 Every few years, like clockwork, you see something big coming out of Dallas. Usually, Paul Quinn College is associated with national headlines when everything from philanthropy to community outreach and academic engagement and development for its students. And we are privileged to be joined this evening by president of Paul Quinn, Dr. Michael Sorrell and Amanda Washington. She is the director of the, and I want to make sure I get this right, the Global Urban Work College Network. So, ladies and gentlemen, thank you so much for joining us this evening. Thank you, brother. It's always good to be with you. Everybody's on parent duty. We see Mr. President in the car at track practice. I just put some babies down. Dr. Washington just put some folks down. So if you hear some children crying, it's one of the three of us. Mike's is older than I think he is, so we're good. What I will start off with saying, Doc, first, you know, a big celebration on campus this previous week, you're unveiling new construction. You're unveiling new programming. All kinds of things happen with your donor network, as usual, the Dallas Symphony Orchestra is in the house. What is it what is it like for the community to see a true evolution of an institution that is in its own right for as much growth as you've had is still growing exponentially is Dallas, you know, in lockstep with the way that you guys move and the kinds of celebration and the kinds of achievements that you make. And are they just all bought in at this point? Oh, I think so. I think, you know, what happened for us is we took a different approach to the pandemic, and that's not unusual. I mean, you know, you've been covering us for 14, 15 years. We take a different approach to everything. And we thought about the pandemic, you know, if we if we're reading this correctly, we don't think we can do the job we want to do. Keep our students safe the way we would like it to stay. If we bring them back before there's a vaccine. And so we thought about it proactively and said, if we were to have students for 15 months, what could we become? And we thought, let's remake the entire school. Now, you know, to your point about Dallas, Dallas has become welcome to us pushing them, expecting us to do different things. And we're entering a phase now where Dallas is fully bought in. We're seeing partnership opportunities coming at us with a level of intensity that we haven't seen before. Now, some of that is because the era that we are in now, right? Like it's become cool to engage with HBCUs. That's all across country. So, so the difficult supper was caused it. But what I can tell you is that when people showed up on our campus last week and realized everything that we had done in 15 months, right? We've finished two new buildings, the first new buildings and literally 50 years on the campus. We've added two schools, a K-12 network with the K-12 school. And then Dallas Independent School District put a school international baccalaureate academy from 6th-12th grade on the campus. We added three new majors, a graduate program that to hedge our bets so that the Lord would be pleased with us. We partnered with Bishop T.D. Jakes to do that. We tried to create and build out our whole global urban college network and we added our first partner institution to that. You know, we've done all the infrastructure. We've built on campus some construction going on. And the best part to me of all, we're even fixing the creek on campus and turning that into a water section. But the best part about this for us is that with the exception of the dorm everything is paid for. So the new project had we pay roughly about $20 million for the new dorm, new residence hall. I want to make sure that my student life people don't come get me. The new residence hall and the new health and wellness center. All what we have left is around six and a half, seven million dollars of debt service to pay on that. And that's the only debt that we have at the institution. Ms. Washer, you talked about the build out of some of that program and in the work college model. We know that PQC is the first historically black with the institution with that model and has pioneered it successfully. So what does that look like from a from a drilled down perspective of, you know, the institution kind of pioneering what this looks like in a historically black context and then larger when you think about what the nation is going to need post pandemic in terms of students affording, affording college being more prepared to get jobs that are becoming constricted in how much, you know, how many people can get a job and what kind of skills they'll need. What does that look like at the short and big, big picture as it relates to Paul Quinn's success with it? Yeah, so nationally, what we know is that after graduation, about 53 percent of college graduates are either unable to immediately find a job or a job within their, you know, their chosen major or their chosen field. And so for us, this means that we directly address the need for students who have historically been underprivileged, whether it be through cycles of generational poverty, whether it be through under exposure or, you know, the both of these. So for us, that really means that we're exposing our students before they even graduate, before they're out of the door of Paul Quinn College to jobs that directly align with their majors, with their fields of study and fields of interest. And not only that, but we expose them to fields and to jobs, to corporations, to people that they might not have been exposed to otherwise, just given what we know historically about the demographic of student that we are working with at Paul Quinn College. So