 All right, let's begin. Let me say hello to everybody and welcome you. I'm Brian Alexander I'm the forums cat herder creator and host and also today and usually I get to be our guest So let me just ask very quickly For those of you who have access to the chat room if you just quickly in the chat say hello and where you're coming in from today For example, I'm coming to you from Manassas, Virginia While you do that I'll introduce the program and then get to the fun. So this is the Future Trends forum I think I recognize everybody here. I think every one of you has been to this before But for those who haven't been for a while, let me give you a little bit of background And for those who are gonna be listening to this on the YouTube recording Let me just give you a little bit of an introduction. So first of all the forum is a conversation-based program This is all about discussions about the future of higher education Typically, we have some great guests and we get to discuss with them Their vision of where higher education could be going We often do this in the company of dozens of people if not hundreds like yourselves We get to ask questions and to share thoughts Now the forum is part of a whole series of projects called the Future of Education Observatory And that includes the forum. It also includes the monthly FTT e-report Includes a blog, a book club and more than that So if you're new to it, just go to FutureofEducation.us and you can learn more Just a quick question, too. Can everybody hear me? Okay. Just let me know in the chat if If my audio is okay. Now if nobody's saying anything Maybe the chat maybe the audio isn't that good Okay, well sounds like it's still going Let me thank some of our sponsors and then dive into today's unusual session So first of all, I wanted to thank NizerNet from New York State This is a non-profit that helps that state's colleges and universities Get a line with broadband internet and do great things with each other We are really proud of the work they do and delighted that can help sponsor us We're also really grateful to Schindig because as you all know Schindig is available This technology that we're using now. So today I have to say that we are going to be using this in a few ways One is I'm going to be showing you some stuff visually so we'll get a chance to see them But also you'll get a chance to ask me questions about this crazy book And I would love to bring as many of you up on stage as possible Now the stage is where I am. This is where this Slide is just for a moment. We can have several of us up here discuss In order to ask your questions and raise your comments, you can just Use either on the two major buttons on the bottom of the screen. There's a white strip running along it You'll see second from left and third from left are buttons the question mark and a raised hand If you click the raised hand that tells me that you want to join us up here on stage In effect, just to make it even easier There's a little teal colored box up here right now And if you press that they should bring you up on stage right away And if you don't want to do that or if you can't just use the question mark A type in a question comment as Tom Tobin already did and thank you Tom much appreciate it Um, if you also want to tweet about this just use the hashtag And you can use that to keep the conversation going intertwined with that social media platform We're really grateful this thing that for making this technology available And i'm also especially delighted and grateful to our supporters on patreon There's about a hundred people there who contribute as little as a dollar a month to keep the lights on And you can see here from the slide people who give ten dollars a month We really appreciate that we can't do it without you as you'd like to join them Just go to patreon.com slash brian elixander Now I mentioned before that a typical session involves a brilliant guest Hundreds if not or dozens of you in a conversation Well today is a little different instead of a brilliant guest you have me And the reason is because I have just published a new book And I wanted to use this time to share the book with you all To get your thoughts and to also thank you for your help in making it possible So the book is called academia next It just appeared from the awesome johns hopkins university press If you'd like to look at a copy online or order a copy Below me on the left edge of the screen There should be two buttons one for the official press and one for an amazon link pressing either those will pop up a page So that you can poke around and If you want order a copy or two we'd be delighted to hear that So let me just move this out of the way And say just what I'd like to do for the next half hour I'd like to tell you a little bit about the book so you can get a sense of what it does where it came from And I'd also like to have some fun. So by fun. I mean I have two different copies of the book right here Which I can give away to the first people who would like to have them In fact, I will try to randomize that Um, so I can pick them out And for those of you who are looking at clothing, we have the first two ever academia next Ready to go Uh, steven if you'd like to join us you might want to point your camera at your fair face Uh, right. No, I can't see it. I can see your desktop and some wires. I think Really? Yeah, either that or you had some drastic facial surgery Oh Well, while steven's doing that, um, let me just uh celebrate a little formally With a little bit of bubbly Which I will unleash upon my office. How can that be? Well, steve if you do it, do you want to just uh, do you want to just refresh the screen and um, and try that? Because if that will help So you still can't see you No, no luck so far Okay We'll try that again Now while I pry this loose, let me just tell you a little bit about the book Giving introduction to it. Um, I explain what it's about And then I would love to hear your questions and thoughts. Um, if you'd like I'd be happy to summarize key parts Um, if you want I could read key parts if you'd like, but I'd rather talk about it and hear it from you Um, so the whole idea of the book is to give us a sense of where higher education is headed Over the next roughly 15 years. Now the focus is on the united states in part. Hang on a second There we go. There we go. I think this is the first ever Live toast that we've done on the future trends for Cheers