Not Alone: Leaders in Conversation

In conversation with... Tim Killeen

• Elsevier • Episode 6

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In this episode of Not Alone Leaders in Conversation, hosted by Rafael Bras, Dr. Timothy Killeen, President of the University of Illinois System, shares his vast experience and insights from an extensive career spanning physics, geophysics, and academic leadership. Dr. Killeen discusses his early life in Cardiff, his shift from pure physics to atmospheric sciences, and the various leadership roles he has held in prominent academic and research institutions.  

The conversation covers critical topics like climate change, the role of academia in policy-making, and the importance of maintaining public trust in science. Dr. Killeen emphasizes the significance of student success, inclusivity, and the need for universities to lead societal change. He also touches on the impact of AI, the responsibility of public universities to serve their communities, and the challenges of managing free speech on campuses. Tune in for a compelling discussion that underscores the complexities and responsibilities of modern higher education leadership.

 

Topics covered include:

  • Meet Dr. Timothy Killeen: From Cardiff to the US
  • Early Life and Academic Journey
  • Transition to Atmospheric Sciences
  • Climate Change and Societal Impact
  • Public Trust in Science and Higher Education
  • Role of Universities in AI and Technology
  • Collaborative Networks for Global Solutions
  • Empowering Students in the Age of AI
  • The Role of Higher Education in Societal Challenges
  • Addressing Inequality in Education
  • Balancing Free Speech and Safety on Campus
  • Leadership and Influences
Speaker 1:

Welcome to Not Alone Leaders in Conversation, a bi-monthly podcast where we delve into the minds and experiences of academic leaders who are shaping the future of higher education. Your host is Raphael Brass, professor at Georgia Institute of Technology and editor of Elsevier's Not Alone newsletter. In each episode, he will explore the complex challenges, decisions and opportunities facing academic institutions today. Some of the topics you can look forward to in this episode are climate change and societal impact, public trust in science and higher education, the role of universities in AI and technology, balancing free speech and safety on campus, and the role of higher education and societal challenges.

Speaker 2:

I'm Rafael Bras, your host, and today we have Dr Timothy Killeen. Tim, as he likes to be called, comes from Cardiff, wales. He has a Bachelor of Science in Physics and Astronomy and a PhD in Atomic and Molecular Physics from the University College of London. From that point on, he moved largely to the US fairly quickly. He went to the University of Michigan where he was a researcher and a professor for many years. During that period he moved from what I would call the pure physics to the physics of the atmosphere and then joined as director of the National Center of Atmospheric Research, which is an NSF-funded activity National Science Foundation-funded activity in the United States, in Boulder, colorado. He served as director for many years, went back to academia briefly and then joined the National Science Foundation where he was the director of the geosciences division. There they call it assistant director, but for whatever it's worth, it's the director. He was there until 2010. In 2012, he became vice chancellor for research at the State University of New York until 2015, at the point when he became the president of the University of Illinois system.

Speaker 2:

It's really a pleasure to have Tim. I've known Tim for many, many years. Tim, it's great to have you. Thank you so much.

Speaker 3:

Thank you very much for meeting with me, Rafael. It's great to see you.

Speaker 2:

Tim, you're a long way from Cardiff and I have to say I have personal knowledge. I was in Cardiff last year. I had never been in Wales but I really enjoyed that experience and enjoyed Cardiff, but it's a very different place. What in your growing up in Cardiff, which is a small city, made you go into science and pursue your academic fields?

Speaker 3:

Well, in my case there was never a question that I would go to university in some challenging arena. My mother was a physician. She was a general practitioner, used to go and deliver babies in the valleys in Wales and I learned at her funeral that she was the second female ever to qualify as a physician in Wales. And I learned at her funeral that she was the second female ever to qualify as a physician in Wales. So I didn't know that she was such a. My father was a, um, a lecturer at, uh, birmingham university in in mining engineering, and uh, we had four siblings, um, five of us all together and uh, we were.

Speaker 3:

We were kind of directed to do well at school and it was never a question. The question might have been what are you going to study at university? And all of my siblings and myself we took that seriously, did our best in the setting we had and we were kind of in an Irish enclave within Wales if you can imagine that the street, the church, everything was kind of Roman Catholic. So it was a Celtic fringe within a Celtic fringe, but very driven for education and for that kind of contributions to society. And looking back, you know I was certainly not given much choice of the matter.

Speaker 3:

I passed the so-called 11+, which meant I was streamed into a grammar school and I did my homework and my writing was really great. I look back on the writing. I used to write fluently cursive script. You look at it now and it's a scroll that I can't even understand. So it was a great family upbringing and it was logical for a young Welsh person to go to university in London and I knew I was pretty good at physics and I thought it was just because I did well. And I had an inspiring high school teacher called Jock Matheson, who I've tried to Google. I've never found him since. I really would love to thank him in some fashion, but he's probably passed away by now and I thought that physics would be. If I could do that, I could probably do anything. So it felt to me like a difficult subject that if I could master I could go on and do whatever I was interested in. So I went to London University, university College London, almost as a natural progression, not really making fundamental decisions myself, but following the path laid out.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I think many of us of our age have had similar experiences. At the heart of it, we didn't have much choice. One question, though, that is interesting you clearly went into physics and, as you said, if you went into that you felt you could do anything. Then you started shifting, when you were at Michigan, to the atmospheric sciences geophysics. How did that come about?

