Good evening, everyone. And welcome im bill kelly, the andrew w. Melon director of the Research Library and mitt pleasure to welcome you here. We are fortunate to have professor Cathy Davidson with us this evening. The author after its important boehm, the new education, how to revolutionize the the university to prepare for a world in flux. She is a director of kuynys never program shep head a chair and professorship and was the Vice President for Interdisciplinary Studies at duke university. He is the author or editor of more than 20 books. The cofounder and director of the worlds first academic social network, she serves on the board of the mozilla corporation, the developer, as you probe foreclosure of the fire fax web browser and underwriter of a Global Community of open Source Developers she was appoint by president obama to the National Council on the humanities, and was the 2016 rerecipient of the award for significant contributions to Higher Education. All of that you probably know and in any case, you can reality it in your program should you wish to refresh your memory. What is more important to understand about cathy his work is its range, its measure, its consequence. I loathe the word transformative a squall of qualifier debased, emptied of meaning by frequent misuse. I have foreworn its deployment expect when speaking to the grandson about robots that turn into trucks or dinosaurs or when im refusing to take him to a michael bane movie this. As close to religion as i get no michael bane movies. I note this bias to underscore the intensity for my feelings about congratulate wheres where work using the term transformative. Write that changes the way we think, see and believe, work that al tears our perception of its subject, and a lasting and fundamental fashion. She is, i would contend, an heir of the rich tradition of american practice pragmatism. What these thinkers have in common is a distrust of settled belief, truth for them is what happens to an idea, dialect, dialectic is the driver of successful process. Certainly the new education, congratulate any thys cathys book the state of american highed education, charts the lan cascade of americaning opinions of innovation and imagines a richer future ground it in, what if. This the descriptor transfer term applies to most of cathys work. The study of the rise of novel in the country. 36 views of mt. Fuji, an account of her experience and her teaching japan change they would way we imagine crossculturallen counter, their mysteries, their opportunities for selfinvention, closing the life and death of an american factory, taught us to see with new eyes the trailing of the commons. Both the future of thinking and now you seat in different ways, changed the way we think about how we live, work and learn in a digital age, in short, Cathy Davidson is an essential and indispensable mind, scholar who demand attention and great cued. I count it a privilege and enjoy to be in conversation with her this evening about the new education. She and i will converse for 40 minutes, 45 minutes or so, depending upon how selfish i feel, and then open the floor to questions. At the conclusion of the program, cathy will be signing books outside the room. I recommend it to you with great enthusiasm. So let me move over to sit next to cathy. [applause] and i didnt fall. Good evening. Thank you so much for being with us. Guest so embarrassed of its very hard to hear that about ones self. It sound lovely to hear it from somebody who i admire so much. Host thank you. Let me begin with where you guinn this wonderful book. By aligning college with all great quests. We have a long runway to the text. You make that alignment on the basis of college involves an obstacle to overcome, here we dragons. Students go to college and then graduates leaving the college environment, advisers to enter the world, the work force. Are these new dragons these students encounter or the same dragons that you and i and our friend inside the room experienced0 some of them, pay . Sunny think its a little of both. Some of the dragons are just the dragons of growing up and those are big muff dragons, going from being dependent on your family and being a child, a minor, to feeling like you can support yourself be a productive, responsible citizen of the world are thats a formidable challenge for all of us. Some people manage to go through it gracely. Didnt. I meant to know about you here. Its a formidable challenge and today thats even more for mettable. Our schools have being regimes of standardized testing which we know prepares you for nothing except doing well on standardized tests. Actually think the stress we put kids under now, where at a very early age we have to tell them they have to prepare for the best school 0 are or else their life is over if they dont get into the top performers some form of child abuse and we cede see this in our universities, an evergrowing part of university bug being used on health care and mental care for people who are anxious and worried and sure theyll be failures in the world. At the same time clearly we have done terrible things. If you complain about the tuition your having to pay par for you child now, especially in Public Education, ore voting did that to this world. We in a different generation, had gifts given to us as part of the public good of a society that our children dont have. Theyre graduating with tuition debt now. If youer going to college and graduating with tuition debt you of the worried and making different choices. What you study and how you study. Then if you feel like youre graduating debt free. So theres a lot of different burdens we have put on kid today, and i think the dragoon for met able. I defend indicate the book to millenials and all generations. Kids have been given a raw deal and its our fault and we have to change that. Host let me use your open language to amplify what yao just said you. Write, pundits are plane wrong about the millenial generation, google has not made them stupid. Their iphones dont maple thick lonely. College doesnt make