 Good evening. This is what's going on. I'm Zoe Vickstrom and our guest this evening is Dr. Ralph Hexter who is interim chancellor at UC Davis. Good evening Mr. Hexter. Hi Zoe, good to be here. I wanted to thank you for being on our show and for taking your time to be here tonight. So let's start with your experience as a student. When you went to Harvard you brought a love of French and the opera. Can you talk about your life as an undergraduate? I actually loved being an undergraduate. I had a wonderful time. It's true I was completely devoted to literature, particularly medieval literature. I think I was one of those high school probably even junior high school readers of Tolkien's rings. You know the ring trilogy and of course the Hobbit and also I was into opera as you said and I sometimes think my preparation for being a medievalist or getting it to comparative literature was as I put it from the two rings, Tolkien's ring and Wagner's ring, both of which I was a fanatic devotee of in high school. So I took a lot of languages, a lot of literature, courses and I generally had a great time. I was a big fan of the Hobbit and Tolkien's books as a kid as well. So your work in graduate school was at Oxford in England and then a PhD at Yale and research in Munich Germany. So what challenges did you face as a graduate student? Gosh as a graduate student. Well I was very fortunate to be able to go study in Oxford and you know I had a really good time. It was an opportunity to really deepen my knowledge of Latin and ancient Greek literature which I actually had started while I was an undergraduate. So but you know Oxford has wonderful long vacations and I tended to like to visit the continent then and so I really had a wonderful opportunity to get to know a couple of countries fairly well, Germany most of all, Italy a little bit and challenges graduate student. You know again my graduate career was a little bit odd I suppose because I only spent two years really in residence at Yale as a graduate student and you know it's interesting when I think about the funding for graduate students I didn't actually have a scholarship and so I went back to Europe on a fellowship supported by the German government to do research and that's what took me to Munich a city I'd visited once before and said gosh if I ever had the chance I'd love to live here and I got to indulge a lot of my passions there opera and theater and art above all. Okay so what tell me about Germany what do you like about it? Well there's so many different parts I'll share a few different things. First of all I love speaking German. I know that German has a reputation of being difficult and I'm not sure I speak it perfectly but you know you can build very complicated grammatical structures in German and that's something I I enjoy also reading the literature but one of the more interesting opportunities I had and you have to understand this is gosh the mid-70s I had the opportunity to go and stay with a family in East Berlin. Got a visa and go behind the wall and live for first two weeks and then for three weeks a little bit later in East Berlin long before the wall came down so that was quite a fascinating experience very very interesting but I actually then when I did my research spent more time in Munich which is very much not in East Germany it's in Bavaria and good food good art in a beautiful situation but probably the most important thing is that I ended up meeting my partner now husband there and we've been together well it'll be close to it'll be 37 years quite soon. Wow congratulations is he German? He is German or was now he's an American but he emigrated from Germany to the United States a few years after we met and went through that whole process now he's totally American. That's awesome. You're recognized as a scholar in comparative literature what are your areas of interest? So I'm I've been the university I have an appointment both as a professor of classics and comparative literature and sort of it's traditional by classics we mean the Greco-Roman world the ancient world of around the Mediterranean so what I work on primarily is the tradition and reception of ancient literature perhaps more Latin than Greek but I've done Greek as well in the Middle Ages how it was interpreted how for example a society very very different from the society for which the Roman poets wrote read those texts which referred to things that they didn't really approve of in a number of different ways so how did they learn to reinterpret them how did they re-adapt them and then that just continues actually on up to our own age the translations and adaptations of of ancient material I'm quite fascinated by that. Okay do you have a favorite classic? You know I actually think it would be Virgil's epic poem The Aeneid which I've taught a few times it's I find not only monumental and moving but also I find so many interpretive challenges there and I suppose also my interest in the immense impact it's had over centuries and quite honestly probably with the exception of the Bible it was the most influential work at least into the 19th century since then the number of people studying the classics has dropped precipitously. You have taught at Yale and been a teacher and administrator at Colorado, Cal Berkeley and Hampshire College which is the most concentrated college town in America. What has your experience taught you about the responsibilities of leadership? Well I would say that you have to take your time you have to learn the context of the college or university you're involved with you have to learn what the values are you have to I've even put it in terms of learning a language because when you start dialoguing with the faculty and the students and you might have some ideas or suggestions you need to know how to translate that into precisely what moves the that culture. Okay how like what efforts do you make to get student input? I know you had breakfast you said with Alex. Well so you know it's interesting I remember at at Hampshire when I was the