 All right. Well, it is actually the top of the hour, so I should begin. Let me welcome everybody. Welcome to the Future Transform. I'm delighted to see you here today. We have a couple of splendid guests, and we have a really, really important book that I'm really looking forward to diving into. These are two awesome people. Laura Chenowich and Catherine Cronin are coming to us from years spent in the education and technology space, doing a lot of really thoughtful and creative work. They also are the authors of a brand-new book called Higher Education for Good. If you look in the bottom left of the screen, you can see a tan-colored box linked to it. And this is a collection that they edited and wrote some in, which takes a look at reimagining higher education in terms of increasing its social purpose for actually doing good in the world. What does this mean? How do we actually make social, sorry, how do we actually make higher education do better in the world? So to begin with, let's bring them up on stage, and then they can tell us what this is all about. So to begin with, we have Laura. Hello, Laura! Hi, Brian. It's great to see you again, and hello to people I know who are here, and hello to the people I don't know who are here. It's great to be here. Great to be talking about the book just to correct you before we even get going, Brian. We are not the authors of this book. We are the editors of this book and the authors of this chapter. There are a lot of authors. There are so many authors. Some of them are with us today, and we hope they're going to be speaking as well. My apologies. I meant to say it. No, no, no. Let's just acknowledge them all. It's a great pleasure. Absolutely. It's a great pleasure to be here. And where are you today, part of this evening? I am in Cape Town. It's nighttime. It's hot. It's been over 30 degrees today. Oh my gosh. Yep. It's all good. Well, stay cool. And speaking of being cool, you know, on the forum we have a tradition of introducing people by asking them what they're working on in the future. What is the next year hold for you? What are the big topics and the big projects for you? So Brian, I'm going to start by telling you what I'm not going to do. Well, okay. What are you not going to do? What I'm not going to do is lead big research projects. I'm not going to be running centers. I'm probably not going to be first authors on any books or on any book chapters. I am at the point in a very strange high education system where it's very rare to have a permanent position and we have a formal retirement age. So I've had to retire and I'm very mindful of the precariousness of most academics lives nowadays. And I think it's really incumbent on me to take a step back and actually give people a lot more space because there's much less space to be had. The other thing that I want to say is I'm going to stop making sense. And by that, I don't mean to get my age away here, but I don't mean the talking heads concept. I'm not going to stop making sense. I mean, I'm going to continue as much as possible with sense making because I think we're in a very confusing period and one that is often explicitly obfuscated. And I think it's incumbent upon as many of us as possible to do as much sense making as possible. So that's really what I'm hoping to focus on. I think that's enough for now. There's lots more to say, but Catherine has things to say to you. Well, I'm glad to hear from both of you and I'm very impressed at this next stage of your career. And as always, I'm looking forward to learning from you. So let me bring up Catherine, your colleague, and let's see a co-editor of this volume. And here we go. Hello, Catherine. Hello from Galway in Ireland. Oh, excellent. We have a whole series of time zones represented here, not to mention a bunch of nations. How was Galway tonight? Galway is a bit wet and wild, and it has been really stormy for the week. It's above freezing, but not very much above freezing. So it's not the nicest time of year here, but it's still lovely, even when it's wild. And although I live in Galway, I've been here half my life. I was born in the Bronx, and I know there's another person here from the Bronx. So shout out to the Bronx. Yeah, I hear that. Hi, Stacey. Native New Yorker here, so glad to hear it. What are you going to be working on for the next year, Catherine? Are you going to be adding books to that lovely bookshelf behind you? My pandemic project, the bookshelf. As Laura and I may say more than once during this hour, this book project was more than producing a book for us. It was definitely a passion project that started out in deep conversations and consisted of deep conversations all the way through. So it's really lovely to be here tonight, for example. We're doing some more online events, some in-person events, really trying to dig in and have deeper conversations around a lot of the ideas in the book. There are so many, there's 27 chapters in the book. There's so much work there. So definitely continuing some of those threads. And I've been working independently a little bit like Laura. I've left full-time institutional employment two years ago. I'm working nearly full-time independently now. But I've been able to create a much different mix in my life, which has been really rewarding. So last year, I worked with community groups who very quickly put a lot of their materials online during the pandemic, but didn't know much about digital or open licensing or permissions or all those kinds of things. So just working with people who have so few resources and are really passionate in doing wonderful work and engaging in dialogue, sharing what I