This is Reimagining The Future of Higher Education from Studiosity. Your go-to podcast with remarkable education leaders, sharing personal stories from their experience in and around the sector, including reflection and evidence for progress in the sector. With your host, Professor Judyth Sachs, former DVC Learning and Teaching at the University of Sydney, Deputy Vice-Chancellor and Provost Macquarie University and Special Advisor in Higher Education at KPMG and now Chief Academic Officer at Studiosity.
Prof Judyth Sachs:
Let me first introduce Arthur Levine, an educator, a scholar, an advocate, a radical, and a great contemporary thinker about higher education.
Dr Arthur Levine:
Wow.
Prof Judyth Sachs:
Previously President of Teachers College Columbia. One of the great education institutions, but also in a new role working with the Woodrow Wilson Institute. So Arthur, thank you for talking to me today. But let me first of all, start by saying...
Dr Arthur Levine:
My pleasure.
Prof Judyth Sachs:
I wish to acknowledge that I am talking to you today on the on the lands of the Darkinyung people from the Central Coast of New South Wales. I acknowledge elders past, present, and future and acknowledge their contribution to the cultural life of Australia and elsewhere. We recognise the unique cultural and spiritual relationships and celebrate the contributions of First Nations people to Australia. So, Arthur, tell me what you brought to demonstrate your...
Dr Arthur Levine:
I have brought a palm tree model. And the reason for it is this. It's that in the business district of Warsaw, Poland, there's a twenty-six metre palm tree. Now we both know they can't grow palm trees in Poland. It's too cold. What happened was they always wanted a palm tree. So they had an artist make one. And so they have this model of a palm tree in the centre of the city. And it looks terrific. But the point they're bringing is this. What it means is that if you want something, if something is important to you, really important to you, you can make it happen.
Prof Judyth Sachs:
Wow. So when was this built, was this after the Second World War, or is it fairly recent?
Dr Arthur Levine:
No. It was built sometime in the 21st century, and it was some time, maybe 2011.
Prof Judyth Sachs:
Extraordinary. So using that as a metaphor, can you sort of translate that into your life as a leader and a learner?
Dr Arthur Levine:
Maybe. Let me try. Let me try.Basically what I believe is that the reason to go into the field of education is that it's the most effective way to change the world. Maybe the slowest but the, but the most effective. I'm a product of the late 1960s and early seventies. And I brought with me that spirit, that change is necessary and society can be better than it is. And therefore it's very important to hold on to the dreams and even more important to bring them to fruition.
"Basically what I believe is that the reason to go into the field of education is that it's the most effective way to change the world. Maybe the slowest but the, but the most effective."
Prof Judyth Sachs:
I totally agree. But do you think I mean, that's that's an idealistic point of view. It's an aspirational point of view. And in your, in your writing and in The Great Upheaval we'll go through it, dig deep into that a little bit later. But are there conditions now working against that noble aspiration, or are you confident that we can still have that noble aspiration?
Dr Arthur Levine:
I am told, limited extent. Let me explain this. Which is for the last year and a half I've been speaking to a lot of university audiences. Faculty, staff, key administrators. And for the most part, our presidents, our vice chancellors have brought me to the campus. And the reason is that they know the world changed in the, in the aftermath of Covid, and they can't figure out what to do with it. They can't figure out how to respond to it. And so what I generally tell faculties is that they've been given a daunting challenge. And that challenge is to reinvent higher education for the 21st century, moving from being a national analogue industrial institution to a global digital knowledge economy institution. Which requires a very different brand of education. And so what I've said is you can't not change, if you try to ride this out, the dramatic demographic changes, the dramatic economic changes, the dramatic technological changes, you will fail as an institution. So why not use this moment to dream? And to enact your dreams. And on top of that, to recognise that you've been given an opportunity, a new generation since the Industrial Revolution, has been given an opportunity to reconceive higher education.
