Podcasts about mark largent

Student success is a key theme in the MSU 2030 strategic plan.  Student success is the measure of an institution's ability to provide an inclusive, equitable curriculum and environment with the academic, social, wellness and financial support that enables all students to learn, thrive, persist, graduate and succeed after graduation.  Mark Largent is MSU's vice provost and dean of undergraduate studies, and Bill Beekman is the university's vice president for strategic initiatives. Beekman and Largent discuss progress on the implementation of the student success theme of the plan. Conversation Highlights: (1:35) – Tell us about your role at MSU, Mark. What does a dean of undergraduate studies do? (3:15) – Why are most graduation rates based on six years rather than four? (5:39) – Are there particular times during a student's college career that are most critical? Are there points of struggle, and how do we help them get past them?  Students only spend 15 percent of their time as college students in the classroom. Covid had a large impact on the college experience.  (12:28) – Largent on the “caustic impact of a deficit mindset.”  What's the difference between a student deficit model and an institution deficit model?  “MSU is a place in which people are invited from a broad variety of backgrounds to come here and leave better than when they got here. It's our responsibility to serve their needs to allow them to learn, thrive and graduate.” “We punch 10 percentage points above our weight.” “Three quarters of the students who come to MSU and graduate have changed their major at least once.” (23:04) – When a student decides to change their major, does it extend their time in college?  (30:28) – What has surprised you most about your role as dean of undergraduate studies? How have you kept momentum for student success going through leadership changes? “We have completely bucked the trend of raising your graduation rate by lowering your admission rate. We have raised our admission and graduation rate simultaneously.” Listen to “MSU Today with Russ White” on the radio and through Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and wherever you get your shows.

Mons is launching a festival of lights, 26 installations over a 3 KM circuit during two four day weekends. To join the yearlong and country-wide celebrations of one hundred years of Surrealism the theme of this first edition is Surrealism and Poetry. We spoke with Natacha Vandenberghe, Director of the department of Culture and Tourism of the City of Mons, Mark Largent, Co-Founder of lightshow company Magic Monkey, and special guest artist Robert Montgomery. 25 to 28 January and 1 to 4 February Free https://www.mons.be/actualites/mons-en-lumieres

If you wanted to mix Star Trek and puppets, we have just what you're looking for with Mark Largent and Stalled Trek! Now part of the Starfleet Podcast Network! Visit us at https://starfleetpodcast.net --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/beyondtrekpodcast/support

Todays Guest breaks the space time continuum to bring us WARP Speed humor through his hit series parody on YouTube, Stalled Trek! Mark R Largent has been playing with puppets and making people laugh for years and we wanted to beam him into the show to experience it first hand and see what warp speed humor is like!Mrs A brings us another RANDOM RECIPE with Mrs A's Famous Salsa Buena, and Andy and I taste stuff that we probably shouldn't!And we couldn't do this as well with out MRS A'S FAMOUS SALSA BUENA, the GOOD WIVES NETWORK & Spreaker Prime & iHeart Radio!!!! coming soon to Tik Tok!This show is part of the Spreaker Prime Network, if you are interested in advertising on this podcast, contact us at https://www.spreaker.com/show/5624504/advertisement

