Tuesday, November 28, 2023 - Jeff Selingo and Michael Horn take their conversation on the road with another stop on the Future U. Campus Tour, this time visiting the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. They sat down with president Santa Ono to discuss the future of higher education and Michigan's role in the local and global communities. Following that interview, Jeff and Michael had a discussion with a panel on a range of topics from sustainability to student wellness, and highlighting what it means in 2023 to be a public flagship with a national profile and serve the community at the same time. This episode is sponsored by Dell Technologies and Google Chrome OS.
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Jeff Selingo and Michael Horn take their conversation on the road with another stop on the Future U. Campus Tour, this time visiting the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. They sat down with president Santa Ono to discuss the future of higher education and Michigan's role in the local and global communities. Following that interview, Jeff and Michael had a discussion with a panel on a range of topics from sustainability to student wellness, and highlighting what it means in 2023 to be a public flagship with a national profile and serve the community at the same time. This episode is sponsored by Dell Technologies and Google Chrome OS.
Still photography provide by Jose Juarez from Michigan Photography.
(0:00) - Intro
(4:54) - The role of the University of Michigan in the state and beyond
(10:36) - Higher education, trust, and community involvement in Detroit
(16:04) - The future of higher education and the Big Ten conference
(21:37) - Mental health challenges in college students
(27:41) - Mental health support for college students during pandemic
(30:29) - Pandemic's impact on college experience and mental health
(32:40) - Supporting international students at the University of Michigan
(34:56) - Collective impact and sustainability in higher education
(36:40) - Value of study abroad
(42:45) - Global education and diversity at the University of Michigan
(46:59) - Mental health supports for university staff
(52:14) - Jeff Selingo's takeaways
(54:07) - Michael Horn's Takeaways
A video is being shown
President Santa Ono:
Part of the issue has to do with a counter-narrative about the value of critical discourse, of asking difficult questions not only internally, but also of government, of society, of social mobility.
Jeff Selingo:
That was Santa Ono, the president of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, which was the latest stop on the Future U campus tour.
Sponsor:
This campus tour episode is made possible with the exclusive support of Dell and Google Chrome OS. Subscribe to Future U wherever you get your podcasts and, if you enjoy the show, share it with your friends so others can discover the conversations we're having about higher education.
Michael Horn:
I'm Michael Horn.
Jeff Selingo:
I'm Jeff Selingo. Welcome, everyone, to Future U. A huge thank you to the University of Michigan for hosting us today.
President Ono, Santa, if I may-
President Santa Ono:
Please do.
Jeff Selingo:
.... welcome to Future U.
President Santa Ono:
Thank you very much. Wonderful to be with you again, Jeff.
Jeff Selingo:
It's great.
Michael Horn:
Yeah, it's great to have you here. We've gotten to interview several dozen university presidents, and a question that always sparks our listeners is learning about their career path to the presidency, so we'd love to hear about your journey to Ann Arbor and the presidency here.
President Santa Ono:
Well, thank you very much. In a way, I've always been at a university. My father was a mathematics professor, and I was born in a university campus at UBC and then followed my father to successive positions at Penn and then at Johns Hopkins where I went to high school. I was then really just focused on being a biomedical scientist, and so I went through the ranks at Johns Hopkins in Harvard, but was really recruited to consider a career in administration by Earl Lewis who had moved at that time from the University of Michigan's Rackham Graduate School to Emory University to be its provost. Through a search, he picked me to be his deputy and to be a senior vice provost at the university. I just love doing that, really working at enterprise-wide level at really shaping that great institution to be an even better university and very proud of what we did together.
I was then recruited to be a provost and then president of the University of Cincinnati and then president of the University of British Columbia where I was born and raised as a toddler, until I was a toddler, and then, about a year ago, recruited to the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, but also with campuses in Dearborn and Flint. That's pretty much my career. I'm a biomedical scientist. I do research in immunology, but now greater than 90% of my time is really focused on being the president.
Jeff Selingo:
We're here at the University of Michigan. You're a world-class, global research university. You're also a state university in this day and age which requires a lot of balancing. I think, when people hear the University of Michigan, they think of where we are right now in Ann Arbor, but as you mentioned, you have these campuses also in Dearborn and Flint. How do you think about the different purposes of each of these campuses, and how do you define the community that's part of each? How do you balance this idea of Michigan being part of the world, but important to the State of Michigan, but also to these communities that you're in?
President Santa Ono:
It's something that I take very seriously. If you look at the history of the development of the University of Michigan system, if you think about the birth of the University of Michigan initially in Detroit and then migrating here to Ann Arbor, which was at its founding, a very sleepy place with lots of fields and animals grazing, if you look at a picture of the original University of Michigan campus in Ann Arbor, it was very small, just a few buildings. If you think about how the university grew, it was because of the state. I often like to say that this is not the University of Michigan. It's the university for Michigan. I truly believe and many people in the institution believe that we owe something to the State of Michigan, and that's something that people feel very fervently.