to you all Ah, steven, there you are And your sound is gone. Um, I don't see you muted on this side Now it looks like you've got good output. Uh, good signal strength. No, I still can't hear you at all Okay So if any of you in the audience right now have, um, any Drinks of your own or any treats, please indulge and join me Um, I would like to thank you all and propose a toast to you all for helping Make this book possible Almost every one of you has contributed your thoughts your comments your feedback and your good wishes And to all of you, I thank you looks like this are impossible without friends like you So to begin the idea of the book, um It took form about 10 years ago as I started my uh full-time research in the future of education technology and I wanted to give A deep dive into where all this could be headed And one of the problems I ran into was that the field was so large There were so many moving parts that it was impossible to do briefly So I began with the future trends in technology and education report FTE and documenting these through a horizon scan going back right now about 10 years Um, and that's the first part of academia next the first five chapters are a detailed detailed look at all these trends reshaping higher education Uh everything from demographics and economics to individual technologies to educational technologies enrollment policy Change is that how higher education is financed It looks through all those in great detail The idea there is to try to find as much concrete evidence from the present as many signals of the future Embedded and embedded in the present thing as we could Okay, steven try to talk now I am trying to talk Hey success and I can successfully hear you I just Set up a brand new computer today. So Some of the regular stuff wasn't working Like you thought I'm not seeing you at the moment, but that's a separate issue entirely Uh, can you hear me? I hear you perfectly. Okay. Um, and everybody else Uh, can you let me know if you can see me? Um In fact, uh, tell you what, um Let's see Even just to make sure so we can be on the same page Let me just try one thing all the right there for a sec. Yep Okay, am I both visual and audio? Ah, there you are Hey, now we're both on the same page. Exactly. I'm quite literally. Well, welcome Um, and thanks for coming. You were a great guest before and you're a great participant. Um, uh in these programs. I really appreciate it Oh, it's always my pleasure I have utterly no idea what to say, but it's always my pleasure Well, you have so much to say That's true. I think I think everybody here knows, uh, you're splendid. Oh, well daily Uh, which is just one of the essential risk conditions for anybody's like you about education technology or education So I got a question I have a burning question. I always have this question But I rarely get the chance to actually put it to the relevant post person in question Why a book? Why a dead tree version of your words that I can't link to in my newsletter? No, it's a good question. That's a really good question. Um, a few reasons one is that, um For every person like you or I um, who wants to have the digital version to You know to remix to link to to highlight and so on There are other people in this potential audience who prefer the dead tree from that Um, we just said we're about that by audience the intended audience is basically everybody involved in higher education So students faculty librarians administrators as well as people directly adjacent to that So for example state government leaders trustees people in companies foundations nonprofits who are interested in higher education or adjacent to it Um and Believe me, you know, they even I produce lots of digital content like what we're doing right now But I also it's a kind of bystacle approach. Um, I also have to address the people who would prefer to get this So that's one of these the second is that, um This had to be long It's had to be book length because there's so much work in it and you can make digital content of that link Yeah, but most of the time many many people really prefer to snack Digitally Just just so you know, I don't know if other people are having this experience, but you're sounding like you're underwater right now Um, let me know from chat people if um if so I can actually switch to a different Room just about 10 feet over here. If that's a problem Yeah, um sounds regular to everybody else. So My bandwidth or where it's canada that uh, just to be sure though is on some Yeah But uh, no to be fair this is available in digital form. Um, this is available in two books Um, so uh, john's huckings is very good about having both of those Well, I saw that Um, and that leads me to my second question Your ebook costs the same as the regular book So How does that happen? Oh, you'd have to talk to the publisher like that The pricing is something that I have The control over I mean I can speak generally to ebook pricing And the different models of it No, in fact the editor for john's hopkins was here. He's in the airport heading to a flight So this is the awesome and wonderful editor greg britain if you want to text chat him And say hi to him and ask him about that Um, but other than that seriously, I would just ask the press why One one more thing if I could if I could say it Both you and I steven baseman visual evidence love books I guess I It seems like an odd sort of line a question and give him my backdrop It's literally your backdrop and uh And I love writing books. This is my third. It's a force that you can if you count second edition of my first and It's a lifelong dream to my books Yeah, I love books, uh, although to be honest, I haven't read A paper book in a number of years now and uh, although, you know, I still haul them off the shelf. This is The most recent Some things never go away, right? This, uh, rust coughs. I hear you Oh, no, I said, how is it? Oh, it's it's a great book. I read it when it came out like 20 years ago Okay, your pages are yellowed now But yeah, it was a great book Influential on me I guess that's the sort of effect you're intending to have with your book like, uh, the whole idea of You know contents using content online as surfing and all of that That came from that book for me anyways the you know, so and and just the idea of responding to uh, chaotic and unpredictable phenomenon the way a surfer would where you don't memorize everything at a time you just give