Mike Isaacson: Reproductive rights are inmates' rights apparently. [Theme song] Nazi SS UFOsLizards wearing human clothesHinduism's secret codesThese are nazi lies Race and IQ are in genesWarfare keeps the nation cleanWhiteness is an AIDS vaccineThese are nazi lies Hollow earth, white genocideMuslim's rampant femicideShooting suspects named Sam HydeHiter lived and no Jews died Army, navy, and the copsSecret service, special opsThey protect us, not sweatshopsThese are nazi lies Mike: Welcome to another episode of The Nazi Lies Podcast. I'm joined today by Associate Provost for Undergraduate Education and Dean of Undergraduate Studies at Michigan State University, Mark Largent, who is with us today to talk about his book Breeding Contempt: The History of Coerced Sterilization in the United States. This slim volume tells the story of the historical enthusiasm for depriving certain classes of people the ability to reproduce and the efforts towards making that a reality. Really happy to get to read this book a second time for this podcast. Welcome to the show Dr. Largent. Mark Largent: Thank you for the invitation and for your kind words. Mike: So I want to start today by talking about what you start the book talking about, which is a discussion of your historical method of storytelling, your historiography. So you make a very deliberate choice of vocabulary that really does have a powerful effect in exposing, kind of, the grittiness of the whole issue. Can you talk about that and what effect you intended to have? Mark: So I was trying very hard to work in an anti-presentist mode. Presentist mode is most commonly what's used in exploring issues like eugenics, things that have become recognized as problematic for a variety of reasons. What often happens when you take a presentistic view like that is you fail to understand how something that seems so obviously problematic to you could have been acceptable to large numbers of people in the past. The danger, of course, is that you fall into the trap of becoming an apologist. So it's a fine line to walk between being a presentist and being an apologist when you're dealing with issues like this. You don't want to explain away past people's beliefs and assumptions and actions as merely products of their time because that doesn't treat them fairly; it doesn't treat them as equals; it sort of lets them off merely because they lived before you. On the other hand, you need to understand the world as it was understood by them. So I think in graduate school is where I first heard the term “doing violence to the historical subject”. That is if you view them through your own eyes, you are doing violence to them. If you view them in such a way as to not hold them to any real standards simply because they came before you and therefore operated in a space of naivete relative to what you think you know, you're doing violence to them. You're treating them as somehow less than you and your present day colleagues. So to walk that line really requires that you use their language and you try to understand and discuss the world the way that they may have understood and discussed it. Now, the problem, of course, when you're dealing with something like this is that many of the things that they held true, many of the assumptions on which their work is based, are deeply problematic to us today, or we at least on the surface claim that they're deeply problematic. Because one of the real dangers of presentism is that it allows you to imagine that you're somehow better than the historical subjects were, that you're above whatever it was that they were dealing with, when in fact, you may simply rationalize some of the very same problematic assumptions that they held differently, holding them in a different way. So as a historian, I feel like it's my responsibility to treat the historical subjects fairly, and that means holding them to the same standards that I hold present-day people to, but also respecting the fact that their contexts were different in some ways. Mike: Right. So one of the interesting things that you do is you also use the terminology that they were using at the time, and I think it gives a really good sense, not only of, I guess, how distasteful it is today, but also it gives a good sense of the logic that they're working with. Mark: Yeah, their language matters. I mean, I really do think words matter, and unpacking words so that you understand what is within them is critically important. And one of the big ones, I address it right from the very start, is the concept of eugenics itself. Eugenics to us is by and large a slur, that if you call a person a eugenicist, you are by and large disparaging them in some way. And that was not held to be true by the subjects that I look at, which the story runs from about 1850 to about 1950, with the most intense period being in the first 25 years of the 20th century or about 1900 to about 1925. And the idea here is that they didn't have a slur in mind when they said eugenics. In fact, eugenics as a slur didn't really even emerge until about the 1960s, I tried to show in the book. Mike: Okay. So let's get a little into the terminology and the procedures involved. What kind of sterilizing interventions were physicians making, and what were they called at the time? Mark: So at the beginning of the story, so from about 1850 to about the 1880s, they were what they would've called “desexing.” They were performing castrations or orchidectomies [Mike's note: they're actually called orchiectomies] as they came to be called. For men, a complete removal of the scrotum and testicles. So, neutering would be the closest concept that we have. These were not widespread, it wasn't common. It was sufficiently brutal that it was considered problematic. But by the time you get into the 1880s and 1890s, a progressive new surgery, the vasectomy, had emerged. Vasectomization had first developed as a rejuvenating activity, a notion that you could rejuvenate a person by eliminating the pathways for sperm to leave the body, so by tying off or cutting the vas deferens. But it was seen from its original holders, and these were by and large the heads of psychiatric hospitals, as a way of managing a couple of complex problems. One of them was what they called chronic masturbation. They thought that the vasectomy would somehow reduce the urge of the men in their charge to masturbate. There was also the notion that it would somehow calm them and be a management tactic. But there'd been a broader effort both before the vasectomy and after it to cut off the inherited characteristics from one generation to another so as not to pass along what were largely seen as problematic traits that followed family lines. So all the way back to the 1850s, you have physicians, the first one that I can identify is in the 1850s Gideon Lincecum in Texas, who brings out in public conversation something that he said physicians widely discussed. And that was that there were families that were just no good, and that they produced children who themselves were no good who would grow up and have children who were no good. And so this notion of good breeding was well aligned with notions of artificial selection and plant and animal breeding. So this is pre-Darwin or pre-Darwin's Origin of the Species, which is published in 1859–this notion that you could artificially select for different traits in plants and animals being applied to the reproduction of human beings. And so what Gideon Lincecum, and other physicians like him, began talking openly about first castration and then by the end of the century vasectomies was intended to sort of stop these problematic lines of parenthood and then eliminate the problematic social behaviors and poverty that they believed were somehow rooted in the very biology of who procreates. At near about the same time near the end of the 19th century in the 1880s, the operation of hysterectomy came into being and then vogue. The idea is that you could, by removing a woman's ovaries or fallopian tube or uterus or all of it, control reproduction with potentially a positive therapeutic effect to women themselves by removing these usually described as diseased organs, the women themselves would be healthier, happier for it. But more importantly or at least equally importantly, you could prevent the passage of these deleterious social traits from parent to child, they believed, by preventing the parent from having children. So you're sort of removing from a community whatever deleterious social traits they believed were associated with the very biology of the parents who would otherwise have children. Mike: Okay. So I tried to get Daniel Kevles to talk about this a bit when we had him on, but he didn't seem familiar too much with the pre-eugenic history. So your story of coerced sterilization doesn't start with the eugenics movement, and you briefly mentioned that. So talk a bit about the origins of the movement for sterilization in the United States. Mark: Well, it really was focused on this analogy to plant and animal breeding which really did preceed both Darwin in 1859 and the emergence of the eugenics movement, which is a progressive era movement shortly after the turn of the 20th century. People generally associate coerced sterilization with the eugenics movement, and they certainly were closely aligned. The eugenics movement began in the very late 19th or early 20th century depending upon which historians you're looking at. But the movement for coerced sterilization had begun much earlier. And in fact, there were even common calls to it being pressed all the way back to Aristotle and his discussion about how certain traits seem to follow in family lines. And so by the mid-19th century when there was widespread interest in artificial plant and animal breeding, the application of it to human traits became an interesting element. And there were advocates for sterilization to prevent the passage of these deleterious traits that even preceded the invention of the word eugenics by Francis Galton in the 1860s. But this pressure had really been focused around thinking about therapy for deleterious traits, that you could avoid them if you could somehow prevent the people who would possess them from coming into existence or from them being passed from a parent to a child. There also was no really hard line to biology proper. And in fact, there was a lot of discussion all the way through the end of the 19th and 20th century about not just eugenics, but also a thing called euthenics, which was the study of the effect of the environment on the development of certain kinds of traits. And so in the same way that you could have a biological transfer of traits, you could have a social transfer of traits. And the thing is you can't separate. We talk about nature and nurture, you can't separate. You can't have nature without nurture and nurture without nature. The widespread analogy that was given was that seeds grow in the soil, and you can have a plant only if you have both seeds and soil. You can't have a seed that grows without soil, and you can't have a plant that grows without a seed. So these two, nature and nurture or eugenics and euthenics, were entwined in most of the conversation in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. We tend to really focus on the latter, the eugenic issues, but euthenics was an important part of it. And that's the same way, if you prevent a parent from having a child who they might pass along either biologically or socially some deleterious trait. You prevent them from becoming a parent, you prevent the passage of that trait. It's really only the eugenics movement and a real narrow focus on the biological transfer of these traits that you lose that nature-nurture symbiosis. But in the 19th century, they were talked about both really hand in hand, there wasn't this sort of hard line of nature over nurture. The place that it started to fall apart was when they began discovering genetic diseases. So Huntington's was the first genetic disease to be identified, and it was Charles Davenport himself who did some of the work to help identify that. And then you realize that that's a purely genetic trait that a parent passes along to a child, and if you prevent a parent from having a child, then you prevent the passage of that trait. So you could actually get rid of diseases if you prevented everyone who's a carrier for that disease from passing along from parent to child. And so there was a kind of either curative or preventative medicine notion in play in this early part. But the idea of genetic disease really helped create some distance in between the people who were thinking about eugenics and euthenics as hand in hand and those who began to think primarily about just eugenics. Mike: I do want to deviate here. So one of the things that you mentioned in the book was that even at the time they recognized that there was a flaw in the eugenic program insofar as, because they didn't have access to genetic testing, when you try to eliminate bad traits, you don't eliminate all the carriers, you only eliminate those that have dominant expressions. So they said it would take about a hundred generations to actually eliminate any of these traits, right? Mark: Yeah, and of course mathematical geneticists came to help us understand why it was that as traits became less and less frequent it became harder and harder to reduce their frequency because they showed up so infrequently. So I think from being fair to the historical subject's point of view, I think there's sort of two responses to it. One is, “Well, if we can substantially reduce the amount of disease by reducing the number of carriers that we know of who carry genetic disease, that's progress. So if you go from some number to a smaller number from one generation to the next of people who are likely or probable to have a genetic disease, that's progress. So you can't say, ‘Because we can't do everything, we shouldn't do anything,' that's a foolish position to take.” So that's one aspect of it. The other aspect of it is that, “While you're correct that lacking genetic testing we can't see the genome in an individual, we can infer a great deal about a person's genome if we have elaborate family histories.” So that's why the real burst of activity in and around eugenics is with Davenport's and Laughlin's Eugenic Record Office and the establishment of this elaborate effort to build very sophisticated family trees, because that was the way that you could infer a genome with some accuracy. Mike: Okay. So one thing that you point out about the early physicians that were sterilizing people was that their reasons for sterilization were not necessarily eugenic, and early on they often weren't. So what were the other motivations of these physicians in sterilizing their patients? Mark: Yeah, they run a gamut, and I'll start with the darkest motives: clearly punitive. There's a significant punitive aspect to it, especially when you're doing something as brutal as castration or as invasive as a hysterectomy. I mean, you have to keep in mind the relatively crude state of surgery in the late 19th and early 20th century. So these are pretty significant things. There was one person in the state of Washington who had argued that a vasectomy was really not much worse than having a tooth pulled. And to imagine that without anything like sophisticated anesthetics makes you realize that having a tooth pulled is probably a pretty miserable experience in the early 20th century. So you're not comparing it to something that's not that big of a deal, but you were probably comparing it to something that was relatively common in an era before fluoride and dental health. So they were trying to sort of normalize it as something that could happen. The use of castration continued well into the 20th century for decades after the vasectomy was invented. So when I looked really closely at the state of Oregon, for example, they were using both castrations and vasectomies. And when we looked at why they were using one rather than the other, what we found was that when people were convicted of offenses that were associated with what we would today consider homosexuality, they were more likely to be castrated. But for men who were in prison for crimes of rape against women, those men would be more likely to receive vasectomy. And so you see this interesting difference in the application of which surgery is used, and it clearly has a punitive aspect of it in the use of castration. When you get later into the 20th century, you'll see this applied increasingly to women. And there's some very ugly stuff that happens in the 1960s and 1970s around women in poverty in which they are coerced to either have their tubes tied or to receive hysterectomies. There's a great book Fit to Be Tied by Rebecca Kluchin that is really the complement to my book. She takes it to the next set of decades, to the fifties, sixties, seventies, and eighties, and looks really closely at the ways in which there's punitive aspects of it all the way through the 20th century. But it's not just punitive, there were also therapeutic measures that were in place. There were clearly people involved who sought access to control of their own reproduction because they didn't want to pass something along or because they didn't want to have children. So keep in mind, especially with the more recent decisions around abortion and privacy rights that we're dealing with right now, until you get to the late 1960s, the guaranteed access to birth control is not a fundamental right in the United States. And so how do you control your own fertility without access to reliable birth control? There are cases, and Christine Manganaro has written about one such case with a physician in Washington State who was using eugenic arguments to justify and get through the bureaucracy necessary to sterilize women, and the women themselves wanted that sterilization and were collaborating with him to do the things necessary to get access to be sterilized. And so in control of your own fertility, there was some of that that you can find examples of. You also find examples of where it has therapeutic uses for people who are suffering from mental or emotional trauma. And again, Christine Manganaro does a nice job in this with looking at women who suffered severe postpartum depression. If you suffer from postpartum depression, what is the only real way in a relatively crude medical environment, what's the only really effective way to avoid postpartum depression? Well, avoid postpartum. Don't get pregnant and have a child. And so that same physician was using sterilization as a way of preventing the postpartum depression that would then follow birth being given by women who had suffered from this previously. Now, I will tell you those cases are relatively rare. By and large, the history of coerced sterilization in the United States is one of either eugenic justification or punitive measures or it's in order to allow for easier control over people, that there's a manipulative aspect of it. So it might be if you sterilize them you can release them because you believe that they will no longer commit the crimes or no longer perpetuate whatever genetic shortcomings those people are believed to have, or a notion that if you sterilize them you can release them because they have paid for their crime, that it's cheaper to sterilize them and release them than it is to keep them incarcerated. But what I think is important to understand here is that it's not a single simple answer to this. It's a pretty complex set of things that are all based on a pretty simplistic notion, and that is that somehow located in the testicles and ovaries of these citizens is a problem that you could surgically remove, that it could be excised from society by taking it out of these people's bodies. And lots of different people were using that to promote lots of different notions. Mike: Right. To me, it was interesting that it wasn't just about like doing things to prevent them from reproducing, but it was also sometimes used as a behavioral control method, they thought sterilizing people would actually change their behavior. Mark: Yeah, I mean, Harry Sharp, the guy who invented the