them dumb or passive i. They want to know bet to world to lead is do a better job address major World Problems than their elders have done. You ask questions about them. You say, how can they accomplish the goals, train them to succeed in a world that changes to fast that no one can predict what will happen next . In some ways is that not the heart of this book . Trying to imagine an education that does better by its students than just preparing them to deal with the dragons you just described. Guest totally. So many of the solutions that people have proposed, we must reform education. Some of the discussions have been just theyre not commonsensical therapy. Stupid. Anyone who thinks about them knows theyre wrong. A time when i talk about Thomas Freedman in the book, our great journalists, saying that massive online open education where you take videos of famous professors on ending world poverty. Thats crazy. Who believes that technology can solve the problemmed of the world. Im technology person. Thats a misunderstanding of both learning and technology. Or thinking that we have to get rid of frills in education and only focus on skills and make sure that every child is just interested in stem and goes into a stem career. For some kids, some young people, stem is great. Science, technology, engineer and math, its great for others its a nightmare. Host you say stem isnt the problem and stem isnt the solution. Guest no. And in fact, what an impoverished way to tech about science, something that has nothing to do with humanity or what matters. Its insulting to science to think that you would get away with you would strip away from education as many states try to, all of the social, political, cultural aspects hey that low signs could abouted or climbed deniers are deny. Those are cultural issues not just scientific issues. Host let me take a step back before we talk about the kinds of solutions, the weapons to deal with dragons. One of the things that appeals to me most about this book, i alluded to fit introduction, is the got a historyize to recognize education agriculture, not nature. When we think of some think of Higher Education cass timeless, connected to the greeks, but what you argue is the modern research universities, a world in which those of us in education live or have lived, is a relatively new organization that arises in the United States. Itself has roots in berlin and humboldt and in europe more generally but arise news the u. S. In the 1860s. When you put a date to that in which things change you open the possibility imagining a different type of Higher Education. Could you tell us a bit or recap what you argue in the book about the history of american Higher Education. The elements that we take for granted about it, innovation that that tame could us in the late 19th century, earliest 20th century. Guest the clear u says i lighter education has not changed since socrates, and therefore it cant change. What i love about looking in detail, really looking in the archives to find out what Charles Elliott, the very young president of harvard, who went on to rule to rule to run and preside over harvard for 40 years host exactly. Both, both in. Guest pretty powerful. What is so great is to see how much detail and how much he is looking at the infrastructure of college and really change all of it themes are things i have a long laundry list of michigan that didnt exist and then did exist. Basically between about 1865 and 1925. And its everything from majors, minors, graduate school, professional schools, electives, school choice, paying salaries for faculty. Before that you were thawing to have a trust fund. So if you taught at harvard you were wealthy enough you didnt need a salary. Admissions exams. A long, long list of things that none of which has to be defined today because theyre all the same flux of our universities. Perhaps most important, they also invented the aye accreditation and ranking system bit which all universities today are still ranked, and guess what is at the top of the ranching ranking system, its harvard. We eave everything phenomenon Community Colleges and Land Grant School examination major Public Research universities, regional elite private universities, liberal arts college think ranking system still puts an infrastructure in place and every college is ranked according to that. That makes no sense. Each university, each college has a dived kind of student, a diskind of obligation to to the students. But theyre all competing with the shadow of what a university, great university, harvard, that has an entoyment so believe i i believe if the endowment were the gdp it would be the 18th 18th largest country to in the world. Howing a tiny college or Community College or Public University begin to compete with that, and why should it . Theres so many different kind way bogey student and part of the dragons students feel now irthats being told that only if they go to hard record or m. I. T. Or stanford will they succeed the world. Theres so many ways to succeed in the world, and that is terrible to make them one size fits all or make our universities one side fits all. Host the universities, if in fact being top of the table is the impulse university or arriving at some high place or a place in the u. S. News World Reports ranking so distorts the way in which colleges operate, that its impossible to think about ways of education that are outside that frame. Let me take you back to elliott. You picked tee title of your book from am article he wrote in 1869. Guest the new education. Host the new education. And elliott is a kind of double figure the is in book, as i read it. The author of system you find destructive for students, faculty forks the life of the mind in the United States. On the other theres a strong admiration for his ability to change a system. Why did you choose to name the book after this 1869 essay that Charles Elliott wrote in the atlantic . Guest well, it would be dishonest to say i had that title in mind when i wrote the book. This book had 20 different titles. That one