Solutions for Higher Education with Southern Utah University President Scott L Wyatt: Recent Episodes
Southern Utah University
Solutions for Higher Education dives into hot topics in the world of colleges and universities. Sometimes it tackles controversies in education, sometimes it looks at current events, sometimes it's innovations and fun. Brought to you by Southern Utah University, but geared toward anyone with an interest in the subjects, episodes are hosted by SUU's President Scott L Wyatt and Professor Steve Meredith.
As he begins the transition to his new position as Senior Executive Director of State Online Education, President Scott L Wyatt reflects on his service at SUU and future opportunities.
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It has become so much a part of my identity and my whole life, along with my wife Kathy. It seems that being a president of a university is not a job, it's a lifestyle. It's every day, weekends, evenings... my whole life is consumed in Southern Utah University and it's been a spectacular time.
Scott L Wyatt, President, Southern Utah UniversityI hope that you, our listeners, have enjoyed this as much as we have. And because it's the last podcast in this form, I do hope that we quickly get back into the podcast in whatever version it is.
Scott L Wyatt, President, Southern Utah University
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President Scott L Wyatt and Solutions for Higher Education host Steve Meredith share a conversation with Dr. Frank Dooley, chancellor at Purdue University Global, focused on the non traditional students that are largely overlooked by higher education.
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I think that the biggest thing that has changed in the past year, I think the acceptance of online education has moved forward—and I mean by both faculty and by prospective students—has probably been moved forward a decade.
Dr. Frank Dooley, Chancellor - Purdue University Global...we're serving a set of students, when you look across the country, that largely have been ignored by higher education for a long time.
Dr. Frank Dooley, Chancellor - Purdue University Global
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Show Notes:President Scott L Wyatt and host Steve Meredith sit down with members of Southern Utah University’s faculty and staff to discuss how the University has adapted teaching and learning during the COVID-19 pandemic. Sylvia Bradshaw, Matt McKenzie, Johnny MacLean, Lynn Vartan, and Matt Weeg all share their perspective on the last year.
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I think all of these offices and probably all of the offices across campus have really learned a lesson in being nimble with the changing priorities as we’ve tried to address the challenges that…kind of the ever-changing challenges that have been confronting us. And I believe we’re going to take that nimbleness forward with us as we continue to be a leader in innovation across the USHE system and across the Intermountain West.
Johnny MacLean, Assistant Provost for Faculty Affairs, Southern Utah UniversityI tell you, the most exciting piece of it that came from this, we are now absolutely paperless. You can imagine a grants office and the amount of paper that was involved…we had already started making that transition and when the pandemic came along, that was beautiful. We have no more stacks of paper anywhere, it’s lovely.
Sylvia Bradshaw, Director of SPARC Office (Sponsored Programs, Agreements, Research, and Contracts)
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Show Notes:President Scott L Wyatt and host Steve Meredith speak with two members of the Southern Utah University Dance program. Danielle Sheather, assistant professor of dance, and Bailey Walker, a first year senior dance student, share they had a memorable year, despite the COVID-19 pandemic.
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. . . I think as artists, all of us are really enthralled by the unknown, at least I am. I think it’s exciting to discover new things, I do take the approach that I am forever a student. And so, I think learning about multimedia…I know a little, and just being thrust into a situation where you have to learn is exciting.
Danielle Sheather, Assistant Professor of Dance, Southern Utah UniversityAnd all of these things that we’ve learned from screen dance, I do think they can be applied to live dance and I think it will make creative works moving forward, especially for me and for my fellow choreographers from this last concert, I think we have a richer understanding of what dance can be.
Bailey Walker, Senior Dance Major, Southern Utah University
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Show Notes:President Scott L Wyatt and Solutions for Higher Education host Steve Meredith are joined by Peter Fuller, president of Workflow Academy. The trio discusses Workflow Academy and how it upscales students, preparing them for placement in cloud technology related careers.
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. . . a massive opportunity that I see, one that makes me try and partner with SUU and with other universities, I want to tap the immense talent pools that you’ve done such a good job of preparing. And the implicit message there is you’ve prepared them 80% of the way . . .
Peter Fuller, CEO The Workflow Academy. . . I worry that higher ed might not be fast enough to build the infrastructure necessary to teach people what we have to teach. Because, I’m not saying it’s going away, but the immediacy of the talent need is right now. We need to make solutions right now.”
Peter Fuller, CEO The Workflow Academy
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Show Notes:This week on Solutions for Higher Education, President Scott L Wyatt and Steve Meredith are joined by Seana Murray, business program manager and John O’Brien, chief technology officer, at Microsoft’s Mixed Reality Services. The group looks at how HoloLens is changing the landscape of virtual higher education and many other industries.
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And so, the new [Case Westen University] medical school is going completely holographic, and they have taught already a number of semesters doing holographic anatomy and cadaveric research. And if I remember correctly, they had decided at one point that approximately…their students are getting approximately 30% additional recall by learning anatomy via spatially contextual holograms versus flat textbooks. And so, that is a huge uptick in recall, and particularly since these are our future doctors.
Seana Murray, Business Program Manager, Microsoft Mixed Reality TeamThere are certain topics that it’s so much easier to teach and for people to appreciate if you can see it in three dimensions instead of on a screen or in a book—and I love reading, don’t get me wrong—but as human beings, we’re used to operating in a 3D world. We spot patterns and process information; our brains are geared to process information that way. And so, I think this is going to open up kind of a whole new frontier for history, for astronomy, for physics, for… you name it.
John O’Brien, Chief Technology Officer, Microsoft Mixed Reality Team
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Show Notes:President Scott L Wyatt and Steve Meredith welcome Aaron Osmond, Workforce Transformation Leader with Amazon Web Services and the Vice Chair of the Utah Board of Higher Education, the governing board that oversees Utah’s colleges and universities. The three discuss the technology industry, how they partner with higher education, and how students can obtain jobs in technology.
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Last year alone in the United States, there were 5.3 million open cloud jobs that were posted in the U.S. Of that, more than half of those jobs remained unfilled. We were not able to find students or existing industry professionals to fill those positions, and that problem is growing at a rate of 30% to 40% every year. There’s a huge skills gap.
Aaron Osmond - Amazon Web ServicesFirst of all, the technology industry is clearly sending signals around its frustration with higher education and the slowness and, frankly, the lack of level of preparedness of students graduating out of our education system across the country - not specific to Utah . . .
Aaron Osmond - Amazon Web Services
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Show Notes:In the first episode of the spring 2021 season, Southern Utah University President Scott L Wyatt and Solutions for Higher Education host Steve Meredith introduce this semester’s topic, Alternatives to Traditional Higher Education. The two discuss the upcoming season and begin to dive into the variety of options available for people outside of higher education.
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Show Notes:President Scott L Wyatt and Steve Meredith welcome Dr. Jon Anderson, Southern Utah University’s Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs. In this episode, the group discusses the role of shared governance in university strategic planning and how to engage faculty, staff, and students in the process.
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And so, [according to the American Association of University Professors] it is the president’s responsibility to innovate for the institution and to push that, and the question then becomes, ‘How is that best done?’ And as you mentioned, it’s best done not by one person putting out new ideas and everybody jumping in line. A lot of that work has to be coming to a shared understanding of the changes that need to happen, and not specific policy changes that I’m talking about, but the changes that are driven by environmental conditions that put the long-term sustainability of the institution at risk.
Jon Anderson - Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs, Southern Utah University. . . I’ll say in advance as we have this conversation that this work of shared governance is not efficient, and it is incredibly slow relative to dictatorship styles, and it is very time-consuming, but very healthy. And so, as we work through this, we’ve got to make sure that people who are engaging in it—and we’re asking, faculty, staff, everybody to engage in it—they have to know upfront it is going to take a lot of effort, it’s going to take a lot of time.
Jon Anderson - Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs, Southern Utah University
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Show Notes:President Scott L Wyatt and Steve Meredith sit down with Dr. Dave Woolstenhulme, Commissioner of Higher Education for the state of Utah, to discuss the structure of higher education in Utah and recent shifts that have been made.
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I think we're going to have some real efficiencies around how we operate and how we do things for backdoor operations of an institution. It won't change the front, what the student is going to see, but when you look at HR, you look at IT, you look at cybersecurity, you look at auditing, you look at all of these back room functions of an institution, and we're complicating that by doing it 16 different times throughout the state. If you're a business person, you sit back and go, 'There's got to be a more efficient and effective way that we could even provide better services than what we're currently providing.'
Dr. Dave Woolstenhulme, Utah State Commissioner of Higher EducationSo, I just think that is probably one of the most critical things we've got to get around is the competition thing. It's not a competition, it's what’s best for the student, and if they're better served at our friends across the street, let's walk them over there and make sure they're served there. And that hasn't happened in the past.
Dr. Dave Woolstenhulme, Utah State Commissioner of Higher Education
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Show Notes:President Scott L Wyatt and Steve Meredith are joined by the entire Solutions for Higher Education team. From recording to distribution, this week’s guests cover all the steps in the podcast’s production. Bailey Bowthorpe, Libby Meredith, Natasha Johnson, Lexi Carter, and Jill Whitaker join in to share their part of the process and their favorite episodes from the years.
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For those of our listeners at home that tune in regularly, they know that the 2020-21 academic year is going to be focused on us talking about ‘how the sausage gets made’ in Higher Ed. Looking behind the innovations that we have undertaken and seeing where they stand and what things have worked and what things haven’t worked. And today, in celebration of this, our 100th episode, we decided to talk about how the podcast sausage gets made.
Steve Meredith, Assistant VP of Enrollment Management for Graduate and Online Programs. . . this actually started as a means to try to communicate to the employees at the university some of the things that we're thinking about and answer questions and explore ideas. So, that's kind of how it started, and we started by bringing in faculty to talk about their research and innovations at the university and challenges that we face.
Scott Wyatt, President of SUU
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Show Notes:President Scott L Wyatt and Steve Meredith sit down with Rita Osborn, executive director of the Center for Rural Health to discuss Southern Utah University’s Rural Health Scholars Program. The program prepares students for graduate-level healthcare programs through academic and non-academic experiences.
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. . . the interesting message is you can have any major you want. You could be a music major and get to medical school. Many healthcare graduate programs appreciate that you diversified a lot of your undergrad experience exploring something that you’re passionate about. We have Spanish majors, psychology majors, nutrition majors, the whole gamut…business majors. So, as long as they're doing well in their sciences and achieve their science pre-reqs, then they’re fine.
Rita Osborn, Executive Director of the Center for Rural HealthMany of our students just don’t know that they’ve got what it takes to do this, and so we come from this with an asset-based approach. 'These are the things that you bring to the table, and if you truly have the passion to do this, you can.'
Rita Osborn, Executive Director of the Center for Rural Health
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Show Notes:President Scott L Wyatt and Steve Meredith sit down with SUU’s Dr. Eric Kirby, assistant vice president for student affairs and Ryan Bailey, coordinator of completion and student success. They discuss SUU’s main retention strategy, the Assistant Coaches for Excellence and Success (ACES), a peer mentoring program for first year students.
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. . . the ACES are basically the "one stop shop" for all incoming students, no ifs, ands, or buts about it. The ACE contacts their incoming student within 24 hours of that student 'depositing' at SUU and basically says that much. "I am your one stop shop; I am your end all and be all of anything you need. I may not know the answers, but I'm going to get you where you need to go."
Eric Kirby, SUU Assistant Vice President for Student Affairs. . . there's always been staff members, there's always been academic advisors, financial aid counselors, but this way, every student has another student where maybe they can ask the nitty-gritty questions, or, "You just did this last year, how did you combat tough roommates? Or asking somebody on a date? Or homesickness?" And they're getting feedback from someone who is in their own shoes which I think has been really successful.
