 I'm so glad to see so many of you here today. Welcome, welcome to the Future Trans Forum. This is our weekly conversation about the future of higher education. And we have a fantastic guest today, really, really great scholar and activist and a wonderful topic. Let's narrow in on our topic. Since March, we've been experiencing an extraordinary situation. Higher education and indeed the world has been under the enormous pressure of the COVID-19 pandemic. And we've been devoting a lot of our program attention to that ever since. And much of March and in April, we had a lot of sessions focused entirely on COVID and what it means for students, faculty, staff, in world and international students, financial sustainability, mental health, as much as we possibly could. And then in April, we kind of blended in COVID with other topics and other subjects as well. Now, in June, we also saw in the United States the birth of a brand new wave of Black Lives Matter anti-racist political organization and mobilization. And we've been addressing that as well. In fact, yesterday, we had a special session just focused on anti-racism in higher education. I'm mentioning these two because they shape our programs, they shape our conversations here on the Future Trans Forum, but indeed they shape our lives and our work and they feed into what we're gonna be talking about for the next couple of months or we'll be talking more about anti-racist movements. We're talking about fall 2020 planning, how to improve our teaching in this and how to do video conferencing well. All of that is a kind of background hum, a big context all around today's guest. I'm absolutely, absolutely delighted to welcome back Chris Newfield. Chris is a professor of American Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is a leading scholar, indeed a founder of the field of critical university studies. He's a fantastic writer. I can recommend a whole series of his books, including this one. This is the Great Mistake, which he'll be talking about today. And he has all kinds of wonderful deep research into this topic that we can discuss. So again, I'm very, very glad you can be here today. Greetings, greetings, Professor Newfield. Thanks, Brian, it's great to be here. Am I coming through all right? You're coming through beautiful, coming through beautiful. But listen, I introduced you as a professor at the Santa Barbara. Before I go further and we talk about content, can we talk about your impending move? Yeah, I'm moving to London if I can ever get a visa. Wow. I'm gonna be the director of research for something called the Independent Social Research Foundation, which funds interdisciplinary work on philosophy of economics, psychoanalysis and anthropology. It's looking at economics and decolonization movements in different parts of the world. So it's really, it funds a bunch of things that I've kind of been working on over the last few years across disciplines. And I'm really excited that, I mean, this is really the main thing. I'm excited to be able to give people support rather than just say I'm really interested in your work, but I don't have anything for you. So I'm, I'll be in a different position than I've been in as a professor, which is applying for money for myself. I can now give it out instead. Well, that's a very exciting change. I've been through that precise change myself. I'd be happy to talk about it. But that's great news for the rest of us who will probably be coming to you for all kinds of support. Please do. At least moral support. Well, but things are in chaos right now. So you might make the transatlantic move at some point, depending on what all the stars line up. Yeah, it's going to, visa offices are opening later this month and who knows how long the backlog is. So I'm going to be doing my London job from Santa Barbara for at least two more months and maybe longer. Well, good luck. Good luck with that. And all best wishes for your new position. We're going to have to, I think in a year and a half or so, bring you back as a guest. It'll be nighttime in London and you'll be there. Even more suave and even more impressive at that point. Friends, I have all kinds of questions to ask a professor and a friend. And I just want to start for the couple to get the ball rolling. But remember the key point here, the future transfer is to hear from you, to hear your thoughts, your questions and your comments. So again, once you feel like you've got the microphone ready and you've got your video camera ready, post the raised hand to join us up here on stage. We're very, very friendly. Even though between the two of us we have as much hair as five people have it. And again, if you can't do video or audio, please just type in the checkbox or type in the question box and we'd like you to hear from us. Chris, you've been a fantastic scholar at the public university. You have at least two great books in the subject. And again, I can't recommend the great mistake enough of Johns Hopkins University Press. You've expertly and with great depth and detail described how public universities, which are about two thirds of American higher education have been suffering financially at the hands of state governments and politics over the past about 40 years right now. And I'm curious, how do you see the COVID pandemic changing that? And do you think state will continue to cut support for students? Are there other completing bases or is there some other transformation you should be anticipating? Yeah, well, states have just been terrible to their colleges and universities. I mean, I can't say enough things about how short-sighted, how ill-spirited most states have been. I mean, there's some exceptions, but not many. And so COVID is another excuse for them to do what they've been doing, which is essentially privatized, right? I mean, that's one of the main subjects of the book is you shifting the cost burden from the taxpayer, which I think is socially just and that the entire society benefits from having a well-educated population to the individual student