it an environment and you Do the wave I love video That was in Siberia. Um So I carried that with me ever since so that's a plug for someone else's book I'm sorry about that. Okay. I I appreciate this and uh, um I'm trying to get like to be a guest in the program so, um After drilling you a bit, perhaps Let me let me ask a more softball question What would be the one thing that I should take from your book? You in particular or the audience in general? Let's say the audience in general because I'll be you know, I'll find something really weird on page 197 Every every reader is different. Yeah And uh, a key thing to take away is that it's really important to think about higher education From a future oriented perspective And that is to think about the future being different in the past in certain ways And to be really open to all those possibilities And that's actually surprisingly hard to do A great deal of discussion for future education is really Grounded in more of the same And when people say same they often mean 95 So, okay, let me press a bit on that. What if it's not the same? What is it? Well, there are a lot of differences And one of the things I do and you can see this in the subtitle of the book is the future's plural higher education Is to look at a series of different possibilities for where it can go And again, the focus for this volume is largely on the united states Because a it's a huge huge field B it's globally significant And c I had to keep this down to one book right now I'm quite serious about doing a future of higher education project. That's just um Something that's a lot larger to do But one thing is to think about the size and shape of higher education That is we may have overbuilt The number of institutions so that we will have to reduce them Either through closures or merger for some other whole transformation It may also include changing the number of students The number of students in the world in us higher education has gone down Last eight years. So it's possible that we're just shrinking I have a scenario for this called peak higher education And maybe that we're on the downhill side of peak The second is to think about what happens when the majority of students are taking classes online However, we measure that I mean if it's the majority taking all classes online or a mix That's an interesting milestone to think about When face-to-face becomes On a path with online or becomes secondary Another way to think about this or fix me optimistic Is to think about this in terms of more international higher education Except for two countries in the world Higher education is more international I don't mean that in a vague general sense of globalism I mean that we have on the on the student side We have more and more movement across international borders You think about the european higher education area, which is a tremendous tremendous way of Of living motion. We also have the research side more more international collaboration, especially in the sciences And we're also seeing lots and lots of countries and regions building up and bulking up their higher capacity Just notably china And I think this is amazing. I think what for two countries? The united kingdom and u.s. Have backed away from this over the past two or three years Most other countries aren't quite following this possibly hungry although Their influence is pretty small because they're much more a small nation But it's possible that we will see Just a much more transnational for higher education That's for example, when you think about mooks set aside everything about much for one second usually No nation in why I saw the first few years of mooks. Usually no one nation dominates But so think about this if you're thinking classes online And that you know you are in a national minority This is not surprising for small nations, but it can be shocking to the country like the United states Think about you might think about the physical campus there and that there's no national plurality or no national majority What a fascinating thing that could be so that's another difference to bear in mind um I in the last part of the book Or let me back a little bit Stephen answer this and The first part of the book looks at trends and so the first book is very very present oriented the first part of the book Looks the present It establishes this battery of trends the second part of the book that extends those in the future Partly by extrapolation of part of the generic scenarios And if you're if you're new to scenarios friends Scenarios a story about the future where one or two trends powerfully reshapes at the time And each of the trends is based on each of those scenarios rather is based on something that's quite Most dramatic augmented campus Where we have a mix of virtual reality and augmented reality that reshapes on a physical campus looks And that may be too extreme for the next five years I don't think so. I think technically it's quite feasible, but that gives you a very different shape of campus I those are a few a few ways. Does that give you a start to answer? Yeah, that's a start. Uh I've always read lots of this future of stuff and of course, I've seen I look here one model in your wine glass Uh And I've always considered the scenarios approach to be a bit of a cop out You know looking at the future and you don't just give us one feature you give us four Uh, or I see him. It's four. Is it usually four? uh, this case, uh, they're actually Seven scenarios seven. Um, plus a chapter of extrapolations Plus a chapter looking, um beyond 20 30 So that's you're really failing to predict the future that is seven different possibilities. Um, so What what what are we supposed to do with that for seven different futures? How do you plan for that? Um, one of the things you do there are a lot of things to do One of them is the simple first order effect that I hope Is like I said before getting people to imagine the future This is like it's like the experience of reading science fiction You know it opens your imagination And that's one key thing that I want to say The second is that the process of all this again What I have all these trends is to get campuses as well as libraries and museums governments To start doing their own futures work I want them to do their own horizon scan their own trends analysis See what's shaping that future for them and then that opens them up to strategic planning So they can start thinking