a good morning, everyone here in San Antonio. It's good afternoon to some of our colleagues out on the East Coast, and we really do welcome you today to this dialogue. I am delighted to be here from TIAA, a company that has worked with Texas A&M. The broader Texas A&M system for a very long time, and now with Texas A&M, San Antonio, and also with the institutions across the country as we help people build their secure financial futures. We are in the retirement business, but we are also in just helping people with their order by natural situation as well. Some of you may know that TIAA is the provider of retirement, of the retirement plan right here at the university, and for those of you who are eligible to participate, I'm looking at all of you in the audience, and I'm hoping you are participating with TIAA. I'll tell you a little bit about my background in a minute, but first, I wanted to introduce our program today. I'm truly honored to share this stage with President Madsen for a conversation celebrating the Hispanic Heritage Month. She is truly an extraordinary woman. I've known President Madsen now for quite a number of years, and every time we meet, it's like old friends. We always have a lot to talk about. Today's session started as part of a series of TIAA for TI employees, but we are really excited to now have included the broader Texas A&M campus in that dialogue. And the conversation actually reflects some of the values of the work that the President's Commission on Equity right here at Texas A&M, the students from the President's Leadership class, participating in the May Center for Experiential Learning and Community Engagement have also been engaged in this as well. So I'm just really thrilled that you guys have joined us today. To begin our program, I'll take the role of anchor woman. I'm going to try to channel Nagina Opera. And raise some questions for discussion. We really do want this to be a dialogue where we are going back and forth and we'll open up for questions towards the end of the session. And we want to dig into issues and topics that are really important to our shared communities. And we are going to, of course, really be focusing on the issues that are facing these and again Latino communities at this time. After we have had some time to talk and present some of our personal views, we'll open the floor to people here but also to the broader TIA community who are tuned in either in some of the conference rooms across the organization but also a lot of people are going to be tuning in through Webex as well. As a reminder to our team at the TIA, we encourage you to join in the conversation through Yammer. You can access Unite Yammer page through the email invite that you all received and as well as through the Enterprise Internet announcement online. And from there you can follow along and provide comments and if you have any questions, please send them in and those questions will be filtered and will actually be asked as part of the dialogue today. So I'm going to turn to our actual program and why we are here today. I think it's always best to begin with what's personal for us because it is that which is personal that really sets our views of the world and how we look at things. So I will start with just asking President Batson and I'll start with asking you a question. Please tell us a little bit about your background, how you came to be a leader of one of the most respected institutions and what are the values that have guided you on your journey and that inform you in the work that you do as a leader? Well, first I want to welcome you to Campus Christina. Thank you for joining us, flying out all of you as this happened and to all the audience in TIAA. Thank you so much for including Texas A&M University system and certainly our campus is part of this conversation across the country and the network within TIAA. We are very pleased with all the work you do for our universities across the country and certainly here at the A&M system. Let me start with some values. From my perspective, there's probably three values that are really important to me as a leader and have been for some time in my career and community and the first and foremost is real respect for the sacrifices and commitments that my parents made for me and my sister to be able to have a better life and the real commitment they had to education and imparting that to others. Although they did not have a formal education, they recognized the importance for the future of our family and the future of the world and now that I've returned to San Antonio I have a much deeper connection and commitment to what that meant to them and what that means to me now as a university president. I think you don't get anywhere in life without perseverance and hard work and I think that's one of my most important values is the ability to work hard, to think smartly, but certainly to work hard and to persevere and to be resilient and it's something we build into our community that we ask from our students and we ask from people around us. I would say the third is this drive and in the Hispanic Latino culture in Afghanistan is to really have the internal motivation and drive to hold yourself accountable and hold yourself to high expectations and all the people around you to high expectations and a commitment to whatever it is you decide to do with your life or your career. You know a lot about my career so I would just be very brief in terms of coming into the university sector having been 20-something years as a university employee in multiple systems I started off and have always been part of staff and earned my degrees along the way. I terminated as senior vice president, chief business officer, chair of the Kugel board before becoming a university president in the transition. So I have a long background in history and understanding of administrative services, student affairs and certainly finance and continue to have a deep appreciation for what DIA does for our community. And since you're here I think I have to ask you to share a