Prof Judyth Sachs:
You, in your book you draw on the story of University of Chicago. Which is, in many respects listening to you now, is an embodiment of that sort of dream and that-that sense of vision. What do you think educators can take now from that, that sort of as a prototype for really, and you talk about looking back, looking forward and looking sideways. So if we look back and then look forward and perhaps looking sideways. What-what if you were given the role to start up a new institution, yikes.
Dr Arthur Levine:
Why would you wish that on me?
Prof Judyth Sachs:
As soon as I said it, I thought why did I say that. But-but still, if you, if you were given that and you know, you don't have to start of with a thirty-thousand student institution, but sort of a higher education laboratory.
Dr Arthur Levine:
Can I change your question just slightly? I'll get to the same point I promise.
Prof Judyth Sachs:
Of course.
Dr Arthur Levine:
I want to describe another example that's in the book, I think it's in the book. It's the University of Wisconsin.
Prof Judyth Sachs:
And I know that well.
Dr Arthur Levine:
Okay. So the president of the University of Wisconsin in 1905 announces that the borders of his campus are the border of the state of Wisconsin, which is one of the fifty US states. And what he does is he reconstructs the university. He makes it inextricably part of the world in which it exists. He builds, rebuilds research. Yes, they do basic research, but they're also doing very applied research. What he does is he creates courses, not only for academics, but for farmers, for commercial people, for people in government. His faculty get involved with policy, his faculty get involved with practice. They bring government people to campus, they create an agricultural lab. They experiment with all kinds of things that could be applied in the field. One of our muckraking journalists sometime thereafter, a fellow named Lincoln Steffens, described that you might just as well see a University of Wisconsin professor work on the train going out to the fields, as to see him walking around the campus. And that's really what had happened and probably the most interesting thing to me is Van Hise was testifying before the state legislature and one legislator said, what's the University of Wisconsin ever done for this state? And Van Hise said, we invented the cow. And, you know, they really had to some extent, they changed breeding, they changed health, they changed the economics, they changed the products, they changed, you name it. Dairy was a different industry because of the University of Wisconsin. And what that story told me was about the need for universities to be tied into their communities. What happens when the world changes, as it is now. Universities are most successful when they have one foot in the library, which is the collective wisdom of humanity. And one foot in the street. When the world changes at the speed, at the depth, at the continuing pace, universities lose traction with the street. And one of the most important things they need to do is regain traction, regain their place in the street. And so that's what Van Hise did. He moved the university back to the street. Or the dairy farmers, [inaudible]
"Universities are most successful when they have one foot in the library, which is the collective wisdom of humanity. And one foot in the street. When the world changes at the speed, at the depth, at the continuing pace, universities lose traction with the street."
Prof Judyth Sachs:
It's interesting though, with University of Wisconsin, each-each campus has a different ecosystem, a different purpose. I've spent two sabbaticals at Madison. So I know Madison very well. And Madison became one of the hotbeds of radicalism during the 1960s. And there are still messages that in terms of the brutalist protectionist architecture. And so that's-that's sort of part of who it is. And then you've got the Republican seat of government in Madison as well. So you've got this sort of tension between the university and the community. So how do universities manage those sorts of tensions as well?
Dr Arthur Levine:
The one thing I'd say, Madison or Wisconsin, before the student radicalism also produced Senator McCarthy and the anti-communist wave in America so that universities can't suddenly thrust themselves in their communities and announce, Here's what you need and here's what you're going to do. It means what universities need to do is talk to their community. They need to talk industry. They need not only their colleagues, they need to look outward. They need to talk to government. They need to talk to their communities. They need to understand what's truly necessary in the world in which they exist and provide it. I've been visiting a lot of campuses lately. And the thing that I knew was true but surprised me nonetheless was I kept being asked, in recognition that something's got to change, what new subjects should we add? And I tell them I've been here for three hours, I don't know what subjects you should add, but I bet your community does. I bet business does. And we need to look outward in a way we don't traditionally do.