and their families. And the result being things that we know quite a bit about now, student debt and the damaging of future economic prospects for students by the withdrawing of public money from institutions. So the fact that every state is now having budgetary trouble because of COVID, economic depression, and other costs that COVID is going to impose on everybody means that they can cut higher education again the way they have in the past. So it's a moment of serious danger for the whole system. I don't wanna dive too much into your book, although it's hard to resist. At the end of your book, you have this visionary, visionary conclusion where you call for not just spending more money on public universities, but a re-evaluation and a transvaluation of how we think about higher education. You ask us to think of it as a public common good rather than as a private good. And you wrote this a few years ago. And I wonder in this past year of such political turmoil and the tumult, have you seen anything which indicates that we might be heading in that direction? Yes, well, I'm glad you brought that up because this is also a huge opportunity. And I say that for this reason, so that cuts can't possibly fix this situation. I mean, you can't cut your way out of a massive increase in COVID costs plus a period in which somewhere between 10 and 25% of your state workforce is unemployed. So what it's gonna require is a bailout, which I think should be better conceived of as a reconstruction project. And I'm thinking of this as a third reconstruction, right? We had one that didn't work so well after the Civil War. We had a second one with the Civil Rights Movement in the 50s and 60s in which all sorts of egalitarian principles were being espoused again, right? Where inequality of outcome for black folks, for women were becoming an unacceptable in a way that prompted even mainstream politicians to come up with policy solutions that at least were tried out for a while. We're in another period like that, where the grotesqueness of the inequalities we have both economically and racially and in other ways are no longer, at least for this month and next month, I hope for longer, unacceptable. So we're in a position of going to the federal government and saying, we need to do massive money creation in order to do a massive, first stimulus for both the economy and the university system. And then secondly, I think in over a three to five year period for the quality reconstruction of institutions of health and education, housing and others that we want. So we're basically, we're looking at a new deal to use that overused phrase for higher ed as well as for the environment, for racial justice and for a number of other domains at the same time. To put, let me put this another way. I mean, we're used to having a cue in which higher education is usually in the back of it because state leaders say, well, look, I have unemployed people, I have disabled people, I have homeless people. I need to do something about supporting them and they don't have any financial resources to bring to the table. You students, on the other hand, you do have some money. You can borrow money and you have in many cases, family money. So I'm gonna cut you first because I have a much harder time cutting these other folks. I think now we're moving into a period where we can see these different social needs as not competitive with each other, but as we're all requiring stimulus and redevelopment at the same time, where helping housing, helping health, helping education are synergistic and that we could come up with a kind of more of a global policy than we've had in the past. You mentioned New Deal and I had to ask, is the Green New Deal one possible framework for this? Yeah, absolutely. Because first of all, Green New Deal requires a bunch of research. We still don't really know how to make energy-intensive renewable sources on the scale that we want. The solar's become much cheaper in the last 10 or 15 years because China's sort of massive development of it, but there's still a lot of technological research that needs to be done. Another area is what is an organization of large scale, say insulation of, we have what, maybe 20 million dwellings in the United States that need to be insulated basically yesterday. And we have people that don't have jobs. And we can imagine college graduates, non-college folks working together and something like that in a way that would solve a whole bunch of social problems at the same time. One of the things I'm excited about is the possibility of taking the university which has been seen as to one side of the lives of ordinary people. And put it right in the middle of the lives of ordinary people through the solving of practical problems and also providing a workforce that can help implement the solutions that you know, researchers come up with in universities. That's another, I mentioned you had a powerful vision at the end that I can see that you're still inhabiting that space, which is terrific. We've already had a stack of questions starting to come up and I wanted to make sure that we'll have a chance to respond to them. This one's came in here from Greg Stalker, I'll just flash that on the screen. What, oops, I pressed the right button, I don't know. Greg asks, what happens if a few dozen private colleges close the next three to six months? What does higher education react as an industry? We get public money to help private colleges so they don't have to close. I mean, there's no other solution. We can't let all these great little places die just because they're poor. You know, I mean, some of them, you know, there are some people who say, oh, well, they're not that great in the first place. I generally, I would have to be, I would need to see the evidence for that because what I see in small private colleges are folks who, you know, lots of dedicated teachers, students that in some cases have limited options, they're not mobile, you know, they can't go across the state to another place where folks have been doing all