Speaker 3:

Well, my transitions have been in some know, in some sense use a physical term a bit of a Brownian motion. You know, whatever comes next is what happens. Closed doors, where you think you might contribute, are very influential because you end up with the open door and you make a passage. So I got a PhD at quite a young age, 23, in particle physics and it was with positronium and positron dynamics before all the medical applications came into play and there were very few places to go for a postdoc. So I followed another mentor, harry Massey, to go for a postdoc. So I followed another mentor, harry Massey, who was the department chair, who said go join that group there.

Speaker 3:

And I did and the group there was launching sounding rockets into the polar night up in the northern coast of Norway and after being in a lab with a white lab jacket and Bunsen burners and solder, you know, soldering things and building gadgets to be out in nature watching the Northern Lights from horizon to horizon was just so thrilling I said if I could use physics to understand this stuff, that is really interesting, understand the complexity of the natural world. So, physics, atomic, molecular fundamentals, the geophysics, was a path that opened up for me without my having decided that that's what I wanted to do. But then it was so interesting and thrilling and that's what led me ultimately to the United States, because I was told that if I could have seven minutes of data from a sounding rocket, that NASA would launch a satellite, would have several years of data from orbit. I thought that was pretty cool. So I came to the United States as actually a second postdoc at University of Michigan, where they had a really great program in observational space sciences.

Speaker 2:

From the space sciences, you actually then went into concerns about climate change and what I would call more atmospheric sciences, if I recall, how did that transition occur?

Speaker 3:

Well, I was still very much an experimental person building satellite instrumentation and we launched it successfully. Then it got all of this wealth of data and information. I really wanted to understand what it was telling us about the natural world. So I kind of went to NCAR to begin with to sort of sit at the feet of the world's best theorist on such things and got into modeling to understand the dynamics. And if you look at space sciences you know the dynamics is driven not only by neutral constituents, as weather systems are, but also driven by plasma constituents derived from the solar wind etc. So in fact the theoretical basis of space, plasma physics, incorporates in a way the kind of same equations in fact that drive the atmospheric dynamics and circulation. So it was a natural extension.

Speaker 3:

And then I was everything I take on I've tried to do really well and I was teaching by then and I really enjoyed the classes that you know stretched me intellectually. That stretched me intellectually whether it was plasma physics or gas kinetic theory or aerospace engineering and then meteorology as well, the systems like hurricanes, tornadoes, weather, frontal passages, the nonlinearities, the turbulence, the wave dissipation. It was all kind of interesting and relevant to my formation and I kind of I felt I could expand into that dimension and then as I got into more leadership roles, that became a natural place where significant energy went in. But I so I started in fundamental physics, experimental, moved to geophysics observationally, and then understanding the upper atmosphere and the ionosphere of the planet led me kind of naturally to expand that, with the same kind of theoretical framing as well, to atmospheric sciences, including weather, frontal frontal passages and turbulence and predictive capabilities for atmospheric sciences. And of course that's very directly relevant to human life. So that was also significant for me.

Speaker 2:

You got into the issues of atmospheric sciences and climate and you know. As you know, climate change has been called an existential threat by some. The majority, or the overwhelming majority, of scientists believe that a lot of what's happening now, the rate of change, is driven by anthropogenic forces. Yet in the US, the political leadership and, frankly, many of the people are divided about it. In Europe, it's different. In other parts of the world, things are different. Why have you thought of what is driving these societies to come to different conclusions, or not conclusions, interpretations of what is, in essence, the same information?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, I think this is a collision between fundamental basic science and social science and decision-making theory of how humans make decisions with risk and uncertainty. All of this is convolved in our response and reaction to climate science as a physicist. The jury came in in the mid-80s and I was teaching the material and it was pretty clear by then that anthropogenic forcings were already influencing outcomes, glacial retreats etc. And that it would only get more so if the loading of infrared active constituents would continue to go up. So you know, when I was involved then of course I went to NCAR, as you pointed out, which is a world-class climate science modeling, and got deeply into the scientific understanding of climate system dynamics, earth system dynamics and all the nonlinear interactions between the physical world. I'm, then, very interested in the socio-technical challenge aspects as well, which bring in all these other fields beyond just the biophysical combinations. And I think in the United States, because of the significance of decision-making with risk and uncertainty, the significance of decision-making with risk and uncertainty, there's this transitional requirement really to go from the basic understanding which for me by the mid-'80s was pretty obvious. You know, the second law of thermodynamics trumps everything right, it's just inexorable. So in my lifetime the Pacific waters have increased by over a degree and there's a lot of evaporation that takes place because of that. What is weather for? It's for moving energy around from surplus to deficits, so everything's going to be more intense. So that was kind of obviously driving some of the thinking, and there are concerns about implications of all of the above. How does society take that kind of knowledge base and create policy solutions that are meaningful, maybe short-term negative in terms of economic impact, but longer term very important? That's a fascinating field actually in many ways and it's played out in different ways in the United States, in part because of the way science is treated and trusted in the United States, a little bit differently from Europe.

