And now from the Blue Ridge PBS studios in Roanoke, virginia. It's the Virginians of Interest podcast, with your hosts Brian Campbell and Karthin Curran.

Welcome to the Virginians of Interest podcast. My name is Brian Campbell. My friend Karthin Curran can't be with us today. We're excited to have Dr Debbie Sideout today from Richard Bland College as our special guest. Welcome, dr Sideout. Thank you, brian. Tell us a little bit about yourself. I know we just had a brief chance to chat. You're a Virginia native. Tell us about where you grew up and your education and how you ended up at Richard Bland College.

Brian, I'm a proud product of the mountain region of Virginia. I grew up in Wise County, the daughter of a coal miner, the granddaughter of moonshiners and coal miners and preachers. So that's my background. I don't think it's that different from many people in the mountain region, but I always want to just emphasize how important it was that I was able to access a college education at what was then Clinch Valley College, and had that college not been there, I would not have been able to attend college. So it's my alma mater and out of all the degrees that I've acquired over the years, that is the most important one in my life.

Well, and by the way, I think I mispronounced it, it's Sido. I mispronounced it, I think, at the very beginning. So when you showed up at then Clinch Valley College, what was your plan? And when you left there, was it the same plan?

Clinch Valley College. What was your plan? And when you left there, was it the same plan? What a great question. I envisioned that I wanted to go to medical school. I majored in biology, then I had these wonderful English professors who got me very excited about literature and composition and I became a double major biology and English and ultimately pursued. My doctorate is in rhetoric and linguistics, so language is very important to me and I've enjoyed the journey.

How did that go back home? When you went back home and said I've changed my mind. I'm not going to be a doctor now, I'm going to be an English major, did that go over well?

mine. I'm not going to be a doctor now, to be an English major. Did that go over well? Isn't that always interesting, going back home after you've learned a few things and changed a bit, probably the thing that was most off-putting to my family and friends back home. I had a professor at Clinch Valley College who said to me Debbie, you're all set, except you've got to get rid of the accent, so I don't speak mountain as much as I used to until I really get home, and then it kind of comes back to me.

Oh, that's great and that's an interesting comment too. So then you begin this academic journey right, and so tell us a little bit about your academic journey, because I think a lot of times people that aren't in academia wonder what that's like, and they know that it's a little Byzantine, but they don't quite understand the Byzantine nature of it.

Brian, as a first-generation college student, I think I would back up and also just give a shout-out to the mother of my best friend in elementary, middle school who was a teacher. And when I was preparing you know, my course schedule for ninth grade, I was going to go into typing and various things like that, just hoping, you know, hoping to get a job, and she said no, no, no, you're going to enroll in the college prep kind of curriculum. And I said OK. So you know, I always like to point out that it's people in our lives who can change our trajectory in that simple way but profound way, and so that happened.

Throughout my academic journey. I ended up going to graduate school master's program at Marquette University. Why? Because they gave me a great teaching assistantship and that was going to sustain me. You know someone who worked my way through college and you know, as is rare these days, I graduated with no debt. So that was wonderful culture shock.

Going to Milwaukee, wisconsin, not just the weather but everything else in the Midwest was strange to me, but I got a fantastic grounding at that Jesuit institution and from there I took a teaching position at a community college in the mountains. I began at Mountain Empire Community College and then moved over to Southwest Community College where I taught full-time for five years and then got interested in administration. And that's where that juncture occurred in my career and it was only then that I thought, you know, I probably should get a doctorate. So I went up to Pittsburgh, indiana University of Pennsylvania, and completed the doctorate. Really, you know, I think the journey for me was not a straight line, but rather trying to sort out how do you make a living, how do you make a life, how do you continue to stay intellectually engaged? But at the core of everything I've done, it's really about trying to give students a leg up who haven't really had that background, who haven't had that support system to make a change in their lives.