sorts of good local work that hasn't achieved financial stability because it's just not well known outside of the region. I mean, schools should not die because they're not famous. Right, I mean, that's a terrible way to deal with this really rich ecosystem that we have of a whole bunch of different kinds of schools that are adapted over decades to their particular kinds of students. So I would like to breach the private public barrier. We already have done it because private universities, including for-profit universities get federally backed student loans, just to take one example. They get also federal research money in billions and billions of dollars. So why not, you know, emergency and where we also have longer term social emergency needs as well, provide federal money to backstop the state sources and put them into schools like Hampshire College and other places that are struggling for no fault of their own. That's a great answer. And you've already wowed some folks in the chat box about this. Let me bring in the other of the major two developments. Now, I think you just made a bridge to that. And then again, I would love to hear what everyone says. Kio, I'm preparing the ground for your question. What about the Black Lives Matter protests? They're a sudden great awakening for racial injustice. What role does that play in terms of public universities now? Well, in addition to the measures that people are now thinking about again, and I mean, it shouldn't have taken the murder of George Floyd to have this in the front of our minds. But, you know, that's how people are. So here we are, you know, it's now very much in the front of our minds. As we can, I think that the single systemic thing that needs to happen is the equalization of funding across public college and university types. So what we have now is a form of structural racism in which colleges and universities that have the highest proportion of students of color have the lowest per student share of funding by and large coming from their states. So I'm talking about community college, which gets less money per student, talking about regional comprehensive publics, which get less money per student. I'm talking about systems like my own, whether it's Cal State or the University of California, where it's terrible when you actually look at the numbers. Campuses that have a higher share of students of color, often lower income students, often went to poor high schools in the first place with fewer educational opportunities, are at the campuses that are then giving them fewer educational opportunities again, because they have the fewest resources per student. So a simple goal would be that could deal with that version of systemic racism would be to level up, to bring poorer schools that are doing the noble work of taking lower income students, students of color, first gen immigrant students, DACA students that have gotten fewer resources and fixing that, flipping that around, giving them more resources than they've had in their previous parts of the system. It's not, the money isn't everything, you know, I get that, but it's really a lot of it when it comes to education, of bringing people up to speed if they need that, et cetera. And DACA for everyone who might not know the term is deferred action for childhood arrivals, it's going to students who are migrants, we can come back to that and explain more about that later if you want. That's a very ambitious program in the chat folks have compared this to a Marshall plan. Yes, yeah, that's a great analogy. You know, cause when we've had big problems in the past, we've thought big and for the last 40 years, we've had government taken out of the think big picture and it has to be put back in. And the reason for that is that it's really only the government, if you just think of it as a coordinating agency that has the capacity to bring collective wealth, which is what we're talking about with tax money, collective wealth to bear on collective problems. So I mean, I do think COVID is shifting the discourse towards, you know, you want to call it socialism, but whatever label you put on it, it's functional and it will, it can solve these problems if we think big enough. It may just be a huge shock. Kathleen Fitzpatrick and there are at least three different people with that name who participated in our conversation. So if you're the, and we delight in all three of them, it boggles the mind that dollars per student not equal already the money type of institution. Which is true. It's just that we have such a disorganized, disaggregated system. But I want to make things a little more nervous if I can. And which is to come back to an argument you made in an earlier book on making public university. You referred to, you were subject to calls of connection in the 70s and 80s. It's a big school, rising numbers, particularly in black and Latino students, taking classes as well as a rise in black studies, the Latino studies and so forth. And you see that some states then react to that lead by California by defunding campuses on a personal basis. I mean, if that pattern of behavior is still present, then it seems to me that we should expect an accelerated defunding now, especially when people link black lives matter to the university. Well, I hope as if we just call it racism, which is what it is, that people will be, legislators will have a harder time doing that. I mean, California is a good example so that the chairman of the Board of Regents of the University of California is a man named John Perez. He was the first Latinx speaker of the state assembly. He's the first Latinx chair of the Board of Regents. He's a first or he's a very smart guy. He's also in the sort of Jerry Brown austerity wing of the Democratic Party, at least towards what seems to be the elitist cause of higher education, which I think is a complete misconception about it. And anyway, there's a sense that, you know, other people need the money more for reasons we can go into if you're interested. Anyway, he's a guy who's totally anti-racist