little bit about your background with the audience as well as those that are on the web. Well, thank you. My background is kind of similar to yours. Very strong parents who looked at education as sort of, you know, you didn't have a choice, right? After you graduated from college then you could talk about what else you wanted to do when you grew up. I'm seeing some nods in the audience from people that understand that as well. I was actually born and raised in Zimbabwe and came here to the United States to go to college. So obviously education was one of the things that my parents really put as first and foremost. So I do understand a lot of the conversations that are going on right now especially about the DACA students and the dialogues that's going on about immigrants as well because I am one of those as well. And how I ended up at TIAA was really, you know, it's an interesting story in itself. I was working for a financial services organization who most of you probably couldn't name off the top of your head and I got a call from a headhunter who said I really think you need to consider some positions that are open at TIAA. I barely knew who TIAA was at that point 20, you know, some years ago but I said okay, you know, what is it that's so special about them? And he said go talk to them and look around and come and tell me if you see yourself as an organization. So I did that. I went in, I interviewed with several different people and as I walked around and as I got introduced to different people I could see myself. TIAA was the most diverse organization, financial services organization that I'd ever, you know, seen and ever worked with and I came back and then I looked at the values that the organization has and it goes back to respect and the values and resilience and I could see those things within the organization and because the values really aligned with my values that was why I decided to move over to TIAA that was 20 plus years ago and you know, here I am. Welcome, we're glad you're here. Thank you so much and by the way, it's a beautiful campus. We drove around and it's really, really beautiful so congratulations to you. So I'm going to move on to some big picture issues that we are all facing right now. Hispanics account for more than half of the total U.S. population growth from 2000 to 2014 reaching 57 million in 2015. Given these demographics, how do you see society changing? What shifts in the American culture and consumer needs might we see and what should colleges and businesses do in response to these shifts? This is a really interesting question that we are asking ourselves all the time. One of the items that we need to be responsive to in the university culture and also in the American culture that you refer to is this rapid pace of accelerated change. There are disruptions in every sector of our economy. We think about energy, we think about natural resources, new technologies, robotics, artificial intelligence, communications. The world is changing in ways that we kind of even imagine and we can't imagine in all cases how business will be done in the future. So it is very important in our network hiding that work 24-7 economy, society that we are preparing for this fast amount of change. So as a university and as a university president we have to think sharply about what does an educated workforce look like and what skills do our students, our graduates, our faculty, and our staff need to be developing in order to prepare students for that future. When you think backwards from that question really forces you to look at what's happening within the pipeline. So what does students look like for the future and what does the future look like for those students? And what we see in our current pipeline is a growing population of traditionally underrepresented minorities. And we know that we also have a growing number of non-traditional students. So we need to reimagine our experiences here at our university to match what we're talking about that's happening in the society and face those issues, confront those issues and how we design delivery models for instruction. We know that the majority, probably close to a third of our students excuse me, students from historically underrepresented minority communities are three times more likely to be living in poverty. So we also have to face those issues when children and their families are looking for universities and what does that experience look like for them. In some regards when you talk to families they say thinking about colleges like an international experience and we know ourselves within the university within the academy the navigation that it takes to get through the system to get in the front door and to be successful in classes. So we really have to think through that immensely. We also know that because our students are coming to us as non-traditional students they're also coming to us as working adults they're coming to us as working parents and many of our students are families making multiple jobs. So that really requires us to rethink how we develop and design curriculum instruction to move the model forward. We are talking about all kinds of practices here and as a startup university one that is growing quickly and rapidly we can embrace innovation we can embrace new thinking around how higher education should be delivered and we can do that to scale. We don't have to do it in pilot program but does it mean that we can relieve ourselves from the responsibility of assessing what's working and what's not working because there's a lot of work ahead of us in a very different context in a very different society. You bring up some really great questions what does the future student look like and what does the future look like that's a very interesting way to look at it but to write I mean the student of today is very different than the student of 10, 15, 20 years ago and we have to be able to figure out how do you still educate them given the different data. I think one of the other important points to remember is that the value of