about what kind of student they should anticipate in 10 years or how publishing will change And again, this this is plural because I don't believe in predicting a single unique area future. I think that's a that's a do game Um, this is really a cognitive event There are a few other people who want to join us. Yeah And in fact You can kick me off if you want I will at some point But let me welcome she'll catch Hi, brian. I'm looking forward to reading the book. Can you hear me perfectly? You sound very good. Thank you I like to to take you from um scenarios and ask you a little bit about analogies And um, I'm maybe you talk about in the book a lot of the discussions about the future of the academy um, try to analogize to other industries, whether it's Information industries like newspapers and publishing or other sort of intrinsically high labor organizations like orchestras that have some of the same labor Uh, some some of the same bone models disease that higher education or disrupted industries like cabs and uber So which of any of those analogies or others do you find even remotely useful to be thinking about what's happening? of with academia next That's a terrific question. And by the way, uh, phil was a great guest Talking about the councilman in pen and colleges a wonderful inter-campus humanities teaching program and the c i c is a great group. It's just tremendous for Um extra in your tech this week. Oh very good. Thank you. Um, the uh I resisted a lot of analogies because uh They really seem to break down pretty quickly the newspaper analogy for example um, I did come up with one and uh When I realized this analogy, I almost gave up the entire project Um, and that analogy was to healthcare Um, and it's specifically specifically to american healthcare. Um, So in general, there's a similarity with healthcare and that we're talking about providing for the care Very human intensive. Um, you know, all kinds of interesting issues of gender professionalization Definitely bomo's cost disease. So by the way, I'm sorry. If you haven't heard the term bomo's cost disease That's created by two economists bomo and bowen Um, and the idea is that there's some fields of economics where you cannot speed up and uh, without ruining what you're doing Um, so you're thinking about fast food does provide food whatever you think I think about factories. We're sure able to produce more content But brain surgery you don't want to speed up because it would be bad for you String quartet is often used for example in higher education. We have yet to find a way that could actually speed up like that So just we can talk more about that if you like that's that's more for most diseases But uh, healthcare suffers from that as well. Um, what made me so depressed was that both in in the us The financial structure, uh for both higher education and And healthcare have a lot in common. Um, they're both very very opaque You know, if you if you head into an emergency room We're not the price And if you go to have a surgery done You're not sure of what you're going to pay until after the insurance is done with it And even if it is done with it, you can still do more Higher education is similarly opaque. We don't have Students will have insurance, but here's the whole question of discounting. Uh, which is very very tricky Our prices change And then there's also the amount of debt involved in both sides Wow, which is extremely powerful In the us the affordable care act did trim Some of the more extraneous horrible parts of medical debt, but it's still is still an issue and this this depressed me You know hoping to find an analogy to something like, you know, um superman or something, but uh But that's That would be great. We're working on it man. We're working But uh, let me put let me push you think about analogies on the biggest level Is there something not useful to think about higher education as a consumer good? Is that an analogy that Yeah, an analogy. Is it a reality? Is it something helpful to think with? Uh, or is that fit into the category of the other analogies that you've just said didn't didn't seem terribly useful to think with Um, I think it's fun to consider Higher education as a consumer service Um, but one problem is we often think about it as a consumer good and it's important to make that distinction Um, but also if you think about it in terms of consumer Economics then that that leads to a whole series of of lines of thought that may be productive So you can think about say the the criticism of the modern university being too corporate too business Sorry, you could follow that path or you could follow the path of students as consumers And what does that mean instead of path to go down or you can talk about for example The financialization of American higher education Um, and and that's another path to follow. So I think I think the consumer part there is it is quite useful That that's all I have I think you have enough sort of white guys with facial hair up here right now So you can you can let me go back to my seat. Well, you're attending room It's great to see you Phil. Thank you We have a few other people who actually have questions up here. Um, so let me just pop some of these questions on the screen So We can toss them around from the awesome thomas toben in wisconsin or it's tuesday wisconsin He asks what is the most challenging area to explore as you are writing the book? You know, we can get back up again, uh, just because I expected you quickly. Um, that's a that's a very kind question. Um, I think, um Part of it was the sheer scope of technology Um, it's not rapidly grew out of proportion simply because technology Advances very very quickly, but there are also so many contours to it so many outlines And uh, I was having to vote more and more time to that and I I think I ended up cutting off stuff But I would have liked to write more about but that really began at blue So I had to do some if I'm going to medical metaphor I had to do some serious triage in that area That's a good question. Thank you We had a question from Steve Covello in, uh, New Hampshire Let me just put this up and they just say again, it's great to have people from almost Online enrollment in campus tech and campus culture. I don't know Steven because I haven't read the article But I will do it now after this session And try and find out more that is from the awesome matt reed dean dad He's been a guest in the program and