know, learning what they're doing. So a little bit more of that as well. Excellent. Excellent. That sounds like a terrific year ahead. I'm so glad to hear it. Here, let me actually just rearrange the screen a little bit so that we're all lined up. We have a quick question actually from one of our really, really deep diving, research-minded audience members. That's Glenn McGee. And he asks this question, actually, this is before we even get to your book. He says, Ireland and Cape Town, do they use the credit hours system in higher ed? And if so, when did that start? This is how incredibly deep-minded our audience is. We dive deep. I'll answer for Ireland uses a European wide system, ECTs, which is, I suppose, equivalent to credit hours, but it's not measured in hours, which I know can be a tension in many systems that still use credit hours. So every course or what's called a module here in Ireland would have a set number of ECTs or credits and you accrue those to get various levels of qualifications. Thank you. Thank you. That's fascinating. And no, not in that way here in South Africa. So of course, that makes me want to say, tell me more, but that's not our job today. Well, first of all, Glenn, that was a good technical question. And Laura and Catherine, thank you for those answers. So by the way, that's an example. If you're new to the forum, that's an example of a Q&A question. So if you wanted to follow Glenn and ask questions like that, just go to the bottom of the screen, go across that white strip and find the question mark button and you can type in your own question. The question I wanted to ask the two of you is this lush book, which has so many ideas and so many people working on this and some of them are here right now. I'm curious, in the process of seeing it from inception to publication, what are some of the ideas that surprised you? You're smiling, Laura. No, no, no, no, no, I'm waiting to hear what you're going to say. My brain is sparking. There were many surprises and some of them were not in the content of the book, but rather in the process of the book. It was a really difficult time to send out an invitation to write proposals for chapters for a book. I mean, we sent out that invitation for proposals in December 2021. We were still in the really difficult days of the pandemic and we received almost 100 proposals, which astonished us and a few people had to drop out. We were committed to this, but what surprised us was how much of a commitment there was from so many different authors and artists who felt they had something to say even though things were so difficult in their institutions, in their settings and continued to be difficult through the process of writing and reviewing. We were in close contact with authors all the way through. So we built what we called a community of authors and reviewers and us as editors, and everyone really supported one another in what we called a critical and caring way. So that was beautiful and surprising and I hope that the quality of the book itself, I think the quality of the book itself certainly reflects that, that kind of openness and caring and so on. So, I mean, I can talk about the content as well, but maybe I'll hand over to you, Laura, to see what you think. I think what surprised me was, as Catherine said, we put out this call at a really difficult time. The pandemic wasn't really over in South Africa. There had been streams of student protests in other parts of the world. There had been academic strikes. People were worn out. They were exhausted. And so to put out a call that says, speak to the question of good, not only require people to think about good, but to put the energy into sharing those ideas. And we had so many proposals. We had far more proposals than we were able to use. And far, yeah, I mean, there's a volume two for us to hand the button over to someone else to do, but it was a surprise in a really good way how much people were doing. A lot of people were quite tentative. It was like, my piece of good isn't really original. Or my piece of good is only halfway there or whatever. But of course, having read the chapters, you'll know that that's not all people are cautious. But that was a really happy surprise, how much good work is being done despite, despite, despite, despite. And we know what all the despite are. The despite are the really difficult circumstances most academics in most places find themselves in. Yeah. Oh, that's, that's a lovely, lovely set of surprises. All the human care and all this willingness to to devote scant resources to envision a better future for higher education and a better higher education for the world. Oh, those are wonderful surprises. I mean, this might be this might be a good moment to ask one or two of the authors who are here. Yeah, yeah. Well, here, let me just do this. If, if any of the authors that can see Robin de Rosa there wants to join us on stage, just click that teal color podium. And the minute you click that, you'll be transported up on stage next to all of us. And you don't have to have a bookshelf, a lot of stuff behind it, but you do have to have a wonderful brain. Hello, Robin. Can you actually hear me? Am I unmuted and everything? I didn't really plan on this. I was just eating my lunch, but I'm sure there, there's some invocation here since my chapters towards the front of the book. And it, it really does as my amazing colleagues and friends are talking about it really does start from in some ways a place of darkness. Because I teach at a regional public university in a rural area of the United States. And we are eyeball deep in scarcity and austerity and demoralization and