the college degree is still very important and there have been some questions in society about that and we need to dismiss that thought with evidence and the evidence is that close to 65% of jobs in our economy today and even greater in the future require a college degree and in order to be prepared and nimble for the types of professions and industries that are yet to be developed we need to be equipping students with good critical thinking skills a strong liberal education where they are grounded in solid reading, solid writing solid mathematics, solid ability to solve the problems and we know from the financial crash of 2007-08 that those individuals who had a college degree had a stronger welfare throughout the economy they were able to hang on to jobs more than those individuals who were not able to retain jobs and there are segments of our society that are being left behind but it tends not to be a college educated student so we need to think about that as we think about what we're doing in our future it brought up resilience early on is one of the things that you have personally and it sounds like a college degree actually provides people with resilience to be able to weather any type of changes in this society but that brings us to another question that we really wanted to discuss today how can an organization build a diverse and inclusive culture you talked a little bit about how the demographics are changing there are a lot of human resources programs these days that are aimed at achieving this goal that's a very important but how do we make sure that diversity and inclusion is a way of life that really informs everything that we do and not something that's just paid group service you know our university is a majority minority institution so I actually think about this a lot in terms of what we're doing in our delivery instruction and I appreciate being on the TIAA advisory council who I know also is talking about these issues as we think about inclusive excellence around the nation what I have come to understand more and more is the need for our community to embrace what we know and what we don't know and there is this wide spectrum of cultural competence and cultural fluency that sometimes we assume that because we have a strong diverse population of individuals who come to our university that we're automatically diverse but in fact we are not, we are not automatically diverse beyond race and ethnicity of course we have to learn about other cultures we have to learn about how other people's as lived experiences impact what they do as human beings here in our university campus we have to be more vivid and more aware of building awareness of differences building knowledge on how to deal with differences and building capacity across our university communities what was so important for me as I began to think about this particular set of ingredients in what the university of the future looked like it became more clear to me that we needed to have more conversations about equity not just diversity and inclusion which are critically important but equity and so this last academic year and coming into this year informed their presence condition on equity here on the campus to begin to have the conversation for the cross representation of faculty staff and students and their charge is to look at equity issues certainly in San Antonio where our university sits within San Antonio and create a vision and a view for equity mindedness and to ensure that those types of conversations and activities are built into our strategic plan and it's integrated in the fabric of all that we're doing we have recently announced president's condition on equity fund which is intended we always talk about sort of put your money with them out there we knew that in order to insent some of the conversations that we're talking about we needed to make funding available for programs for students, for faculty and for staff and we've done that we've made that award to think about what is the whole campus community look like. I challenge everyone at TIAA and certainly within our university community to think about our voices that we amplify our voices that we act as visible role models and that we lead with a respectful attitude and all of these elements are what come together to build an inclusive culture in any community but certainly very important for a university community you know and building on this theme so how do we then cultivate leaders from all sectors of our society you know you did mention that diversity and inclusion it used to be just about color it's not about just color anymore it's about the culture and you mentioned cultural competence and cultural fluency so how do we cultivate leaders that get all of that and be really instrumental in changing the dynamics at all college universities as well as our financial institutions as well so this is where the hard work really comes in and really begins I'd like to share with you that one of the most profound moments I had in my career and have had in my career was being asked if I would facilitate a panel although that panel was race, colon is it an illusion or is it real and I had that exact reaction and I thought to myself wow I don't want to do that I'm not prepared for that I feel ultimately I did accept that assignment but in order to do that and to go through this question of leadership I felt like I myself personally had to really do in depth dive on understanding the academic principles having a deeper understanding of academic scholars who study critical race theory who bring the academic principles around what it is that we're talking about when we talk about race, ethnicity, class and culture in a society and having done that and read a lot about that and continued to read a lot about that began to form a foundation of good and uncomfortable to feeling comfortable and I think when we can have these conversations across the spectrum outside of our comfort zone is where the critical learning begins and moves us forward so when you talk about building leaders it