"And the thing that I knew was true but surprised me nonetheless was I kept being asked, in recognition that something's got to change, what new subjects should we add? And I tell them I've been here for three hours, I don't know what subjects you should add, but I bet your community does. I bet business does. And we need to look outward in a way we don't traditionally do."
Prof Judyth Sachs:
So in the UK they talk about the civic university and in places like in the north, at Lincoln University, it's the, the university is very connected to the community. Do you see that that's a way to reimagine higher education for those better links, that sort of creating the university as part of the whole social ecosystem of the community?
Dr Arthur Levine:
And they all have different communities. ANU is national. What we find is that [New] South Wales is regional and everyone has a different community. And so we're talking about paying attention in very different kinds of ways than traditionally. Let me give you an example. And this is, it can't be more local than this example. I was visiting Amarillo College, which is in Texas. And I was having dinner with the president the night before I spoke. And he said well we planned our entire university around Maria. And I didn't really know what he was talking about. He said Maria is Latino. She's twenty-six. She has two kids. She works two jobs. She attends college part-time. And he said, So what that means is that we need to provide education, what it boiled down to was the five Cs. We need to know who our students are. And since students don't start with a 'c', we need to know who our customers are, or our consumers. Second, we need to make it convenient for them. I know most of my career I offered courses that were convenient for me. We needed to offer this concept of convenience to our students. And we also need to provide the content they need and the delivery system they need. I know, I know Australia is moving into short courses and microcredentials. Well, that's something they're going to be asking for and something Maria asked for. And they're doing a hybrid medium online. They doing in-person. And what they also thought was that they really needed to do something about cost. I know that in the United States we have a high student debt problem. I know Australia has got an average of $25,000 in student debt. So that, well ours is thirty-seven so we're way ahead of you, which I'm sorry to say. But they couldn't provide, they couldn't change tuition for Maria. So instead they had a capital campaign. And in their capital campaign they raised money for scholarships that give Maria more financial aid. And Maria also needed special kinds of financial aid. She is very poor. And it may mean that she couldn't come to college some days because she didn't have bus fare. They needed to provide the resources for Maria to be able to ride the bus. That's an extraordinary story. When I went to visit the campus for their orientation for staff and faculty, the president talked to me about Maria and I thought, I don't know if anybody's paying attention. So I looked around, people were wrapped. And then what happened next was the faculty governing committee got up. And whereas the President talked about what they've done for Maria last year, they talked about what they're going to do for Maria this year. It was extraordinary way to define the community. I don't think there are very many universities in Australia that can define their community that way. There are perhaps more VETs that can. But not-uh-the university system. But they can define some community.
Prof Judyth Sachs:
So was Maria a mythical person, or was Maria a metaphor for the broader project of what they were trying to do?
Dr Arthur Levine:
Maria was a good model. She wasn't a real person. She was a good model for what their students look like. They personalised the model.
Prof Judyth Sachs:
So is that, is that, I mean if-if we sort of take a-a helicopter view, that we actually have to sort of get people to imagine themselves in the lives of students and in imagining the lives of students, they will see that, in fact, many students are doing it tough and get them to imagine the lives of researchers, to imagine the lives of teachers. Because for many, you know, I don't know about you, but when I was working at a university, people would say, Oh, you've got the long holidays, you can have fun. Well, the long holidays was when you got your work done.
Dr Arthur Levine:
And so, what are you asking me?
Prof Judyth Sachs:
It's just that is-is-is this sort of way, the way that you've used Maria as an example, an exemplar of if universities are stuck, how to start rethinking because you're talking about you know, we're talking about reimagining and rethinking higher education.
Dr Arthur Levine:
Yeah. And what I'm really saying is. When I was professor at Harvard, we could not conceive of identifying our university as one student. The place we were talking about just now was a teaching college. It wasn't a university. So in that sense, the way universities define themselves in terms of research they do - who is that research for? What's that research for? In terms of the teaching - what do we teach? Who do we teach? And in terms of the services we provide to society, that's how you define community.