college president following a tradition that the previous president established I went to the Donning Hall every Monday morning for breakfast and just had an open table whoever wanted to come and sit down and talk with me we had breakfast together for about an hour and a half and it's interesting there were some people who came pretty regularly and then there were others who only came when there was a burning issue that they had but that's so important what I'm doing right now and you know I think in some ways you know the transition between Hampshire college which is 1400 students and you see Davis which is well if you count the graduate and professional students 35 students 35 000 students 28 000 undergraduates one of the things that actually astonishes me is how despite its size I think a lot of our students of course they have some large classes no doubt about that but through their activities they find places to make it an intimate experience you know the whether they're involved like Alex is in ASUCD or the sports teams it really is somehow a small town many small towns but to your question when I took on the acting chance or role now I'm interim chancellor but that's just as a title change I proposed to students that if anyone was interested they should shadow me for part of my day and I was delighted that immediately we had over 20 volunteers and since then other people have added their names to the list I think we've probably have 40 now and so since May I've been having usually a pair of students at a time join me for a portion of my day because I think it's a great opportunity for them to see or just get a taste of the many different things that the university involves for example one of the the students who shattered me early on had to suffer through an hour-long meeting on compliance but it's interesting to to realize that part of our university and you know UC Davis also has a medical center and school of medicine a school of nursing in in Sacramento is there so many issues of compliance and you know following this rule and that and we take it very seriously obviously it's I think an interesting perspective for students to realize that while they day in day out see a certain part of the university we have an administration and lots of staff who are focused on a tremendous range of of things you wouldn't even know like yesterday just as an example I was out at Bodega Marine Lab Bodega Bay which UC Davis runs and that you know again there were we had students along on that trip to see the work that's being done there wow so there's a lot of opportunities that make students feel like the college is more intimate when it's really big it is and you know and and I have to say I'm I hope it's not too much of a stress on my staff but I really love this program of students shadowing me so I know we'll continue it okay sounds like you have a lot of people who want well want to do that since I work every day there's no lack of meetings for people to join me at so what is your evaluation of Linda Catehi oh gosh um Linda Catehi of course was chancellor when I came she hired me I think she's actually um one of the people who saw very clearly the greatness of UC Davis and I think everyone at the university knows how great we are but we have a tradition of being perhaps overly modest sometimes hiding our light beneath a bushel being the best kept secret and chancellor Catehi you know took the measure of all that we were and helped make sure that we were confident in getting that message out and I think that that is it's not bragging it's not arrogance but I think we are now projecting and communicating much more of what it is that we do whether it's our focus on teaching whether it's the immense amount of research we do you know I uh leaders like that most leaders are called on to be change agents of one sort or another and it's a very challenging thing to do I was talking about that in my own sense of leadership yeah and I think that we're now in a very very better place thanks to her period as chancellor okay just because you guys now have a reputation or you had the same reputation before but now it's more known because of Chancellor Catehi well I think that she helped us feel confident about communicating that and it is you know it's something you have to work at because everyone is familiar with some of the older established universities and also part of the challenge of communicating what UC Davis is is both to honor our heritage as you know the original ag school of the University of California the Aggies yeah but and of course our tremendous expertise in veterinary medicine but also let people know that we've got lots of other parts we are an enormous and comprehensive university perhaps pointing out that in areas that really are key to meeting the challenges of the 21st century feeding what will become nine or ten billion people doing it in a way that respects the environment attending to a sort of complex interaction that we call one health between for example um diseases I mean Zika is a very good example diseases that move from animals whether they're wild animals or an insects or farmyard livestock to humans given what we have at UC Davis a school of medicine a college of agricultural and environmental sciences and a veterinary school there's no university better positioned to work collaboratively on those kinds of challenges and so I think it's also adding some richness to the messaging that helps people see what is relevant about all the work we do now all right so moving into the future you had a distinguished career at UC Berkeley as chair of the comparative literature department and dean of languages and then you were dean of the deans of letters and sciences you have proposed the creation of a dean of letters and sciences position and the chemistry department is trying to block your final decision use this problem to describe your administrative philosophy and how you viewed shared governance with the faculty and with the graduate and undergraduate student body sure um you know