struck me because i do believe we need a new education for the world were living in now. What elliott did that i admire at the welcome acome professor tetching at hard vair, theoretical checkist issue did not want to be a practical chim mist and his father lost everything in the panic of 1857. The the first gill Global Financial crisis, and elliott thought we would have to go into business and then his grandfather died and he got a little trust fund and was able to use that to go to europe and decided to study the european system. And many people, not just elout about many people in 1856 thought blamed the crisis on poor american education. Said that america led the morse code was transmitting information about the collapse faster than anyone could happen what was going only. One Financial Market after another collapses worldwide and they said americans were naive. Had become become technocrats and had an educational system that taught you to be a minister. So elliott believe that and went to europe to find out how european education change and he came back the United States and tried to figure out what would work in america at the time. Now, i dont exactly love the people that were his model but they were the most important theiriists at the time. So in standardized tessing, deviation from the means, standard deviation, sir james gaulton, cousin of darwin and a eugenist. And he believed in invented the bell curve believed that british acristocrats to be paid to produce and poor people should be sterilized. Host Teddy Roosevelt believed . No and the founder of the modern occasion. The tyranny of mary meritocracy, and its rooted in racist and class assumptions who is entitled to run the country. Host when he takes the presidency of harvard, 35 years old, a great surprise, he had written this kind of attack on american education, speaks well for the Harvard Corporation to take this chance. The inaugural address, features a line in which he said the question is not what to teach but how. Same question that were guest thats one of my admirations for elliott. Still the question. How you teach. Host still valid, that question . I think not only still valid, probably more valid now because many of the methods that were experimental and elliotts day have become frozen. The lecture method and also the typical seminar method where we know that in fact who speaks in a seminar room replicates the say yours kind of hiker, aty in society. So many bet progressive dewey, believed a more progressive activist education as did others and one of the thing is advocate is a method of learning where every student is a researcher and eve student is pushed to be curious and to follow their ideas, and to think about how knowledge comes together in complex ways rather than in the professionalized way that were perfect in 1890 because there werent professions in the same way then. Host one other point you make about elliotts midle and education in the late 19th 19th under is that he is training students not be class assists or ministers but preparing them to take positions in management. Guest absolutely. Host you align with charles taylor, talk about education as a kind of con pick conspicuous consumption. What is different about training students for jobs in a technological world than training them for jobs in a world that is still primarily agricultural and industrial . What different about what we what education what the new Education Needs to do for students now than what education needed to do in elliotts day. So Charles Elliott it basically creating the infrastructure, the educationals intellectual infrastructure for a new professional managerial class. That is running new institutions, new corporations, new professions. Almost all of those have been disrupted in pretty graphic ways in the last 20 years by technology. So that professions that people were sure could never be automated, are now being turned upsidedown, and education i simply prepare outside for a career and professionizes you for a career might get you a first job but might also get you helpless and obsolete ten years from now. I think about Something Like taxi drivers. Identify years ago nobody would have thought a taxi driver could become outmoded and now you cant go in any taxi in new york without somebody talking about what uber has done. How a whole different arrangement not Just Technology but a rearrangement of human labor has changed. Another one is service workers. You go to cvs and you dont need nearly the personnel you had before because you can the checking out is automated. There are many occupations which are not only automated but other 0 occupations which cant be automated but are terribly, tear my underresourced. So for example, people often talk about how College Students dont make as much money as they used to. One reason is 60 ofcome students are women and women tend by and large, statistically to go in the four socalled femmized professions that are terribly important and terribly underpaid. Teaching, social work, health care, librarianship. Those are horribly, horribly underresourced professions. You need a College Degree for those professions. And our society doesnt thats not an educational problem. Thats a social problem. A society is a so i think students need not only to learn how to think but how to think really critically about what the values of the society are that theyre entering itch want studented to be activists. Let me ask a more practical question. If we assume i think most people would agree with what you just said that training that a first job is just that, that depends on which kind of survey you read, but anywhere from seven to 11 jobs and careers and professional changes holm do we train people for the future when we dont know what the future looks like . If we dont know what this student is going to do. A lot of what your argument addresses is preparing students to succeed in the workplace, and by no moans are you talking about giving. The job specific skills. Can you talk about how you think we should be preparing students for this world