Prof Judyth Sachs:
My sense that in Australia there's this sort of homogeneity of universities. They all look pretty much the same. And you know, they all do research, they all do teaching, and they all do service. In the US there's more differentiation because you've got the liberal arts colleges that sadly for financial reasons and probably that the times are starting to decline. You've got the-the state universities, you've got the elite universities, you've got the private universities. So, it seems to me that the Americans have got a clearer sense of the purpose of the university. But do we need a common purpose of the university? I mean, I've done a lot of work at Lund University, you know one of those relatively new universities that was established in 1666.
Dr Arthur Levine:
Exactly.
Prof Judyth Sachs:
We don't have anything like this. They know who they are.
Dr Arthur Levine:
Yes, but I'm willing to bet, and I don't know what I'm talking about, which gives me more confidence in betting, that Adelaide needs, the University of Adelaide can provide different kinds of things to Adelaide than the things that are needed in Sydney. And ANU, despite Australia's questions about national universities, can offer some things to the country that others can't. What are those things? What does Adelaide need most? What about Melbourne?
Prof Judyth Sachs:
Submarines, working with the Americans for AUKUS.
Dr Arthur Levine:
Exactly, exactly. I think that's the perfect answer.
Prof Judyth Sachs:
So, so you get the recognition that they are different. And look, having worked at University of Sydney for twelve years and having done a lot of consultancy work for the ANU for the last few years as well. The ANU makes a real sense that we are Australia's national university and that, that's their great point of differentiation and that's-that's what actually makes people proud to be there. But it's small, it's in the nation's capital. The President, Vice Chancellor has access to politicians. And so I guess that sort of, the political relationship, so relationships actually with communities, with politicians, with you know, the captains of industry, are probably fundamental to the role of vice chancellor or president in your case.
Dr Arthur Levine:
Right. I think the question becomes, let's take the University of Sydney. And they must have about 75,000 students, graduate and undergraduate. And the question is, what does Sydney need out of its university? There must be things it needs. There are policy issues that are local, not national. And clearly that's something a university can do research on. I think in basic research they'll probably all be the same. But I must admit if I could reinvent universities, they'd all have a somewhat different purpose. We don't all need to be doing the same research. We could differentiate.
Prof Judyth Sachs:
We don't need every university to have a, a law school.
Dr Arthur Levine:
Right.
Prof Judyth Sachs:
And a business school.
Dr Arthur Levine:
You're right. So that we could certainly, without diminishing the quality of the University of Sydney certainly geared more and placing more in the needs of Sydney. And I can't see how that would hurt.
Prof Judyth Sachs:
Can we can we get back to your life as a student? What was your undergraduate and your postgraduate experience like as a student?
Dr Arthur Levine:
Oh, and now I have to tell all. I wasn't a marvellous student as an undergraduate. I finished in the bottom quarter of my college class. But I had a wonderful time. Just a wonderful time. And I was very active in student politics. Very active. And I remember a demonstration I went to and the president of the university came out and it wasn't me who said this, but he said, You're bringing this university to its knees, what would you have me do? And some wise guy in the back said 'Buy kneepads' and I became a college president, I'm guessing twelve years later. And the day I arrived in my office, there was a huge package filled with kneepads. Just filled with kneepads. So that was my undergraduate education. My undergraduate degree was in cell biology. And my graduate degree was in higher education slash sociology. I fell in love with Education while I was in college.
Prof Judyth Sachs:
And was, were you transformed as a person through education? Your undergraduate education, was that a transformative experience? Sounds as you became politicised.