as a premise of his career. And yet he has produced a defunding, which is sort of the textbook definition of structural racism, which is as, and I just did a post about this with a chart that makes it really easy to see, as the share of students at the University of California who are white has declined over the last 20 years, the share of state income that goes to the University of California declines in lockstep. It is freakishly exactly proportional to the decline of those two things. And so it's like, oh, you have fewer white students, you're gonna get less fewer tax dollars. But this would absolutely hate that idea. And so my hope is that as there's, I mean, this is one of those things where you think that knowledge really make a difference is not just about power. Like maybe people are doing the wrong thing just because they're ignorant. So I mean, I'm always hoping that often that is the case. I think this may be one of those cases where someone like John Perez would say, oh, damn, you know, I didn't, I really did not mean to be supporting that pattern. And now I'm not going to. This would be a good time for me to remind folks that there is a, there are links to resources on the bottom left of your screen. You should see a kind of yellow orange button or if this is an excellent, excellent blog you're making at the University. We had a few comments in the chat I just wanted to share. And then we have a really powerful question. Stephen Downs from Canada says that we benefit from social services of the public health and education which demands some of the effects of racism and prejudice. Even so, the pandemic is forcing everything of just how fairly the benefits of society are distributed. Thank you. Thank you for that, Stephen. We have a question from Keele, I'm sorry, Keele Deutch. And Keele, I keep masquerading your last names and you can tell me exactly how to finance that challenge completely. Who has economic questions? So I think you must have a big factor in the higher costs, which is the unjust degree system credential cartel and mandated for years of seat time. Would you support third party credential? Third party, what was the last word? Credential, well, I'll put it down for you. Yeah, it really depends on the, I mean, I would like institutions of higher learning to be credentialed themselves by whatever, crediting agencies or one way of doing it, they're imperfect. I'm not opposed to new entrants and I'm not opposed to the idea that people can accelerate and don't need to sit for three years or four years or whatever it is. I mean, that's quite possible. I just think that that concept has been used as an excuse for shortcuts around learning that we have to look at carefully, but I'm not categorically opposed to that at all. Keele's talking about the opposite end of this. He's not referring to accreditation of individual colleges and universities, he's referring instead to accreditation of students. No, I understand, I just, I changed the subject to, I also want those people to be accredited. Thank you, Keele. If you want to follow up with more, he's right now, can't appear in video, but I appreciate you following that line of thought. George Station, it was not too far here on this and at least on the continental scale, he's at Cal State. The point of the Cal State system has also experienced the same defunding issue that you described as student demographics have changed and there's a good link to a resource there. Well, I have a couple more questions to ask, but then the forum is yours. In fact, can we put this up here? You should see a TLCO box, so if you'd like to join us on stage, your camera and microphone working, you should as well click that button here on stage. Otherwise, if you want to run a topic past me, just type in the question box and I'd love to hear more. One of the questions I had to ask is state governments often go on a key who pays the pipe or calls a team model and I have heard this on Mars as well. Some academic leaders say, well, privatization is good because it gets us out from the government. It's possible if we follow your model, we get a Marshall plan and bring me the other side that expands state and also federal funding, that we might see greater demands for state and our federal control, as things like curriculum, academic quality and so on. How would you negotiate that kind of strings attached phenomenon? Sorry, Brian, I didn't understand the sentence before the strings attached things. Sorry, I'm just saying that if state governments and federal government want to spend more money on this, they might want to control or issue more requests about things in terms of curriculum, student figure of speech, programs, quality, that kind of thing. Yeah, so this is a big cultural issue in the United States. I mean, when did we become a country in which everybody spends half their time telling everyone else how to do their job? But that's basically what's happened with, everybody knows how to teach better than teachers. Politicians know better, CEOs know better, Elon Musk certainly knows better how to teach than I do. So where do we draw the line? I'd like to see some real pushback on strings on money that goes into the activities that you're just trusting professionals to know how to do. We can't watch doctors do surgery or have somebody in the room with a patient while they're getting a cancer diagnosis and talking about treatments. And we don't want to do that. And the same is true with teaching. I'm teaching as much more politicized historically in the United States than medicine. But I think the states will do better with community colleges any level of education if they send the money and get out of the way and let people do their jobs. We have enough internal checks. We have enough reviewing going on all the time of everything that all of us do inside of institutions. So it's like, I know this sounds obnoxious, but I think this is actually epistemologically and operationally defensible. Send us the money and leave us alone. And we will send you really