Speaker 3:

But I'd say that internationally we're still at a juncture where the new knowledge is coming of age really significantly now, with all of the networks of observations oceans, atmospheres, biosphere, et cetera just at the time and, raphael, this is on our professional watch, right. So you know, think about about it. It's like a if if we'd have had this body of knowledge 150 years ago, a lot of these problems would have been avoided in terms of global environmental stresses, right, and if we had this body of knowledge that we have today, 150 years into the future, we would be really in bad shape because we would have lived through. And so this collision, the need for the knowledge and the existence of the knowledge on our professional watch, is something that drives me personally significantly, if you understand what I'm getting at. You know this is an existential issue of our times and I have kids and grandkids now, and it's very important that we utilize the.

Speaker 3:

You know, we improve the body of knowledge and that's a responsibility and we create the human capital, which is a major responsibility of educators like ourselves. It's all about the students, right? We need to make sure that they have the requisite tools to make intelligent decisions. And then the coming together of the social sciences, the behavioral sciences, the history, the ethics all of these issues makes for me an amazing platform, almost an astonishing place to be in a university that has all of these component pieces that need to fit together like a jigsaw puzzle to create a more helpful future. And I'm a believer that the United States is the place where that family of not just disciplines but technologies can come together to create solutions for the future and deploy them not just nationally, nationally, but internationally as well, creating jobs and human welfare along the way, and that, in a way, is something that I think should drive us all in in the higher education arena because, when it comes down to it, it's all about the students, it's all about building that human capital.

Speaker 3:

These are challenges now that are not out there 20, 30 years into the future as they were in the mid-'80s, but they're right here at this stage. So I think the challenge is going to be are we going to make these intelligent decisions driven by crises or are we going to make intelligent decisions driven by knowledge crises or we're going to make intelligent decisions driven by knowledge, and the knowledge has to be derived from multiple disciplines, almost transdisciplinary work coming together with scenarios and acceptance that these are nonlinear systems that you can't absolutely predict, but you can get probabilistic envelopes of the scenario outcomes. This is a very exciting intellectual field, but also this feeling that we're in the spotlight in this decade is also a little humbling and chastening, because we've got to do the job really well and project it into society.

Speaker 2:

Part of the issue, though, which you alluded to, is the element of trust in science. I think, overall, science have always been trusted, has been respected, but for the last few decades, the data indicates that the public at large feels that maybe they shouldn't be trusted as much as they were before, and the same applies to our academic institutions, although there's the difference between the two. That leads to some loss of respect from the policymakers also, and this was very evident during COVID. Clearly, why is this happening? Is it reversible? Can we continue in this trend?

Speaker 3:

I do think it's reversible, but I do acknowledge that public trust and confidence in the overall sector has been in decline. It's not true for the University of Illinois, where we do annual surveys where public trust and confidence in our system is going up. We can demonstrate that. But it's because of this sense that we are not solving problems. It's because of this sense that we are not solving problems. We're creating bigger gaps between haves and have-nots. That in a way, distorts and gives tension to society, that some people are left out, that there's an elitism component to the intelligentsia. I think we've got to combat that by being grounded in public good, and this is where I've obviously voted with my feet to be a system lead in a land grant setting, grounded in place time and history. And I do think we've got to be opening our doors wide. We've got to make sure that we're not exacerbating societal tensions by creating the right kind of human capital, the right kind of systems that can be, you know, beneficial to human welfare, moving forward. And we've got to do that intentionally. And we can't do that behind a screen where, or you know, the screen could be a jargon screen, right, you know, we, we use language that people don't understand that well or we're seen as saying one thing and then something else emerges. So I think there's a lot of work to do in this, in this area. But the, the scientific establishment internationally and in the united states and in Europe, has the opportunity to turn this around quickly because there will be, as things occur in nature and in the world, in geopolitical settings, there will be a return to basic understanding, to basic principle decision-making. I think we have to model that in the higher education establishment by working with a generous, collaborative spirit, that is.

Speaker 3:

You know, I actually, when I was at NSF, I tried to move away from the word sustainability because it's become, like some of the other language, a little bit co-opted and you know it's become a political hot ticket in some settings to what I used to call thrivability. I know others have used that term, but you could imagine a sustained future. That's pretty miserable. I was scanning through the TV last night the Blade Runner was on there and that's like a miserable. But sustainable future is closes gaps between, you know, access and affordability and completion and participation in society, and that's a complex family of issues.

Speaker 3:

That is not just. It's not just an experimental physicist can take this on right. It's got to be really all hands on deck. Essentially I would include centrally the humanities, actually centrally. One of my bugbears is that if the humanities feel like they're on the periphery looking in, we've got to convert that so that the policy implications and the societal implications of the basic research is mediated and driven by human society's needs. And those are complex challenges. You can model positrons in a computer more easily than you can model human beings and how they make decisions with risk and uncertainty. But I think this is the challenge of our times. We need to reverse that loss of trust and confidence in our sector for a helpful future, because we can't be making decisions with blindfolds on.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, there's been some argument lately that scientists scientists should reframe themselves to get too deeply into the policy arena. That science is all about facts. Just state the facts, state the outcome, look at alternatives, but that's it. Don't go too far. Do you believe that that's an approach?