devaluation of the of the learning process. And at first, I think I even reached out to these guys. I've known them through open education for a long time and said, you know, I really want to be part of this, but I the truths that I deal with every single day in my job, I direct a library now and a teaching and learning center are very, very distressing. But I don't feel like I can't, I also get a lot of spin. And I don't feel like I can write about hope. Unless I go into the darkness, because otherwise I'm just going to feel like a spin doctor. So I appreciated that they, and that they chose to put my chapter at the front. I thought was really a way of saying to academics, look, if you are in a dire place, don't be afraid to read about hope, because we are going to acknowledge first the very difficult conditions, which I think are the labor conditions that are so toxically difficult for so many people right now. And then they're also learning conditions for our students and ourselves as scholars and researchers. So most of my chapter really lays out those conditions through the lens of neoliberalism. And in the research that I did for the book, which has such a global lens, I was really pushed to see whether my experience in the United States, in what ways it was similar and different from experiences in other places, and really found a lot of common and distressing themes that did center around the privatization and marketization of learning in ways that have been distressing, I think, for higher ed. So I just want to thank them for taking a really realistic look at the picture, and then the folks who follow me find hope that I think is very much rooted in the realities of the challenges that we're facing. Thank you. Thank you for saying that. Thanks, Robin. I was so just happy to see you in that first chapter to say, that's amazing. That's great. And before I could even say anything more, Jim Luke just joined us. Another author from your book. Hello, Jim. I just want to mention it was a fantastic experience. And there's so many aspects to talk about. It was a very difficult period for me as well, personally, health-wise, professionally, career-wise, in addition to, you know, all the background of the pandemic and stuff like that going on. But I also have to tell everybody, if you have a chance to work with Catherine or Laura, or if particular, Laura walks up to you like she did at a conference to me in Galway about four or five years ago, and says to you, this is very important work. And we have to do research on this, and you have to do it. When she says that, you pretty much have to do it. But what I liked about this was part of the experience was it's cliche to say walk the talk. But for example, in the process of creating the book, which was in effect, I think, I think, I don't think any of us thought we know what is higher ed. We were all kind of continuing, you know, hesitant about doing it. But the process of trying to write it and work with each other and the process of forming the community and having these conversations, like I'm remembering a long conversation was supposed to be peer review that I had with Kate Bowles at one point, and I came away with it. And afterwards I'm thinking, oh, this is the kind of network polycentric governance I wrote about. We need to have kind of an open commas structure, which involves polycentric stuff and all kinds of abstract stuff that economists talk about. And I'm going, oh, no, this is actually it. So we're actually doing it. We're modeling it at the same time as we're actually learning it ourselves. And I'm realizing, yeah, that's what higher ed is great at. That's what it's about anywhere. It's about everybody in the society learning more about what we do. And what it's not about is just, you know, workforce development for some sort of, you know, other that already has too much. So anyway, it was it was fantastic experience. I know I'm inspired. I know what I'm doing post retirement is I'm going to be doing more writing and talking about this stuff. Oh, good. Yeah. So get it today. Thank you, Jim. Can I keep you here for a minute more? Sure. I rarely leave the stage voluntarily. That's good to know says the man with the power. Um, well, it sounds like Catherine and Laura that you've assembled a wonderful community of people to do a lot of really solid work together. We have another person to join us. Let me see if I can bring her up. This is Caroline. I think her camera is off. Oh, there you are. Can you hear me? Here is you. Hello. Hi, I just don't know how to jump into the podium, but I just raised my hand and it seemed it worked. I was I saw that and I comply. Yeah, I wanted I'm a co-author. I wrote a chapter with two more colleagues. And I think that one of the really wonderful things and rare combination to find many days is, you know, I think that Laura are very, very good scholars, very high standard scholars. So there is work hard to achieve that standard in a way. But then at some time, there is this very other human side of it. So in the process of writing, editing, also, you know, you need to agree with the editor. That's the idea. They have all of that. I think they are very very, very without being compromised or without, you know, under us. I don't know how to say it, but it's this really two things work together. You are, in a way, you, them, writing, but at the same time, they care so that you go up that standard. I find that in a very friendly environment, which I don't think is always the case. And I really think, and I don't know, but I imagine that they have invested a lot in this because you have, you know, it requires time, it