Dr Arthur Levine:
I was certainly politicised. And, but I was never a radical, I was a liberal when that was still a reasonable thing for people to be. And what? What it really did for me was social mobility. I grew up in the South Bronx. Which is one of the poor neighbourhoods in the United States. My father hadn't finished high school. And what university did for me was move me along in terms of mobility and opportunity and opened up to me a world that would have, never would have been available to me. Because poor neighbourhood's constraint. They very heavily constraint and they can't see what's beyond their borders.
Prof Judyth Sachs:
That's true. That's true. So that, did you ever imagine yourself as a university president?
Dr Arthur Levine:
No, I didn't. Yes and no. By the time I graduated from college, I knew I wanted to do two things. One was to be a university president. And the other was to be a senior researcher in a higher education think tank. And it took me a while to get there. I did take the medical boards. I did take the law boards, which are the admissions tests. I did take the graduate record exam for graduate school. I did take the national teacher exam. I did take the business boards. I did take the State Department exam. The Educational Testing Service in the United States had a huge picture of me in their lobby because for two years I was their best customer. I didn't know what I wanted to do.
Prof Judyth Sachs:
Right. So if we can now return to Maria. Maria being a student. What was your, I mean you talked about your undergraduate experience being really, really good, but your postgraduate experience, postgraduate education can be quite lonely. You know, the loneliness of writing your dissertation, doing your research. What was it like for you and where did you do your PhD?
Dr Arthur Levine:
The State University of New York in Buffalo.
Prof Judyth Sachs:
Oh, you went there for the, for the weather?
Dr Arthur Levine:
Absolutely. Absolutely. I had this winter coat, I really wanted to try. So that, I loved my graduate education. And the reason was, I need to step back a bit. When I was president at Teachers College people regularly came to me and said, I'm thinking about going to graduate school. And what I would tell them was there are only two reasons to go to graduate school. One is you can't bear not to study the subject matter. And second, you absolutely need this credential for what it is you want to do. If neither one of those is true, go to work. And when I got to graduate school, I was in love with the subject area. I wanted to know everything I could learn at that university. Everything. And so that was a glorious experience for me. And plus, it's weird. I published my first book my first year of graduate school. So people treated me nicely.
Prof Judyth Sachs:
So in terms of the current student experience, I mean, it really has been a watershed of, you know, Covid, we learnt a lot. We learnt a lot about how students learn. We learnt a lot about student expectations. We learnt a lot about diverse learning styles. We learnt a lot about poverty and how, you know, there's such inequity in terms of students trying to study in a small apartment where there was only one computer dealing, you know, managing a whole, a whole family. So how do you, how do you reimagine student, the student experience nowadays, given given that this, this was probably, it was the best of times and the worst of times.
"So how do you, how do you reimagine student, the student experience nowadays, given given that this, this was probably, it was the best of times and the worst of times."
Dr Arthur Levine:
And just for people who may be watching, Australia and the United States, really had similar impacts from Covid. We both lost a moment and Australia as well with international students. And we both went entirely online. And we both had a number of new providers, who weren't colleges and universities, providing post-secondary education. And we both got more heavily into short courses. Because students wanted just in time education. They wanted to learn how to do something now, prepare me for this by Thursday. So when you ask the question. Of what I imagine in terms of student experience. The reality of the United States is that 18% of all of our college students are eighteen to twenty-four years old, live on or near a campus residence and attend full-time. So what we think of as the traditional college experience, it's something that's enjoyed by only a minority. And my biggest fear right now is that since we've created so many new online providers. It's that we create, we exacerbate a system in which there are two forms of higher education. One for the very wealthy, and one to the less wealthy. One is in-person. One is in residence. One is full-time. And the other one is part time, online, anywhere, anytime and cheaper. That's wrong. In 1947, the President of the United States, Harry Truman, created a commission on the future of higher education. And it said what we need is two things. We need to ensure access to higher education. And we need to ensure choice in higher education. And we've done better on access, though we're far from perfect, then we have on choice. And we really do need it now. We desperately need that now. So when I think about universities. And the United States has four thousand degree-granting universities, just shy of that. So when you think about how you get your arms around this entire enterprise, the place for action right now is our fifty states. We don't have a federal Ministry of Education. We have a Department of Education, but the authority for education is all to the states. So there are fifty different locales. So in my last job at Woodrow Wilson. What I did was work with states to try to make the kinds of changes that we've been talking about. And I think all that's possible. I had an opportunity in the last several years, when I was President at Woodrow Wilson. The president of MIT and I decided to create a freestanding education school. And what it would be was a graduate school. And it would be competency based. And by that, what I mean is students would, we'd throw out the clock. Students would advance entirely according to mastery of subject matter. Which they would demonstrate so it was an outcome based school. That was very, very hard to create. How do you create internships and apprenticeships when the clock doesn't matter anymore? How do you make those competency based? So I got an excellent chance to create the kind of school I wanted to create. And I was grateful for it.