You're absolutely right that, over the history of the university, as it grew from one campus into a system of three universities, that each of the additional campuses, Flint and then Dearborn, served a different community, communities that have evolved over time, but have been critical for the success of the State of Michigan. Both Flint and Dearborn were very, very important, continue to be very important, but were very important as the state grew and succeeded in the auto industry, but they're very different towns as well in terms of their demographics, in terms of the focus of those campuses, in terms of the priorities, in terms of, for example, practice-based education at Dearborn, but also the demographics in those two different cities.
I take and I think the university takes very seriously our role in each of these three different locations. We have great leaders of all three campuses in Flint with Donna Fry and Domenico Grasso at Dearborn. I'm really proud of their strategic thinking. I'm very proud of the role that each campus plays in their cities, but also the synergy that exists that we hope to grow between the three campuses.
Michael Horn:
Let's dive into the Ann Arbor campus where we are specifically, and you've noted to us beforehand that you all have 150 programs in the top 10 globally just an incredible stunning breadth and depth of excellence at the university. You all are obviously a magnet for talent around the world. Among undergrad applicants, you admit less than one out of every five applicants. You conduct research on pressing challenges confronting humanity such as climate change, which we'll get into in the second half of the show, but you're also in the backyard of Detroit. As you mentioned, you were once located there. You're a state institution in Michigan. I'm just curious about how you think about the intersection though of those overlapping communities and, perhaps, missions and where are their synergies, but what are their tensions or trade-offs that you have to make and how do you see those evolving right now?
President Santa Ono:
I think that the University of Michigan takes seriously all of these concentric circles of responsibility. As I was mentioning in my previous response, we owe a great deal to the State of Michigan, but also to the Detroit where we were founded, but we still have extensive and, likely, a growing presence. That is something that will continue to be a priority. As you have said, the University of Michigan now, in terms of its educational activities, research activities and healthcare, we really span the entire State of Michigan and our neighboring states as well in terms of the collaborations that we have in terms of research and outreach. As you say, we also are members of both hemispheric and global organizations like the University Climate Change Coalition as a hemispheric network of institutions focused on climate action. We take that very, very seriously.
We also believe, because of the strength of our faculty, what I like to call breadth at scale, excellence at scale, that we have a responsibility because of our size, the excellence of our faculty, staff and students, that there are very few institutions that have the excellence, the breadth and the number of people that we graduate and individuals who train here and who go to other institutions, very few institutions that can really have a transformative impact on the most vexing problems that we face as a civilization. We take that responsibility very, very seriously.
Jeff Selingo:
Okay, so I want to stay there for a minute because big public universities, local community leaders, states like to point fingers at them and say, "You're not quite doing enough for the state." We know, for example, across the country right now that trust in higher education has dropped to historic lows. People just don't think it's doing enough as an institution, big I, institution across the country, enough for the issues that we're facing today. How do you combat these perceptions that Michigan is just this elite public university now.
President Santa Ono:
I would say, and I speak to all people around the state, politicians and all the people at the federal level as well, that you'd have to ask them, but I would say that they have noticed that we're at the table more, that we take this responsibility even more seriously than we have. I would argue that the University of Michigan has been involved at each of these levels of responsibility for a long time, but I'm very proud of the fact that our leaders, our deans, our faculty and our students are very involved at each of these levels through activism, through service.
If you look at any of these initiatives that are occurring, say, at the state level, to your point, we are really ramping up what we do, for example, in terms of economic development and technology transfer in the state. The governor has really responded. The Lieutenant Governor has really responded by including us on significant committees and commissions.
We are very involved with the other universities in the state, not only the RI universities, but community colleges, to really think about how to create the talent and to retain the talent that's going to be required for the vibrancy of the state economy. We're also engaged very actively with other institutions, but also the federal government, ensuring that we remain competitive as a nation. I would say that I think that, if you talk to people though, I hope that they will point out that we're at the table and we're very engaged and we're ramping up our involvement.
Jeff Selingo:
You've been obviously in higher ed for a long time. What do you think is at the center then of this lack of trust or this declining trust in higher education writ large across the country?
President Santa Ono:
I think it's multifactorial. I think that, one, it's the issue of communication. I think that the view that universities have for a long time been ivory towers is partially true. Universities haven't been very good at articulating their commitment, their passion, haven't really gone outside of their campus boundaries in some cases. I don't think it's true at Michigan. Part of it is communication. If you don't talk about your involvement, people don't know about it and assume that it's not happening, so part of it is communication.
I would say the other part of the distrust has to do with the question of ROI and whether or not people really believe that what students are experiencing on campus, in the classroom, in the laboratory, how it relates to their future careers and their future impact on the community, on society in general. I think that it's time for introspection, and we're doing that as an institution, and sectors are doing that as well. I think it's healthy. Many things have changed since I was a college student. It is important, I think, for all of us to think about how we integrate into society, how we start to look at what we teach and how we can prepare our future graduates to contribute to different fields.