vasectomy, firmly believed that he would reduce the problems of the young men in his mental hospital and their masturbation, what you call chronic masturbation problems. Mike: Right, okay. So now obviously a major factor of the movement for sterilization of the so-called unfit was the eugenics movement. So, like I said, we had Kevles on, so my listeners are familiar with the general history of the eugenics movement as far as its kind of intellectual development. So talk about some of the ways that the eugenicists were instrumental in turning sterilization practice into sterilization policy. Mark: Well, the biggest was what now is pretty normal in American politics, and that is what the founders referred to as states as the laboratories for democracy. The idea that the founders had all the way back to the Federalists was a notion that you had a federal government, but then you also had originally 13 grown to 50 states, each of which was a kind of individual laboratory for democracy. So an individual state could come up with new legislation and enact it, and the other states could see how it went. They could see what value there might be in that legislation. And then you'd have all of these different little experiments going on, and the good ones would spread to other states. And the early proponents of eugenics in the United States seized on this structure of governance that we have to individually, state by state, go to the legislatures with model legislation. And that model legislation came out of the Eugenic Records Office, and this is really Harry Laughlin's push to get states to adopt very similar eugenic laws. And you could state by state use these sort of models for it, so that legislators wouldn't even have to do the work of writing these things. Rather, the bills could be handed to them as a model bill that could be debated and put into place. And the promise on all of them is that if you adopted this legislation, you would have a healthier body of citizens. You would have a safer community of people who live there, that the state would save money because it wouldn't have to put so many people in prison or mental health facilities, and that by and large the public good would be advanced. And it was all leveraged on a set of prejudices against people who were not seen as sufficiently fit, that they didn't meet whatever kinds of standards that there were for human goodness. Mike: Okay. So on the subject of model legislation, so you talked about that and you also talked a bit about how court arguments were replicated across state lines as well. So how early was the eugenics movement to this game of pre-fabricated policy? Mark: Well, I can't find anybody who is earlier. I mean, this really seems like one of the real novel contributions of the proponents of this. And it's because it leverages certain characteristics of the way in which federalism works in the United States with the very nature of eugenics itself which is operating at this intersection of human biology and education and public health and medicine and the punitive aspects of mental health facilities or of prisons, and all of these things are under control of the state, individual states. They are powers that either explicitly or implied in the US Constitution are of state import. And it really only is until you get Buck v. Bell in the mid-twenties that you have any kind of federal sanctification of this. But prior to that, it had been going on at lower and lower courts, the big advance being made in the Michigan case two years before Buck v. Bell. And that Michigan case, everything that ultimately would be tested in the Buck v. Bell case was all sort of laid out and sorted in a much more complex case. But Buck v. Bell was the Supreme Court's sanctification of it. Mike: Okay. So one of the things I liked about your book was that it's rich with data, but it's not bogged down with it. So what are some of the key statistics about sterilization in the US that people should know? Mark: Well, I think one of the biggest is that it peaks in the 1930s and begins to fade prior to World War II. Another one is who is it that's advancing it at any given time? So what you see are really interesting lineage of professions who are advancing first sterilization and then eugenic sterilization in the 20th century. And one of the things that I find most fascinating is one of the last groups to get on board and one of the last groups to get off of this train are American biologists, and that American biologists really used this as a way to help professionalize them in the early 20th century because it allowed them to demonstrate the public value of basic scientific research. And then really are among the last ones off. You don't see biologists turn against eugenics until the late sixties and early seventies, which is really late relative to other professional groups. I mean, the psychiatrists, psychologists, anthropologists, many of the other social scientists, they are beginning to turn against it in the thirties. But American biologists sort of continue replicating a set of base assumptions that were first made in biology textbooks in the teens and twenties. They continue restating those assumptions all the way through the sixties. Mike: So for a while, the eugenics movement was largely unopposed in it's crusade to sterilize the so-called unfit. I mean, there were parts of the Catholic Church that were opposed and individuals here there, but there wasn't any sort of organized resistance. Now you claim that all changed with Buck v. Bell, so talk about that ruling and the reactions to it. Mark: Yeah. And again, it's funny to talk about this, funny in a like slow down and look at the car accident funny, funny weird and a little scary funny, it's funny to look at this right now in the context of, again, recent Supreme Court decisions about abortion because I do say in the book and I have said elsewhere that there really is no pro-life movement in the United States until Roe v. Wade. And in that same way, there really was no organized opposition to eugenics in United States until Buck v. Bell, that these court cases represent pivotal moments in the emergence of opposition because they crystallized something that until then really didn't have full state sanctification. And so in both the case of eugenics in Buck v. Bell in the twenties and Roe in the seventies, you have the crystallization of something to push against. And Buck creates for an increasingly large number of professionals and social commentators something very specific against which they can push and they can begin leveraging their sets of arguments. What I always find interesting is that the original arguments against eugenics in the 20s are very different than what are made later. That is, they often are rife with many of the same prejudiced assumptions that proponents of eugenics had. The issue for many though becomes the notion of whether or not the state has the power to do it and has the authority or is smart enough to know how to do it well.n ot really addressing the underlying civil liberties issues, which I think by the late 20th century are much more prominent in our minds. Mike: Okay. So eugenics began to decline starting in the 30s, as you said. The Pope came out against it, there was organized resistance to it, and advances in biology were beginning to unwind some of its core claims. But according to your book, eugenics took quite a while to finally lose public respect. So talk a bit about the decline of eugenics and what sort of documentation you used in the book to gauge support for the theory. Mark: Yeah, so that's actually my favorite part of the book, was the part that I found most interesting. For years, I had collected biology textbooks, hunting bookstores for them and libraries. And in every time I would find one, I would record if it talked about eugenics and how it talked about eugenics. And the thing that we see very clearly is that there's no systematic turn against eugenics in biology textbooks until you get into the 1970s, and then you start seeing this sort of shift in the discussion of it. First you see a decline in any discussion, you start seeing in the fifties eugenics falls out of the textbooks. And then as you get into the sixties, seventies, and really into the eighties, you start seeing some criticism of it emerge. But up until the 1960s, there's almost no textbook published that doesn't include eugenics, and there's almost none of the ones that do talk about it are critical. You don't see the real explosion of criticism until you get into the early and mid-sixties, and then by the time you get between the mid-seventies and 1980, it's overwhelmingly critical and overwhelmingly common to talk in negative ways about eugenics. So I used the textbooks as a marker for the state-of-the-art sort of received wisdom. And until the sixties, the received wisdom that every college kid is taught is that eugenics is good and possible, and biology can tell us how to do it right and well. Mike: Okay. So sterilization laws did start to also be repealed or overturned at the state level in the latter half of the 20th century with the decline of eugenics. Can you talk a bit about the decline of sterilization policy? Mark: Yeah. So a couple of things happened, and again, I point you to Rebecca Kluchin's work which I think is very good in this regard. So my story is mostly a story about white people and disproportionately a story about men. And so from the late 19th century through the first third of the 20th century, the majority of people who were targeted for sterilization were white men. And my argument was that this was a very racist activity because these men were being sterilized because they did not meet the ideals of white masculinity. That is, they were involved in activities that we associate with homosexuality; they were developmentally delayed; they stole or were violent. These are all unacceptable expressions or unacceptable activities of white masculinity. Violence or thievery or lower intelligence are acceptable for other races, but they're not acceptable for the white race. And so these people had to be cleaned up, they had to clean up the white race. And I talk explicitly about how racist it was and how it focused almost entirely on white men. That began to shift first with an increasing emphasis on women, and then by the mid-20th century, an increasing emphasis on people of color. And that shift happens at the same time that eugenics itself becomes increasingly problematic. And again, Kluchin does a much better and more thorough job of looking at that latter period. But my earlier work or my work in the earlier period makes clear that it's no less racist, that is, that targeting white men because they weren't upholding the expectations of white masculinity is a racist activity. And the latter work looks at what happens to minoritized communities and women, especially minority women, which by the time you get to 1970s, the vast majority of people who were being targeted for compulsory sterilization or coerced sterilization are minoritized women. Mike: Okay. Now despite the general revulsion of the public to eugenics programs, the ghosts of the movement for sterilization still linger in many ways reflecting the origins of the movement. In particular, you point to legislation that was passed in four states authorizing the sterilization of certain classes of criminals in exchange for more lenient sentences as well as sort of vigilante judges who attempted to implement these sort of schemes in their own rulings. So where is sterilization still policy? Mark: You see interesting popping up in interesting and problematic ways in certain either court cases or legislation that seems to get at the same underlying assumptions. And I guess if you were to ask simply, “What do you see as an overall historiographic trend to which you want to contribute?” One of the things that I want to argue, because I try to work very hard to not be either an apologist or a presentist, is that many of the same assumptions that led to things that we would consider deeply problematic are still present in our public discourse or our underlying assumptions today. And so making the people in the past make more sense to us isn't an effort to apologize for them. It's an effort rather to show that today we still have some deeply problematic underlying assumptions in how we look at people and we think about issues like equity or equality that future historians will look back on and perhaps point out our own shortcomings. So ways in which you may look at how it is that, for example, we would be much more inclined to be motivated to invest in sex ed or in birth control opportunities for people of poorer means, making investments in communities where we would allow for greater access because of a recognition that poor people should be encouraged to use birth control in ways that wealthier people don't need to be encouraged to use birth control. And I think as you're challenging some of those assumptions, you start confronting awkward concerns about what we think is happening in poorer communities, why they have larger numbers of children, and why that might be bad or problematic for us. You certainly see it now in an increasing set of conversations about pedophilia and about how you might need to have some biological intervention in men especially who are convicted of pedophilia, and that's in some strange segment of our popular discourse right now out there. But I think the biggest place for it is in the way in which we can very easily dismiss people in the past as merely eugenicists and oversimplify their views. Well, we would say when we are challenged for our own views that, "Oh, well, it's complicated actually," and you try to unpack it in more ways. Mike: Right, okay. So one interesting thing you pointed to was the involvement of these private sector non-profit activist organizations in kind of a new movement for sterilization. In particular, you point to this organization called CRACK, so tell us what CRACK was doing. Mark: Well, CRACK, and there's been others that have emerged like them that are philanthropic organizations or privately funded organizations that seek to provide access to sterilization in poor communities. Now, on the surface, there is undoubtedly both inequity in access to medical care between wealthier and poorer communities and a greater capacity for a person to have control over their own fertility if they have greater access to medical care. So you really can't deny the benefits of it. CRACK is interesting because not only are they providing access to medical care, but they're providing stipends to people. They were offering economic payments to people in order to be sterilized in addition to the sterilization procedure. And an economic incentive like a hundred dollars means something radically different to a poor person than it does to a wealthy person. So it would've a disproportionate impact on swaying a person's decision to be vasectomized or to receive a tubal ligation if the hundred bucks mattered to them in ways that it didn't matter to a wealthier person. But this is part of a larger movement away from state-sponsoredred eugenics to what Diane Paul talks about as a neoliberal approach to thinking about human reproduction. And this moves away from state coercion to social coercion or away from state coercion to economic coercion. The issue here is if you sort of turn this over to the marketplace and you're allowing for social coercion or economic coercion to take the place of government coercion, are you any less coercive? That's why when I use the language in the book, I talk about coerced sterilization, not just compulsory sterilization or eugenic sterilization, but coerced sterilization, the idea that a person could be offered a shorter prison sentence or offered money or offered access to something if they were willing to be sterilized. And that coercion, whether it's in the hands of the state or in the hands of a philanthropic organization, is equally coercive and is equally problematic and is based on some of the very same underlying assumptions that there are good people who have good genes and there are bad people who have bad genes and we can figure out which are which and that we are somehow morally empowered to encourage the good people to have more children and discourage the bad people from having children. And so that commonality, whether you're on the philanthropic side of this coercion or the legal side of this coercion, shares too many similarities for me to be comfortable. Mike: Okay. So somewhere in the book you state that while it hasn't been directly overturned, Buck versus Bell was essentially overruled by other rulings such as Griswold versus Connecticut and Roe v. Wade. So now your book was published in 2008, since then a lot of has happened in the courts. So how do things look now that we have rulings like Dobbs versus Jackson's Women's Health Organization on the books? Mark: Well, I tell you, I'm extraordinarily happy that people understand that the recent abortion decision undermines the foundation for things like Griswold and all the way up through gay marriage. And recognizing that the legal foundations on which Roe was decided while weak–undoubtedly weak, I think any careful scholar on this is going to tell you that simply a privacy argument for Roe was liable for being overturned–but not only does the overturning of Roe on the basis of privacy threaten Roe, but it threatens all of these other things that we take absolutely for granted right now like access to birth control, like interracial marriage, like gay marriage. This is deeply problematic.  But it also tells us that we were relying on something that was not sufficient and perhaps not trustworthy. That is, there was work to be done to more carefully explicate why it is that in progressive modern society access to birth control, access to the legal recognition to marry the person you love regardless of their sex, gender, race, or ethnicity, and access to control of your own reproduction, those are all critical to a modern progressive society. And we had founded it on too tenuous a basis with Roe, and so we have good work to do, critical and important work to do to really further solidify these rights. I think the fact that these appear so important to the election of 2022 and to the election of legislators suggests that we're no longer willing to rely on just the court to preserve and protect these rights, but that we want a deeper and more binding commitment of legislation. Mike: All right. So finally, one thing that you say in the book which I liked is that history exists to teach us about ourselves. So what can we learn about ourselves through reading this book? Mark: So I'm a rather pessimistic historian. I like a quote attributed to Mark Twain, almost every witty thing is attributed to Mark Twain. There's a quote from Mark Twain that says, "History doesn't repeat, but it does rhyme." And I've always really liked that because I think people who study history know that to a certain degree we are doomed to repeat the past, that there's a certain similarity with things that seem to happen over and over and over again. But like that movie Groundhog Day, the act of learning over and over and over again does change you. And we know that reading history and reading fiction generates in a person a sense of both empathy and a broader sense of why and how people do things. And so I think these kinds of histories are critical for us to look back at the ugliest, most challenging aspects of our own society's histories so that we can do a little bit better as we confront the same sorts of things generation after generation after generation. Mike: All right. Well, Dr. Largent, thank you so much for coming on The Nazi Lies Podcast to talk about coerced sterilization in the United States. The book again is Breeding Contempt, out from Rutgers University Press. Thanks again. Mark: Thank you, Mike, I appreciate the opportunity. Mike: You missed Breeding Contempt with us in The Nazi Lies Book Club. Join us weekly on Discord as we discuss the books of upcoming guests of the show. Sign up on Patreon or shoot us a DM. Thanks for listening. [Theme song]