one of the best commentators in community colleges online. Just a really great guy Thank you for your point of view Speaking of good friends. We have me so, uh Maybe brian isn't here anymore or maybe it's just me up tag. I'm it so okay, so Uh, while we're waiting for brian, did I just oh there he is Did I just blank out for a second? Yeah, you did That's okay. I was already to take over for you. I could imagine you would. Uh, did you all see my question from joellen? For about a second. Okay. Let me bring this back up Joellen asked to pay attention to various sectors and sub sectors Uh, which is a great question. Um, and since uh, and just for everybody's Knowledge joellen is a great friend. Uh, she led the national institute for technology and liberal education for years I worked for her on that which is a privilege and a great learning experience Um, she's now with the councilman independent colleges where she does great stuff there Um, and just a wonderful person and an inspiration for me Uh, this question is about sub sectors and different and this is a Stephen, this is another reason why this is a book length project. Um, you think about 4,400 institutions in the united states and they're extraordinarily diverse in terms of everything their public nature and private nature Their scale the mission some of them were secular someone were religious and religious ones have just incredible numbers of sects Uh, I mean it's really extraordinary Almost unique part of global higher education And so I have to keep slicing and dicing this into different areas So one of the things I I one of the demarcations is geographical We've talked about demographics in this program before The demographic changes sweeping the world are very very important in the united states. They're very uneven So the northeast and the south the southeast Um are suffering a serious decline in Children they're aging rapidly Whereas we have a sector stretching roughly from texas to the dakotas Which nathan grah another previous guest in the program Suscribed as fertility alley I was in idaho working with the university there and the the locals said we do something that the rest of the country has Forgot how to do we make babies and and and that's quite true But that that demographic impetus among other things Has a huge huge impact on a lot of colleges and universities In that it starts to draw down the number of 18 year olds So colleges and universities that serve that population are going to be fighting each other more directly It also the longevity aspect means we have to rethink adult education And possibly rethink how we approach teaching and otherwise serving senior citizens Now so this problem is not so great for those in the infertility alley. That's one demarcation A second is to break out private and public As the awesome chris newfield has established The united states has systematically defunded public education for the past 30 or 40 years And that's been a major major factor in reshaping how public universities and colleges succeed Myla modder is a former president James duterstat said famously He used to describe the university of michigan as a state supported institution Then he changed it to a state located institution. Now. We call it a state molested institution And and this is this is funny But also telling because it means that public universities have now really pushed hard on On privatization in all kinds of ways. It means the faculty and staff are encouraged in more entrepreneurial It means students go into more and more debt It changes the politics of relations between universities and state governments And that's very very different public i'm trying from private universities and colleges Which is about one third of higher education or a different realm So then a little further as the debt crisis gets more and more daunting and frightening to more and more people We see the rise of free public education That happens the states like the tennessee promise or new york state with the excelsior program Which then splits again that divide between A deep into the divide between private and public universities and colleges So that those are other areas you can you can pull out We can go still further you think about catholic universities Which are facing problems mostly due to the terrible ongoing specter of child sex abuse campus And so this is forcing a lot of catholic universities to think about how they can attract students In an era where this is becoming more and more horrifying Think as well about say religious institutions on the protestant side Which are trying to market themselves to a demographic that is decreasingly affiliated with religions You think about liberal arts colleges and universities, which is very dear to your heart to all that money And these have the advantage of in many ways giving us the best preparation for the 21st century Since they teach us to code switch across multiple domains to think synthetically in an interdisciplinary way The downside is people often associate liberal arts with the humanities And in the united states the humanities enrollment is just collapsing across the nation So that makes them a little less appealing I I slice and dice this in many ways and I could go on one one more note nationwide Like many countries united states is seeing a deepening divide between urban and rural populations And this is occurring in multiple levels including infrastructure age economics and politics And so it may be that rural colleges and universities are having a harder and harder time attracting students Whereas urban or urban area College universities have a better time Um, it may be that we're just going to start to empty out the countryside There's a great great biologist eo wilson who proposes that we should We should devote half of the land mass of human civilization completely to nature And uh, obviously do it with the countryside I don't know if we're heading that way But we're we're starting down that path and that has a lot of implications for how you support All these colleges universities Friends, I've got steven on here and I'll let him down gently because he's been lovely to talk to Let me thank you for coming steven I know we should have the reverse of a star trek sun What I'd like to do right now before we have even more questions is I would like to Give away a couple of these books for free to everybody else who's uh, who is interested So let me do this this