 So privileged to take the time this evening to make amends for my dereliction of duty and not having this brother on sooner. He is an esteemed HBCU executive that we let get away. He's now the Associate Vice President of University Advancement at Minnesota State University, Mankato. Dr. William Broussard, brother, is always a treat in an honor to speak with you and even more so in a formal capacity for the HBCU digest. So thank you for the time this evening, my man. I appreciate the opportunity. I look forward to any time we get to have conversations with one another, a long time fan of yours, not just as a supporter, but just have always appreciated the work that you do, the selflessness, the risk. The stupidity is all right. I appreciate it, Lepida, for sharing you with the world in the way that she does and the family because you put it all out there, but man, it's so needed. It's so necessary. We've got to know where the edges are, right? And so someone's got to keep pushing, pushing that envelope and bringing all the information to the table. And you report, we decide. You bring the information to us and then we have to decide what to do with that information. So thank you for being someone who is always committed to doing that. It is high praise from you, brother, absolutely. Let's talk about one of those hard edges. And you've been prolific in this particular area, which has been absolutely needed for generations and just under a true microscope of exploration because of you, that is executive turnover in the HBCU sector. You've done this annually, thankfully for the digest. You are tonight debuting a new analysis, particularly of the HBCU and the predominantly black institution sector, the comparison, the comparative analysis. Can you talk a little bit about how did you even get started in this executive realm of turnover and retention and then explore and broaden it to a new topic about schools that may not be HBCUs but are serving a predominantly black, a number of black students as well. Sure. So I'd be remiss, my formal training, academic training is in rhetoric and composition, but I trained as an ethnographer and ethnographers as do all cultural anthropologists always have arrival stories. And the problem with those stories is sometimes we think they're terrific stories and they're not, but the other problem is, is that usually when we provide an analysis, 55% of the analysis is the arrival story. So I'll try to be brief. I came to my interest in this. I've been with your support, publishing a report, just put out the sixth report on executive turnover at HBCUs. And my arrival story, my interest in this was personal. I spent six and a half years working at two historically black colleges. And in that six and a half period, I worked for six different campus executives. And so it just extrapolate that for a second. If you're someone who works in higher ed, if you work in K through 12, if you work in federal government, imagine if we had a different president of the United States every year. Imagine if you had a different CEO at a major company every year what that would look like. And so I became interested in it because I saw that high turnover happening where I worked and immediately started seeing that the ramifications of that, the impact on the institutions themselves, the impact on the people who work there, the impact on those executives and most alarmingly, the threat that it held for those institutions continuing to recruit executives down the line. And I didn't just see it, if I'd just seen it at one institution, okay, that's an aberration. Seeing it at another one, okay, now I'm seeing a trend. But something else that I thought about, I worked in college athletics for 12 years. And at the first HBCU where I worked, I worked in college athletics. And we ran a 10 member conference and those 10 institutions over the course of three years themselves had 21 different presidents. And so this wasn't something localized just to my experience at these one or two institutions. I started seeing it pretty widespread. So then I start thinking, so now it's beyond me just having a spate of bad luck. It's more than a notion, right? Yeah, okay, so then I start thinking, okay, well, is this a regional thing? Is it just in the region that we're in? And so the first time that I studied it, I recognized that it was happening to institutions all over the country. It was happening to two year institutions as well as four year institutions. It was happening to everything from the mid-sized regional institutions with nearly 8,000 to 10, 11,000 students. It's also happening to small private institutions. It was across the board, across HBCU. So over the six years as the lowest single year in terms of turnover, it's occurred at 25% of the institutions and in the worst years or the highest turnover years, it's been nearly 35%. And so I wasn't just looking at a president getting fired or a president being terminated or president quitting under suspicious circumstances because the ultimate threats that I've identified and that can be reasonably extrapolated by most reasonably intelligent people. You've got reputational harm and potential negative press. You've got further difficulty continuing to represent, sorry, to recruit representatives that are your middle management, your directors of admissions, directors of athletics, folks who do important director level work but who might not be cabinet level. The loss of institutional progress and the ultimate harm to the reputation of the institution, those are the things that I saw happening but that doesn't just happen when the president gets fired. It doesn't just happen when the president leaves under suspicious circumstances. If there's a string of presidents