Podcasts about suny farmingdale

In this episode of the Baldwin Bruins Sports Podcast, Blaine, Averi and Robert sit down with Chase Timberlake and Gabe Phillips from the Boyd Varsity Basketball team. They discuss their love for the game, the impact of Coach Burton, their plans for the future and most specifically about tonight's semi-finals playoff game against Great Neck South. Come support the boys tonight at SUNY Farmingdale at 6 PM.

Join us for a conversation about the importance and benefits of continuing education with Marsha, a Direct Support Professional (DSP) at Family Residences and Essential Enterprises (FREE) Inc. Marsha has a graduate degree and recently completed a new micro-credential program available at SUNY Farmingdale. Listen on to hear her experience with returning to the classroom and her advice for new and returning students.

This week on Below the Radar, we are joined by Travis Holloway: a poet, translator, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at SUNY Farmingdale, and author of the book How to Live at the End of the World: Theory, Art, and Politics for the Anthropocene (Stanford University Press, 2022). Am and Travis discuss noticing patterns in contemporary art making during the climate crisis. Travis also shares about translating the work of philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, the importance of friendship with all living beings, and the process of publishing a book. Full episode details: https://www.sfu.ca/vancity-office-community-engagement/below-the-radar-podcast/episodes/233-travis-holloway.html Read the transcript: https://www.sfu.ca/vancity-office-community-engagement/below-the-radar-podcast/transcripts/233-travis-holloway.html Donate to Below the Radar: https://www.sfu.ca/vancity-office-community-engagement/below-the-radar-podcast/donate.html Resources: How to Live at the End of the World: Theory, Art, and Politics for the Anthropocene: https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=34552 Read more of Travis's work: https://pratt.academia.edu/TravisHolloway Bio: Travis Holloway grew up queer and working class in a rural factory town affected by free trade and globalization. His most recent book is How to Live at the End of the World: Theory, Art, and Politics for the Anthropocene (Stanford, 2022). Holloway is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at SUNY Farmingdale and a poet and former Goldwater Fellow in Creative Writing at NYU. He has an M.F.A., Ph.D., and is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at SUNY Farmingdale, a translator, and a poet and former Goldwater Fellow in Creative Writing at NYU. His primary interests are in contemporary continental philosophy, aesthetics, social and political philosophy, queer theory, and the environmental humanities. His work on these topics has been published in Italy, Turkey, the UK, Columbia, Canada, the Czech Republic, and the U.S. His most recent publications include "Weather" (The Philosopher, 2022), "Philosophy at the End of the World: For a Counterhistory of Human Beings in the Anthropocene" (The Philosopher, 2020), "A Strategy for a Democratic Future" (Tropos, 2019), “Neoliberalism and the Future of Democracy" (Philosophy Today, 2018), and “How to Perform a Democracy” (Epoché, 2017). He is co-translator of three books and several articles by Jean-Luc Nancy, and co-author of several public-facing articles and the book Occupying Wall Street: The Inside Story of an Action that Changed America (OR Books, 2011). He is currently working on two additional monographs: How to Perform a Democracy; and How to Assemble with All the Living. Holloway has received fellowships from the Fulbright Commission, the DAAD, the Andrew Mellon foundation, and the Max Kade Institute for research and advanced study in Germany, France, and Italy. Cite this episode: Chicago Style Johal, Am. “How to Live at the End of the World — with Travis Holloway.” Below the Radar, SFU's Vancity Office of Community Engagement. Podcast audio, January 30, 2024. https://www.sfu.ca/vancity-office-community-engagement/below-the-radar-podcast/episodes/233-travis-holloway.html.

the near universal disappearance of shared social enterprise: the ruling class builds walls and lunar shuttles, while the rest of us contend with the atrophy of institutional integrity and the utter abdication of providing even minimal shelter from looming disaster. The irony of the Anthropocene era is that, in a neoliberal culture of the self, it is forcing us to consider ourselves as a collective again. For those of us who are not wealthy enough to start a colony on Mars or isolate ourselves from the world, the Anthropocene ends the fantasy of sheer individualism and worldlessness once and for all. It introduces a profound sense of time and events after the so-called "end of history" and an entirely new approach to solidarity. How to Live at the End of the World: Theory, Art, and Politics for the Anthropocene (Stanford UP, 2022) is a hopeful exploration of how we might inherit the name "Anthropocene," renarrate it, and revise our way of life or thought in view of it. In his book on time, art, and politics in an era of escalating climate change, Holloway takes up difficult, unanswered questions in recent work by Donna Haraway, Kathryn Yusoff, Bruno Latour, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and Isabelle Stengers, sketching a path toward a radical form of democracy―a zoocracy, or, a rule of all of the living. Travis Holloway is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at SUNY Farmingdale and a poet and former Goldwater Fellow in Creative Writing at NYU. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

the near universal disappearance of shared social enterprise: the ruling class builds walls and lunar shuttles, while the rest of us contend with the atrophy of institutional integrity and the utter abdication of providing even minimal shelter from looming disaster. The irony of the Anthropocene era is that, in a neoliberal culture of the self, it is forcing us to consider ourselves as a collective again. For those of us who are not wealthy enough to start a colony on Mars or isolate ourselves from the world, the Anthropocene ends the fantasy of sheer individualism and worldlessness once and for all. It introduces a profound sense of time and events after the so-called "end of history" and an entirely new approach to solidarity. How to Live at the End of the World: Theory, Art, and Politics for the Anthropocene (Stanford UP, 2022) is a hopeful exploration of how we might inherit the name "Anthropocene," renarrate it, and revise our way of life or thought in view of it. In his book on time, art, and politics in an era of escalating climate change, Holloway takes up difficult, unanswered questions in recent work by Donna Haraway, Kathryn Yusoff, Bruno Latour, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and Isabelle Stengers, sketching a path toward a radical form of democracy―a zoocracy, or, a rule of all of the living. Travis Holloway is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at SUNY Farmingdale and a poet and former Goldwater Fellow in Creative Writing at NYU. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

the near universal disappearance of shared social enterprise: the ruling class builds walls and lunar shuttles, while the rest of us contend with the atrophy of institutional integrity and the utter abdication of providing even minimal shelter from looming disaster. The irony of the Anthropocene era is that, in a neoliberal culture of the self, it is forcing us to consider ourselves as a collective again. For those of us who are not wealthy enough to start a colony on Mars or isolate ourselves from the world, the Anthropocene ends the fantasy of sheer individualism and worldlessness once and for all. It introduces a profound sense of time and events after the so-called "end of history" and an entirely new approach to solidarity. How to Live at the End of the World: Theory, Art, and Politics for the Anthropocene (Stanford UP, 2022) is a hopeful exploration of how we might inherit the name "Anthropocene," renarrate it, and revise our way of life or thought in view of it. In his book on time, art, and politics in an era of escalating climate change, Holloway takes up difficult, unanswered questions in recent work by Donna Haraway, Kathryn Yusoff, Bruno Latour, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and Isabelle Stengers, sketching a path toward a radical form of democracy―a zoocracy, or, a rule of all of the living. Travis Holloway is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at SUNY Farmingdale and a poet and former Goldwater Fellow in Creative Writing at NYU. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

the near universal disappearance of shared social enterprise: the ruling class builds walls and lunar shuttles, while the rest of us contend with the atrophy of institutional integrity and the utter abdication of providing even minimal shelter from looming disaster. The irony of the Anthropocene era is that, in a neoliberal culture of the self, it is forcing us to consider ourselves as a collective again. For those of us who are not wealthy enough to start a colony on Mars or isolate ourselves from the world, the Anthropocene ends the fantasy of sheer individualism and worldlessness once and for all. It introduces a profound sense of time and events after the so-called "end of history" and an entirely new approach to solidarity. How to Live at the End of the World: Theory, Art, and Politics for the Anthropocene (Stanford UP, 2022) is a hopeful exploration of how we might inherit the name "Anthropocene," renarrate it, and revise our way of life or thought in view of it. In his book on time, art, and politics in an era of escalating climate change, Holloway takes up difficult, unanswered questions in recent work by Donna Haraway, Kathryn Yusoff, Bruno Latour, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and Isabelle Stengers, sketching a path toward a radical form of democracy―a zoocracy, or, a rule of all of the living. Travis Holloway is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at SUNY Farmingdale and a poet and former Goldwater Fellow in Creative Writing at NYU. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

the near universal disappearance of shared social enterprise: the ruling class builds walls and lunar shuttles, while the rest of us contend with the atrophy of institutional integrity and the utter abdication of providing even minimal shelter from looming disaster. The irony of the Anthropocene era is that, in a neoliberal culture of the self, it is forcing us to consider ourselves as a collective again. For those of us who are not wealthy enough to start a colony on Mars or isolate ourselves from the world, the Anthropocene ends the fantasy of sheer individualism and worldlessness once and for all. It introduces a profound sense of time and events after the so-called "end of history" and an entirely new approach to solidarity. How to Live at the End of the World: Theory, Art, and Politics for the Anthropocene (Stanford UP, 2022) is a hopeful exploration of how we might inherit the name "Anthropocene," renarrate it, and revise our way of life or thought in view of it. In his book on time, art, and politics in an era of escalating climate change, Holloway takes up difficult, unanswered questions in recent work by Donna Haraway, Kathryn Yusoff, Bruno Latour, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and Isabelle Stengers, sketching a path toward a radical form of democracy―a zoocracy, or, a rule of all of the living. Travis Holloway is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at SUNY Farmingdale and a poet and former Goldwater Fellow in Creative Writing at NYU. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