way. I've got a list of everybody who has checked in um, and what I'm going to do is Pick people out by a random number and if you are still here, I will give you A shout out and you can just let me know Your mailing address and I can ship you the book right after our session is concluded So let's see We have two copies of the book And the first one I have is to Clow castellanus. Are you here? Well, I'm going to put you down Clow and um, and if I'm mispronouncing your name or misreading it from the spreadsheet, please let me know I don't see clow. So let me get another number How about Now we're down to Eric ruckman. Are you here, Eric? Let me see I will try and bring in Eric and send him a copy after this And I like to give away a t-shirt So these are all extra large White with the whole book covered lovely design from johns hopkins university press And the first person that I can pick from that is Number five who is Stephen airman Are you there, Stephen? I hope so I can send you a t-shirt right after this and steven. You can let me know Where I should send it to I'm going to hold off on one more book and one more shirt as we continue Um, but we have questions. They're still coming up and I want to bring these up here um, so we have a question from uh kelvin bentley. Oh great guy. Good to see you man Uh, kelvin asks what percentage of colleges and universities will suffer a clean sacrifice of some sort or form mergers and Uh, kelvin, uh, so he's referring to a model. I've been putting out called the queen sacrifice Which refers to when a college in university Gets rid of tenured and tenure-track faculty The metaphor is from chess I use it to describe Tenured faculty in the sense that they are the most powerful piece on the chess board of academia in that they have governance roles they have often higher compensation they have tenure and usually they are the last to be axed in In cuts that they can be either when an institution requires financial exigency or when an institution removes program or decreases a major Right now, I think the percentage of this has been pretty low something like one or two percent But I could see that rising to five or even 10 percent. Um, it's not widely reported Sometimes colleges and universities try and do this without much publicity, which is kind of understandable Um, but I would not be surprised to see 10 percent doing a queen sacrifice in terms of closures and mergers Um, right now numbers are relatively low, but things are a bit edgy I could see that going as high as five percent, especially in areas with very very low demographics and low demand for higher education Good question. Thank you Um, and we have a another great question from tom Tom hams and I want to bring tom up on stage because I always do And because tom is a good friend and someone I like to torment a lot Tom can you hear us? Okay. Yeah, I can hear you fine You're at the institute right now, aren't you? Yes. I've been institutionalized Well, I'm not going to touch that line with the 10-foot euphemism. Um Um You asked a great question now. What is the good that education is selling and what is the good that health care is selling? Um, it's coming from your earlier discussion. No, it's a nice link. Um, it's a really really good question Uh, for me higher education is if you will selling Um, and we do sell um because we do have market transactions a series of goods The biggest two goods, um are clearly learning In the form of teaching and learning the form of research Um, and those are kind of the two incontestable ones that we're best known for now Those are as joellen pointed out unevenly distributed because we have different sectors So we don't expect a lot of research from say for example Community colleges. We don't expect a lot of research or any research from agents Which are the majority that preponderance of faculty in the united states Um, but those two, um, nevertheless as a whole are I think what we are vending There are also a few more things How do you measure that? I mean the the reason I ask the question is that You know, what is the health care system selling? Is it health? You know, or is it treatment? Right, and those are those are two distinct things because You know, unless you have a you know, most most of the time the health care system is selling treatment Um, occasionally your doctor will give you some advice on on Things you can do to remain healthy or to be healthier But usually it's uh, it's after the fact in a and a uh palliative for you know, what ails you I think there's a similar there's a similar problem with with education in that, um, you know Are we selling treatment or are we selling? State of being and it's a little different from health care in that sense, but equally hard to measure in my opinion um The the treatment is easier to measure because it's so self contained That you know, you can look at a clinic You can look at a person at home taking medication or a person in the hospital And you can isolate that and they're designed to be isolated And and you can do the same thing with teaching and with research You know, you can you have final exams you have Professional exams as well as being able to track research through We're measuring there what not necessarily how educated they are but but how well they take those exams Well, quite true quite true and you could say as well that uh, how well people respond to treatment directly to radiation For example, right. Well, not dying is a good mark Well, you'd think we do have a disturbed a lot of deaths by accidents in in uh, um in health care The problem is once we step out and say, okay. Well, we we want to produce knowledge And learning for example in society then you can you can try to measure the total amount of learning in a given nation But two big problems occur one is that It's a nightmarish problem. No one agrees on the different parts of it. I mean for example the Uh, I'm just blanking the name of it. There's a math and reading test that uh international test That just came out a couple of months ago I'm sorry pizza. Yes a peaceful. Thank you. Um, and that still is controversial I I think it's the best one we've got but it's still very hard to measure um, and the second problem with that is um inputs are now huge Um, so it's the same again with health care And we can measure the the health of a nation at once these two problems as well for weight We use bmi which is almost widely hated and