Ryan Bailey, SUU Coordinator of Completion and Student Success
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Show Notes:President Scott Wyatt and Steve Meredith sit down with SUU’s Provost Jon Anderson to discuss SUU’s newest innovation: a $10,000 bachelor of general studies degree program. They discuss the promise of online student growth and how this new program offers yet another path for SUU students to succeed.
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. . . as we did our financial modeling, we settled on a price point of about $79 a credit, which would allow someone to enter SUU Speedway Campus and finish a full bachelor’s degree for under $10,000. I believe we’re the first institution in the intermountain west to offer a full bachelor’s degree for under $10,000. The Speedway Campus only offers one degree program and that is a Bachelor of General Studies, either a Bachelor of Science or a Bachelor of Arts in General Studies. It’s a list of about 40 courses the student can complete to get to 120 credits and they can do that entering in seven week sessions.
Dr. Jon Anderson, SUU ProvostI really, fundamentally believe that the broader the brand is, the more recognized the brand is, the more success that every modality will have. So, as people hear about SUU being successful in any one area, that begins to bleed over to lots of other areas and the whole institution begins to elevate. It’s true that the rising tide lifts all boats, and the same thing happens with the brand of an institution.
Dr. Jon Anderson, SUU Provost
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Show Notes:President Scott Wyatt and Steve Meredith meet with two leaders from Southwest Technical College, Tessa Douglas, director of Dual Enrollment and Placement Services, and Will Pierce, Vice President of Instruction. They discuss the innovative partnership between SUU and Southwest Tech and how the two entities have developed multiple pathways for students to take courses at both institutions.
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The SUU students who come [to STECH] all seem to have really positive feedback about their programs. They’re really excited that they have an option to do hands-on type learning in addition to their academic learning at SUU. A lot of the Southwest Tech students who have moved on to SUU, have been really, really grateful because they don’t necessarily think they would have gone to SUU otherwise...
Tessa Douglas, Director of Dual Enrollment and Placement Services - Southwest Technical College. . . we gathered faculty and administration at Southwest Tech and we said, “Let’s take a look at your [SUU’s] curriculum. Let’s pull together your syllabi, let’s pull together your…what textbooks you’re using, let’s get some examples of some of your assignments, some of your tests…. And we got all of that together, it was a monumental task.
Will Pierce, Vice President for Instruction - Southwest Technical College
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Show Notes:President Scott L Wyatt and Steve Meredith sit down with Tawny Hammond, National Director of Learning Advancement for Best Friends Animal Society and SUU's Melynda Thorpe, Executive Director of Community and Professional Development. They discuss the SUU & Best Friends Executive Leadership Certification, the nation’s first university-endorsed animal services leadership program for working professionals as well as the importance of obtaining higher education in animal welfare.
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. . . it really goes back to an alumni banquet that we had here on campus and SUU was recognizing Julie Castle, CEO of Best Friends who is an alumna. I happened to be there in the audience…I was at a table at the back of the room. I remember where I was sitting, I remember Julie standing up there and her saying the words articulating the goal of ending the killing of animals in shelters by the year 2025. And when you hear Julie speak, she's such a captivating speaker and person altogether, but that really resonated with me and I turned to the person next to me and said, 'I think we can help with that.'
Melynda Thorpe, Executive Director, SUU Community and Professional DevelopmentI think that our work with SUU has . . . made us better as an organization in that we're able to fulfill that goal of being a learning and leading organization in ending the killing of pets in our nation. It's given us a prestigious partner, an academic partner, a very logical partner when you look at geography.
Tawny Hammond, National Director of Learning Advancement, Best Friends Animal Society
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Show Notes:President Scott L Wyatt and Steve Meredith talk with Ken Hall, SUU School of Business Associate Dean, about the overhaul and growth of the MBA program over the last few years. They discuss the importance of maintaining quality between face-to-face and online courses and how holding the same admissions standards for all students - regardless of how they take classes - has really strengthened the program.
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It’s nice to see the numbers grow, absolutely, there’s a lot of positives that come with growth, but one of the things that I think we’re most proud of is our admissions standards have stayed the same and the quality—especially the quality of our online classes—has increased during this time.
Ken Hall
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Show Notes:President Scott L Wyatt and Steve Meredith talk with SUU's Faculty Senate President Bill Heyborne about the Three Year Degree program. They discuss the initial concept, the ripple effect it had on campus - specifically among faculty members - and how authentic communication and using the brilliant minds available made the program setup a success.
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After you approached me about participating in this podcast, I started thinking about the things that have gone well, the things that haven’t gone so well, and as I thought about the things that haven’t gone so well from the faculty perspective, I then started thinking, “Well, what is it that these things all have in common? Why did they not go so well?” And the place where I’ve landed is: faculty are creatures of habit. And I don’t mean that in a derogatory way at all.
Bill HeyborneWhat impressed me and what I learned from this experience, is that all I had to do was say to you and your committee in the Faculty Senate, "Whatever you want to do is fine." [ . . . . what I learned is that those who care the most about something have to be in at the beginning, not reviewing proposals.
Soctt L Wyatt
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Show Notes:President Scott L Wyatt and Steve Meredith kick off the 2020-21 season by introducing this year’s podcast theme: Innovation in Higher Education: Lessons Learned. They preview some of the topics to be discussed, like the partnership between SUU and Southwest Technical College and SUU’s Three Year Degree program.
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We don’t give salary increases for people that are creative, we don’t give a bonus to anybody like that. But as you move up the ladder and get to the top, so you’re at the point where you can be the most creative and influence change the most, it seems like in the public sector, that you also tend to irritate more people. And, as we say in politics, “Friends come and go, but enemies accumulate.”
Scott L Wyatt. . . disruptions always lead an organization or a person into being better or worse at the end of the disruption. So, that’s…and the approach that we’ve tried to take as a university is we are going to be better at the end of this pandemic.”
Soctt L Wyatt
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Show Notes:Author Christopher Corbett joins the podcast today as we discuss his book The Poker Bride.
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Mark Twain talks about not writing about mankind, but writing about a man and I was very interested in putting a human face on an experience that we don’t know that much about, and that is the experience of the Chinese in the West and more particularly, of Chinese concubines in the West. And that’s how I found Polly Bemis, who was and is now and probably always will be known in Idaho as 'the Poker Bride.'
Christopher Corbett. . . when you’re looking at a story like Polly Bemis’, you really have to start at the end, not at the beginning. And the reason for that is quite simply that we know a great deal about Polly Bemis, and you’ve read the book, but we know a great deal about her because of the end of her life in the 1920s and ‘30s.
John M. Barry
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Show Notes:Author John M. Barry joins the podcast today as we discuss his book The Great Influenza and how relevant it is to the time we are living through right now.
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[The 1918] virus did go everywhere. The death toll is estimated at between 15 and 100 million people in a much smaller population. If you adjust for population, that would be equal to 220 to 440 million people today.
John M. Barry[In 1918] they created a propaganda arm called the Committee for Public Information. The architect for that committee said that, “There is nothing in experience that tells us truth is superior to falsehood. All that matters is the inspirational value.
John M. Barry
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Show Notes:President Scott L Wyatt and Steve Meredith are joined by Dave Shively to discuss his book The Pacific Alone, the second installment in the Summer Book Club series. They discuss Ed Gillet’s journey across the Pacific Ocean and Shively’s process for gathering all the details and writing this book.
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You just keep moving forward and if things get bad, take a break. Stop and eat, make camp, and then you get up the next day and you keep moving because you know that you’re more capable than you thought you were.
David Shively quoting Ed GilletWe expect comfort and all of our endeavors to be achieved with minimal effort. Yet, here is somebody who could have done the same experience, gone to Hawaii with minimal effort, but chose to take the absolute most difficult path.
David Shively
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Show Notes:President Scott L Wyatt and Steve Meredith are joined by SUU professors Dr. Daniel Hatch and Dr. Tyler Stillman to discuss the first book in the Summer Book Club: Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl. They discuss their interpretations of the meaning of life, the importance of relationships with others and being honest with yourself, and speculate about Viktor Frankl’s motivation in writing this book.
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It did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us. We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life—daily and hourly. Our answer must consist, not in talk and meditation, but in right action and in right conduct. Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual.
Viktor FranklA human being is not one in pursuit of happiness but rather in search of a reason to become happy, last but not least, through actualizing the potential meaning inherent and dormant in the given situation.
Viktor Frankl
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Show Notes:As part of the podcast series Solutions for Higher Education, SUU President Scott L Wyatt will lead a “Summer Reading Club” focusing on a new book each month. Readers who join the podcast will be given an introduction to the book by Scott Wyatt and podcast host Steve Meredith, who will be joined by an expert guest to give additional insight and context to the completed reading.
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. . . We've put together an interesting collection of books that we hope are all relevant to the time that we're in. And some of the books are new, some are old, some are really deeply thoughtful and some are just fun. But we think that it’s going to be a good group of books. And they’re all from kind of a different genre.
Scott L Wyatt, SUU PresidentWell, and it’s a good time to be reading books. So, people are always asking us, "What are we doing with our time?" And the answer is usually, "We’re actually working harder than we were last summer."
Scott L Wyatt, SUU President
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Show Notes:President Scott L Wyatt and Steve Meredith sit 6 feet apart and discuss SUU and COVID-19, how the coronavirus has impacted Southern Utah University and higher education.
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This generation that has been sometimes accused of being overly socially engaged on technology and not socially enough engaged face-to-face . . . is the most well-equipped generation of all time to be able to handle a pandemic like this.
Scott L Wyatt, SUU PresidentIt reminds me that of all the things that we’re trying to teach, the character is probably the supreme. We’re trying to help people develop grit, the ability to face change, to adjust their lives.
Scott L Wyatt, SUU President
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Show Notes:President Scott L Wyatt and Steve Meredith are joined by Beth McMurtrie, senior writer for The Chronicle for Higher Education. They discuss McMurtrie's article "Fixing the Courses that Everybody Loves to Hate" and how the student success movement has adjusted in light of Generation Z students flooding college campuses.
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This generation, Gen Z they call it, is an interesting one. They're quite practical, they're kind of skeptical, they’re very comfortable with being self-taught, they learn a lot of stuff from YouTube and other means, they don’t necessarily assume the teacher has all of the answers. So, they kind of…they're challenging them in a way saying, "Explain to me why I should care." And I think a good teacher should be able to do that, right? They should be able to stop and say, "This stuff does matter."
Beth McMurtrie, The Chronicle of Higher EducationSomebody called what happens in the classroom a donut hole in the student success movement. People talk about nudges, they talk about chatbots, they talk about all sorts of things outside of the classroom that might keep students in college, but they don’t really talk about the core of their experience which is what happens in the classroom day in and day out. What are you learning? Do you feel engaged? Do you feel connected? Do you feel like you belong? Do you feel like you’re learning how to do college?
Beth McMurtrie, The Chronicle of Higher Education
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Show Notes:Sophia Laderman from the State Higher Education Executive Offices Association joins the podcast this week to discuss the funding of higher education and how it has impacted tuition over the years.
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. . . if we go all the way back to 1980, funding was a lot higher, several thousand dollars per student higher. So, that means your average student at a public institution was getting a lot more state money for their education. And so, as state funding has gone down, tuition revenue has gone up and I think that’s what ends up in the news most often is increases in tuition rates that affect students . . .
Sophia Laderman, SHEEO. . . there’s all this talk of a recession coming up, so with the next recession, it looks like funding will probably decline even further and that’s definitely concerning because . . . we might be at the point where we can’t really raise tuition anymore without pricing students out of the market and so it seems like there’s a big crunch coming up for the financing of higher education.
Sophia Laderman, SHEEO
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Show Notes:This week on the podcast we talk with Madeleine Rhyneer from Richmond, Virginia where she is the Vice President for Consulting and Dean of Enrollment Services at EAB. She recently had an article published entitled "No, Your College is Not An Exception" in the Chronicle of Higher Education and we just had to discuss that with her.