I think it's very healthy. It's happened in the entire history of higher education, and this is a good time for us to do that as well, so part of it is an appropriate question of alignment of what we do in the wants and needs of society, but also in terms of what our students want. Students are different from when you and I were in college, and we need to listen to them and incorporate that into the path forward, and I think it's healthy.
Michael Horn:
There's the talk the talk, communicate, there's the walk the walk and ROI and so forth. The other part of this that you've mentioned to us is that you've said we want to play a bigger role in elevating Detroit. I'd love to know what that looks like tactically and on the ground.
President Santa Ono:
Yeah. Before I answer that, there was a third thing I want to talk about, and I think it would be amiss for me not to mention that part of the issue has to do with a counter-narrative about the value of critical discourse, of asking difficult questions not only internally, but also of government, of society, of social mobility. I think it's exceedingly important at these times for universities to remain committed to truth, to evidence-based decision-making, to reinforcing the importance of diversity of thought, of civil discourse.
I think that many institutions have varied from that from decades ago, and it's particularly important for us to recommit to that because the cornerstone of a just society is that kind of freedom of expression, diversity of ideas and civil discourse. In the absence of that, we lose one of the great attributes of a university is a diverse set of opinions, of perspectives that together actually inform the best path forward.
Michael Horn:
No. That makes sense. Let's go to the Detroit one. Just briefly, just talk about tactically what your work in elevating Detroit looks like.
President Santa Ono:
Well, one of the first people that I had the privilege of meeting when I arrived here in Michigan was the mayor of Detroit, Mike Duggan, who's a proud graduate of the University of Michigan. He's incredibly passionate about Detroit. He loves Detroit like no one I've met, and he's been very, very successful. There's really a renaissance of sorts that you can see if you go there. I encourage you to go there. There are incredible restaurants, wonderful museums. The orchestra is really fantastic. You can see, even within the year that I've been here, the impact of that kind of focused effort.
Go into the mayor's council room, there are all kinds of charts. He holds everyone accountable, including myself even though I don't work for him, to really be part of the solution to make Detroit better. His enthusiasm is infectious. I want to be his partner because, as I said, the University of Michigan, the resources that we have, the place that we hold in higher education is due to the success of Detroit, is due to the success of Michigan. We owe something back to Detroit and to Michigan to help make this an even more vibrant and economically successful part of the United States.
Jeff Selingo:
Just a quick follow up on that, do you believe that the citizens of Detroit and of Michigan believe that?
President Santa Ono:
Well, I would say that we have work to do. To answer your question about how we're doing this, I'm sitting down, and the deans, other heads of department are sitting down. We have hundreds of interactions across Detroit in education, in healthcare and economic development and innovation, and we're going to ramp that up. That's how we're actually doing it. There's no substitute to rolling up your sleeves and working together, developing plans.
That's not just with the mayor. It's his entire team. I think that's going to continue to grow. The investments that are taking place in terms of infrastructure and programs are just breathtaking in the space, for example, education as an example. We're going to invest more in K-12 education in Detroit and our Marsal Family School of Education. I'm very proud of their role with that. That's just one example.
Jeff Selingo:
One other question before we open it up to audience questions, again, use the QR code to ask questions and we'll ask them from the stage here. We were talking before we got on stage about football and, obviously, the Big 10 conference has expanded again.
President Santa Ono:
It's no longer 10.
Jeff Selingo:
No longer 10. It hasn't been 10 for quite some time. The other thing that we talk a lot on this podcast about is the future of higher ed in terms of mergers and acquisitions, but more alliances and how universities can work more together. I've done a lot of work on the Big 10 over the years in terms of the history of the conference which really started out as an academic conference more than athletics. One of the things that I think really differs the Big 10 conference from every other athletic conference, and you know this from being in another athletic conferences, is that academic component, the Big 10 academic alliance.
What else can the Big 10 do as the conference expands, as we think about the power of all of these institutions now that are going to be in the Big 10 to solve the big challenges facing the US? Do you imagine the Big 10 academic alliance and the alliance aspect of it to become bigger as a result of the expansion?
President Santa Ono:
Well, certainly, there are more institutions. I can tell you as a member of the expansion committee of sorts within the committee and presidents and chancellors that, as has been the case for a long time at the Big 10, the strength of current and prospective members of the conference, one of the most important things that is considered is their strength as a research university, most of them public, as you know, with a few exceptions.
Jeff Selingo:
Two now, right?
President Santa Ono:
That's right. That's right.
Michael Horn:
It used to be one.
President Santa Ono:
It used to be one, Northwestern, and it used to be University of Chicago, my alma mater. It's incredibly important. I've been in other conferences. There's actually a vibrant facility in Chicago where that alliance members meet not only the presidents, but also faculty members, students and deans. A lot of wonderful things have happened because of that alliance. I can tell you, in my conversations with the other presidents and chancellors, that not only is that integral to each of our identities, but it is one of the most attractive features of the Big 10.
