 I'm Julie Bishop, the Chancellor of the Australian National University. I'm joining you from Perth, Western Australia, the traditional lands of the Noongar people. Our audience comes from across Australia and we have guests from across the world. We acknowledge and celebrate the first Australians on whose land each of us is today and we pay our respects to the Elders past and present. I'm delighted to welcome you to the big picture series panel discussion of the 2020 Australian National University Crawford Leadership Forum. And I do thank the ANU Public Policy and Societal Impact Hub for posting today's discussion. The big picture series will continue for the month of June. So please register for other discussions. They will be lively, entertaining, informative. The impact of COVID, this global pandemic, has been profound around the world. And it's shaking the very foundations of the university system. Teaching and research has been disrupted. Students across nations and within nations are stranded, unable to attend classes. Revenues have plummeted. But even before COVID-19 became part of our lives, universities were reassessing their model, their place in the world, whether they had relevance for the 21st century. The Industrial Revolution, based on technology, that fourth Industrial Revolution is changing the way we live and work and engage. And so the topic today, the future of universities could not be more timely. Our panel will look at questions like how have universities adapted in these unprecedented times? What model has worked best? What is the future for universities? And how will it look in a decade, two decades to come? Now as today's discussion is being broadcast live, I encourage you to submit questions to our panel throughout the discussion using the Q&A function in your toolbar. Please join me now in welcoming our distinguished speakers. Professor Michael McRobbie, President of Indiana University. Professor Lily Kong, President of Singapore Management University. Our own Professor Brian Schmidt, Vice Chancellor and President of the Australia National University. And distinguished Professor Genevieve Bill, Director of 3A Institute, the Australian National University, who will be chairing this morning's discussion. We are delighted to welcome you all and I'll hand over to Genevieve who will get the conversation started. Thank you Chancellor, we really appreciate that you could be joining us today and we're really grateful that everyone is logged on, dialed in or possibly watching this from some other place and some other time. I too want to begin by acknowledging where I am today on the traditional lands of the Ngunnawal and Nambri people and pay my respects to the elders past and present and to leaders emergent. And I want to acknowledge that this broadcast goes out across Indigenous lands all over Australia and all over the world and pay my respects to elders and traditional owners where this finds you. We're incredibly excited to get to do this. This is the first of a new series we're trying here for the month of June. So we hope this will be the first of many moments where you join us in the rectangle and get to participate. I have to do a little bit of housekeeping first. There's a couple things I need to remind you. I have to go to remind you that this is being recorded and will be broadcast on the ANU channel on YouTube. So the little red button in the top left hand corner that applies to all of us here. Your cameras and mics have been disabled so the way you can participate is through the Q&A box. I know we're going to get a lot of questions. I know some of you sent questions in advance. I have a spreadsheet of 50 of those already and I'm hoping we'll find a way to make sure we can at least answer some of those questions. And I think that's everything. Oh yeah, if you want to ask a question, if you put your name and your city or place that you are from, I will attempt to put that into the question too. So we've had a bit of a chance to talk, Brian, Michael, Lily and I about how we wanted this conversation to unfold. And we hope that it would be more of a discussion and a conversation. And for me at least and I know for Brian, we're both incredibly excited and grateful to have Michael and Lily join us because they bring a different set of perspectives and a different set of experiences. And frankly, are in equally complicated places in the world and I suspect in the middle of equally complicated conversations. So I wanted to start with a little bit of a throwback. I know all of the conversations we're having at the moment feel like they're very much centered on COVID-19 and the world that we find ourselves in. But I wanted to start by reflecting on where you were all at six months ago. Because as the chancellor just said, we've been talking about the future of universities for a little while. And I think thinking about what our visions for our universities and our sector was has been a conversation. I know each one of you is engaged in both in your own institution and in your countries of sort of occupation now. So I'm wondering if we could start with a little bit of six months ago. What were you thinking about the future of both your university and the sector look like? And Michael, I might start with you. So six months ago, almost exactly six months ago, I was I would have been presiding at a graduation ceremony, but what we call a commencement ceremony in the United States, at which we gave an honorary degree to one of our most distinguished alumni. It was former director of national intelligence, Dan Coates. And it was our large winter commencement. And it was thousands of students getting their degrees, 10,000 plus people in the audience and so on. And it was one of these celebratory joyous events that are such a big part of, I think, all universities. And it was right in the middle of our bicentennial. Because this is our bicentennial year store, we're 200 years old. And we're right in the middle of the major celebrations and so on. And we had pretty much completed a strategic plan at that point. A whole range of initiatives had been carried out. And we were really focused on what was the next century of the existence of our university going to look like, what were all the major things we were going to