Well, let's back up a little bit and I want to hear a little bit more about when you were teaching at the community college. I went to community college while I was serving in the military Thomas Nelson it's now something different. I think down in Hampton Virginia, and I remember I'd done really reasonably well in high school in English and I remember just thinking English composition was such a cool class to take and was probably somebody very much like you. That was my teacher class to take and was probably somebody very much like you. That was my teacher. What was that like in those early teaching years? And I presume you were probably teaching something like English composition, correct?

That's exactly what I was teaching. Yes, what was that like? You know, I was very young, I got a great grounding as a teaching assistant at Marquette and so actually taught and they were very supportive in helping to establish curriculum and all that. So I felt that I went in with all the tools to teach. But I was at Southwest in particular, I had such a diverse group of students. So you mentioned ex-military, I had ex-military, I had older students, I had students from you know every walk of life. And then you pepper in the circumstances of some of the Chicago Milwaukee region, a lot of private school kids coming into Marquette that's who I was teaching Coming back to the mountains, understanding that the intellectual capacity, absolutely no difference.

But the difference was in life circumstances. The difference was in preparation in a public high school in the mountains, was in preparation in a public high school in the mountains. You know, it's just for me it was so eye-opening to know that all of the research that has been done and definitively states that there is a correlation, there is a causal effect between socioeconomic circumstances and educational attainment, that hit me like a ton of bricks. Right, it's not that people in any particular area are smarter than are, you know, are better prepared for intellectual pursuits. In many cases, it really comes down to zip code.

Oh, I couldn't agree more. I mean, when I found a paper that I'd written and it was one of these where I'd been sent overseas for about six weeks, so I just had to, literally without notice, miss six weeks of class and it was a paper that I had to catch up on, and I just remember this was before the Internet and how accommodating the young teacher was she was a young woman too, I can't remember her name, but it was never a question that she was going to work with me to help me through this period. And I remember I got a reasonably decent grade on the paper and it wasn't. You know. I ended up writing better the older I got, because I was, you know. But I just remember thinking then what a great experience community college was.

And I had a conversation with my great niece the other day and that she knew that I work in higher ed and they said where do you think a young person should go to college today? And I said I don't have children, but if I had a kid today I would say to start at a community college. I just feel like— oh, brian, yes, I just think that you're going to get early terrific education. It's less money and you're going to get really enthusiastic. I just remember all my instructors at Thomas Nelson back in the day. I remember I had a biology professor that would run around the room. He was almost like a theatrical person. He was so excited to teach the dissection of the fetal pig. I remember to this day I could still see him and I thought this is where the action is and I hope it's still like that. So you get into the administration game.

Did you ever scratch your head and think why did I do this? Or was it as rewarding as you thought it was going to be? I, my thinking, was that my ability to impact what I wanted to impact the education of students that that I would have more scope and scale to do that in an administrative role. I was indeed able to have greater impact there, because, ultimately, administration is about how the resources that one has are allocated to achieve the mission. And so, for me, that clarity, you know it, has driven me throughout my administrative career. So if we're talking about human resources, it resources, physical resources, it's all about how that's utilized to educate students.

And so, yes, I mean I was able to put more funding into professional development. You know that teaching loads at two-year colleges tends to be high, much higher than at a University of Virginia or a William Mary, and so you know teachers can get burned out in that environment. So investment in professional development has been a consistent throughout my career. Also, allocation of resources to make sure that the physical plant does not say to a student you are in a lesser place, therefore you are less important, right? I want the physical plant, I want the classrooms to really be, you know, state of the art, as much as they can be given our funding so that students can feel the pride of place and can know that this college really cares about you and your education. You're not getting second rate, you're getting first rate.

So, in any case, yeah, administration has. As I moved to my first presidency, which was in New York, in Syracuse, at Onondaga Community College, a large school, we had about 13,000 students when I left. Coming back to Richard Bland, which is not a community college, mind you, but is, as you said, a bit of a unicorn in Virginia public higher education, but it's always been sort of that drive to support the students, to give the students every opportunity to succeed whatever pathway they're taking. That has driven me throughout my career. I still have tremendous passion around it and, you know, have a team throughout faculty and administrators who share that same core value and that makes the work fun.