MSU Strategic Plan 2030 identifies goals within six key themes: student success, staff and faculty success, discovery, creativity, and innovation for excellence and global impact, sustainable health, stewardship and sustainability, and diversity, equity, and inclusion.On this edition of MSU Today, we'll be focusing on the student success theme of the plan with its executive sponsors: Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs Teresa Woodruff and Senior Vice President for Student Life and Engagement Vennie Gore. Michigan State University President Samuel L. Stanley Jr., M.D. says MSU student success is central to everything we're doing at MSU.“It's no accident that student success was the first pillar of our strategic plan, and it's really central to everything we're doing at Michigan State University,” says Stanley. “It touches on everything we do. I think what's exciting about what we're trying to do in this pillar and this area of emphasis is really bring to even further fruition a change in attitude and accomplishment that is taking place at Michigan State.“We believe that every student we admit to Michigan State is capable and should graduate from Michigan State University. They're capable of doing that. When they finish, we're going to continue to support them in having rewarding careers during their lifetime. We're going to help everyone who comes here graduate because we believe they can.“We're not going to stop at graduation. We're going to continue to be an advocate for them and support them as they continue in their careers and their lives. People have been talking about this before I came, but I really see this as an opportunity for us as an institution to really make this happen. We're going to talk a lot today with Provost Woodruff and Vennie Gore about graduation rates. That's one of the most important measures of success. We're supporting students' mental health and supporting them in every way, shape, and form. It's a holistic approach to see them succeed at Michigan State University. And I couldn't be more excited about that.”Gore says the goal is for every student MSU admits to learn, grow, and thrive.“Our goal is to have every student that we admit learn, grow, and thrive here at Michigan State and make sure they have the opportunity to have access to world class education through our faculty,” Gore says. “And we want them to have access to co-curricular and extracurricular activities, which helps them to grow and develop as people and become lifelong Spartans. That's what we mean when we talk about student success for the whole person.“I meet alumni who have been here in the '50s and the '60s and the '70s and they look back on their educational experiences very fondly. They talk about what they achieved here at Michigan State and how it's helped them in their career and their life. That's what we want for everyone. Because I think when parents send their sons or daughters here, they want them to have that kind of enriched experience so that when they leave here, they can go out in the world and do the things that they hope to do.”“Boy, Vennie, you're spot on,” Woodruff says. “I really echo a lot of what you said. I do agree. I think the student success that we measure at MSU is unique, and it's really the measure of our institution's ability to provide the kind of environment and inclusive, equitable curriculum and environment that really enables every student to learn, thrive, persist, graduate, and succeed after graduation. Each one of those is student success.“The way we really look at it is to be very holistic and to understand that student success is not necessarily a measure of the academic achievement of an individual or the student collectively, but rather really thinking about how well the institution supports its students, which I think is a very MSU way of looking at student success. It really allows us to identify places where there are hurdles.“We don't want a single soul at this institution to stub their toe as they're running down the track towards the world that is awaiting them with open arms with all the problems and the opportunities that exist. This notion of student success really is something that I think I'm really proud of. Vennie, as you said, I think it's something that parents see as really the opportunity for their child or grandchild or niece or nephew or friend to really succeed.”What are some of the ways MSU is excelling in this area now?“Go Green Go 15 is the credit momentum campaign,” continues Woodruff. “And what that really represents is the fact that one of the things that was identified at MSU is that students needed to maintain steady momentum in order to graduate in a timely way. If you graduate in a timely way, it allows you to get to that next destination more quickly and with less financial burden.“That really illustrates the way MSU is able to look at student success with these data informed efforts and allow us to then modulate the institution towards the students' success. Another one that I know that we've done is to really redesign the math course curriculum. We're working on general education and other gateway courses. “Part of that really lives out in the Neighborhood Student Success Collaborative, something that I think, Vennie, you and others really brought to this institution as a way of blending together intellectual and social in the ways in which you learn in a dynamic interface between people and the living setting and the formal learning environment and that we learn from each other. The newest thing we did during my time here is really My Spartan Story. It was started before I arrived, but it's that interactive platform that allows us to capture all these experiences. If in fact we believe that student success is part of this continuum of their experiences at the institution, how can we collate and capture all of that work to allow them to use that as they move beyond this institution? Student success is not of a moment in time. It is of that student's lifelong outcomes of being at a place like MSU.”“One of the other things about being on a residential campus this large for our 50,000 students here on campus, our graduate professional students in Grand Rapids or in Flint or Detroit or up in the U.P. is finding that sense of belonging,” Gore continues. “When I find that sort of sense of belonging in a community, it helps me find my colleagues. My grandmother used to say you are your friends. I didn't really know what that meant, Russ. But I think what it really means is that if I'm a person here who's interested in the sciences and I become part of Lyman Briggs and I meet other students who have similar interests, that enriches my whole experience while I'm here. And that sense of belonging is critically important for everyone because I think what we're learning even in this period of the pandemic is that isolation is bad for students. Being social and having a sense of connection and having that support is critical. Belonging is another thing we are working toward because that helps with students persisting in school.”Recently the Division of Residential and Hospitality Services was merged with the Division of Student Affairs and Services to form the Division of Student Life and Engagement. How is this connected to the strategic plan and how will it support student success?“In many ways, the two divisions have worked side by side together because we are both here for students,” continues Gore. “Residential and Hospitality Services was really focused on the campus experience. Student Affairs and Services had a broader mission of not just our on-campus students, but our off-campus students, fraternity and sorority life, our visitors, and our veterans who are here.“Bringing the two units together allows us to have greater collaboration as we work across the campus. We know that we're not in isolation. Working with the Provost Office and the colleges also allows for us to have the holistic experience. One of the things that I've been really pleased with as the two divisions have come together is I think everybody recognizes the importance of collaboration and to working across our own boundaries. And that's critical for where we are and how we serve this campus community.”“Well, again, I think Vennie's hit it on the head,” says Woodruff. “If we go back to the strategic plan and how engineering the institution best enables the success of every student, it is to invert the traditional definition of student success. Instead of centering on the students' assumed capacity or willingness to earn degrees, the strategic plan really defines student success as the measure of the institution's capacity or willingness to support every student.“When Vennie and I sat down and talked about the living-learning environments, the Neighborhoods, we thought that was really brilliant. But then what we did in addition is to say, ‘Well, what happens when students live and learn for additional time within this setting? Do they succeed?' Yes, they succeed even better. They succeed in the outcomes, which is getting to their goals academically.“What that really contemplates as we think about the structure of the institution is the opportunity to more flexibly enable those institutional changes that support our objectives. Really that's where the Division of Residential and Hospitality Services and the Division of Student Affairs represented two groups that work together. But by coming together, we synergize in a way that we can better enable the student outcomes.“I think institutions that are confident can make big changes, and it can then lead to extraordinary outcomes. We'll be measuring this. We'll be looking back, Vennie, in 2030 together from some vantage point and be able to say students today are better because of what we did institutionally back in 2020 and 2021. That's the exciting thing about MSU. It's a place that's not ossified in a particular way of working, rather it's aspirational for what our students really need.“And then we as leaders implement. I'm really excited about what this is going to do for our student success over time.”“If you think about the ethos at Michigan State, for an institution of our size and as decentralized as it may feel, there is a very low barrier to collaboration,” Gore says. “It's not just between the student life and engagement and provost offices. You see it in the colleges, and you see faculty members and researchers working across disciplines to expand scholarship or advance knowledge to solve big problems. That has been something that I think we have. It's just part of our DNA that we're able to do that. In other institutions I worked at, I would say that wasn't necessarily the case.”With respect to the strategic plan, where do you see this focus on student success leading in the future?“When we look at it in 2030, we would like to have eliminated the opportunity gaps,” Gore continues. “When we talk about the opportunity gaps, there are some subgroups of our community that aren't graduating at the level that we wish for or their parents wish for. It isn't about whether they have the academic ability. There are some non-cognitive things that come into play that make that a difficult hurdle for some students.“Mark Largent (associate provost for undergraduate education and dean of undergraduate studies) is fond to say that if we get a student to their junior year, that we're graduating them at the rate of Ivy League schools, 90 to 94 percent. It's that first and second year that is critical for us. And that's why the second year live-on (on-campus living requirement) was really important because it provides that sense of stability for students so they can get to the junior year. They're in their program, and then they can graduate. We hope in 2030 that we have students who are graduating at a high rate across all demographics. That would be the big change that we'd like to see.”“Absolutely,” adds Woodruff. “Some of the ways we're engineering the environment for student success is in part the merger that we just talked about, but it's also in the way we're using data across a vast network of institutions. We have our institutional data, but also through the University Innovation Alliance, we're able to scale our knowledge node in ways that allow us to gather information and be able to test our hypotheses and be able to then work towards more equitable educational outcomes in some cases that perhaps we couldn't see entirely but that can be revealed through these large networks.“That's something that I think allows this university itself to be a learning institution. I always say I never learn anything from talking to myself. If we simply look inward, we will never actually be able to enable the success that we wish to achieve. That University Innovation Alliance is something that I'm really excited about.“I want to go back to the Neighborhood concept. It was an MSU concept in 2010, and we really began to think about the ways in which we offer opportunities for learning environments in a holistic way. And by having this in a place that students can access easily, it creates that opportunity for the student to casually learn and formally learn in the places and spaces where they are.“Our goal is to eliminate the achievement gaps that we see today, and we've made steady strides. In as much as this institution continues to be thoughtful and intellectual partners in the institutional sense of trying to understand institutional barriers, I'm convinced our students can get there. At some level, our students are running a race. If there's a high hurdle, what we need to do is add that little pole vault so they can get over it. As we go, we hope to learn how to remove barriers and take those high hurdles to low and then eventually have an even playing field. Everyone who comes in races at the same level, and that I think is going to allow everyone to learn, thrive, graduate, and then succeed.”What are the primary goals in this area of student success?“Again, we want to get to an 86 percent five-year graduation rate. That's our goal,” Gore says. “We've been very successful in incrementally moving that up over the last eight years. We want students to have a holistic experience. When they leave here, we want them to not only be good scholars but also have an appreciation for the arts, have good health and wellness, and be good citizens. They're global citizens so they understand the impact of the world. That's what student success looks like to me and that's what we would like to have.”“I agree with that,” says Woodruff. “Our objective is to make this place more accessible and attractive to a wider variety of students. Strengthening our ability to tell our story and really increasing the success of students who are here begins to tell that story. And that's from our undergraduate to our graduate students and to our professional students. Broadening the diversity of the student body provides a way in which our students become a learning community for each other.“That's an important part of what we're driving toward - increasing the number and diversity of learners across campus. We're widening the ways in which students can learn. And of course, part of that has been developed through the pandemic, but we're doing it in a really intentional way to understand the pedagogical ways in which students learn best. Instead of asking students to change, we ask how we can change. That's one of the objectives of the institution.“And we really must make sure that along the way, we're creating a climate that the students can see that they are part of that climate, that there is a give and a get, that it's not just that I come, but that I am a part of, that I am the climate, and I am the institution. If we think about each other and that we are all part of this, we create an MSU that really will thrive and create the best success metrics for every student that comes.”What are some of the biggest challenges to reaching our goals for student success?“Some of our biggest challenges are going to be the time and people part,” says Gore. “The reason why I say this, Russ, is I think everyone in the country has been talking about the Great Resignation. Having good talent in the institution is important to us. It's not a challenge of will, and it's not a challenge of political will. It's just a challenge of making sure that we're staffed at the point where we can provide the experience for our students. I'm an optimist who believes that as we come out of the pandemic, we will start to see ourselves as an employer of choice. This is a place where people want to be. We have a forward thinking plan. Folks can see themselves in this plan and they want to be a part of it. While the talent is a challenge, it's not an overwhelming challenge for me.”“I think that's right,” adds Woodruff. “Our limited resource is ourselves. We might think that's monetary, but I think that the limitation to MSU will only be in the way we think about how this institution grows and evolves and how we become part of that evolution. That's going to take time and trust and coordination. It's going to take each of us seeing each other as part of the solution and believing that a change in the organization isn't a reflection on me or what I do but really a reflection on what the institution needs to do going forward.“Being adaptable through change management, particularly in the current moment, is something that requires an enormous amount of trust. What we've seen across this period in the last several years is that people have started to lose trust in the institutions that once you didn't even think about. I saw a poll recently that trust in pediatricians is at an all-time low. What that says is that we have at a societal level pressure on each one of us as part of organizations and MSU as an institution. How do we build that willingness to give each other the latitude to work in an environment that is changing but is still going to be here for the next hundred years? The value of higher education has been questioned, but there is no other way in society where we have changed more lives, not only by those who go through our institution, but by those who stay. Our student success is linked to our faculty success.“We have to continue to enable each of us to give each other a little benefit of the doubt while we go through the moment and believe that each of us wants the best for each other. I think once we begin to bring that trust back to every circumstance, we're going to reach our goal of a great university and great student success.”What are some of the things that position MSU to be a leader in student success?“It's in our DNA,” says Gore. “When I graduated from graduate school in 1982 from Indiana, there were four institutions that were on the forefront of living-learning: Michigan State, Vermont, UC Davis, and UW Stevens Point. They had a history of residential colleges and what they meant for large public Research 1 institutions and that integration and that set level of collaboration. We've had this long history over the years.“One of the other things too is that we haven't rested on history. If you were to go back and look over time, you could see the evolution of what that meant on our campus. When we started the Neighborhood concept back in 2009 as a pilot at Hubbard Residence Hall, we intuitively knew that it was going to be messy. The pilot would be very different than what the product would be. And that has been true. What that says is that the people who are attracted to this work are thoughtful and innovative, and they don't necessarily think that we have all the answers. We're going to try some things. Some of those things will work and some won't. The things that don't work we'll forget about, and we'll keep going without feeling we failed. I think that's the big thing. MSU is okay with trying something. And if it doesn't work out, it's all right and we move on to the next thing. It's that messiness that you have to be an organization like Michigan State to be okay with.”“I echo that,” Woodruff continues. “We're experimentalists. When you're actually doing hypothesis-based thinking, you actually are not always right. In fact, I always say we're a batter, not a pitcher. A pitcher has to be right. Most of the time, a batter only has to put the ball in play about a quarter of the time. I really think that you've hit it on the head.“We're really enabling a series of increasingly coordinated and very deliberative and thoughtful approaches across the entire enterprise. There's a saying I have that we have provostial partnerships across the entire institution. We are all provostial in the ecumenical sense of the way the provost is part of the opening and the enabling of everyone towards their academic goals. We're really being very thoughtful.“That includes the merger of RHS and Student Affairs in a way that is an increase in coordination and deliberation that is going to, we believe, enable student success. We're also focusing on the strengths and skill sets of existing leaders and making sure we all see how we can be part of this momentum and then leveraging that talent that exists and trying to maximize the output that we have in ways that really have no silos. We have this egalitarian way of working.“That itself is part of perhaps some of the experimental ways in which Vennie was just talking. But also I think it's just because leaders in this space understand what our goals are, and they really are towards student success and academic excellence. And relative to that, I think our faculty and academic staff from across the university are really engaged with our staff in all the ways that this institution's goals ask them to be. The strategic plan emphasis on student success really helps shine a light on all this work that is happening. That's part of our DNA. That's part of the experimentalist in us to achieve the goals on behalf of those in whose interests we serve.”“I like the baseball analogy,” says Gore. “A Major League player gets paid multimillion dollar to have a batting average of 300, which is getting a hit three out of 10 times. If we were in that genre, we're probably batting 700. Seven out 10 times we get it right. Those three other times, we swing and miss. That happens in life and that's okay. But we're going to try something. If something doesn't work, it's okay. We're going to move on. We're going to do some other things. We have the flexible latitude to do that.”“We' trust each other,” says Woodruff. “Even if I fail, I know I'm going to be picked up. But if we lack coordination, he's going to call me. These are ways in which we develop leadership together with the strategic objectives of the institution and our great faculty and students to holistically come together and have that great batting average.”Vennie, earlier you mentioned the goal of an 86 percent graduation rate. What are some of the ways we will measure the success of the student success initiative?“We keep score, using the baseball analogy,” Gore says. “At the end of the game, you want to know whether you won or lost. Graduation is one of the ways you keep score. Retention is another way that you keep score. How many of our students are staying from their freshman to sophomore to junior years? What are those retention rates? Are we seeing changes in subgroups? It's like calling balls and strikes in a baseball game. That's sort of how we look at it. The data analytics are something that we really began moving forward and understanding what the important things are. I like to think of this in three strategic questions: Are you doing the right things? Do you have the capacity to do the right things? And can you do the right things right the first time? And that's all about execution. You can analytically look at all those different things to be able to say that you're being successful.”“Right. I agree,” Woodruff adds. “That 86 percent graduation rate is one piece of this. I also want to look at placement rates for where the students go after getting an undergraduate degree or graduate degree. And that's the going to be important as well as a metric of success. We're working to reduce probation rates, too. We'll be measuring that this year, and that's going to be an important metric for us on the pathway. We want to see that sense of belonging and the climate assessments continue to improve. One of the things in the merger that Vennie's really focused on across all our affinity and identity groups is to make sure that sense of belonging is there and that folks know that this is not top-down. This is all of us. If you're here, you're a part of creating the culture that exists.“Looking for someone else to create culture is not the same as creating the culture we all wish to be a part of. That's the message that Vennie's been giving, and it's been really a winning and wonderful way of thinking in a really renewed way about the institution. We want to have impactful opportunities for the students for internships and externships and laboratory environments and making sure students know that's an option for them early in their careers. That's an important part of this.“We've seen a bit of a decline in the use of student services during this current context. We want to make sure that use of the services that we have created is increasing. I think another one is that student debt upon graduation has been decreased and part of that is the credit momentum. That is to say that we expect you to be here for a period with deep learning and then to graduate. That will be in the student's best interest as they move along.“Part of that is creating an inclusive, equitable curriculum and an environment that enables their academic and social and overall wellness and financial support. That leads back to the student's ability to learn, thrive, persist, graduate, and succeed. All of that's really part of what that last set of metrics really enables.”“We all have a role in student success no matter what your role is at the institution,” says Gore. “Whether you're a faculty member or a staff member who is serving food or you're a TA, we all have a role. At least through the pandemic, what we have heard from our undergraduate students is that college is more than just going to class. It's the whole experience.“And that impact that we all have on the individual student, no matter what our role is, is significant. Some of the most significant relationships have come through advising and mentoring and saying hello and being there for their well-being and knowing that there's someone in your corner to support you. That's student success. This is the collective responsibility of all of us as members of our community.”“Really well said, Vennie,” says Woodruff. “The strategic plan is really such an asset to have for an institution that, through the COVID context, was able to continue to reach for what its aspirations should be. That's the leadership of our president and every person in a leadership role and everybody who participated in really thinking about what our aspirations are at a time when other institutions were really being grounded by the pandemic.“Out of that has come the opportunity to really change the institution on behalf of the students we serve. I'm so grateful to all my colleagues with whom we've all worked to have this strategic plan, and the opportunity to implement it is just so exciting. I just can't wait to see what happens next to all of the students who come through this institution at this particular time. It's really an exciting time and the world so desperately needs them.“Our students are carrying heavy buckets. No doubt about it. But we've told them that what we're doing is we're putting our hands next to them and we're going to help them carry it. We can't take it away. We wish we could, but we can't. We know that whatever they've learned, both within our academic halls as well as within our residential halls and within the halls of life and the changes that they've experienced, that those buckets have been filled. But we're going to help them with what comes next. We can't predict what their lives are going to be. But we know because of being part of this institution that they're ready for both the expected and the unexpected. That's the best that we can do on behalf of these students. I couldn't be more excited for the future that they will help create.”On this edition of MSU Today, we've been talking about the student success theme of MSU's Strategic Plan 2030, Empowering Excellence, Advancing Equity and Expanding Impact with the executive sponsors of the theme, Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs Teresa Woodruff and Senior Vice President for Student Life and Engagement Vennie Gore. Read and learn more about MSU Strategic Plan 2030 at strategicplan.msu.edu. MSU Today airs Sunday mornings at 9:00 on WKAR News/Talk and Sunday evenings at 8:00 on 760 WJR. Find, rate, and subscribe to “MSU Today with Russ White” on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and wherever you get your shows.