Speaker 3:

I don't think that approach holds much water for any lengthy period. I think there's. I like to say there are many roads to Valhalla right. One is being a deep scientist in a small field in a room with a pencil and creating incredible advances in knowledge. But these kind of issues cross so many disciplines and interfaces that they need this more consilience approach. That's a word that's being used increasingly to build the, the, the knowledge base, that that incorporates the policy scenarios, uh, and look at them in in a probabilistic way. It should be do this, this might happen, or that. You know, this might be the probabilistic set of outcomes. If we do that, this could be more beneficial or dangerous. There might be some consequences of actions. So I think it's incumbent upon, frankly, universities to drive this.

Speaker 3:

I'm a big believer that public, private, governmental tripod is very powerful, particularly in the United States. It's like an enormously powerful machine that can create all kinds of human advancement Public, private, governmental and I've become increasingly convinced, just from my last 10 years here, that the public sector has to lead more than it's done in the past and that gives us in the higher education, particularly the public higher education land-grant, large public universities with all the disciplines, a responsibility to lead on the policy-informing piece, but with an intellectual rigor that is going to be very important to preserve that trust and confidence. It can't be like shotgun approaches, or I have a hunch here and a hunch there. It's got to be based on the best confluence of disciplines, obviously, notably including the biophysical understanding how is the natural world going to evolve given these stresses and changes, as well as how is the societal world going to again and reactive to societal tensions, frankly, and proclivities there. So I think there's got to be more leadership from the research-intensive public, from the research intensive public, you know, and that's why I'm where I am, in terms of not just creating the knowledge base that we talked about before, but drawing the implications for future courses of action that will be beneficial.

Speaker 3:

The world is waiting for this. It's waiting, and you might argue that it's going to come from the large corporations, the Googles and the Apples. I'm not so sure it will. I think the range of disciplines has to go all the way through the deep humanities, starting with fundamental physics, chemistry, biology, mathematics, obviously, and computation IT is going to be very important mathematics, obviously, and computation IT is going to be very important. Ai is going to be a very significant player in these decisional paths, that all the way through the humanities. And I just feel like, in this timeframe, where the new knowledge is coming just in time, just in time to really help human society, that these platforms that we're honored and privileged to be charged with are really important.

Speaker 1:

The Not Alone podcast is a collaboration between Elsevier and Professor Raphael Brass. We bring unfiltered perspectives on global issues by research and academic leaders. Experts from MIT, harvard, ucla and beyond bring their conviction and compassion to a wide range of topics. Follow our channel for fresh content. And now back to the show.

Speaker 2:

You talk a lot about sort of not quoting you but using words that you implied. Academic institutions have to become more relevant. They have to become more relevant, probably in many different dimensions. Let it be economic development, let it be policy setting on environmental issues, let it be elections, let it be anything, but there are still a lot of people in academia, there are many institutions, that simply do not necessarily see it that way. Now I have to say that in my lifetime I've seen a dramatic change where most institutions that are worse than money certainly understand that that is the issue, and the top institutions in the world and the country do that.

Speaker 2:

But there are some that resisted, some faculty that resisted not the majority, but some do. Are we going to get over that hump?

Speaker 3:

We have to get over that hump too, and I fully appreciate what you're saying. I think part of the danger that we all face is complacency and arrogance. Right, those two factors can really slow progress down, and they can come from too much success, frankly, as well as a lack of appreciation of includes all of the public universities, the community colleges, the small towns that were erstwhile manufacturing centers, that need now a new job creation opportunity, and we're trying to do it in a way that lifts all boats, rather than having a winner here and multiple losers there and multiple losers there. And so it's the participation in job creation, in economic development that is regionally tailored and appropriate at scale, with excellence and integrity, is the way we address this conundrum, and we've got to do it, I believe, in ways that are grounded in the societies that are supporting us, and that you know we. So we froze tuition of seven of the last 10 years and the years we raised it it was like 1.8%, 2%. So we are committed to affordability, even though we could have raised tuition to make more resources available, and that it's because of our guiding principle that we want to serve the society in which we're embedded, which means that the downstate rural hinterlands need to be supported with access to jobs and access to educational opportunities, and so we need to do that as part of our mission. We need to do it in the world city of Chicago, we need to do it in the peri-urban mission. We need to do it in the world city of Chicago, we need to do it in the peri-urban settings, we need to do it in the small towns. So I do an annual tour of the state.

Speaker 3:

A couple of years ago, we went to Cairo, illinois, and they had no grocery in their community no grocery. So what's our response? Well, we found a way to put a community grocery in. No grocery. So what's our response? Well, we found a way to put a community grocery in. Well, that's a simple, single thing. But I can tell you that extraordinarily improved the standing of our university there. Oh boy, these folks not only visit it, but they care about what's going on in that community. Does it buy us an uptick in the rankings? No, is it something that we can brag about? No, but I think we've got to have a service role.