well educated students. And you can check up on us, but don't micromanage us around either the metrics or the process that gets us there. Wow, that's tricky. It's tricky, but I understand democratic accountability, but we've gone way over on the side of micromanaging and micromanaging of experts by non-experts. And that is more. I mean, you're an Americanist by training and by inclination and practice. And what do you think in our current society supports that? Is it just declining, is it part of our increased emphasis of experts? Is it a kind of frustrated, lowercase deed of a credit desire that national politics doesn't really support or want? Well, it's a 50 year campaign, culture wars is one term for it, of to discredit public sector employees as caring about the quality of their products, right? I mean, it's called, Nancy McLean's written a good book about this with James Buchanan and the public choice movement within economics, that's one piece of this. That essentially the argument was, we'll look teachers and firefighters and all those folks, they're just gain maximizers like you and me. They're just in it for the best salary and the best pension they can possibly get out of you, the taxpayer. So first of all, you've got to be as cheap as possible with them because they're going to screw you otherwise. And then secondly, you got to micromanage their product because they're basically lazy and they're just trying to collect a paycheck and get a pension. And that is totally fundamentally opposed A to my theory of human nature because I think people like to work and like to do a good job. Secondly, it's totally opposed to my personal experience of people, which is that people like to work like to do a good job. I don't know anybody that wants to do a crappy job. I mean, I know people who aren't paid enough. I know people who have four teaching jobs and so they can't spend enough time on any one of them. I know people that are micromanaged and so they can't do their job as well. They can't enact their own personal vision of their job on the job, right? But I just don't know the public choice crisis is a fake, it's a fake crisis and we need to exit that period of mistrust so that we can all just assume that we can, we're all doing the job well enough so we can go actually do our jobs instead of trying to control how other people's are doing their. Well, it's a fascinating problem. I'm really glad you mentioned this. When we think in a K through 12 level, how we have a lower-case key democratic student in the over teaching, especially in public schools. But this is a little different. We've seen some corner veiling discussion in the chart. We had Bill Katz, a fellow Americanist that there's a 200 plus year old tradition of healthy American distrust of expertise. Jessica Surden does ask this question. I agree to push back the professors but I've seen some poor professors who can't do criticism. How do we criticize professors who aren't doing their job if there's no way for them to take it seriously? If there's no way for them to take what seriously? Criticism. Oh, well professors A, they have to take criticism seriously. B, we do. I mean, the professor that does not accept criticism needs to be disciplined by peers. So there's the department peers, there's department chairs, there's deans, there's a whole series of managers who are in fact responsible for maintaining a peer review process. And I also, I don't sound like a, I just think professionals should rule everything. I am a Democrat, small D. I do think that accountability is important. I do think that general public should be able to see into institutions and understand how they're working and see what the real problems are. And I do think that the general public's view about whether we're doing a good job or not is really important. So how do we get these things into combination? How do I hear what you were saying about what I'm doing wrong without you just prescribing solutions that I know aren't gonna work and then enacting metrics that will require me to do things that I think aren't gonna work, right? How do we? So it has to be worse of some kind of a political dialogue that is time consuming and which is, and here's the important point. It's very different from audit culture, public choice, suspicion structure, which is what we have too much of right now. This is an important dynamic. And you're hitting a whole series of key points which is bringing up questions all over the place. And I wanna give some people on their chance to share those. We have Sarah, the senator, who says this week, we're studying Henry Giroux. It tracks in what you're saying about systematic issues around micromanaging instructors. What parts of academia can work to mitigate this? CTLs, admins? To mitigate micromanagement? Yeah. This, I think it's gotta be a cultural shift away from sort of top down and towards more cooperation. And it's also gonna require something that most professors don't love that. Which is kind of pure immersion in long meetings. And while it's like 360 review and it is like you are also being reviewed. And it's just more of the week involved in those kinds of meeting-based discussions. I think we're gonna have to bite the bullet and do that. The alternative is a professional management that is not involved in the teaching, learning, research complex. And therefore just kind of it does audit because it's not there and it doesn't know. I would love to see, for example, the very large student affairs silo that has been developed for good reasons in universities opened up and put into direct connection with the classroom, the laboratory, the library. Because we have a whole parallel educational apparatus and it would be cheaper and it would be less telling you what to do ish if we brought these two groups together and around, for example, we're gonna have to do hybrid courses and we're gonna have to make them good. And there's all sorts of great versions of community-based hybrid learning that universities should be doing more of as a rule. But