derided and still used throughout medicine And the number of inputs are just insane. You know, do you You know, is it the television watching alter either of these what about of physical health? How does that impact? Learning there was a great story a couple of weeks ago about a school in los angeles where they kind of accidentally replaced an air filter And up the test scores of students So how do you data that shows things like sunlight has a major impact on things like Or the time of day you give the tests Yeah And so these are all things that that come into play there too. No, I mean the point I'm trying to make, you know You know the point I'm trying to make is that it's it's it's hard You know, we don't produce a car at the end of our process You know, we can't point to the fact that we've built 50 000 forwards or something like that Um, we produce graduates, but whether or not those graduates are capable of doing anything is is yet to be determined I think no, that's a good point And this is one that's that's very very hard to solve Thank you. Um, thank you for asking that. Um, it's one way to think about and this may be through either of us um another research project to explore when we were both When you're finished with your current one and um My next one this weekend this weekend Let me know We have um another question up here from Amanda Burbage. So let me bring Amanda up on stage Hello, Amanda. Hey, Brian and everybody. I'm glad to be joining the conversation. I am really excited about the book You can't wait to read it. Thank you And um, I want to ask you a thousand questions, but the one I'm going to ask you while I'm on the podium is How does your uh, how do your future scenarios? relate to That's a fantastic question um, and you know how uh, I mentioned before how I had this problem of Cutting back. Um, so you don't have to meet yourself. We can keep talking, right? You know, I mentioned how I had to cut back on on technology and how I couldn't talk about international higher education fully Um, this is a part of the problem I love history and I have a degree in history and I wanted to see so much in my history But then greg my editor would never have spoken to me again. It would have been an eight volume work. Um, so I Partly I reached back into recent history to pull out a few things. So for example In our lifetime, I think the lifetime of everybody involved in this conversation Um higher education has expanded Uh in every measure, you know, the number of institutions the number of students the number of people working institutions And that's a great thing. I mean we have more people with more learning Tom caution is about measuring it, but we can we see that experience we can count that um Now in so you can look back into us for about 1982 to about 2012 we had this long boom There's continuous growth, which is very exciting. Um, well about 2012 it stopped growing and has actually gone down a bit ever since Um, and that's a real caution. So I would think back how have we dealt with this in the past? You know, what kind of crisis have we gone through and it turns out in the late 70s and early 80s We among other things, you know, tried to reinvent parts of higher ed to try to be more sustainable um I I I go back to the past for all kinds of things. There's a great book about The populist movement in the 1890s. So, you know, we say we have a populist moment now But you actually have capital p populist party. Um, and that sees control democratically of state governments, which then we're able to control public universities It's fascinating to see how how they change their curriculum and we see echoes of that now um I I also looked at the past for inspiration um The land grant universities were invented um by a law passed um and led by a vermont senator just in moral during the american civil war And that that just flabbergasted me every time I think of it, you know, you're fighting this Epic brutal horrific nearly total war in the meantime of that you say, well, Let's reinvent higher education. My god. What what version, you know, to be able to do that. I think that's just So I yes, I keep thinking in the past and and when you mention the sins of the father is one more aspect of that And one thing that I've been tracking is is the persistent and horrendous problem of racial inequality in higher education And now we're seeing that take a more historical turn where we have colleges and universities like like georgetown and rine work That are trying to settle with the past by doing forms of reparations. For example our scholarships So that's it. That's a great question. Thank you so much. We have a few more questions popping up And uh, let me just grab these here. Uh, so there's one from uh, Ah joshua kim Um, which is always good to hear from him Um, he has a new book that he's co-op that's coming out too. I'm looking forward to having him on the program Would you recommend that your kids pursue a career in higher education? If so, which one? It's a good question and a personal one. Um I could get very personal about my children and and their interests and their work And I I kind of want to hold back from that in respect of their privacy Um, so I'll be a little abstract Partly depends on their interest and what they're working on and what their aptitude is Um, so may be that for one of my children Um, it may be that working in higher education institution Actually is a good fit for him in certain ways Um, again, I hate to be cryptic, but I'm trying to respect his privacy Um And may be for him the museum world is actually a good fit Um, but not for my uh, not for my daughter. Um, uh her temperament and her interest really lead in different places Um, I would really hesitate before recommending anybody become a faculty member at this stage um, one of the trends that I tracked and the uh The dedication of a book is about this. Um, is that in the united states we have turned our labor force into Temps majority of faculty are part-time adjuncts. So the dedication of my book Is to adjuncts I say to all adjunct faculty who do more than anyone with less than anyone to build the future of higher education And for people who can do the adjunct life people who are independently wealthy or who Don't need to do so for economic reasons because they have another career Bravo to them. Uh, and to all the adjuncts This is a heroic and criminally mistreated group of people Um, but I would hesitate