Mark Largent:Welcome. My name is Mark Largent. I'm the associate provost and dean for undergraduate education at Michigan State University. And it is my pleasure to be your host today. I want to start by thanking the Spartan Jazz Quintet for their talent and their time and their contribution to this really wonderful ceremony today. I am so happy to be here. I have to be honest with you. This is a very joyful time as we restart a school year. I am one of those people who started school when I was six and I've never stopped starting school every fall. And to have fallen out of that rhythm last year and the loss of that pattern I had really depended on and the people who I was close to was tremendously difficult. And I know that so many of you here are that way as well. And so many of you are so energized by this building and these people and our students. And so I'm just joyful to be here. So thank you for joining me for this. I think the joy we have in being here emphasizes for us the sense of place and what importance place holds for us, together, here, now, celebrating this new place. As a historian, I cannot help but see architecture as emblematic of a very particular time and place in which a building was created. Those buildings create spaces that reflect the intentions of the time in which they were built. Those spaces, then, in the years and years that follow, both empower and constrain what happens in those spaces. We call this architectural determinism and what it means is spaces allow for certain things, but not all things. Fifty some years ago, we built the last one of these kinds of buildings, that new classroom building, right on the other side of this, Wells Hall. And much has changed in 50 years. Who we teach, how we teach, what we teach, and who teaches even has changed in that last half century. And so a building that we build now must reflect who we are now and who we want to be next, both, and this building most certainly does that. Our dedicated world-class faculty have been formulating and reformulating answers the questions of what we should teach and how we should teach it. And this building opens the doors to an unimaginably wide landscape of opportunity to pursue those answers, but also for opportunity for our students themselves. And ultimately, that's why we're here, is for our students and their opportunity. This building is designed for both today and tomorrow's science education needs. It is incredibly flexible. Architectural determinism in this space has been constrained to limits we've never seen before in a classroom building on this campus, perhaps anywhere, because this is probably the best science education building on the planet. It is flexible. It is welcoming. It is open. And if you have not been inside of it yet, I'm excited for you to go in because you will leave with a sense of empowerment and excitement that our students have told us they feel when they walk in those doors.So, it is my pleasure now to introduce someone who has pursued answers to some of medicine's most urgent problems throughout his entire professional life, an infectious disease expert, a researcher, patent holder, former technology transfer executive. Our first speaker is a leader who knows the value of collaborative research and multi-disciplinary pedagogy firsthand. It's also a person who has done wonders over the last year and a half helping lead us through a time none of us could have imagined. So I want to thank and introduce MSU president Samuel L Stanley.Samuel L Stanley:Well, thank you, associate provost Largent, or I should say, thank you, Mark, for that extraordinarily kind introduction. And I almost am ready to throw away my comments because I think Mark summarized everything I'm going to say in one sentence, which is, the best science education building in the world at Michigan State University. Is there really anything else to add to that statement? I'm not sure there is, but you know what I'm going to anyway. So we'll just move ahead. So I wanted to begin by acknowledging the state of Michigan and particularly the legislature for its partnership in helping to fund this facility. It was the first time in nearly 50 years. I'm going to say this again, it's the first time in nearly 50 years that MSU added exclusive classroom space with state funding. So thank you for the vision of those who helped make this possible. Thank you. This is an important day for Michigan State University and all of our students. This impressive facility represents the commitment of MSU and the state of Michigan to prepare our students to thrive in a dynamic and complex world. Understanding scientific principles, mathematical concepts, physical and biological processes is increasingly important for many reasons. We know that jobs requiring STEM knowledge are the fastest growing in the country. And among the most secure. STEM occupations will grow by more than twice the rate of non-STEM jobs in this decade. And STEM occupations, on average, pay about twice as much. We also know that on the whole, STEM occupations do not, and the person who are among them, represent the diversity of our society. Since data indicate that women make up nearly half of the workforce, but a little more than a quarter of STEM workers today. Black and Hispanic participation in STEM occupations also trails their representation in the workforce. Because of its importance, supporting diversity in STEM is a priority for the nation, as well as Michigan State University. More broadly, STEM skills and qualifications are valuable for everyone. An NSF, National Science Foundation, report concluded last year that whether or not they become scientists or engineers, all Americans should have access, opportunity, encouragement, and tools to participate in the innovation economy and to succeed amid technological progress and change. Understanding STEM principles is increasingly necessary to assess information, weigh choices, and even manage your health. And it's important for also being a contributing member of society. Science-based issues confront the world today with some of its greatest challenges, medical, environmental, and technological. Society needs citizens who are able to understand those issues, make informed choices and lead our communities. This new facility is a 21st century response, the newest evolution of MSU's land grant commitment to connect people with such vital knowledge. It represents our innovative spirit and transformative mission. We see these qualities in the facility's creative design and repurposing of the power plant. And we see these qualities inside where learning spaces will accommodate some 7,000 students every week. Among other programs, this facility will host introductory STEM courses, including in biological sciences, chemistry, computer science, engineering, and physics. We work with faculty members and others to consider how our curriculum is delivered and how spaces are used, to design a building based on learning and the student experience. There are about 1,200 seats and common areas and gathering spaces to facilitate collaboration. We know those kinds of productive collisions are absolutely central to learning. And this building helps make them possible. The arts features will also connect the STEM disciplines to imagination and creativity, critical forces as we go forward. The innovation represented by this building extended to its construction as well. Parts of the new wings were constructed with sustainable cross-laminated timber for example. It's the first time this mass timber has been used for a laboratory and academic building in this country. Features such as that help integrate this facility into MSU sustainability goals. So in sum, the teaching and learning facility, our STEM Teaching and Learning Facility, connects key MSU values to how we support excellence and student success. It links the university's past to its future while prioritizing diversity, equity, and inclusion. I'm very pleased that all of you can join us today for this ribbon cutting as we celebrate the opening of our STEM building, and there'll be an opportunity to tour the building when this program begins. Thank you again so much for coming and thank you for all of you who helped make this day possible. Thank you.Mark Largent:Thank you, President Stanley. During the years that this building has been in development, the MSU Board of Trustees has been an integral part of supporting the process, guiding it, and providing both material and political support that we need to carry out this work. So it's now my honor to introduce a Lansing area luminary, who has spent a lifetime in public service, board of trustees chair, Dianne Byrum.Dianne Byrum:Thank you, Mark. What a great day for a ribbon cutting. It's wonderful to be able to represent the Board of Trustees at the grand opening of the STEM Teaching and Learning Facility. As President Stanley mentioned, the state of Michigan has been a valued partner in this project. The allocation of nearly $30 million in capital outlay funding was instrumental in the construction of this innovative teaching and learning space. When you invest in higher education, you are contributing to student success and investing in our future. I applaud the Michigan legislature for recognizing the value of the STEM Teaching and Learning Facility and what it will mean to MSU and our state. This project provided us a unique opportunity to work with the DNR. One of the experiences of the building's design is the use of cross laminated timber also known as mass timber. It was used for the load bearing structure, framing, floors, and ceiling. Among other benefits, this mass timber promotes forest health and a reduction in carbon emissions. I had the privilege of being here in August, 2018 for the groundbreaking. So it's an honor to stand here today, three years later, reflecting on the magnitude of changes and advancements of the project on campus. And more importantly, the thousands of students who will benefit from the experience that this building will support. The adaptive and innovative spaces will help our faculty provide even more exceptional and personalized learning that will help prepare our students to succeed and lead. I cannot wait to see how it will be used, but even more, I can't wait to see how it will empower our students to be world changers. Thank you.Mark Largent:Thank you, Chair Byrum.Our next speaker knows a few things about opening doors for millions of people for so many years now. She knows about building coalitions and getting things done. She knows that Michigan's future relies on our ability to build and to innovate. It is now my pleasure to introduce the honorable Debbie Stabenow, US Senator from Michigan.Debbie Stabenow:Okay. First, Go Green!Crowd:Go White!Debbie Stabenow:Okay. Now I know where I am. So it is really exciting for me to be here. I have to say. First of all, we all know Michigan State's the premier land grant university in the country. One of the world's top research institutions, right Mr. President? There's no question about that. And now home to this impressive new building that's going to create opportunities, first and foremost, for thousands of students. I've just met a few of them here today and told them we're expecting great things. And then also opportunities that go beyond that, I think, in terms of where we need to go in the world. This is the first mass timber building in our state. It's the first mass timber building, therefore it's the tallest mass building. At some point, there will be one taller, but I keep telling everyone, we have the tallest building in the state, which we do, and it is about cross laminated timber, which is about the economy. It's about jobs. It's about addressing the climate crisis. And I have to tell you personally, for me, this has really been an area of focus for me as chair of the Agriculture Nutrition and Forestry Committee. Back in 2014, we put into the five-year farm bill timber innovation act research. We're going to do research on cross-laminated timber in a more aggressive way, how we could use timber in building buildings and other opportunities. And then in the 2018 bill, we expanded it with full funding. And when I look at the opportunities that we have to address the climate crisis, which is right in front of our face, the wildfires, the droughts, the floods, everything that is happening for us, how we use wood and how we manage forests in a sustainable way is very much a part of how we move forward. And it's an intimate part of what I'm working on right now in the Senate, frankly. And what I'm also excited about is this as an economic opportunity for us in Michigan. We have a lot of paper mills around Michigan, and we all know we're not using paper much anymore. But we are moving towards cross laminated timber as a building material and many of our folks in areas that desperately need jobs, as we retool, are part of that future, to be able to get there. Now, I was up at Michigan Tech bragging with them about Michigan State. I'm not sure that's good politics, but anyway, they are, I know, partnering with you and they're doing a ton of research as well and are very excited from the Upper Peninsula standpoint of what this means. So I see this as something that fundamentally is about students and it's about opportunity and innovation. It is also about how we move forward in a future that is more sustainable. And that Michigan State really is at the forefront of this and helping us to solve a whole range of problems we need to solve. Let me finally say I've had the opportunity twice now to be in the building, if you have not, it is so cool. I look forward to going back. When we talk about flexibility, the workstations literally move around the room. And so I've never seen so much flexibility on what can be done. And I was very proud to be able to brag about this and bring in the United States Secretary of Agriculture about a month ago, to be able to see the building and meet with many of our farm leaders, again, to talk about our role in agriculture and forestry being part of the solution as it relates to the climate crisis. So let me close with a quote from Gifford Pinchot, the very first Chief of the United States Forest Service. Once he said, "The vast possibilities of our great future will become realities, only if we make ourselves responsible for that future." As usual, Michigan state is in the front of the line being responsible for our future. And I'm so excited to see what comes next. Congratulations.Mark Largent:Thank you very much, Senator Stabenow for your words and your work and your support of our work. Such a mammoth undertaking could not be possible without the support of people who believe in the future of STEM in Michigan at every level. It's now my pleasure to introduce another of those supporters, Senator Curtis Hertel, an MSU alum. The senator is the perfect representative for East Lansing and MSU. His wide ranging experience includes serving as the minority vice chair on the appropriations committee, a member of the appropriation subcommittee on universities and community colleges, and he serves on the capital outlay committee. Welcome Senator Hertel. Thank you for joining us.Curtis Hertel:It's a pleasure to be here with Senator Stabenow. It's always nice to be after Senator Stabenow. That's always a difficult spot to be in. She is a real Senator. I'm a minor league Senator. President Stanley, Chairman Byrum, and the Board of Trustees, honored guests, the Spartan community. It's nice to be part of this momentous occasion. I also want to take a moment to recognize my former colleague in Darwin Booher. When you watch the cable news, oftentimes you see just the worst parts of politics. You see the anger, you see the name calling, but in reality, that's not all that's there. Darwin served on the opposite side of the aisle with me. He was always a consummate public servant. And you know, I was a freshman legislator when we got the funding for this project and I was a little loud sometimes. And Darwin didn't have to listen to me in his office over and over again, talking about this project. And he didn't have to make sure that this was part of the final deal. And I appreciate your willingness to work across the aisle and to get this done for the people in Michigan. Thank you, Darwin. As a proud Spartan myself, it's always good to be back on campus, but I'm especially happy to share in the special occasion for MSU and its students that have been in the making for several years. I am very pleased to be part of this project and part of the funding structure. As a member of the joint capital outlay committee, and now as the minority vice chair for the Senate appropriations committee, we don't always get to see the fruits of our labor. Oftentimes we vote on something that's a very large number and we know it exists, but we don't actually get to see what it's actually doing in our community. And so to be here, to be part of this building and to see it as part of our campus means a lot to me. It's always also inspiring to see the ingenuity of MSU's use of the space of this beautiful campus. So when you take a historic building that was formerly the power plant that powered this campus, and now it'll be a 40,000 square foot STEM building that will power, not only this campus, but our future and our nation's future. It is truly an honor to be part of it. Spartans will lead our state's workforce in science, technology, engineering, math, and computer science. Thank you again for letting us be part of this process and Go Green!Crowd:Go White!Mark Largent:Thank you, Senator Hertel. At the core of this exciting new venture is what we will do in the building. Educate. This exciting new venture is a commitment to our educators to help our students learn and thrive in the sciences and beyond. To help represent that and talk about some of it, I would like to introduce my colleague, Dr. Andrea Bierema. She is from the Center for Integrative Studies in general science and the Department of Integrative Biology. And she embodies the commitment that we have to undergraduate STEM education. Her award winning work at MSU includes teaching at the Kellogg Biological Station researching and putting into practice undergraduate biology education, and avian communication. Dr. Bierema.Andrea Bierema:Well, hi, everyone. I'd really like to say just how excited I am that we have this building and not just because of the beautiful building with a great theme, but because of how the rooms are actually created and what they can do. And so, as we've heard the beginning of the ceremony, we've learned a lot about teaching over these last 50 years. And with that then, part of that is thinking about how students can work in teams and how that can help with their learning and actually engage with material. So with my classes, this is what students do, they work in teams, but we're usually having to overcome the barriers of the classrooms we're in because they are made for students to simply sit there and watch me go on and on for an hour. And yeah, just hopefully they catch some of what I'm saying, but when they actually work together, it's so much better. And when we were in those lecture style rooms, they would have to be like maybe in a long line. And you just have to recognize that the person on this side is not going to have any idea what the person on this side is actually saying, but hey, let's hope this works. Or if they're actually sitting behind and in front of each other and just trying to make it work, overcome the barriers of the classroom. But now we have this building where room after room after room is actually designed for this kind of learning. And also on top of that. So it's just kind of, this might seem kind of simple, but having not only these tables with movable chairs, but actually having outlets at every one of them. I know that seems simple, but that's one of the things, that I just can't depend on students coming in with a charged laptop, whether their laptop doesn't hold a charge or it's dead by the time they come to my afternoon class, It used to be that those students would have to sit on the floor by a wall at an outlet, but no more with this building, which is totally awesome. Another thing too, in some of these rooms, with the tables, they actually have monitors that come up from the tables with just a simple push of a button. Totally amazing. What's nice about this is with team learning, it's really helpful if you can actually have different people, have different roles, including someone to actually be the recorder. And now we can do this where they can plug in their laptop. Everyone in the team can actually see what's going on in real time. And rather than just trying to crowd around somebody's little, tiny laptop. So totally amazing. I'm totally excited. And thank you.Mark Largent:The bad news is every single seat in her classes is full, so none of you are getting in this semester. Registration is still open for spring. Thank you, Dr. Bierema. It is easy to see how the work of educators like you engage our students in really amazing ways. It's also easy to see it when we talked to the students themselves. Students. Students are the reason that we're here. This is our purpose. Everything else is intended to support that, one way or another. The reason for this magnificent new structure, the reason that I'm here, the reason that we carry on the work that we do is because of the investments that we make in the people who come here in order to develop their purposes and their passions. They are our portals into the future. When I'm in need of a dose of hope, all have to do is walk outside and find it. Wandering this campus every day, I often stop to talk to the students who have decided to put their faith in us to give them that access to the future. And it reminds me that uncommon is not just part of our slogan. It really is who fills this campus, an uncommon energy, an uncommon optimism, and a really uncommon potential. You can feel it on this campus every day. So I want to thank the students who I've had the pleasure to be around for all of these years. One such student is Alyssa Fritz. She's a senior from Reese, Michigan. She's pursuing a bachelor of arts and communications with a concentration in communication science, analytics, and research methods, and a minor in communicative sciences and disorders. She's an active member of the campus community, where she works as a resident assistant and as a student office assistant in communication science, and disorders. She volunteers with the prevention, outreach, and engagement, and she serves as an undergraduate research ambassador. She is busy, but she's joining us today. Thank you, Alyssa.Alyssa Fritz:Interdisciplinary. Describing the relationship between multiple branches of knowledge. A word we have heard multiple times in reference to a goal we should have in our own educations. And an adjective that this university holds close to her heart. Some of you may be asking yourself why a communication major is giving this address. Don't worry. I asked myself the exact same question when I was asked to come up here to say a few words, but that's because for the past three years at MSU, I've danced this fine line of trying to find my own academic identity. I knew what I wanted to do. I just didn't find identity in the science, technology, engineering, or mathematics, but also didn't find identity in the social sciences or the arts and humanities. I just was what I was, a communication major who loves data analytics and research methods. But I, like many of the students here, am someone who wants to make the world a better place, a more accessible place for all. In my case, I'll do it through helping the world to find a voice in topics of speech language pathology. But some of you may go on to study foodborne illnesses and work to implement policy to protect the everyday consumer. Others may go on to study personalized genetic medicine practices to help better target cancer in the body. These are all topics that people who visit this facility daily may study and may one day centralize their whole career around. I'm just one Spartan story of interdisciplinary identities, but there are thousands of us. Of course, the STEM acronym is, in itself, an integration of multiple disciplines. This building and everything it stands for culminates to the foundations of what it truly means to be interdisciplinary. And as a senior who's walked by in this construction site for the past three years, I'm excited to see what other Spartan stories begin here today. Thank you.Mark Largent:Thank you, Alyssa. Well, now I'd like to introduce our last presenter, last speaker. Certainly not least, she's my boss. I would like to introduce someone for whom excellence in STEM has been a lifelong pursuit, MSU's provost and vice president for academic affairs. Teresa K Woodruff stands at the nexus of excellence in research and education. Her many distinctions include receiving the presidential award for excellence in science mentoring under President Obama and earning the Endocrine Society's Laureate award in 2021, a top honor that recognizes the highest achievements in the field of endocrinology. Provost Woodruff's accomplishments in the sciences are matched by her passion for education. It's what makes getting to work for her truly a joy. It's my pleasure now to introduce provost Teresa K Woodruff.Teresa K Woodruff:Well, good afternoon, everyone. And thank you so very much, Mark. For all of the reasons noted before me, this new facility truly represents institutional investment being made in STEM here at MSU, in Michigan, and beyond. I want to add my thanks to President Stanley for his leadership, Trustee Byrum and our Board of Trustees, those who are here and those who are not, as well as to our great leadership, both in the state and at the federal level who represent us so well every day. And also to Glenn Granger and his team with whom I've spent many, multiple quality hours touring the building with multiple awestruck faculty and students. Thank you for our partnership. Infrastructure requires bricks and mortar entries. It requires intellectual planning and people. And bridging all of these requirements, our Nestor Deocampo who is here somewhere. Nestor? I hear some woots. He's way in the back. He's standing, but way in the back. And Barb Kranz who is here in the front. Both of whom are excellent partners to all of us in the provost office and Dan Bollman in Infrastructure Planning and Facilities. Dan, thank you to all of your members of that team. The architect Frank Lloyd Wright once said form follows function. That has been misunderstood. Form and function should be joined in a spiritual union. From its mass timber framing to the easy snap lab benches to the flipped inverse and other newly invented teaching modalities, form and function are truly unified in this MSU STEM Teaching and Learning Facility. Some of you have heard me talk about the ways in which I see MSU rising. In particular, through spirals of excellence that are beacons to the world, drawing in the best educators and teachers and lighting the pathway to a new generation of student learners. These instructional models create a union with the building itself and will move students from what I call horizontal learning, that which we already know, to vertical learning, that which we have yet to discover. Some of you have also heard me talk about the imprint that we wish to have every MSU student have. Areas of entrepreneurship and innovation, ethics and honor, quantitative and creative skills. This building is emblematic of each of these traits. This new building will be a place and space that fosters discovery and innovation, a site of opportunity and exponential intellectual expansion. There's also a place in a space that bridges the arts and the sciences with its fourth floor student project space that will feature cross-disciplinary projects along with a common area for performances and the display of public art. Here, both the creative and the quantitative will be nurtured and explored. Boundaries will be pushed, stretched, and even shattered. This is truly a facility that speaks to and encourages the whole student with opportunities to learn, and to know, and to discover, and to create. A building in which form and function are inherently one. An academic spiritual union right here at Michigan State University. We welcome all of the intellectual and creative energy and excitement it will bring to our community of scholars and we are grateful to every individual who played a role in getting us to this auspicious day. Thank you. And welcome.Mark Largent:Having the building is wonderful. It's nice and it's empowering, but it is not in and of itself sufficient. It needs to be filled with the right things. So having the best science education building and offering the world's best science education, are not necessarily guaranteed. That's why we're going to guarantee it. The first thing that we did is we hired two really talented colleagues and we brought them into the provost office as the assistant dean and associate dean for STEM education. I want to welcome and thank two of my colleagues, Stephen Thomas, and Julie Libarkin for filling those roles. They're right here. And I want you to buttonhole them and engage with them afterwards because you will find out immediately what a wealth of knowledge and experience and energy that they have. They are deeply collaborative colleagues, and I'm really excited that they're joining this effort to make this the world's best scientific education institution. They will do it based on disciplinary education research, based on scholarship of teaching and learning, and they will do it so that every one of our students is supported to develop their purposes and their passions. And so that every student we admit learns thrives and graduates. That that is our goal. So thank you for what all of you have done and for what all of you are going to do in this building. This is a really wonderful day. Thank you for joining us for it.MSU Today airs Sunday mornings at 9:00 on 105.1 FM and AM 870 and streams at WKAR.org. Find "MSU Today with Russ White" on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and wherever you get your shows.