"The president of MIT and I decided to create a freestanding education school. And what it would be was a graduate school. And it would be competency based. And by that, what I mean is students would, we'd throw out the clock. Students would advance entirely according to mastery of subject matter."
Prof Judyth Sachs:
So give me a sense of what the student experience would would be like in that school.
Dr Arthur Levine:
The students would, they couldn't no, we only allowed them to enrol once a year. Or it would have been terrible because students advanced according to their own mastery. So we had one set of competencies they had to master. And there were performance competencies, there were knowledge competencies. And students had to demonstrate those things. And the competencies, you could do it, you could do some of it by reading. You do some of it by participating in interactive activities. You could do some of it by online. You could do some of it by, all kinds of things but the end result was each competency had a mentorship and an assessment, and what we could do is guide students. So the way higher education is right now, what happens is that, imagine if your GPS, I don't know what they're called in Australia.
Prof Judyth Sachs:
Satellite navigation.
Dr Arthur Levine:
Yeah. If you satellite navigation, which is wonderful, what happens is you make a mistake and it tells you where you made it and you change it. But imagine if it worked like a course. And you only got readings say every fifteen weeks. So you get in your car, you tell it where it wants to go. Let's make this easier, let's say it's an hour. They're giving you readings every hour. At the end of an hour it says you're now much further away from where you started. You're going in the wrong direction. Recalculating. That's not useful. Why would I want that? What we're going to see in schools and this is what we have with the school we created, we could catch students as they go along, all evaluation was formative. Until the final evaluation which was summative. Okay, we've just assessed you. You need to fix this, you need to fix that. Here's how you might do that. I remember walking into a simulated classroom. So that the student was talking to a screen. And in this classroom, a mother had just come in and told the teacher that, now remember this isn't a real mother, this is a cartoon. Came in and told the student that she was the worst teacher who'd ever taught. That she had done horrible things to her son. And the student can stop this any time she wants to stop it. And after a few minutes, the student was crying. And she stopped it. And her instructor talked to her about what she had done. And they agreed upon a new course. Mother came in again, told her what a terrible teacher she was and you know what she handled it this time. And the third time she even looked good. So it's this kind of instruction that makes the enormous difference.
Prof Judyth Sachs:
So you're talking about a personalised approach, but also you're talking about different kinds of assessment.
Dr Arthur Levine:
Yeah, I am. And of course it could be a while before we get there. What I just described is not cheap.
Prof Judyth Sachs:
How many students?
Dr Arthur Levine:
It was in the earliest days, it was never over two hundred. We were bringing it to scale and then the University of Kansas adopted it. Just took it, moved it to Kansas. And decided to use the model to influence its entire program.
Prof Judyth Sachs:
And the students that enrolled in it were they the elite students? Or were they?
Dr Arthur Levine:
And you know what we quickly realised was, if we only had elite students then other universities could say, Well, we can't do that, we don't have students like these. So we made our midpoint be what the general population looked like at education schools. And that was a good thing to do. The other thing we tried to do and we never reached it. For this to be diffused we need it for, it to be at a price point for students and a cost for universities that wasn't prohibitive. And we haven't gotten there yet.