doesn't just happen innately this is not like building our financial technical skills or building our communication skills this is a different way of thinking and when you approach leadership with a growth mindset around a lot of historical activities that we can drop from the women's movement with the rights movement farm workers movement now today they all should be community movements the transgender society movement there's a whole range where we can learn from but it does require thoughtful skill development it requires us to be skilled in learning how to listen to being empathetic to putting ourselves in other people's shoes and to really knowing what that means to try and understand how to live experiences as we think about our own leadership and then as we grow around our own society and our own positions we take this with us and we hope that we can continue to enrich and use it around it by being skilled and able to do that but I don't think it happens without training and preparedness I've become more attuned to that in the last year than perhaps another time in my life that's a really very unique position you are in a university setting where you could help actually develop those types of leaders despite the curriculum and everything else so I think that's exactly right so I am going to just talk about the elephant in the room one of the subjects that we've been dancing around and I know it's probably everyone's mind in this room when we are talking about diversity I wanted to talk a little bit about how Hispanics have been portrayed and treated recently and my question is how do we promote civil discourse during what for many is a really trouble time for our nation a couple of nights ago I had an opportunity with some people that are here in the room to watch a film called stolen education and without getting into the whole background of that particular film I'll tell you what my takeaway was the faculty member who led that, Dr. Andrique Alamon used a phrase in the script and also in the credits that really resonated with me and I think it's critical for this discussion and he called it the inheritance of courage and I think the message there for me as I've been thinking about it is to reflect on what has really gone on in our society in the last couple of years and certainly in the long time history that we have before us in the Latino community in the Hispanic community and to remember that now, today we have the responsibility to use this courage of those who came before us we have more educated Hispanics in Latinos now than we've ever had before we cannot lose sight of that we need more we're not in a good spot but we need more of what we have we have role models in place we need to use our voice we need to use our voice to reject bigotry to reject hatred hateful language to help prompt up and stand up teachers that are in the K-12 system right now as well as our own faculty who are teaching young children who are hearing these messages being broadcast in all forms not just on the television but the radio social media and it is emboldened even more dialogue that we may not all agree with but that doesn't mean that we should shut down our voices it means we have to amplify our voices to help others understand two sides of the coin and continue to build up on the cultural competence, the cultural assets and the cultural awareness that exists within the Hispanic community I think we need to rise up and be visible I think we need to remind people in the Hispanic and Latino community and in all communities to practice local advocacy to use their right to vote Latinos are still the block that votes least in elections we need to register people to vote and we need to get out and vote we need to practice community organization and work within local non-profits such as ones that were mentioned that you belong to and others that help spread this message and have the dialogue have the courage to have the dialogue and as hard as it is today we have to lead with respect and we have to be respectful to everyone within our community that doesn't mean shouting down to people that we don't agree with but sometimes it does mean walking away sometimes it does mean we need a cooling off period to come back and have civil conversations but there are paradigms that we can draw from and we need to think about that as we come together within the Latino community and Hispanic community and continue to amplify the stories now more than ever so you know I've only said one so confronting these issues and sometimes it's really hard not to want to come back if somebody really says something that is really insulting and the cooling off period I think it's really important to be able to just take a breath and think through what it is that you're going to say and then be able to stay in a way that can hopefully convince somebody to see things that will be different so what do you think are the responsibilities of an academic community within let's say the borders of Texas A&M but also beyond that going into the community you know this is something that is way very heavily on me I have to tell you I've reflected a lot about this I saw a lot about what happened over this summer it really has heightened my awareness, my sensitivity and my concern for where we are as a community where we are as a nation and how I felt that I could really deal with this was to go back to understanding what is the role of a public university in today's society and what is the role of this sort of public discourse in today's society because some of the some of the issues that have come up like the March in Virginia over the summer I live in Virginia so I'm very sensitive to what has happened so far and it is not only disheartening these some of those exhibitions and protests were reflections that our society, our country, our nation men and women who served in uniform came together to fight against and now those positions aren't over so I thought a lot about it from our university's perspective and it is important to remember that a public