the near universal disappearance of shared social enterprise: the ruling class builds walls and lunar shuttles, while the rest of us contend with the atrophy of institutional integrity and the utter abdication of providing even minimal shelter from looming disaster. The irony of the Anthropocene era is that, in a neoliberal culture of the self, it is forcing us to consider ourselves as a collective again. For those of us who are not wealthy enough to start a colony on Mars or isolate ourselves from the world, the Anthropocene ends the fantasy of sheer individualism and worldlessness once and for all. It introduces a profound sense of time and events after the so-called "end of history" and an entirely new approach to solidarity. How to Live at the End of the World: Theory, Art, and Politics for the Anthropocene (Stanford UP, 2022) is a hopeful exploration of how we might inherit the name "Anthropocene," renarrate it, and revise our way of life or thought in view of it. In his book on time, art, and politics in an era of escalating climate change, Holloway takes up difficult, unanswered questions in recent work by Donna Haraway, Kathryn Yusoff, Bruno Latour, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and Isabelle Stengers, sketching a path toward a radical form of democracy―a zoocracy, or, a rule of all of the living. Travis Holloway is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at SUNY Farmingdale and a poet and former Goldwater Fellow in Creative Writing at NYU. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Mordecai Ian Brownlee, president of the Community College of Aurora, will lead the conversation on navigating the digital equity gap in higher education.   FASKIANOS: Welcome to CFR's Higher Education Webinar. I'm Irina Faskianos, vice president of the National Program and Outreach at CFR. Today's discussion is on the record, and the video and transcript will be available on our website, CFR.org/academic. CFR takes no institutional positions on matters of policy. We are delighted to have Mordecai Ian Brownlee with us today to talk about the digital equity gap in higher education. Dr. Brownlee is president of the Community College of Aurora in Colorado. He also teaches for Lamar University in the College of Education and Human Development. Dr. Brownlee publishes frequently and serves as a columnist for EdSurge. He has been featured on a number of national platforms including by Diverse Issues in Higher Education magazine as a new school leader representing the next generation of college presidents, and he was most recently appointed to serve on the board of directors of the American Association of Community Colleges. So, Dr. Brownlee, thank you very much for taking the time to be with us. I thought we could begin by having you define digital equity and give us an overview of the digital equity gap in higher education, and I know you are going to share a presentation with us so we look forward to seeing that on screen. BROWNLEE: Absolutely. Thank you so much for the opportunity to the Council on Foreign Relations. Just thank you all so much. And to answer that question as we talk about digital equity, it's the assurance of ensuring that all have access to the information technology available and to have the capacity to engage in society and productive citizenship. And so we'll talk about that and let me just start sharing the screen and we'll jump right into it. All right. Here we go. So, once again, thank you all for the opportunity, again, to the Council of Foreign Relations for this opportunity to talk about navigating digital equity. Bringing greetings on behalf of the Community College of Aurora here in Aurora, Colorado. And let's just jump right into it. You know, as we talk about defining this work, how to navigate this work, we have to first understand the work, and to understand digital equity we must first understand the digital divide. And so, you know, as we talked about the digital divide at the beginning of the pandemic it, certainly, was dealing with the voice and mindset, the texture and tone, of accessibility and being able to engage in learning throughout the pandemic and, first of all, I would say as educators it's so critical that even as we are, quote/unquote, “coming out of the pandemic” that we still acknowledge part of the challenges that are happening across the country and across the world in regards to accessibility—equitable accessibility to information technology, to the tools, and to have the capacity to not only learn but, certainly, engage in the economy and society. So as we talk about digital equity, we must understand the digital divide and so let's kind of define that. One of my favorite definitions for the digital divide defined comes from the National League of Cities and they say the digital divide is the gap between individuals who have access to computers, high-speed internet, and the skills to use them, and those who do not. There's two critical components as we talk about digital equity that I want to call out with the digital divide definition here. One is access. The other is skill. Access and skill. So as we think about equity and just think about how do we level the playing field, how do we close the gap on accessibility and skill attainment to engage. And it's not just being able to access and that's the other—I think the complexity here as we think about the term equity because just because I provide you the computer, right—and we found this during the pandemic—just because I provide you the computer do you even have broadband access? And if you have broadband access do you have dependable sustainable broadband access? And then if you have sustainable broadband access, are you skilled to not only learn but and engage through this instrument and tool, and that in itself is where we have found there to be challenges as we think throughout the pandemic and, certainly, beyond the pandemic on what we must do to close the gap for equity and the digital divide. So digital divide provides that access, skill. Equity will then take us deeper into this work. Here are key factors I want to call out in regards to how we must eradicate or address these challenges, these factors, in order to close the gap on the digital divide. Number one, what we have seen through research—and digitalresponsibility.org has done a great job of calling this out—number one, age-related issues as we think about the various generations that are engaged in society and still present in society. We have digital natives. I consider myself to be a digital native as a millennial. But this is very different than previous generations that may not have had the proper training and skill and their jobs do not have them engaging, utilizing these tools and instruments on a regular basis and so that in itself has created some challenges. And, again, there is, certainly, all those that are outliers and those among the generations that have been able to engage in these instruments and tools. However, it is truly a fact through research that age-related issues have been a part of this challenge, more specifically, speaking to our older population. Socioeconomic factors—have to talk about it. I think about it, especially in the higher education space. Our tribal institutions is where I've heard throughout the pandemic some of our most severe challenges that have been experienced in regards to the digital divide. One of the stories that I heard that just breaks my heart—I remember the first time I heard it, it truly had me in tears—we were at the height of the pandemic at this point and what we were learning is in one particular tribal community in order for those students to complete—these are young K-12 students—in order for them to complete their assignments they had elders and community members of that tribe that would walk the students up to the highest point on the mountain within that particular tribal territory just to be able to pick up an internet signal, and they were able to do this when there was not as much traffic on that internet broadband access—that grid, if you will. And so those students were having to do their work—their homework—between the hours of 2:00 a.m. and 5:00 a.m. in the morning. Very interesting reality—unfortunate reality. We, certainly, have to come up with the solutions to addressing this. This in itself is part of that digital divide conversation. Geographic causes—it depends on where you are in the country. I remember at one point in time I was teaching and served the University of Charleston out of Charleston, West Virginia, and for those that are familiar with that part of the country in the Appalachia, I would have my students that were having to use their own cell phones in order to complete their assignments and upload their assignments. They did not have either, in some cases, the actual tools or accessibility, would have to drive in to more populated spaces to pick up a signal. This was impacting their learning experience. This in itself is all a part of that digital divide. Last, certainly, not least, racial, culture, language. All of this plays a role and more in that skill set component along with accessibility component and how are we going to as educators, as key stakeholders within our community, leaders, be a part of the solution to close that divide. Age-related issues, socioeconomic factors, geographic causes, racial, cultural, and language. Again, digitalresponsibility.org is the source on that there. Step two, to navigate digital equity we must understand digital equity, and so now we're going to go and delve into what does it mean—what does digital equity mean. So I'm taking my definition, again, from the National League of Cities. Digital equity is a condition in which all individuals and communities have the information technology capacity needed for full participation in our society, democracy, and economy. This is huge. So, again, as you heard me talk about the digital divide just moments ago, it's the component of accessibility and skill. That skill is then where we get into productive citizenship through society, democracy, and economy, and so now we're talking about how does this tool, this instrument—it's much more than just accessibility. Now how do I engage? How am I advancing my family, my economic—social economic realities through this instrument and tool? The definition goes on to say—again, by the National League of Cities—digital equity is necessary for civic and cultural participation, employment, lifelong learning, and access to essential services. Case in point, life. As we think about all aspects of life from employment to social participation—as we think social media engagement, employment, we all understand what that means; lifelong learning, certainly as educators we have to think about that component—and then accessibility to the tools that we need, I think about my own child who this past weekend had to reach out for virtual assistance from medical care for an earache that he was having. My ability to have the skill set and accessibility to reach out, obtain those resources for my family, and engage through an electronic means to fulfill what my needs were are all a part of this equity. Life in itself should be able to remain whole in what I produce and how it is able to produce within me, and that is in itself digital equity. So step three, let's discuss how to navigate digital equity in higher education and, again, hello to all of our educators that are on the call today. So here's some tips that I want to leave for you on today just to think about, and I look forward to our conversation that we're about to have here in a moment. Number one, as educators—and we're talking about navigating digital equity—it is so important that we understand who we're serving. I say that because, unfortunately, what can happen is especially as educators and we think about the economy, the disruptions that we're experiencing in the marketplace right now, we'll sometimes pursue who we want, not necessarily who we have, and that's unfortunate. As we think about the respective institutional missions and the spaces in which we serve, we have to be mission centered and embrace who it is that we're serving because we owe it to those students who are pursuing their academic endeavors and their professional endeavors through our respective institutions to totally be served. We must understand their realities. One of the conversations we have here at the Community College of Aurora is the conversation about you don't know who is actually sitting, respectively, in that seat in that classroom and what they had to overcome in order to sit in that seat that particular day. Do we know how many bus routes they had to take? Do we understand the challenges that they were having with their children? Do we know are they now leaving their second job that they've worked for the past twenty-four hours to now sit in your classroom? So we have to understand, be aware, and approach that engagement with a sense of grace. I think that's a word that we, perhaps, haven't necessarily embraced in the academy in the way in which we have—should have, but now more than ever we have to. Secondly, create systems that level the learning engagement field. So it's this idea of privilege—this thought of privilege—and, perhaps, what we assumed that everyone had access to and what everyone had the ability to engage with that they don't necessarily have, and if they do have accessibility to it do we have a true understanding of what all they have to do to have that level of engagement and accessibility? Again, case in point, bus routes. Think about what's happening around our country. There has been a reduction from a transportation standpoint financially, and many of the routes and the transportation services that have been provided—some of this due to disruption, others due to areas in which there have had to be a funneling of tax dollars and resources in other spaces and places in our communities. Long story short, the reality is, is that in many communities the bus routes have had to be reduced, which means that individuals are either having to walk or find ways to public accessibility to some of these resources in terms of broadband access and computer access. So then as we're teaching and we're instructing and we're providing services, we have to think about how can we level the playing field and remove barriers? Does it have to be performed—does that learning outcome have to come in the form of computer access and broadband accessibility? And maybe it does, so this takes us to point number three. Let's promote community resources to close the digital divide. I think that laser focus on how we're going to close that divide creates this space for equity, and so, perhaps, it's through libraries. There's one organization out of North Carolina in some of their rural spaces they have now through grant funds created different spaces in their rural communities for those in more rural spaces to gain access to a computer lab and the grants are sustaining that accessibility through computer labs in those rural spaces. Amazing resource. There's many others and examples that we can share around the country. So with that said, let's promote these community resources. Sometimes it's a library. Sometimes it's a grant-funded opportunity. Sometimes it's a local nonprofit. So let's talk about how we can be creative in our respective communities to close the gap there. Fourth, adjust learning experiences to be more inclusive. Not only do we need to create the systems to level the playing field but we must then adjust the learning experiences to be more inclusive to create learning spaces and engagement spaces for all, going back to not only accessibility but skill. Last, certainly not least, providing institutional resources to close the digital divide. What I mean by this is, is that, in closing, due to—through the pandemic and many of our institutions received the Higher Education Emergency Relief Funds—the HEERF funds. Those HEERF funds were utilized in many different ways. In many cases, we were able to do laptop loan programs. In some spaces they were even doing hotspot loan programs. And so now that we are coming out of the pandemic what does it look like to sustain these resources, OK, because now that we provide these resources how do we sustain them? How do we ensure that we're having long-term engagements? One of the things that I want and I ask from my educators, especially administrators, to look at: How do we close this—(inaudible)—without placing the costs on the backs of our students? They already have enough going on. We don't need to just move the cost of something on to their tuition and fees. How can we be even more creative with the engagements and enrollments of our students to being laser focused on what we're doing to close, again, many of those factors and gaps that were highlighted earlier? So grateful for the opportunity. Have a website. Would love to engage with you all more. I know we're getting ready to go into conversation. But itsdrmordecai.com and, again, thank you all so much for the opportunity. FASKIANOS: Fantastic. Thank you so much for that overview. So we're going to go to all of you for your questions now. You can click the raised hand icon on your screen to ask a question, and on an iPad or a tablet click the more button to access the raised hand feature. When you're called upon accept the unmute prompt and please state your name and affiliation followed by a question. You can also submit a written question by the Q&A icon and I will read out the question, and if you do write your question please include your affiliation just to give us a sense of where you're coming from. And there are no questions as of yet but I know that will change, or else you were so thorough that nobody has questions. (Laughs.) So do you see now with the pandemic experience that there will be continued—I'm going to ask the first question—you know, that this has opened up the space now for deeper understanding of the digital divide and bringing the resources to bear? Or now that we're kind of post-pandemic or whatever this is people have forgotten about it and are moving on? BROWNLEE: Thank you so much for the question, my friend. I think that it's twofold. There's two sides of this coin, right. So there's the one side of the coin where the awareness now is so much deeper and richer than it ever has been because of the amount of resources and what it took to sustain since 2020 those resources that were being provided to the students in the community. So now there's many that have learned and they're now having those conversations about how to sustain the resources because, as we all know, while there's been an extension of HEERF funds through the Department of Education, that day is coming to an end here pretty soon and so we have to talk about sustainability. The other side of that coin is, unfortunately, there are those that acknowledge what the realities were but their agenda is more on how do we move past it, not necessarily sustain what we were providing. That's part of the issue for some that we have to address because we don't just move on from hardship, right. That hardship is real and we have to still maintain a laser focus on how we're going to close the digital divide, especially in the academic spaces, but also understanding our responsibility as not only educators but community leaders, stakeholders within our community, to be a part of the solutions and the expansions on equitable access and resources being made available. And so I think with both sides of those coins we're seeing two different realities. But I think that there's also a need now more than ever to maintain the senses of urgency around the haves and have nots and what we're going to do to be a part of the solution to ensure that we're raising the level of accessibility and skill for all within our communities. FASKIANOS: I noted in your presentation you talked about knowing who your students are. So what advice do you have for higher education educators and leaders who are trying to navigate the digital divide in their classroom and to get to know—to figure out where their students are coming from and what their needs may be? BROWNLEE: So, as we all know, especially in the IR space, right, there's different tools, resources, that we can use to survey our students. There's different splash pages, if you will, that we can utilize in terms of the enrollment processes or the readvising processes, or even think of some of our learning management tools that we can engage with students to determine what their needs truly are. I think that it's important that we create tools and instruments that will have high engagement rates. Sometimes those have to be incentivized. But we have to think about outside of our normal student leader responses how we're capturing the voice of all of our students. And so that's those that would not typically provide response, and as we think about the digital divide we have to acknowledge that that tool, that instrument, can't just be electronic. What are we going to do to have paper resources or maybe through phone conversations, outreach, being able to have, certainly, the walk around conversations around our respective campuses and the universities. And so we need to have those conversations to make sure that we're capturing the voice of all of our students, I think, is in the true spirit of continued improvement. We have to understand who we serve and then acknowledge, through the development of systems and the recalibration of our student experiences, are the voice of these students. FASKIANOS: Right. And in terms of the skills, because community colleges are so focused on developing the skills, what specifically are you doing at Aurora or are you seeing in the community college space to help students develop those skills that they need to navigate digitally? BROWNLEE: Absolutely. One of the things I'll talk about—and those that may not be aware and I don't know who all has visited Denver—but the history of Aurora—Aurora is the most diverse community—city—in the state of Colorado. I call that out because immigrants—it has a strong—there's a strong population in this community and so part of our young thirty-nine years of existence in this community has been providing English second language courses. We're noticing that especially our immigrant families and communities that are seeking social and economic mobility, highly skilled from where they come from but now we must create learning opportunities to close that gap, not only through language but through accessibility in this American market. And so through our community ESL programs we've been able to educate upwards of two thousand students a year and walk them through the various levels of learning and engagement with the English language, and then at some point in that process—learning process—we then engage and begin the computer engagement in utilizing the English language in their native language and beginning to close that gap. So I think that that work in itself is a part of that digital equity that must be created—how do you create the foundation to build upon to then advance the engagement. And there's been some other great examples that I've seen around the country in doing that work, a lot of grant programs that I've seen in respective communities. You heard me talk about what's happening out there in the Carolinas. But I think about what's also happening over in California. California has been a great state that's been able to do some work about working and identifying through heat maps and institutional resource—research and resources and community resources, looking at demographics, identifying low socioeconomic spaces, and putting concentrated efforts in those particular communities to increase the level of engagement, accessibility, and skill, and it's critical and key. FASKIANOS: Great. We have a question from Gloria Ayee. So if you can unmute yourself and state your affiliation. Q: Hello. Thank you so much for sharing this important work that you're doing. I am Gloria Ayee and I am a lecturer and senior research fellow at Harvard University, and my question is about the connection between the digital divide and also how it mirrors to current inequities that we see in the educational system in general. So thinking about that type of relationship, what do you think are the most significant challenges to addressing the digital divide, given the issues that we continue to see with the educational system in general at all types of institutions, and what do you foresee as the best way to actually address these challenges? BROWNLEE: Oh, that's a great question. Great question. Thank you so much for asking that question, Gloria. I would say two things come to mind—funding and agenda, right. So if—I'll tell you what comes to mind for me. So as we think about financially and we look at how these institutions are funded around the country, let's think K-12. So grade schools. Think K-12. Let's also think higher education. Are we talking headcount? Are we talking full-time equivalency? Are we talking success points? Are we talking—even as we think about developmental education, how are these institutions being funded to sustain the work of working especially with low socioeconomic communities? Let's just take, for example, full-time equivalency, especially in this higher education space. So if I were someone who wanted to work to create programs that I'm going to help in the advancing and addressing of the digital divide and advancing digital equity, I need funds in order to do that. Now, could I pursue grant funds? Absolutely. But even—we all know that grant funds are not necessarily all the time sustainable funds. Short-term funds, but it still has to be a hard-lined. So then as we think about doing this work—I'll go back to funding and agenda—realizing and looking at what would need to shift within particularly my state's legislative agenda or, perhaps, in that particular district how the funding is occurring. If I'm working with a high population, which we are here at the Community College of Aurora—a high population of part-time students, these are students that are maybe taking one class and engaging. However, if I'm funded by a full-time equivalency model it then takes several students that are taking one class to then equal that one full-time equivalent, which then impacts my funding structure. So then how do I then serve, yet, I am seeking to obtain? And this is where we then get into, I think, a part of that friction of agenda and funding models. So I think that as we think equity—with an equity mindset beyond just the initiatives of overlay—we actually want to bake in the equity experience within our respective states and communities—then we're going to have to take a look at the funding agenda, the agenda and funding—how are we truly going to advance equity and closing the digital divide. It has to be funded properly towards sustainability. We've seen this same thing occur in developmental education as well for those who've been a part of those conversations where we saw around the country there will be a reduction in developmental education funding, which has been impacted, in some cases, the success rates and resources that were historically provided through community colleges in certain communities. Same thing in this digital divide space and digital equity. So funding an agenda, and I think that the solution is, is really coming to the table and saying what does equity look like without it being an overlaid agenda, without it just being a conversation? What does it look like for it to be baked into the experience of how we're going to transform lives, which then means that, in many cases, legislatively and funding models. We have to move from a transactional mindset to a transformational mindset and we have to go all in on ensuring that we're creating equitable communities and engagements for those that we serve. Oh, you're muted, my friend. FASKIANOS: Yes. Thank you. After two-and-a-half years—(laughter)—I should know that. Encourage all of you to share your best practices and what you're doing in your communities as well. You know, we have seen the Biden administration really focusing on diversity, equity, and inclusion. They're focusing on bringing more diversity to the State Department and other parts of the government. Is the Department of Education looking at the funding model? Is this an area that they are actively trying to reform and adjust? BROWNLEE: I get the sense—and I've had the pleasure of speaking in front of several legislators in different venues—I get the sense that there is a major conversation that's happening. I do. I truly get the sense that there's a major conversation happening, not just with our current administration from thinking about our U.S. president but also thinking local legislators as well. I really think that there's conversations—many conversations that are happening. If anything, I feel as though the major—I don't want to use the word barrier so I'm searching for the appropriate word here. But I think the major hurdle that we're going to have to think about is how we have built and designed our funding models to date. You know, some of these funding models were built in early 1990s, mid-1990s in some cases. Really, you don't see it too much early 2000s, and so we have older financial modeling infrastructure that we're trying to pursue this work and how to change it. And so it can't be a Band-Aid approach. I think in some spaces and communities that's what's been done is that rather than changing the actual model, the infrastructure itself, it's received a Band-Aid in the form of grants. And I do believe that grants are significant and, certainly, necessary and appreciated. However, I think that we're reaching a point in society where there has to be a total restructuring of our funding models and taking a look at what percentages are going where, taking a look at the demographics in our respective communities, taking a look at the economic realities in our respective communities. Take a look at just how much the demographics are shifting in our respective communities and building a model that's ready to engage, sustain, and raise the level for all, and I think that we're on our way. I, certainly, hope that we are. FASKIANOS: Thank you. I'm going to take the next question from Rufus Glasper. Q: I am here. FASKIANOS: Wonderful. Q: Hi, Mordecai. How are you today? BROWNLEE: How are you, sir? Q: Hi, Irina. FASKIANOS: Hi, Rufus. Great to hear from you. Q: Mordecai, talk a little bit about digital equity and faculty. How have they accepted, rejected, embraced what you were describing as all of the different factors that are affecting our students, and what kind of practices have you developed or can be developed to ensure that faculty can continue the progress and include our students who are most needy? BROWNLEE: Great question, Dr. Glasper. I didn't expect anything different coming from you. So, let me just say, we've had some very intense conversations, and I have to really give our faculty and our instructors kudos because I will tell you this is probably by far one of the most engaged communities that I've ever worked in of educators that are committed to just truly getting to the solution. There's some strong work that was done around inclusive excellence here at the Community College of Aurora, certainly, prior to my arrival. It led to this college receiving an Inclusive Excellence Award from the American Association of Community Colleges right around 2017. Part of their work at that time was looking at, as our faculty and our academy, how were we going to close the gap on success rates, particularly in English and math, and part of that work was creating resources towards gap closure to ensure that those that had not traditionally and historically had access to some of those learning materials and plans and resources that they were being provided those in a more intensive way. Now as we think more into the digital space and, certainly, think through the pandemic, what we've now done as an institution is that we've become—Community College of Aurora has become the very first Achieving the Dream institution in the state of Colorado and one of the projects that our faculty and our instructors are delving into—I've got a big meeting tomorrow on this, matter of fact—is taking a look at the respective success rates in our gateway courses—our key courses that are gateways into our respective academic programs—and asking ourselves how can we create more equitable learning experiences. Two things—critical things—that I've seen our faculty do. Number one, looking at the data. I think that the data is key and critical—taking a look, disaggregating that data. And our faculty and our instructors continue to do that work, looking at a three-year spread, a five-year spread, and saying: Where is the success occurring? Who's it occurring with and those respective identities of those students? And then really asking the hard questions: Why isn't this population succeeding at the same rate as this population? The other part of this criticality is, is also then accepting that there can't be an excuse in the work. There can't be an excuse in the work and that we must ensure then that we are creating the equitable resources and infrastructure to close the gap, create learning experiences, and say, listen, if our students can't access the internet and the Web then what can we do to create for them the resources, whether it be paper? If they can't come to the teaching demonstration at this particular day how can I create an opportunity for them to engage and obtain that information at another given time? Perhaps they're a working parent and can't necessarily attend at 10:00 a.m. but they can at 5:00 p.m. What are we doing to level the playing field with accessibility? And the other aspect of that is just that our faculty and instructors have been partnering to create these more holistic learning engagement opportunities where if we're having a conversation in English then what can we do within our math department and almost cohorting, in a sense, the learning experiences amongst those two separate classes but then creating like engagements where the same conversations happening in English could be happening in math and science to begin to bring about a new learning within the students to say, OK, well, this particular world issue, now I'm understanding it through various lenses and I understand the interconnectivity in these learning experiences. And so more integrated learning, and I think that we've got a long way to go but we're committed to doing that work. FASKIANOS: So Rufus Glasper is the chancellor of Maricopa Community Colleges, and I just thought I would ask you, Rufus, to maybe share your experience as the chancellor what has been working in your community. Q: I am the chancellor emeritus. I have not been at the colleges for a little over six years now. But I am the president and CEO for the League for Innovation in the Community College. And one of the things that I'd like to connect with with our experience right now we are involved in the state of Arizona with a project which is—which we are embracing. We are working with four different types of institutions right now—urban metropolitan, we have a couple of rural institutions and we have a couple of tribal, and we're trying to make that connectiveness between insecurities—student insecurities. So we're looking at housing. We're looking at hunger. We're looking at jobs. And one of the things that we have found is that we can't make either of these items connect and work without broadband first, and the reason being when you're looking at access it's critical when you start to look at the activities that are occurring throughout the U.S. now and specifically within Arizona—I'll talk about the connections we have now made that are national in scope, that are city, town, and county in scope, and the commitments that we are now working to obtain from all of those who are in position relative to enhancing broadband access and digital equity. There's actually a Center for Digital Equity at Arizona State University (ASU), and last week we had a gathering of all of our institutions to get a better understanding of what does digital equity mean as it comes from the ASU center. What does it mean for each of our different types of institutions, and I will tell you that the one that was hardest hit was the one you talked about and that's tribal just in terms of access, in terms of resources. But I am pleased with the dollars that are out there now at all levels. So if this is a time for us to increase access, increase affordability, than I think we should seize the moment. My question then, which would lead to another one, is on the whole notion of sustainability and you talked about that in terms of stimulus kinds of resources, and equity is in everyone's face right now, especially broadband and others. Is it a sustainable initiative and focus and what are the elements that need to be connected in order to make sure that it stays in the forefront and that our students who may have benefited from buses sitting in their neighborhood during the pandemic and others but are still trying to make choices? And I'll make the last connection point, and you made the opening—how flexible should our institutions be around work-based learning so that our students who are not able to come to the campus and be there on a regular basis but want to balance having a virtual environment? Do you see a balance coming or do you see us forced into staying the old, antiquated model of face-to-face classes and sixteen and eighteen weeks? BROWNLEE: Let me start with the sustainability component then. Thank you again, Dr. Glasper. From a sustainability standpoint, I'll say here at the institution part of the conversation—it's a hard conversation. But I encourage every educator to have this conversation, this brave conversation, in your spaces. Let's take a look at your success rates, and I'm just particularly speaking to higher education right now. Let's take a look at your various academic profiles. Let's take a look at what has been your engagements with your workforce partners, your advisory councils, in many cases, and let's talk about two things—one, the sustainability of those programs and, two, the social and economic mobility of those programs directly to workforce. I think what we will find is what we found here at the Community College of Aurora is that over time the various disruptions that have occurred has shifted the needs of our students. However, the institutions respectively delivering these services have not shifted with the times. And so it is quite possible that either our approach to the work or the actual lack of proper programming is prohibiting social and economic mobility in many of these communities and especially for us. Fifty-two percent of our students are first generation. Sixty-seven percent of our students are students of color. So as we talk about sustainability, we're right there on the front line of having to take a look at enrollment, full-time equivalency, completion, graduation, and employment rates, and we began to find a shifting of that. And so when we talk sustainability, I bring this up as a framework, if you will, to say once you've had those conversations now let's talk about where there are losses—financial losses—and areas in which we can truly be innovative and reallocate dollars that were once going in certain areas and infuse that into other areas that are going to have a higher return. So I think thinking, truly, with a return on investment—an ROI mindset—will then help us to not only meet the needs of our mission, meet it in its current state and its current needs and the disruption that's currently being experienced, which will then help create new opportunities for sustainability beyond what has just been HEERF funding or potential grant funding, it can be hardlined into the institutional mission. I think the other component of that sustainability, too, is looking at the strategic plans of our respective organizations, looking at those—not only the mission but the objectives and asking how equity is not necessarily a separate objective but equity is actually ingrained in all aspects of the objectives—the strategic objectives—because, at that point, we can then understand the significance in resourcing and funding equity all the way through the entirety of the institution. In regards to your latter question about work-based learning and the old model of doing things, I, certainly, believe and hope, Dr. Glasper, that there's this new movement that's occurring where we're going to have to embrace, whether we like it or not, the next era of higher education, and that next era will require us to not approach things in the same modalities and same ways. We're watching, especially in research, the confidence levels reduce—heavily reduced now in the public's perception of what higher education is to provide in comparison to what it once provided. Higher education in many communities isn't necessarily being seen as the sole or the primary tool towards social economic mobility as it once was twenty, thirty years ago. So what does this mean? Our approach to sixteen-week instruction is, certainly, going to have to be transformed. What does it look like to have five-week instruction? Eight-week instruction? What does it look like for us to have true noncredit instructional programs that's in direct partnership with business and industry to ramp up the training and social economic mobility opportunities within our communities? Folks aren't necessarily looking for a two-year or a four-year or a six-year learning experience. They need to put food on their family's table today. What does it look like for them to engage with the institution and have that kind of learning experience, and we have to do it with a digital equity mindset, right, because they're seeking opportunity. So it doesn't necessarily mean that they have accessibility in their current state. We want to get them to a state where they can have that accessibility. So how then do we create those tools? One key component of this is even looking at our college application processes. What is the readability score on some of these applications? We want to educate those that may have a reading level of a—seventh or eighth grade reading level. But some of these college applications are reading at a fourteen, fifteen grade reading level. That in itself is creating a barrier to those that are seeking opportunity, that need the opportunity to up skill. And so I think that the old model is going to, in my opinion, and hopefully quickly deteriorate and we're going to have to be more effective. But let me also say this. It is critical that we have our faculty and our instructors at the table. These decisions shouldn't be thrown upon them. It should be conversations that we're having collectively together, and then how can then we resource our faculty and our instructors and our staff to be a part of those solutions, drive those solutions, reinvest in them to be able to create more innovative and more, I'll say the word, relevant learning experiences because I truly believe that relevance is not necessarily a word that we've used in higher education in terms of our approach, but now more than ever we're going to have to. FASKIANOS: OK. So I'm going to take a written question from Nicole Muthoni, who is an entrepreneur and innovator at the University of Connecticut. She has been passionately working on bridging the divide in emergent nations, especially Kenya. Therefore, in this regard, the key factors creating the digital divide in this space is geographic causes, socioeconomic factors, and culture. So the question is what tools and programs can we use to effectively educate teachers to learn the necessary skills that they can use to teach their students in the classrooms. This is because most of the teachers have not been empowered with the necessary and needed skills for educating in the space of digital equity. BROWNLEE: I think—I began to speak to that right towards the end of what I was just sharing, right. FASKIANOS: Right. BROWNLEE: It's this idea of we've got to get out of the blame game. Oh, I want you to come up with the solution. Well, how are you investing in me to be a part of the solution? How are you even engaging me in part of being the solution? You know, as I talked earlier about those conversations we're having at CCA about what are those programs that have been unsustainable or times have shifted and changed and we needed to create some more relevant learning experiences. It is our faculty and our instructors that made that decision to be able to say, hey, it's time to pivot. They were at the table. Not just present for the sake of inclusion but, truly, the decision makers in that work. Now, I think, the next component of this work as we talked about achieving the dream and us being the first in the state of Colorado, part of our strategic plan is creating a—we don't have a name so just work with me here conceptually. We don't have a name yet. But I can tell you what the desired outcome is, and the desired outcome is that we create a learning center for our faculty and our instructors to grow and to be invested in and to learn what are those emerging approaches that will—on the verge of becoming best practices. However, they're not, quote/unquote, “best practices” around the country yet. What could we create here at CCA to be a part of those solutions? And also exposure to national best practice. What are we doing to invest into our people? So I think that part of that shifting that Dr. Glasper was calling out is going to have to occur now more than ever because, unfortunately, what's happened, I think, in the academy too many of our instructors and faculty have been blamed. Too many of our staff had been blamed, not engaged and brought about to be the solution, and not just thrown right out there in the fire to say come up with something. No. You need to care for your folks more deeply, more passionately, and more genuinely than we have ever before and really ask the question how are we going to be relevant and make sure that our folks feel cared for and that they're valued in the spaces in which they're serving. FASKIANOS: Thank you. So the next question is from Krishna Garza-Baker from the University of Texas at San Antonio. What would you say is the role of private service providers and their ability to assist in reducing the digital divide? Are they doing enough to collaborate with higher education institutions to address this area, specifically, internet service providers? And I'm going to add on to that. What are your recommendations for how schools can and should be leveraging corporate and community partnerships to help address the digital divide? BROWNLEE: You know, you heard me earlier talk about how we can't just do this overlay approach. Yes, I want to give you a voucher for reduced broadband access. That's wonderful. It is. It is grateful. It's better than not having it. But now let's talk about how we're truly going to hardline in opportunities for all. As we think about the spirit of advocacy, unfortunately, sometimes, as they say, it's the squeaky wheel gets the grease, I think, is how it's communicated. And so what I would say is, is that now we have to think about those that don't have a voice how we're still meeting their needs. And so working directly with corporate industry partners, those who have the access. What does it look like if we focus less on trying to make a dollar and more on trying to create opportunity? What would it look like if we all came about and said we want to be the solution to the issue? Yes, there's areas and opportunities where we'll make that dollar. But as we think about society as a whole, what does it look like to create experiences and a life for the goodness of all? And so I think that now we really more than ever have to have these conversations. More than ever it just can't be who gets the voucher. It's how do you create the accessibility for all, those who have a voice and those who know how to use their voice. And I think that—if I understand the nature of that question now, I will say with private entities, corporate partnerships, I think it's more visibility in these colleges and universities and these nonprofit spaces beyond the cameras and just looking at the campaigns. What does it look like for us to have the conversations day in and day out to say we're neighbors, we're all going to collectively be a part of the solutions and to bring the rising up, if you will, of our communities to raise the level for all and that's, certainly, what we're seeking to do. We've seen some major responsiveness in this particular community to say, listen, outside of just some campaign and a picture, what does it look like for you all to be a part of our learning experience, a part of our community, a part of our solutions, and to hardline these experiences for all. So equity causes and it charges and it demands that, and we have to realize the power of that. FASKIANOS: Thank you. I'm going to take the next question from Laila Bichara from SUNY Farmingdale. Many of my students are immigrants and are first-generation college students. My question is about skill transfer—once our students get access to technology for themselves and their families who are then losing their jobs due to automation. BROWNLEE: Demographic shift. I talked about it earlier. You know, I think about here in the Denver Metro area and I'm going to—I attended a site visit conversation with their chamber of commerce there in Denver. It was pretty telling. In looking at the demographics, it broke down how for millennials, I think, there's currently—so there's 3.3 million in the greater Denver area. It broke down for millennials, which I fall into this group—I think it was eight hundred and sixty-four thousand millennials currently in that space. Then it had Xers. Not Xers. It had generation Z. Z accounted for, roughly, six hundred thousand. But get this. So my children, my eight- and my four-year-old—they're generation alpha—were only accounting for, roughly, three hundred thousand in the space currently right now. I say that as an example that I'm going to walk us through really quickly, and that is, is with the lens of equity and we think about the shifting and the disruptions in market and we think about especially now in the markets humanization versus automation, and we want to create social and economic mobility for these respective spaces wherever those realities are and we think about accessibility to the internet and we talk about that digital equity and the digital divide, we then have to have a high degree of urgency within us to say that what will—can we create today that will prevent communities of color and low socioeconomic communities that traditionally in this current market would have been given opportunities but that in the future market, due to a lack of potential skill and accessibility, will not be provided the resources and the opportunities that they once were in an automated world. And so what do we do then to make sure that they're not the one pressing the button. They're the one that's coding the button, right, and that's all a part of that work and that shifting. So it's going to take stronger math and science skills and accessibility and equity all built into their learning experiences because if not the wide—we will widen the gap—the poverty gap—because we move, again, deeper into automation, lessen the humanization, and then we are essentially moving an entire population of folks further down the supply chain, if you will, which then will prohibit their learning—not learning, their earning ability. And so we have to be laser focused on those realities and, really, look to eradicate what's going to be future barriers now so systematically we are able to address it. FASKIANOS: Great. So the last question I wanted to ask you is you've just completed your first year as president. What are the lessons that you've learned? BROWNLEE: Oh, my gosh. I will tell you that, you know, I just released an article on this talking about my first year in the presidency and through EdSurge and lessons learned, and one of those lessons I would say is is—that I highlighted in that article is, you know, don't do more for an institution than you would do for your own family. I think that as educators, as community leaders, and anyone that's on this call, I'll just take the opportunity to encourage you. You know, sometimes we give our all to these entities in which we serve, and we do it and we give it countless hours. You know, we say it's a forty-hour job but we're probably spending fifty, sixty, seventy, if not more, and we get lost in that, right. And so there's good work to be done. However, what is the biggest mockery of all to save the world but lose your own family? And I think that part of my lesson that I had to really reflect on was, like, right now as I'm giving this lecture my eight-year-old son is here in the office with me right now that I'm trying to get to be quiet and work with me as I'm giving—having this time with you all now, right. He doesn't have school today. It's an in-service day. But really creating those engagements for my family to be engaged in the experiences and making sure that they're part of the process. I think the other component of this is, too—and I talked about this in the article—is realizing that it is a privilege to serve, never taking for granted the ability, the opportunity, that we have to serve because there's others that wish that they had these opportunities. So, yes, even in our most—our days of most frustration it still is a pleasure and a blessing and an opportunity to serve and honor. And so what would life look like if we embraced it for the pleasure and the honor that it truly is and how we treat and create spaces for others to thrive, because they're sacrificing being away from their families and loved ones to do this work. We need to create more communities for all to thrive. FASKIANOS: Oh, your son should be very proud of you. I have to say that—what a role model. BROWNLEE: Thank you. FASKIANOS: I'm going to go next to Laurette Foster. Laurette, please say your affiliation. It's great to have you on. Q: Hi. Laurette Foster, Prairie View A&M University in Texas. And I really don't have a question. I just want to say how delighted I was to hear the conversation and hear about what the next steps are, because looking back at the pandemic and how we wanted to step up and do so much and I'm just afraid that even though we did those things that needed to be done that many of us now are settling back into the old ways. And it's still funny that when you told the story about the tribal community happened to go to the top of the mountain from 2:00 in the morning to do—the passion for education is there with the kids. But we have to continue to do our part. So I just appreciate all the comments and—that you did today. It was really enlightening. So thank you very much. BROWNLEE: And thank you, and I will say that my wife is a proud product of Prairie View A&M. The Hill as well. So just thank you for your comments. FASKIANOS: We have another thank you from John Marks of LSU of Alexandria just saying that it was really great to take time out of his day and to—said they—definitely in Louisiana access and skills are, indeed, real obstacles that are typical of every online class that he's taught. I'm going to take the final question from Haetham Abdul-Razaq from Northwest Vista College, again, from San Antonio, Texas, working on a research project regarding online learning and community college students. One of the interesting findings is that some students might be considered as tech savvy, yet they have problems engaging in online classes. Do you think that we should build on the strengths of our students' digital knowledge when it comes to these sorts of skills? BROWNLEE: Great question. Absolutely. I think, you know, we talk about creating student-centered approaches and sometimes we're successful at that and other times we're not, perhaps, because if we were to really delve into student-centered approaches just how far from our base currently of how we approach higher education just how far it'll take us. But I would say, going back to an earlier conversation, now's the time more than ever to go there. Matter of fact, we should have went there already before. It's time, truly, for a revolution and an evolution in our approach to learning and engagement and advancement with an equity lens. And I go back to that word relevance. We have to create more relevant learning experiences. Think about business and industry. If we look at what's happened over the past ten years due to some of our bureaucracies and our lack of responsiveness. Look at business and industry. They're creating learning experiences right around higher education, in some cases not even engaging higher education anymore, directly working with middle schools and high schools to create their own strong pipelines. What has happened that that even came about, right? And so due to a lack of responsiveness, perhaps, innovation—true innovation—and that student-centered approach that we, perhaps, moved far from or maybe just took parts of that was easier to tackle, not the harder aspects of that, and so we now have to tackle it. We have to embrace it, because if not I think that five, ten years from now, certainly, twenty years from now, we'll have more institutional closures, more reductions in enrollments, if we fail to be responsive and create these more equitable learning opportunities that are geared at creating a digital equity. FASKIANOS: Right. Well, we are just at the end of our time. Thank you very much, Dr. Mordecai Brownlee. We really appreciate your being with us and sharing your insights, and to all of you for your questions and comments. And so you can follow Dr. Mordecai and also go to his website, itsdrmordecai.com, and at @itsdrmordecai, correct? BROWNLEE: That is correct. That is correct. I look forward to engaging with everyone. FASKIANOS: Wonderful. We really appreciate it. Just as a reminder for all of you, our next Higher Education webinar will be on Wednesday, November 2, at 1:00 p.m. Eastern time. Rebecca Granato, associate vice president for global initiatives at Bard College, will talk about refugees, migration, and education. So we hope you'll tune in for that. In the meantime, I encourage you to check out CFR fellowships for educators at CFR.org/fellowships, and this is a program that allows educators to come for a year in residence at CFR or else go work in—we place you in government to get some policy-relevant experience. The deadline is October 31. So if you're interested email us and we can send you information about that. Also, go to CFR.org, ForeignAffairs.com, and ThinkGlobalHealth.org for research and analysis, and follow us at @CFR_Academic. Thank you all again. Thank you, Dr. Brownlee. We appreciate it, and we hope you have a good rest of the day. (END)  