of constant change and a kind of fluidity in professions and in employment. Guest one thing that i thinkunder educational system does a poor job at is giving students tools for really understanding the process by which you become an expert. That is a process of not just learning but learning how to learn. Figuring out how you solve problem inside any situation, and even to have a kind of pedagogual term, education is metta cognition. Not just content but why something is count as content. What makes up a good argument, good way of responding to any situation, whether its in technology or as a texas si driver. What kind of a taxi driver, what things allow you think about, okay, i learned how to get here. Here no longer exists. Here is obsolete. How die take my own confidence in my ability to learn and use that to apply to Something Else . Some people talk about this as lifelong learning. Its police officerlong unlearning because constantly being able to take an introspective look at ones own habits and own assumeses and that think about what has to change to move forward. Thats not edition yeast and were in an educational system that standardized wives thinking that makes that harder. What in the world real world give yourself five choices choid you couple with the best possible answerment no one lives a life that way. No one. Host none of the above. Guest none of the above. Yes, most live in the world of none of the above. Aallowed to say we taught a class together. Host you can. Im proud of that. Guest when bill hired me at the Graduate Center and it was in his research year, and i said i know youre writing a book and ono thats important how would you like to teach the craziestclass anyone ever taught. Host she wasnt kidding. Guest and c. A. P. Bill is a former grad of the center, and such a hero to Graduate Center, the City University of new york, was willing to do this. I said were going for walk into has the first fay and say, hi, aisle congratulate ya davidson and just moved here from another university and im under here and i was brought here to start the program and im bill kelly and im the president emarry to us at the university. Goodbye. Well be back 45 minutes. Design the class that will change your life. Host thats exactly what she said. Guest and we left. One of the students, is here was in that class. We came back 45 minutes later and they were like go away, good away, and i said what happens now . I said we go away. We came back five minutes later and everybody is sitting there proud. And what had done is pus postie notes with a schedule nor class because no one should have to schedule on the fly. And they had designed an incredible class. Now, think that process of learning how you take 14 people, hardly anyone of whom had known one another. A class in the matching the future of Higher Education. Everything from computer scientists to somebody in speech and audiology, to host criminal justice. Guest criminal justice. A wide range of students. What they figured out was how to Work Together at a group, how to divide into teams of four, how to couple up with important topics and what way did not class was so at cuny when youre a graduate student you teach in one the undergraduate campuses. They came up with experiment inside learning we did in our graduate class every week, and then that week they tried them out with their undergraduates and whether it was a could are science class and got feedback whether day worked and the students and campuses could all talk to each other about what was working and not working. Incredible experience and i dont think you forget that. Host you dont. Guest i dont think you forget that in a situation where you had two pretty darn powerful people in the world, they gave up their power and gave it to you, and let you create a class and you created probably the best class certainly one of over best classes. Certainly for me. Let me devils a void cat. Everything she said is entirely. So a lifechanging experience, but in a time in which expertise is being challenged on every front, everything from Climate Change to fake news to media and so forth. How do you at one point you talk about faculty learning from students and embracing what you call being a public amateur. Are you at all concerned that the surrender of that the power of the podium or the kind of level of expertise that is implicit in the pedagogy you just described, leads to a kind of relativism that disavows expertise, that simply says, its certainly didnt happen in the class you were describing but one argument that is made about students centered learn is it turns experts into amateurs and amateurism becomes a positive value, and a moment in which i think that is a fairly fraught position. Guest i wont say that every professor that i interviewed who does some form of active learning, defeat that ab problem but everything i talked to in writing the book and my experience is that students, when charged with that responsibility of making a class, were morigerous, more demanding, more determined to get it right, than in a normal situation where you have the answers we also know a lot about content and how poor we are at retaining content. Im not going to say the name of the university but of the prep school but one of the top five wealthiest and most press citious prepare schools did a kind of a horrible thing to its students. In september, one year, they gave every student at their school exactly the final exam that those students had taken in may. So if you took geology exam in may, you yourself, not spread out, just you individually took the exact same geology test that you took in may; one of the top five school in the country. Anyone would say this. The average grade on the final examples in may, aminos, b plus, depending on how you 90 , 92. The average grade in september, can anyone guess . Low f. Low f. Low f. Not even boredline, not a gray area. Low f. Ed inless to say the school was freaked out. But actually, if if i were at that school i would say the biggest lesson your students learned is when they have