or chancellors who leave for whatever reason and those clocks get reset, whatever work was being advanced by the previous executive that has to either start over because new relationships have to be built or that get stalled in the interim because well, we like what you got so far but we're gonna wait and see. We're gonna take a wait and see approach and see what the next executive does and if we wanna work with that person, if we like that person, we like the previous person, we wanna see if we like this one. Every time that happens, all the way down to faculty, non-tenured faculty and staff on your campus wondering, am I gonna have a job in the next three months, six months? It sends a shock wave across your campus whenever that happens and only institutions, and this isn't about best or worst, highest ranked, lowest ranked, only institutions that are the most stable with regard to their reputation, their finances, their trajectories can handle this kind of turnover and even they can't handle it for very long before people start to become suspicious about what their next five to 10 to 20 years or what their trajectories look like. And so when you look at HBCUs as a sector, a sector of institutions that have been so important historically to this nation, not just to black people, to this entire nation, to entire regional economies, to building the black middle class, all the ways that HBCUs have been important and yet they are among the most maligned for various reasons that are obvious to many of us in the media, among folks who work in state legislatures, among private funders, we can't afford reputational harm and we certainly can't afford it when it's self-imposed. And so I know there's probably a lot of folks who are listening this evening thinking, President Muhammad has been there, seven, eight, nine, 10 years, been pretty steady, been pretty consistent. This isn't a conversation I have to worry about. Well, I started to look into it. I got curious about a couple of things. One, I wanted to know, hey, I've only been looking at this the last six years. Let's extend the window a little bit. So I went back looking at the last, I went back to the year 2000, so roughly two decades. And in some instances, presidents who were presidents in 2000 started before the year 2000. So it ended up pushing me back to around the mid-1990s. And what I learned was that some of the institutions that are in this particular morass now with the high turnover, hadn't always been that way. As recently as a decade ago, they might have had a president who had been there for 30 years, right? 20 years, you're a historian of this, right? Whether you wanted it ever to be one or not, you know it now. And you can probably think without even hiccuping of five institutions that had in the past maybe decade had four or five presidents, but before that had someone who was there. Long serving, right? You know, 10, 20 years, got a building named after him on campus, right? You're only one president, one executive away. Because of the reasons that you end up seeing the high turnover rates happen, that we've been able to identify that you've written about in great detail, you're only one president away. You know, you're only one of those long, long tenured executives away from being subject to the same kind of shenanigans that we keep seeing unfold from that happen to your institution. So this is something that we have to be concerned about from the standpoint of our institutions who are suffering through this right now, the institutions that may suffer through it because we've had a lot of high profile, long tenured presidents and chancellors announced resignations in the coming months and years. So we've got to be thinking about those institutions too and we've got to be working hard to identify, again, what's the cause of these symptoms? So for comparison's sake, I compared historically black colleges over the past 25 years to a category of institutions defined by the federal government as predominantly black institutions or PBI's. And so these are institutions that a lot of times folk think of HBCUs, right? So Chicago State. You start thinking about Chicago State. You think about one that I thought for the longest time was an HBCU. In Malcolm X. Yeah. Malcolm X College. Malcolm X College. Someone had posted the other day, just visited one of my favorite institutions, the only HBCU in California and they were talking about the Drew Institute. And so a lot of folks think that these are HBCUs. Of course, HBCUs were specifically, specific federal program cut off year 1964, all these other requirements. But institutions that are, institutions very similar to HBCUs. They have to have a black enrollment of 40% or more. 50% or more of their students have to be essentially Pell eligible, eligible for federal aid. And a couple of other characteristics, on paper, in form, in virtually any, any way that you can imagine, that these institutions look like HBCUs. And so if you're in North Carolina, and everybody knows Winston Salem, everybody knows Fayetteville, everybody knows Elizabeth City, everybody knows North Carolina A&T, Central, Bennett, St. Augs, Shaw, all these folks. If you ever spent any time in Rocky Mountain, right? Which, you know, folks from Fayetteville and Elizabeth City were just in Rocky Mountain, right? They just had them down East Classic down there. North Carolina Wesley. And in Rocky Mountain, very high black population and is considered a PBI, but it's not, nobody would ever think it was an HBCU. But they have lots of things in common. And so given their institutional similarities and in many instances, having similar histories in terms of the communities that they serve, the institutional goals that they have, the kinds of leaders that they would need to recruit to their institutions for those institutions to be successful, one would think that they would have similar issues, right? Similar difficulties, both recruiting and retaining executive talent compared to HBCUs. And so what I found was looking at the institutions that are considered, currently considered PBI's and looking back over the past, the same period, roughly 20 to 25 years. 