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Jason Bordoff, cofounding dean, Columbia Climate School, founding director of the Center on Global Energy Policy, and professor of professional practice in international and public affairs at Columbia University, leads a conversation on energy policy and efforts to combat climate change.   FASKIANOS: Welcome to today's session of the CFR Fall 2021 Academic Webinar Series. I am Irina Faskianos, vice president of the National Program and Outreach here at CFR. Today's discussion is on the record. And the video and transcript will be available on our website, CFR.org/academic. As always, CFR takes no institutional positions on matters of policy. We are delighted to have with us today Jason Bordoff to talk about energy policy and efforts to combat climate change. Jason Bordoff is cofounding dean of the Columbia Climate School, founding director of the Center on Global Energy Policy, and professor of professional practice in international and public affairs at Columbia University. He previously served as special assistant to President Obama and senior director for energy and climate change on the National Security Council, and he has held senior policy positions on the White House's National Economic Council and Council on Environmental Quality. He is a columnist for Foreign Policy magazine and is often on TV and radio. So, we're really happy to have him with us today. So, Jason, thank you very much. We are just coming off the COP26 conference that took place in Glasgow that started on October 31, I believe, and concluded last Friday, November 12. Could you talk about what came out of the conference at a high level, if you think that the agreements that were reached went far enough or didn't go far enough, and what your policy recommendations are to really advance and fight the countdown that we have to the Earth warming? BORDOFF: Yeah. Thanks. Well, first, thanks to you, Irina, and thanks to CFR for the invitation to be with you all today. Really delighted to have the chance to talk about these important issues. I was there for much of the two-week period in Glasgow representing the Energy Center and the Climate School here at Columbia. I think it's kind of a glass half-full/glass half-empty outlook coming out of Glasgow. So I think the Glasgow conference was notable in several respects. We'll look back on it, I think, and some of the things we will remember are—some of the things we'll remember—(dog barking)—sorry—are the role of the private sector and private finance, I think, was much more prominent in Glasgow this year. I think there were commitments around some important things like methane, a very potent greenhouse gas, was much higher on the priority list in this U.N. climate meeting than in prior ones. You had pledges on deforestation and other things that are important. And then the final agreement did have some important elements to it, particularly around Article 6, how you design carbon markets around the world. But the glass half-empty outlook is still we are nowhere close to being on track for the kind of targets that countries and companies are committing to: net zero by 2050 or 1.5 degrees of warming. I think there were—there should be hope and optimism coming out of COP. The role of the youth—at Columbia, we were honored to organize a private roundtable for President Obama with youth climate activists. It's hard to spend time with young people in COP or on campus here at Columbia or anywhere else and not be inspired by how passionately they take these issues. So the activism you saw in the streets, the sense of urgency among everyone—activists, civil society, governments, the private sector—felt different, I think, at this COP than other COPs that I have attended or probably the ones I haven't attended. But there was also for some I saw kind of we're coming out of this and we're on track for below two degrees. Or, you know, Fatih Birol, the head of the International Energy Agency, tweeted that when you add up all the pledges we're on track for 1.8 degrees Celsius warming. He's talking about all of the pledges meaning every country who's promised to be net zero by 2050, 2060, 2070, and at least from my standpoint there's a good reason to take those with a grain of salt. They're not often backed up by concrete plans or ideas about how you would get anywhere close to achieving those goals. So it's good that we have elevated ambition, which is kind of one of the core outcomes of the COP in Glasgow. But it is also the case that when you elevate ambition and the reality doesn't change as fast or maybe faster than the ambition is changing, what you have is a growing gap between ambition and reality. And I think that's where we are today. Oil use is rising each and every year. Gas use is rising. Coal use is going up this year. I don't know if it's going to keep going up, but at a minimum it's going to plateau. It's not falling off a cliff. So the reality of the energy world today—which is 75 percent of emissions are energy—is not anything close to net zero by 2050. It is the case that progress is possible. So if you go back to before the Paris agreement, we were on track for something like maybe 3.7 degrees Celsius of warming. If you look at a current outlook, it's maybe 2.7, 2.8 (degrees), so just below three degrees. So progress is possible. That's good. If you look at the nationally determined contribution pledges—so the commitments countries made that are more near term, more accountability for them; the commitments they made to reduce emissions by 2030, their NDCs—we would be on track for about 2.4 degrees Celsius warming, assuming all those pledges are fulfilled. But history would suggest a reason to be a little skeptical about that. The U.S. has a pledge to get to a 50 to 52 percent reduction in emissions by 2030, and look at how things are working or not working in Washington and make your own judgment about how likely it is that we'll put in place the set of policies that would be required to get to that ambitious level of decarbonization by 2030. And I think the same healthy dose of skepticism is warranted when you look elsewhere in the world. But even if we achieve all of those, we're still falling short of below two degrees, nevertheless 1.5 (degrees). And so, again, I think the outcome from COP for me was optimism that progress is possible—we have made a lot of progress in the last ten years—but acute concern that we're nowhere close to being on track to take targets like 1.5 degrees Celsius or net zero by 2050 seriously. And we just need to be honest as a climate and energy community—and I live in both of those worlds; there's a lot of overlap between them, obviously—about how hard it is to achieve the goals we are talking about. Renewables have grown incredibly quickly. Optimistic headlines every day about what is happening in solar and wind. Costs have come down more than 90 percent. Battery costs have come down more than 90 percent in the last decade. But solar and wind create electricity, and electricity is 20 percent of global final energy consumption. The outlook for electric vehicles is much more promising today. Lots of companies like Ford and others are committing to be all-electric by a certain date ten or twenty years from now. Cars are 20 percent of global oil demand. About half of the emission reductions—cumulative emission reductions between now and 2050 will need to come from technologies that are not yet available at commercial scale and sectors of the economy that are really hard to decarbonize like steel and cement and ships and airplanes. We're not—we don't have all the tools we need to do those yet. And then, in Glasgow, the focus of a lot of what we did at Columbia was on—we did a lot of different things, but one of the key areas of focus was the challenge of thinking about decarbonization in emerging and developing economies. I don't think we talk about that enough. The issue of historical responsibility of loss and damage was more on the agenda this year, and I think you'll hear even more about it in the year ahead. The next COP is in Africa. There was growing tension between rich and poor countries at this COP. I think a starting point was what we see in the pandemic alone and how inequitable around the world the impacts of the pandemic are. Many people couldn't even travel to Glasgow from the Global South because they couldn't get vaccinated. We need, between now and 2050, estimates are—a ballpark—$100 trillion of additional investment in clean energy if we're going to get on track for 1.5 (degrees)/net zero by 2050. So the question that should obsess all of us who work in this space: Where will that money come from? Most of it's going to be private sector, not public. Most of it is going to be in developing and emerging economies. That is where the growth in energy is going to come from. Eight hundred million people have no access to energy at all. Nevertheless, if you model what energy access means, it's often defined as, you have enough to turn on lights or charge your cellphone. But when you talk about even a fraction of the standard of living we take for granted—driving a car, having a refrigerator, having an air conditioner—the numbers are massive. They're just huge, and the population of Africa's going to double to 2.2 billion by the year 2050. So these are really big numbers and we need to recognize how hard this is. But we should also recognize that it is possible. We have a lot of the tools we need. We need innovation in technology and we need stronger policy, whether that's a carbon price or standards for different sectors. And then, of course, we need private-sector actors to step up as well, and all of us. And we have these great commitments to achieve these goals with a lot of capital being put to work, and now we need to hold people accountable to make sure that they do that. So, again, I look back on the last two weeks or before, two weeks of COP, the gap between ambition and reality got bigger. Not necessarily a bad thing—ambition is a good thing—but now it's time to turn the ambition into action. We need governments to follow through on their pledges. Good news is we have a wide menu of options for reducing emissions. The bad news is there's not a lot of time at our current rate of emissions. And emissions are still going up each and every year. They're not even falling yet. Remember, what matters is the cumulative total, not the annual flow. At our current rate of emissions, the budget—carbon budget for staying below 1.5 (degrees) is used up in, around a decade or so, so there's not much time to get to work. But I'm really excited about what we're building with the first climate school in the country here at Columbia. When it comes to pushing—turning ambition into action, that requires research, it requires education, and it requires engaging with partners in civil society and the public sector and the private sector to help turn that research into action. And the people we're working with here every day on campus are the ones who are going to be the leaders that are going to hopefully do a better job—(laughs)—than we've done over the last few decades. So whatever you're doing at your educational institution—be it teaching or research or learning—we all have a role to play in the implementation of responsible, forward-thinking energy policy. I'm really excited to have the chance to talk with you all today. Look forward to your questions and to the conversation. Thank you again. FASKIANOS: Jason, that's fantastic. Thank you very much for that informative and sobering view. So let's turn to all of you now for your questions. So I'm going to go first to—I have one raised hand from Stephen Kass. Q: OK. Thank you. Jason, thank you for the very useful and concise summary. What specific kinds of energy programs do you think developing countries should now be pursuing? Should they be giving up coal entirely? Should they be importing natural gas? Should they be investing in renewables or nuclear? What recipe would you advise developing countries to pursue for their own energy needs? BORDOFF: It's going to need to be a lot of different things, so there's no single answer to that, of course. And by the way, I'll just say it would be super helpful if people don't mind just introducing yourself when you ask a question. That would be helpful to me, at least. I appreciate it. I think they need to do a lot of different things. I think I would start with low-hanging fruit, and renewable electricity is not the entire answer. The sun and wind are intermittent. Electricity can't do certain things yet, like power ships and airplanes. But the low cost of solar and wind, I think, does mean it's a good place to start, and then we need to think about those other sectors as well. I think a key thing there comes back to finance, and that's why we're spending so much time on it with our research agenda here. Access to financing and cost of capital are really important. Clean energy tends to be more capital-intensive and then, like solar and wind, more CAPEX, less OPEX over time. But attaining financing in poor countries is really difficult and expensive. Lack of experience with renewable energy, local banks are often reluctant to lend to those kinds of projects. And then foreign investors, where most of that capital is going to come from, view projects often in emerging markets and developing economies particularly as more risky. Local utilities may not be creditworthy. There's currency inflation risk in many developing countries, people worry about recouping their upfront investment if bills are paid in local currency. There's political risk, maybe corruption, inconsistently enforced regulations. And it can be harder to build clean energy infrastructure if you don't have other kinds of infrastructure, like ports, and roads, and bridges and a good electrical grid. So I would start there. And I think there's a role for those countries to scale up their clean energy sectors, but also for policymakers and multilateral development banks and governments elsewhere—there was a lot of focus in Glasgow on whether the developed countries would make good on their promise made in Copenhagen to send $100 billion a year in climate finance to developing countries. And they fell short of that. But even that is kind of a rounding error, compared to the one to two trillion (dollars) a year that the International Energy Agency estimates is needed. So there are many other things besides just writing a check that government, like in the U.S. or elsewhere, can do. The Development Finance Corporation, for example, can lend to banks in local and affordable rates, finance projects in local currency, expand the availability of loan guarantees. I've written before about how I think even what often gets called industrial policy, let's think about some sectors—in the same way China did with solar or batteries fifteen years ago. Are there sectors where governments might help to grow domestic industries and, by doing that, scale—bring down the cost of technologies that are expensive now, the premium for low-carbon or zero-carbon cement or steel. It's just—it's not reasonable to ask a developing country to build new cities, and new highways, and all the new construction they're going to do with zero-carbon steel and cement because it's just way too expensive. So how do you bring those costs down? If we think about investments, we can make through U.S. infrastructure or other spending to do that, that not only may help to grow some domestic industries and jobs here, that can be its own form of global leadership if we're driving those costs of those technologies down to make it cheaper for others to pick up. So I think that's one of the places I'd start. But there are a lot of other things we need to do too. FASKIANOS: Thank you. I'm going to take the next question—and let me just go back. Stephen Kass is an adjunct professor at NYU. So the next question is a written question from Wei Liang, who is an assistant professor of international policy studies at Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey. And the question is: I wonder if you could briefly address the Green Climate Fund and individual countries' pledge on that. BORDOFF: Yeah, I mean, it touches a little bit on what I said a moment ago about the need for developed countries to provide climate finance to developing countries. And so I think that's—it's important that we take those obligations seriously, and that we, in advanced economies, step up and make those funds available. And but, again, we're talking—the amount we're still talking about is so small compared to the amounts that are needed to deal both with the impacts of climate change, and then also to curb climate change, to mitigate climate change. Because we know that developing countries are in the parts of the world that will often be most adversely impacted by climate impacts—droughts, and heat waves, and storms, and food security issues—from a standpoint of equity are the parts of the world that have done the least to cause this problem, responsible for very few emissions. If you look cumulatively at emissions since the start of the industrial age, about half—nearly half have come from the U.S. and EU combined. Two percent from the entire continent of Africa. So they are using very little energy today, haven't therefore contributed to the problems, and have the fewest resources, of course, to cope with the impacts, and also to develop in a cleaner way. Sometimes it's cheaper to develop in a cleaner way. Renewables are often today competitive with coal, even without subsidy. But there are many areas where that's not the case, and there is a cost. And we need to help make sure that, you know, we're thinking about what a just transition looks like. And that means many different things for different communities, whether you're a coal worker or an agricultural worker in California that may, you know, be working outside in worse and worse heat. But it also means thinking about the parts of the world that need assistance to make this transition. So I think we need to be taking that much more seriously. FASKIANOS: Next question is a raised hand from Tara Weil, who is an undergraduate student at Pomona College. Q: Hi. So, given that developed nations are the largest contributors to carbon emissions, as you've said, how can larger powers be convinced as to the importance of addressing global inequality with regards to climate change? And thank you so much, also, for giving this talk. BORDOFF: Yeah. Thank you for being here. I don't have a great answer to your question. I mean, the politics of foreign aid in general are not great, as we often hear in events at CFR. So I do think one—we need to continue to encourage, through political advocacy, civil society, and other ways, governments in advanced economies to think about all the tools they have at their disposal. I think the ones that are going to be—I'm reluctant to try to speak as a political commenter rather than a climate and energy commenter on what's going to work politically. But part of that is demonstrating what—it's not just generosity. It is also in one's self-interest to do these things. And just look at the pandemic, right? What would it look like for the U.S. to show greater leadership, or any country to show even greater leadership and help cope with the pandemic all around the world in parts of the world that are struggling to vaccinate their people? That is not only an act of generosity, but it is clearly one of self-interest too, because it's a pretty globalized economy and you're not going to be able to get a pandemic under control at home if it's not under control abroad. Of course, the same is true of the impacts of climate change. It doesn't matter where a ton of CO2 comes from. And we can decarbonize our own economy, but the U.S. is only 15 percent of annual emissions globally. So it's not going to make a huge difference unless everyone else does that as well. There is also the potential, I think, to—and we see this increasingly when you look at the discussion of the Biden infrastructure bill, how they talk about the U.S.-China relationship, which of course are the two most important countries from the standpoint of climate change. It is one of cooperation. That was one of the success stories in Glasgow, was a commitment to cooperate more. We'll see if we can actually do it, because it's a pretty difficult and tense U.S.-China relationship right now. So the question is, can you separate climate from all those other problems on human rights, and intellectual property, and everything else and then cooperate on climate? It's been hard, but there's a renewed commitment to try to do that. But also, a recognition that action in the clean energy space is not only about cooperation but it's also about economic competition. And you have seen more and more focus on both the Republican and Democratic sides of the aisle on thinking about the security of supply chains, and critical minerals, and the inputs in lithium and rare earth elements that go into many aspects of clean energy. To my point before about aspects of industrial policy that might help grow your own domestic economy, I think there are ways in which countries can take measures that help—that help their own economies and help workers and help create jobs, and that in the process are helping to drive forward more quickly the clean energy technologies we need, and bring down the cost of those technologies to make them more accessible and available in some of the less-developed countries. So I think trying to frame it less as do we keep funds at home, do we write a check abroad? But there are actually many steps you could do to create economic opportunities and are win-win. Without being pollyannish about it, I think there is some truth to some of those. And I think we can focus on those politically as well. FASKIANOS: Thank you. I'm going to take an international question from Luciana Alexandra Ghica, who is an associate professor for international cooperation at the University of Bucharest. What type of topics do you think we should address immediately in university programs that provide training in climate, development, global policies, or international public affairs, so that a new generation of leaders really pushes forward the agenda on climate change? BORDOFF: Yeah. Well, I'll say a quick word about what we're doing at Columbia, and maybe it's relevant to that question, because Columbia has made this historic commitment to build a climate school. There are many initiatives, and centers, and institutes. There was not only a handful of schools—law school, business school, medical school, engineering school. And it is the largest commitment a university can make to any particular topic, is something on the scale of a school with degree-granting authority and tenure-granting authority, and all the things that come with a school. And it's just the scale at a place like Columbia, and many other places, is just enormous. That's what we're doing on climate. We have created a climate school. And I'm honored President Bollinger asked me to help lead it. And we're going to build a faculty. We have our first inaugural class of masters' students, about ninety students that are going through the program right now, and we have a building in Manhattan for the climate school, and on and on. The idea—but the question is, what is climate, right? Because academia has been historically organized into traditional academic disciplines. So you have people who you hire through a tenured search, and they go to the engineering faculty and build their lab there. And there's law professors, and their business school professors, and on and on and on, social work. But for climate, you need all of those, right? They all kind of need to come together. And, like, interdisciplinary doesn't even sort of do justice to what it means to think about approaching this systemic—it's a systemic challenge. The system has to change. And so whatever solution you're talking about—if you want to get hydrogen to scale in the world, let's—you know, for certain sectors of the economy that may be hard to do with renewable energy, or in terms of renewable energy and, say, green hydrogen. You need engineering breakthroughs to bring down the cost of electrolyzers, or you need new business models, or you need financial institution frameworks that figure out how you're going to put the capital into these things. You need the policy incentives. How are you going to—you need permitting and regulation. How do we permit hydrogen infrastructure? It's barely been done before. There are concerns in the environmental justice community about some aspects of technologies like that or carbon capture that need to be taken seriously and addressed. There are geopolitical implications, potentially, to starting to build a global trade in ammonia or hydrogen, and what security concerns—energy security concerns might accompany those, the way we thought about oil or gas from Russia into Europe. I have an article coming out in the next issue of Foreign Affairs about the geopolitics of the energy transition. So we need disciplines that come together and look at a problem like that in all of those multifaceted dimensions, so we can figure out how to get from a lab to scale out in the world. And so when we think about the areas of concentration here, climate finance, climate justice, climate in society, climate in international security—I mean, a range of things that I think are really important to help people understand. And that's going to be a major focus of what we do at the climate school here. FASKIANOS: Fantastic. Let's go next to Sean Grossnickle, who has raised his hand. A graduate student at Fordham University. Q: Speak now? Hi, this is not Sean but Henry Schwalbenberg, also at Fordham, where I teach in our international political economy and development program. I went to a conference about a month ago in Rome. And there was a physicist from CERN. And he was a big advocate of something I'd never heard of, and this is this thorium for nuclear reactors. And he was going through all the pros, but I wanted a more balanced perspective on it. And I'm hoping that you might give me a little pros and cons of this thorium nuclear reactor technique. BORDOFF: Yeah. I will be honest and say that nuclear is not my area of focus. We have a pretty strong team here that works in nuclear, and I think is optimistic about the breakthroughs we're going to see in several potential areas of nuclear—advanced nuclear technology, that being one of them, or small modular reactors, and others. At a high level, I will say I do think if you're serious about the math of decarbonization and getting to net zero by 2050, it's hard to do without zero-carbon nuclear power. It's firm, baseload power. It runs all the time. Obviously, there are challenges with intermittency of solar and wind, although they can be addressed to some extent with energy story. Most of the analyses that are done show not necessarily in the U.S. but in other parts of the world significant growth in nuclear power. The International Energy Agency just modeled what it looks like to get to net zero by 2050, and this pathway that got a lot of attention for saying things like we would not be investing in new oil and gas supply. The world has to change a lot pretty quickly. And they have about a hundred new nuclear plants being built by 2030, so that's a pretty big number. So we're going to need all tools—(laughs)—that we have at our disposal. And unfortunately, I worry we may still fall short. So I think at a high level we need to think really hard about how to improve nuclear technology. The people who know that really well I think are optimistic about our ability to do that. And I will follow up on thorium in particular with my colleagues at Columbia, and happy to follow up with you offline about it. FASKIANOS: Great. I'm going to take a written question from Stephen Bird, who's an associate professor of political science at Clarkson University. He thanks you, and he wanted you to talk a little bit more about political will. The overall dollar amounts are clear. Much cheaper to address climate change than to ignore it. That said, countries are, clearly, lagging. Is it a case of countries just don't want to take action now because of issues of fairness or because of lack of domestic political support, i.e., citizens aren't convinced that they should pay costs now with payoffs that come later, and what might we do to improve that issue in terms of persuading or arguing for more political will? BORDOFF: Yeah. It's a question for, you know, a political scientist as much as an energy or climate expert, and