university must uphold our right to free speech we must uphold our right to speak opinions that are different than our own even when they are important even when they are hateful that this is how we learn and rise above it together and this importance of voice is more important now when I speak with faculty faculty sometimes say to me we feel like we need more education to understand how to deal with these issues in our classrooms how to have a conversation that's not combative in the classroom but it comes down to voice and amplification of voice and teaching students to behave in a civil and respectful way and to reject violence to reject violent forms of expression that is also now being involved in if we agree or disagree we just act it out with violence our country has already been through that we don't want to go backwards we want to go forward so our faculty, our staff, us we need to be skilled in knowing how to have that kind of conversation and this notion of respect is one that's difficult in this heated society but if we lose sight of respect we will never be able to engage in a civil discourse and to be able to use words like I respectfully disagree and I'm not going to have this conversation with you anymore because we're not going to get anywhere but at least you're speaking your voice and remember generations before us didn't even have the ability to speak their voices and this is something we cannot lose sight of and that is ultimately the role of a public university to foster and review civil and civic engagement community engagement for all people to continue to welcome individuals like yourself who come to our universities as international students and become productive contributors in our society we cannot lose sight of that as difficult as it is we have to continue to rise above it and one of the things that you mentioned was listening I think listening is a really key part of having a civic conversation listening to somebody at least you are trying to hear their point of view and then you can convince them of your own point of view but you have to listen to what it is that concerns them and then you can try to convince them or maybe they'll convince you but it really has to be almost equal right? in some cases it's just empathetic I understand that and you're never going to change that background isn't going to change but it's almost like maybe you have to stop trying to change that and just move on just understand it and hopefully the other person understands you and keep moving forward so we're talking about the voice do you think it is possible to talk about the voice of the Hispanic and Latino community is there value in a collective effort to raise the visibility of the community or to attempt to create a monolithic view of the Hispanic community do you attempt to create a monolithic view of the Hispanic community or does that just feed to the stereotype well I think we have to start from a position of strength and start from a position of affirmation of what the Hispanic and Latino community brings to our university, brings to our society brings to our workplaces so there is strength in embracing our assets from within the community and within our culture there is also strength in hearing from all diverse voices not everyone in the Hispanic community not everyone in the Latino community or the African American community or any community for that matter has the same experiences we are not monolithic we are very diverse within our diversity we practice different forms of religion we have different political beliefs we have different abilities we have different sexual orientations we have different forms of diversity which is what we embrace about all of our communities but specifically from the Hispanic and Latino community we know that we need to come together to continue to create pipelines for education if you ask me do we come together in one strength in one voice I think that's where we share a common denominator and a common factor and that is getting more individuals through the pipeline so although we have more educated Latinos than we have ever had we lag in numbers and we have a greater number of students at least in Texas and I think across the nation as well that are people of color that are people of Latino and Hispanic descent that need to be exposed to mathematics to science to computer technologies can you be reading at age by age eight at third grade level so that we have these opportunities to build and accumulate a society with educated Latinos across every spectrum across every discipline with bench strength and depth and that is still something where we can come together I believe in one voice so what I'm hearing is not everyone should speak with one voice but when it comes to education it should be really everyone should be supportive of getting a more educated Hispanic and Latino population yes and when I say educated because I'm a president of comprehensive university we think of four-year degrees but there are great strengths in the Latino community in technical jobs and in paraprofessional jobs that do require education there are very few jobs that you go straight from high school into a high-paying position or high-paying wealth one of the concerns that I think we also can come together is we need more of the Latino community in high-paying jobs many of the incoming students who want to be engineers computer scientists technical professionals are not Latino we need those greater pipelines because those are the highest paying jobs in our economy right now and without that pipeline we cannot build wealth and we do need to build financial wealth to sustain the hierarchy the passage of wealth and assets into the infrastructure of the Latino and Hispanic community and that comes with smart financial planning some things that TIAA does good wealth management strategies and the opportunity to achieve that increases with degree attainment so we need more degrees to be earned and we need more Latinos and Latinas in the sciences in the technology and in the engineering