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One of the things that I've been challenging people with . . . in the last few months is to ask . . . , "What's your elevator pitch?" Which is the business way of saying, "What's the 20-second introduction to your university to a person who really doesn’t know you at all?" And most people sort of look at me like, "Oh my goodness." Or they'll go to, "Well, we're really friendly" or "We're small." And I'm like, "OK, friendly is pretty much table stakes in any kind of market where you're serving people and small is not a point of distinction at all.
Madeleine Rhyneer, EABI feel like it's important to have honest conversations and sometimes they end up being pretty direct conversations to say, "Actually, to the public, we all do more or less the same thing, and we do it more or less close to them, more or less well or not-well, more or less online or in a virtual format." And that the traditional, 'If we build it because we're here, they will come,' that just isn't working anymore.
Madeleine Rhyneer, EAB
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Show Notes:President Scott L Wyatt and Steve Meredith sit down with Rachel Fishman, Deputy Director for Research at the Higher Education Initiative with New America, to discuss the perceptions of higher education, including affordability, quality, and return on investment.
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. . . overwhelmingly people think [higher education is] not fine the way it is. We do ask a follow-up question to this that’s open ended that’s like, “Well, why do you feel that way?” And the overwhelming response is cost and affordability, which I think makes a lot of sense, especially given everything that we’ve basically seen in the news for the past four or five years where there’s a constant talk about student loan debt, how it’s 1.5-1.6 trillion dollars, what that means for a generation of students who now have debt and what that means for millennials and Generation Z mobility.
Rachel Fishman, Higher Education Initiative with New America. . . never before have students been this invested in their education by having to borrow loans or having to front their own earnings or their parents’ earnings to help pay for it. And so, more people are in higher education than ever before and more are looking to see a serious return on investment because they’re making a serious investment of their own money.
Rachel Fishman, Higher Education Initiative with New America
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Show Notes:We've invited Barbara Brittingham, the President of the New England Commission on Higher Education, to discuss what the downturn in higher ed enrollment is doing from an accreditation standpoint.
Featured Quotes:
. . . one of the things that the commission has seen (and Vermont is an excellent example of this unfortunately), is that when a small college closes, it is obviously very hard on the students and the faculty and the staff who work there, it's difficult for the alums, but it’s also very difficult for the local community because they have their campus that was a major employer in town, often it was a cultural center and has athletic facilities available to the community often and provided a lot of activity for the small businesses in town and the practitioners in town.
Barbara Brittingham, New England Commission on Higher EducationMy predecessor used to say that ‘most [governing] boards want good news and a good meal.’ And I think a good meal is still possible, but I don’t know if the news is going to be good.
Barbara Brittingham, New England Commission on Higher Education
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Show Notes:Michael Osborn, VP & Senior Analyst with Moody’s Investors Service, joins us this week to discuss the credit worthiness, financial liability, and growth projections of higher education.
Featured Quotes:
And I would say, while we moved it (the credit outlook for higher education) to stable, it’s not that we think everything is substantially better and that the challenges are over. In fact, this report doesn’t shy away from many of the challenges that are facing the sector. It’s that we think that there is stability in this “new normal” of higher education . . .
Michael Osborn, Moody’s Investors Service…one thing that we’re looking at is a university’s program review assessment period. How often are they assessing or reviewing programs and what is the schematic for assessment and maybe taking programs offline, or adding programs?
Michael Osborn, Moody’s Investors Service
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Show Notes:President Scott L Wyatt and Steve Meredith sit down with Jon Boeckenstedt, vice provost for enrollment management at Oregon State University. They discuss the adjustments colleges need to make to stay alive over the next decade, including more transparency in pricing and reducing barriers to admission.
Featured Quotes:
. . . there was a Gallup Poll just a few weeks ago that talked about the American public’s confidence in higher education and how important it was or is or isn’t and the number who said it was very important has fallen from 70% to 50% in just three or four years. So, I think people are becoming less willing to put forth and put out that much effort and that many resources for the education that they believe, I think, is largely a commodity anymore . . .
John Boeckenstedt, Oregon State University. . . we can kind of get by from year to year if everything external stays the same, but when those big things happen outside the university in society, or politics, or government, or economics, or just public perception, we’re not always well equipped to handle that dramatic, punctuated equilibrium.
John Boeckenstedt, Oregon State University
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Show Notes:In this week's episode of Solutions for Higher Education, our hosts discuss the difficult decision colleges face to close down with Stephanie Niles, VP for Enrollment and Communications at Ohio Wesleyan University and immediate past president for the National Association for College Admission Counseling.
Featured Quotes:
I think for an institution to not take stock, to not be willing to ask the hard questions, to not be willing to really take a look at itself…what it does well? Who it serves? Is there another population it should be serving? Are there opportunities being missed? Are there things the institution is doing, programs it’s delivering, that are not as effective, are not resonating and capturing the population needed? I think each and every…almost each and every institution is in a position now to have to really take stock of themselves and ask those tough questions. I know my institution is currently in a position of doing that.
Stephanie Niles, Ohio Wesleyan UniversityWe can’t think about just next year or just three years from now, but if we want to sustain the institution for 20, 30, 50 years and beyond, that’s going to be somewhat dependent on the decisions that we make now.
Stephanie Niles, Ohio Wesleyan University
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Show Notes:President Scott L Wyatt and Steve Meredith discuss the upcoming shift in enrollment numbers at universities and colleges with Nathan Grawe, professor of economics at Carleton College and author of Demographics and the Demand for Higher Education.
Featured Quotes:
[Because of the financial crisis of 2008] Young families decided that maybe it wasn’t the best time to have children and fertility rates declined and, in fact, they’ve continued to decline through at least 2018. And so, that means that about 18 years later, we can expect there to be a smaller population of prospective students for traditional-aged college. And the declines we’re talking about are significant. We’re talking 10% to 15% nationally and in some parts of the country, much steeper than that. So that no matter where you are in higher ed, we can expect that in the mid-2020s, we’re going to see a significant reversal. And so, we end up sharing some burdens together and yet having distinct paths at the same time.
Nathan Grawe, Carleton CollegeI wouldn’t be surprised to see many institutions . . . engaging more aggressively with merit aid and discounting. That kind of pressure can create pressure that goes upward. You might find that you compete well with another institution for a student in the current environment, but if you're competing with another institution that starts getting aggressive with discounting and offering financial aid, you may start losing students that you’ve become accustomed to winning.
Nathan Grawe, Carleton College
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Show Notes:President Scott L Wyatt and Steve Meredith are joined by Eric Kelderman, senior reporter for The Chronicle of Higher Education, to discuss enrollment projections in the United States over the next ten years. They discuss the growth SUU has seen and the rippling impact decreasing enrollments will have on surrounding businesses, especially in communities where universities are the main economic driver.
Featured Quotes:
We anticipate that there are going to be winners and losers. The small, non-selective privates are probably the most endangered and we’ve seen several of those close in recent years. As you mentioned, I think the flagships typically tend to feel like they’re buffered from this a little bit and that may be the case and certainly the most selective privates, the Ivies, the Stanfords, places like that, are expected to continue to attract a significant amount of interest and applications to maintain their classes. And then further down the line we’ll see institutions like yours, sort of what we call typically comprehensive regionals. And we’ve seen a number of strategies that institutions around the countries have used to sort of try and ameliorate or stave off some of these challenges.
Eric Kelderman, The Chronicle of Higher EducationIn Utah alone since 2000, if you average the tuition cost from all of the universities in Utah, the public ones…and we’re affordable. Utah is like the second most affordable tuition rate in the whole country, but even in Utah, tuition and fees have climbed 216% since the year 2000. And during that time, general inflation has only increased by 48%. People are considering this.
Scott L Wyatt, Southern Utah University
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Show Notes:Today on the show we talk with Lee Gardner, senior writer for The Chronicle of Higher Education about the special report from The Chronicle for Higher Education entitled, "The Looming Enrollment Crisis." Gardner wrote the article "Weather the Storm" in the special report and today we're talking with him on the topic.
Featured Quotes:
Higher education is dealing with a lot of different issues and some of them are very thorny and difficult, but I don't think that any one of them feels as immediate for a lot of institutions as their worries about their enrollment. That’s critical to the enterprise for private institutions and especially now that state support is not what it once was, it's critical for public institutions.
Lee Gardner, The Chronicle of Higher EducationAs we sometimes talk about in The Chronicle newsroom, ‘What can we stop doing?’ Because if you just keep adding things that you offer and adding things that you do and you don’t similarly expand your ability to do those things, then at a certain point, it's unsustainable.
Lee Gardner, The Chronicle of Higher Education
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Show Notes:President Wyatt and Steve Meredith are joined by SUU's VP for Advancement & Enrollment Management Stuart Jones. They discuss the impending enrollment crisis all colleges and universities are facing and talk through a few of the ways Southern Utah University is combating that enrollment drop.
Featured Quotes:
Well, as we go forward from here, one of the things that we need to be very aware of is that the enrollment challenges that universities and colleges around the country are facing may come to us. It’s just that Utah is a little bit behind everyone else in the declining of students coming to college because we’ve had a higher birth rate than many other places and because of the economic activity in Utah, primarily in the center of the population, the Wasatch Front, a lot of economic growth up there. But our birth rate dropped in 2008 like everybody else’s and we’re going to see some changes in 2026. And so, part of this growth strategy is to have a running head start when we know that the inevitable disruptions are going to occur in about six years.
Scott Wyatt, SUU President. . . I think the most important thing that we did [at SUU] is made enrollment our focus. I love what Warren Buffet says, he and Bill Gates were asked what the key to their success was and they both said the same thing—focus. That you cannot do everything but you can do virtually anything if you really set your mind to it.
Stuart Jones, SUU Vice President for Advancement and Enrollment Management
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Show Notes:President Scott L Wyatt and Steve Meredith are joined by Dustin Hansen, Sr. Creative Director at Electronic Arts, to discuss game design and game theory and how video games relate to learning opportunities and educational growth.
Featured Quotes:
. . . if I’m being really honest, my approach to education kind of follows my approach to game theory which is you have to let people experiment. You have to let somebody fail, and I was in a teaching, an art teaching position, one of the hardest things for any artist and I’m sure Steve will fit with this too because it crosses over to music very well, is artists are told to find their voice. What’s the unique thing that you can do to find your voice? And it just absolutely stifles people. It stops them in their tracks. So, my theory to that is the only way to find your voice is to fail at trying to be somebody else.
Dustin Hansen, Electronic ArtsSo, when we’re asking people to really pause and understand language and we can’t truly speak their language—and I’m speaking as a game designer, not as an educator but I think there are some similarities there—when we’re asking them to speak in a language that we have defined, as a game designer, there’s a high, high correlation with failure there. But when you allow them to speak in their own experiences, that failure and that learning goes up dramatically.
Dustin Hansen, Electronic Arts
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Show Notes:It’s Thanksgiving week and our podcast hosts dive into the history of this important American holiday, including the pilgrimage to America, religious persecution, Plymouth Rock, and the meal that started the strong tradition of turkey, mashed potatoes, and pumpkin pie each November.
Featured Quotes:
So, here is the teaser for Thanksgiving dinner. When you show up for Thanksgiving dinner and they family is all gathered around, you ask, ‘Why did the Pilgrims come to America? To get to the other side.’ No, the actual answer is sort of to escape the Dutch. So, yes, absolutely they were seeking religious freedom, and they found it in Holland, but they couldn’t live an English village lifestyle in Holland. So . . . they were actually escaping the Dutch, not gaining religious freedom. I just think that’s such a fun little twist on the story.