requires patience, it requires writing, you know, and so in reading and reading with a sense of detail, in saying, you know, I think we find that really, really wonderful. I'm quite new to I'm not, you know, although I'm 75. And I think that's really made of all the work and enjoy, nevertheless, you know, the time, the physicality, the clarity, whatever it's happened, but I think it was just a space of care, of joy, flourishing, of growing. And I don't think that happens all the time. And I am very grateful for that. Brian, can I, can I answer those, those very kind words, please? Absolutely, you are a freezer. And then just jump in. Okay, no, well, Catherine might want to say something to you. Carolyn, thanks, thanks so much for what you've said. And I would like to just say that it's not just us as individuals, it's actually where we are in our careers. And there's something about being a senior person in the system that gives you freedom that you don't have when you're, you said an emerging, a junior, whatever, whatever. And when I was the director of the central teaching and learning, we found that the people who were who were most free to innovate were either the very new people who hadn't yet been sucked into the system, or the full professors, the most senior people who actually at the point, they didn't have to prove anything. And the terrible thing about academia now is that people are just caught in this rat race of pressures and matrices and hoops that they have to jump through. And, and in fact, it astonishes me how much care people manage to actually show these students given the kinds of pressures that they under. So thank you. It is incredibly time consuming. But you do have to be able to be at that point where you're able to make that choice. And that's, that's, that's where the system really fails, because it gets left to individuals to somehow adjust for the system. And it's a systemic problem, not an individual one. Yeah, I agree with that, Laura. And thank you all. The, the word dialectic was mentioned in the comments. And I think even with those intentions that Laura and I had the, the book would not have happened as it did unless people met us in a particular place. So it was a relationship that we had. So that permission would be nothing unless people brought creativity and courage to the project to, you know, to say the difficult things like Robin said. And a lot of, you know, as with any project like this, a lot of lovely coincidences happened. So Robin, for example, wrote about a book written by Eddie Glaude called Begin Again about the writings of James Baldwin, which I had finished a few months previously and just was bold over by and affected my work quite a bit. And, you know, Eddie, he, Eddie Glaude uses this concept of the aftertimes that James Baldwin was writing in a time of moral reckoning in, you know, the late 60s, early 70s, his later writing in what was called an aftertimes. Sorry, there's a little feedback there. And that we're living through another aftertimes now. And we can refuse to adjust to the status quo and accommodate the status quo. And he uses this lovely phrase, which is that we can stand a scant to the way things are. So, so Laura and I set that intention. And every single person who wrote for the book did that to stand a scant at the way things are, no matter how difficult they are, but just to imagine, you know, better possible futures. And they varied because the authors are so diverse. But so we thank all the authors for for standing these scans, as we did. That was actually not only a wonderful thing to say, but also they anticipated one of the questions I was going to ask. So you you've addressed that very, very nicely. Carolyn and Jim, thank you both for contributing to Carolyn. Are you Carolyn Kuhn who wrote for the book? Yeah, I am Caroline Kuhn, yes. Excellent. So you can find both of their chapters in the book. And by the way, that you can download the entire thing as a PDF. Yeah. You can do it right now. And thank you both. I'm going to put you both from the stage right now to make some room for some other folks. Thank you. Thank you very much. Will you mute us because I'm not sure where I can mute myself. It's okay. I'm just going to actually just take you off the stage. So you're great. Thank you. So this is the this is the time when we don't only have dogs, but we also have more questions. So I guess while Laura is fending off the canine world, I do have one question to put to you, if you could say more about how your authors would aim to imagine a different future. And the reason for my question is not just professional envy, but little because so many academics that I that I listen to and talk with are very what's a good word? I don't mean conservative or political sense, but what they see, they feel themselves under attack. And what they want to do is conserve and preserve what they have with their particular corner of the higher education space. So they might be a historian, they might be a biologist, not the librarian. And what they want to do is not think into something new or different, what they want to do is hold on to what they've got against whatever pressure they're against. I'm curious, what are some of the ways that your authors and the two of you as editors were able to break free of that? How are you what are some of the mental routes you took to create such different futures? Well, I'll start and then I'll hand over to Laura. One phrase that you'll see in a number of the chapters is came from our invitation for proposals. And that is we invited people to share numbers of alternative futures. And that seems to be a spark for a lot