shared governance is one of the bedrock values of really any great research university certainly of the University of California and the regions of Cal the University of California long ago established the academic senate is having authority over such things as curriculum admission standards very very important content issues in addition we have a wonderful tradition and this is encouraged of consulting with the academic senate so to take the example that you use this idea of maintaining the College of Letters and Science as one college and even having one dean for the college instead of three divisional deans it's a it's a it's a an idea that we discussed over three years of committees and consultations the first year because in fact not just chemistry but the whole area of math and physical sciences proposed let's call it a hypothesis that they should go and form a separate college so we had a group look at the arguments that they proposed and this was a group that in the spirit of shared governance was filled was co-chaired by one of my administrators the vice provost for undergraduate education and the vice chair of the academic senate so this involved that kind of joint that shared viewpoint it's an administrative matter in the end but it's very important to get the input from faculty and of course letters and science is a college of over 600 senate faculty and some 30 departments so there's a lot going on there in any event they did their report and their their conclusion was it didn't make sense from their point of view to have math and physical sciences go off and become a separate college but rather there were lots of ways we could address the challenges that all the different parts faced so then we the chancellor and I proposed this idea of having one dean and we had yet another committee filled with faculty from all the different parts including a member of the chemistry department look at this at great length and in the end they made a recommendation that we should go forward with this and then we had yet another committee and I may be right maybe on this committee that we had a member of chemistry to define the job description and search for the individual so I understand that there are some individuals any number of them who really still hold in their heart the desire to go in different direction but after an extremely long and consultative process which is after all advisory on administrative matters I feel that we've had a chance for lots of people to share their views and so I think that's that is the essence of consultation you know shared governance having all of those opinions together in one room is important it is you know shared governance in its strict form is not the same thing as shared government the administration is still responsible and accountable for the the functioning of the administration and so it's very very important to understand that in shared governance we defer to the academic senate on those questions that they have specific authority for and we listen to advice but it's not in the end a joint decision consensus and certainly unanimity is not always required you you have to spend a lot of time listening to questions responding and getting a lot of opinions okay so the latest campus long-range development plan will cover at least the next 20 years and this is a two-part question so first ucd has the most land of any uc campuses and yet ucd has the worst record for providing campus student housing at outrageous prices ucd made a commitment to the city to meet one third of its student housing needs and ucd needs to be doing more how how do you think this will all work out well just as a point of fact and it's it's very funny because i was having this discussion with folks today currently we house 36 percent of our students okay so um more than the third but but um you know land is one thing money is another and the the the cost of developing the infrastructure and above all building the buildings you know we have that opportunity by using the revenue we get from the housing we rent but there are a lot of stages in this and i so you should know that the whole system the uc system as encouraging and helping the campuses reach the goal of housing 40 percent of our students on campus so four percent more than what's currently happening but i but i want to say i mean we know that um it's as you pointed out we have a lot of land and davis as a town is um you know for the students the vacancy rate is extremely low someone has recently cited it to me as less than one percent point two percent vacancy rate this is tremendous stress on our students um it means that of course anything that's available is very expensive and students have to share it um or if they can't find anything they go further a field which both reduces the opportunity to have that residential experience in a college town or on campus and it takes time and it adds to the you know energy costs by having commutation particularly if it's further than a bicycle will reach so again not that we have specific plans but i think that it might be better over some period of time to try to provide housing for 50 of our students to relieve the pressure that they feel and of course on the on the community because that the college town nature of davis is so important for all of us yeah it's um living here is a chance to be part of the community and to be in the middle of all of the action would you guys build houses on what's currently uc davis land is that how how would that work yeah that would be the idea is um and as you point out we have a good bit of land and so um you know we've begun to develop west of 113 west village we're certainly going to expand there um both um you know primarily single family homes for faculty and staff because it's very hard for them to find property to buy in davis and we want to keep the commute very very short if possible um but also more student housing but we're also looking during the the time of the long-range development plan to develop other sites on our campus