Speaker 3:

Raphael, if I can inflict upon's a tegaw house on the abana uh champagne, but one of his quote, it's only about like a 30 word quote is is something that stuck with me. He said I slept. I slept and thought that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted and behold, service is joy. So in those words, for me that's the whole encapsulation of what we need to do.

Speaker 3:

We need to serve because it's it's incumbent upon us to do that, which means we can't leave communities out or behind. This drives the whole. You know fairness, diversity, also language. That's being co-opted a little bit, and I think we need to recover the sort of Abraham Lincoln land grant kind of perspective where we want to have excellence, integrity at scale that's accessible to all and that's how you rebuild trust and confidence, not by compartmentalizing to make sure that you've got the smaller group. So we've grown our enrollment by 18,000 students in the last 10 years on my watch. We've just run it, we've just opened our doors. Yeah, more so, yeah, without any sacrifice in quality or excellence or outcomes.

Speaker 2:

It's almost going back to the basic concept of the land grant and the extension services in a new reincarnation, if I can put it that way, and there are some of your colleagues, particularly the president of Purdue University, who has been thinking along the same lines. So it's how you do that. Let me move a little bit to something you touched on, which is AI and technology, and I'll cut to the chase quickly on this one. Ai well, the jury is still out, but if you ask me it's here to stay, is still out, but if you ask me it's here to stay. It all of a sudden came from quiet to in everybody's lips and it came surprisingly, almost overnight, from one of the large technology startups funded and supported by a very large technology company. So the question is at the moment, the large language models and AI and so on are completely controlled by the private sector and a handful of very, very large corporations that have resources of people and money like nobody else, more than most countries. How do universities compete?

Speaker 3:

Well, thank you for the question. It's another big question. You're talking to the president of the university that created the first chat room among the first chat rooms, the first educational software, the first usable browser. So these IT innovations are kind of in our genome in a way, and this is another round of that. Now AI has been, you know, born.

Speaker 3:

You know University of Toronto was very significant in bringing to bear over decades. It's not going away, I completely agree. It's going to be embedded in education, it's going to be embedded in decision-making, it's going to be. So. It's got to be done well, with figures of merit that are not simply dollars saved and dollars made, but lead in the direction of human advancement. That is also the responsibility of universities, well-endowed, intellectually hefty universities like ours. We have three of the national 12 AI centers. We're leading the AI Center for STEM Education, for example, AI Center for Food Production, etc. So we're heavily into the use of AI as a family of tools to support advancement in lots of fronts. This need for the social sciences and the ethicists and the you know all of the all of the wrappings around it, so these don't become black boxes that are are leading us in directions that might not be because of the externalities involved, might not be ultimately beneficial for people. So we we have to, in this instance we have to push our way in intellectually working with those big companies, working on the rubrics and on the policies and on the standards, working with federal agencies, working with international partners, et cetera, and we're up to that. I think.

Speaker 3:

What I was talking about before in the economic development question was networks. We were talking about a network in Illinois that has all of these players connected by advanced cyber infrastructure and technology. We need networks of networks now. We need it regionally in the Midwest, the Great Lakes, which we're leading with University of Toronto. We need it in the hemisphere, which we're working with Mexico and Brazil to have, and then we need it internationally as well. So networks of networks that are connected to the inherent goodness of the higher education sector and research capacity, I think are going to be really really very important and can help drive the solution to the problems you're envisaging here.

Speaker 3:

When it all comes down, when you pare it all down, it's all about the students, right? You know James Carville had this thing during the Clinton election. It's the economy stupid. My version of that is it's the economy stupid. My version of that is it's the student. Stupid, because what we do in education is all about providing normally younger human beings with the kind of skill sets and the ability to discern and to utilize these new tools, and we need to liberate them, but with sort of guardrails against improper behavior or behavior that could be damaging long term. So you're touching on the challenges of our times.

Speaker 3:

The AI thing is a non-trivial, it's an opportunity space. We've got to take advantage of it and not just whine about what we see as negative things. I used to have on my laptop the 13th commandment thou shalt not whine, and I don't have it anymore, but you know I wrote underneath it one time unless it's world-class whining, which I think is okay to do. So I think we've got to step up our game in AI.

Speaker 3:

Quantum is another arena where we're heavily working on that with lots of partners. Quantum if the quantum computing and the quantum communications develop as fast as they appear to be, then they're going to be transformational as well to our sector. So we have to participate in these things like it mattered, and that's what we're trying to do in our network and we're trying to have these networks of networks, including Singapore, India, Brazil, Mexico as well, and I know you've heard me talk about that in the past. I think that intellectual globalization is part of the path forward, and I'm not talking about trade and geopolitical conflicts, I'm just talking about intellectual connectivity internationally, which is going to be, I think, important for the future.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, you said something that struck me and I think is a very good way of describing what needs to happen. If I recall correctly, you said we had to push ourselves into that conversation, and that's probably a very apropos way of describing the situation, because it's undeniable that the resources of these large corporations have proven to effectively be able to do things that not even governments have been able to achieve, and that is impressive, to say the least, and they will continue to do so. When you have corporations now owning nuclear power plants, you begin to question not question, that's the wrong word you begin to wonder how does the rest of the world, or the rest of us, create the boundaries? How do we interact when the power of balance seems so lopsided at times?