I think in real time, not only are we combating the idea of, you know, the impediment to professional and social mobility within corporate America, right outside of graduation. But we're also bringing students right to the jobs and the opportunities that we really think that they can fulfill and that they can excel in and combat generational poverty and after they graduate from Paul Quinn College. For both of you, do you think that there is an emerging strength in being a smaller institution? So for so many years, we've thought about colleges as economic anchors and you got to get big to make sure that you're doing your part to power an economy, to attract more students, to get more resources. But now we're seeing that, you know, fewer and fewer people are going to college every year. So activity is going to be at a premium because of what it's going to take to recover post pandemic. Is there a level of strength? And I would ask this to both of you in being smaller, in being 500,000, 1500 students and being able to have a hands on impact to, I guess, more effectively deploy resources. Is there an advantage to that? Oh, what I'll say about that is, you know, when we have always thought that there was an advantage to be small, we never thought large just for the sake of becoming large. What we did think, regardless of the size of your enrollment, you could have an outsized presence in your community. So, yes, we don't have a thousand students, but it's hard to find an institution, you know, especially in our area that does more for the community than we do. And, you know, we did a COVID-19 test in clinic where we tested something like 8,000 people. We did a food giveaway program all summer, gave away, I think it was 5,000 or 6,000 boxes of food, you know, thousands of gallons of milk. I mean, you know, we continue, like we've got two schools. How big an institution do you have? I challenge you to find anywhere, both inside the Historically Black College and University Spear and outside of it, to find a school with both a charter school on their campus, right? So student size doesn't have to meet like your lack of your modest student size doesn't mean that you have a modest impact. This is about what you design and how you implement your design. To impact the greatest number of people. Yeah, and I would echo that for what we're doing for the Global Urban War College Network. So we know that the traditional higher education model, though there might be many students in one school, just the way that it's set up, it does little to speak to the impediments and in turn the disparities that many students are traditionally facing within these institutions and within these environments. And so because Paul Quinn College is a smaller college, the way that I've heard it say, and as you tell me, if this is not how you feel about it, but because Paul Quinn College is a smaller college, there's more opportunity to be flexible, to be nimble, to try things, to see if it really fits and aligns with the needs of the students. And because Paul Quinn College has done that and has found in the work college program, in the flexibility of the ability to to instill and install the work college program, there's that opportunity to bring that to bear in other institutions as well that are very similar to Paul Quinn College, but, you know, have not been able to try some of the things that Paul Quinn College has tried and found success in with their student population. Let's talk about philanthropy real quick, Doc, because I think you and I have talked offline and several presidents have talked offline. This is a good opportunity for HBCUs, not that we're rich, but we are better than we were a year ago. Even under morbid tragic circumstances, the result is we're a little bit more stable than we were before. That's a good thing. But is it or can it be misleading when we think about what the what the earmarks are for that, what the decisions that revolve around that kind of stuff, the pressure that goes along with a McKenzie Scott, where you're always waiting around to see if you're going to be on the on the hit list for her. And you and you look at what you guys are doing and it hasn't gotten there yet. Is it are there are there drawbacks to even this being a propitious time for HBCUs? Oh, I think, you know, is we've been without for so long that we've developed a scarcity mindset. And so I look at it and you just say this, I'm so excited for the institutions that have received funding from McKenzie Scott, you know, many of those presidents I know, and I'm just like they're working hard. They're doing great things. And I celebrate that and I celebrate the way that they are able to take that and leverage it and make other things happen for themselves. Right? Like I think that's extraordinary. I look at it from our perspective, you know, we're not one of the institutions that have received that tap on the shoulder. But, okay, I mean, we're, we're just doing what we've always done, which is create game changing programs that challenge the under assumption of all of education. And what we have always known, and what we are starting to see candidly, is there is a significant number of people out there, starting to make sense with it. Right? Like, so we tried our attention outside the traditional philanthropic circle, a while ago. And, you know, we that we understood that it was going to take a minute for it to take root. And it is starting to take root now. And I love the sustainability of the model that we have. So I think, I think that if people are sitting around waiting, waiting, waiting, thinking, When is it our turn? When is it our turn? I would encourage them to just say, this is