where more um dense housing could could be placed for students so that we can get to the 40% and if possible go even beyond that get to 50 got it that would be great so what is your commitment to take the pressure off of the community housing market by providing affordable student housing on campus while protecting russell fields well so i certainly talked about that yeah you explained a little bit of that but the specific issue of russell field i've i've gotten to know a bit of that dialogue um in response to community concern about the amount of russell field that we were thinking could be zoned for residents and and mind you the long-range development plan these are not specific projects that are planned it's just a planning document that sort of does zoning and saying this is potential area for development we we we went back to the drawing boards we withdrew that and that we have planning for the potential of some housing there we've moved it much further back so there's much more setback from russell road as well as an opportunity for passersby and nearby residents to um enjoy the the expansive space that they have been used to okay so on a different note what are your thoughts about the potential for uc davis my goodness um uc davis this this is a big question it is feel free to talk as much as you'd like about this so i think uc davis will continue on its trajectory of recognizing building on the greatness that we've already established um but finding new areas for example i did say that we feel that some of the great great issues of our century um you know we as a society we have to step up to them you know whether it's climate change and on the one hand doing what we can to mitigate the increases in climate that are seem to be caused by by human activity i i i have no doubt of that but i know that there are a few people who still question that but none of us were in to climate change so we would like to slow that down as much as possible but there's also going to be an enormous amount of work in the areas of adaptation that's required and so in the area of water resourcing for example um helping farmers and other processes do what needs to be done with ever less water or finding ways to recycle it um any number of things is we really have to attend to that i think uc davis also has because of its interdisciplinary structure and just the range of fields an opportunity to dig into these questions whether it's the food chain or ecology or one health um you know everything is connected to everything else i mentioned that yesterday we were at bodega marine lab right and to hear how it is that the oceans are acidifying um because of the runoff from land and human activity on land um and what that's doing to the wildlife you know it's also um a case that the rising temperatures affect the pH level of the waters and that definitely impacts the ability of shellfish to form their shells or actually we were we were there with president apolitano and she asked a question of why did a certain kind of salmon suddenly disappear and basically one of the major causes of that were logging practices really and dams and logging practices so my my point is just that everything is connected to everything else and it often takes that kind of concerted collaborative university research to sort that out so back to your major question what about uc davis is we have the research we also have we're perfectly positioned very very close to our state capital we have lots of connections with policymakers lawmakers we'd like to use students who are very very interested in working in that area making a difference help take the scientific research that we have developed and uncovered and see if we could turn that into policy there's so many examples of that so um that's one of the things that i would like to see uc davis do even more of and we're doing so much already i think another thing that i think about is uc davis is davis right but we also are so important for our larger region for sacramento and i mean in some areas for example in health care to provide some of the top level care or trauma we really are the only thing going for 33 counties in northern california so region is large in that sense but particularly sacramento our capital city where we already have our health center our health sciences campus with the medical center i definitely have a vision that we find more ways to work with our regional partners so that sacramento also looks at uc davis and every little town in the area look at uc davis and say that's our uc um we of course we have a very very special relationship with davis itself we are in davis that we bear its name very proudly but i think that there are lots of people in the area whom we want to inspire to help them feel that uc davis is there uc okay so how um how can davis community members or sacramento community members get involved with ucd if they don't actually attend the college well you know it ranges from taking advantage of the offerings that we have at the mundavi center our new uh menini shrimp museum of art is opening in a few days and there will be opportunities like that but i think that there are other opportunities of accessing what we have whether it's online just our websites and our information um for example or taking a course at like beer brewing or something like that at our university extension i think we can discover other things for example um all of uc has the uc center in sacramento which uh we happen to run for the for the for the uc um and there are lectures there on policy so i think that there are dozens of probably many dozens of public lectures both on our davis campus and in the health systems campus in sacramento i i would like to find opportunities for people in the area who are just interested to tap into those resources okay and can you tell me a little bit more about the uc davis extension program that you just mentioned right and i want to differentiate it's funny at uc davis we have we use the word extension to describe two very different things