I'm really proud of the fact that the University of Michigan, when you go to the union where the steps of which John F. Kennedy articulated his vision of Peace Corps I think at 2:00 AM in the morning, something like that, that on the sides of that front door are a scholar and an athlete. Some people often ask me, "Why is that important?" Well, we are a very large institution with 19 schools, an incredible amount of activity just in Ann Arbor, but if I compare the University of Chicago and University of Michigan, I've been at both, I'm proud of both, there's something special about the athlete part, the way it brings people together in the big house, over 105, 112,000 people coming together and, if you actually walk around, you'll see people from Michigan Medicine, from Kinesiology, from SMTD, LS&A, from engineering, all cheering for the same team and they're just saying, "The team. The team. The team."
What's really special about the University of Michigan is, whether it's athletics, any of the sports, whether it's research, whether it's teaching, there's an esprit de corps that I've never seen anywhere. I think that's part of the secret sauce of what makes the University of Michigan special is that people will come together maybe at a football game, maybe at a coffee house and they'll talk about ideas. I've been to many alumni events for different institutions, and what's unique about the University of Michigan is they'll talk a lot before the event and they'll stay the longest. This love of discourse, of sharing ideas, dreaming about how as a community we can come together and do even better internally and externally is something that I'm particularly proud of.
Michael Horn:
I won't ask what alumni enthusiasm does for your sleep schedule, but as we move to Q&A, there's a few questions, but for time's sake, we're going to just do one right now, which is that someone wrote, "I imagine that admissions at such a competitive public university is quite complicated. A lot of your counterparts in the private university space can prioritize what they choose in admissions, financials, racial equity, things like that, but you also have to consider whether you are serving Michigan's best interests. How do you balance that especially given the revenue disparity potential with out-of-state students versus in-state?"
President Santa Ono:
Well, we are discussing this actively. There's several aspects of your question. It's multifaceted what you asked. You're right. I mean, one in five is just the general selectivity. If you look at, for example, musical theater or robotics, it could be as low as 3% of the students are accepted. There are students that I know who have applied to Ivy League schools in Michigan, gotten into Ivy League schools and not Michigan. That is something that we think about. We think about are we the right size? We are large. We are not the largest public university in the State of Michigan, but, Jeff, as you've written, if you compare our sites to Toronto or Arizona State or UBC, we are significantly smaller.
I've asked just the fundamental question to our deans, "Do you want grow?" and the answer from most of them is, "Yes, but only if we can provide a quality of educational student experience that they deserve so we're not just growing and we're not going to grow for the sake of growing," but, Jeff, you're right, there is something that we need to think about seriously about, "Do we make the Michigan educational experience, the total experience, available to more people?" because there's an important role public universities play. If you count all the graduates from the elite privates, they don't have the output that we do. If you look at Michigan State, Wayne State, Ohio State, Illinois, the Big 10 universities, our output is enormous, and so we have a responsibility to provide an uncommon education to the common person which is kind of our foundation to what we do as an institution. We need to think about it. We are thinking about it, and that's part of your question.
The other part of your question was the differential in in-state students and out-out-of state. I actually think, if you think about how we were founded, we're not really a land grant, the proportion of students here that are out of state is higher than at many other public universities. I actually think it's pretty healthy where it is. I wouldn't want it to change much more. I do worry about, to part of your question, whether we should grow so that more qualified Michigan students can come, but I actually think there is something that's positive to bringing the different kinds of people, students, personalities, perspectives from across America together in one campus. If you think about 36,000 undergrads, I think it's enriching for someone to be in a classroom, a laboratory, in a residence hall with people not only from Michigan, but people from the coasts. It's actually good for the country actually as well, so we have to look at the right number, but I think that the mix is magical.
Jeff Selingo:
Well, thank you President Ono for being with us today on Future U, and we'll be right back after this break.
President Santa Ono:
Thank you very much. Thank you very much.
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Jeff Selingo:
Welcome back to Future U. As we dive into this conversation with our panelists at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, as a reminder, this is a stop on the Future U campus tour, and it is brought to you by Dell Technologies and Google Chrome OS. On our panel today, we have Rob Ernst, the associate vice president for Student Life for Health and Wellness. He's also a physician, as we talked about backstage, and is the university's chief health officer. We also have Judith Pennywell here, the director of the International Center, thank you for being here, and Lashaun Jackson, a senior in the School for Environment and Sustainability. Welcome to you all.
Judith Pennywell:
Yes. Thank you.
Jeff Selingo:
Welcome. Thanks for being here.
Lashaun Jackson:
Thank you.
Jeff Selingo:
I want to start. We said we would dig into a bunch of the issues that came up in the first part of the conversation with the President Ono, and I want to start with a question that has probably impacted all of you, which is the growing mental health challenges impacting young adults. I want to see how this is playing out at the University of Michigan and what you're doing to address it.
Rob, let's start with you, given your role at focusing on health and, critically, wellness, which is obviously becoming a big issue on college campuses nationwide.