I wish I had a better answer to it. I think it is—climate is one of the trickiest problems for so many reasons but one of those is there is no acute event now that you sort of respond to, hopefully, and pull everyone together. It's a set of things that, you know, of course, there would have been storms and droughts before but we know they're intensified and made worse. It's hard to rally public support. We often respond to a crisis kind of proverbial, you know, frog in the boiling water kind of thing. So that makes it hard. There are huge issues—we talked about a just transition a few minutes ago—there are huge issues with intergenerational equity when we talk about climate. There are, clearly, climate impacts and damages today but some of the worst will be in the future, including for people who may not be born yet, and we don't do a great job in our political environment about thinking about those and valuing them today and how you do that, and from an economic standpoint, of course, there are questions about discount rates you apply and everything else. I think, politically, one of the things that has mobilized stronger climate—support for climate action, so it is encouraging that if you look at polling on climate change, the level of urgency that the public in many countries, including the U.S., broadly, ascribe to acting on climate has gone up a lot. It's higher today than it was, you know, a decade or so ago. That's a result of people seeing the impacts and also advocacy campaigns and political campaigns. It is often tied to—it's like a win-win. Like, President Biden says when he thinks of climate he thinks of jobs, and so we're going to deal with climate and we're going to grow the economy faster and we're going to create jobs, and there is truth to that. It is also the case that there are costs. The cost of inaction are higher, but there are costs associated with the transition itself. So if you survey the American public, I think, climate, according to the latest YouGov/Economist poll I saw, you know, it was number two on the list of things they cared the most about. That's much higher than in the past. And then if you ask the American public are they willing to pay $0.25 a gallon more at the pump to act on climate, 75 percent say no. And you look at the challenges the Biden administration is having right now sort of thinking about a really strong set of measures to put in place to move the ball forward on climate, but acute concern today about where oil prices are and inflation and natural gas prices as we head into the winter. If the weather is cold then it's going to be really expensive for people to heat their homes in parts—some parts of the country like New England, maybe. So that's a reality, and I think we need to—it was interesting, in the roundtable we did with President Obama with climate activists, that was a message he had for them. You know, be impatient, be angry, keep the pressure on, but also be pragmatic. And by that he means, like, you know, try to see the world through the eyes of others and people who are worried about the cost of filling up at the pump, the cost of paying their heating bills. They're not—some of them may not be where you are yet. They may not have the same sense of urgency with acting on climate that many of us on this Zoom do and need to take those concerns seriously. So I think that's a real challenge, and it can be addressed with good policy, to some extent, right, if you think about the revenue raised from a carbon tax and how it could be redistributed in a way that reduce the regressive impacts. I've written about how, at a high level—I'll say one last point—if we get on track for an energy transition, which we're not on yet, right. (Laughs.) Oil and gas use are going up each and every year. But imagine we started to get on track where those were falling year after year. It's still going to take decades, and that process of transition is going to be really messy. It's going to be really volatile. We're going to have fits and starts in policy from Obama to Trump to Biden. We're going to make estimate—we're going to make bets on technologies and maybe get those technologies wrong or misunderstand the cost curves, the potential to shut down investment in certain forms of energy before the rest are ready to pick up the slack. If it's messy and volatile and bumpy, that's not only harmful economically and geopolitically, it will undermine public support for stronger climate action. So you see, like, in Washington they're selling off the Strategic Petroleum Reserve because we're moving to a world beyond oil and also we have all this domestic oil now with shale. We need more, not fewer, tools to mitigate volatility for the next several decades if we're serious about making this transition, and I think the same is true for thinking about sort of buffers you could build into geopolitics, foreign policy, and national security, because there will be—in a post-oil and gas world, you know, you may say, well, we're not going to worry as much about the Middle East or about, you know, Russia's leverage in Europe. But there will be new risks created and we can talk about what some of those might be, and we need new tools of foreign policy to mitigate those potential foreign policy risks. FASKIANOS: Thank you. I'm going to take the next question. Raised hand from Chloe Demrovsky, adjunct instructor at NYU. Q: Hey, can you hear me? BORDOFF: Yes. Thank you. FASKIANOS: Yes. Q: Hi. Chloe Demrovsky, adjunct at NYU and president and CEO of Disaster Recovery Institute International. Thanks for being with us, Jason. So my question is about the feasibility and your thoughts on artificially altered clouds or solar geoengineering. What are the ethical and geopolitical implications of, perhaps, using this to buy a little time for our energy transition? Thanks. BORDOFF: Yeah. A super interesting question, and I will say, again, I'm sort of—think of myself as an energy expert. So that is where I spend more time than thinking about tools like solar geoengineering. I guess, it seems there's, obviously, huge risks associated with something like that and we need to understand them. We need to do research. We need to figure out what those risks may be. There are global governance concerns. It's actually pretty cheap to do solar geoengineering. So what happens when some country or some billionaire decides they want to start spraying stuff into the atmosphere to cool the planet? And for those who don't know that, you know, solar—I mean, you think of after a volcano the planet cools a little bit because of all the particulates up in the atmosphere. When you model in an energy system model how much phasing out coal will reduce warming, you, obviously, have much less carbon dioxide emissions but that's offset slightly—not completely, of course—it's offset a little bit by the fact that you have less local air pollution, which is a good thing from air pollution. But air pollution has a slightly cooling effect, because you have these little particles floating around that reflect sunlight. So the idea is can we create that artificially and cool the planet, and you can imagine lots of reasons why that could go wrong when you're trying to figure out what—how much to put in there, what unintended consequences could be. You still have other impacts of carbon dioxide like ocean acidification. Maybe you go too far in one direction, that's like you're setting the thermostat. That's why one of the companies doing carbon removal is called Global Thermostat. You're kind of figuring out what temperature it should be. But I will say so it's an area that needs research and I think, given how far we are away from achieving goals like 1.5 and net-zero 2050, I guess what I would say is in the same way that when I worked in the Obama administration it was—I wouldn't say controversial, but there were some people who didn't want to talk about adaptation because it was kind of a more—there was a moral hazard problem there. It was, you know, less pressure to mitigate and reduce emissions if we thought adaptation was a solution. People worry about that from the standpoint of solar geoengineering. But the likelihood—I hope I'm wrong, but the likelihood that we roll the clock forward, you know, later this decade and we realize we've made progress but we're still pretty far short, and the impacts of climate change in the same way the IPCC 1.5 report said, you know what, 1.5 is going to be pretty bad, too, and that's even worse than we thought, the more we learn about climate the more reason there is to be concerned, not less concerned. It seems very plausible to me that we will kind of come to a growing consensus that we have to think about whether this technology can, as you said, buy us time. This is not something you do permanently. You need to get to net zero to stop global warming. But if you want to reduce the impacts of warming on the rate of Arctic sea ice melt and all the rest, can you buy time, extend the runway, by doing this for some number of decades. And I think—I don't have a strong view on the right answer to that. But I think it's something we, certainly, need to be thinking about researching and understanding what the consequences would be because we're going to have to figure out how to take more abrupt actions to close that gap between ambition and reality unless the reality starts to change much more quickly than is the case right now. FASKIANOS: Thank you. I saw a raised hand from Maya but she lowered it. So if you want to raise your hand again, please do so. And in the meantime, I'm going to take a written question from Jennifer Sklarew, who's an assistant professor of energy and sustainability at George Mason University. Was CCS/CCUS, which carbon capture and storage/carbon capture utilization and storage, to write out those acronyms, promoted as a climate change solution in Glasgow and was there a pushback against this technology option as both a climate change solution and a support mechanism for continued fossil fuel use? BORDOFF: There was some pushback but, I think, actually, more in the other direction. So I think there has been a growing recognition from many in the climate world that carbon capture technology, carbon removal technology, need to be part of the solution. I think there's almost no climate model at this point that shows how you would get to 1.5 degrees or net zero—1.5 degrees without huge amounts of negative emissions—carbon removal. Some of that can be nature based, but a lot of it will be—some of it will be technology based as well and focusing on what we care about, which is the emissions, is the most important thing. So and this is not, I don't think, the primary thing you're going to do. You want to do the things that are easiest and cheapest and present the fewest risks. So putting a lot of renewables into the grid, getting electrification into the vehicle fleet—there's a lot of things that you would do before that. But if you think about some of the sectors in the economy we talked about before that are hard to decarbonize like steel and cement, it may well be the case that carbon capture is part of the technology there. There was a big announcement yesterday from the NET Power Allam Cycle gas plant in Texas that they had finally come online with delivering net-zero power to the grid. It was sort of a milestone in that technology. So we need to advance this technology and figure out how we're going to—how we're going to get where we need to be. We need to hold that kind of technology accountable to make sure that it's actually meeting the standards we're talking about so that it actually is very low, if not zero, carbon. But if you look at, you know, most of the scenarios I'm aware of, whether it's—Princeton did the study “Net-Zero America,” how we get to net zero by 2050 in the U.S. The International Energy Agency, as I said, did it for net zero globally. There is a meaningful role for carbon capture, to some extent, in the power sector in these heavy industry sectors like steel and cement, and then making, say, hydrogen some of that will be blue hydrogen. Most of it, eventually, will be green, but there may be some role for blue hydrogen, which is—which is gas with carbon capture. So I think, if anything, there's been a growing understanding that we need all tools on deck right away and, again, I fear even with all the tools we may still fall short. FASKIANOS: Great. There's a written question from Laila Bichara, who's at SUNY Farmingdale, international business. There was a New York Times article, “Business Schools Respond to a Flood of Interest in ESG,” talking about the issue of the scarcity of skills in recent graduates to help with social impact, sustainable investments, climate finance, and social entrepreneurship. And she wanted to know if there are resources that you could point the group to in terms of foundation courses or certification that would provide all students with a basic foundation. BORDOFF: Yeah. That's a really good question and it's a growing area of focus and I think universities should be doing more in. The Tamer Center of Columbia Business School does a lot of work in ESG. We hosted a really interesting roundtable at the Center on Global Energy Policy yesterday on ESG and actually been doing a lot of work thinking about that in the context of state-owned enterprises and national oil companies, which we don't talk about enough. But they're a really, really big part of the problem we're talking about. We tend to focus more on these very well-known private sector companies or financial institutions in places like New York. So there—Bloomberg Philanthropies has done a huge amount in this space. I think there's some really good educational programs with some universities and business schools that have done a lot in the ESG space. But I think it's a need, to be frank. I mean, the fact that you're asking the question and I'm pointing to a few examples, but not a huge number, and it is something that universities need to educate themselves about but then is an opportunity for us to educate others. Maybe a revenue one, too, with executive education or something. But there's a lot of companies and financial institutions that want to understand this better. I worry that while there's a huge growing focus on climate, which is a good thing, in the financial community, the phrase ESG kind of means so many different things right now. It's this alphabet soup of regulations and standards and disclosure requirements, and some may make a difference and some may not and it's hard to figure out which ones matter, and for people who want to do the responsible thing what does that really mean. That's an area where research is needed. I mean, that's a role for what we do every day to think about if the SEC is going to regulate what makes a difference and what doesn't, if you're going to create green bonds. If you're going to call everything green in the finance community, what's real and what's not? What moves the needle? What doesn't? What are the returns for greener portfolios? How is that affecting the cost of capital for clean energy versus dirty energy? You know, on and on. I think those are important research questions for us to take on and then it's our job to help educate others as well. FASKIANOS: Great. So the next question I'm going to take from—oh, OK. Good. Maya Copeland (sp) has written her question. She's a political science major at Delaware State University. Do you believe developed nations like the U.S. have done a lot in reference to climate change or mostly talk? If you believe nations like the U.S. have dropped the ball in this aspect, what do you think it would take to get those powerhouses serious about environmental change? BORDOFF: I think advanced economies have done—many have done a lot. I mean, the European Union has taken climate seriously and has reduced emissions and has pretty strong measures in place with a carbon market, for example, with a pretty high carbon price right now. The politics of this issue are not quite as favorable in the U.S., but the U.S. has seen emissions decline more than most over the last decade and a half, in part because of policy measures that have, you know, advanced renewable energy and brought the cost of that down as well as cheaper natural gas displacing coal for a while. But at a broader level, you know, have we done enough? The answer is no one's done enough—(laughs)—which is why emissions are still going up every single year. So that—so the answer is no, we haven't done enough. Almost no country has done enough at home to be on a trajectory for net zero 2050. You saw the announcements from countries like India saying, we'll get to net zero by 2070, and, you know, people said, oh, well, that's terrible. They're not saying 2050. And implicit in that is sort of saying, well, if you want to get global to net zero by 2050 we're not all going to move at the same speed, right. Some countries have advanced with the benefit of hydrocarbons since the Industrial Age and some haven't. So, presumably, the pathways are going to look different, right. And, you know, that's not always how countries in the advanced—in the developing—in the developed world talk about it. The commitment from the Biden administration is net zero by 2050. So I would say there's been—there are some models to point to of countries that have taken this issue seriously but we're not doing enough and partly because the political will is not there and partly—I come back to what I said before—this problem is harder than people realize. So you say which countries are doing enough, like, point to some models, right, and somebody might point to Norway, which, you know, the share of new vehicles sold that are electric in Norway went from zero to, I think, it's 70 percent now. I mean, that's amazing. Seventy percent of new car sales are electric. And if you go back to the start of that trajectory, about a decade or decade and a half, oil demand is unchanged in Norway. So we can talk about why that is and it's because a lot—as I said earlier, a lot of oil is used for things other than cars, and it's increased for trucks and planes and petrochemicals. It takes time for the vehicle fleet to turn over. So when you start selling a bunch of electric cars, you know, average car is on the road for fifteen years so it takes a while before that—the vehicle stock turns over. So I saw that kind of mapped out on a chart recently, just two lines—one is electric vehicle sales going straight up and then the other is oil demand in a flat line. It's a reminder of how unforgiving the math of decarbonization is. The math of climate is really unforgiving, like, you know, the kind of harmful impacts we're going to see with even 1.5 degrees warming. But the math of energy and decarbonization is really unforgiving, too. It's—and we just need to be honest with ourselves about what it takes to get where we need to go. Because I think it's good to have optimism and ambition, but I worry there should be optimism but not happy talk. We should recognize that there's a lot of work to do and let's get to work doing it. FASKIANOS: Great. So there are several questions in the chat about China. I'm going to start off with Andrew Campbell, who's a student at George Mason University. Is LNG—liquefied natural gas—a bridge toward renewable energy still being considered? If not, how are India and China's expected growth and increase in coal use going to be addressed? And then there are a couple of other comments or questions about China. You know, what's your take on China as the biggest emitter and return somewhat to coal? Can we actually even make stated and adequate new goals? And, you know, given the relationship between U.S. and China, which is contentious, you know, what is the cooperation going to be between U.S. and China on climate? So there's a lot packed in there, but I know you can address it all. (Laughs.) BORDOFF: Yeah. I think the China question is really hard, as I said earlier, this kind of, like, competition and cooperation and we're going to try to do both, and I think there was a hope early on—Secretary Kerry said it—that climate could be segmented from the broader challenges in the U.S.-China relationship, and I think that has proven harder to do than people had hoped, in part, because, you know, you need both parties to want to do that. I think China has signaled it's not necessarily willing to segment cooperation on climate from lots of other issues. And then these things bleed together where, you know, there's measures being taken in Washington to restrict imports of solar panels from China, that there were concerns that were made with—in ways that have human rights abuses associated with them with forced labor or maybe have unfair trade practices in terms of subsidies. China is—you know, the leadership in China takes climate seriously. This is a country that recognizes, I think, climate change is real and that needs to be addressed. They have a set of national interests that matter a lot, obviously, to them in terms of economic growth, and the pathway to get there is challenging. So it's a country that's growing clean energy incredibly quickly, as we're seeing right now, in part because there's a(n) energy crunch throughout Europe and Asia. They are ramping up the use of coal quite a bit again, but also taking some pretty strong measures to advance clean energy and, over time, hopefully, move in a lower carbon direction for reasons both about concerns over climate but also local air pollution, which is much, much worse in many parts of China than it is here and that's a huge source of concern for the public there. So when it comes to things like coal they need to figure out how to address those air pollution problems. And then for reasons of economic competition, like I mentioned a minute ago. I mean, China dominates the global market for refining and processing of critical minerals for solar panels, and there are economic and national competitiveness and strategic reasons to do that. So all of those things motivate them to move in the direction of clean energy, but they need to be moving faster to phase down hydrocarbon energy for sure. And then you ask a really hard question about—not hard, but one of the most contentious questions is about the role of natural gas in the transition, and we can have a whole separate session about that. I think there is a view of many in the climate community and many in developing countries—in developed countries that there's not space left in the carbon budget for natural gas, and you saw the Biden administration recently declare through the Treasury Department that, except in very rare cases of the poorest of the poor like Sierra Leone or something, they would not finance natural gas projects through the multilateral development banks. The vice president of Nigeria, I think, responded—speaking of CFR—in Foreign Affairs by writing that this was not fair and you need to think about a viable pathway for a country like Nigeria to develop and it just—it doesn't work to get there that fast. There has to be a bridge. The role of gas looks very different in different parts of the world. It looks different in the U.S. than it does in an emerging or a developing economy. It looks different in the power sector, where there are a lot more alternatives like renewables than it does in heavy industry or how we heat our homes. It looks different for, say, in the Global South, where you're talking about people who are still using coal and charcoal and dung for cooking to think about solutions like liquefied petroleum gas. So all of those things are true, but we need to think about gas also with the carbon budget in mind. I mean, the math is just the math. (Laughs.) If you're going to build any gas infrastructure and not have it blow through the carbon budget, it's going to have to be retired before the end of its normal economic life and you need to think about how that might look in different parts of the world. So you need to be fair to people, to allow them to grow, but also recognize that the math of carbon, you know, is what it is. FASKIANOS: Great. I just want to credit those last—the China questions came from Lada Kochtcheeva at North Carolina State University and Joan Kaufman, who's director of Schwarzman Scholars based in China. We are really at the end of our time—we started a couple minutes late—and I just wanted to go back to—there are students on the call who are following with a professor on the webinar who wanted you just to comment on blue hydrogen, whether or not it is contributing or helping to reduce greenhouse gases. BORDOFF: I think the answer is it can. You just need to make sure that it actually does. So the question of—and by blue hydrogen we mean, you know, using gas with carbon capture to create hydrogen. It needs to have very low methane leakage rates. It needs to have very high capture rates, and we know that is technically possible. It doesn't mean it will be done that way. So if people are going to pursue blue hydrogen as part of the solution in the—particularly in the near term, you need to make sure that it's meeting those standards. I think in the long run my guess and, I think, most guesses would be that green hydrogen is going to make more sense. It's going to be cheaper. The cost is going to come down. And so if we have a significant part of the energy sector that is hydrogen and ammonia in, say, 2050, more of that's going to be green than blue. But there can be a role for blue if you make sure it's done the right way. You just have to actually make sure it's done the right way. FASKIANOS: Great. And, Jason, we are out of time, but I wanted to give you one last, you know, one-minute or thirty seconds, whatever you want, just to say some parting words on your work at the center or, you know, to leave the group with what they can do, again. So— BORDOFF: Well, I would just say thanks for the chance to be with you all and for the work that you're doing every day. You know, I think Glasgow was a moment when the world came together to elevate ambition and roll up our sleeves and say this is—this is the decisive decade. Like, we'll know ten years from now—(laughs)—if we got anywhere close to making it or not. And so it's time for everyone to kind of roll up their sleeves and say, what can we do? We're doing that, I think, at Columbia with the creation of this new climate school. We do that every day at the Center on Global Energy Policy. And so just in all of your institutions, you know, what does that mean for you? What does it mean for the institution? What does that mean for your own research and time and how you allocate it? How do we step up and say, what can we do in the biggest and boldest way we can? Because we need—we're creating a climate school because I think the view is—you know, a hundred years ago there were no schools of public health and now it's how would you deal with a pandemic without a school of public health? So I think our view is decades from now we'll look back and wonder how we ever thought it was possible to handle a problem as complex and urgent as climate change without universities devoting their greatest kind of resource to them. And the measure of success for universities has to be research and new knowledge creation. It has to be education. It has to be serving our own communities. For us, it's, you know, the community here in New York, Harlem. But also are we focusing the extraordinary resources and capacity and expertise of these great institutions to solve humanity's greatest problems? That has to be a motivating force, too, for much of—maybe not all of but a lot of what universities do. So I'd just ask all of us to go back and think about how we can do that in our own work every day. and we have to do it through partnerships. I think universities don't work together as well as they need to. But this is only going to work if we work together. FASKIANOS: Great way to end. Thank you very much, Jason Bordoff. We really appreciate it. We'll have to look for your article in Foreign Affairs magazine, which is published by CFR. So, we are excited that you continue to contribute to the magazine. You can follow Jason Bordoff on Twitter at @JasonBordoff. Very easy to remember. Our final academic webinar of the semester will be on Wednesday, December 1, at 1:00 p.m. (ET). Michelle Gavin, who is CFR's Ralph Bunche senior fellow for Africa policy studies, will talk about African politics and security issues. So in the meantime, follow us at @CFR_Academic. Come to CFR.org, ForeignAffairs.com, and ThinkGlobalHealth.org for research and analysis on global issues, and we look forward to continuing the conversation with you. Take care. BORDOFF: Thank you. (END)