Speaker 3:

Well, I think you're right. I do think we need to push our way in Again. This is public-private governmental tripod that I referred to, where we cannot be in our sector, the public higher ed sector we cannot be passive recipients of things. Again, the human capital is key. I believe it's still true that the university that provides Microsoft with more employees is the University of Illinois. We're feeding these corporations with the kinds of technical insight and understanding and engineering that is driving these things there. I think that tripod has to really work better than it has in the recent past.

Speaker 3:

Now I'm not criticizing anything in terms of federal agencies or anything like that, but you just go back for a moment to climate challenge and when I was at NSF, I chaired or co-chaired the strategic plan for the 13 agency effort in global change and I at one calculated the total global investment in global change research. It was about $20 billion. This is 15 years ago or something like that. It sounds like a lot of money. That included NASA, noaa satellites. But I leave NSF and one day, one afternoon, one region, one storm, storm called Super Storm Sandy, hits the upstate New york 60 billion dollars damage.

Speaker 3:

So are we investing enough in understanding the human relationship with a planet that supports us. Who's gonna call that? Who's gonna lay that case out? We need to invest um energy and resources in deepening our understanding of the human condition, and that's got to be this tripod. Now, as I said earlier, I believe I've come to believe that the higher ed sector should not be a passive element of that tripod. In fact, it increasingly has to lead because it still has remnant public trust and confidence and standing. But we've got to earn that every day through the kinds of things we were talking about before, which is access, affordability, opportunities for job creation, so that people don't get left behind in the modern society. And if we go down the wrong path with AI, that's gonna make it even worse. There'll be an even bigger gulf between the haves and have-nots in our society and it'll show up in all kinds of ways.

Speaker 2:

I think, in fact, that gulf between the have and the have-nots is what is causing the lack of trust on science and academia. In a way, I was just reading recently we come from a period of growth where resources and growth were ample, yet we are moving now to a period where, even in some places, enrollment is falling and that growth model doesn't hold any longer. So people are mad. And people are mad because they see in this competitive, larger number of students potentially applying or interested or need not being able to get in, and that's driven by a sense of lack of affordability, lack of access. Affordability, lack of access, dealing with arrogant institutions something you have used before in this interview. What are your thoughts?

Speaker 3:

I think if we leave people behind intentionally, we'll be doing a disservice to the future. Basically, now, what does that mean? That means we can't give everybody a world-class higher educational experience and get a degree. So we've got to be more broad in our thinking about what our sector can do. K through lifelong learning. It's like a broader perspective.

Speaker 3:

It's not just the four-year in and out, what's your ranking in the US News World Report that matters. It's your impact on excellent, integrity and scale. I think scale is as important as the other elements of excellence and almost as important as anything else. So we need to open our doors, but in an intelligent way, not to just bring people in and have them flake out or not go forward. We've got to be focused on success and in these tours that I do of the state, we take our senior leadership and we go places where you can see that talent is everywhere right, but opportunity is not equally distributed. So we need to find a way to enable opportunity to map into talent to talent. If there's a youngster in East St Louis who's never been exposed to anything positive, you can't expect them to just imagine it and make it up. You've got to go there and you've got to give them an opportunity to do a hands-on team project, et cetera, and there are heroic instances of this happening. We need to scale up those instances so that we kind of in the broader setting I'm not talking about a university system only, I'm talking about a broader sort of societal function. So how to do that is very much on my mind now.

Speaker 3:

Obviously, working with community colleges is important. Working in high schools is important. Working in middle schools, k through lifelong learning, helping families assess the opportunity space, keeping things affordable is almost like number one, the number one job the more it's out of reach. So we've been increasing our financial aid and we've froze our tuition, we froze fees, we've tried to keep it within reach. We've got special agreements that if families make less than the median income it's free, no tuition, no fees. We've incorporated all of those kind of things to enable the talent to access the opportunity space.

Speaker 3:

Now, when you talk that way, you've got to actually create fair pathways for that to occur. If somebody is held back, has the potential, but they're held back through no fault of their own, somebody's got to intervene to open that gate so that the first exposure, the second exposure, can lead to better things and we don't do that intentionally enough in our educational sector. So I think and that's again comes back to the land-grant thinking which was all about providing opportunities for the working people in the agricultural fields and mechanical fields it's not going to be perfect, you can't do this overnight, instantaneously, but we've got to be seen as working on these structural issues of opportunity and talent and sometimes we get lost in again the jargon of programs that are criticized for not having enough product and too expensive and so forth. So we've got to be sort of more grounded in our thinking. I believe, and we're trying to do that. That's part of our mission as a big land-grant system in a state the size of the Netherlands. Right, we've got everything. We've got the rural, we've got the urban, we've got the manufacturing, we've got the IT, we've got the energy and the healthcare opportunities.