Scott L Wyatt, Southern Utah University PresidentThis is what they probably had. They certainly grew corn, so they had corn. They had squash, they grew beans, they had barley, peas, they would have undoubtedly had ducks and geese and wild turkeys. A lot of fish, so they probably had bass and blue fish and cod. Because they had a crop of barley, they had beer that they were able to brew. No forks or spoons, they would have eaten with knives and fingers. But that’s the first Thanksgiving dinner.
Scott L Wyatt, Southern Utah University President
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Show Notes:In this week’s episode, President Wyatt and Scott Meredith spend some time with Stephen Lisonbee, SUU’s Executive Director of Regional Services. They discuss the Utah Legislature’s focus on training the rising generations to fill technical and skill-heavy jobs, such as engineering, medicine, business and education.
Featured Quotes:
I began working at a young age and by the time I graduated high school had four or five jobs. And those jobs taught me several skills that put me in a position where I understood how to work in the workforce. And currently, because of the recession we went through, a lot of our youth that are now coming into education missed those opportunities because they were filled by other adults and others. So, they’re needing to learn some of those skills and they might be starting their engagement to industry a little later, but we’re now kind of adjusting that. So, it’s interesting to see how important these jobs are for our students. Probably more so now than they once were.
Stephen Lisonbee, Executive Director of Regional Services at SUUI was getting off of an airplane the other day and somebody complained to me about the Utah Legislature and I said, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.” We are receiving 50% of our funding from the Utah Legislature. There’s no state that I’m aware of that even come close to that . . . And that support comes to us for the real career-focused kinds of…the things that we think are career-focused like engineering and the medical careers and business and education, but it also comes to us for all of the humanities and arts and everything else.
Scott L Wyatt, Southern Utah University President
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Show Notes:In a special Veteran’s Day episode, President Scott L Wyatt and Steve Meredith sit down with the SUU Veteran’s Resource and Support Center Director Amanda Keller and Executive Director of the Bryce Canyon Association Gayle Pollock to discuss the history of Veteran’s Day, what life can look like after service for veterans, and the resources for veterans in southern Utah.
Featured Quotes:
In great deeds something abides. On great fields something stays. Forms change and pass; bodies disappear, but spirits linger, to consecrate ground for the vision-place of souls. Generations that know us not and that we know not of, heart-drawn to see where and by whom great things were suffered and done for them, shall come to this deathless field to ponder and dream; And lo! the shadow of a mighty presence shall wrap them in its bosom, and the power of the vision pass into their souls.
Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, Union Brigadier General, US Civil WarSo, there are a lot of unique challenges that they [veterans] face . . . when they decide to come back to school. They change from a very structured and very rigid daily life to not so much structure. They sit in classrooms next to the traditional 18 year old. They have different world views, they have this rich knowledge that our traditional students don't have - - and some of that knowledge comes with a little bit of baggage.
Amanda Keller, Director - SUU Veterans Resource and Support Center
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Show Notes:President Scott L Wyatt and Steve Meredith sit down with Ryan Hagge from the American Academy of Innovation, and SUU’s own James Sage and Johnny MacLean, to discuss the balance between content and skills in project- and competency- based education.
Featured Quotes:
So, the classic example when people hear the word “project,” they automatically think “Science Fair” and that’s not really what we’re talking about here. The whole idea of project-based learning centers on student-led inquiry, research, and design. That means that you may pose this essential question, is what it’s called, this big question and then the student gets to really dictate the direction that they take that learning from there. And the question is such that it can’t be a Google answer, so, there’s no one side of the answer, there’s some current debate on the issue.
Ryan HaggeI think about my family and that they work in their profession for many, many years and they developed skills in management or account or all kinds of skills and there’s no mechanism for higher ed to award credit for those demonstrated skills. So, being able to assemble a portfolio, being able to apply standards and then map competencies to college credit…Is a really transformative thing for higher ed. It really is innovative.
James Sage
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Show Notes:President Scott L Wyatt and Steve Meredith sit down with John Louviere and Rene Eborn, AVP/Exec Dir for Academic & Instructional Services and SAVP for Strategic Initiatives at Utah State University, to discuss the innovative approach USU is taking to competency-based education, specifically with general education assessments and online course offerings.
Featured Quotes:
So, for instance, the student would register for English 1010 and . . . there’s a pre-assessment to see where they fall, and then there’s content and casing material that the faculty members have developed for these courses that the students then move through at different speeds and variables, and then they move into the next assessment and the next assessment on their own time during the term and they have that flexibility during the term. They can take the whole term to do it or they can do it in the first two weeks and the faculty member works with them individually to help them learn the materials and move through the course or to demonstrate their competence into the course.
Rene EbornI think that the students that are coming to us now are different students than they used to be and they are very consumer driven. They do a lot of research before they come and then a lot of our adult learners are looking for that flexibility as well. And so, yes, I think it’s very much market-driven in that regard.
Rene Eborn
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Show Notes:President Scott L Wyatt and Steve Meredith sit down with Paul Fain, writer for Inside Higher Ed, to discuss direct assessment, a type of competency-based education.
Featured Quotes:
I'm going to make a bold prediction here, but I think people should be watching competency-based education because I think the addition to kind of the growth of these programs and the kind of adopters who are trying this, that's one thing, but the underlying potentially transformative change to higher education on the whole, if it's more competency-focused, is enormous.
Paul Fain. . . it seems hard to believe that someone won’t figure this out in a really scalable way. And just even the interest politically, and it’s not just coming from one side, they’re trying to do things differently. I’ve got to feel like something is going to happen.
Paul Fain
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Show Notes:We're talking with Phyllis Hauptfeld with Academic Partnerships about SUU's plans to grow online degree offerings.
Featured Quotes:
. . . there’s no doubt that online is providing the kind of accessibility to students who are location-bound. I mean, the marketplace for your traditional students is about 3.5 million a year graduates. The adult learner, the online student, is 20-25 times that size.
Phyllis HauptfeldI think most people that work at universities would be surprised how many consultants help with different kinds of things . . . . the world has become so sophisticated and I can think of a whole list of consultants that we work with regularly.
Scott L Wyatt
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Show Notes:This episode we discuss SUU's plans to lower tuition costs for online-only students in an effort to make an education more accessible.
Featured Quotes:
The hypothetical full-time, face-to-face student shows up, it takes 120 credits to graduate, if that student takes 15 credits per semester over four years, that student is going to end up paying $29,000 tuition and fees, we’re not counting inflation, it’s just $29,000 to get a bachelor’s degree. Then, if we take the hypothetical average online student, this is a student who is taking 7 credits because that’s all she can take, she’s going to take 17 semesters to finish from start to finish. And at $2,500 per semester, she’s going to end up paying $43,000.
Scott L WyattThe driving motive [for SUU] is access and affordability, helping people move up. And as we have been talking about online, we’ve discovered that there are some challenges for online students to get in and get a degree, and one of those is cost.
Scott L Wyatt
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Show Notes:Dr. Megan Fromm, journalism teacher at Grand Junction High School, joins us on this week’s podcast to discuss the rethinking of general education requirements in education. Dr. Fromm penned the article “How We Could Radically Rethink the Core Curriculum in Higher Education” which the group references throughout the episode.
Featured Quotes:
I think we are most missing an interdisciplinary approach. I feel like we still have, and when I was writing this piece, I reference sort of this idea of, “What would a new core look like?” And I was looking at the core requirements, mostly at different Colorado Universities, and they’re still pretty siloed. You still have a class in humanities or history, you have a health and wellness, you have maybe government politics, and there just wasn’t a lot of crossover, and for students who are increasingly coming to universities looking for that specialization, it was hard for them to make connections.
Megan FrommThat very specific topic, the idea of the First Amendment, was honestly one of the most compelling reasons that I switched to high school because I...my experience at higher ed was very similar to that incident that you described just in terms of feeling like, “Oh man, we’ve got to do a better job of explaining what this means and the burden of free speech.
Megan Fromm
Links Associated with this Episode:* Transcript * Article: How We Could Radically Rethink the Core Curriculum in Higher Education
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Show Notes: President Scott L Wyatt and Steve Meredith talk with Julie Hartley and Greg Benson, Assistant Commissioners of Higher Education for Academic and Student Affairs in the state of Utah, about the delivery methods for general education and the various competencies gained through general ed courses.
Featured Quotes:
For a long time, higher education was kind of seen as a gatekeeper of sorts. Something for people of elite status to have access to and not other people. And the teaching model is often referred to as “face on the stage” where a very smart person is up at the front just spewing out information for the students and the smart ones will grasp it and move through the ranks and the others will drop out and along the sideline. And there’s been a major shift in higher education and pedagogical strategies to being more concerned about teaching methodologies and making sure that the students are actually grasping the materials and that the faculty are educating them as opposed to weeding them out.
*Julie Hartley *
Are General Education courses themed and structured to foster success? Or are they unnecessary obstacles for students?
Greg Benson
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Show Notes: This week's episode talks with student government leaders Jeff Carr and Chris Westwood. We learn what drew them to SUU, how they decided to get involved with student government, and more about who they are.
Featured Quotes:
And then when I got to the university, I took a political science class, and I was an acting major at the time, and it was just fascinating to me and it was something that really just kind of drew me in. I switched my major and I started kind of thinking more along those lines, and so, when the opportunity came to get involved in student government, it seemed like a really cool way to practice a lot of the principles that I had been learning.
Jeff Carr, SUU Student Body President
I went to Zion National Park just last weekend and I try and do a hike or tennis every week as much as I possibly can, and you would really miss that if you were just looking down at a screen. You’d kind of get a fake reality, I guess. Something that’s not really there. And students need to put down the phone sometimes and just look at what’s in front of them.
Chris Westwood
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Show Notes: Dr. Jean Boreen, dean of SUU’s College of Humanities and Social Sciences, joins President Scott L Wyatt and Steve Meredith this week for the last book in the Summer Book Club: Pride and Prejudice. They discuss the bridge Pride and Prejudice has built between classic literature and young adult literature and outline some of Jane Austen’s background as a successful author in the 1800s.
Featured Quote:
. . . there were women during the timeframe that Austen compared herself to who were being published, and I think in that way, she was very competitive and wanted to make sure that what she was writing could be held up against anything that was being written by any of these other female authors, as well as most of the male authors . . .
Jean Boreen, Dean of Humanities & Social Sciences, Southern Utah University
Links Associated with this Episode: * About the Summer Book Club series * Transcript
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Show Notes: Dr. Bryce Christensen joins President Scott L Wyatt and Steve Meredith this week for the third book in the Summer Book Club: Tao Te Ching.
The most translated book in the world after the Bible, the Tao Te Ching, or “Book of the Tao,” is a guide to cultivating a life of peace, serenity, and compassion. Through aphorisms and parable, it leads readers toward the Tao, or the “Way”: harmony with the life force of the universe. Traditionally attributed to Lao-tzu, a Chinese philosopher thought to have been a contemporary of Confucius, it is the essential text of Taoism, one of the three major religions of ancient China.
Featured Quote:
"I think we, Americans, even more broadly, Westerners in general, tend to be very agenda driven. We have things we want to do. And that can lead to what the British poet Elizabeth Jennings called, and I love her phrase, the phrase I’m about to quote, “A kind of tutored willfulness."
Bryce Christensen, Professor of English, Southern Utah University
Links Associated with this Episode: * Bryce Christensen - Faculty Website * About the Summer Book Club series * Transcript
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Show Notes: President Scott L Wyatt and Steve Meredith are joined by Dr. Joy Sterrantino to discuss the second book in the Summer Book Club: Hamlet. The trio discuss the upcoming performance of Hamlet by the Utah Shakespeare Festival, the complex relationships found within the story, and the overall themes woven into the story.
The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, often shortened to Hamlet, is a tragedy written by William Shakespeare sometime between 1599 and 1602. Set in Denmark, the play depicts Prince Hamlet and his revenge against his uncle, Claudius, who has murdered Hamlet's father in order to seize his throne and marry Hamlet's mother. Hamlet is Shakespeare's longest play and is considered among the most powerful and influential works of world literature. It was one of Shakespeare's most popular works during his lifetime and still ranks among his most performed.