Brian Mateo, associate dean of civic engagement and director of strategic partnerships in Bard College's Globalization and International Affairs Program and security fellow at the Truman National Security Project, discusses how higher education administrators can encourage student civic engagement and participation in global issues.   FASKIANOS: Welcome to CFR's Higher Education Webinar. I'm Irina Faskianos, vice president of the National Program and Outreach at CFR. Today's discussion is on the record and the video and transcript will be available on our website, CFR.org/Academic if you would like to reference after today's discussion. As always, CFR takes no institutional positions on matters of policy. So with that, I'm delighted to have the pleasure of introducing Brian Mateo to talk about how higher education administrators can encourage student civic engagement and participation in global issues. We've shared his bio with you, so I'll just give you a few highlights. Mr. Mateo serves as associate dean of civic engagement at Bard College, where he works with faculty and students across the Open Society University Network on experiential learning and civic engagement opportunities. Previously he worked with public diplomacy programs sponsored by the U.S. State Department Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs on U.S. foreign policy and engagement. He's also a security fellow at the Truman National Security Project, a term member at the Council on Foreign Relations, and a trained climate reality leader under former Vice President Al Gore. So, Brian, thank you very much for being with us. If we could just dive right in to talk about what is the role of higher education in civic engagement? How do you define it, and how do you encourage administrators and students to get more involved? MATEO: Thank you very much for having me here today at the Council on Foreign Relations, Irina. I'm very excited for this opportunity. So, yes, what is the role of higher education institutions when it comes to civic engagement? So the American Psychological Association defines civic engagement as individuals and collective actions designed to identify and address issues of public concern. At the core of Bard's mission is to be a private college in the public interest. And how we do that is by providing access and education, especially for students that are underrepresented or may not have access to a liberal arts education. This is evidenced by our Bard Early Colleges, which are high school—which are for high school aged students that can take up to a year or two years of free college credit to be able to accelerate their college career. It's also evidenced by our Bard Prison Initiative, which is the largest prison education program for incarcerated individuals in the nation. So when we think about how do we do this, I see—I can't help but think about Astin's model of student development, which says that for students that are hyper-involved in their institutions, they get to be more engaged and involved, and the quality of their involvement goes up. And if we provide high level of programs and resources, students are more likely to be engaged. And then Astin also encourages us to make sure that we are providing resources and programmatic efforts that are meeting the needs of the students today. And I will begin to talk about how we do this from the student level, the faculty/staff level, institutionally, and also talk about how we work with communities. And before I begin, Bard also is a founding member of the Open Society University Network, which is comprised of over forty academic and research institutions. So not only are we also collaborating with our local communities, we also have a transnational network that we're working with. So how do you engage students? We do this by making sure that we're merging the curricular and co-curricular learning. This is also evidenced by our Certificate of Civic Engagement Program, which is a structured path for undergraduate students that are interested in deepening their knowledge and understanding of civic engagement and community engagement. And students are able to participate in this program and also earn a certificate that will also be added to their transcript. We also provide students with grants and opportunities to pursue internships that are unpaid, which are—which are called Community Act Awards. So students that find unpaid internships related to civic engagement and also social justice issues can apply for a grant to be able to supplement that, and making it more equitable for our students. We also provide what are called microgrants, which are seed funding for students that want to be able to do community-based projects. For faculty and staff, we encourage them to teach courses on experiential learning. And these courses enable students to not only work with the community but bring the community also into our classroom. And looking at David Kolb's experiential learning cycle, where students need—where students start with concrete experience, work on reflection, and also thinking about the experience while then planning and learning what they've—and executing what they've learned, is very important when it comes to civic engagement work because students are—students are introduced to some of these issues in the classroom, and then they have the ability to work through those issues with a professor and community members as well. And some example of these courses are—I teach a course on civic engagement myself, where the course is historical, theoretical, and experiential. And we look at social movements in America that help effect change. And we look at the civil rights movement, women rights, LGBT rights, climate activism and climate action, as well as the role of the media and what is misinformation and disinformation. And in this course, students also have to conduct what's called the Community Needs Assessment. And the Community Needs Assessment, students come with a research question and then work to interview community members to see what are the issues that are happening there. For faculty that also want to learn more about how to create courses on experiential learning, we also offer an experiential leaning institute where faculty from the OSUN network can participate. And then students—examples of work that faculty have done with students have been implementing a digital platform to assist with teaching or tutoring practices, historical tours and workshops, and also storytelling and interviews of community partners as well. Faculty that teach experiential learning, students say that about 89 percent of them say that engagement this way has helped their awareness to social justice and community issues. And in 2020 we had over eight hundred students that participated in about eighty courses. And those courses worked with ninety-five community agencies or organizations. We also help faculty and graduate students on conducting engaged research and scholarship practice. So some of examples of these are looking at LGBT issues in South Africa, the intersection of how music supports education with people—with people with disabilities, and also peacebuilding and storytelling as well. And we also help staff and faculty create civic action plans, which help colleges around the OSUN network institutionalize civic engagement and strategically think of how these four pillars can work together. While working with community partners, we're also very intentional in making sure that we have equitable practices. We developed what's called the Principles of Equity, where faculty/staff and community members can read on our website on how we work with the community, and making sure that it's reciprocal, making sure that it's—that we're deepening and creating sustainable partnerships while also engaging community with resources and developing shared resources as well that can benefit both the community and students and the institution. When it comes to institutional engagement, I gave examples of the Bard Early Colleges and Bard Prison Initiative. Bard has also been able to work with student-led—with other student-led initiatives that have become part of the institution. Examples of these as well are Brothers At, which is a mentoring and college-readiness program nationwide for young men of color, as well as Sister to Sister, that does similar work but with young women of color. And recently, Bard also has worked with trying to evacuate nearly two hundred Afghan students and helping them get an education throughout our network as well. So those are some examples of institutional engagement at Bard—at Bard as well. And I constantly think to myself: What is it that we want our students to gain when they participate in our—in our program, or engage with our network? And looking back at Astin's theory of student involvement, we see that Astin talks about inputs, which are what students come with, the environment, what is it that we're providing for our students, and the outputs. As a result of a student attending our universities, what is it that we want them to get out of this, aside from just, you know, the academic knowledge. But how do we want them to be involved? And in my opinion, I feel like there's a few outputs that we would want, as higher education administrators. And I'll state them and then conclude my presentation. So I strongly believe that, you know, we want them to be critical thinkers. We want them to understand and practice equity, be strategic problem solvers, understand the power of reflection and active listening, community builders, practice empathy, be lifelong learners, and also ultimately be engaged individuals. Thank you. FASKIANOS: Brian, thank you very much. Let's go to all of you now. (Gives queuing instructions.)  So I'm going to go first go to Manuel Montoya. Please unmute yourself and tell us your institution. Q: Yeah. Hello. My name's Manuel Montoya and I am from the University of New Mexico. Thank you, Irina, for setting this up. I think this is an important discussion. And thank you, Mr. Mateo, for your presentation. I'm pleased to hear all the work that you're doing. That's inspiring. I will, I guess, do two parts. I will share some of the work that I've done and then share a question that I think is germane to this particular issue. We recently set up a global experiential learning curriculum at the university that is designed to get students to merge theory with practice and some sort of practical impact in terms of the global economy and other things. And we have a—we have a group of students that work with the largest folk art market in the world, which is based in Santa Fe. And we're trying to get them to work with indigenous communities throughout the world to try to have a larger platform for market entry. And we're—we've been in talks for the past four years to try to get the Olympic games to have some sort of mini pop-up folk art market that represents these types of market activities. And inside of that there is a lot of issues about human rights, but also about the value of crafting economy. There's all sorts of things that students are trying to engage with that require a liberal arts education. My question, or my frustration, often happens at places that aren't like Bard College, places that don't necessarily see community-engaged learning as having some sort of incentive structure for faculty. I'm one of many faculty members that does that, likely because I care about the issues and also because I think that it does make research and other forms of academic and intellectual contributions valuable. So my question to Mr. Mateo, or just generally to whoever's participating, is how are we creating an incentive structure for faculty and for other people who are engaged within the university system to make this transition to do the kind of work that Mr. Mateo is talking about? And what is that—what is that going to take in places that are embedded a little bit more traditionally in the way that higher education either incentivizes or evaluates faculty and stuff in more traditional ways? MATEO: Yes. Thank you so much for your question. And it's a question that we're all grappling with, right, as well. Some of us—some of us are doing the work deeper and, you know, sometimes taking risks, and others are in the inception piece. So I'll elaborate by saying this: Students more and more are asking how do I apply what I'm learning in the classroom to a job? How do I make sure that, as a result of me attending this institution, I'm also going to be competitive or be able to contribute to society, right? So I think that—I think that more and more institutions and faculty are thinking about this, because you—you know, students are less inclined to go be taught something and not be able to apply it. At the same time, students also want to see themselves, their history, and also what's going on in the community into the curriculum too. So this is also driving the conversation. It is not easy to teach courses on experiential learning. It takes a lot of time. It also takes resources. And you have to embed reflection and community engagement into the syllabus. And sometimes when you're teaching two days a week for an hour or an hour and a half—you know, fifteen-week curriculum for the semester, that can be difficult to do. So what we've done is that we've developed an experiential learning institute to help faculty understand how to bring this thing into it, how to work with community, how to start that timeline. Because it's very different to develop a syllabus than to bring in community, because you sometimes have to start setting that up earlier. And also, we provide grants to support them to be able to do either—to buy resources for transportation, if they need to hire a student intern to help them with this work as well. So those are some of the ways that we have tried to do this. I also want to talk about data and assessment, because I can't stress enough how much—how important that is. Because when you're measuring students' learning and you see that their learning has grown exponentially from an experiential based course, you cannot argue with that, right? So we try to do our best to make sure that we are—that we're also assessing learning and making sure that when—that when we are asking for funding or that when we are trying to create new programs and initiatives, that we are doing this not only evidence-based in theory and practice, but also on the data that proves that this is something that is of a benefit to the community, to our students, and our institution. Q: Thank you, Mr. Mateo. I guess I have one follow-up question, if it's permissible, Irina. FASKIANOS: Sure. Go ahead, Manuel. Q: Yeah, yeah. So I think you're entirely right. I think that assessment at the student level and the student engagement level, being able to see how this connects to the vocational and even their social destinies is a really, really important factor. I've noted that many institutions across the country are having a great difficulty trying to incorporate or embed community engagement as how they evaluate their faculty. And I'm a tenured faculty at the university, and it's a research one institution. It's not a liberal arts institution. But, you know, publish or perish becomes still one of the ways in which I'm evaluated. So I have to—I have to attend to this kind of master of publishing in peer-reviewed journals, while at the same time my heart and really the most effective work that I do is during community engagement work. So I guess my question is also fundamentally about how we're—how we're transforming institutions to be able to adapt and really incorporate the type of community engagement work that you're talking about, Mr. Mateo, while at the same time valuing and validating its value with the assessment of faculty every year. Because I would say that you'd get a ton of faculty who'd be really good at doing this kind of work, but they're disincentivized to do it because they're only evaluated by their peer-reviewed journal work. So how does one connect the two? What is the frontier for that in higher education that you guys have seen? And I'd really, really like to know, because I think that's going to be a really important part of the frontier of what higher education is dealing with. MATEO: Well, yes, thank you. And, you know, as a field of higher education we're here not only teach, but provide knowledge, and hopefully that that knowledge helps better communities or help create an awareness, right? So that's something that needs to—that needs to be a driving source and conversation because, you know, what we try to do is to incentivize faculty whenever they aren't conducting research, and also students as well, when they want to do community-based work, to see who they can partner with, how they can go about and do that. And making sure that we're amplifying voices and showing the level of work that people are doing so, like, that their work can be recognized and that it also shows that there's a value to this as well. So that's what I would say there. It's still something that I think institutions grapple with, but more and more I believe that as institutions begin to see the value of being civically engaged, because at the end of the day, you know, we all also exist in the community. Our colleges and our campuses are within our community, within a community, within a domestic national and international realm. And, you know, what is it that we want to do? We want to contribute. And that's one of the reasons why we also provide engaged research grants for faculty too. So I hope that that answers your question, Manuel, and I'm happy to elaborate more. Q: I'll yield to other questions. But thank you very much. I appreciate it. FASKIANOS: I'm going to go next to Laila Bichara, who has a raised hand. And if you could unmute and identify your institution. Q: Hi. Well, I work for SUNY Farmingdale. And generally speaking, I teach with experiential learning. I use all kinds of newspapers and case studies and current affairs to make sure that the theory we cover in global business, you know, management and all other courses are, you know, applied and showing the results and what's going on. That said, I am currently serving on an adjunct staff to work on couple of issues. One is social mobility and the second is community engagement, and I see a lot of interrelation between this and experiential learning. And I just wanted to see if there is any work done or papers done in the social mobility, because our students are typically first-generation college students. They don't have role models at home and they rely heavily on us to guide them, and they're usually kids or, you know, students in their twenties that have two or three jobs to pay for their education. So any ideas, any links, any guidance for me to start to make advancement in that project and help my students. MATEO: Great. Thank you. So what I hear you say is that looking at the linkages between social mobility, community engagement, and which one was the third one? Q: Experiential learning as well. MATEO: Experiential learning. Yes. Q: Yeah. It's all a kind of, like, spiral to me. You know, that's how I see it. MATEO: Yes. So when allowing students to do experiential learning into the classroom and bringing into the classroom, you're also helping them get applied skills, and yes, so there is at times a level of—a disadvantage when a student is working three jobs while also studying and then you're telling them like, oh, go volunteer, or go do this, right. By embedding experiential learning into the curriculum, you're still teaching students with some of these applicable skills that they can use as a part of a resume and also can speak to in an interview and saying, like, this is how I was able to do this as evidenced by that, right. And that, in turn, helps students to be able to find other opportunities as well. In terms of links, so we do have resources at our Center for Civic Engagement website, which is cce.bard.edu, and there's a resource link there, and then we also have resources as well on our OSUN website, osun.bard.edu. So those are—those are places that you that you can find some of these resources. FASKIANOS: Great. And we'll send out after this a link to this webinar as well as with those URLs so that people—websites so people can go back and dig deeper. So I'm going to go next to David Kim's written question. He's an assistant professor at UCLA. Thank you for this discussion. I'd like to hear more about insights into community engagement on an international or global level. What are some best practices when faculty, communities, and students work across borders—international borders? How are they different from community engagement at a local or national level? MATEO: Thank you. So we have to be aware of, you know, what we can provide and also what is it—what are some of the needs or how it can be reciprocal. So a lot of listening and intentionality has to be brought into it because sometimes, you know, we can come in with our own mindset of, oh, this is how we do it and we do it well, and then you meet other counterparts and then they're, like, well, but this is also another way of doing it. So there has to be a collaborative and reciprocal way or a mutual, respectful, reciprocal way of engaging, and, typically, you know, how we've done that is that we've partnered with other universities. We've also seen who are the community partners that are there in the international realm and how we can work around that, too. So I would say being intentional, making sure that you have capacity for what you are doing so, like, that you can deliver and also having a mutual reciprocal approach as well as active listening, and be willing to learn also from our international partners, too. FASKIANOS: I think, Brian, you mentioned that you were looking at LGBTQ+ issues in South Africa. Do you have any partnerships? Can you sort of give us examples of how you're doing that? MATEO: Yes. That's one of the research grants that we have provided to someone to be able to do that research. So the individual there is partnered with organizations and are conducting that research, and once that research is done we will make sure to publish it. FASKIANOS: Great. OK. I'm going to go next to Isaac Castellano from Boise State University. Our career center just landed a grant to pilot a program to pay students for their internship experiences. For us, a lot of students—our students have to work and this is another way beyond embedding experiential learning into their coursework. So I think he's sharing more than asking a question, but maybe you have a reaction to that. MATEO: Yes, and thank you so much, Isaac. So yeah. So we piloted this a couple of years ago and it's been very successful, and the way that it—the way that it works is it's for summer internships and students can request up to $3,000 for any unpaid internship. And we have them submit an application as well as a supervisor form and an agreement of what the students will be doing for that organization. And then, in return, the students will write one to two reflection papers on their experience, and then when they come back to campus the next semester they get to present about their experience and what they've done for that internship. So that's how we—that's how we run our community action awards, and it's been super successful. It has been able to provide access to students that wouldn't otherwise be able to do an unpaid internship, and the students submit a budget of up to $2,000 and then we see how we can—how we can help fund that. So I highly encourage you to definitely do that pilot, and if you do want any other insight or how to be able to do that, I'm happy to share my email as well with Irina when she sends out the resources. FASKIANOS: Great. And Isaac has a follow-up. Where does the money come from, that paid summer program that you're talking about? MATEO: It could—grants. We also try to fund—try to find funding and resources as well. So it comes through various sources, and so that's how we try to support our students. FASKIANOS: Great. Thank you. OK. So the next question is another written question. And people can ask their questions, too, but this is from Chip Pitts at Stanford University. Have you encountered obstacles in this environment characterized by major demographic changes and increasing polarization, e.g., mandates against critical race theory, based on the perceived political nature, even leftist nature of, quote/unquote, “social justice” and “human rights” or “environmental community engagement efforts”? And if so, or for those in places where there are more conservative values, what have you seen or would you suggest to shore up and spur more courage and leadership among the reluctant or shy faculty and administrators and overcome and avoid such blockages? MATEO: Mmm hmm. Thank you. So you have to meet communities where they're at, right, and making sure that they also understand that we're here to work with them, too, and this is why active listening and making sure that there is a reciprocal approach to this is important. And it's not—sometimes it can be fairly easy to be able to say, hey, we want to collaborate with you, and other times it can be extremely difficult and tenuous. But continuing to demonstrate and show the level of learning or how that community is continuously being engaged is something that's very important because, in my opinion, I think that sometimes, you know, we have a hard time of showing all the great work that we're doing, and in order for us to be able to partner and work more with community members we also have to show the research and demonstrate and be able to present this so people understand what we are trying to do. So there are times that it is challenging, and there are some things that will work with some communities and some things that will not. So where then are you able to then find what can work and how you can make it happen, and then from there be able to build up from there—from the ground up. So yeah, so there are some communities where you can do, like, one to ten things and then other communities that you can do one to three things and, hopefully, that you can start to do four or five, but then how do you still provide that access and education and equity as well. FASKIANOS: Brian, what would you say are the—in your opinion, the global issues students are most interested in? And, you know, if a college can only take on or faculty can only take on one issue that they're trying to push, you know, what would be the one, or to drive a—foster more civic engagement? What do you think would be a viable and a good starting—steppingstone to sort of expand this into their community and both on campus and off? MATEO: Wow. That's a great question, Irina. I would say that students are very interested in gender equity, LGBT. They're also very interested in making sure that underrepresented populations are included in conversations, as well as awareness in disability. An all-encompassing issue that students are also passionate about because most of them experience this globally every day is climate change, and making sure that, you know, how we can engage students through there. So that—so out of everything that I mentioned, this also encompasses these issues as a major one, and Bard, through the Open Society University Network, is actually having a global teach-in, which is—you can find this in the Solve Climate by '30 and I can send the link to Irina as well—where all colleges and universities can come in and do a global teach-in and as well get resources, and we're providing opportunities for students around the world to also be able to receive opportunity to get engaged, too. So we're doing this in March, and we're trying to get a robust number of institutions to participate in this because climate doesn't only affect, you know, our living environment, but it also affects students' educational pursuits. Harvard conducted a study called Heat and Learning that showed that for every degree Fahrenheit that goes up student learning goes down by 1 percent. It's also shown disparities that—you know, climate change also has, you know, a disproportionate effect on young people of color because of regions where people live in cold and hot environments, as well as disparities when it comes to gender. Women are more likely to be taken out of the classroom when there are climate change disasters to be caretakers, and we're also seeing a rise in child marriages because of that, too. You know, it also—you also talk about sanitation when it comes to climate change and educational environments. You know, if you start to—if your building starts to get moldy and also if students start to get sick because of the infrastructure or it gets too hot, you're going to see an increased rate of students showing up—not showing up and being absent or dropout rates as well. So climate change exacerbates or, as it's called, a threat multiplier, and this is something that as higher education administrators we have to also make sure that we are—that we're constantly thinking and showing how can we, based on students' interests, can help to solve climate as well. FASKIANOS: Great. So if others have questions—Manuel, I don't know if you had a follow-on. You said you would cede the floor but you can come back on. You can raise your hand or write—type your question in the Q&A box, or I could ask more. Just waiting to see if Manuel wanted to come back in. OK. There is a—oh, Manuel said his question was answered. OK. Great. So—sorry, I'm just looking—toggling a lot of things. All right. So my next question would be—you did talk about this earlier—you know, there has been a lot written about what is a college education worth, and I think this connection of the critical thinking and the internships and the experiential learning. But could you talk a little bit more about students' educational performance and career path and how they can leverage these—you know, what they're doing, civic engagement, into their future career plans? MATEO: Yes. Thank you. FASKIANOS: And then I have another random question. Mmm hmm. MATEO: Yes. So helping students to understand that some of the work that they do outside of a classroom could also translate both inside as well because when I have—when I see students when they're thinking about their career path, they're like, oh, but I've never done an internship before, or, oh, but I've never actually had a job here or there. But then when you start to look at the classes that they're taking and the application piece in those courses, you can sort of say, yes, but you also in this course did storytelling of a community and also created a podcast. So this is also an application piece where you can add to your resume, too. So helping students to think and link experiential learning to application, and demonstrating that is definitely an added plus, and this is why a lot of these courses are also very popular and very highly rated for students because they're starting—they start to see that they're also gaining transferable skills while engaging in these courses, too, that they can then add to their resume and be able to speak to at an interview as well. Like, I'll give you the example of the community needs assessment that the students that I work with conduct. You know, they can talk about research. They can talk about, you know, being able to work with communities. They also have to interview a leader in that community, whether that be a politician or a school leader or anyone. You know, so there are skills that they can then say here are some tangible outcomes as a result of this assignment, and that's why experiential learning can also help when it comes to merging career paths for students. FASKIANOS: Great. So a few more questions in the chat. Jim Zaffiro, who is at Central College, has asked what recommendations would you have for incorporating civic engagement into a common first-year experience course? MATEO: Mmm hmm. Yes. So looking back at Astin's model of input-environment-outputs, right, so we need to figure out, like, you know, how can we create a baseline for students to best understand what it means to be civically engaged and the environments piece of it. So what I would say, making sure that they understand the community they're a part of, what are some of the issues and needs, providing reflection for them to talk about how they have been engaged, how do they see themselves as engaged citizens and providing opportunities for them to get exposure to working with community members and working outside of the community as well. So we do this starting from our orientational language and thinking, where we start to not only provide articles and readings on this but we're also getting students to volunteer and get—and having students to think about how they want—how they want to be involved, and showing them a lot of the student-led initiatives that we offer that they can either get involved or start on their own. And then throughout the first year they also have what's called the Citizen Science Program, which is a January term, where students start to see how science and citizenship come together and work together. And during that time, we also have our MLK Day of Engagement, which is a day for students to also go out and volunteer into the community and reflect on their volunteer work as well. So that's kind of how we've embedded a lot of engagement for our first-years to making sure that we're providing them with engagement, adding courses for them to think about what does it mean to be engaged in either a civic engagement course or experiential learning courses and opportunities throughout the year for them to be involved, which, ultimately, we were then promoting for them how they can—how they can apply for these community action awards and also for the summer, but also what are ways for them to get engaged through the broader OSUN network. FASKIANOS: Great. How has the pandemic exacerbated preexisting community needs? How have you at Bard deepened students' civic engagement in order to help alleviate the pandemic-related effects that we are seeing in our communities? MATEO: Yes, and as we all know, when it comes to community-based work in civic engagement, you know, we all had to, you know, come indoors, and we had this notion that we had to be there to be able to engage with the community. So we developed—and this is also part of our civic engagement website—a tool kit on how to do engagement virtually, how to be able to do blended learning as well, and making sure that we still had a commitment to our community leaders. And our community partners also were able to come into our classes via Zoom and engage with students as well, and we helped students find virtual engagement, whether it be tutoring, whether it be, you know, helping to analyze something and sending it back. So these were some of the ways. But it did definitely create a halt, though we quickly found ways to not only build and provide resources but also pivot and making sure that we provide opportunities for students that were online and making sure that we showed a commitment to our partners as well. FASKIANOS: So John Dietrich at Bryant University asks for examples, more examples in practice of bringing experiential learning into the classroom, so if you could put some— MATEO: Yes. Yeah, so we have a course that's called All Politics is Local and what we do in that—and what the faculty members do in that course is that they're able to pair students with local internships in different government organizations, so not only are students learning about local government in the class but they're actually interning at the same time in different local governments. Another example of a professor that teaches studio arts is a class called Portraits and Community where they get to talk to community members and identify the history of that community, also talk with Congress—with a member of Congress while painting these community members and learning their stories, learning how to tell their stories but using art as a way of engagement. Another example is being able to develop tool kits, so, for example, looking at, you know, if you're a professor in biology or in chemistry and you have a local river or you have, you know, an ecosystem or environment, you know, how has that changed throughout the years and how can students create experiments and be able to then provide knowledge for local leaders or community members to see if there has been change that has been happening there? So I hope that this gives you some examples of community-based learning and education when it comes to doing it in the classroom. Podcasts have also been something that have been very important because students not only learn the skill on how to run a podcast and how to do a podcast, but then they also get to interview community members and do it—and be able to speak and provide the opportunity for storytelling as well. FASKIANOS: Can you talk a little bit about the role civic engagement plays in international students' educational experience? I mean, a lot of campuses have international students, and what does it mean for them and what are they taking back to their countries? MATEO: Yeah, so working with the OSUN network I've learned a lot about what other campuses have been doing and how they do civic engagement, and at some campuses civic engagement is embedded from the beginning. They are taking courses, they have to graduate with a certain amount of hours to be able to get their degree, you know, and some institutions in the United States do that, some don't per se, you know, so—and then also thinking about what—so for them also thinking about what does it mean to be engaged in their communities, and what are some of the work that they are doing as well? So civic engagement can look differently, so some of it can be tutoring. Some of it can be, you know, mostly youth engagement. A lot of it can be gender equity and working to raise awareness on gender issues. So there has been a great sense of education knowledge on my part on seeing how other institutions work on civic engagement. At the same time, it's also great because we're able to talk about civic engagement and develop that baseline and learn how we can grow together, and what are some things that they're doing that we can do and vice versa? So that—so I would say that in some institutions globally, civic engagement is embedded from the beginning and students have to make sure that they are taking courses on engagement. Some of them have, like, first-year sophomore-, junior-, senior-level seminars on engagement, and then others, you have to have a requirement of graduation for a certain amount of hours. So that's how, kind of, it's worked. FASKIANOS: Brian, you talked about inputs and outputs and metrics, so have you measured how civic engagement, the programs that you're doing are affecting students' perspectives on diversity, equity, and inclusion? MATEO: Yes, we have, actually, and—I have this here in my notes—yes, and 89 percent of them say that it has created an awareness of social justice issues and it has also enhanced their learning. So we're seeing that this is something that is showing and demonstrating that by engaging, and also at times engaging with difference, it has helped their learning. And over 90 percent of students say that they would continue to engage our—engage with arts and science courses or experiential courses as a result of that. FASKIANOS: Do you do that survey after each semester or is it at the end of the academic year? How are you doing that? MATEO: Yeah, so we do that survey at the end of each semester when it comes to faculty courses. When it comes to the engagement that students are doing outside of the classroom we also try to assess that, too, which I do midway and also at the end, and some students also do culminating projects, as well, that they are incorporating—at the end of their academic career they are talking about how civic engagement has helped them. So an example of that is—and this is the certificate in civic engagement that we've recently launched. You know, students will be able to apply for what's called an engaged senior project grant that they can get funding to be able to add civic engagement into their final project too, so that's—we're measuring and seeing how many students are interested and want to be able to engage in that. So I would say all together we are doing—you know, and sometimes, you know, we capture a lot of data and sometimes, you know, so we try to make sure that we're doing it as holistic as possible but we do it at the end, so at the end of each semester if a course qualifies as experiential learning, we are doing—so it's a separate evaluation outside of the normal class evaluation, and then we start to see and look at the metrics and what students have learned and, like, now we can start to gather and tell stories behind, you know, what these courses are doing. FASKIANOS: Great. So we have a follow-up question from Manuel Montoya: How does experiential learning and community engagement avoid essentializing the communities you engage with? On a related note, how does one navigate who gets to represent community needs when working on issues of engagement? MATEO: Yeah, this is a very, very, very, like, a thin line. Right? And it comes, again, with mutual respect, reciprocity, active listening. Some of the time community partners come to us and say, hey, we have a need and then we evaluate it and see how we can help that need. Other times, faculty or even students are like, hey, here is something that we should be working on and then we do that. Right? So an example of that is the Bard Prison Initiative. A student came and said, hey, look, we should be working on this and then it became an institutional part of Bard and now it's one of the largest prison education programs for incarcerated individuals across the nation. You know, so—and it takes a lot of reflecting and making sure that the community's needs are also in the forefront, because we don't want to usurp or take on, you know, or say, like, oh, this is ours now. No, this is “in collaboration with.” This is not a “we do this” per se. So that's why we have developed the principles of equity, and I'll share that, as well, with Irina so you can get a sense—that talks about this is, how can we make this equitable? How can we acknowledge and reflect on the work that we're doing? How do we—how are we not making sure that we're showing up and saying, like, oh, look, we're here, as like, you know, how—saving a community. But no, we're here to help enhance a community while they're enhancing our learning and providing assistance for us as well. So it has to be reciprocal in order for you to maintain a deep and sustained relationship. FASKIANOS: Great. And I'm just going to flag—I don't know if people are looking at the Q&A but Chip Pitts was building on what you talked about the importance of climate as a health issue. There's a study that's worth looking at, www.thelancet.com/countdown-health-climate, so you can look there. MATEO: Thank you, Chip. FASKIANOS: We do have another comment. I've benefited immensely from this discussion, bringing to fore the relevance of community engagement for students and faculty. I'm seeing new areas I can suggest for experiential learning to my institution. Terrific. That's great. MATEO: Thank you. I'm glad. FASKIANOS: Really appreciate that from NenpoSarah Gowon—and the last name is cut off. All right, so I wanted to ask you about—in your view, do you—I mean, you've been doing this for a long time. What do you see as the challenges that you've faced in sort of bringing this along in your community? And what have been the unexpected surprises and the receptivity to this approach of experiential learning and critical thinking, et cetera? MATEO: Thank you. That's an excellent question and here's reflection, you know, as we talk about experiential learning. Right? So I would say that my—so I was—so I'm fortunate enough to be able to work with the OSUN network to be in—and become a lifelong learner myself and learn how other institutions have been doing this. And going back to what Manuel was alluding to is that when something is new it's hard to bring in change. Right? So when asking people, hey, do you want to teach a course on experiential learning or asking a student, hey, do you want to also do this type of civic engagement work, what sometimes is heard is, oh, this is more work; this is going to be too hard. Right? So how do you show those benefits, right? And in the beginning, initial stages, it's going to be an uphill battle. But once you have one or two or a group of people doing it and talking about how great it is and how their students are engaged—like, in some of the assessments students are asking for more time in those courses because they're like, this is so—this is great, that we want to make sure that we meet more or we want to make sure we have more time to do—to engage in these courses, so now we're seeing that students want more of these courses and not just of the courses in general but maybe adding a third section instead of just meeting two times a week per se. You know? And then—and funding can also be something that's very—that can be challenging because, you know, you need to make this a commitment in saying, like, yes, we are going to fund, let's say, for example, thirty student internships over the summer because we believe that this is going to help engage their learning. We believe this is going to create an opportunity for them moving forward. Right? So—and researcher—sometimes, you know, if you're in a metropolitan area, it's easier for you to say, yeah, we're going to go to a museum or we're going to go to this community because we can all just take public transportation. But if you're in a rural environment, you're relying on vans and buses and so on and so forth, and that can sometimes run you $500 to $2,000 per visit, you know. So you also have to think really strategically and think smarter, not harder, and how are you engaging? Right? Because one of the detriments is that great, we went to one community once and as a result of that, like, what would happen—because, again, it goes back to sustained, deepening relationships, so those are some of the things that can be some of the challenges. Some of the breakthroughs for me is when you start to see the learning connect, when a student's like, you know—you know, I once had someone from the New York City's mayor's office come speak to the students in my class and it really warmed my heart when a student was like, I didn't know that I had access; I didn't realize that someone like me could be able to speak to someone from the mayor's office. And I'm like, but you're also a citizen of New York City and this is what—you know, so there was that disconnect for the student; it was like, wow, I can do this. Another student wants to—is pursuing, you know, a degree in political science and stuff like that. You know, or even when a student did a research project on the tolls of the taxi in New York City because that student felt they had a personal connection to this, and then they were able to see how, you know, some stories were similar to what—to the narrative that they had and be able to then share some possible solutions and show that they can also be active citizens and engage and be empowered. That is the other piece that, like, once you see that people start to be empowered, they want to continue doing this work and it's, you know, my job and the job of others at other higher education institutions to continue to empower and continue to provide opportunities and shed light, you know, because some of this is also exposure. You know, thinking about outputs; it's like sometimes you know what you know, but then when you meet a professor that's doing some type of research that you're just like, wow, this is so intriguing; I never knew I could do this. That's something that is also very influential for the student. And I'll give you a personal anecdote about myself. I myself have been an experiential learner. You know, I went to college and I got my master's in higher ed administration, but all of a sudden I'm working with international communities, I'm also part of the Council on Foreign Relations doing research on climate, and teaching experiential learning. And that is as evidenced by Bard being a private college for public interest, and also enabling us to be a part of the system that we ourselves can be experiential learners and be able to do different things and sometimes, you know, like, not necessarily shift our careers but find new interests, because this is what we want to do and develop the system that can be reciprocal for our students, faculty, staff, and community. FASKIANOS: Well, with that, we've reached the end of our hour. Brain Mateo, thank you very much for sharing what you're doing at Bard, your stories, and we will circulate to everybody the resources that you mentioned, and, you know, just want to thank you for your dedication. And to everybody on this call, I mean, it really has brought home for me the important work that you all are doing to raise the next generation of leaders, and we need them and you all are role models for young adults who, as somebody said, their parents have never gone to college and really need some guidance on next steps. So thank you to you, Brian, and to everybody on this call for what you're doing in your communities. We will share Brian's email address and you can follow him on Twitter at @brianmateo. So I encourage you to follow him there. Our next Higher Education Webinar will be in November, and we will send the topic speaker and date under separate cover. And so I encourage you to follow us, @CFR_Academic on Twitter, and visit CFR.org, ForeignAffairs.com, and ThinkGlobalHealth.org for more resources. And of course, as always, you can email cfracademic@cfr.org, with suggestions of future topics or speakers you would like to hear from. We're trying to be a resource for all of you and support you and the important work that you are doing. So Brian, thank you again. MATEO: Thank you. And I'll make sure to share resources with you. Have a great day. FASKIANOS: Wonderful. (END)