18% of those institutions had an executive turnover rate or had 10 years that were below the six and a half year mark. The American Council on Education's last study they did in 2017, they found that the average presidential tenure across American colleges and universities was six and a half years. So 18% of those institutions of PBI's had turnover that was that high. Of the 82 four-year historically black colleges I looked at, 37 of them had presidential or executive print, presidential chancellor, executive 10 years below that six and a half year mark. And four of them are right on the cusp of it, basically dependent upon the person that they've most recently hired. They have a president who if that president ends up serving five years or fewer than that average over the past 20 to 25 years, it's gonna dip below six and a half years. So nearly 50% of HBCUs have been experiencing that high turnover the past 20 to 25 years compared to only 18% of PBI's. So there's something specific about HBCUs and it's not tied to institutional type. And it's not cultural, it's not regional or geographic, but it's something that, the data means something. It's not all sound and fury, right? Hopefully it's not a tale told by an idiot either, but there's something in that data, right? It's got to mean something. And the pressure is on us to figure out what that something is. Well, see, and it's almost like, and you and I have talked so many times over the years, it's almost like playing ex-vowels where we're like, you know, Scully and Malta, right? This is you and me sitting here and you're looking at it, you know the politics, and I'm not talking about just legislative, you know the politics of an alumni association, the politics of football boosters, the politics of who's sleeping with who on campus. So, but we can never talk about those things. Right. You can never do a deep dive analytically or otherwise because those are factors that never would never have math attached to them. We know they exist and people in the community know they exist. So how do you get around it? So that's why the approach, I think multimodal approaches are extremely important. I don't think, you know, when I say data, I want to be very clear. I don't just mean numbers. I don't just mean qualitative data and I don't just mean that the method of analysis is going to be the scientific method, you know, street committees, there's a lot of valuable data there, right? And you can ignore it at your own peril, right? And there have been many executives who have, but I think it's going to take a combination of, it can't just be just the metadata, right? From 30,000 feet, but it also can't just be the street committee. Right. It can't just be the individual stories. It can't just be us telling the hero's tales about the successful individuals who have navigated that because only some of that is due to talent and skill and design, quite frankly. There's so much luck, right? And there's so much lack of replication. If we take the stories of the careers of some of the great HBCU presidents and say, I'm going to do everything that that president did in this context, it's coin flip. Right. Right. And frankly, the data is showing it's not even a coin flip. Right. Right. The coin flip is showing that the first year you come in because what I'm showing in terms of the median experience, the median presidential tenure is among those, among the 41 HBCUs that I kind of have, kind of in crisis right now, their presidential tenures are shorter than the average academic careers of their students. So the president is coming in recruiting a student before that student graduates. They're gone. They're gone. Yeah. You know, so that's, and I'm just, I'm flatly unwilling. And as we all should be to say, well, well, those are just, just, just bad fits, just bad experience, wrong person, wrong time. No. Right. Not that many times, right? There's lots of instances where, yeah, sure. You know, wrong person, wrong time, wrong fit, you know, miscalculation all the way around. That happens at every institutional type. But when it happens this frequency, the data is telling us something. And I think some of our best and brightest minds, I think it's time we put some energy towards figuring out what that is because we have too many institutions who are in dire need. Well, all of our institutions are in dire need of great leadership, but some at these particular moments, right? We have too many of our institutions who, this is it, like whatever hire you making now could be your last. Right. And so the science behind whatever science is informing your decision-making and frankly, whatever kinds of shenanigans you are familiar with generally going into your decision-making, whatever political science you apply to minimizing the impact of those shenanigans may determine whether or not we're talking about your institution in this report on HBCU Digest six years from now. And that's five years ago, 10 years ago, when you issued that clarion call, we're not gonna say on air all the things that people called you, right? But we're starting to see this come true and it's not just in HBCU, it's getting to the point. There was a point last year where I felt like every other week I opened up the Chronicle and another institution was closing down. This is real, this is absolutely