be tackling. So it was in the middle of a very joyous, very celebratory time. And within months, of course, we were wrestling day-to-day with the decisions we had to make to basically close down the standard operational part of the university. The kinds of things we were thinking about there were... We think we had played a major role in the economic development of the state for 200 years in a variety of areas, in particular in the health sciences where we're particularly strong. And how were we going to use the strengths that we had and all the change that we have affected over the previous six or seven years to focus on some of the big issues in certainly in the American system of higher education? Making the case for the continuing relevance of large-scale research, maybe now even clearer than it ever was, at least to many people, how we could continue to defend the value of a university degree as opposed to other kinds of qualifications. And in particular, how could we ensure that technology could become even more pervasive throughout the institution? In fact, the reason I'm here, I'm proud alumnus as I am of the Australian National University was initially to be responsible for all the technology of the university before I became president. So I spent 20 years of my life at the university working in that very area and I've seen the sort of impact that it's had on a very large, one of the largest multi-campus universities in the United States. So it would have been the things that many of my colleagues were thinking about. I'm sure those were kind of the things that Brian was thinking about and Lily was thinking about at the same time. And little did we know what was in store for us. Yeah, so I was going to ask you, Lily, six months ago, what were you thinking the future of the university sector would look and feel like? So while Michael was thinking by centennial, we were at the Singapore Management University, we're just entering our 20th year and excited to think about the next decade, the third decade of the university. And just like Michael, we were in the midst of finalising a strategic plan for the next decade. We were excited about a few things. One was greater industry engagement as part of a strategy. Two was how as a university located in the heart of the city, we could contribute to a vibrant innovation and entrepreneurship ecosystem within the city, fortunate to have venture capitalists sort of beginning to coalesce around where we are. WeWorks and other co-working spaces springing up around us and so forth. And how could we as a university in the city be a vibrant part of the city, contributing to it, but also drawing spirit from it? And we were excited about our internationalisation agenda, the possibilities of establishing overseas presence, particularly in Southeast Asia, and pushing very hard for greater integration on campus with interdisciplinarity and so forth. So all these exciting ideas which were beginning to come together around certain strategic priority areas and excited to celebrate our 20th anniversary. And we in fact had our first Patrons Day event of the 20th anniversary year, just as COVID was hitting us. But we managed to get the 500 people through a ceremony and then everything else stopped after that. So, Brian, I know for us here in Australia six months ago was December. So I think we were already in a particular kind of moment, but six months ago when you were contemplating the future of the sector and of the ANU, where was your head at? So, not the 200th anniversary, not the 20th. Next year is our 75th, so sort of the geometric mean of Michael and Lily. And I was thinking of where ANU wanted to be in 2025. I have about five years probably left and my time as Vice Chancellor and trying to figure out, we sort of presented a big vision and how are we going to get there in 2025? That's where I was very much focused. And it really included several things that I thought were important for our sector. One was putting the student back at the center of a university's activities and really committing to Australia to have a place where the education from a student's perspective is as good as any place in the world, uniquely Australian, but as good as anywhere in the world. And so it was going to be the year of the student. And it probably still is the year of the student, just not quite as I expected. But we had already seen the big bushfires in 2019 start. The bushfires that created the smoke that destroyed my vintage, closed campus for many, many days right at the beginning of the year. And so we were also focusing on how research, the fundamental research, we could be really good at it, but also start applying it to the problems. And we saw that very much as a global effort going through and working with colleagues across the world to solve issues around climate change, energy, food security, health, and really trying to ramp up how we work collectively as universities in an international context. You can imagine that's been a little disrupted in some ways, although it turns out via video there's some opportunities to speed that because people's willingness to engage on activities is actually probably easier as just today shows. Can I get you to dwell on that a little bit, Brian? So six months ago, we were thinking about our strategic plan for 2025. We were contemplating a year where students were the locus of our attention. Six months in with World Health Organization declared a pandemic on March 11th. You closed down campus at the end of March. We're contemplating coming back now. Where do you see the kind of conversation for us, both at the ANU and in the sector in Australia in this moment? Well, I mean, I think there's the challenges. We're just sort of in survival mode right now, just trying to figure out our business model, which at the beginning of the year I knew was going to be disrupted over time. And I think what I have seen is it's everything's sped up. All the things I thought might happen over the next decade have happened and are going to happen in the next year. So digitalization is speeding up and we've had to get my professor yet who weren't too keen on digitalization of classes. They're all keen on it now and they've had to deliver it in a couple months. The ability to work remotely