challenge, theyre a students. That is a life lesson. So that student centered learning. Turns from memorizing content to saying if i have a challenge, what are the thing is need to do to be able to make that challenge. In fact, going all the way back to dewey, 8 to 10 in all its replicated over and over again with tend to remember from a class we dont have a test about eight to ten percent, and the person who has the clad versus the one who didnt, about eight to ten percent better. All kinds of factors that are woven into that but we tend, as learners to take what we want to know, build on that, and become more and more expert not at everything we learned but at some strand or thread through our learning. What student centered learning does is take the thread and make it into a knotted, heavy strong rope that is going to be something that you can climb up on. My metaphor is going nowhere. Host im also too old and too large to think of that. Maybe we should take a pause and go back and describe what students centered learning is. The fulcrum of this argument of the book and im not sure it would not benefit to us unpack that term. What do you mean when you talk about student centered learning. Guest the opposite might be either Credential Center learning or professor centered learning. The object of the class is the final exam that leads to a great point to a degree. That its Credential Centeredded learning. The big point of student centered learning youre preparing students not just nor final exam but how they take all that they learned and have that at their disposal for after the final exam, where its in their everyday life, whether its interior life beyond, but youre think can as the focal point is what can this learning do for the students . Also means that schreck selectivity can be the top four at stanford are record as my friend says i have a much harder job than stanford or harvard. Have to select a top one hundred percent. When you think about that, her job is to take any student from where they are and to constantly say, have i gotten everybody . Have i gotten the homeless person, the person jut us another flip the person who was 16 and dropped out of school and and now has three kid 30 years old and coming back to school for the first time and how die take them wherever they are . So thats at the student centeredness. Take them wherever they are and take them to a level where they can be a productive member of society. Community college. So Community Colleges are one therefore big herod in book. I think every university and every professor can learn from Community Colleges. Going back to elliott, a professor at a Research University never learned anything about learning. Right . Their job was to learn their specialization and their students job was to emulate them. I never had a class in pedagogy. I never read the research and i would say probably theres only a handful of us who really, really studied the science of learning. Even though what we do now lives is teach. Community knowledge, because youre teaching the top 100 . You have to know whats an effective teaching midwest. Host not what to teach but how. Guest that this elliott idea and what we know we know this in over everyday lives right . Grades are not how you learn. If you have a twoyearold, you dont say, hmm, two steps today, b plus. Host b plus for you, big fella. Guest what a way to kill motivation . What a way to kill learning. If you have to study for a drivers exam, learning tennis, or yoga, right . Youre learning by constant formative feedback. Not an end of grade test you score and are etheir ashamed or proud you got an a and thats its over, come back in september, where question now know that youre a failure again but you never know that because youre not tested. Right . So the whole point of student centered learning is youre constantly tested. People always say to me youre against testing. No. Im after i really want tests. I want challenges. A mathematician who teaches at Arizona State is the director of program in arts, engineering in new media. He takes his first year students every year and gives them a really tough problem to solve. One year it was, what will life be like in phoenix when theres no more water . Think about that. Thats a question of ecology, hydrologic science, of class and race, of culture, right . How we live. Its everything. So his students worked together to come up with paradigms for how to solve really complex problems. But also problems that are about their life. If youre living in phoenix right now, youre probably thinking about what life is like when theres no water because youre close to that. Youre really close to that. Host the example that you have just offered leads me to ask a different kind of question. One of the terrific things about this book is rather than offering prooffensements and prattitudesitudesitudes and broo change education, it offers examples. To paraphrase george bush, a thousand points of light. Various teachers, schools, exercises and it runs the entire gamut from Community Colleges to elite institutions and everything in between. And each chapter offers us some of these examples. You just gave us one class is another. My question is scalability. That gets asked. In a lot of the examples you provide are from interdigg disciplinary states, program that dont generally hire their own faculty, that exist in some marginalized way at universities. Colleges like olden college, a program at kstate in a Senior Citizens home. How do what is your thinking about how these extraordinary examples of student centered learning and far Better Outcomes how does that become scalable at a time in which american Higher Education, particularly in the public sector, more than 83 of the students who go to college, attend college, at public universities . And theyre all under massive stress and more than half of the teachers who teaching at these colleges and universities are parttime instructors, theyre adjuncts. This is a crisis that has been written about ask discussed by everybody for the last 30 years. How do you move