real right now. The stakes are that high. We've got to get a handle on what these factors are that lead to this, isolate them, eliminate them and change trajectories. We've got to help institutions figure out what that is. Is that possible when the conversation at the executive level is always, you know what, Bruce Sard is right, glad that ain't us. Like, see, this is the challenge of it because every board, because the prescription here it seems like the boards have to get together and figure out what is your mission and how are you acting out that mission in executive hiring and retention and collaboration with a president. And yet everybody feels like we got to do what we got to do. And whatever that definition is justifies in whatever turnover or whatever chaos or whatever, you know, misalignment there is because it's almost like we got to do what we got to do. So there is no solution. I hate to say it, I hate to be doomsday about it but there is no solution or is there? I don't think there's a solution in the sense that the solution is daunting. In the sense that we have to provide an analysis that looks backwards, forwards, all at once, right? So we've got to be able to see in both directions at the same time while holding sway on our contemporary issues, right? We can't, for example, decide on something that's gonna leverage us for better stability in 10 years from now when there are challenges, existential challenges about getting to 10 weeks from now. Right now, right. So there, and I've had this trouble everywhere I've worked. So if there's a silver lining here, we're all in together, I've worked at predominantly white institutions, historically black institutions, research one institutions, public regionals, small private colleges, community college, I've worked at every type of institution there is. And I've met with and developed relationships with folks on all of those campuses. And what I see campuses doing that are trying to position themselves both now and into the future is they're doing an analysis that looks at all of those problems. They're digging deep into their tradition and their history to identify which traditions are worth preserving, okay? And what do we build our identity and our brand around? What helps us reach out to all of those alumni, age 21 to 100 and more, who historically have helped build the institution. How do we involve them in the storytelling? How do we keep them engaged? How do we get them to help us continue bringing in the lifeblood of the institution which is future students, right? One thing I've always hammered on and had hammered on to me is, yeah, that's great. If you can go get somebody to give $1,000, right? Get them to send their child here. It's gonna be way more than $1,000. It's way more than $1,000, right? So how do we get into the history, right? How do we identify those stories we're telling? And how do you do that? So in a contemporary sense, right? Figure out where you are right now. How do you recruit students now? How do you retain students now? And then thinking, again, long into the future, how do you build connections with legislators, with alumni, with private sector, with our communities, town and gallon relations? How do you do all of that at the same time? And the answer is simple, but we're not gonna like it. It's money, it's resources. It's having enough people and enough hours in the day to allocate the people that you need to allocate to all of those different assignments. And so how does one person look in three directions at the same time? They don't. So one of the things that you're seeing a lot of institutions do that don't see huge influxes of new money coming in, right? Is they're reprioritizing, right? So one of the things I think it's not hard and fast, but one of the first things I look at when I hear about an institution that is in some form of distress, financial accreditation, culture, whatever it is. One of the first things I look at is I look to see where they make cuts. And if they're making cuts in external relations, and I know I'm gonna, you won't talk about upsetting some people. I'm gonna upset some folks in academic affairs by saying this, because I wear both hats too, I'm faculty as well. But when the first cut that you make at the institution is people in alumni relations. The first cut you make is fundraisers. The first cut you make is recruiters. You're taking your revenue away. You're done. You're done. Unless you've got some kind of plan with, this is step one. I don't know how many of your viewers are fans of South Park, but there's an episode where they encounter the underpants gnomes, right? And the underpants gnomes say we steal your underpants to make money. How do you make money? Step one. Steal your underpants. Step three, we make profit. What's step two? Just a bunch of question marks. Nobody knows. So if that's your step one, right? And step two isn't immediately followed up with here are the ways that we expect to be able to generate revenues to replace the ones that we are going to inevitably lose by not engaging our alumni, by not raising money, and by not aggressively recruiting students. So if you're gonna reinvest that money in academic programs that you think are slated for growth, and you can project that growth out over the next 10 years, and you have specific metrics in place and a plan for what to do if you do not meet those metrics, okay? Well, now you're talking, right? I'm willing to see that one through. But just cutting noses to spite faces doesn't do it. And so one of the first questions that I always ask at folks at institutions or struggling like this, what's the strategic plan, right? Are you adhering to it? Are they tied to specific metrics, right? Are those metrics tied