of writers, you know. So we made it really clear that yes, we were inviting analytical work and exploration of the current challenges and problems of higher education and beyond. But we also said in the call for chapters that we were inspired by work in other areas. We weren't just talking about work in higher education. We are inspired by work in areas of climate justice and social justice, where people were using speculative approaches. We invited people to write in different genres. We tried to really smudge some of those, you know, really strict boundaries of academic writing that we're all, you know, posed with. So we invited people to write in the form of poetry or dialogues or fiction. We invited work from artists to adjust the themes of the book. So that invitation seemed to, you know, to allow people to step out into a different space. You know, it wasn't just another journal article or, you know, which are required, obviously, many people in higher education. But it was just a different way of thinking and sharing that process of thinking. So I think that was part of why people felt a little bit freer to do that. I don't know what you think, Laura. I didn't quite catch the question because I was dealing with the dog, but the actual dog is a real dog. Is the dog happy and safe? The dog isn't very fine. The dog was stuck under a bush and couldn't get out. Oh, no. What I did want to say, though, is, well, there are two things I wanted to say, and I'm not sure if they linked to what you were asking. But the one thing is that, Catherine, and I thought a lot about this notion of community. And we started thinking that, actually, we wanted to talk about coalitions rather than community, although, of course, the kind of community that we found that the book created was an important community. But there was a recognition that what everyone is doing is political. And we wanted to capture that. And the other thing that that was relevant to is that we are so mindful of the kind of washing that's going on in high education at the moment. The open washing and the equity washing and the greenwashing and the appropriation of terminology that we would have previously been able to assume, signal the set of values. And now, because those have been so mainstreamed or taken over, we can't assume anymore. And that that was a really important part of this process that we wanted to make clear and to enable. Well, thank you. Thank you. That actually is a really, really good answer. Both of you, thank you. This is something I think you've just laid out in a book, Explicated and exemplified some really, really powerful ways of being able to think of altering futures, especially in the face of so many challenges. And we have speaking of altering futures, I want to bring on board another guest. This is George Station, who is coming to you from a massive university system wide strike. So just let you know, I'm glad that we can have him here. And he's safe and sound. This is our dear friend, George Station, coming to us from California State University, Monterey Bay. Hello, sir. I'm high there. And am I coming through on audio? Okay. Thank you. And hello, everyone. So glad to see everyone, including our other folks who have already been on and the folks in the chat and so on. It's a family reunion, which I think I mentioned in the chat, of sorts, of sorts. But I want to first, I want to thank you both for the book, of course, but I want to thank Catherine for mentioning Eddie Glaude specifically. That specific book has been on my shortlist for too long. And this allows me to bring it back up because I'm actually starting my semester with a Baldwin reading, the author teacher there. And so that allows me kind of an excuse to bring a more current reading of Baldwin into the class as well. It's on teaching for social change. But my question and the reason I wanted to come up, besides saying hi, is I note that you kind of mentioned, and if you could both say more about, I'll call it the generational issue, because we were both talking about stepping back from active teaching and work in different ways. Jim mentioned it. Jim Luke mentioned it in another way. And I'm wondering if you could say more about that aspect of doing higher education for good and having to be at a certain career stage to even be able to dive in as deeply as you and some of the co-authors did. Could be at the certain seniority, like, you know, Robin's not doing multiple things very actively in the league with New Hampshire right now. I'm in second career. I've been a lecturer, even though I'm a lecturer and not tenured faculty, I've been doing this a long time, a couple of decades, and I've got a feel for what I want to be doing in the higher education space. But where are we going to make space for the next generation? How are we going to do that? Are volumes two and three? Should we find more grad students? What can we do about that as we are, I'm going to say, we have our generational vision, but we also have a certain amount of generational power that we may be giving up that could actually influence higher education. So that's my kind of global question. Wow. In the chat, Glenn McGee notes that the problem of generations is huge in the sociology of knowledge. Thank you for that, Glenn. Hi. Kevin and Laura, do you want to respond to George's really thoughtful comment? I can start. Laura, is that okay? I can see your thinking. We know each other very well. A few things are going through my mind, George. One is, yes, we are in a particular place in our careers. We've been through lots of different stages. I was precarious employment in higher education for many