and save on greenhouse gases by flying and seeing Michael McRoby in person or Lily in person. Well, those two trips to Indiana and Singapore have been postponed or maybe even canceled. So all of those things we're going to work on have sped up. Some of the things around students obviously just haven't been able to do because they haven't been on campus. But I think the part that I'm worried about is tackling those global issues of climate change, food security and stuff. Those have been disrupted, partially because a lot of them included partners in China, for example, and the ability to work right now in this geopolitical uncertainty. I think things have been disrupted a bit there and I'm not trying to figure out how to get that back on track. It's not easy. So, Michael, I saw that you were nodding there when Brian was talking. Six months after the 200th anniversary kind of speculation and hope, where do you find yourself, your university and your sector in the United States? Oh, well, it's been a massive shock to higher education in the United States as it has, I think, to higher education in most of the rest of the world. I mean, our model, the fundamental model of the university is one of certainly on traditional campuses is a very dense agglomerations of students in person to person, pedagogical settings and social settings. And that is that's one of the great draws for university campuses, well, certainly around the world, certainly here as well. And to go from that to everything being online in a couple of weeks as we as we did. And as I mentioned before, we have 100,000 students across seven campuses around the state of Indiana was a massive undertaking. And I think that the students are to be congratulated certainly here and everywhere else for their forbearance and resilience in dealing with this. And the faculty, too, as Brian said, many people who have been skeptical of online education would not, I would not say they were necessarily completely convinced, but they understand more now the role that it can play as part of a sort of mediated blended education, which we've argued for a long time really is the future of education. I've never been of a lever. In fact, I've been a huge skeptic about the claims for the traditional model of education being replaced by purely online education. I think one thing that this crisis has definitively proved in my view, I think in the view of many of my colleagues over here, is that the model of students doing their four years of study in the parent's basement is just a complete travesty. It's not true at all. There is a desperation for young traditional age students to get back to a college education. Obviously there are the parts that they enjoy, but it is the ability to interact with other students. Sociologists will claim that 50% of what a student learns, they learn from interaction with other students and other aspects of their environment outside the classroom, all of that they've lost. And that's what they want back. And that's what's gonna be so hard for us to do in the present circumstances, but what all of us are trying to, and we're all dealing with the same problem. We're all trying to solve it in similar ways, but that's the problem we're gonna have to solve for us to be able to bring back students in late August when our academic year starts. So Lily, can I ask you where you're thinking is that in this regard? So six months later, I know Singapore's had a very different trajectory with COVID-19 than say the United States. Where is your university and your sector currently? It has, the trajectory in Singapore, you know, the unfortunate thing, and the fortunate thing in one sense is that the community spread is relatively contained, but the unfortunate thing is that the foreign worker dormitories are where the spread has been more severe. And that has opened up questions about inequality. It's opened up questions about what role universities have to play in addressing social disparities and issues to that effect. And so what that's done for us is in terms of thinking about what kinds of research we should be doing as a university that contributes to a more equal and just society, that's one. In educational terms, as with everybody else, we've had to make that pivot very quickly to the use of educational technology. What it has done for me at least, and I am having these conversations with colleagues on campus at this point in time, is to strengthen my own conviction about what we use technology for in education. It's easy to have lots of talking heads on screen and students can listen to whatever material is being spewed out. But we have a fundamental philosophical belief in the student as an individual who has personal learning needs. And so how do we use technology to personalize learning? We also have a fundamental belief in the student as a social being who learns through interaction and through collaboration. And so how do we use technology to deepen that interaction and collaboration rather than to take away from it? And thirdly, we believe that the student is an individual who is part of a larger community and society and who draws benefits from that in myriad ways, but who should also contribute back to that community and society in ways that are meaningful to that community. So we're a firm believer in experiential learning. How do we use technology to enhance that experiential learning so that they can continue to contribute back to the society? So just as an example of that last pillar, we do have community service as a graduation requirement. Lots of students do lots more hours than the graduation requirements demand. But if there is a lockdown, how do students participate in community service? And so the challenge that I've thrown to my colleagues is how do we use technology in the learning of students that enhances the personalization, that enhances the interaction and that enhances the contribution to community rather than to withdraw into self and me and the screen. So no immediate answers, but the conversations are alive on campus. I'm really struck in listening to those answers and in starting to read some of the questions that are coming through in real time, that there's an interesting, it's not tension exactly, but there's these two streams of