that requires somebody like me who's good at preparing content but who is not a designer in terms of interfaces and so on, having access to several other people that can really help me with the course and that we would maybe end up doing, performing together as a team. That's the little structural design paradigm. Yeah, and we don't have that now at a public university with limited resources. I just came out of a budget meeting where the campus is planning to cross the board cut of 6.72% and that's just the beginning, that's the floor of the cut. Where are departments that are already, we're already cut 10 years ago and have never recovered from that, going to find $100 to hire even an undergraduate to help me with course design, much less a professional person. Especially if they're thinking in a more conservative way, trying to stick to what they know well must be something to me. Yeah, yeah, so we, A, we need more funding and we haven't even talked about COVID costs and the whole health issue that we're dealing with. B, we need, we are going to make education, instruction delivery and learning more expensive, not cheaper if we do proper online. It does not save money to do it well. It costs money to do well. And it's not only upfront costs, I think it's going to, it's higher permanent costs because you're getting sophisticated teams together with serious sort of complimentary professional skills and they can't just film it and walk away. They have to continuously implement it. I mean, this is another plus thing at, I don't know if we have time to talk about this or not, but I do think COVID is actually an opportunity for educational upgrade. You know, the, the MOOC, the mass scale MOOC wave of 2012 and 2013 was overblown, but it made one really good point, which is that push delivery in large lectures does not work very well. And yet that's the only thing that public universities can afford. So maybe now we can rethink because we have to because COVID is destroying the, the massification paradigm at least for a year or two years, at least for that long, maybe forever. Why don't we take this as an opportunity to demassify for real and then bite the cost bullet and go to the state and go to the federal government and say, everything those guys, those tech folks from Silicon Valley told you about how, you know, zero marginal cost of instruction for millions of students. That was wrong. They, we lied to you or we just didn't know. Now we know that it's going to cost a lot of money but we really want to do this and we know that you want to do it too. We have, this is a great thought and I want to keep the place spinning. There's, there's questions that came up following everything you've said at every point. Questions about change. Mark, how do you put these two up here one after the other because they're really, they're sibling questions. Mark Johnstone at the University of New Haven asks how faculty can be encouraged to work collaboratively better and to collectively improve practice. Mench models you mentioned appear to fund supervisory processes like 360 review, et cetera. So hang on to that question. How do you get faculty to do this? And then at the same time from the Houston edits Tom Haynes asks, how would you operation in a general public understanding the often diffuse outcomes universities produce? So one question is how do you, these are questions about change and how do you get the whole public thinking better about what higher education actually does and then how do you get faculty to work more collaboratively or collectively like that? And those are two massive great questions. Just the, the faculty, the simple answer is buy out their time. Because the single biggest obstacle, I mean, there's all, there's other psychological ones and malformation of professional life and stuff like that. But the biggest one is collaboration means time I don't have being sucked out of basically my private life. So, you know, the way that all of us protect our teaching and our research and our service ratios which are already kind of three jobs in one is by not going to the next meeting, right? Just saying forget it, I can't do that. If that next meeting is about collaborative instruction about redesigning the department's entire curriculum so that it fits together better, which I think in most cases it would be a good thing. Then that time has to be, something else has to be taken away as an obligation and an obligation has to be subtracted. So universities have to be much more creative about relieving that particular burden. And I think folks will show up if they can find the time to do it because we're all worried about our teaching, we're all worried about our students. Then the other, the short answer to that other excellent question is open up the black box. You know, we need people to be able to see what happens in the classroom. How do students learn? How do you, I mean, how do you figure something out? You know, how do I know how to read this sentence that I couldn't read three minutes ago? Or how does that, you know how you're doing a problem set and some equation suddenly falls into place? Yes. And you know, it didn't honestly, like five minutes before it was completely opaque and you were the dumbest person on the planet. And now you totally get it. We have to talk about that, like what enables that? How, what staffing? What academic labor is involved with that? How it varies from student to student? How students of color have been put in schools where they, you know, in most cases where they haven't gotten the kind of support they need to have more of those moments. I get the college, you know, we have to have the multi-dimensional social version of the conversation about the cognition of instruction and the institutional basis for that. And I think that that will help people get it. We just, we don't, one last piece of this is we're now in a position where the education, sorry, the economic payoff of higher education is more uncertain to put it politely. So the wage premium between college and