to things such as revenue generation? If we don't wanna be crass about it, we can talk about retention. We can talk about graduation rates. All those things are tied in one way or another to revenue. All of that has to be done at the same time. Someone's gotta be able to stop and say everybody stop panicking. We've gotta do all of these things. We gotta do it right now and we gotta be able to look in all of those directions. If you're in for that, let's go. Let's come up with a plan, let's fight, but we've gotta do all of those things. That's what we have to do where we are right now. The other thing, the other way to approach that is to assume that if we don't start doing that right now, it could happen tomorrow, it could happen a month from now, it could happen. So something we were talking about previously, talent recruitment. You've gotta have the right group of folks around you. The right group of executives, the right group of middle managers, the right group of assistant directors in that pipeline being cultivated, being developed so that they understand, right? Enough, not everybody has to be alumni, but you want a good number of folks from that community that are alumni who know those stories, who know that history, who can help guide some of those executives who have great talent and have been recruited to the institution and still have to learn some of those things. It takes all kinds because they're gonna bring some perspective from other institutions and other experiences that are valuable, too. But I still think fundamentally, and I hold on to this, I'm 43 years old, I'm in my 21st year in higher ed, maybe at age 63 in year 41, I see it differently, but I still think there's an element of that that does have to come from the center and from the top. The people who have been at your institution the longest and are their voices heard and are they people who can help be good stewards and carry the way forward and the top? The executives, the chancellors, the presidents, the cabinets, the boards who govern our work. If they truly have the institution's best interests in mind. And that's something that you've written about in great detail that we're not always rolling the boat in the same direction in that accord. And that's why a lot of these plans don't appear to be successful. It's why you have the high turnover because a lot of the institutions that are struggling through this, some of them have it or just beset upon. Some of them are being faced with a set of circumstances that may ultimately not be navigable, right? And in that sense, you're right. They're not gonna come up with a solution. Others of them, I'm sorry, go on. No, I was gonna say, if we look at the schools that do it well, it seems like they navigate it because they have expertise in, I guess, intra-leadership love language. That is to say, a board like Howard or Spelman, Morehouse, Xavier, you rarely see that kind of board members jumping around. Every now and then, more often than not, they're not jumping around excited and stirring up stuff because they know a corporate love language and they know how to pick a president and then speak that president's language and the president knows how to speak back to them. And usually it's corporate minded. Right. I need some money. How much can y'all marshal? Okay. How many friends can we mobilize around of specific calls? Sure. They know how to speak the love language, but is that possible in certain institutions where unless I'm stupid enough still and young enough still to be stupid, that love language is difficult when the board is teachers and preachers or and the president feels like I'm smarter than all of y'all or if the board is comprised of really smart people, so smart that they're exploitive of everybody around them, including the president. Or there's hardly a proposal that they can be satisfied by. Right. Because and so at some institutions, I'm aware of boards not having very many educators, right? People with specific kinds of experiences that might lend themselves to be very, very valuable. But I think the flip side of that is you can have too many, right? You can have too many folks too many folks with that kind of experience. Again, thinking that their way of seeing things is the only way or the best way to see things and not being open to new ideas. So I think balance is just like with anything else, extremely important, but that gets back to how these boards are comprised, how they're composed, right? If the governor is in charge of it, what's the process by which the governor appoints board members in your state? If it's someone at the board of regents, what's the means by which that commissioner of the board of regents appoints your board members? If it's a private institution, religious affiliated, what are the means by which those board members are appointed, right? Are they specific? Are they clear? Are they public? As alumni, are you engaged in that process? Is there a vetting process at all? Right, because with lots of these institutions, they just sort of show up one day, right? And inevitably, when you start examining things, this one is connected to this one, this one recommended this one, right? And you start thinking, well, if the governor's making these recommendations, right? But how are they just recommending one another then you realize, I don't think these governors are paying a whole lot of attention on what's going on at these institutions the way we think that they are, right? And so now you've got this great... Which could be by design, by the way. You know, if it ain't by design, if it ain't by design, there's a lot of Southern governors who ain't gonna mess with the design as is. Right. Because these aren't bugs, these are features. Right. Right