conversations. There's a conversation about, how do we ensure a quality student experience? And Brian, we have one of our first year students writing Marlo Mears and asking, how does the university ensure that students are gonna have quality access and a quality access to a good education? And I think, Michael, you're reflecting on that too, and so are you, Lily. So there's this sort of interesting tension around, how do we think through quality student experiences and what that will look like in a COVID and post-COVID world with the equal tension piece, which I think all of you are reflecting on too, about what are gonna be the underlying business models that we have here. And Brian, we have a question from Andrew Carey from the age about how it is to, we wanna think at the Australian level about what our business models will look like moving forward in terms of how we think about revenue. But I suspect, because we've also had a question for you, Michael, about the business models for the American university sector, the top of mind for both our students, and I think the broader community is both, how do we ensure a quality education that, as you said, Brian Sanders on the students? And then how do we also think about what the business models might need to be and how they evolve? I'm not sure there's an easy way to answer that question, but that's the question. How do we thread the needle between those two things? We're gonna let them go first? Yes. So, I don't see, I mean, the university sector here is, as you know, very large and complicated, 4,500 different institutions around the country. And for an institution like ours, I don't see, certainly on our major campuses, I don't see the business model changing that much. I mean, we're a large public research university. We get funding for about 20% or so of our budget comes from the state. The state is effectively covering part of the costs of students who live in the state. And then we charge tuition for students out of the state, which both means anywhere else in the United States or anywhere else in the world. That is a multiple on that in state tuition. That's the model. And that, I think, will basically stay, at least from places like us, will stay the same. The one I'm knowing is, if the percentage of online education grows and grows, and I don't see that necessarily as happening, I do see the blended side of it happening, as I said before, then what has to reconsider that distinction between resident and non-resident whether that starts to break down. Now, that's something we obviously are concerned about, and at least it's something we consider and so are the institutions in the United States, big institutions in the United States. It's a bit different for private institutions where they have just one tuition rate, two. And there, this becomes even more pointed for them because there's no state funding to help cover the cost of some large percentage of their student body. So, can you continue to provide a quality education and still charge at the same tuition if the great bulk of it is no longer being done person to person? And that, I think, is probably more of a challenge for private universities than it may actually be for large public universities. We, 85% of students in the American university system are at public universities there. And so that is the area of where real democratization and education takes place. And the public universities have a different market and a focus differently. And their financial model is different to the public's. Yeah, and I think there's a big difference between the US business model, and for example, the Australian one. And indeed, I would say the Singaporeese model is different again. And Lily can talk a bit about that. The reality here in Australia is that our business model has evolved to be very reliant, much more so than the US model is on international students and the fees that they provide. And we have a system more so than either the US or Singapore of cross subsidizing research with student fees, where I think both in Singapore and in the US, student fees sort of cover teaching and the government research and business research covers research and they're quite separate. Even though they coexist here, they're very financially intertwined. And so this has been a big shock for us. And if the international student market changes, and I think there are reasons to believe it will change, it has flow on effects for us. I still think, as Michael said, that the foundational bits of people going to university is gonna remain and the digitalization that we've seen gives us the opportunity of doing a better job of teaching than we used to. So it's actually gonna improve. It's not gonna save us much money, but it means people can learn faster, better. It also provides the opportunity of the democratization of learning. Right now, only 37% of people in Australia go to university. This new ability to scale up digitally means people are gonna be able to get short courses when they need them. And I think it gives the opportunity of actually giving more education to more of Australians. And so I probably not gonna do that at ANU, but other institutions will. So I think that will be another flavor, but I don't really see as long as I keep straight what I'm doing, which is teaching in an intensive on-campus experience and really good research. I don't see that going away. People need to grow up and be part of my campus experience. But I do think there are opportunities to make sure everyone else gets the skills and things that they need. And I think Lily can talk a little bit about Singapore, where Singapore has really said lifelong learning is part of the missions of Singapore. I don't think lifelong learning is on the agenda here in Australia, probably not too much on the US either. But I think that has to be one of the things we can do with the digitalization better than we used to. So thanks for that, Brian. You're absolutely right. There are several pieces to this that affect our business model, but present opportunities in as much as they present challenges. So in Australian universities, as I understand it, the international student flow could have a significant impact on some universities. For us in Singapore, the large proportion of funding for