Prof Judyth Sachs:
So Arthur just to sort of round out our conversation, which-which I have, I'm just mesmerised with the ideas that are coming forward. But, what advice would you give to the young Arthur Levine? And what advice would you give to people who are going into senior leadership roles in terms of how they navigate their futures?
Dr Arthur Levine:
My college roommate and I were having a talk recently. And I said the twenty-one year old Arthur Levine, if told what happened to his life would tell me I sold out. And my roommate who is a, who's a lawyer who helps special children, said No he wouldn't and mine wouldn't think that of me either. I don't agree with him wholly. The world was black and white when I was young. But you know what I'd tell him, Do what you did, you chose a good path. Follow it. After college my friend and I did some research and wrote a book. My father was appalled. But that book made my career. And what do I tell leaders? I spend a lot of time with leaders these days. And one piece of advice I give them, Scare the hell out of your faculty, tell them the truth and then invite them to join you in creating the future. And in some respects, the times are so dramatic. We won't be able to keep doing what we're doing. I was looking at the numbers of universities that are working with online program managers. It's thirty-three of the universities in the system. And Coursera, which is non-modern, has at least five out of eight of the big eight. So what we're seeing is a whole set of new challenges that no matter how well we think of ourselves. Students are going to have a lot more choice than they've ever had. Students are also going to be able to use technology in ways we never imagined. And colleges and universities are going to have in their hands AI, and virtual reality, and AR. And that's all going to be there. We can create anything for education. And if universities don't do it others will.
"I spend a lot of time with leaders these days. And one piece of advice I give them, Scare the hell out of your faculty, tell them the truth and then invite them to join you in creating the future."
Prof Judyth Sachs:
So I'm also hearing you, leaders have to have a high appetite for risk. And for many, they are conservative because of the boards that they manage.
Dr Arthur Levine:
I sort of lost track of where I was going. Let me finish the thought and I apologise. Yes, they have to have a sense of risk. That's very true in the United States. I don't know to what extent it's true in Australia. But I do know this. This is a time for dreamers. But it's also a time for people who can talk to other people. We need presidents who can work with other people, who can work with faculties, who can work with trustees, who can listen. Listening is a really important skill these days. That's very important. And the thing I used to tell college presidents when they asked, what do I need to know. I would always tell them this before the world went crazy. Maybe it's crazy, and I just didn't know. But in any case, what I'd tell them is learn history. Nothing you're going to face hasn't happened in some form earlier. Find out what happened, what it did, and what worked. It was the best tool I could think of.
Prof Judyth Sachs:
And look, as a social scientist myself, I agree. Arthur thank you for a most enjoyable forty-five minutes.
Dr Arthur Levine:
Oh my goodness, yes.
Prof Judyth Sachs:
And I guess it's probably wine o'clock for you now.
Dr Arthur Levine:
No, it's almost five.
Prof Judyth Sachs:
No wine.
Dr Arthur Levine:
Oh, yeah, wine o'clock.
Prof Judyth Sachs:
I know English is such a hard language to understand.
Dr Arthur Levine:
I'm going to wait an hour and sixteen minutes. It was a pleasure to meet you. And I really enjoyed listening to your other broadcasts.
Prof Judyth Sachs:
Oh, I'm glad that you know that, I think it's a great privilege. And I think it's a privilege that I can contact people and for the Australian ones I know most of them because we were all deputy vice chancellors together. I decided that I, after doing transformational work for seven and a half years in a university, I was exhausted and I'd do something else. So I'm glad that you enjoy them. There's one that I did this week with the Vice Chancellor of Edith Cowan University. Listen to that one. In Australian, that's what we call a cracker.
Dr Arthur Levine:
I can't wait. I can't wait to hear a cracker!
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