years and then permanent and then local and then national. So we're in this particular place. It has affordances and we could have just written, you know, decided to spend two years writing a book, the two of us, but that's not what we wanted to do. We wanted to, you know, this whole notion of our community and the forging a coalition was really important to us and we intentionally invited not just a diversity of authors from global north, global south, many, many different countries, but we really wanted people at different stages of their careers. So there are chapters written by graduate students. One brilliant chapter written by four graduate students from the University of Cape Town who were working as technology advisors during the pandemic, you know, helping lecturers to implement UDL in their courses. And they looked at UDL from a global south perspective and said, huh, this is one definition of access that we can improve, but maybe we could stretch this a little bit because there's some things that are not included in this particular definition of access. So some really wonderful examples of, you know, people in early stages of the career or on the margins and other ways, you know, use, you know, putting two different lenses or three different lenses together and generating really exciting, important work. So we offered mentoring, we stated that in our invitation, you know, we knew a lot of the problems that you're talking about. So we tried to get out in front of that and said, don't be dismayed, you know, if your early career or a student, you know, will offer mentoring, some of that was from ourselves, some of that we were able to get other scholars to do. And I think it makes the book a lot better, you know, it's really, really, you know, there are students, graduate students, learning technologists, lecturers, you know, senior academics as a whole range, even someone who's not working in higher education but has important opinions about it. So that's maybe partway to answer the question, Laura. Just one other thing about the book is we also intentionally decided that the last word had to go to the next generation. So Georgia Rory is a PhD student in India, looking at the economics of education. And, you know, that's also part of the baton sharing. Just by the way, I'm not suggesting that I or we don't have anything to contribute. That's not the logic. The logic is actually taking, I feel like we have a lot to contribute intellectually and in other ways. The logic is actually acknowledging the systemic crisis for younger academics or people trying to get into academia at the moment in almost every place where it's a, you know, we all know the stories of people doing four different jobs in four different places on contracts, you know, the numbers of contracts. And we've looked at the figures in just about every country in the world. So when we say that, we don't mean like we run out of ideas. I feel like we're both bursting with ideas. It's actually how does one confront the crisis in academia. And I suppose my hope is that it's like this pendulum that eventually the realization will hit systemically that neoliberalism doesn't work for knowledge production and there will be some pushback. And part of this work that we're all doing and that the authors are doing will be part of that pushback and they will actually write things so that that kind of thinking systemically isn't needed in the same way because there's so much to be done. And if you look at the issues that Brian's raised in his various forums, there is so much to be done and there's so much for people in academia to do in terms of sense making. And we need this whole generation, these postgraduate students, some of us, it's our children. You know, it's really important. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. And thank you, Laura. And Catherine, for your response to because you're actually helping rewrite the syllabus for my other class now, which is with teacher ed students teaching and learning with technology. And so you both rightly disabused me of the idea. So I've seen the book in a certain way. So now I get to rethink and dive back in because, obviously, I haven't, you know, a lot of us and I, you know, I haven't read the book yet, right? I'm just like, I'm looking to read it. And so now I know better about the contributions, but the chapter by grad students on UDL in the global south can immediately go into my teaching and learning with technology class because of the limits of, I'm going to say, generic UDL, universal design. And I brought in, started to bring in an anti-racism lens last semester, because of a particular book, because I think there's only a book or two now that specifically talks about anti-racism in UDL. And I think the chapter that Catherine mentioned is going to kind of flesh out the rest of my rapidly being revised syllabus. That's the other thing that's happening this week across the CSU across Cal State, because of the very short one day strike. We were thrown back into our classes a few days more quickly than most of us thought we would. So in about 10 minutes, I've got my next class period. So thank you so much, Brian. George, just to mention, there's also a book on why decolonization is important for teaching and learning. Great. There's also a chapter that that will be valuable for your curriculum, too, I suspect. Great. Thank you. Okay. So your book's obviously going on the syllabus in about 10 minutes. Thank you, George. Our work here is done. I think Jim has got, he said he had something to add to something I said earlier. And I kind of knew it was coming because I know Jim well. That