high school is maintaining itself and growing only because the high school is going down. And so we all have tons of really good students who go out there and they spend years trying to get their foot on the ladder now and they can't pay their loans back. And this is not, this is the moment for universities to stop overemphasizing the pecuniary or the monetary benefits, stop selling the BA as primarily a wage benefit and start talking about all these other things involved, you know, personal development, building education for citizenship, education for a post-racist society. You know, the whole range of human capabilities that people get by having these additional four years that are intellectually usually more intense than high school lives. Just two quick notes for everyone. They've got to bring one person up on stage. The wage premium is the difference in lifetime earnings between someone who has a college degree and someone who hasn't gotten one. And the building is a wonderful German term for education, but character creation and more. It's a great term. We don't translate well into English. We have on video Phil Katz coming to us from the Council for Independent Colleges. Phil, how are you doing, sir? I'm good. I hope you can hear me. Yes. Beautiful. And I should say I'm talking for myself today, not for CIC, although I appreciate the Chris's comments earlier about the value of private colleges also as producers of the public good. So I'm listening here and I'm conflicted because I agree with a lot of what you say, but I don't think you're convincing me. What can we say right now to talk about, especially public universities, but also private colleges, about instruments of the public good? I want to push a little further on where you just were. What are the arguments that in this very specific moment where it's so difficult for people to appreciate public goods, what are the arguments that are working? And I don't think the argument that says, we provide building is an argument that's going to make California taxpayers open their pockets more. I only partly agree with that last one. I don't think we've tried it. I don't think we've taken the risk of saying, look, you want your kids to be happy. You want to be happy. You want to be able to think about things accurately. You want them to be able to be in a relationship with people that's not just about arguing conflict. How do you deal with differences? How do you deal with racial, gender, sexuality differences? How do you read a ballot proposition so you know whether you're about to be screwed or not? You want education at this level to do that. So you have K through 12, which is about learning the fundamentals and about learning the basics of knowledge, the processes whereby you acquire knowledge. Then you want this combined pecuniary, non-pecuniary thing. I'll just put it in one sentence, which is the capabilities that allow people to produce knowledge rather than simply consume it, which is also a prerequisite for doing well in the current economy. So it's kind of a two birds one. And that's an argument that we've been trying to make about higher education for years. And I think that it's getting less and less traction. I'm troubled especially at this moment because there's such a divided sense of where public good exists. If we look at the title of the session about COVID and Black Lives Matter, on the one hand, you see a number of the protests about Black Lives Matter, which are a tremendous demonstration of a sense of larger public good, especially the fact that you see such a diversity of protesters. And then you see so many reactions to COVID being a denial of individual contributions to the public good. And so when you compare these two very strong reactions right now of Black Lives Matter protests and folks screaming in the face of Walmart workers because they've been asked to wear a mask to come in. Well, I don't know how we make convincing arguments about colleges being the most important or even an important public good in this very parlous moment. Well, I mean, these are great questions. So I don't at all mean to just come back and act like I, here's the formula. Because you're pointing out that there isn't a formula and we have to grow up our way to a better discourse. So I just want to acknowledge that. The first thing though is I think we can't over focus on the guys screaming in the faces of the Wisconsin state house, the guards, the security people that were there and take them as normative Americans. I mean, we over focus with the very systematic help of the media on a fringe of really primitive selfish individualists that I do not think are very typical even of Trump voters much less of the wider population. I mean, I come from Republicans. So I just know but none of my family is really in that zone. And that's true of my other Republican friends here. But the second thing is you're pointing at it. What I think is a deep cultural and even spiritual crisis in the United States that has been part of our experience as a country really since the end of the Cold War. The Cold War kind of sutured us to this World War II greatest generation defeating the Nazis, understanding of who we really were in spite of slavery, racism, genocide, et cetera, and all the other stuff that's also central part of our history. And we kind of repressed that. And then the great crusade against first, Nazism and then communism is kind of over. And we have this strange period. What is it? Is it really going to be Silicon Valley and high technology? Is it wealth inequality? Is that what the United States is going to devote itself to? Is it, are we a theocracy? I mean, none of the candidates that get the most attention have will do the job. They don't work. So what universities are not doing anymore is putting in a bid for a vision of what the national purposes are, right? It's not just one. And I think when we do that, we'll also be able to explain what the point of college is more easily. When we really re-evaluate that's an idea. Yeah, it would be a