Note: The Utah Shakespeare Festival will be performing Hamlet beginning June 8th and running through October 12th, 2019.
Featured Quote:
"It was not this haughty thing just for kings and queens, which I think there’s a misinterpretation that some people think that that’s what Shakespeare was about, but it wasn’t. "
Joy Sterrantino, Assistant Professor of English, Southern Utah University
Links Associated with this Episode: * Joy Sterrantino - Faculty Website * About the Summer Book Club series * Transcript
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Show Notes: President Scott L Wyatt and Steve Meredith are joined by Dr. Kyle Bishop to discuss the first book in the Summer Book Club: The Underground Railroad. The trio discuss the metaphor of the railroad, break down the motives of the main characters, and identify the learning outcomes from the book.
The Underground Railroad, published in 2016, is the sixth novel by American author Colson Whitehead. The alternate history novel tells the story of Cora and Caesar, two slaves in the southeastern United States during the 19th century, who make a bid for freedom from their Georgia plantations by following the Underground Railroad, which the novel depicts as primarily a rail transport system in addition to a series of safe houses and secret routes. The Underground Railroad was a critical and commercial success, hitting the best seller lists and winning several notable prizes.
Featured Quote:
"Her fate is tremendously ambiguous. And that's one thing that frustrates a lot of people with more modernist or post-modernist writing is it’s the ambiguity. Author’s love the ambiguity because we don't really know when this story takes place. We don't really know if this is an alternative history where there was no Civil War or if this is pre-Civil War because it’s…my students noticed that it reads like a dystopia. It reads like a post-apocalyptic narrative in a lot of ways."
Kyle Bishop, Professor of English, Southern Utah University
Links Associated with this Episode: * Kyle Bishop - SUU Experts Directory * The Underground Railroad * About the Summer Book Club series
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Quotes:
(referencing Tao Te Ching): If you’re going to only read one book that’s from the Chinese culture in your life, this might be the one. This might be it. ~ Scott Wyatt
I actually have a sweater, I shouldn’t say this, but I actually have a sweater that says, “Don’t bother me, I’m watching a Hallmark movie.” ~ Steve Meredith
Full Transcript:[https://www.suu.edu/presidentspodcast/57/] (https://www.suu.edu/presidentspodcast/57/)
Featured Quotes:
"Rather than being reactive and, as you described earlier, and wait in our offices for students to come to us with questions, instead, we are encouraging our advisors to be very proactive to identify those students who may be at risk for not persisting on campus or may have life struggles and going to them to see what they can do to help that student be successful. Very different model. To get to that point, we’ve had to arm our advisors to with a tremendous amount of data on each of our students, we’ve had to give them permission to do things differently . . . "
~ Jared Tippets
". . . we have a mantra by which we live and operate, and that is that we will make decisions about how we spend our time and our money and the way we approach our jobs based on 1) “What’s best for students,” 2) “What’s best for the university,” 3) “What’s best for the department or the unit or my office,” and 4) “What’s best for me”. What we see across higher education is that oftentimes, people are making decisions in the reverse order, based on 1) “What’s best for me and my career?”"
~ Jared Tippets
Full Transcript
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"Clemson is a lovely campus, but we’re not in the middle of a metropolitan area, so, students would have to miss some class if they wanted to gain any work experience while they were going to class.” And I was like, “That’s a terrific idea. It’s going to give students a chance to kind of peek behind the curtain to see what goes on at the university behind closed doors, it’s going to give them a chance to earn a little bit of money to defray some educational expenses, certainly boost their resume, it’s just a win-win all across the board.”
~ Neil Burton, Clemson University.
Full Transcript
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“And so, at a time when I’m sure you’re aware that the news isn’t great around the world, there’s a lot of challenges, certainly a lot of issues around economic mobility, the idea that the American dream indeed is not dead and that there are great institutions that are promoting this economic ascent is really heartening.”
- Jeff Gold, Assistant Vice Chancellor for Student Success Strategic Initiatives at the California State University System
Full Transcript
Featured Quote:
"So, I’ve got an Environmental Field Studies class I teach in the fall and what we do is we go out and I get a project from one of the local agencies like Montana Fish Wildlife and Parks and so, for example, we’ve been working on the grayling in the Upper Big Hole. Grayling are down to about 1,000 due to mostly habitat destruction related to bad ranching practices . . . So, what I do is I go to the land managers and say, “OK, what do you guys want…what do you need done?” And so, we went up onto the Big Hole valley up on the Big Hole Rivers about 40 minutes from campus and I leave at 8:00 or 8:15 in the morning with the student and we’re up there all day and they’re in hip boots and waders on the river doing stream cross-section profiles and assessing riparian vegetation and stability, using server samplers to collect macroinvertebrates and determine what the food resources look like for grayling in the stream, habitat surveys, all of it…sediment surveys. And then by about week…we’re up there for about two, two and a half weeks working every day, all day long."
- Rob Thomas, Professor of Geology at University of Montana Western
Full Transcript
Featured Quote:
". . . so, if there are two or three major reasons, one of the major reasons is that the Legislature funds maybe $100,000,000 every year to build new buildings on college campuses in Utah. And those campuses, not completely, but to some degree are largely vacant for almost half the year. So, they’re very, very busy for 15 weeks of fall semester and they’re very busy for 15 weeks of winter semester. That’s 30 weeks out of 52. So, there’s a lot of lost capital and they want to see us find a way to make these buildings useful all year round and if they can be useful all year round then that moderates the need for buying new buildings and this is a financial issue to them and it’s one that has caused tremendous concern for years."
~ Scott Wyatt, President of Southern Utah University
Full Transcript
About the 3-Year Bachelor's Degree Program
Featured Quote:
". . . if we go back to 1776 and sit in that world, those who founded this country were creating something that really had never happened before. It was the first time that a group of people had sat down and, through careful deliberation, created a form of democracy. And that was dependent upon the people be educated enough, engaged enough, thoughtful about other people enough that the people themselves could kind of be in charge. [It had] never been successful before and one of the fun pieces of this comes from the Massachusetts’ Constitution that John Adams wrote where he said that, “It shall be the duty of legislators in all future periods of this commonwealth to cherish the interests of literature and the sciences."
Full Transcript and Additional Links
Previous episodes referenced in this podcast:
- Episode 28
- Episode 40
- Episode 32
- Episode 16
- Episode 21
- Episode 13
Links to each episode can be found in the transcript web page.
Featured Quote:
"Steve, we haven’t done a very good job in the higher education community of responding to the various criticisms that are waged against higher ed and we…I guess this podcast was an attempt to try to really explore this and think about it a little bit."
~ Scott Wyatt
Full Transcript and Additional Links
Previous episodes referenced in this podcast:
- Episode 1
- Episode 18
- Episode 27
- Episode 39
- Episode 3
- Episode 17
Links to each episode can be found in the transcript web page.
Featured Quote:
"So, typically you find the 18 to 24-year-old demographic of students, they thrive in an environment where you have the face-to-face, you have the community of students that they come with and that is a lot to have in terms of the experience of being in a university setting on campus. Clearly that has tremendous value and we see that in our students. But then there are many, many, many thousands of students who never had the opportunity to graduate for a variety of reasons. They had to exit and go and take on work in order to be able to support their families or those kinds of situations that they…that required them to not necessarily be at the university for the length of time that it requires to graduate. So, in those situations, you want them to have the opportunity to be able to take on the courses that they need to take on with the flexibility that they need to have with their lifestyle and other situations, that then gives them the opportunity to still finish their graduation."
- Sethuraman Panchnathan
Full Transcript
Featured Quote:
There are some aspects where our courses in our program are superior. Not all—face-to-face has its advantages, especially for very small classes like 20, 30, lots of interaction, you can change directions many times…this is not achieved. But even with larger classes on campus, if you have 300 students in the class, in the classroom, it’s very limited. After three questions, the professor says, “Hey, I cannot answer anymore. I have to continue.”
- Zvi Galil
Full Transcript
Featured Quote:
Well, I think that every student who’s coming to your college and coming to every other college, one of the first things they have on their mind is, “How is this going to help me get a job? How am I going to be able to turn this into the sort of career that I envision for myself?” And so, whereas 25 years ago, people might have said, “I’m just exploring. I’m wondering about how this might apply to something I would like to do or at least try and see if I’m interested in it.” Today, there is very much a straight-line thought that’s going through people’s heads that, “This has got to work out for me because I don’t have a plan B.”
~Martin Van Der Werf
Full Transcript
Featured Quote:
". . . It’s the definition of luck when opportunity meets preparation. I feel like we were prepared . . ."
- Sam Cardon
Full Transcript
Sam Cardon's Website
Video: La Capitana from the PBS Innovators special
Featured Quote:
"The business side of higher education is really a neglected part of higher education for the most part. In part, because higher education is just such a complicated structure in the first place. I mean, with money coming from all sorts of areas and all sorts of forms—tuition and grants and public funding and payoffs from the endowment and so on—so, it’s difficult to follow all that. And on top of that, higher education is just a very fractured environment anyway, very siloed and very big. A lot of institutions are huge. So, to try to get a handle on that, it’s difficult for a leader to try to turn the boat, so to speak. But, knowing where you are, knowing where you stand is absolutely vital. Absolutely the first step."
Full Transcript
Article: Enough 'Do More With Less.' It’s Time for Colleges to Find Actual Efficiencies.
Quotes:
"Not every college or university or school has to be accredited, but we do have to be accredited if we want our students to qualify for federal financial aid or loans, Pell grants, any of those kinds of things."
"the role of accreditation is to make sure that the student and the taxpayer is investing money on the part of the taxpayer, money and time on the part of the student, to attending an institution that has met a quality standard that says, “You know what? This is a worthwhile investment of your time and money. You have a great opportunity here to get a good education.”"
"but the daunting task of writing long reports…I think most people have pointed to that as being incredibly cumbersome, incredibly costly and not terribly productive in the long run to their goals."
"Everybody’s learning experience is unique and different, including what everybody hopes to learn from the experience."
"to make vast changes, fundamental changes about the role of accreditation would require a statutory change"
"we certainly are coming to the table intending to find the point of consensus."
Full Transcript
Quotes:
"founded by the governors of 19 western states and territories ... by which they would dramatically expand access to high-quality education for underserved populations"
"you evolve into what we today have is that credit-hour term-based model that is the conventional system of things"
"The fact that students can move through it more quickly, do you find that to be motivating for them?"
"It is still possible for an individual to complete a course in two or four weeks, but they still have to progress through the assessments that are part of that designed curriculum."
"we can also evaluate the efficacy of those different learning resources in improving individual student mastery of the competencies designed in the course."
“Who cares how much time you spend in a seat? We care about what you're learning.”
Full Transcript
Quotes:
"from my experience as an entrepreneur and business creator is when I get too complacent and don’t push the change a little bit and actually go to where the value is to delivered and actually what the market’s really needing and wanting, then I get myself in trouble"
"I find that the not-for-profits miss who the customer is"
"what we often aren’t great at is staying abreast of changes, either economical or social, that make it so that we need to actually change what we are teaching."
"we can’t stay the same and continue to flourish"
"we’re trying to turn our school into a three-year bachelor’s program."
"One of our biggest struggles though, frankly, in helping students graduate quickly is the large percentage of them not knowing what their major is to be."
"we as humans like to change our minds from time to time."
"We’ve talked about breaking down barriers, better, faster, cheaper, adding value, doing more projects to help people be more prepared for the workforce."
Full Transcript
Quotes:
"Bay Path has a really fascinating trajectory. We were founded in 1897, but we were actually founded as a for-profit co-ed business institute in downtown Springfield. And over the course over the past 120+ years, we have changed our name five times. We are now Bay Path University."