sounds terrifying. And so now I'm going to take myself or if you can excuse me from the stage and let Jim back in, that would be great. Thanks. Thank you, George. Yeah, I just wanted to react to an earlier part of George's comment. And he talked about in some of the discussion there, he's talking about like obviously getting at the age or stage and career of some of us as authors. And then, as Laura and Catherine brought up, and then there were the younger ones that were innovative. And I think, and somebody else, I don't know if it's George mentioned, well, how do we produce, where's it going to come from for volume two of higher ed for good or something like that. And so I'm not at all worried about that. Because as part of the research for the chapter I wrote, I did a fair amount of study in that way that only an economist can think they have the guts to summarize the entire history of higher ed across cultures in a few pages. I looked at it and really the essence of higher ed, adult education beyond the basics, has always been this multiple intergenerational thing. That's what we're about. And we've lost sight and gotten distracted ourselves in our last generations into thinking that everything is about these things, these books and these documents and these courses. And actually now we think about course is actually being a bunch of content, you know, written down. In fact, it's always been a bunch of folks that have gotten to an elder stage of their life with a lot of deep knowledge. And they're passing it on whether they're doing that by publishing research and new insights that they've learned or they're doing it by face to face in teaching. They're passing it on. And at the same time, having a dialogue with these newcomers or these young ones or other folks that have a different perspective and you got some, oh, and then from that we get more and we get people in the middle of their career going, yeah, this is fascinating. I really need to learn more. And that's what they do. And they do it. And so that's been going on for a couple of millennia or more. And I'm not at all worried about that continuing to go on. What I am concerned about is whether or not our current institutional structures facilitate that as well as they might. And I think we're getting a little bit and that's why, you know, the concern about austerity and all that other kind of stuff. But, you know, I'm also aware that institutional structures have changed. I mean, what you would have called higher education. In China, 800 years ago, didn't look like a university today, but it was exactly doing the same thing. So I'm not worried about it. I think we need to focus on the assets of higher ed is, in fact, all these dialogues, all this passing on of what, oh, I learned this or that. Now you can know it so you can learn more. Well, thank you. Thank you. That's really, really well said. Laura, Catherine and Jim, we have two juicy questions coming in. And I want to make sure that we get a chance to handle them. And thank you, Jim, for chiming in. I love the path that you all have taken with Georgia's vector there about generations. This is a question here. Jim, let me give you a chance to climb off the stage here. This is a question from Yaprak Dalit Ward. And I hope I've not completely destroyed your name. And he asks, the Wall Street Journal essay, Why American Had Lost Faith in the Value of College, indicated US college is all, college for all is broken. How do we move forward regarding a higher education for good? You want me to put it back on the screen again? I suppose the thing that we've written about and one must emphasize is that high education, it doesn't exist in a vacuum. Higher education is part of a broader social system. And so we're not going to be able to fix higher education if we don't fix the way our societies are structured at the moment, which I think is why neoliberalism was such a thread through the book. It wasn't one we asked for. In fact, we asked for people to talk about climate change and growing trees. And we got neoliberalism instead. So high education is an echo and a reflection of broader social problems. Where it's unique is its opportunity to also shape society because of the fact that it's a knowledge working space. It's a bit terrifying that much of the knowledge work is now happening inside Google and big tech companies. But that is what has to be clung to is the fact that it is the responsibility of universities to shape change and to think differently. But it can't do it in isolation. Yeah. I agree with that completely, Laura. And we haven't mentioned this yet. It's five minutes to the hour and we haven't mentioned the manifesto. One of the things that Laura and I did after these chapters were written and having been so close to them was to look across them as diverse as they are in so many respects and see if there were threads that could connect them that would address the question that you just posed. And we not definitively calling it a manifesto. The language we use in the book is towards a manifesto. And that's a nod to just the diversity of context that we all find ourselves in in higher education in different countries and areas and roles and so on. And the five tenets of the manifesto are like Robin started us off with naming and analyzing the troubles of higher education. We quote Miranda Fricker who says in her work on epistemic justice says we must study injustice first because the negative imprint reveals the value of the positive quality. So naming and analyzing and digging in to the troubles of HE is essential as Laura says it's connected to so much else. The second tenet is