from these particular examples in this landscape of austerity to scale these particular examples up . How does that work . Your view . Guest well, first of all issue was i took pains to make sure my examples were not just from the m. I. T. Media explain the d school at stanford. Theyre from universities that are incredit by stressed universities. So, big picture, we have to start reinvesting in Higher Education thats just appalling. A group in california called californias promise that says if every middle class person in california paid 39 more a year in taxes, and that money was dedicated to the university of california city, cal state. We could hurricane to 1980 las level support which is almost free tuition, or not adjunct faculty all over this place. So its a mall individual investment for an amassive social good. So thats one thing. Two, there are really simple this is like one of the few talks situations ive ever been in, in the last year wishes havent done what i call think fair share. An experiment you do with little index cards and have audience i teach a pedagogy in the class. I did it with 6,000 International Baccalaureate team if in philadelphia 76ers auditorium to show how a very simple exercise that aloud everyone to have a voice in a room and to have a conversation with another person, already changes so that youre not just hearing but actually processing that hearing. One of my friends used something he calls an exit ticket and die this. He teaches at mag gill university. Lectures to of hundred people. Stain of taking roll of giving pop quiz, at the end of every class he has students time, the 90 seconds write on an index card and sign their him in, the one thing we talk about in this class look tour, a lecture class that is going too keep you up tonight . If nothinges whats the question i should have asked that would have tent you up on the same topic . And his students write this down, its great. He and his assistants can tail role its like a pop quiz and tell students youre not just a body in this room. Youre a human in this room who happens to be a student. You have input. And then he goes what he does is he puts out these 600 cards and figures out what his lecture has to be in the next time and refers to what students contributed. Thats a very low cost way of saying to students, of changing what the pair time is and the paradigm is and we could have done in this situation, i also have people pair up and talk about three things youll do if its an educational setting, do to actually change your classroom in the next six months and have people write their email addresses down and promise theyll email each other ooh to make sure they have done that. Those are simple really, really simple thing and seem kind of trivial but they change the way people, students represent in a classroom. Who speaks in a classroom. They change who feels entitled to speak in a classroom. People of color. Immigrant students, students whoas english is not good, student students with cognitive disabilities, shy people. Gives all these methods, inventory method that say everybody person in this room deserves to be there. No bell curve. 100 of you. The top 100 of you deserve to be here, and you all are going to get an education and all going to contribute to each others education. Thats another one hover those thing that is a life lesson. Believe it also contributes to a different idea of citizenship in the world. Not, im getting mine, because youre not getting yours, but a sense of how to contribute. Host let me follow up on that; im getting mine and youre getting yours, neoliberal position. The first part of what you said had to do with underfunding of education, particularly in the public side, increasing level of debt among students, bifurcation, inequality. Thing wes think about all the time. If in fact the goal is not simply to change individual teaching techniques and to provide that level of respect, but to begin to think about the ways in which we return to thinking of education as a public good rather than a private investment. You talk about the land grant act, the g. I. Bill, ways and times in which this country imagined education as an investment in its future. Not just investment in individual students but in the larger civic good of the United States. We louis or way we lost our way with that. 1980s. In education becomes a matter of private investment. Youll benefit with a higher salary so you should pay tuition, this its consistent with an aging population, its consistent with a change in priorities that have to do with security, that have to do with health care, and a systemic defunding of Public Education. We know this. What is the line of argument that we make . Again to quote who ran michigan for a long time, has this famous thing where he says, michigan was a state university, then it became a state supported university, then it became a state assisted university, then a state located university. Then it became a state molested university. And that arc is. So one reason i always discusses in my classes is when people feel so down by the system that you need something that makes you feel powerful again. This is all about how to have a voice in your society. Since method on how you can stand up and seemingly have no power whatsoever, how you can learn to have an individual in a collective voice to make a difference. We are seeing this, interestingly, in america all over, fighting for healthcare and other things were people are saying wow, the system is maybe not working for me so how can i work with other people to have a voice in a system thats determined to eradicate my voice on every level. I think were all starting to see that we need to be reinvesting in education. So, this book came out on september 5. I dont go in our without hearing from a student, a faculty member, a parent, ahead of a professional organization that says how can we parte be part of this. I think we all feel we have to do something different. This is not working. We cant be impoverishing our future. These young people are going to be taking