"in academic organizations, being innovative and entrepreneurial is a very difficult thing to do"
"it has to be worked at and fostered"
"I think all of us can probably tell stories of the power that our alumni have or have had on our efforts to try to change things"
"Traditions are some of our very best things about universities and they are also some of our challenges."
"you wind up perpetuating more of what you're already doing as opposed to getting somebody who might come in from industry or somebody who might bring a radically different perspective"
Full Transcript
From Dr. Morriss-Olson
Article: 10 Barriers to Innovation in Higher Education
Blog: The Accidental Provost
Quotes:
"my life has been a little crazy along the way and I’ve had a lot of challenges."
"Scholarships have helped me a lot make this possible and they’re going to carry me through. "
"Working part-time, raising six kids, getting a bachelor’s degree, learning how to fly, pretty complicated. But, as soon as you get through your schooling, there’s a great job waiting."
"I am one of the first in my community to go to college and study in America."
"you’re not a first-generation college student, you’re a first-generation high school graduate"
"My goal is to become an international business owner and use that business to help my country out."
"And I don’t know how my life would be without the help and people who believing in me and really trust their gut to invest in me. "
"it helps me focus because, you know, there’s a reason behind why they are involved and investing."
"I also know that this is my shot. That if I fail, I can’t just try again"
"it’s the smaller donations sometimes that make it possible for individuals"
Full Transcript
Quotes:
"college campuses are intended to be a true marketplace of ideas"
"what I find troubles a lot of universities or trips them up is knowing what is protected and what is not and how to administer that speech on their campuses"
"How do you find the line between an intentional incitement versus protected political rhetoric?"
"hate crimes are against the law and therefor, hate speech must be against the law. But they are two totally different things. Hate crime is a crime."
"that’s why it’s so difficult to try and regulate hate speech, because you’re ultimately regulating a viewpoint and regulating an idea, and that’s notoriously hard"
" just doing simple training up front to let people know that, “These are things that you need to think about when you talk” doesn’t mean that you say, “You can’t say these things.”"
"some of this speech that at the time was kind of offensive and difficult to listen to has changed the world in a positive way."
"if you can’t define it, then it’s really hard to prohibit it."
"speech is more than words. It’s conduct and images and all that kind of stuff"
"If we’re that confident that we’re right, then we should welcome opposing viewpoints because we know that the right ideas will surface at the end as triumphant."
Full Transcript
Quotes:
"right now, I think that we’re ranked 22nd in the country, so that’s out of the like 349 division one programs, we’re the 22nd"
"something that I’ve learned by being a student athlete is just to be persistent"
"it’s just constant work, work, work ... that definitely translates to everything and that’s why I’m grateful to be a student athlete."
"We can all show up for one day, but can we show up for every day?"
"Coach Houle calls it is having a “Teflon attitude.” So when you have a bad race or when stuff is not going how you want, just let it slide off. Let it fuel you for the future"
"I think that no matter what situation a student is in, to just find something outside of school that you’re passionate about and that you enjoy"
"every successful person had to go through obstacles, and it just makes them who they are now"
"failures make the successes so much sweeter"
Full Transcript
11/20/18: Now with Full updated audio. Sorry to those who got the partial version!
Full Transcript
Quotes:
"the cost is always one of the major concerns. “How much is this going to cost me? How am I going to afford it when I’m’ done? What are my options for paying for it? What can we do in order to keep the cost low?”"
"right now the average is about $37,000 for a student graduating. And so, they go into the workforce with about $37,000 in debt today."
"however, when you look at the state of Utah, we are the number one in the country with an average student debt of $18,425."
"we’re actually lower than the Utah average, which is $16,824."
"we hear these students who can’t afford to pay their student debt, but one of the things that they need to know is that there are options."
"you go to a very expensive school and get a lot of debt and your options are limited because you have to make a lot of money. And if you can’t make it, then you’re in trouble"
"if a student wanted to, they could borrow way more than they needed, live way high on the hog for a few years, and then spend a long time paying it back."
Full Transcript
Quotes:
"as far back as we can go in human history we have records of ancient people using fire as a tool."
"if you burn on a regular basis, some of your bigger trees are not going to grow on the landscape, but your smaller forbs, we call them, so smaller plants, are going to grow and you might be able to harvest seeds from those plants and then eat them or maybe feed them to some of your animals."
"if we move forward, we have, for example, this huge Brian Head fire last year and then this year, as a result of that fire, we see a lot of flooding—landslides, mudslides—and we still have fires raging right now."
"I would call myself a generalist or maybe an attention deficit scientist."
"We have to go out in the early spring, so around April or May, depending on the weather, and look for wildflowers that are blooming. So, it’s a pretty nice job to have. We get to walk around in the wilderness looking for big populations—fields—of wildflowers. Because what we’re looking for are not rare plants, we’re looking for really common plants that are going to be useful for public agencies and even private land owners who want to have their land restored and have enough seeds to work with."
"You’re collecting seeds as part of this larger project to restore forests and rangelands and such but help us understand a little bit more of the broader world’s seed collection efforts. There’s huge banks of seeds in places like Iceland and Colorado."
"You can store seeds for just hundreds and hundreds of years under the right conditions."
"You can use drones for crime scenes, so why not for looking for plants?"
Full Transcript
Quotes:
"it’s hard as somebody that care a lot about young people to see this much suffering and wonder, “What is going on and how can we help?”"
"We keep adding additional mental health professionals and the lines don’t seem to be getting shorter."
"So, are we so successful of decreasing the stigma? Are we maybe calling more attention to something that in previous years people might have just powered through? And then what’s the utility of that? The coping strategy of powering through and just “sucking it up”? I think those are all interesting questions that I sometimes struggle with."
"I think the effect of social media can’t be understated. There’s a lot that we know about social media, how it affects mental health. It can be another stressor in the way that it’s an opportunity for people to engage in what we might call negative self-talk or negative cognitive distortions."
"you have more access to information, and when you have more access to information, you have more access to potentially fearful type intervention"
"When I was in law school, we were doing research in the library with books. We had to go to a communal place to do our research. And now, all of the research for lawyers is done pretty much online by themselves staring at a computer screen."
"the importance of taking care of our bodies can’t be understated, and I think that sometimes because of the technology that we have in medicine and in all areas of our life, we forget the simple things."
"people have become bubble-wrapped, and because of that, when they’re actually confronted with adult issues and anxieties, they may be a little less adept at dealing with them or less prepared to deal with them."
"We can’t take the importance of community for granted."
Full Transcript
Quotes:
"We like to have a sense of perceived control. As we start to look inwards, we start to look at who and what we are, it can be a little uncomfortable. So, built into us humans are all kinds of mechanisms that allow us to have a sense on constancy and a sense of perceived control."
"If we have successes, we tend to almost immediately attribute it to an internal cause."
"we do tend to externalize those things that are more negative."
"this idea that individuals need to become vulnerable by examining their self and who and what they are until they're able to build that protective reality hard shell around them again." (From professor-emeritus John Ault)
"helping students realize that they've come a long way or that they actually know a lot now relative to what they knew causes that sense of happiness because there's a realization that they're making progress towards a goal"
"we're pretty active in the sense of distorting reality until we're kind of forced to face it"
"We are taught somewhere in the second or third grade that you go to college to get a degree. If we can help our students understand that, while that's a nice accomplishment, what we really want them to do is to get an education."
"we've been talking about this in the context of a university because that's where we are and that's who we're working with all of the time, but I'm assuming, Grant, this applies in every aspect of our lives. In our family relationships, in our hobbies and interests, and just everything that we're doing."
Full Transcript
Rankings episode
Quotes:
"I was writing music for Danny Lux, who composes for Grey’s Anatomy, so he was throwing cues my way to write, and lots of other shows."
"I loved the craft of it, absolutely, but got to a time where my family and I decided to make a career change basically for more balance for ourselves."
"I was actually singing on Xena Warrior Princess or on a Disney film or whatever it was. That I somehow was selling my artistry and my creativity and my training short."
"how do we answer those questions in a world where people feel like they are one WebMD visit away from being a doctor or one YouTube tutorial away from being Frank Lloyd Wright, or whatever. What extra value does higher education add that you cannot get through a YouTube tutorial?"
"But, curating it, because there is so much of it, the quality of that needs to be curated by somebody who actually understands the subject, and then, beyond that, there’s a mentorship element to it that teaches you application."
"I know almost immediately what their background has been. Their background has been a YouTube tutorial, because they lack the breadth of experience and the breadth of context that’s necessary to accurately and effectively use that tool."
"Universities are more than simply teaching skills to accomplish certain tasks, and that’s one of the things that I’ve just been thinking about as well. There’s a lot of character development and socialization and mentoring and helping build connections and leading a student from developing that broader context."
"The technology changes every day, and unless you have a broad understanding of the principles and concepts and the history of all these things, then you’re going to try to learn something and you’re going to learn it, but then you’re not going to know what to do tomorrow when it changes."
"Which is why sometimes I’m leveraging online resources way more than any text in another form because the time to market is so short, a lot of the times it’s more up to date that something I can find inside of a library, right?"
"YouTube vs. university. It’s just…you can get some skills and specific pieces of information, but you can’t weave it all together and fully understand it."
"The team projects were always our most frustrating thing, because there's always one person that didn't do any work at all.
But those are the kinds of things we have to learn to be successful in the workplace."
Full Transcript
SUU Master of Music Technology
Quotes:
"I think there’s a way to make history interesting, and there’s a way to find it interesting for ourselves, but I’m a late-comer to history. It’s been something that I’ve loved to spend time with, and there’s a lot for us to learn from there."
"the seeds for education and the importance of it were sown right from the very beginning with the Founding Fathers."
"this would be something that we would constantly be striving for, that equality, liberty, all of these noble virtues that this country had in its founding document are things that we’re striving for. They weren’t descriptive of who we were, they were a statement of where we were going."
"how do I take what appears like there’s two opinions and discover that there’s more than two, or how do I take a bunch of opinions and figure out which one is the best? This is hard stuff."
"So, what we’ve got is religion is one of the sources to teach us these values and virtues that we need. There wasn’t a public education system at the time. There were universities, but they were limited in who could go, how many people could attend them.'
"you can’t have a democracy unless we can have good humor"
"Nobody’s going to guarantee anything, but we are all guaranteed the right to pursue it"
"Southern Utah University is actively engaged, focused, on delivering the promise of America."
Full Transcript
Quotes:
"I think that most of our students would have no knowledge of where Title IX came from. I think Steve and I both remember back to the days when there was, in our high schools or junior high schools, a large boy’s gym and then a teeny little girl’s gym, and almost all of the athletes were males."
"athletics was tacked on almost at the end and that the legislation actually had very little to do with athletics but that it really moved to the front burner once that became tacked on."
" the main impetus for writing Title IX was access to academic courses, not athletics."
"Title IX is not particularly moved by that desire to run a business in the athletics program."
"I think things are breaking down slowly in terms of the entrenched discrimination that has gone on so many years against women in athletics. We’ve made some very large strides in even the 20 years or so that I’ve been consulting."
"We all have daughters and sons and sisters and brothers, and we just want everybody to have a fair shot at it."
Full Transcript
Quotes:
"The military, again, not producing the quantity that they once did, it’s really been pushed down to the civilian flight schools to really meet industry demand."
"the aviation program has really been noticed and it’s been noticed from an international standpoint on what we’re able to supply and how we’re able to supply graduating students into some just absolutely amazing jobs with really unlimited possibility..."
"to move to the next level into the majors—the Deltas and the Uniteds—you’re looking at a bachelor’s degree minimum to get into these highly sought-after careers."
"I’m very proud to say, our pilots that have graduated from SUU have flown on every continent—but they’re taking along with them the English and the history and that just really broadens"
"within the MIS degree, within the three branches, three legs of that degree, we are actively working towards making one of those nine credit branches pure aviation"
"how do we educate women, minorities, that this should not remain the exclusive domain of the white man?"