Rob Ernst:
Well, student mental health has been a big issue for a long time. You're right, I think there's been a lot of concern that it's getting worse. I think some of the contributing factors for why there's been concern even before the pandemic was a growing awareness that the local community couldn't support the needs of students, particularly a big school like ours, students come from all over the place, and payment for mental healthcare can be really challenging.
I think there's also been a trend which I thought was unsolvable 20 years ago, which was stigma around help-seeking. That's very different now and has contributed to an increased demand for some of what I'll call downstream services. That's a positive when you've got a willingness to seek help or to help others around you. The third has been an issue that students have long wanted to get in early and get prompt service, so the issue for access has been a problem. The model has often been short-term, brief intervention, but, increasingly now, the students have been wanting longer-term treatment, and many students have more experience with mental health care before they come to campus or so are much more savvy consumers of mental health services, so we're expecting more to at least come to campus with an awareness of the differences between these kinds of modalities.
We have been like many places adding mental health providers, and that hasn't seemed to move the needle. During the peak of the pandemic, our institution, understanding that this problem may even become worse given the distress associated with the pandemic, charged a team from across the campus to think about innovative ways to address mental healthcare. Some of the suggestions that came out of that were best practices around some of these downstream resources and partnering with tele-counseling services, but we've also during that same time adopted the Okanagan Charter, and that was really the charge to address the ecosystem and to really try and promote the entire place as a health-promoting university as an upstream approach in an effort to try and reduce the drivers of distress at a policy and a systems level.
Jeff Selingo:
Lashaun, how about the student body and your peers? We were talking earlier about how you started your first year here at Michigan online and, actually, your entire first year online, so talk a little bit about not only how's that impacted you, but how has that impacted your peers? What are you seeing among your fellow classmates?
Lashaun Jackson:
Yeah, that was challenging for sure. I think, when you're growing up, you expect to graduate college, you expect to have your senior prom, and then none of those things happen and you're like, "Okay, maybe we'll have freshman year of college," and that didn't happen either. It was very challenging. I think we talked more about it behind stage, just talking about how it was hard to feel like you had an effect on the world. I was just staring at pixels all the time for the entire year. I'm just like, "What am I do?" I just felt like a robot.
Getting here and meeting people in my age group, being a senior, we're all like, "Yeah, it's the year for juniors." It's like, "We're going to make up for all the time lost." I think, in that way, it's been a positive outcome, and since that, we recognize the time loss and want to do our best to make up for it. I think that has made my experience here a little more sweeter, just to know that we came out of it and it wasn't all good, but it's okay now. Yeah.
Jeff Selingo:
Do you feel like the pandemic hastened the issues that were already there? How do you think it would've been different if you had started that first year here?
Lashaun Jackson:
I don't know how different it would've been. I don't know. I think I'd be less present because I would expect these things like, "Oh, okay, this is normal. Okay, this is how it's supposed to be," but the fact that it wasn't how it's supposed to be made you step back and realize, oh, this is actually really special to be in a place and learn with others and grow with others. I think I've grown a lot leadership-wise and confidence-wise. I think, in that sense, not having that first year of just being like a drone and losing all my social skills and then coming back and relearning all of them was really special for me. I think, yeah, that's the difference.
Michael Horn:
Judith, we've talked a lot on Future U about the mental health changes, the challenges facing colleges and universities and student at colleges and universities. I think we tend to do it from a domestic lens of domestic students. How about international students because, often, I don't think we're thinking of them in perhaps a different way if we have to? What should universities be doing for international students specifically?
Judith Pennywell:
Right. Well, I'll start by saying our statistics. We have about a 17% international student population within our student body, and so that's a fairly large percentage. Of that, about 65% are graduate, professional, doctoral students, some of whom bring families. When we think about international students in our office, we're really thinking about someone as young as 17 all the way up to 30s, 40s, that kind of thing and their children and that kind of thing.
Some of the things that we've done here, from the mundane, we have an international health insurance requirement, and that provides students and provides us with an opportunity to make sure that students are taken care of in the case of illness, injury or worse and that they have access to all the different services that are offered here within the university community, Michigan Med and the overall community or when they're traveling. It's mundane, but it's important.
Our counseling and psychological services, CAPS, they do amazing work. They have several groups targeted at international students, some of which they do in other languages, and they have several counselors who speak other languages. I'm sure Rob is going to speak more about some of the collective impact work that we're doing, but they've made sure to include people from my office, including myself, to make sure that international student concerns and voices are being heard in the process.
Michael Horn:
It's a perfect transition because I wanted to move to collective impact and the role that that plays. It won't surprise listeners, too, a very decentralized campus in the University of Michigan, and I want to turn to you, Lashaun, first just because you've become very focused in your journey at the University of Michigan on this question of sustainability. You didn't start there, but you've come to there. I'd love you to talk a little bit about the roles that you've held, what you're studying, and how collective impact has informed how Michigan has tackled this question of sustainability. You had this great quote when we talked beforehand where you said that, "A flagship university, things could be a little lonely, but we're doing it with other actors, figures, communities that need to be at the center of these conversations and movements."