a university actually does come from the government. So unlike a state university in the US, we would get 60% or more from the government, depending on the university. And so to some extent, therefore, there is a cushioned effect from the international student market. Having said that, it is the case that particularly at, for us at SMU, particularly at the taught master's level, the impact of having a smaller flow of international students is non-trivial either. So that's one impact. The second is in terms of going online and the student voices that are saying, well, then you really should be reducing fees as a consequence because we're not getting the same experience. Not that they don't want the same experience as Michael was saying, the students want to have that interaction on campus. They want to live on campus and so forth. But if that's not possible, then you should be cutting our fees. That's the voice of the student. Having said that, we do have a very big push in Singapore for continuing education. And over the last three or four years in particular, the universities have gotten into the act where as private providers had filled that space previously. That space has grown and universities have gotten into the act of providing a lot of what we call in Singapore skills, future training. It's a government scheme with big subsidies that are given to universities to provide those causes. And subsidies are given to the individual Singaporean citizen who can then use that budget to pay the universities or any other provider for the training that they get. And so that going online has actually been quite welcome to the adult working population that is looking to upskill and reskill. And so whereas there are some challenges that are posed from the international student pipeline, the online delivery for undergraduate students who are hankering to come back to campus, this other stream of revenue and opportunities are opening up with continuing education. I'd just like to make a final point about the democratization of learning and agree. And at the same time, disagree with what I've heard so far. There is certainly a democratization in that more students potentially could access the online causes. At the same time, with pivoting very quickly to online for our existing undergraduates, we've become very sensitive to the fact that the digital divide and the socioeconomic disparity among students actually has surfaced much more strongly. Students whose families are living in cramped quarters where it's difficult for them to actually have study spaces where it's difficult for them to have subscription to broadband at a sufficient speed that they can actually do their exams online without disturbance, without disadvantage. Those are the sorts of issues that have come to the fore that we're very conscious about and are putting our minds to thinking about how can we take advantage of the theoretical democratization to ensure that that's actually the case in practice. Thank you, Lily, because I suspect we've seen both sides of that piece of the sort of equality and equity of access, right? It hasn't just been for our students, it's been for our faculty and our staff who have also found themselves engaging in multiple forms of shift and domestic labors that get masked and all of that. I'm always sort of struck by the idea that when we talk about delivering a digital experience to our students, there's someone on the other end of that delivery pathway too. And we certainly know in Australia from work that has been done that the pandemic has had a differential impact in both people's career possibilities as well as for our students based on all sorts of things around gender divisions of labor, expectations about childcare, about what it meant to have all of these things happen simultaneously. So I think it's an incredibly complicated space when we talk about digital engagement and it's something that has been of interest to everyone who has both submitted questions in advance and who is still submitting them now is about both how do we think about the blended strategy? What does it mean to have the possibility of digital engagement as well as maintaining some kind of on-campus presence for all the reasons you said, Michael. And then also how do we think about, and I suspect this is an extension of the question you're all answering too, is how do we think about a business model without also then thinking that certain kinds of categories of education, research and learning seem to be less quote unquote economically viable or valuable? So this would be the kind of question of what's the role of the humanities in all of this? How do we think about the social sciences? I know that at least three of us come from that area. So I think it's probably a question near and dear to our hearts. I had someone ask me about what they thought the value of anthropology would be during the pandemic. And I think there's sort of a piece about how do we imagine a reinvention of the universities that doesn't mean an economic model that feels like economic rationalism. At least that would be my kind of summary of some of these questions. I think it's how do we reinvent the university without losing the pieces that seem possibly less obviously valuable but still deeply important? Michael, I'm gonna start with you on that one. Oh, well, as you know, Genevieve, the traditional model of a university education here certainly at a large research university or a private research university for that matter is the classic liberal arts model, not liberal in the political sense, but which has a different meaning in Australia than it does here, of course. But liberal in the sense that the education provides exposure to both breadth and depth in a variety of different fields. It's the famous model of Cardinal Newman. And that really to this day is still the fundamental model of undergraduate education that certainly the very best American university. So there is a natural willingness to a natural understanding of the important role that the humanities as really the bastions of the history of and the culture and the knowledge, wisdom of the human race play in that. And although debates rage constantly about their relevance, by and large, the best of them certainly survive. I've, in