Rushi Kota grew up in the residential streets of Queens NY but was born in India to a single mother who brought him to America to achieve the American Dream. America was where he learned the value of perseverance and hard work. Kota has set out to break ethnic stereotypes in Hollywood and be more than just his skin color. Kota chose a traditional career path in Automotive Engineering at SUNY Farmingdale where he double majored in Industrial Management Technology and Business Administration. However, after graduating in the financial crisis of 2008, with unemployment rates at a record high, jobless, and in debt; he took that as a sign to follow a different path.After two years of vigorously pursuing acting in New York, Rushi was then accepted into Harvard University's MFA program for Acting, following that up with a residency at Stanislavski's Moscow Art Theater School in Russia. On television, Kota starred in the comedy series Funny or Die's "ESL: English is the Second Language". Additional credits include guest-starring in Ryan Murphy's "9-1-1", Freeform's "Famous In Love", and recurred on the CBS show "Extant" with Halle Barry. Feature film credits include "The Divorce Party" with Thomas Cocquerel and Matilda Lutz, "The One I wrote For You" with Cheyenne Jackson, and Kevin Pollack directed by Andrew Lauer. Stage credits include Regional Broadway shows "Guards At The Taj"-Marin Theater, "Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity"- Capital Stage, "Boston Abolitionist Project"-A.R.T., "Great Catherine"- A.R.T., "Blanco Posnet"-A.R.T., "Hansel and Gretel"-A.R.T., "Imaginary Invalid"-M.X.A.T. Kota has become a master of home workouts while quarantining with his wife and best fur-baby and cherishing the power of family.He wants to act with Mindy Kaling. Loves Ryan Reynolds and has advice for desi kids who want to make it in Hollywood. And not sure if he can give Bollywood a try but if there are English-speaking roles; he will give it a shot.Check out our entire convo with him here#NEVERHAVEIEVER#ORDINARYJOE#RUSHIKOTA