Lashaun Jackson:
Yeah. I think, yeah, it's a lot. Yeah, to begin, I think the most fulfilling experience I've had so far on campus was, last year, I served as co-president of our student sustainability coalition, and that's where I was able to really work with others who very obviously cared about the issue of sustainability and making our campus and community better than it is and better in the future. Through that, I think I learned a lot about what it means to have collective impact.
I think, obviously, when you get together with people who care about the same thing, okay, you're going to work towards the same thing, but seeing the impact as well is just invaluable, honestly. I think, yeah, when we talk about strategic visioning, like Santa mentioned earlier, I think it's important to elevate students and their voices in these spaces because I think my generation is the one that's tasked with solving the world's issues, unfortunately. While that is daunting, it does provide a lot of opportunity for us to hone in and get together and be like, "Hey, I care about you. We care about each other. Let's get through this together and figure out ways to do it together."
With sustainability, on a campus level, I think it's important to, like Santa said as well, collaborate with others and realize that, in these coming years, the world will be changing, and I think who we have by our side is just going to be paramount to how we get on the other side of that.
Michael Horn:
Judith, I'd love you to weigh in here just because, obviously, collective impact doesn't just go through the work that students are doing here, but you're sending students all over the world. There's quite a global aspect of the University of Michigan. How are you thinking about these issues?
Judith Pennywell:
Right. Well, we think about education abroad, not just study abroad. We think about the opportunities that we can provide students to not only study, but to do research, to do volunteer service, to do internships overseas so that they're getting these experiences not only in their field of study or in their area of interest like, say, sustainability, but they're bringing back ideas and perspectives that continue to grow, enhance their ultimate educational experience here at Michigan. Sending them out into the world reaps rewards when they come back, right?
We have probably, pre-pandemic, we're still rebounding on the study abroad or the education abroad side, but we've had about 36, 37% of our undergraduate body do education abroad experiences. I think it's a tribute to the academic departments here and the colleges and schools and how they're set up. It might be decentralized, but they're definitely thinking about how do we best serve our students and educational abroad experiences in these particular majors in our field. It's a continuing opportunity that we need to pursue because I think it's very important for students to develop the types of knowledge, skills, attitudes that will serve them well regardless if they go on to grad school or into careers.
Michael Horn:
Yeah. Rob, let's let you lay out those principles then of collective impact that undergird not just the sustainability work, but also the health and wellness work that we were talking about in a lot of actions, it seems to me, at least from talking to you beforehand, that undergird when, say, University of Michigan says we have to come together as a community to tackle something.
Rob Ernst:
Right. I think it's because we're so famously decentralized and the big issues that have a common agenda across a big decentralized place or a perfect scenario for collective impact, which it's a framework to bring people together to bring about societal change. The important part from my perspective with the collective impact is it has to be anchored to a common agenda. For health and wellness, I mentioned a moment ago, during the peak of the pandemic, the vice president of Student Life and the provost charged this student mental health task force and, as we were getting ready to lean into best practices for downstream interventions for student mental health that might've been exacerbated by the pandemic and then rolled them out to the campus, we consistently heard from faculty and staff, "What about us? We're struggling, too." Even if you only care about student mental health, building capacity for faculty and staff is the ingredients for an ecosystem that improves the wellbeing of the whole community.
The common agenda is how collective impact starts and, for health and wellness I mentioned ago, we built our collective impact structure around an aspirational goal of being a health-promoting university. We joined the US Health Promoting Campuses Network. We built a backbone, which is really important. It's not just a commitment to try and be better. It's a permanent infrastructure that's well represented across campus with different stakeholders that they could bring to the table around this common agenda.
The goal is to try and identify mutually reinforcing activities that lead to policy and system change so that you can actually work upstream on the drivers of distress. The whole ecosystem improves that way. One of the early wins we had was, for instance, changing the start date for the winter semester, pushed it back a week. There was a policy. We start winter semester first Wednesday after the first Monday, just policy, probably a good reasoning for setting that up so that you can plan your calendars or something, but when the first Monday is January 1st, that means classes start January 3rd, and people just...
Michael Horn:
They're not ready.
Rob Ernst:
... across the system said that we're just not ready. It gave us a framework. It gave us a backbone structure. It gave us a governing body and a platform to talk about this common agenda. Some of the tricky parts that are still a work in progress are some shared measures. It's tricky when you're trying to measure things like how do you build resiliency in students, how do you measure someone's ability to define their purpose or how do you prioritize your health along the same lines as your academics? These are the things we're trying to figure out through this structure.
At the same time, we also learned, as we were coming together to work on a collective approach to COVID, continuous communication is critically important along those lines, so having a common agenda, building a backbone structure, identifying mutually reinforcing activities, identifying some common measures and then continuous communication or the underlying principles for collective impact. We call ours the Wellbeing Collective. It's a thing. It's not just an idea.