Spartans Athletic Director Bill Beekman welcomes Mark Largent to this edition of MSU Today. Largent is the associate provost for undergraduate education, dean of undergraduate studies, and a professor in the Department of History at Michigan State University.

“You can tell two things from the length of my title,“ says Largent. “The associate provost and dean of undergraduate education's responsibility is to coordinate the undergraduate experience, especially in and around the classroom, across the 169 majors in our 17 different degree granting colleges. My job is, from the central unit, like the federal government, to help coordinate all the activities that go on across the college campus related to undergraduate education and to create a more coherent and seamless experience for our students because 70 percent of them change their majors from the time they start to the time they finish. About half of them change them more than once.“That's not really a problem unless they're doing it into their third and fourth years. And in fact, as soon as they change their majors in their first and second years, they tend to have really good outcomes. They tend to persist and graduate as they're exploring and finding their way and discovering their purposes and passions. And then we coordinate with all the other things that happen that are different from going to class versus going to college. Going to college consists of a lot more than going to class. Students only spend about 15 percent of their time in class. The other 85 percent of their waking hours are spent in college.“All of the co-curricular and extracurricular things and everything that happens in the residence halls and everything that's part of the overall student experience falls to my office to help coordinate, make sense of, and ensure that our students are given the best opportunity to learn, thrive, and graduate.”Beekman asks Largent how MSU defines student success.“That 15 percent does understate the academic and curricular investments that students have to make in their time. For every hour that a student spends in class, the expectation is that they spend two to three hours preparing for class or working on assignments and projects. So you're really looking at one hour of class time leading to three or four hours overall. And so suddenly that 15 percent is now closer to 60 percent of their time spent on academic pursuits. And then the rest of their time is spent working jobs and participating in sports and co-curricular and extracurricular activities. So that overall suite of things is a really critical part of what we think of when we talk about student success.“The old definition of student success was that a student was successful as measured by the things that go on their transcript. So student success was just a student getting good grades. It was simply that. In the 21st century, both professionally and colloquially, when we talk about student success, we're actually talking about the ability of an institution to support the students that it matriculates so they can learn, thrive, and graduate. Student success in the 20th century was really getting good grades. Student success in the 21st century is a measure of the institution and whether your institution is designed to support your students. And so when we look at the persistence and graduation rates across the country, on average, half of the students that start college will not finish. It's an astoundingly low rate. Fifty percent of the students who start working on a college degree never finish it. But then when you go to a place like the Ivy League, approximately 95 to 96 percent of the students that start finish.“When we started this effort, we were at about 77 percent of our students. We were in the top half of the Big Ten. Seventy seven percent of our students who started here finished at Michigan State. About another 10 percent started at Michigan State and finished someplace else. And sometimes that was because they decided that their purposes and their passions were in one of the really few areas in which Michigan State didn't have a major. So for example if you wanted to get a degree in aeronautics and become a pilot, we don't happen to have that program. So you'd have to go to a place like Western in order to do that. Sometimes they would want to pursue a degree that we have limited spots for. So for example in nursing we typically have about 500 students a year who start in our nursing degree, but we only have about 175 slots because of clinical placements. So those students will go someplace else.“So we were looking at about 87 percent of our students who would start at Michigan State and then finish here or someplace else. And we said we can do even better than that. And so we began a very concerted effort to redesign all different aspects of the university. Advising, counseling, curricular pathways, the ways in which we supported students with residential education and what's happening in the dorms. The ways in which we help students with career advice and career counseling, not when they're in their junior year or their senior year, but when they are going through new student orientation. We push it all the way back so they can start thinking about the alignment between what they're learning and what they ultimately want to do with that degree.“What has happened over the last seven years is every single year, our persistence and graduation rate has gone up. We went up from 77 to 78, 79, and 80 percent. Last year we finished at 81.3 percent. That constant push isn't about changing who we're admitting; we are admitting the same students. We're actually designing the institution better to serve the students' needs. And so when we talk about student success, it's a measure of the institution, not a measure of individuals sort of making it through their classes. The other thing that we've learned in this process is that grades are actually a pretty poor predictor of student success. It turns out that their grades don't tell us very much about whether they're going to graduate.“In fact, the students who have the highest graduation rates don't have the highest grades; they're in the second tier of grades. They tend to be more resilient. They tend to be more adventurous and they do quite well in terms of retention and graduation rates. It turns out that to be successful as a student, you need to do a lot more than just get good grades. So to be a student success institution, we need to do a lot more than just make sure students get good grades. We have to support every aspect of them. We have to support their mental and physical health, their financial wellbeing, and every single thing that goes into a student's sense of belonging to the institution.“A lot of the student success work that we've done has focused on things like basic needs. Helping students feel more confident that they know where their next meal is coming from and how they're paying rent next month, making sure that students have access to physical and mental health facilities as they need them, and increasing access to physical fitness activities on campus, which is a really big push for us right now. So combined, all these things are redesigning the university to make it a student success institution. And what we've found is that if a student starts their junior year, 19 out of 20 of them graduate. Juniors have almost a 95 percent graduation rate at Michigan State University. So our real focus right now is really looking at what happens in those first two years and designing that experience so that the students are very well taken care of and that they make it to their third year. And if they do, they're golden. They graduate.”Largent talks about the pandemic's impact on MSU and its operations and about the university's plans for a more traditional campus experience this fall. And he describes his career path to MSU and what attracted him to the banks of the Red Cedar. MSU Today airs Sunday mornings at 9:00 on 105.1 FM and AM 870 and streams at WKAR.org. Find “MSU Today with Russ White” on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and wherever you get your shows.