okay so first of all there's the cooperative extension program which is part of our land grant heritage these are specialists most of them are in the college of agricultural environmental sciences who build on the work of our faculty to take the research to practical purposes to actually work with groups of farmers or you know gardeners just home gardeners to take this knowledge and get it out so that's one sense of the word extension okay what i refer to university extension is a continuing education college it's very common in many universities and we have a university extension unit that actually has centers in sacramento and offers courses there it does a lot of training programs for state governmental agencies as well so it is non-degree educational programs all right so and any any community member can take that take those courses well it depends you have to sign up for them okay and and they're they are fee those are fee based courses university the cooperative extension is actually a part of the public service mission of the land grant university okay and you start you said sacramento classes and are there any of those classes in davis yes there are and we have locations both i mean our graduate school of management also has a center in sacramento for its weekend and night time mba program and actually uc davis also has a another weekend and nighttime mba program in the bay area in san ramon so uc davis really we do stretch from the sierra with our um lake tahoe research center to the sea at bidet with our bedega marine lab and we we're very far flung yeah so you've you've talked a lot about the agriculture side of uc davis can you tell me about the literature side and tell me what about uc davis is special um in terms of the english department well let's take some literature all together i mean we have a great english department um but we have courses um for example that build on some of the interests that our students have here at this university i mean naturally we have courses on the greats of english literature on shakespeare and milton and certainly more recent authors but there's a long tradition of nature poetry and even let's call it let's update it and call it environmental literature and so many of our students have interests in that we offer courses on that right what sorry what is environmental literature just literature based off of things in the environment well um for example it could be literature that um describes how an individual may have had a transformational experience by going into the mountains and getting to appreciate the rhythm of the seasons um you're asking me something that i'm personally not a specialist on but um you know what i might talk about as well is the is some of the faculty that we've hired in the humanities and arts who work on the interface between the arts or literature and science and discovery um so given the fact that we're such a science heavy campus um any number of programs that i can think of clap my own department of classics think uh spanish and portuguese have hired people who look at um science as it was evolving in different periods and how that was an expression of the culture of the age and and and and courses are built around that um another i mean i actually am very proud of the department of classics one of my home departments because they are very very welcoming of students and for example they have a course that they teach for a lot of pre-med students bio biology majors right and all of those words as you know are built on latin or greek roots and so it can help from the science side learning all this material if you know more about the words but my colleagues use this as an opportunity to have that um introduction to the words themselves serve as a door onto ancient culture we also have um just to expand on this we have courses on ethics in science and biology in medicine for example um we also have great strength and one of the only minors in human rights studies wow yeah so you know can you tell me a little bit about that sure sure um we have a number of faculty in different places in the university who focus on human rights it's something that our school of law works on um but you know one of the things that i think is true of many students today certainly true of davis students is they want to make a difference in the world and you know i'm someone who works in as a scholar in studying other languages languages other than english and more distant times and places and who knows why i was motivated i speculated on token but um i think that many of our students get excited about doing that when they see that there are contemporary families and whole cities and countries where they would like to get involved perhaps travel there and help them and you know just knowing about you if you're going to interact with people you have to know their culture if possible their language so i think that working in human rights and all the very many complex political and international relations issues that you get involved with it's also an opportunity to learn first uh at first hand as much as you can about the culture the religion the um customs and of course there's in my view there's no better way to begin to get a deep knowledge of that other than learning the language which you said you did with in germany in german do you know any other languages besides well i mean i i read classical latin and ancient greek but in terms of my sort of everyday use will limit it to german french and italian oh wow so yes you do have you visited those places as well absolutely um you know at this point it's a little rusty and sometimes the first day or two of gibberish will emerge mix up german roots and french grammar forms but after a while it gets straightened out okay so back to uc davis values um do have you found that ucd shares some similar values to um the people in the city of davis like how has the davis community affected the uc davis community and vice versa my goodness um davis is clearly a small town it it it you know was an