the period I've been president, I've taken a particular interest in supporting the languages. We actually teach more foreign languages than any other university in the United States. We teach in any one year, we teach somewhere between 70 and 80, 70, 80 foreign languages. In fact, it was that strength that first brought us together in the very strong relationship that we have with A&U. And we took the position that with other universities closing down their language programs, there had to be at least one place that would still teach Moosebeck and Urdu and all kinds of other less commonly spoken, actually quite commonly spoken in some of those countries, languages. So we established a new school, one of whose fundamental strengths was language instruction. And we, it was almost a sort of a counterintuitive move. And we have seen a significant increase in the number of students taking combinations of languages with international visits. In fact, it's a school named after two of the great statesmen of the state, Senator Richard Luger, the late Senator Richard Luger and former congressman Lee Hamilton, it's the Hamilton Luger School of Global and International Studies. And that's been enormously successful for us. And I think is a way in which one can take strengths and languages, combine them with international studies and turn that into a sort of magnetic draw card for students as we have, as we've managed to do it. So it is an issue that I don't think is, I don't think there's any glib solution to it. There's ongoing debates. I think sometimes the humanities aren't their best, their best allies, their own best allies in some ways. But I think the fundamental importance of the core of the humanities continues to shine through. I'm gonna pivot a little bit here because we've been getting lots and lots of questions and I wanna make sure that we honor as many of them as we can. A number of those questions really focus on how we think about, not just the model of the university, but how we might do educational delivery. So a number of the questions ask things like we've seen commercial enterprises work out, how to do capabilities and skills training. There are a number of online service providers. We see people working out, how to think about short courses and micro-credentialing. We have people asking, how do we think about any one of those things? So sort of the broad question there I think would be, and it was one that we talked a little bit about before this session, which is that coming out from this six month period, there's clearly a number of things we've all learned, right? Lily, you reflected on both the kind of transformation for your students and about how to think about what it means to have an educational experience when you can and can't be on campus. Michael, you were sort of thinking about what's the virtue of the physical as well as the digital. I'm wondering what each one of you has learned at your university in the last six months that is a useful thing you want to continue to do moving forward. So what are the things you've learned about digital engagement, for instance, that will change the way your university functions moving forward and what sort of, what have you taken from that that you think is interesting and useful? Lily is being very innovative in Singapore as well, but I guess from my perspective, I think there's been two things that have emerged to me very strongly. One, it's how to use digital successfully, and two, how to not use digital in the future. So it's made very clear where digital is enhancing and it's made very clear where digital is a second cousin to the intense in-person experience. And so for me, it is a matter of taking the good and focusing on augmenting our experience. We know students don't like coming to thousand person lectures very often. If you have a really charismatic lecture and it's interesting, they'll do it occasionally, but as a means of actually information transfer as Galileo got up on his pedestal and part of a university, it don't work very well because they all go to digital. They don't show up. So there are other ways of getting that basic information, which are digital, and they go through and do that. But when they do come on campus, the thing our students really miss is that in-person engagement, where you interrogate our ideas. So let's spend our time doing that because Google can outsource me on the big stand and deliver digital stuff, but they can't outsource my world leading professors who can have a one-on-one conversation about exploring ideas and news. So- On your beautiful campus, Brian. On my beautiful campus, in a serene environment that makes people want to contemplate and your beautiful campus as well. And Lily's got a beautiful campus as well. You can make pies. It is not contemplative and beautiful all the time. But make pies are fine until they hit you. So I'm really focused on that. Really going through and getting now people to focus on what works well digitally doing that and then really focusing our energy on the stuff we can do well in-person that I am not gonna be disintermediated or outsourced by a for-profit entity. Universities are not for profit. At least mine isn't. We are public good. And we need to do our job really well and uniquely. So Lily, I see you nodding away there vigorously. You wanna jump out? I was just remembering the mic pies at ANU. But seriously, one thing that we've learned is the importance of the synchronous interaction, even if it's mediated by technology as opposed to the asynchronous. So it's entirely possible for us to put lots of material online and students can access in their own time at their own pace, which is the rhetoric about many of these material that's online. But really, even if it were technology mediated, what the students are looking for and what they really learn from is that interaction with somebody else at the other end of, on the other side of the screen, I might put it that way. And so having said that, we have tried very hard to say to some university partners that say you can still have your student come on an exchange program because our materials online and they can still access our material. And we've politely said, well, thank you, but that's not what we would want for our students. First of