Hosted by Mark Largent, Associate Provost for Undergraduate Education, Jeff Grabill, Associate Provost for Teaching, Learning and Technology, and Vennie Gore, Vice President for Auxiliary Enterprises. How is MSU standing up virtual student support and what does our path forward look like?

Hosted by Mark Largent, Associate Provost for Undergraduate Education & Jeff Grabill, Associate Provost for Teaching, Learning and Technology. Featuring special guests Andrea Bierema, Academic Specialist in the Center for Integrative Studies in General Science and Department of Integrative Biology, and Michael Ristich, Academic Specialist in the Department of Writing, Rhetoric, and American Cultures.

Hosted by Mark Largent, Associate Provost for Undergraduate Education & Jeff Grabill, Associate Provost for Teaching, Learning and Technology. Featuring special guests David Weismantel, MSU University Physician and Kelly Millenbah, Senior Associate Dean for College of Ag and Natural Resources; Director of Academic and Student Affairs.

Hosted by Mark Largent, Associate Provost for Undergraduate Education & Jeff Grabill, Associate Provost for Teaching, Learning and Technology. Featuring special guests Denise Maybank, Vice President and Associate Provost for Student Affairs and Vennie Gore, Vice President for Auxiliary Enterprises.

Hosted by Mark Largent, Associate Provost for Undergraduate Education & Jeff Grabill, Associate Provost for Teaching, Learning and Technology. Featuring special guests Denise Maybank, Vice President and Associate Provost for Student Affairs and Vennie Gore, Vice President for Auxiliary Enterprises.

Hosted by Mark Largent, Associate Provost for Undergraduate Education & Jeff Grabill, Associate Provost for Teaching, Learning and Technology. Featuring special guest Denise Maybank, Vice President and Associate Provost for Student Affairs and Services.  

Hosted by Mark Largent, Associate Provost for Undergraduate Education & Jeff Grabill, Associate Provost for Teaching, Learning and Technology. Featuring special guest Samuel L. Stanley, University President.

Hosted by Mark Largent, Associate Provost for Undergraduate Education & Jeff Grabill, Associate Provost for Teaching, Learning and Technology. Featuring special guest Shannon Burton, University Ombudsperson.  

Hosted by Mark Largent, Associate Provost for Undergraduate Education & Jeff Grabill, Associate Provost for Teaching, Learning and Technology. Featuring special guest Dan Bollman, Vice President for Strategic Infrastructure Planning and Facilities.