in these systems. But yeah, from what we know about many of these boards, absolutely, by design, right? Enough distance from the composition of those boards for governors to be able to say, those recommendations were made by these folks, I'm not really in it. But enough closeness to it where when things go well, they can get credit for it. I mean, they're concerned about re-election campaigns, right? So something that I've heard you, something that I've heard you preach for a very long time and that I've learned to understand the value of much, much more over time. We often look at, in the novel Catch 22, everybody, every time they wanna complain, they go running to the general and you end up learning that it's actually this corporal that's actually running things, right? You don't know it unless you know it, right? And it's the same thing, we tend to think, well, who has the power on these campuses? Right, so lots of people think it's the president, they'll say, oh, no, no, no, it's not the president of the chancellor, it's the board. Oh, no, no, it's not the board, it's the governor. Oh, no, it's not the most powerful people at these campuses, and all these campuses, or it's alumni, I've heard you say that for going on a decade now, if not a decade, I think I've been reading the digest that long, right? It's the alumni, and when you don't recognize that, you forfeit that power. If something goes on, if some shenanigans, some chicanery goes on, right, at your alma mater, at your institution, and all you marshal is, you know, a repost on Facebook and a sad face emoji and SMH, that's not enough. Like, and it may feel futile, right? The same way it feels futile when certain policies are passed and people say, call your congressman, call your congresswoman, call your member of the Senate, call your state representative, people like, what's that going to do? Right. Can't guarantee that your call is going to be the call, right, that breaks the proverbial camels back, that puts them over that hump where that's the thing that makes them focus on that issue, okay? Can't guarantee that. Can't guarantee that if no one calls, nothing will happen. Nothing will happen. We can guarantee that, right? And so when you see something happening on your campus, when an executive that you think was otherwise working in earnest to improve things on your campus is unceremoniously dismissed. When someone is hired as an executive at your alma mater, who you don't feel has, you have questions about their credentials or their experience, particularly for the moment that you're in, right? Or when news reports come out that identify there's some, you should be uneasy about the circumstances by which this particular person was put into power. Are you going to public meetings, right? Are you going to board meetings to voice those concerns? Are you writing your current board members? Are you writing? If it's, again, whoever points to your board members, are you writing those people? Are you calling them? Are you trying to find out more information? Because I can tell you, if someone at the institution has that fear, but can't make that phone call, can't write that letter for fear of reprisal, right? We need people outside the institution to do that. Right, right. There was a time where you said, well, you know, you faculty can stand up and do that. Well, tenured don't mean what it used to mean. Correct. You know, 50 years ago, 75% of the teaching positions in American colleges and universities were tenured or tenure track. Now the number is closer to 30%. So for one, there are many, many fewer tenured folks on our campuses. What we've learned in recent years is your one ex-agency bankruptcy, retrenchment, whatever you call it in your state. Oh, that's gone, right. Yeah, all those protections are gone. And even in lieu of that, some institutions just say, we'd rather pay out the lawsuit. Yep. Right, so even tenured faculty aren't in position to raise those questions the way that they used to be. Alumni need to be engaged now. Be engaged now. Don't wait until that crisis, right? And again, preaching of the choir, don't just show up at home. No, but I think it's useful people to hear that because I think that and it also is to reset the narrative on how we experience institutional success because I think that we look at athletic success and facilities or capital planning or buildings. Man, the campus is thriving. Look at this. This building wasn't here when I was here and football team is winning. We're good. School is on track. And everything could be burning on the inside but the external facing elements of institutional life look good. So, you know, I would wrap it up by saying, you know, I think we're clear. Alumni have to be more engaged but can they be at this point when you're talking about professionals or parents who have other engagements in, you know, church or if attorney or other things, is there a way that HBCU issues in form can be pushed on their plate and say, now take that and do something with it that's gonna save your school? Sure, because now it starts feeling like in addition to everything else I've got going on right now I gotta take this on too. Right. Perfectly understandable. And to that I can, I will say this, young alumni, if you want to be insured, if you think about your parents, grandparents went to HBCUs, the 30, 40, 50 years they've been going to homecoming and talking trash at the class again, if you want to have that same life where you're talking about your alma mater, 20, 30, 40, 50 years from now, you've got the youthfulness, the energy, the savvy, you know, in terms of engaging on social media, young alumni can carry a lot of that weight. And in many ways have outsized voices. Lots and lots of