challenging assumptions and resisting hegemonies. The third one is making claims for just humane and globally sustainable higher education. So digging into the dirt in naming and analyzing and challenging and then banner you know what are we working towards and again that's borrowing from movements for social justice and social change as well. Fourth one is imagining and sharing possibilities for change and the fifth one is making positive change even if it's small scale in a classroom and recognizing the power as Laura said already of coalition that we can do this in our various locations and ways and you know whether it's structural or individual or pedagogy or content or policy. But you know these five tenets we think are you know when we look at any issue that we're addressing we think it's a it's a really good way of thinking through and identifying paths for action and change. Well thank you and that's all thanks to the authors we have to say. Well thank you thank you both for those those really sweet answers to Professor Ward what a great question. One quick question for everybody in the chat we've had a couple of requests to copy the chat and and post it up to a blog post I'll do this by anonymizing some late editing any objections please let me know in the chat. Here's a here's a question that follows up on the previous one Catherine and Laura and this is from our good friend Keele Dunsch who asks in his view it's the out of control price of college particularly here in the U.S. that's the biggest thing that needs fixing about higher ed. Part of this is caused by employer degree mandates which will grant the higher ed near monopoly and job credentialing that is now starting to change I would like Laura and Catherine's view on this topic. So that's that's starting off with the question of higher education prices spiraling up and that ends with the question of breaking up the role that higher education has on job credentialing. I'm going to say one sentence and hand over to Laura and that's to read Robin's chapter and that's not just a pithy response it's there's so much in there about this. Yeah now and I would agree because as Robin said herself when she started writing she was writing about the U.S. and we really encouraged her to think about how these particular issues play out in different contexts and what the underlying principles that join these different contexts together and what's distinct in different places. So the U.S. I learned a lot about the U.S. from this process because it's quite unique in that sense. Yes and there are places where in theory high education is free where there are still massive problems because as we know you know near liberalism it's not just structural it's also a mental process and it's also practices being brought into organization so it's not a purely economic model it's endogenous and exogenous. That's a really big question to ask right at the end so I think Robin really does provide an excellent overview about how these different principles play out in different places. Thank you thank you both for the answer to the question thank you Keele as ever for the thoughtful for the thoughtful question and thanks to Robin for providing a passionately written thoughtful answer. I guess we are the very end of our time and I just want to read from the last chapter in the book these are the last this is really the last sentence of it let's continue striving with such endeavors with even more vigor let's continue shaking the universe of higher education through our ideas and the power of words to explore more pathways towards higher education for good. So I think that's a beautiful beautiful way to to end both that volume from Jyoti Arora and also our hour today. Laura Catherine how can people keep up with you what's the best way to find out what you're up to next. It's sad it used to I want we used to be able to say on Twitter but no longer. So instead of Twitter Catherine Cronin.net is my website and that's got all my contact details on it and all else. Oh good oh good well I'm doing that old-fashioned I'm doing that old-fashioned thing of putting a an email address though. That works that works well old-fashioned and new all kinds of changes and features are open here thank you Laura thank you Catherine for helping bring together this extraordinary book an extraordinary community this is really really important I hope everyone gets a chance to read this soon thank you both. Thank you Brian. Thank you everyone the chat has been amazing it's been hard to keep up but just amazing conversation thank you everyone. Thank you all but don't go away yet folks even though this is a parts of a few some of us are experiencing a night time let me just thank everybody for your questions for your comments and let me just point out where things are headed next. So if you'd like to keep up with the forum if you'd like to keep talking about these issues here is me across all the social media with the hashtag ftte you can find me on threads blue sky mastodon and twitter as well as on my blog if you'd like to go into our back sessions and take a look at previous sessions talking about some of these topics everything from accreditation and cost to visioning the future just go to tinyurl.com slash ftf archive if you'd like to look at our upcoming sessions on a whole variety of topics just go to forum that future of education that us and the meantime thank you all for all this conversation this has been a terrific time i'm grateful to you putting up with me coming through from foggy time where it's almost the 26th i hope everybody is well safe and sound we'll see you next thursday take care bye bye