version of that. Yeah, but it has to be updated, right? It's not the 19th century. It's not the 1950s. It's not the 1990s, as I never tire of saying, right? So we're gonna, we have to update it in all the ways that this amazing population that we actually have could help us do. Good luck to all of us, I think. Yes. Thank you for the great question. And all the work we do, it's, we have, we're almost out of time. We were just at the end of our minutes and we have time for just about one more question to go. I wanted to bring this one up, because this is a couple, across a few different points. This is an economic question, right? What about the possibility of cutting costs comes to question? Let's see, a few folks, like Keel Drumshin, a few others, have mentioned problems of too much staff or too much administrative, administrative superstructure on campuses, as well as non-academic functions, such as sports, residential domains have been mentioned. And then also a few folks like Stephen Dowings have argued for the possibility of reducing costs in order to make colleges and universities more accessible to everybody, which is a foundational point of public education. What do you, I mean, is this something that we can try? Or are college universities already cut so badly with the bone that it's not possible? Well, I think it's both. I mean, there are certainly things that we could do, but a lot of the serious cost savings are gonna be de-staffing, which just means firing people. I mean, that's the, that's the mind. I mean, that's what the meeting was about that I was just in, you know, or tiptoeing around layoffs, basically. I'm not interested in that. I mean, I'm really, I'm anti-layoff. I'm very pro-refunctioning people. So I wonder if we could cut costs over a five to 10 year period by doing closer collaborations among people that are in these silos. So the example of course designers and professors working together, you know, to do sort of complicated course delivery that would increase learning, that might be one. But we're not spending that much, you know? Spending like 8,000 a year, 10,000 a year per student for tertiary education, it's not a lot, it's not that much. We're not blowing money on instruction. You know, we've adjunctified instruction terribly. We have to dial that back. We have to actually raise costs or instruction by paying people properly and giving them stable jobs. So to have any kind of decent ethics around academic labor, we're gonna spend more money there. One thing that would help is by requiring research sponsors, extramural research sponsors to pay the full cost of doing the actual research is something that I talked about in the book. What's happening now is between 20 and 25 cents of every dollar of research expenditure is being supported by either state taxpayers or student tuition. So some of the money that students would put directly into their own classrooms and that would allow for non-tenure track people to be tenure track people or to get paid a proper salary instead of a per course charge of costs like three or $4,000 is going into research subsidy because research is expensive and universities don't have other sources and the sponsors are not paying the proper amount. So there's those kinds of, it's a holistic kind of package that we have to do. There isn't gonna be one thing. The place where I just, I do not think we should start by cutting the workforce. I think we should start with restructuring the business model so that the outside beneficiaries pay something closer to the full cost of what they're getting back. That would be a very difficult one for D.D. Yeah, it's a big political lift for sure. We have more questions coming in. And we'll talk about it. Oh, thank you. Thank you very much. And I appreciate it. Pardon me, I have to see you in the back, everybody. What's the best way to keep up with you and your work? Is it here? Can you see anything? Or your wonderful new growth effort? Brian, I think what you're asking, bad sound is a venue for contact. So the blog I think is a good place to start. It's remaking the university. It's a blog spot blog. It's pretty easy to find. People are welcome to email me at the English department at UCSB. If you have particular issues you'd like to pursue. I will root through the chaos of my inbox and find you. I'm happy to continue this conversation. I'm really glad that I'm grateful to you, Brian, for bringing the people together like this and so regularly. First of all, Chris, thank you for driving this conversation. And second, my thanks to the wonderful community here. Brilliant, brilliant folks who've been asking fantastic questions. This is a wonderful community that I'm just delighted to be a part of. We have to let you go back to your work. But let me wish you all best in trying to keep your UC. Going through this incredibly stressful time. And let me wish you all best luck in your move across the country and across the Atlantic. Thank you, Brian. And thanks, everybody. I look forward to the next time. So do we. So do we. Don't go, friends. I just want to point out a couple more things. And for coming up for the next few weeks. First of all, we're continuing a whole series of topics. Black Lives Matter and anti-racism and higher education. We're going to try to have more extra sessions about that. So if you want to reach out to me for suggested speakers, please do. We have fall 2020 planning with all kinds of issues improving teaching and how to do live video. Well, we also continue to have these conversations go on social media, Twitter using the hashtag FTTE, but also our groups on LinkedIn, Slack and Facebook. So we'd love to hear from you there. Our archive continues to grow. We have 213 videos there now. So if you'd like to dive back into our great conversations, including Chris's first appearance, please do. And in the meantime, thank you again for all of your thoughts, your conversation. This has been a really, really rich discussion. I really appreciate it. Thank you all. Stay safe. See you online. Bye-bye.