"I think some people come down and say, “Well, this seems like it’s kind of an expensive program” because they have to pay for the flight hours. Seems like an expensive program, but the return on investment is spectacular."
"The rest of aviation is a part-time gig. You’re mandated through the FAA. You can only work really part-time, but you’re getting paid full-time wages."
"we train great pilots. We’ve produced over 600 pilots since we’ve been in operation for five years. And we train in a very unique environment, unlike any other training environment within collegiate aviation. We’re the highest altitude in school in the country"
"We’re committing to mom and dad when they put their children in the program that we’re going to do absolutely everything we can to make sure that they not only get good, relevant training, but they also come back."
Full Transcript
Quotes:
"We’re looking at plays that are 400 years old and are still relevant today. And that’s why we weep, it’s why we laugh, and we could just jump right into the plays"
"the fact that we’re going to tolerate somebody isn’t as good as including them."
Wyatt: It looks to me like we’ve pretty much solved the intolerance issues.
Bahr: Oh, it’s done. We’ve solved it. Isn’t that nice?
[All laugh]
“My job is not just to tolerate, my job is not just to be diverse, but my job is to include.”
"the universality of art. Something that is funny in the 80s and is still funny today, but is funny in a different way"
"I’m grateful for the embryonic connection that the Festival has with SUU because I think we serve as catalysts to each other. Institution of higher learning and the theater is also an institution of higher learning and we are both there learning together."
Full Transcript
Quotes:
"And the tagline is always “The difference between a first world country and a third world country is public health.” The things that you put in place and the structural things that are available to people in order to help them not get sick just by being the environment they’re in."
"When I’m in some countries… but now I do think, “I’m so happy that we have food handlers permits and training and somebody watching out for us.” "
"the book is a story of the cholera outbreak in London in 1854. And so let’s start out with London in 1854, and what really grabbed me in reading this story was thinking about the comparison when I travel to large cities today what I find and what kind of repulses me a little bit in a lot of garbage that might be laying on the side of the street or things that are dilapidated, and I think, “Well, we should keep these cities prettier.” But in fact, they’re beautiful compared to what cities were like 150 years ago. We have no concept of how clean even our most unclean cities are. "
"he’s interested because he notices that these people are getting sick rapidly and they’re in a fairly focused area in the city. And then it became much more study-able"
"I think I see a problem, and I think I know the solution and I’m going to go after the solution, and sometimes I find that the solution isn’t the solution. It’s making it worse."
"Part of the problem with the anti-vaccine movement is most of the people now haven’t seen what diphtheria looks like or something like that. So it’s easy to believe that a disease isn’t a threat when you haven’t seen it, right?"
"I think that the first lesson to learn from this book is that we live in a great time. No matter where we live in the world, we’re living in a better time, better place than in the past."
Full Transcript
Quotes:
"there is a hero in public health, kind of began the science of what we call epidemiology, his name was John Snow. He was not just famous for his work with cholera, which this story is about, but he also was a very famous anesthesiologist"
"here’s a guy that risked his career to go against the weight of science and medicine—all of the thinking of the day—and say, “You’re all wrong, and I’m going to prove you wrong.” That seems to be a great risk."
"one of the great messages from The Ghost Map is just because a lot of people believe it, or because we’ve always done it that way, doesn’t mean that it’s not incredibly stupid."
"“What are our assumptions? And do we know that they’re right?” Because we’ve all got something that we’re pursuing that may not be accurate. "
The American Academy of Pediatrics has for many, many years now recommended that ear infections not be treated with antibiotics because they don’t do any good—98% of them are viral—and yet, for ear infection, antibiotics are prescribed about 80% of the time. So it’s a smaller example, but it’s the exact same thing. We just have a hard time sometimes embracing what the science tells us and moving on to the next step."
Full Transcript
As part of the podcast series Solutions for Higher Education, SUU President Scott L Wyatt will lead a “Summer Reading Club” focusing on a new book each month. The July 2018 book is 1984 by George Orwell. In this episode we are joined by English faculty member Joy Sterrantino and Political Science faculty member Doug Bennett.
Quotes:
"this is a great group to talk about this book with because we’ve got a literature expert, a government expert"
"This book is a warning."
"I think the book reflects a reality that I slowly came to grips with in D.C."
"People will say to me, “There’s so much money in politics, it’s obscene.” And I’ll say, “The federal budget is three trillion dollars, and Americans spend ten times as much on pornography as they do on political campaigns. So, you tell me what’s important and where we should spend our money.”"
"it kills me with the voting thing, specifically because it’s so easy for us to vote. And it is important. And yet, people don’t do it "
"the local newspapers and local radio stations for the most part, they really tried hard to do their very best as a community sort of a thing and they’re dependent on this same community supporting them. "
"One of the things with my students is I tell them not to use news sources as their primary sources if they can find it somewhere else."
"I have to laugh because every single year, the university sends out an April Fool’s joke... and it’s surprising how many people will read the heading and then send me an angry email. [All laugh] Without having read the story. It cracks me up. I even had a reporter do that this last year."
"it was intended that the federal district be insulated from the vicissitudes of state politics. It’s a federal enclave, intended to house the government. It was never intended to be a state."
"You say, “We should all have a right to healthcare.” I certainly agree with that. That’s very different from saying, “The government will determine what kind of healthcare you get and give it to you.”"
"how much of our power we are ceding through the increasing intrusion of technology into our lives."
"one of the things I do for the very beginning of class is, for those classes, I will scour the internet for information, public information, about the students. So instead of them introducing themselves, I’ll introduce them and they just look horrified like how do I know these things?"
"that’s how Hitler became in power. People were fed up and there were just so many problems in the country, so Hitler just sounded good."
"the moral outrage wasn’t there before Trump."
"it’s not an issue of women’s rights for The Post and The Times, it’s a way to go after Trump. They don’t care about women any more than they did 10 years ago. It’s a tool to go after Trump."
Full Transcript
Quotes:
"it’s still apropos. It’s not just applying itself to that time period. We still see governments that are like this, and so the point of 1984 is, “What if government control went to the extreme? What would that look like?”
"we do tend to make these compromises without realizing it, and it’s not a good compromise. It’s not between two good choices, they’re kind of two bad choices, but one looks a little better than the other, so we choose that."
"if you’re facing this direction, you’ll end up where you’re facing. So we need to be aware of where we’re facing and make sure it’s the direction we want to go."
"It was one of the most profound books I’ve ever read, and I think that it’s one of the most important books that anybody could read, personally."
"this is a great story to remind us of what to strive for."
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Quotes:
"one of the things he did was he went out and told all kinds of groups—he was on Oprah, he was on every medium he could—to tell people just how dangerous this was."
"we’re seeing significant increases in the number of fatalities on the roadways in the United States. And that reverses a trend of over 50 years of declining crashes. And the most likely culprit is the fact that we’re becoming more and more of a distracted driving society."
"The current law in Utah is basically, it’s run like a DUI. If you kill somebody and you’re texting and driving, you’re looking at a second-degree felony now."
"if you’re on a phone, you can create something called “inattentional blindness” where something is right in front of you, but you don’t see it."
"you’re more than twice the level of impairment when you’re texting as you would have been at a .08 blood alcohol level. So twice the crash risk of a drunk driver."
"every aspect of life, including criminal cases or slight offenses, the quicker we forgive, the quicker we heal."
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Quotes:
"the idea is that we are going to have a summer reading list, one book each month, and we’ve chosen three different types of books"
"If I’m the president of a university where the values we have are teaching and learning, if I’m not learning, then there’s something wrong there."
"Where we’re inviting all of our students who are home for the summer or those that are still in Cedar City or from the Cedar City community, our alumni who are spread out all over the world, this might be a fun way to connect and hold true to SUU’s motto, “Learning lives forever.” Once a T-bird, we’ll always be there for you, and course you don’t have to be a T-bird to join in with us. We want everybody to join. "
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Quotes:
"One of the lucky things that environmental psychologists get to do when we’re not in a laboratory is to be outdoors oftentimes"
"We’ve been collecting baseline acoustic data out in that area to validate some models that look at how quiet or how loud specific areas are"
"We scoured the recording looking for any other sign within that time period, and there’s nothing else there. So perhaps a puff of wind? Perhaps a ghost."
"So we probably should have you put some recording instruments outside of Old Main."
"we have some of the quietest locations in Southern Utah of any place that’s been recorded in the lower 48 states"
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Quotes:
"So for those of the uninitiated in math, what is a Schur ring?"
"Because we know, but we want everybody else to know."
"the Marshall Islands, they’re in the North Pacific in the Micronesian area and there are about 32 or 33 atolls and they have an average height of six feet above sea level. So with rising sea levels, they will be some of the first nations to disappear. "
"One of the biggest things was getting the feedback back and having to let go of my creation a little bit and be open to the different ways that it could…the different directions that it could take."
"understanding the scientific process—knowing how to ask good questions and find out for yourself how to answer them—is a really important skill."
"I’ve really become converted to being an evidence-based therapist, and that has caused me to take more of a behavioral approach and also a brain-based approach."
"You would think bear hair is cool, but it’s really actually the worst."
"My largest takeaway from this was I was surprised about kind of the resources that we have. Considering the LGBT Support Group, Pride and Equality Club, Center for Diversity and Inclusion, and when I asked people about these services, there was 10% that didn’t even know it existed."
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Quotes:
"most students can get through kindergarten through high school without ever having to have to do anything other than respond. Read and respond, memorize, answer the test question…and what we’re trying to do is create an environment where students go to the unscripted questions."
"we find ourselves with more than a thousand students participating in undergraduate research."
"I chose Atlas because I really wanted to focus on this relationship between people—not just two people, but as a group"
"Cavendish thinks that everything has basically a soul. Everything is material and everything is intelligent, so she, in addition to being a philosopher, was a poet and a literary figure. "
"It’s actually based on the original Thunderground at SUU in the early 1990s. It was a couple of students who worked at the newspaper weren’t able to publish some of their opinion pieces so they did this anonymous thing and they kind of kept it underground, ... So just kind of keeping with the original idea of it but kind of expanding on it. "
"Her Land was published in 1915 which was the year that women’s suffrage was granted, and so although both of these books are fiction, there’s a lot of factual information that comes from the novels. "
"I did some research on gender pay gaps, specifically among faculty members at SUU. I thought this would be interesting because we all talk about gender pay gap"
"we were determining how reliable the standing long jump is in determining lower body muscular power output for track and field athletes"
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"a lot of people don’t know what the world “technical” really means when it comes to education—but it’s the hands-on, it’s the trades, it’s really what we call the “boots on the ground” types of careers in the community"
"those who register at Southwest Tech are entitled to register for classes at Southern Utah University, and those that are going to be admitted and enrolled at Southern Utah University can sign up for classes at Southwest Tech"
"many of our automotive technicians or our plumbers that come to Southwest Tech with the goal to become a technician. Then, they ask us, “Well I want to own my own business. What is the next step?” That next step could be and should be business classes at the university."
"a student at Southern Utah University can sign up at SUU, take classes, but then also walk 6 blocks, take a couple classes at Southwest Tech"
"our hopes as we build this out is that everything flows to the student’s benefit."
"Students need the opportunity to explore while they’re at the university or the tech college. And then if it makes sense to take more classes at the university or at the tech college, based on their interest, we now give them that opportunity"
"So we’ve got support from the Legislature and the Governor’s office and both of our boards."
"it was an exciting day to put pen to paper and actually see this thing start to take off."
"this relationship, this memorandum of understanding, really aligns how we want to accomplish developing that workforce of the future."
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Quotes:
"he spoke about towards education, on the topics of education and also continuing the struggle for freedom and equality and equity for everyone."