before sending anyone down my path That's a good question um And uh, we have another question from the awesome rock sand So let me put this up here rock sand risk and ask if I could talk about climate challenges and technological trends including vr conferences. Um, so um before I Oh gosh, there's so much to say about that Climate change is my next topic one that i'm working very hard on Um, and that's going to possibly be a book. Um in the near future Because climate change hits us in a few different angles. There's the physical plant angle That is how many campuses worldwide are faced with either rising water or desertification How many campuses also have to reconfigure their physical plans in order to become more carbon neutral? Either because they want to or because of political pressure either internally or externally How will curriculum change? Um as we try to Make our our campuses Approach the climate emergency. So what fields will expand in which will contract? How will pedagogy change? Um, how will we change the physical way we do business in terms of travel? Well, we have fewer academic conferences will study abroad decrease. Uh, these are some of the questions we have to deal with right now um speaking of which um Involved in the conversation right now is the awesome trend batsom Who has just published an e-book on this very topic called the last humans and trend if you want to put your The url to that um in the chat box. That'd be great to see and rock sand and Trent You guys should definitely know each other. You're almost neighbors. I think That's a really great question now in order to uh Fulfill my promise to give away things I'm going to give away two more items one more t-shirt I will do this to another person picked at random from our list of guests So that will go to What looks like henry edda has on more Henrietta, are you here? Let me go over to our list of folks and see if I can bring her in Don't see her on this right now. I'm going to follow up with her right afterwards And then one more buck. Let's see who gets to have the last book for this We have one more random number generator. Thank you google The book goes to Stephen Crawford Good for you, man We're going to email all of you guys make sure I get your physical address and ship these out Oh, by the way, I promised uh I promised uh silly hats and I didn't get to put mine on yet. So let me just do that And venessa, let me see if we can get you on venessa Venessa, how's your broadband? Can you hear and see us? I'm I'm anchored on the hot on a hot spot. I anchored my phone is a hot spot and that seems to be working better Excellent. Good to see you Well, I just wanted because of the occasion I wanted to come up and say congratulations in person and I've already ordered my book, you know So I don't have to feel bad about not getting a free one There's a 40 off sale At drown hopkins grab it. No. Yes I to be honest I don't know if I would have bought if it wasn't on sale because I was going like oh, no I don't know about that, but I ordered it and um, I I I I want to tell you just how much I I appreciate your dedication Thank you as a as a retired as a retired adjunct in bad health I appreciate that. I I've been I really admire how you've been with us since the beginning Do you remember our first encounter? No, you don't I you were I guessed Person at somebody's uh seamook that's one of those back when everybody was doing their own seamook Yes, and you came on as a sort of like we're going to talk to this consultant brian alexander And I was there and I asked you a question about adjunct labor And the mook and the and the the guy running the mook said, oh, no We don't want to talk about that right now and you answered the question And I thought following this guy Thank you for remembering that Vanessa. Thank you so much That's a as you know, that's a cause dear to my heart And you are dear to our hearts as well. Thank you. Thank you so much. Take care my friend Friends, we're at the last minute of the last of of this session And so I just want to give a couple of people one more chance Ophelia mangan asked a question She asks about which chapter of book should I use with instructors who prohibit the use of any tech or devices in their classrooms Ophelia, I may have just the right one for you. Although I'm not sure if it'll work with a backfire Chapter 13 is called retro campus and the idea of that is campuses that deliberately try not to have any technology It's a kind of satire See if they recognize themselves in it Now the other thing you could do Is the extreme opposite And show them the one augmented campus which has the greatest amount of technology or show them the scenario called renaissance Where I celebrate the creativity That humans can do that humans can show as we use digital technology So either of those I think would be very good. Thank you for the great question Friends, I take my head off to you all literally and figuratively You're in the acknowledgments to this book Because I have learned so much from you in the past four years From your thoughts your questions your feedback and I've also learned from your spirit You've been generous with your time some of you with your money all of you with your sense of humor And I really really appreciate that I thank you now from the bottom of my heart and I thank you as well from the front of the book Thanks again Speaking of books, uh, Tom Tobin has a new book coming out Tom if you could put a link to it in the chat book in the chat box so everyone could see it that would be great And before we go, let me tell you about the next couple of weeks Our guest next week on january 23rd. There's two guests cali renaissance and amy bonomi They are the authors and editors of a new book on women leading change in academia Which is a really exciting book very very important for our time There's the link to it if you'd like to join us we'd be glad to see you Excuse me We're also um continuing to put up more and more videos. So if you'd like to go look at previous Programs, the whole archive is there on tinyworld.com slash fdf archive If you'd like to keep talking about this we're all over social media from twitter to slack the linkedin and facebook We'd be glad to hear from you all again. Thank you so much I'm just in debt to you all and i'm delighted to be able to spend time with you Thank you so much read academia next tell your friends. See you next time. Bye. Bye