Police Commissioner Patrick J. Ryder Nassau County Police Department Patrick J. Ryder was named Commissioner of the Nassau County Police Department by County Executive Laura Curran in February 2018. He recently completed his 35th year in law enforcement, serving the last 33 years with the Nassau County Police Department. Commissioner Ryder began his law enforcement career with the New York Police Department in 1984. He joined the NCPD on July 18, 1986 and was assigned to the 3rd Precinct and has worked in the Bureau of Special Operations, 5th Precinct, 8th Squad, and the Asset Forfeiture and Intelligence (AFI). In 2008 he was designated the Commanding Officer of AFI, where he proactively implemented a number of life-saving programs and initiatives that helped ensure officer and public safety. These include the NCPD’s Real-Time Intelligence (RTI) system; the R.E.A.C.H. Program; the Civilian Intelligence Analyst Program; the creation of the Counter-Terrorism Unit, Think Tank, and the Department’s Criminal Intelligence Rapid Response Team (CIRRT). Together these initiatives have brought crime in Nassau County to historic lows, allowing residents to enjoy the lowest crime rate for a city its size in the United States. Commissioner Ryder has a Master’s Degree in Homeland Security and Management from Long Island University. He is an Adjunct Professor of Criminal Justice and Intelligence-Led Policing at Nassau Community College. He currently sits on the Advisory Board for Criminal Justice at SUNY Farmingdale and has been a Counter-Terrorism Lecturer at the University of Maryland Center for Health and Homeland Security. Commissioner Ryder is a New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services-Certified Law Enforcement Instructor, a New York State Certified Crime and Intelligence Analyst, a Certified Anti-Money Laundering Specialist, and has Top Secret clearance with the FBI’s New York Field Office. He has also been deputized as an IRS Criminal Investigator. Additionally, he has trained members of law enforcement agencies from Egypt, Tajikistan, Tunisia, South Africa, and Turkey. He and his wife Jill have three children: Liam, Sean, and Meghan. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/otcpod1/support