"he spent a bit of time talking about how education has two purposes. One is a utilitarian purpose, which is preparing us for careers. And then the other purpose is to develop character."
"two dangerous things in the world is sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity."
"We’re all ignorant about something. We don’t know everything, but if we approach everything with sincerity, then we can hopefully humbly come to knowledge which is the goal of education."
"To challenge a way of thinking is dangerous, but it is necessary. It can be scary, but from that comes good things,"
"anybody can love a friend. Anybody can hate hate, but it takes a strong, solid person to be able to return love to hate."
"What I see today so much in dialogue is that when two people are arguing about a disagreement, if one isn’t succeeding, that person frequently moves from the area of disagreement to criticizing the person."
"We can attack ideas, we can attack thoughts, we can challenge thoughts—and that’s a good thing, iron sharpens iron—but we don’t attack the person and who they are. That’s a reflection on our character when we do that."
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Quotes:
"I think one of them begins with empathy to others so that when we hear an opinion that is different from what we’ve always believed, we don’t immediately shut it off, but we look at the person as being a good person and try to learn from that individual as much as we can."
"what a liberal education also does, is help a student think about integrating what they’re learning. And I think higher education needs to do a better job at this, because often we have students that are taking a course in biology and we have a student who’s taking a course in accounting and a student who’s taking a course in a humanities…well how do they connect, and how do they relate to each other?"
"or to agree with some but disagree with others and to do so empathetically, to do so with good humor, to do so with gentility is something that technology has actually helped us lose to a great extent."
"I don’t think there’s ever been a time where it was more important to teach these broad principles that bring us together, rather than push us apart."
"what education does is give you options. It frees you up [not only from] from superstition and ignorance but it frees you up for life choices."
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Quotes:
"English is one of those languages where words have multiple meanings, and when one of the meanings of the word has a certain connotation, it’s hard to use the word in any sense without that troubling connotation, good or bad, imposing on all other meanings of the word."
"the term “liberal” has been quite politicized. But there are the liberal arts, which relate to disciplines."
"Then there’s liberal education, which really sort of connotes a broader set of skills. Sort of a broad based, transferable skill set."
"And employers actually really like what the liberal arts do, what they add to a student’s education and to their life"
"when we, on a university campus, talk about the liberal arts, we aren’t talking about politics and we’re not talking about painting or singing."
"We’re talking about an education that is. . . liberally given, broadly given, that gives students a foundation to pursue a whole variety of careers, to develop the skills that will help them be successful."
"creating these transferable skill sets, this flexibility of mind, this higher order of thinking skills that students are going to need no matter what they’re working or what they’re doing."
"something that the country is moving towards is something called “micro-credentialing” or “stackable credentialing”
"we’re trying to take this idea of this broadly based, liberally given version of education and then infuse it with little “mini majors” that students can opt to take that are much more specific"
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Quotes:
"really there are few people out there who have tried to nail this thing down because it is kind of an open-ended discussion about “What constitutes experiential learning and who owns that?” Project based learning on the other hand from my perspective is, “The student owns that.”"
"I go into the lab and I do assignment one and two and three and four, and I have a great experience and I’m learning from my hands-on experience. But that’s not at all what we’re talking about when we say project-based learning. "
"they put together a proposal. And you’re not going to tell them what they’re going to learn. You’re not going to tell them what they should care about. You’re just going to tell them, “What is it that you want to learn?” And then, “How are you going to learn it?” And “We’ll help you."
"our new professionals need to understand that it’s likely that not only may they change jobs, but they may do things that are completely different in 10 years after graduation from where they start after graduation."
"once we get out of the way, students constantly blow our minds and amaze us."
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Quotes:
"about stories and why they’re important and how they’re passed on. And it became really an obsession with me that it’s an important part of communication"
"The penalty for failing to listen is to lose one’s history"
"If we don’t have that shared narrative, then they aren’t able to be part of something bigger than themselves."
"I believe that’s part of our culture is that we get so stuck in the facts now that we have lost the culture of, 'Let’s get to the moral.'"
"I think we have the best founding story out there. Not that I’ve researched every institution, but we certainly have the grit and determination and everything that you need to make a story interesting."
"And there are thousands of lessons in each and every part of that story depending on what you’re listening to or what you need to learn or what you want to take out of it—your interpretation."
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Quotes:
"talk about the concern about factionalism and the propensity that we as human beings have to put our passions and our emotions to work in the way that we relate to one another and the way that we discourse with one another."
"So it sometimes feels that today in our discourse, I know more what political parties are against than I know what they’re for."
"tough political fights are not a bad thing. But when it becomes personal and we start attacking people, that’s where the problem comes in."
"the larger issue behind all of this is recognizing our own limitations as human beings."
"it’s easy to burn down a barn. A barn raising takes a community."
"we’re not a pure democracy. We’re not meant to be a pure democracy. We’re a republic with some democratic institutions"
"find a way to bring back discourse, to become less isolated in our conversations, to be less critical of people and focus more on ideas, and just build back some respect one for another."
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Quotes:
"The Olympics started out small. They were always a festival to Zeus worshiping the big chief Mount Olympus deity, and the games were an appendage to this bigger, religious festival. And over time, the games got more popular sort of like what we’ve seen today with the modern Olympic movement"
"And they tried to figure out how to do this sport based on these pictures. And so we’re not sure that what we’re doing with the discus is the same as what the ancient Greeks were."
"You've got the element of one of the goals of the Olympics is to bring nations together and now this is becoming a divisive thing, not a bringing together"
"the early 50s and 60s as television dollars got involved and then in the 80s as sponsorships took off and the Olympics actually became profitable, maybe not for the host cities but because profitable for the sponsors"
"The Olympics are compelling. People will watch and the great…the winners, the great human interest winning stories, that seems to be the key. "
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"about 70% choose not to buy a textbook or textbooks in at least one of their classes each term. Now that’s huge. That means they’re adopting a cost saving measure that they know is going to cost them in grades"
"the average cost for a textbook in the state of Utah is $105 dollars. Now, that’s all the way from entering freshman to seniors"
"We do these surveys all the time here about, “Why did you leave? Why did you drop out or why haven’t you completed?” And we always get the same leading answer, which is, finances. It’s cost. "
"open texts have a way of mitigating the cost without sacrificing either the quality or the content."
"you can get as on-demand print copies. So rather than having to print 50,000 copies and then recoup the cost that way, you can simply print the number of copies you need"
"we’re looking course-by-course to see what we can replace, what commercial texts we can replace with an open text"
"Our goal is always to help students learn... And in order to do that, we need to make the experience better, reduce the cost, get more materials in front of students instead of less."
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Quotes:
"diversity is important for us because we want to make sure that every single group, every category of people, everyone, gets a chance"
"what better way can you break through prejudices and barriers and national conflicts than to get to know people?"
". Just simply having people in the room from different cultures and backgrounds and ideas forces us to all be better. We all step up."
"Hot dogs and hamburgers are American but they came to us from elsewhere."
"we’re trying to bring everybody along. We’re trying to make sure that everybody is successful."
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Quotes:
"We are more concerned about students finishing than students starting."
"So, amongst all public regional universities in the eight intermountain west states, Southern Utah University has the highest graduation rate, and you don't get a high graduation rate, unless you continually improve your retention rate—the number of students that come back for the second year. "
"But there hasn't been, over the last decades, a lot of effort put into seeing how much teaching itself can have an influence on retention. Until recently. "
"So there are a couple questions that we would ask about the success of this program and one question is, “Is learning better?” And another question is, “Is retention better?” They are both important."
"But the point is, is that our Jumpstart program has...we have invested our very best, experienced, tenured faculty members in a freshman experience that is dynamic and integrated. And the result seems to suggest that that the outcomes go way up."
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Quotes:
"Jumpstart is kind of the Marketing Department’s title for this integrated General Education program that we have at SUU where a student in her or his freshman year gets all the general education classes in one cohort taught around a single theme."
"...we went to lunch, and you proposed this crazy idea of, “Is it possible to create a General Education program that would be so engaging that students would actually choose to come to Southern Utah University because of it?” "
"...until I taught the first cohort of Jumpstart and I realized, “No, Jumpstart is the coolest thing, as a faculty member, that I’ve ever been able to participate in.”"
"...we do know that in talking with students who have now been out of the Jumpstart program—they are all juniors this year—that seeing things in an integrated nature is something that sticks with them."
"But now, once we start integrating these topics together and we light a fire under the student, it’s, “Wow! This is relevant to me. This is interesting to me. I see how all of these things relate.”"
"Jumpstart gives them a year to sample all these really neat areas in engaging ways and it’s really interesting to watch the student slowly decide, “I want to go into art history” or “I want to go into physiology or agriculture.” It’s fascinating to see."
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Quotes:
"What’s unique about an American higher education, one of the primarily unique things, is General Education. That we think that somebody who is majoring in engineering, or art, or education, or business, that they need to have this broad understanding."
"...but it’s what helps us understand other peoples and cultures and ideas and informs our lives. It enriches everything about us..."
"Because if, in fact, you could record it and play it back then you probably should. So we’re experimenting with a variety of kinds of General Education classes "
"We pride ourselves in all these things, but really for the last decades, we haven’t shown that that’s something that we care about because it’s received the least amount of attention. "
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"But the question is still there: Why is it that over the last 20 years, 40 years, 60 years that tuition has gone up substantially faster than inflation?"
"...acknowledging the fact that if our budget state support portion has declined from 70% to 50%, 48%. That expense is picked up somewhere."
"Our school began in 1897 with 161 students and a grand total of 4 employees."
"...today universities are doing much, much more than just teaching."
"So, we have our own police department, we have our own mental health counseling."
"...our mission is different; the students we serve are different, and the community expectations are different."
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Referenced:
Podcast 3 - Is College Still Worth the Cost?
Quotes:
"And so we start with this big picture, and then we say, “How do we accomplish this?” Well, we accomplish this by strengthening individuals."
"it’s a surprise how many people think college athletics is all about making money."
"nationally, this is a real challenge. The next generation might actually be less educated than the current generation."
"And once we state the goal, write it down, and go after it, we do what athletes do, which is fight, work hard, sacrifice, pull together as teams."
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Quotes:
"There are 8.6 million more jobs in America available for those with a bachelor's degree than there were in 2008. There actually wasn't a loss of jobs during the recession for college graduates."
"Utah has a lower tuition than most states. We, in fact, have the fourth lowest tuition of all the states in the country."
"The cost of tuition and fees and books for four years at Southern Utah University is less than a new pickup truck without any extras."
"And what we find is that those who graduate from college live five years longer than those who didn't finish high school"
"We get to spend our time doing the kind of business that leads people to higher happiness, longer lives, better health, less dependence on government assistance, less stress during recessions or economic downturns, and greater levels of prosperity."
Full transcript: https://www.suu.edu/presidentspodcast/03/
Quotes:
"We really want our students to be respectful and courteous, and to make a place where everybody feels comfortable, wanted, welcome. But in order to do that, too often times there is a temptation to curtail speech."
"We're members of the executive branch of government, and therefore, the First Amendment protections of free speech—which bars government from denying free speech—applies to us."
"We cannot turn over to government employees the ability to tell us what we can and cannot say."
"So as university employees, our mission is to allow speech, to help our students process that speech…to help them find ways to not be offended by it so that we become more divided, but rather, to find ways to think through the ideas"
Full Transcript: https://www.suu.edu/presidentspodcast/02/
Quotes:
"most of the members of the public—potential students or students, family members—they see these rankings, but they don’t know they criteria that’s being used. "
"it’s about potential, but it’s not about actual. And so we are judging all of these universities and publishing these rankings based on our potential to do good perhaps, but not on whether we are doing any good, whether we are changing any student’s lives"
"that there are a lot of apple to orange comparisons that don’t hold fair"
Full Transcript: https://www.suu.edu/presidentspodcast/01/