all, if they're not able to go to where you are, they're not immersed in another country. They're not immersed in another culture. They're not, and even if it were synchronous, as a Chinese saying goes, you can read a thousand words, but it's not the same as seeing it for yourself just the one time. So, you know, at the end of the day, technology can supplement, can maybe even enable for some and enhance in other situations, but it doesn't replace. So Michael, you're up. Oh, well, I mean, Brian and Lily both put it very, very eloquently. I completely agree with everything they say. I mean, you asked about what have we learned and I'll just repeat what I said earlier. One thing I think we've learned certainly we have definitively as students do not was, as I said before, want to be locked in their parents' basement for four years doing their degree online. They want an on-campus experience. And but the nature of that experience wasn't certainly at our institution pretty heavily technology mediated already. It's going to be more heavily technology mediated, but I think it'll chip away at the parts that as Brian said, the students really aren't, really don't find particularly stimulating the thousand person lecture and stuff like that and move it more in the direction of smaller classes, more interactive classes and flip classes. I mean, all the combination of all that. I think that's the direction that we're all going in. And what this tragic pandemic has done has probably accelerated that. I haven't seen, I mean, the commercial sector has had an impact here. I don't see them as having in any way really undermine the fundamental business model of certainly the undergraduate model of education in this country. I certainly think at the graduate level, it's a different matter. Completely online bachelor's degrees, we have a relatively small number of those online courses. We have thousands. We'll have even more after this, but online master's degrees are another matter. You're dealing with a more mature student, a student who probably has a job or some other employment and wants to do another degree in master's degrees in this country becoming more and more important and wants to do it in a way that's convenient to them at their pace and so do it online. There's no doubt that that is a really important marketplace. And that's probably a place where the commercial sector may be able to have more of an impact than I think they've had at the undergraduate level. So I'm acutely aware that I could keep asking you questions coming off this feed for the rest of the day. And I want to thank everyone who keeps submitting questions because I can't ask as fast as you can type at them. And I'm also aware that we only have about 10 minutes left in this panel. So I wanted to move us to a little bit of kind of forward looking. So if we had the kind of where we were six months ago, where we are today looking forward, I'm wondering for each one of you, and I'm going to start with you, Michael, and then Lily, then Brian, what's the one thing you're going to do differently as a leader coming out of this period and the one thing you're going to do differently as a human being? Because I'm aware sometimes our leadership roles and our human roles are slightly different. So the two things you're going to carry forward, one as a leader and one as a human, after where we've been. And I'm acutely aware for you, Michael, that America is still very much roiled with both COVID-19 and a very complicated conversation about race and politics and policing. So I'm aware you are in the eye of all of that too. So with those things in mind, what are the two things for you that you do differently now moving forward? I may not be quite answering the question of the way you put it, but one of the things that is very much on my mind at the moment grows directly out of the pandemic itself. And I have worked very closely with the deans of our various health sciences schools and our epidemiologists and neurologists and so on as we've sought to map out the parameters of our response here. And one thing that's become abundantly clear is that in some ways we've been very, very lucky that this hasn't happened before. It's happened at a time when the quality of molecular biology worldwide is extraordinarily good. And I just read today, Dr. Tony Fauci, who's been very cautious about the things he said Dr. Fauci said today that he believes that there's a good chance that we are vaccine by the end of this year. Now he's brought that forward because before that it was gonna be well into next year and so on. And that's I think a comment on the power of the whole health sciences enterprise worldwide that has been brought, this massive power that's been brought to bear on this. But you just think of the last 10 years we've had roughly 10, 15 years we've had H1N1, Zika, Ms. SARS and Ebola, which have been contained at all of which you've had a band influence. And I think that this has got to be the definitive wake-up call. And certainly in the United States, a lot of us are talking about the need for some kind of Manhattan project, moonshot in virology that actually provides the country with the capability of being able to react coherently to future pandemics because most virologists will tell you there will be another one and maybe next time it could be a lot worse. So in a university with a very large health sciences, we have the biggest medical school in the United States in a university with a very big health sciences operation. I see it as being vital for us and I'll certainly play my role and try to play my role in it in helping to sort of lead the efforts to build up some kind of national effort in this area to do our part to ensure that if this happens again or when this happens again, we're better prepared to deal with it and address it. As to personally, I'll simply say that since I've been in my study in my house at the moment, I've been here with only a few times out for about 10 weeks. My wife and I had this seizure that during the day we've had lunch together nearly every day. It's been wonderful and we think it is a very good sign for our retirement that we'll be able to have lunch together and enjoy it. That's an excellent learning for both of you. Lily? So I'll keep my