Speaker 3:

But healthcare, which I just mentioned, is an important part of this. If you don't have health, you're restricted to what you can do. Health and educational opportunity. It's still true that a huge number of schools in the state of Illinois have no AP offerings. We're trying to rectify that by providing it to all the schools. It's true that in the state of Illinois. There are life expectancy gaps of 16 years. You go from one county to another county. Now those are tractable problems. They're actually tractable problems because what you need is access to healthcare, you need screening, you need educational opportunities, you need good nutrition, et cetera. We need to sort of embrace all of these societal challenges with the tripod that I mentioned before, and I just feel these days that we have the lead, more than we've done in the past, from our sector and that's a non-trivial thing to take on. And you know, sometimes boards of trustees don't see that as relevant, sometimes important stakeholders don't see that as relevant. But I think if we don't do it we will exacerbate some of the societal tensions that have been building.

Speaker 2:

One of the tensions societal tensions that've been building, certainly have come up lately over the last year in all the debate about geopolitics and Gaza and Israel, those particular issues. The key question is how do we maneuver, navigate the sometimes tenuous balance between free speech and the right to express disagreement? How do we manage that? How institutions manage that? Some institutions, as you know, have taken the idea that institutional neutrality is the only way to go, that institutions should not respond to anything, simply stay quiet if it does not have to do with the academic enterprise and their own research enterprise. How do you manage that you have three campuses under your oversight?

Speaker 3:

Well, we're not immune from all of those pressures that you pointed out, and particularly the last several years they've been sort of manifest and COVID brought them out significantly as well. And how we responded to COVID was based on providing resources and support for our community. We just developed a test that was massively deployed 10 million tests. We tested everybody so we knew exactly the virus couldn't hide. So you've got to be seen as contributing Now when it comes to free speech on campus, obviously in order to generate the human capital and has ability to recognize, to be truth-seeking, to have discernment, to be able to hear sometimes objectionable points of view from others without becoming violent or having outrage sort of take over or having outrage sort of take over. We have to manage that with young people and you know we've never seen I'm sure you've never seen a temperamental 18-year-old right. So we have all of those things on our campuses. We need to embrace free speech, but we also need to balance it with safety and with recognition that we're a shared space for a broad community with lots of different perspectives and attitudes and you can't take one piece of it and thrust it down everybody else's. So we try to do that.

Speaker 3:

We talk about this continuously, about this continuously. We've had many protest issues, but it's all about the students. So you know, safety of our students, no violence, please. This is a common place for us. It's a learning organization and in terms of statements that ex cathedra kinds of statements that the university might make, picking a side or not, we avoid that.

Speaker 3:

But there are some things that are so fundamental that affect our student body itself. And you mentioned the Middle East. We have many Jewish students, we have many Palestinian students. We have a lot of anxiety, even anguish, in multiple of our population. We care about everybody, but we don't have statements coming out all the time on this, that and the other thing. But we have not adopted the Calvin approach, which is the University of Chicago approach. For me that seems too absolutist. But we have also strayed away from the politically charged language which is being co-opted in lots of different directions by lots of different sides. Because if you just embrace even some forms of language, you're either building a barricade or tearing it down or burning it down, and we should not be about building barricades. We should be about lifting people into circumstances where they can contribute to society in ways that acknowledge differences of opinions, that are able to hear things but still participate well.

Speaker 3:

I think we've navigated it pretty well. Now I'm touching wood as I say that you know, who knows what could happen tomorrow, but nobody's gotten hurt. We've had some instances where there was bad behavior, that people are being held accountable in ways that you know I think are defensible. But we don't want to be in the crosshairs of a cultural configuration either, and I think it's incumbent upon the leadership to focus on our day job, which is educators.

Speaker 2:

The issue is particularly unique in that you and I have spoken about this before because it's from within, In other words, we find ourselves in our friends and community. All sides are represented. So it's more akin of a terrible term to use but a civil war than a unifying front against some external pressure, which was the early 70s, late 60s, against the war, and the campuses were in an uproar much bigger than what we've seen here now. But it was different. Now it's a lot more complicated, Maybe smaller but far more complicated. So let me say that you said something, that I am glad you said it and I agree Any absolutist policy is bound to be violated, and I think those were the words that you sort of implied or used relative to a Calvin-type policy.

Speaker 3:

I think we have to live in the time frame in this history, historical circumstances that we're in and recognize the dignity and importance of every member of our community, and that's so. We've got a set of guiding principles that goes through the board and we we adhere to those guiding principles and we avoid getting politicized. When you know I'm asked, as I am with some donors and some alumni, you know where we might stand on a thing I say you know. You can be sure of one thing we are absolute partisans for our students. That's our partisanship. We partisan elsewhere, but talk about our students. We are, you know, here to help them develop and succeed, wherever they come from, whatever they look like, whatever their accents are, and we want to do that at scale. And, rafael, I have to tell you, we educate more Latino physicians than every other institution in the country except Puerto Rico.

Speaker 2:

Wonderful. You have been certainly very focused on repeating that students are in the forefront of everything, and that sort of North Star in your leadership style is quite important. So let me address questions of leadership a little bit more. Who are your heroes? Do you have any heroes that you would say you aspire to be like?