Hosted by Mark Largent, Associate Provost for Undergraduate Education & Jeff Grabill, Associate Provost for Teaching, Learning and Technology. Featuring special guest Mónica Ramírez-Montagut, Director of the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum (MSU Broad).

Hosted by Mark Largent, Associate Provost for Undergraduate Education & Jeff Grabill, Associate Provost for Teaching, Learning and Technology. Featuring special guest Steve Hanson, Associate Provost and Dean for International Studies and Programs.

Hosted by Mark Largent, Associate Provost for Undergraduate Education & Jeff Grabill, Associate Provost for Teaching, Learning and Technology. Featuring special guest Brendan Cantwell, associate professor and coordinator of the Higher, Adult, and Lifelong Education (HALE) program with the College of Education.  

Hosted by Mark Largent, Associate Provost for Undergraduate Education & Jeff Grabill, Associate Provost for Teaching, Learning and Technology. Featuring special guest Jeff Dwyer, Director of MSU Extension; Senior Associate Dean of Outreach and Engagement.

Hosted by Mark Largent, Associate Provost for Undergraduate Education & Jeff Grabill, Associate Provost for Teaching, Learning and Technology. Featuring special guests Kate Sonka, Assistant Director of Academic Technology at the College of Arts & Letters, and Jeremy Van Hof, Director of Learning Tech and Development, Broad College of Business.

Hosted by Mark Largent, Associate Provost for Undergraduate Education & Jeff Grabill, Associate Provost for Teaching, Learning and Technology. Featuring special guest Laurie Van Egeren, Interim Associate Provost for University Outreach and Engagement.

Hosted by Mark Largent, Associate Provost for Undergraduate Education & Jeff Grabill, Associate Provost for Teaching, Learning and Technology. Featuring special guest Mark Haas, Vice President for Finance and Treasurer.

Hosted by Mark Largent, Associate Provost for Undergraduate Education & Jeff Grabill, Associate Provost for Teaching, Learning and Technology. Featuring special guest Bill Beekman, MSU Athletic Director.  

Hosted by Mark Largent, Associate Provost for Undergraduate Education & Jeff Grabill, Associate Provost for Teaching, Learning and Technology. Featuring special guest Wolfgang Bauer, Associate Vice President for Administration.

Hosted by Mark Largent, Associate Provost for Undergraduate Education & Jeff Grabill, Associate Provost for Teaching, Learning and Technology. Featuring special guest David Weismantel, MSU University Physician.

Hosted by Mark Largent, Associate Provost for Undergraduate Education & Jeff Grabill, Associate Provost for Teaching, Learning and Technology. Featuring special guest John Ambrose, Director of the Office of Admissions.

Hosted by Mark Largent, Associate Provost for Undergraduate Education & Jeff Grabill, Associate Provost for Teaching, Learning and Technology. Featuring special guest Thomas Glasmacher, FRIB Laboratory Director and University Distinguished Professor in Physics.

Hosted by Mark Largent, Associate Provost for Undergraduate Education & Jeff Grabill, Associate Provost for Teaching, Learning and Technology. Featuring special guests Judith Stoddart, Associate Provost for University Collections and Arts Initiatives, and James Forger, Dean of the College of Music.

Hosted by Mark Largent, Associate Provost for Undergraduate Education & Jeff Grabill, Associate Provost for Teaching, Learning and Technology. Featuring special guest Felicia Wu, John A. Hannah Distinguished Professor in Food Safety, Toxicology, and Risk Assessment.

Hosted by Mark Largent, Associate Provost for Undergraduate Education & Jeff Grabill, Associate Provost for Teaching, Learning and Technology. Featuring special guest Portia Watkins, Director of New Student Orientation.

Hosted by Mark Largent, Associate Provost for Undergraduate Education & Jeff Grabill, Associate Provost for Teaching, Learning and Technology. Featuring special guest Emily Guerrant, Vice President for Media and Public Information.      

Hosted by Mark Largent, Associate Provost for Undergraduate Education & Jeff Grabill, Associate Provost for Teaching, Learning and Technology. Featuring special guest Leo Kempel, Dean, College of Engineering.

Hosted by Mark Largent, Associate Provost for Undergraduate Education & Jeff Grabill, Associate Provost for Teaching, Learning and Technology. Featuring special guests Janet Lille and David Bertram, Government and Community Relations.

Hosted by Mark Largent, Associate Provost for Undergraduate Education & Jeff Grabill, Associate Provost for Teaching, Learning and Technology. Featuring special guest Sheril Kirshenbaum, Executive Director of Science Debate. College of Agriculture and Natural Resources.

Hosted by Mark Largent, Associate Provost for Undergraduate Education & Jeff Grabill, Associate Provost for Teaching, Learning and Technology. Featuring special guests Monaca Eaton, Associate Director for Teaching and Instruction in the MSU School of Social Work, and Lisa Laughman, Health4U Lead Emotional Wellness Consultant and EAP counselor.

Hosted by Mark Largent, Associate Provost for Undergraduate Education & Jeff Grabill, Associate Provost for Teaching, Learning and Technology. Featuring special guest Phil Duxbury, Dean of MSU’s College of Natural Science.

Hosted by Mark Largent, Associate Provost for Undergraduate Education & Jeff Grabill, Associate Provost for Teaching, Learning and Technology. Featuring special guests Devon Akmon, Director of Science Gallery Detroit, and Natasha Miller, Community Engagement Manager for Science Gallery Detroit.

Hosted by Mark Largent, Associate Provost for Undergraduate Education & Jeff Grabill, Associate Provost for Teaching, Learning and Technology. Featuring special guests Chris Gray, Director of the MSU Veterinary Medical Center, and Rachel Reams, Director of the MSU Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory.

This week on Exposure, Connie Rahbany spoke with Spartan Fireside!Spartan Fireside is a weekly MSU webinar brought to you by Jeff Grabill, the associate provost for teaching, learning and technology, Mark Largent, the associate provost for undergraduate education, and others from across the MSU community. When MSU transitioned to remote education, Spartan Fireside was created to continue building up the Spartan community in both an educational and personal environment. It is open to all MSU faculty, students and staff!For more information, check out their website!

Hosted by Mark Largent, Associate Provost for Undergraduate Education & Jeff Grabill, Associate Provost for Teaching, Learning and Technology. Featuring special guest Jeff Beavers, Executive Director of the MSU Career Services Network.

Hosted by Mark Largent, Associate Provost for Undergraduate Education & Jeff Grabill, Associate Provost for Teaching, Learning and Technology. Featuring special guest Randy Rasch, Dean of the College of Nursing.

Hosted by Mark Largent, Associate Provost for Undergraduate Education & Jeff Grabill, Associate Provost for Teaching, Learning and Technology. Featuring special guests Barbara Roberts, Executive Director of the WorkLife Office and Senior Advisor to the Provost, and Jaimie Hutchison, Lifespan & Family Services Coordinator at the WorkLife Office.

Hosted by Mark Largent, Associate Provost for Undergraduate Education & Jeff Grabill, Associate Provost for Teaching, Learning and Technology. Featuring special guests Kimberly Steed-Page, Director of the Student Parent Resource Center, and Ben Lauren, Assistant Professor of Experience Architecture (XA) in the Writing, Rhetoric, and American Cultures Department.

Hosted by Mark Largent, Associate Provost for Undergraduate Education & Jeff Grabill, Associate Provost for Teaching, Learning and Technology. Featuring special guest Prabu David is Dean of the College of Communication Arts and Sciences.

Hosted by Mark Largent, Associate Provost for Undergraduate Education & Jeff Grabill, Associate Provost for Teaching, Learning and Technology. Featuring special guest Ronald Hendrick, Dean of the MSU College of Agriculture and Natural Resources.

Hosted by Mark Largent, Associate Provost for Undergraduate Education & Jeff Grabill, Associate Provost for Teaching, Learning and Technology. Featuring special guest Genyne Royal, Assistant Dean for Student Success Initiatives & Director of the NSSC.

Hosted by Mark Largent, Associate Provost for Undergraduate Education & Jeff Grabill, Associate Provost for Teaching, Learning and Technology. Featuring special guest Thomas Jeitschko,  Associate Provost for Graduate Education and Dean of the Graduate School.

Hosted by Mark Largent, Associate Provost for Undergraduate Education & Jeff Grabill, Associate Provost for Teaching, Learning and Technology. Featuring special guest Cynthia Jackson-Elmoore, Dean and Professor of the Honors College at MSU.

Hosted by Mark Largent, Associate Provost for Undergraduate Education & Jeff Grabill, Associate Provost for Teaching, Learning and Technology. Featuring special guest Michael Hudson, Director of the MSU Resource Center for Persons with Disabilities (RCPD).

Hosted by Mark Largent, Associate Provost for Undergraduate Education & Jeff Grabill, Associate Provost for Teaching, Learning and Technology. Featuring special guest Sanjay Gupta, the Eli & Edythe L. Broad Dean.

Hosted by Mark Largent, Associate Provost for Undergraduate Education & Jeff Grabill, Associate Provost for Teaching, Learning and Technology. Featuring special guest Jane Zimmerman MSU Associate Professor of Mathematics, and Michael Ristich, Academic Specialist in the MSU Department of Rhetoric, Writing, and American Culture.

Hosted by Mark Largent, Associate Provost for Undergraduate Education & Jeff Grabill, Associate Provost for Teaching, Learning and Technology. Featuring special guest Joe Salem, MSU Dean of Libraries.

Hosted by Mark Largent, Associate Provost for Undergraduate Education & Jeff Grabill, Associate Provost for Teaching, Learning and Technology. Featuring special guest Norm Beauchamp, MSU Executive Vice President for Health Sciences.

Hosted by Mark Largent, Associate Provost for Undergraduate Education & Jeff Grabill, Associate Provost for Teaching, Learning and Technology. Featuring special guests Mario Kakos, ASMSU President and Brianne Aiello, ASMSU Vice President.

Hosted by Mark Largent, Associate Provost for Undergraduate Education & Jeff Grabill, Associate Provost for Teaching, Learning and Technology. Featuring special guest Melissa Woo, Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer for MSU.

Hosted by Mark Largent, Associate Provost for Undergraduate Education & Jeff Grabill, Associate Provost for Teaching, Learning and Technology. Featuring special guest Paulette Granberry Russell, MSU Senior Advisor to the President for Diversity and Director of the Office for Inclusion and Intercultural Initiatives.

Hosted by Mark Largent, Associate Provost for Undergraduate Education & Jeff Grabill, Associate Provost for Teaching, Learning and Technology. Featuring special guests Casey Henley, Director of Online Programs for the MSU Neuroscience Program and Stephen Thomas, Digital Curriculum Coordinator for the MSU College of Natural Science.

Hosted by Mark Largent, Associate Provost for Undergraduate Education & Jeff Grabill, Associate Provost for Teaching, Learning and Technology. Featuring special guest Terry Sullivan, MSU Interim Provost.

Hosted by Mark Largent, Associate Provost for Undergraduate Education & Jeff Grabill, Associate Provost for Teaching, Learning and Technology. Featuring special guest Chris Long, Dean of the MSU College of Arts and Letters.

Hosted by Mark Largent, Associate Provost for Undergraduate Education & Jeff Grabill, Associate Provost for Teaching, Learning and Technology. Featuring special guest Beronda Montgomery, Professor of Biochemistry & Molecular Biology and Microbiology & Molecular Genetics in the Department of Energy (DOE) Plant Research Laboratory at MSU.

Hosted by Mark Largent, Associate Provost for Undergraduate Education & Jeff Grabill, Associate Provost for Teaching, Learning and Technology. Featuring special guest Deb Dotterer, Assistant Dean for University Advising

Hosted by Mark Largent, Associate Provost for Undergraduate Education & Jeff Grabill, Associate Provost for Teaching, Learning and Technology. Featuring special guest Vennie Gore, Vice President for Auxiliary Enterprises.