Jeff Selingo:
Okay. I want to get to our last set of questions, and again we're going to ask questions from the audience as well when we have time, but I want to return to the topic we explored earlier with President Ono around being this global university, but also having an anchor, being anchored here in Michigan in Ann Arbor and Detroit specifically.
Judith, let me start with you on this and then we'll move to Lashaun and Rob. Can you talk about the university's international goals and how they intersect with being a good member and partner in the community because again, some people might say, "Well, we're a state university in the State of Michigan. Why do we need international students?"
Judith Pennywell:
Right. Well, as you mentioned before, we're in the backyard of Detroit and a stone's throw from Detroit is another country, it's Canada, and so we are international by nature. I don't think it's incongruent. I think you can be a public-serving institution and a global institution at the same time. The types of things that we're teaching, the ideas and concepts our students are learning, the research we're doing, it's all global. We've learned something from the pandemic. We've learned something from [inaudible 00:46:28] techs like climate change and sustainability.
We can't just do it in a vacuum. We have to be thinking about more than our community. I think our goals around engaged learning, making sure students have opportunities to grow inside and outside of the classroom and figure out how to solve big problems because, as Lashaun mentioned, her generation is going to solve the problems for us.
Rob Ernst:
We hope.
Judith Pennywell:
I think that's all part of our work. If we have a diverse student body coming from around the country, that was noted earlier, as well as around the world, 125 countries, we want to make sure that we are thinking about things not only locally, but globally.
Jeff Selingo:
Lashaun, what has that meant for you? We talked about around the country. You're from Georgia. How has the worldwide view of higher education here and how has that changed or enriched your experience here as an undergraduate?
Lashaun Jackson:
Yeah, there's no denying that the University of Michigan is very well resourced. I think I've had a lot of opportunities like this that I've taken advantage of, and I will always be grateful for those. I think what's more important to me though is what we do with where we are, not necessarily how we're ranked. I think it's important. Like you were saying, I think it is international by nature, but starting small is also very key. I've learned a lot about community building and community resiliency in the past couple of years. I think learning to take care of yourself and others first I think can radiate out in unimaginable ways, honestly, to the local community, state, community, national, international. I think really just does start small, and I think that's a cliche, but I've learned that it's true, and I've been working to practice that in my life, and it's been really fulfilling.
Jeff Selingo:
Rob, how about you in terms of what are the things you're thinking about that maybe your colleagues at other universities don't necessarily think about because you have this huge footprint around the world?
Rob Ernst:
Well, there's some responsibility from a practical standpoint, as Judith mentioned. We have students and other affiliates traveling around the world. Just like we have to do in our own backyard, we have to understand the health and safety of our folks when they're not here. That's part of the work. The way I would think about this is, I'm reminded when I was listening to the earlier segment with President Ono when he talked about the importance of a student experience, it's a transformational time. It's a long time ago for me, but I'm always energized when I think about that opportunity for students to transform themselves. That happens in the ecosystem that's enriched by diversity and diverse backgrounds and experiences.
The Okanagan Charter I mentioned earlier, this international charter, it's grounded in principles of equity and diversity and really speaks to the interconnectedness of people, communities and the entire planet. If there's pain in one of those, then it gets transmitted to others, but if there's goodness and you enriched by the experiences of others as well, so I think diversity is a key ingredient to an ecosystem for transformative experiences.
Michael Horn:
We have some great questions coming in on the iPad. Do we have time for two or do we have to cut?
Jeff Selingo:
We can do two.
Michael Horn:
Okay. We'll try. All right. Rob, I think this is probably going to be for you, but if you all have a perspective, jump on in. The first one is students are seeking more mental health support, yet many faculty are untrained with assisting and filling the support that's needed. How can we re-envision graduate training to prepare the future professors to be able to handle this new part of the job?
Rob Ernst:
Right. Right. Yeah. One of the things I'm super excited about that's coming out of the Wellbeing Collective and was identified by one of the work groups charged by our backbone structure was how do we build faculty capacity, understanding that they are on the front lines and, oftentimes, seeing students in distress. We're going to work with our Center for Transformative Learning to try and come up with a systemic model for building faculty capacity on how to have the tools not just to identify students in distress, but to actually intervene and then connect into the system. I think that's the other key part is to build a system that is a continuum and it's not just a one-size-fits-all, it's not just a mental health issue. It's a counseling deficiency.
We have other opportunities to address some of the specific issues that may be in place. For instance, we have a wellness coaching program that's really gaining popularity around motivational interviewing that can explore issues around behavioral issues or addictions and things like that and recognize that, oftentimes, students feel more comfortable seeking help out of a medical provider, so having a model that's connected across the continuum built to make sure we address some of the more significant things through partnerships, but not a one-size-fits-all and, you're absolutely right, having some tools to build capacity for our faculty who want to be partners in this.