and in the biodynamics and all kinds of leadership platforms we need more I think you bring up a really good point because financial strength also leads to being able to influence many, many other things including being able to educate more if you've got financial well-being you can then educate more and more people so I absolutely understand that but it creates a hierarchy of financial wealth that has been a majority of society for a long time it has not existed in the historically underrepresented communities that we can only attain through sinking higher paying jobs or starting on businesses and creating on wealth and it starts with the K through 12 and then kind of moves in absolutely so I'm going to switch gears a little bit as of 2015 there were 41 million native Spanish speakers in the United States in addition to about 11.6 million bilingual speakers by statistics right what is your view on how language should be treated in U.S. educational institutions and in society at large should English be the primary language for courses at an institution or the majority student for those Spanish is their primary language what are the issues and how should we be looking at this well I certainly believe that bilingual education is critically important and I believe that we as parents as a society should be promoting bilingual education at a young age like many other countries do we have not embraced English is the primary language currently in the United States it's really the primary language in many other parts of the world as well so I think it would be difficult to begin to move away from that but it doesn't mean that we shouldn't embrace native language speakers not just in Spanish but in other languages as well and we will find in school districts now that there are communities and populations that are embracing other languages and teaching curriculum in that regard so that English becomes the second language and eventually becomes the dominant or the excuse me equal languages in terms of the bilingual trilingual, bilingual that we need in our country I think our society now has a much different view on bilingual education than we did before we don't see Spanish speakers as a deficit as it was before we see Spanish speakers I see Spanish speakers as an asset I see Spanish speaking I see multilingual Chinese Arabic other sorts of language as assets to value in our university system to value in our households and certainly to value in the workplaces it just makes us much more competitive as a business much more competitive as a society and much more competitive as a patient so I think we're asking the wrong question I think we ask how do we educate all students in multiple languages that's really when the United States is falling behind not requiring everyone to speak more in one language I was in Spain for vacation earlier this year and in talking to people people could switch from one language to another to another and I felt I was in a deficit because I speak rudimentary Spanish and you know I was able to survive because everyone else speaks English but I came back I was like okay I have got to learn other languages after that and I'm making my children also be binding as well because of that I think one of the things in the Hispanic and Latino society those of us who grew up in some of these understand and maybe even in the 80s have an understanding that our parents and grandparents felt that it was a disadvantage for children of a certain era to be fully bilingual and to really embrace the Spanish language because they saw it as a deficit and that society treated it as a deficit at that time we aren't in that position now but you have this gap within the Latino and Hispanic society of those of us who speak Spanish those of us who don't speak Spanish and we struggle with how we should feel about it that's why I really think we're asking the wrong question and talking about the wrong issues when we don't focus on everyone should speak multiple languages and we should embrace all of that and try to bridge that gap for our nation I told you so one of the questions that I have why should you give these Latino students in pursuing education and career goals I know that's part of your role here but to our TIAA audience what advice would you give? well first of all don't give up as an institution and certainly when in TIAA as well I think some of this holds true that when you have a large population of first generation students who don't have college in the family history there are other support networks and mechanisms that are needed to understand how to navigate through the system and to understand that this is hard work this is not an extension of high school it's not even truly an extension it's a scaffold on the community college level so the work, the rigor is more difficult the pace of learning is more difficult the volume of information that comes at you within society is more difficult so we need to ensure that students don't give up we need to ensure as institutions that we are providing the right support networks and that our employees our staff and our faculty understand the support network that's necessary we do that here at Texas A&M and so even the other wonderful universities in terms of writing centers tutoring centers, math support centers course redesigned to ensure that we know a lot about where the issues are it's tackling those issues in how the coursework is designed and how students are supported students need peer mentoring students need to understand that they can cross the finish line they can attain their degree and that everyone goes through this students need to understand they have to work hard they have to stay motivated in every step of the way we have to continue to impart the knowledge and the wisdom that is necessary to achieve academic rigor and academic excellence in degree attainment I have superintendents in our local community tell me that some of their students that come to us at any other university for that matter who come from first generation households who