care of all of us as we are aging as well. We have some big World Problems to us fault. More people are feeling that were at a Tipping Point in finding ways of making change happen. Its hard to be an optimist sometimes but we have been in a real downward trend. University of colorado gets 3 of its financing from the state of colorado. Thats ridiculous. Thats not Public Education anymore. We all deserve better than that. California has almost flipped its presence at system. Thats the three strikes rule. We can change those things. Is it easy to change those things, now its not easy to change those things. We have the will to change those things, i think part of student centered education is not just empowering us but also the faculty to think that we can change. One of the great gifts of this book is that its hard hitting about the challenges we confront but remove relentlessly optimistic. Ive got about 30 more questions but im a save them for lunch. We have questions from the audience. I will say the book ends with ten ways that any student of the busiest university in the country can still find a way to have a great education and how they can change their classrooms tomorrow. I actually do think feeling some sense of power in the world helps to get a better sense of power in the world. One of the things of autocratic regimes is to make you feel powerless. We all deserve moments of being able to feel more powerful in a world where the temperatures of the ocean are rising and hurricanes are destroying whole nations and democracy is being hacked all over the place. I think we all deserve to feel powerful and then its incumbent on us to use that power. Yes, sir, can we start with this question. So you were a at duke and now youre cuny and those seemed like very different institutions but i wanted to ask you, what you think duke can learn from cuny and what can cuny learn from duke. Thank you. Thats a great question for the end of the book does that. It talks about the things my students tell me, whether students at duke or right here. Theyre now teaching and is a mentor and has a job and is a huge hero is about. [applause] stephanie made a video of her classmate thing why do you go to college. Nobody says i go to college to make more money, they say to lead a better life to contribute, to make my family proud, to make the country more proud, to make contributions to society, to lead a better life, a better and for life. When i asked students at duke, why do you go to college, i get those same kind of answers. Not from everybody but from a surprising amount. Theres something about making the commitment at any age. This is not just for your residential colleges. Im also talking about returning students and their 40s. Heres the thing thats different from anything else in education. Its voluntary. No one says you have to go to college. No one said you have to stay in college. College is voluntary. You are voluntarily giving your time, your money and your attention to something that is hard. Thats true whether your student at duke or a student at laguardia. Youre making a voluntary effort to improve yourself and improve everyone around you to. To me, structurally, thats already something we have to build on because there arent that many things in our lives that we do voluntarily. Can sometimes be pretty boring or pretty awful or pretty frustrating. I had talked to people who had taken algebra 13 times because, ive written it college about why it shouldnt be required. I love algebra. It happens to be my thing but it shouldnt be a gateway to Higher Education. Theyve taken it 13 times and were finally able to pass it and went to a Community College and their now full professional. Theyve had a great professional life, but how can you not be inspired by somebody who is willing to over and over and over again put themselves through the frustration of doing something they dont think they can do. Basically thats what colleges. Thank you, i loved your book. Ive spent a career trying to encourage the kind of initiative that you described, but there are two points that i would like you to elaborate. Im sorry. Thank you even if the states and the federal government provided more money , all the other things happen that brought us back to some golden age, there are two ingredients that need to change and i would like your comments on our system of governance of colleges and universities on how that system influences the environment that allows faculty to be tutors and set of professors and the reward system thats greatly encouraged by faculty that in fact limits the possibilities of the initiatives you described. Good questions. Very good questions from someone who has a major book coming out on this exact issue so i appreciate that question very much. The reward system, it was also part of the agenda is based on peerreviewed publication. I have nothing against peerreviewed publication. In fact we know faculty member spent 60 of their time on preparation for teaching and grading. Although accounts, ive never been on a tenure case where someone says there terrible teachers but we can give them tenure anyway, but its assumed and its almost like mystical how you become a teacher. We dont train t people to be good teachers and Evaluation System for good teacher is Student Evaluations which we know are terribly faulty and prejudices against people of color and women teachers. A new study came out that showed students had ranked the syllabi and the textbook of their professor, one had a womans name on top one had a man, the mail textbook was a brilliant textbook and it was such an organized syllabus and the womans was what a stupid textbook and how badly organized. The only thing different, theyve done similar studies with africanamerican sounding names and white sounding names. Same things. This is really prejudice. We rate everything. I cant go to a restaurant without reading a yelp review. We have very poor systems now for evaluation in Higher Education. Clearly we have to change that. I also hate, so typically we say application, teaching and