On this episode of the Reverse The Universe Podcast I am joined by special guest Harrison Cohen entrepreneur and president of Growth Generators, A company focusing on growing online communities around brands and companies to help get into a still untapped market for their products or services. He also has his personal brand at harrisonbaron.com, where he helps small business owners and salespeople leverage LinkedIn and other platforms to make sales. Harrison Baron was born and raised on Long Island, growing up in the small town of Bayport. He attended SUNY Farmingdale for Computer information systems with an emphasis in computer programming, where he received his bachelor’s degree. From there, he proceeded to get an internship where he was brought into the company as an entry-level employee. After two short years, he worked his way up to an executive position in the company. During this time, he also started a podcast called the Brutally Honest Podcast that would help educate people on business and personal stories. Recently he has decided to become a full-time entrepreneur where he founded and is now president of Growth Generators. You can reach Harrison or check out his businesses @ Social media handles Instagram @harrison_Baron LinkedIn: @harrisontbaron https://www.harrisonbaron.com/ https://www.growth-generators.com/ https://bottleandash.com/ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCVEGLcLM-W_pi7LijKOiSSg https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7qybtkxKos3z6NjK1FH-vg --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/reversetheuniversepodcast/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/reversetheuniversepodcast/support

Harrison Baron was born and raised on Long Island, growing up in a small town of Bayport. He attended SUNY Farmingdale for Computer information systems with an emphasis in computer programming, where he received his bachelor’s degree. From there, he proceeded to get an internship where he was brought into the company as an entry level employee. After two short years, he worked his way up to an executive position in the company. During this time, he also started a podcast called the Brutally Honest Podcast that would help educate people on business and personal stories. Recently he has decided to become a full-time entrepreneur where he founded and is now president of Baron Media Group. A company focusing on growing online communities around brands and companies to help get into a still untapped market for their products or services. He also has his personal brand at harrisonbaron.com, where he helps small business owners and salespeople leverage LinkedIn and other platforms to make sales. In his free time, Harrison is a volunteer firefighter, spending time outdoors, and finding new adventures. Want to connect or work with Harrison? See Below: Wesbite: https://www.baronmediagroup.com/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCVEGLcLM-W_pi7LijKOiSSg Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/baronmediagroup/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/baronmediagroup Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/baronmediagroup/ +++++ Please Follow & Connect with me! Link's Below ▶︎ WEBSITE | https://tyzerevans.com ▶︎ YOUTUBE | https://youtube.com/c/tyzerevans ▶︎ INSTAGRAM | https://instagram.com/tyzerevans ▶︎ FACEBOOK | https://facebook.com/grindsellelevate ▶︎ LINKEDIN | https://linkedin.com/in/tyzerevans ▶︎ TWITTER | https://twitter.com/tyzerevans ▶︎ TIKTOK | https://tiktok.com/tyzerevans ▶︎ PODCAST | https://tiktok.com/tyzerevans ▶︎ PATREON | https://patreon.com/tyzerevans

I talked to Dan about how he got started in this business and how he was able to do so well. We also talk about the IAQ business and adapting to the current business challenges. Dan Moody, President of Target Sales, Inc has been in the HVAC business since 1984 and a manufacturer’s rep since 1995. He graduated from SUNY Farmingdale in 1987 with a degree in HVAC. Dan was born in Brooklyn, NY, and worked as an HVAC Wholesaler in Long Island. Shortly after getting married he moved to Tampa to work for Carrier and York. They raised 2 sons that now both live with their families in Tampa. Dan likes to spend time with family, saltwater fish, drive his classic car, and try new restaurants.

Target Funding Book Launch:Kedma Ough, MBA is one of today’s most respected authorities on business funding and entrepreneurship and is a nationally recognized business coach and Small Business Administration award-winning “Small Business Champion” that has coached more than 10,000 entrepreneurs through a wide range of business advising. In her best selling book Target Funding through McGraw Hill, Ough teaches the readers how to target grants, funds, and resources even if you have exhausted all avenues. Ough is a proud fifth-generation entrepreneur and her great-great-grandfather peddled various products throughout Ireland. Today’s Resource Links from the Podcast:www.targetfunding.com www.automategrowsell.com Timestamped Show Notes:  00:30: Introduction 07:37: My ROI to this day really has been strong. So a lot of my early work was through the centers, but I want to call a caveat here. It's still very stringent to go through the job application process. You can't just write show up. My business is still in place since 2001, exclusively representing people with disabilities. 14:55: I love the home services industry so much because it's so recession-proof. Because if we think about the idea that, let's suppose we're in a recession and your toilet bowl goes out, something goes up, you're not going to say, you know, let's put off waiting for the plumber for six weeks, you know? 18:00: I would say that your choice for having an education is just a tool in your toolbox. The question is what's your return on investment? I work with people today who tell me their MBA cost them $80,000. Okay, how long will it take for them to repay it? My total cost for my undergrad? 23:00: I was forced into this horrible situation and I remember having to make the decision to file bankruptcy. I was sitting on a curb, right outside the bankruptcy court sobbing my eyes out. I was wrapping up my masters and I'm thinking, what do I do next? I remember going back to my apartment and over the next two weeks, it was a foggy thing. Here's what happened. I received an envelope from Capital One. 25:30: Book editing was grueling. But you know once you make a journey to commit to a goal like a book, it is like giving birth without any kind of medicine and you just have to go for it. 30:00: I called about three weeks ago after my book launch. It took me 30 years to call them, 30 years! There's more to that. If you read my journey, everybody has a story. I just grew up in a very difficult home environment. I was 18 going on 19, I was attending Community College, SUNY Farmingdale, and it was evening class, wintertime, and I got a 911 page from my therapist. Judy never pages me and I remember picking up my books running out of the classroom. Back then we had payphones. 39:00: Here's the thing I want people to know. I want people to listen to this. If you listen to anything that I say, listen to this seriously. I want you to think about the lowest moments in your life and if you haven't had them, congratulations. For the rest of us, I want you to think about those moments. Then I want you to look in your mind's eye, and remember who was there. Those are the people that matter, not when you're wealthy, not when you've made it. The reason I dedicated my entire book to SUNY Farmingdale is that they believed in me before I believed in myself. 50:50: Final Words Our Final Words of the Show:Every action you have is premeditated because it had to happen at a thought level. Every thought, I mean, even if it's seconds, it's seconds in your thoughts. So if you want to change the view of your movie, just be mindful of your thoughts and who you're surrounding yourself with. I know that sounds cliché. I think it really brings it down to what do you want to show up seeing every day? What responsibility do you have in making sure that you show up with the right intentions and the right actions? Action...

Jeff Nagel, AIF®, CRPSe, FPQPTM Financial Advisor Jeff began his career in 2011 and joined AVZ in 2015 as a Financial Advisor. He is responsible for providing personalized investment solutions to help clients work toward their long-term financial goals. He also manages client assets, develops and deepens client relationships and always works toward making his clients financial goals a reality. He has a proven track record of professional success in relationship-building skills and money management. Mr. Nagel's expertise is in the area of asset management, portfolio construction, and analysis. Prior to joining AVZ Mr. Nagel worked as a Financial Advisor for Oppenheimer & Company where he built and maintained client investment plans and provided financial planning services. Mr. Nagel received his Bachelor's degree from SUNY Farmingdale in 2015. He is an Accredited Investment Fiduciary (AIF®), Chartered Retirement Plans Specialist (CRPS®), as well as a Financial Paraplanner Qualified Professional (FPQP®). He has also passed the FINRA Series 7, 63 and 66 exams and holds a New York State Life and Health Insurance license. In 2017, Jeff became a recipient of Long Island Business News' 30 Under 30 Award, which recognizes professionals under the age of 30 who contribute to the Long Island community through public service and who have made significant strides in business. Jeff serves on the golf committees for both Mercy Haven and the Maurer Foundation. He is also a member of the Board of Directors for the Bellport Golf Club located in Bellport, New York. Securities offered through 1st Global Capital Corp. Member FINRA, SIPC. Investment advisory services offered through 1st Global Advisors, Inc. Insurance services offered through 1st Global Insurance Services, Inc. All discussion in this show is purely for entertainment and education. Show Sponsor: http://www.dreamdancefitness.com/ Show Sponsor: https://elisemargolin.zenfolio.com Show Sponsor: https://agiledragonconsulting.com/ Support the show! Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/brutallyhonestpodcast Website: https://www.brutallyhonestpodcast.com/ Instagram & Facebook @brutallyhonestpodcast Produced by: https://www.baronmediagroup.com/

 Jeremiah and Verdel Jones have been married for 30 years. In 1983 they began dating as high school sweethearts. In 1987 Jeremiah joined the US Navy and Verdel attended SUNY Farmingdale. A year later at almost 21 and 19, Jeremiah and Verdel married and moved to Boston, MA. After a few years in MA, Jeremiah in the Navy and Verdel finishing up her Bachelor's degree, they moved back to Long Island and began their family. ----more----The Joneses have two children Marcus 26 and Miya 22. Through the years they have grown together - grown apart - and grew more in love with each other through not only their unconditional love for each other but through their devoted friendship. They currently host an Internet TV show called, Let's Kick It With The Jones, and they own a production company MiyaMar Productions alongside their two children. With The Joneses, everything is a family affair. “The way to get started is to quit talking and start doing.”  – Walt Disney    Meet Verdel Jones     Verdel A. Jones - The College Planning Expert and author of, The Parent Agent: How to Represent Your Child and Get Them Into the College of Their Choice Verdel has been an educator for over 20 years as a teacher, school counselor, and district level administrator. As a presenter and speaker, Verdel continually provides her community with valuable resources regarding various educational topics and passionately presents this information to parents and students. She has visited hundreds of colleges and can articulate what to look for in a college that will meet the needs of your child. Her extensive knowledge of the college exploration and selection process; current educational issues; and the social and emotional challenges students experience, make her an expert in her field. Being a teacher at heart, her passion is focused on sharing conversations that inform and enlighten – in the hopes that you learn something you did not know. In carrying out this work she is the executive producer and host of the Internet TV show, Conversations with Verdel Jones. She is also the CEO and Founder of Deliteach Enterprises, LLC which provides various services including hosting events dedicated to supporting our community. Verdel received her master’s degree in educational leadership from Long Island University, a master's degree in secondary education from Hofstra University, and obtained a bachelor's degree in business administration from the University of Massachusetts at Boston. Jeremiah Jones Jr. has been working in the telecommunications field almost 20 years and is dedicated to providing his customers with quality service and expediency. This proud father of two adult children was born and raised on Long Island, New York and met his wife in high school - they were high school sweethearts. In addition, he served in the US Navy for over 13 years and attributes that experience in building a solid foundation for his family. He is currently the co-host of the Internet TV show, Let's Kick It.   Follow Verdel Jones on Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | YouTube Music Credits: Music Intro/Outro: “Thoughts” by Killah Smilez Music Outro: “Explained” by Killah Smilez Make sure you check out the Killah Smilez song on Amazon  Catch the music video by Killah Smilez HERE Want to share the episode? Please share the episode on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and Soundcloud Don’t forget to subscribe to WokeNFree on iTunes, Stitcher, TuneIn, iHeartRadio, and Google Play Do you want to join the show as a guest on an upcoming episode? Contact us HERE Don't forget to submit a scenario to us for SCENARIO TIME!    SCENARIO TIME: How would you respond to these scenarios in SCENARIO TIME? Let's chat HERE!  Have you reviewed our show yet? Pick your platform of choice HERE     Do you want to start a podcast? We are here to HELP! Schedule a FREE consultation with us HERE This post contains affiliate links. That means if you click on a link and buy something, WokeNFree will earn a small commission from the advertiser at no additional cost to you.

Looking for ways to increase student confidence in their ability to learn? Or their ability to see themselves as professionals in the field? In this episode, Carly Tribulli, a Biology Professor at SUNY-Farmingdale, joins us to discuss how comics may be created and used to meet students where they’re at, draw them in, and help them develop mental models of complicated processes and concepts. We discuss Carly's plans to create an OER biology textbook in which biological processes are represented using comic strips, her planned research on the effectiveness of instructional use of comics, as well the positive role model that she provides in Carly's Adventures in Waspland, an instructional comic that Carly created for the American Museum of Natural History during her graduate study there. A transcript of this episode and show notes may be found at http://teaforteaching.com.

Dr. Bryan Field is an Assistant Professor of Physics at SUNY Farmingdale on Long Island, New York. He is a theoretical particle physicist, and his work focuses on understanding results from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN and in the past he has actively collaborated on experiments involving ATLAS, which is one of two general-purpose detectors at the LHC. In particular, Dr. Fields is interested in the properties of the recently discovered Higgs Boson in the Standard Model of particle physics, as well as a concept known as supersymmetry, which is discussed at length in this episode. For more information visit his web page: Dr. Bryan Field