Speaker 3:

Oh yeah, many, many. And you know, just popping into my head, somebody you probably know, ari Patrinos was. You know, he basically drove two amazingly important things. Basically drove two amazingly important things. One is the US Global Change Research Program, which has been seminal for this understanding, but the second one was the Human Genome Project. He did both of those things. Without Ari they would not have happened.

Speaker 3:

So there's one person who is very mild-mannered, not out there, you know, big social media presence, look how great I am, but boy did he contribute. So I would like to have that kind of quiet, considerate leadership style with. I can't aspire to that kind of impact, but Ari's another name that pops into my mind. Maybe you don't know, or maybe you do Raphael Rangel-Sostmann. I don't know if you know Raphael. Oh, maybe you do, raphael Rangel-Sostmann. I don't know if you know Raphael. He was the for about 36 years. He was the rector of Tec de Monterrey when it grew like massively. Raphael was on my advisory committee and he was doing student success deeply before it became a thing. Right Before there were consultants and software packages et cetera. They were going through student by student by student. Are you late? Five minutes to class focused on student outcomes and success and that led to public trust and confidence. And so there's a person again with a leadership style that was. That was. I would call it a generous, you know servant leadership style and you know I love Rita Caldwell, who was with NSF and really you know her thinking about graduate students and the role that they can play, I think was really important for the Times. Cora Marrett as as well. I worked with it, so I could go on and on and on about people in my sector who are.

Speaker 3:

I've also already mentioned Tegel and his quote. I think that's worth with. Thinking about that. Service is joy. Again, it comes back to this servant leadership perspective, but with a leadership approach that takes on the challenges. Those are the kinds of leaders that I like to see. Of course, jimmy Carter just passed away. That was a different time, but he was concerned about global change back then when education breeds character and intellect, right. But he also went on to say that if done improperly, it will lead to illogical propagandists consumed by immoral purposes. Wow, that's a quote that struck me across the face, right, whoa. If done improperly, it can actually make things worse. I've always been a believer that education is the antidote to everything that ails society. So I'm now thinking, boy, we've got to make sure we do this really, really well, with integrity and honor, and so that's another insight that I've taken on this year.

Speaker 2:

That's a great quote, by the way, which I had not heard before. But censored content, censored education is, I think, at heart propaganda, and that, I think, is what he is addressing, which is a wonderful thought of how education can do harm if done improperly Indeed. How much do you rely on advisors?

Speaker 3:

Oh, a lot. You're one of them. As you know, I've always gone to my quaint term Rolodeck and picked people that I really respect and asked them to help us with insights and perspectives on what we're doing, how we're going about doing it and perspectives on what we're doing. How we're going about doing it. I've done this at SUNY, I did this at Michigan, I did this at NSF, and if you get advisors who are able to challenge your thinking, able to give you a sense of what's worked in the past and maybe not so well in the past pitfalls can critique what you're saying and how you're going about saying it and doing it. I think it adds a huge amount of value.

Speaker 3:

I think this, the model of servant leadership which I try to aspire to, needs input from people who care deeply about the guiding principles of the enterprise but have experiences that go way beyond what your limited perspectives might be. I'm always honored when I'm asked to provide advice and you know I'm thinking, boy, I'm this Welsh kid from Cairo, what do I know? But I think it's very important to put time and energy into listening to viewpoints and gaining advice. And uh, no, I mentioned a couple of people rafael gave.

Speaker 3:

Uh, you know, student success became like a much bigger part of, and that involves mentoring, bridge programs, summer programs. You know all the things that go to create a successful outcome and I'm proud to say that we have wonderful graduation rates that are high but can get higher still. With that emphasis on once you get somebody make it work, don't bring them in and let them flail and underperform. And that's where fairness and actually equity comes into play, because you can't expect everybody to be self-motivated sufficiently to succeed. They need intervention and help. This goes into representation on committees and awards, it goes into underserved communities, all the way through. So I'm not sure if I answered your last question.

Speaker 2:

You have, you have, and I have to say the Welsh kid has come a long way. Thank you so much, tim. I do have one regret about this interview, and that is that I did not ask you to bring your guitar, which I would have loved for you to play. You're a classic guitar player, I understand, and I've never heard you play, so it would have been a fantastic opportunity Next time.

Speaker 3:

I have a little YouTube thing I could point you to on some of the things I've done. But you know I was out in Singapore, I'm on the board of the National University of Singapore and they had a dinner in my honor and they knew as well that I played classic guitar, or at least tried to. I'm an aspiring you know wannabe kind of musician. They brought a guitar from the conservatory to the dinner. Oh wow, they waited until I'd had a glass of wine.

Speaker 2:

Next time we'll do this in person, I'll bring the wine. Thank you so much, team. I think the Not Alone audience will be thrilled with this hour we have spent together.

Speaker 3:

It's always a pleasure to talk to you, rafael. Thank you for including me in this. Take care, you too.

Speaker 1:

Thank you for tuning in to this episode of Not Alone Leaders in Conversation. We hope this discussion today sparked new ideas and left you with plenty to think about as you continue to lead in your own institution. If you found this conversation interesting, insightful or thought-provoking, please share this episode with your colleagues, peers and friends, and don't forget to subscribe to the podcast on your preferred platform so you can stay up to date with our latest episodes.