politicians are looking to young people, right? The youth vote, right? They might be more inclined to hear from a young person, right? Someone who's talking about building a business or starting a career or building a family, buying a home or starting their life in their district. Maybe they'd be more inclined to hear from you. And because those folks by volume have fewer things on their proverbial plate than maybe folks our age, you know, kids of various engagements. But for folks our age and older who may have limited time, limited resources. Jared, I'm sure you get pulled on all the time. Man, we want you to serve on this board. We want you to do this thing. We want you to do that thing. You've got to prioritize the same way I've got to prioritize, right? I tell folks all the time, if I'm gonna serve on your board, I need to know what you need me to do, right? How much is it gonna cost? How much money you need me to give. And I've got a top three thing, right? When I make those kinds of commitments, you're gonna be one of my top three philanthropic commitments, right? So if I can make a commitment to you that puts you in that range where I can give the amount of time that you're asking me to give, if it aligns with what I'm wanting to do, I'm all in. This might not be the thing that, where most people or all people want to get involved, but there's enough. There's certainly every institution might not have, you know, of your 125,000 living alumni, you might not have 12,500, but you might have 1,250, 1%, right? That might be enough. That might be enough. But once you're living alumni, start engaging in that way. I mean, when you start talking about annual giving rates, right, one of the factors by which USA Today rates institutions, right? The average giving rate across public regional institutions like many HBCUs are, at predominantly white institutions, that range is somewhere between usually high threes to maybe 7%, and at HBCUs it's substantially higher, right? The average of the gifts may be lower, the total attainment on the gifts may be lower, but the number of people who give, right? The number of historically black colleges with annual giving, sorry, alumni giving rates above 10%, much, much higher, right? So there's evidence that there's a willingness to engage among HBCU alumni that's substantially higher than at predominantly white institutions, but that engagement needs to manifest itself in some other ways. And so for folks who are interested in politics and in how our institutions work and understanding how they can be involved, what they should do. I think reading HBCU Digest, reading about higher ed as an industry, at this point in your life now when you're young and you've got a little more time, a little more energy for doing those kinds of things, thank God for the programs at Morgan and Howard and Jackson State where the younger folks are working on advanced degrees, and higher education leadership foundation and folks like that that are looking at these issues and trying to figure out how to develop a sustainable future for HBCUs. I think there's enough of us out there engaged in these both publicly and behind the scenes. I think there are enough of us out there to pay attention to this, apply energy and pressure to it. And again, as we start figuring out the reasons behind this, we will have to pivot very quickly from identifying what those reasons are to finding the solutions for it and what better time? I mean, the largest single year infusion of private dollars into historically black colleges in the history of all historical black colleges. Ever, right. Perhaps since they're the land grants that founded many of them. So now there's money there, right? And there's increased interest there. I think this is a rich time for us to- And political synergy on both sides. Oh absolutely. I think this is a unique opportunity for us to pivot that focus and start finding some answers and potentially some solutions. Let's find it out, bro. You got some forthcoming research, presidential pathways, particularly from the student affairs element of it, position it for us so we can be sure to check it out and any media and engagement you're gonna be doing on that research. Sure, sure. So I had the good, good opportunity to work with Robert Palmer at Howard University on a handful of his projects. So I published a couple of chapters and edited collections of his. And one we have coming up, we worked together on some research. The specific title of the chapter is the role of an executive in student affairs at historically black college university, opportunities for promoting student growth and a pathway to the presidency. The collection is entitled understanding the work of student affairs professionals at minority serving institutions in the US. So that will be, we're looking at an early 2022 publication for that particular project. And the article that I'm referencing for the research that we spoke about tonight is entitled executive turnover at HBCUs and acute and growing problem among predominantly black institutions. So that will be, that's sooner than later, that will be out. Please take the time everybody to read this. Like don't just watch this video, read everything below. Because it's important to see the data distillation to really comprehensively get what kind of a crisis we're in because it has been that for a number of years. So brother, you know what? I appreciate it, man. Again, it is my great and sincere apologies for not doing this sooner. It'll be more often than not. I appreciate you allowing me to be honest and you being the diplomat tonight and I'd be the crazy fool, so thank you. It's worked for us the last decade, man. Why mess with a winning form? Why mess with a fourth?