come from households within their sphere of influence are survivors and we need to establish precedent and establish practices that will build on that survivor mentality in the affirmative some of the practices that we need to think about are not uncommon but they're difficult to do things like block scheduling we have to look back at how the course structure the course schedule is defined if we know students need to work or they have other household responsibilities we need to structure a schedule that allows them to do that and we also know that online education is not the answer we support online education it is important and for some people it is the answer but it's not the answer for everyone so earlier maybe a decade ago we were all pointing to online education was going to change the paradigm everyone was going to graduate faster because we can all do it online but for students who need that support network online education it's not always easy and there are some learners who don't learn well in that environment so we need to take all those constructs into account when we're developing course content and how courses are designed and how the schedule is designed in innovative ways to ensure success and we do need to invent more experiential learning and community engagement those types of things that we are looking at now here A&M San Antonio are doing and I could mention earlier not as privates but as students I know I had mentioned that we are going to give some time for questions and answers first I want to say thank you so much for the President Madsen we are going to switch to questions now we'll start with questions here in San Antonio and then we'll go to questions that will come in through Yama as well so if anyone has a question here I am aware of all questions Hello President Madsen Hello As a student here at Texas A&M San Antonio and as a DACA recipient many of my friends that are also DACA recipients and even undocumented students are very scared of our current immigration tensions, the rising tensions in this country and within the Hispanic and Latino community you know there's always support for us and stuff but what are you as not only as a university president but as a community leader going to do as far as actions to protect us and to provide us with a higher education I think you bring a very important issue and glad that you have the courage to be here and to ask the question so first of all one of the important things is not to go into the shadows as I mentioned earlier but I think it's important that we have the resources to use our platforms here at our university I'm very focused on making sure that we have the support services and the networks in place we support organizations like the Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities one of our representatives is here in the audience Haku has lobbyists who are driving this issue as do other the importance of these issues within our legislation to find solutions to find answers I've certainly spoken with our congressman congress reps our delegation and I've been speaking with our local delegation here in Bear County but this is really a federal issue and I have made my position known to our federal delegation that it is important that we provide opportunities for access and degree attainment and employment and at some point a pathway to citizenship for DACA recipients thank you for asking we have a question that came in through WebEx and this is from Ruben Harrow and his question is who was your most impactful mentor and what is the most important thing you learned from them well you know if you'd ask me this question three years ago I would have had a different answer than I'm going to give you right now and I have to say that the most impactful mentors have been my parents and while I've always seen my parents as influencers and ensuring that I had a good life and a good opportunity and being a respectful daughter and all those other things that happen in Latino culture I have a much deeper appreciation for the sacrifices and the commitments that they've made so that I can be here today in a position of authority and influence so that's really important to me in terms of I think professionally we all need to have mentors I have received shoulder taps throughout my career asking me to stretch myself to take on new roles to take on new responsibilities and they were important experiences for me and people who have helped open doors for education and for career opportunity and for upward trajectory I value that and I think we need to look for those sponsors in our lives and for me I would say they've been men and they've been white men that have helped to open doors and open pathways and we need to embrace mentorship and sponsorship and coaching but mentorship and sponsorship in particular which he's asking about in all forms and to understand that to know the inner circle and to know the inner culture of some of the dominant business circles in business practices we need people who know it from the inside out and that often is white men, individuals of power and influence and if I were to answer that question for myself I am it's almost a duplicate of what you just said my parents were very very influential in my life and then I've had sponsors and mentors that run the gamut I have been really limited to one or the other I've had men and women like some of the most influential white men that have helped me along the way as well I think what you're saying is you need to be open minded and you need to look for people across the spectrum and you also need to be diverse and inclusive in the way that you look at which are the mentors that can help you in your career as well I think the other thing I would add to your response is that for those of us that are in the room and online that are a Hispanic or Latino or identify that way and you have earned degrees master's, doctorates, whatever the case may be that we have to recognize that we're in a position of privilege now and a position of power and influence and I don't