an incredibly liberating moment. What are things that we would love to do? And we probably were going to have a bit of a challenge selling before, let's go tell them now. Like, let's jump at it now, so that we can perhaps find people who want to be our allies, want to be our advocates. I think it's a great time. I think this will go out to be one of the very best times. But I think it's upon us to maximize this moment in creative ways. And then the final question for both of you, what does the future look like? So, you know, oftentimes we have these conversations, we I think that we're poised in our sector to see a lot of turnover with leadership. Because you've been through, you know, there are a couple of presents who've been long serving and they're they're on the tail end of a pandemic, and they're saying enough, I'm done. And then you got some political, I guess, cauldrons, I would say is the best way to put it. That are working a little bit harder than they have been in the future, because things are changing so rapidly. Are you are you optimistic about what's going on? And I mean, from a Paul Quinn perspective, from a work college network perspective, are you optimistic about your thing? And are you optimistic about higher education at large? Well, I would hope it was optimistic, because we just hired me to honest. Yeah, well, I mean, to that point, I was just hired, and I am very optimistic. As far as I know, there is absolutely no model within higher education that is like the global urban work college network that is using the activist model, really activist model of education to both identify and eradicate problems that have persisted in the demographic, you know, with the students that we're working with, with our partner institutions. I don't know of an institution that is doing this. I don't know of a network of institutions that is doing this. Let me backtrack as an HBCU graduate myself, I would say, our HBCUs have have been doing the work is said, you know, since their inception. So I'm not that's not to say that HBCUs are not doing the work of identifying and eradicating. I don't know that there is an intentional network that is being put to use to do this through the work college model that Paul Quinn College has found success in. And so that is to say, I am extremely excited. Like I said, I'm an HBCU graduate. So it's great to be back on an HBCU campus and with an HBCU community and with colleagues. And of course, I don't even have to say it goes without saying that President Sorrell is the best. So I'm excited for my position for, you know, for the college, and just for what's to come for Paul Quinn and for the network in general. Yeah, I have to tell you, Jerry, like, I'm super excited because one, what I always know is whatever we have going on right now, like, I got a couple other things in the bag, right? We'll even answer a question like this one. I think in order for you to be optimistic, you have to have a plan. And we have a great plan. But I do worry about not so much the HBCU sector, because, you know, let's be honest, we are in a period where some states that we typically reside in are about as politically oppressive as they have been in a long time. It's a syncing dynamic. On one hand, you you are doing things that certainly help and aid us. On the other hand, we are doing things directly and negatively impact the communities from which our students come, our people come, right? So it's really sort of a very sister way of doing it. Because, you know, I used to be in the crisis management business, and it reminds me of something that someone once taught me, and I said, you know, to really excel in this field to learn the art of smiling while you put a knife in someone's stomach, right? So that you are creating this cognitive dissonance where you are sitting there saying, I think I'm bleeding out. Why would someone be smiling at me while telling me, right? And so it's you have to be concerned because while the institutions may be having a dissonance moment, political pressure, our political influence is being threatened, our ability to elect people who, you know, represent our communities being threatened. So as a sector, an HBCU sector as a higher education sector, this is actually the moment where we should be finding our sea legs and using our voices and rising up, right? Because if we don't do that, like, let's just be very, very candid. If the voter suppression laws take hold, if hunger doesn't pass something which prevents states from doing this, we have codified the ability of legislators to legitimize that's what's going on right now, right? If you can throw people out, throw people out, if you can, because you did not like that, then the essence of democracy, the essence of what has made this country who it is no longer exist. And if that protection is on, what about those of us who come from marginalized places that need at least some form of functioning government to protect our interests and our people, who we do. So I think higher ed needs to stand up quickly, forcefully, loudly and, you know, create an environment where we can protect. Because the other thing about, and I'll get off my soapbox, the other thing about this is America's K through 12 educational system is now defined by topics. The majority coming out of K through 12 schools in our country are coming from under-resourced communities. The entire South has over 50% of their students coming from low-income, poverty-informed communities. So if we don't fight for those individuals, what is to become of them? And newsflash, specifically, all those folks aren't black, right? So maybe this is the time that we build allies and really extend our impact on them.