Jeff Selingo:
Well, we really are on the frontline in many cases.
Rob Ernst:
Very much. Very much.
Michael Horn:
Yeah, so the next question is also about mental health supports, and it refers to the... and I have to make sure I get my zeros right here, but staff make up 50,000 people on the Ann Arbor campus and yet don't receive many of the mental health supports given to faculty and students, particularly the added breaks for mental health. How would you address this inequity? I don't know who wants to answer? Something we've actually talked a lot about is that universities think a lot about student experience, think a lot about faculty experience. They don't always think about the staff experience.
Rob Ernst:
Yeah. I'm happy to jump in here as well and say that, increasingly... In fact, all the time now, I grew up as a campus health provider and I use those words specifically, many people will say they run a student health center, I call it campus health, and that encompasses the entire ecosystem, as I say. It's I think becoming increasingly apparent that a university even like ours that provides a very generous benefit package and says, "You're a free agent. We're going to give you this generous benefit package. Now, go figure out where you're going to get your needed care."
Many employees are finding, like I said earlier, with the students, that the surrounding community doesn't have the capacity to meet those needs, particularly those most in need. This is the really challenging part. Our university has had employee assistance programs which grew out of specific, often, concerns with performance and things like that, but over the last 10 years are increasingly being turned to as a mental health provider. We've got to come up with another approach on the downstream. It's complicated. It's why I'm so bullish about working upstream on the drivers of distress. If we can really work together and think about the ecosystem and try and turn down the temperature through systems and policies just like we should be doing for environmental justice, then I think we won't have to be so dependent upon the downstream resources.
Judith Pennywell:
It's training and retraining of supervisors as well to watch out and be cognizant of the fact that staff are facing some of the similar issues that we're seeing in other parts of the community. Our HR policies and our supervision supervisors training can use a boost in this area, I think, and that's something that we have to continue to think about in order to be successful in the future.
Lashaun Jackson:
Yeah. I also think it's a culture shift as well, I think encouraging people to just show up as they are and feel comfortable in the spaces that they're in. I mean, we go into work and we have to do this job and go home. We spend a lot of time here, and I think encouraging people to just be themselves and show up as they are and how they need to be and communicate that, I don't know how that works. I still am trying to figure that out, but I think that's a key element as well.
Jeff Selingo:
But even for faculty, the faculty don't have to be perfect in front of the classroom, right? Exactly. That's all we have time for today for the three of you. This has been a great conversation.
I don't know about you, Michael, but this whole day or this whole hour that we've been together here, I'm just thinking of the ideas that President Ono talked about in terms of growing and balancing that with quality. He made reference to Canada, obviously, where he was here previously at the University of British Columbia, where the universities there, the top quality universities in Canada are much larger than the top quality universities in the US. That was one big takeaway I had of that, Judith, what you said about education versus study abroad, that we need to think more broadly about the work that students are doing abroad.
Then, third, Lashaun, just in terms of the work of sustainability. I moderated a panel recently where the top threat to American higher ed is we often think of it as enrollment. We often think of it as finances and things like that. Everybody on the panel identified sustainability and environmental sustainability as one of the biggest threats to American higher education. I'm just fascinated by your trajectory here because I often think that American higher education is very good at training people and educating people for other industries, but not necessarily thinking about themselves, not necessarily thinking about the institution itself, and that you're becoming so involved in the institution here I think really speaks volumes for what I think could be a model for other colleges and universities to really get their students involved at solving the problems locally, not just nationally and internationally.
Michael, I don't know if you have any additional thoughts.
Michael Horn:
Yeah, just a couple, building off of that, I mean, I'm always struck when I'm at a university at how running a university is running a city or a state in its own right, right? That speaks, I think, to giving students and others in the community more opportunities to be part of those problem-solving on the campus itself, and then I was just struck, Rob, I'm always struck by just how the stigma around mental health really has gone away and the ripple effects that that creates both not just for the downstream conversation, but for the upstream and more of the preventative approach to not just mental health, but wellness more generally is so critical I think on our campuses.
Lashaun, you talked a lot about how missing that year really led the students and you to really want to seize the opportunity of being in this place. I think a lot about this because we often talk about, hey, what if it was a three-year degree instead of a four-year and stuff like that, but I think more than that, showing up then on campus was the other part of what you said as you are and being able to present yourself and get into these complicated conversations and have civil discourse, like Santa talked about in the first half, that is often missing from universities unfortunately. Wrestling with the trade-offs between all these questions that we've been debating is a real big part of the work of the university, so really appreciate you all engaging in it.
Jeff Selingo:
Yeah, and please join us in thanking all three of these panelists today. Thank you. Thank you. We're going to leave it there. In addition to our panelists, thank you to our sponsors again, Dell Technologies and Google Chrome OS. Thank you to President Ono, of course, and thanks again to the folks here at the University of Michigan and all of you for joining us today. Thank you very much for being here. Thank you and have a good day.