responsibility brief for me. It's really recognizing that what the community, the university community needs at this point in time is the leader who is a human being. And that has come through very, very clearly that it has been a rallying point for people to come together. It has been a time when the community has looked for an empathetic listening leader who is authentic and the communication is so very important and the means of communication is so very important and there is probably no such thing as over communication at a time like this, perhaps. And that's the one thing that I've taken away from this that people are waiting to hear from you and want to hear in particular ways in not just in the message, but in the tone of the message. And I think that's something that I've learned very importantly. And I think it's going to be something that is going to recur again and again with whether it's another virus or touch wood, a terrorist attack, people are looking for that human being in a leader. Thank you. Brian, I'm going to give you the last word but I'm going to add one layer of complexity onto it because of course we are mostly broadcasting from our home territory. You know that there are many ANU people on the line asking you questions, wouldn't surprise you. We have a student who wants to know what the future of life in the dormitories would be. So I think in wrapping up the what you've, what you plan to do differently and what you will do differently both as a leader and as a human. I think there's a question in there from Michael Yee about what does it mean to think about being a student on campus and being in the residences and what the future of the ANU that way is. And if you want to take that as your final thought, I would be grateful. All right, so Lily sort of stole a little what I was going to say, which is communication. I did an all staff meeting. We had 1150 people come in on it. It was remarkable. It's highly civilized, people ask questions and you can really go through and have a conversation. And so those used to be sort of a once a year activity for them. So as a leader, we can do those once a month. And you know, my entire life is about trying to be open and transparent and try to people understand at least why I make decisions even though they don't like them. And that is important. The other thing that's really been opened up that I think is important is flexibility. A lot of people are working at home flexibly and are probably more productive and happier and other people are less productive and less happy. But the point is, I did commit earlier this year before COVID-19 to a flexible workplace. And that's one of the things that sped up is people have realized, wow, they can work a day a week at home and maybe get stuff done. And my wife has been working a day a week at home as an economist for our Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, very successful. And she gets stuff done in a way that is different at home. You can actually think and you don't get interrupted all the time. So I'm hoping we can keep that for my entire workforce and including myself. I'm probably for the foreseeable future we'll spend a day at home precisely because it allows me to get things done in a slightly different way. Travel, I'm probably never gonna look at travel again. I mean, I've done a lot of trips, 10, 12, 13 international trips a year. I think I'm gonna do less. I think we can do it this way. And it's just easier on me and it's definitely easier on the planet. So I think that's gonna be a big change. And it doesn't mean I'm not gonna do some trips but the trips are gonna be very specific for reasons I have to be there in person. Not just to fall it off, if you're not there in person, you're irrelevant. And so I think there is a change. And if I look about my highly communal university, it is a place that people are gonna be able to come and my students when they come to the residences in the short term, it's gonna be pretty regimented which is four square meters per person. It's gonna have to have a little bit more, this is the time you get to use the kitchen. When you come walking through campus, you're not gonna get to go in and just sloppily interact with everyone which is I'm looking forward to in the future but right now we can't do it. But what do I see for a year from now? I want people to work flexibly but I want them to come into work because it's a great place to come. I want the students to interact with campus not like what they used to but even more so, more interaction but make the interactions interesting, high quality and unique. So that's what I'm focusing on. Those are glorious hopes for the future. And I wanted to pause here and thank Brian and Lily and Michael and to acknowledge that they have told us stories from places that are probably quite far from where you are logged on and listening to this. And I wanted to thank you for talking to us about where you've been and sharing a little bit about what it's been like in Singapore and in Indiana in the US and a little bit from the ANU. And I wanted to thank all three of you for bringing your incredible expertise to bear here. And I also wanted to acknowledge the extraordinary number of people who asked really smart questions and I'm sorry I couldn't answer or ask all of them for you. My suspicion is if you track down any one of these people's email addresses they will answer them. I'm not gonna give you their email addresses. It's a basically imagine it's a threshold test. What I am gonna close by saying is two things though. This discussion was recorded and it will be available for viewing on ANU TV on YouTube. And we had as the chancellor said at the beginning a number of other sessions like this coming up in the rest of the month. So if you want to be listening to conversations about global public health, Asia in the Pacific region, climate change and how we think about the world order and international relations more broadly. All things I think you heard from our three amazing people here today. Those will be forthcoming in the rest of the month. So you can log in and join us in those conversations. And in the meantime, I wanna thank you all for joining us today and hope that wherever you find yourself you stay safe and also stay engaged.