agricultural depot before it was a college town i think that the establishment of the university farm just fed with that but now we're talking about a time over a century ago um i think there's a certain um there's a deep honesty um in davis and at uc davis certainly a concern for other people um the opposite of arrogance um but i think that by virtue of being the host to what is now a mammoth university with a very very international population over the years of course uc davis draws students and faculty and staff from around the world and that has greatly impacted davis um it is home to a very international um population of families and you know i think it's particularly nice i don't know that there i mean a college town tends to have a more cosmopolitan selection of restaurants right another small town and personally i think that's a wonderful thing i think it's great i mean so even i like to think even citizens of davis who might not be directly connected to the university profit from that in the fact that we have all of that more diversity right there as well how do you adjust the needs of international students well you know it's something that we're still busy learning because um we've have a wonderful um set of staff who are helping them in the first instance but over the years we've realized that we probably need to have academic advisors who think quite intentionally about the needs of international students um this doesn't necessarily be an entire different set of advisors but we want to try to help our advisors um be ready to consider what particular challenges international students have what are some of those challenges well for example that they might not um feel empowered to ask a question okay or go to a faculty member's office hours or they might feel shy about saying to a faculty member i don't understand this you know i think there are things that you as a student here just take for granted you know and you've grown up with it it's the culture right um yes different people have different approaches that but you certainly know that well heck if i don't understand something i'll go to the professor's office hours and say can you help me on this but not every every student knows that or for example i'm now going to think about graduate students um of course everyone feels a great deal of loyalty to the faculty member you're working for and who's your advisor but sometimes some stress is developed and you know i've known some international students who felt gosh i would like to go to my professor and say actually i want to work on a different topic but who felt very constrained about doing that so there's some you know the interface between the learning and the culture as one of the things and so um you know it's all part of being open to cultural differences which we have of course within our american and california population but also internationally i was going to say that we also have as a wonderful partner international house which is right across russell boulevard from us and also we have in the community both folks who have international um heritage themselves of recent memory and many who don't who love to be host families for our international students and families and help them feel at home in the community okay and the advisors give them advice on how to excel in the community well they certainly point their way to international house but i but the advisors are certainly the academic advisors are more helping them advance in their work but we also we have for example um some of our american uc davis students volunteer to serve as like um ambassadors and and partner up you know just be buddies with international students which is great for you know english practice you know i know this having been a student in another in a country where another language is spoken is if you are with another group of americans say in a study abroad program you're really not going to get the practice that you need or the opportunity you know maybe it's more challenging you put yourself out there but you can learn so much more about the language and the cultures if you can find a way to be integrated have live with families okay and this is a program you sign up for yes exactly we also have a number of students who come here and this is something else that university extension runs which is um english language education with a cultural component and it's possible to take that program and sign up to actually live in the home of families in davis so as like a permanent no not permanently just to live for a certain a number of weeks as okay when you're taking the course you live in the community and i've heard stories of families of course taking them on picnics or of course if it's during the school year families will invite people over for say Thanksgiving dinner it's very important wow yeah we we did when i was growing up we had a series of international students that we hosted which helped open my mind to the world yeah so it benefited you as well as the international student absolutely and any family and davis can sign up for this program i think so wow that's really amazing that that opportunity exists um so scheduling classes has been hard for a lot of students and a lot of people have to take a fifth year of school or is there anything that's being done to help that problem so when i did arrive i discovered there was sort of a chronic problem of waitlist for gateway classes and i as i was i was provost i definitely urged the colleges and i provided some additional resources to not put up with not regard waitlist as something we were always going to have but you know my goodness if you know there are this many people who need to take the class let's provide the sections and from what i understand from my vice provost undergraduate education we had more or less this doesn't mean that every student always gets the class that he or she wants at the time they want but we had pretty much eliminated the waitlist when suddenly we were asked to take more california students so we have a new influx