service. Service is the worst word in the world. When we caught leadership or institutional change. I once got in lots of trouble with an audience and ill say it again and get in trouble when i said i think tenure is a great thing because every freedom of speech is being tested at every college and country. I think its important for that issue of freedom of speech but i think we need a use it or lose it tenure. If youre lucky enough that you cant be fired unless you do something egregious, it should be your obligation to do one thing at a year that wouldve gotten you fired in another job. It should be your obligation to do something, for you to say i have tenure, therefore let me use it, im to do something responsible and bold. We have so many committees, it makes it feel like its impossible to get anything done. Faculty, administrators and students are to get together and working groups and maybe alumni in some situations, it will allow you to have a foothold to make bigger changes. Thats basically what elliot is doing. Hes changing one thing and then changing another thing and another thing and building on that. Its all interrelated. You cant change assessment without curriculum. We have time for two more questions. Yes, maam. Thank you. Im so glad i came. I recently tired from an administrative position so this makes me almost want to go back and try that one thing. I would like to hear your thoughts about the way Public Institutions have attempted to create with the elite by creating programs like the honors programs were students could have gone to the elite Program Get Support financially as well as mentoring and all kinds of things. Where the average student, youre just there and hopefully you can get through. I dont know a lot about that program in particular, but i know enough. I would love the standards for getting into the program to ensure more equity going in because i think the structure of the Program Going out would help people arrive at that level. I think theres many of those programs all over the country in every school has them, their often small and i want more those programs to be the core. There are ways to do that. There are many ways to do that. Thats basically the theme of the book, how you can take things that are already triedandtrue and make sense of it. What can we learn from those things and make them work. One thing, what youre saying is wonderful, right on, your book should be required reading and the two of you should take over the system. What they need to get in this country is education is infrastructure. Every dollar you put in it, you will get back millions, hundreds, thousands. Yes. Look at all the money its generated. I have a friend, chuck feeney, you might be familiar with who went over to ireland to change the economy over there by dumping his own money into the system. Once youre done reforming the colleges, please get involved with the primary and the secondary because guess what, we have an underbelly of uneducated cap people in this country who dont make it to college, and those systems have to be change changed. My last book was about k12 focused significantly on k12, and i actually think until Higher Education changes, k12 cant change. The reason is because no parent who wants the best for their kids gonna mess things up in a way that their kid can get to college. College is the gatekeeper. Until college really changes, and thats why im so bullish on Community College. I also dont think college is the answer for everybody. I think there are phenomenal things you can do in this World Without a college education. I wish we supported those two. You need to scaffold some kind of training on everything you do. Theres many different ways to do that. One of the things i talked about in my last book is how sad it is that weve taken Vocational Training out of so many of our schools. I have a brilliant nephew, he is a genius, and he always was, who can barely read and write, but hes a mechanical and computer genius, and his mother would drive him to the one Vocational School that allowed him to work on school. He went to a forprofit school and he has a hundred people working for him. If you watched any nfl gain, this kid is in charge of the auto audiovisual there. That man ha mom had a fight for that. There was a time when those kind of resources were available at every school. There are all kinds of tracks like that. Weather is for hairdressing which is not going to be automated or farm mechanics or for anything else. Its horrible. Weve delegated much of the manual labor to free exploited, bias and racist prison labor. It has replaced the education as the great infrastructure. Prison system is a total exploitation. We can change that. There are more and more and more of these examples in this book. We have barely scratched the surface. I urge upon you and your friends, i hate the word transformative, but this is that. Please join me in thanking kathy davis. [applause] thank you offers pendin caring enough about this subject to spend your time here. Thank you so much. Book tv has covered many books about education including ones by bestselling author david osborne. Education activists and jonathan coastal and former assistant secretary of education under president george w. Bush. If this is a topic that interests you, go to our website booktv. Org and in the search bar type education book and you will find a large archive of authors and materials. All of these programs are available to watch online. There are an estimated five head of cattle. Resident in south dakota. In controlled recklessness, Nathan Sanderson restores the live who is a key player in developing the south dakota cattle industry. We are here in the capital here in south dakota and we got the Capital Building behind us and adjacent is one of the highlights to south dakota. The state of south dakota really developed in two ways so it started as dakota territory and in 1889 south korda, north dakota both became states. At the time of statehood, eastern south dakota have been settled for a number of years. Farmers camer