know that we always see ourselves in that role and so we need to recognize the privilege that we have and make sure that we reach back deeper and further back and pull up and to remember we still have that role and responsibility we have one more question do you have a question in this room or we have one more person in this room Hello Dr. Madsen my question is for those of us in the room who are education majors particularly a special education major you talked about getting Latinos more involved in our STEM programs what are some action steps that we as education majors can take starting now that we can implement into our classrooms I'm so glad that you're asking that question and thank you for coming I don't want to diminish in any way education although I didn't call that out we produce very high quality teachers high quality teachers are going to be the key to our future for the future generation of our population that's coming through K through 12 what I think is important for you in particular as a male as a male individual in a school system to remember that the encounters that students have with teachers you can think about this as hallway mentoring you can think about this as pathway mentoring you won't know the impact and the influence that you have on students sometimes until decades later so what you can do now and today is to remember the importance of your voice remember the importance of every word and every action that you take with students and to embrace them with the affirmative lens of the opportunities that they have before them and to build on their strengths and their assets in your classroom whether it's in science, English, math reading, writing, spelling whatever it is you're influencing them more than you will ever know and that is one of the greatest gifts of being an educator and being a teacher you can move up and take that back to you in the classrooms and then teach them to express their voice teach them to understand information literacy at every level and just because they hear something doesn't mean it's factually accurate or just because they read it on the internet may or may not be true verify resources double check citations make sure that what you're teaching is actually factually based and as they learn that you're creating this circle of influencers and spheres that will pay dividends into the future and talking about teachers, my most influential teacher is Mr. Mamushu who taught me English when I was in seventh grade he forced me to know how to read and to write and to, you know I still remember conjugating verbs so there is a huge role for teachers in in the society and in educating the future as well I would say that just one more thing as you get into the workforce and you become a teacher to make sure you understand what the needs of our community are and that you can bring that up with your principal assistant principals and up through the superintendent ranks that there are lots of programs out there that some school districts never even engage in any other infrastructure challenges and all of that generation of students misses out on an opportunity that they need to make themselves for a better life I just want to say thank you so much President Madsen for this dialogue and for sharing your experience we got a few more questions but we will get them answered and we'll email the answers back to the folks that asked the questions but again we just want to say thank you for your partnership thank you for working with us at TIA to make us better it's part of your work with the Hispanic Advisory Council thank you for being a counselor to us as well as providers for you know wealth management and retirement for our educators and again thank you for sharing your experience and sharing your beautiful campus with us today thank you for wanting to run for it you're still online for it and including me in this opportunity and to all the employees with TIA thank you for listening in and for what you're doing for our employees and our community here thank you very much thank you everyone for joining us I know you didn't get to see all of the background but how many sites did you have on-site or how many employees we've already had so yes we had this was broadcast throughout all of TIA we had five major conference rooms where we were actually streaming via youtube and that was in Denver Louisville New York Charlotte and Chicago I believe and then there were hundreds if not thousands of employees in all different locations via Webex this got a lot of attention the question is why is it from Denver I'm not sure where it's from but we also have 16,000 employees just to meet you guys and with employees all over the United States and everyone had the opportunity to log in to listen in so there's a lot of attention of the organization which is great because diversity and inclusion is something that is being tiered to TIA it's hard and we are really trying hard to be that organization that not only recognizes it and who works on it but also takes what we have learned and take it out into the rest of the country as well I'd also like to recognize Sandy Hope who joined in today she's a senior leader from the Hispanic Association of Colleges to the University and she was able to join up today and certainly the work that you're doing in space is the leadership for all across our country so thank you for spending some time with us here today thank you for the invitation thank you for the partnerships that we all share in in order to accomplish these these auditions thank you to our faculty please feel free to come up and introduce yourself to Christina and Moriel and say hello and they are also recruiting interns and you employees so we would love for our students to come at least introduce yourself and learn a little bit about opportunities that might exist David and I'm David M.D.A. student I've been off in the summer thank you I'd like to thank David for sharing and his team together on the IT team for all of their time thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you