and so we're going to go through that process again but there's some other things that we're doing to try to help certainly that log jam one of the things that we're doing is that we working with the faculty discovered that we hadn't looked at our pattern of prerequisites for a very long time and there were some places where the prerequisites that were listed in the catalog were outdated faculty and students weren't really necessarily paying much attention to it which could sometimes lead to students who weren't really ready to take a certain class being in that class and not doing particularly well and wanting to take it a second time while they were occupying seats that some other students who might have been really ready to take that class when able to get into so we hope that again within partnership with the academic senate this careful look and new management of prerequisites will help you know and finally i want to say is that you know the the fifth year our actual average is something like four years and one quarter okay so there are many many people complete fifth year absolutely not there are people who take that time and you know i have to say there are reasons why people want to do it they might have decided to take a quarter abroad or a whole year abroad or do something like that um i mean i more often than not meet students who are choosing to take another quarter rather than they were forced into it you know got it and would would these solutions also help with overcrowded lecture halls well so one of the most important things is we're now building a new large lecture hall okay where's that going to be it's going to be at the corner of california and oh my goodness i'm not exactly remembering the cross street on campus but it's on campus of course in the center of campus i can see the spot i mean it's not all that far from the mu and it will be nearly 600 seats interestingly enough we've looked you know class even lectures are becoming more interactive so the way this classroom will be laid out is instead of but instead of seats that have the little arm that comes up with the desk in front of everyone is a long desk between the rolls and rows and it's only very slightly raked so in fact the seats will swivel and you can instantly make a group of four or six students who will work together over a workspace on a project or a question together and then we can swivel back and it's a you know a standard lecture hall facing one direction so collaboration will be more prioritized because there's more and more idea of flipping the classroom that is using lots of other means to have students access the information and then making the classroom experience even a lecture experience much more interactive so that's under construction and should open the winter quarter of 2018 so in the meantime we're actually using the mundavi center for classes oh really which is a beautiful space i don't know if you've been into jackson hall yes i love it and but they were very very welcoming of students it's several mornings a week and of course they then have their own rehearsals and other things to set up but we teach there as well and i don't know whether we'll continue doing that after the new lecture hall is open but we definitely have to continue expanding our classroom repertoire so that we have enough spaces for the students okay and final question our next guest on what's going on is kevin blue uc davis's new athletic director and kevin was your first major hire can you talk about the selection process and why you think people should watch our interview with kevin next week kevin is fabulous i'm very very privileged to have been able to select him and recruit him to uc davis yes you're right um the process had gone um very far down in the in the in the meetings with the candidates when i was asked to step into this role um i took the opportunity to meet all the finalists or interact with them in one way or another and um some of them were phone interviews but i did look again at the work that the selection advisory committee had done and i reviewed all the material and i was very very impressed with with kevin um kevin has a real vision as i know he'll tell you for in passion for the scholar athlete i mean one of the things that we're most proud of at uc davis is that our athletes in all of the sports take their majors across the university i've met varsity players who are engineers or philosophers and they also perform at an extremely high level in terms of their academics and kevin regards that as the ideal to have and he has some really interesting ideas about how we can make our program distinctive so that more talented scholar athletes want to come to uc davis okay so you're looking at not just the athletic abilities but the educational abilities as well absolutely i mean i think if you're going to come to a uc first of all you have to be at a certain level right about it and also i think it's a it's forgive me if this sounds overly dramatic but it's really a holy obligation we have to anyone who comes here whether they're you know outside activity is music or student government or sports and if you're going to do varsity sports it's an enormous investment of time right but we have to make sure that we enable you at the same time to have a full and complete and valuable experience as a student wow that's that's a really great opportunity and well you know i mean probably kevin will say this but you know sometimes people think that if you're going to have great athletic achievement you have to give up on the academic and he absolutely does not believe that's true and that's one of the reasons why i know he's the right athletic director for us and that his passion and commitment to that is going to serve the student athletes and the goals of our entire university sounds like a good reason to watch the show to hear what he has to say i'll do it myself all right well thank you very much for being here today um this is what's going on thank you for watching and have a good evening thank you