Tell me a little bit about because our listeners I've got to be honest with you. I've learned a lot about Richard Bland in the last six years by being in Richmond, but I'm a native Virginian and I did not know much about it other than it existed. Tell us about the journey. I presume when you were back at Clinch Valley you didn't think Richard Bland is where I want to end up, meaning it wasn't, it wasn't a destination. How did you end up from New York? Did you just get a call?

from a recruiter and you thought, well, this will be fun, I'll go back to Virginia. I mean, how did you end up at Richard Bland, brian? I was in my 10th or 11th year at that college in Syracuse, had just developed my third strategic plan and got a call from a recruiter yes, a boutique firm that was conducting the search for Richard Bland. I had just published a book on revisioning community colleges and the book is what got the attention of this firm. And so the call was from a board member who was going to lead the search for the RBC president and he said you know, could we just have a conversation? I'd like to get your insights, liked your book. And so it really began there and I learned more about Richard Bland as well and thought that it really could be a good fit and, frankly, a good bookend, as I thought about my career and coming back home to Virginia and having an impact in a state that I love and with students that I love.

So it has been a tremendous journey, a great joy, and I'm in my 14th year, so a good run. And you know it's. As you know, the landscape of higher education is changing quickly. It's a bit of a wild ride, pandemic. You know who among us thought we would go through something like that, where the whole world shut down. You know everybody went online. So it's been interesting, it's been challenging, but also has forced us to rethink higher education in ways that I think are productive and can positively impact higher education going forward your sage advice in this re-envisioning.

What was it that caused this person to give you a call that you foreshadowed in this book that we may be living through right now?

You are the only person who's ever asked me that question, so thank you for that. Revisioning community colleges was about a theory that I had that higher education functions best when it is thought about from a public policy point of view, regionally Meaning. If in a region however you choose to define that region if the most elite university, the community colleges, the technical colleges, the privates, the publics, everyone is really working together, talking together, thinking together about the needs of that region, economic development needs. You know specific characteristics of a region, the socio-demographics of the region, the socio-demographics of the region. We are wasting less money and other resources. We are able to plan together, collaborate together in ways that add value.

Prime minister in Australia had just allocated a ton of money to do just that to look at the mining areas of Australia, for example, and what higher education needed to be doing there compared to other areas of Australia. You know more aboriginal areas, what needs to be happening in those regions and how do you incentivize, kind of compel, higher education to work together in that way? So I was in Australia. I did a lot of on-the-ground research. There had a great time. That was fun, but at the end of the day I'm sorry to say, the funding in Australia dried up and while they made great early progress, it's still a struggle to get public bodies to really contemplate investing in a region, with certain incentives in place to really get them to focus on what matters for that area what matters for that area?

Well, first, I'm glad I asked you the question and I had no idea that your answer was going to be literally my thesis, meaning we don't know. We've never met until today. We work in the same business and we're not that far from each other. But you know, I work on this pharmaceutical project at VCU. I believe I used to work in North Carolina. I think North Carolina gets an A in this area. I think Virginia gets a D in this area. I think North Carolina gets an A-minus in this area. I think Virginia gets a D-minus in this area.

I think our universities are completely disconnected. They don't communicate very well and North Carolina runs circles around us and we can at least get up to a C-minus or maybe a B-minus. And I'll give you a perfect example I was sharing the other day. It was announced a few weeks ago Duke and UNC a major public and a major private are going to build a billion-dollar children's hospital just outside of Raleigh, and something like that would just not be even possible. So even in North Carolina it's not even just a matter of the public. Universities, from the community colleges to the major research universities, are connected Down there. Even the private universities are in the same food chain, meaning when it comes to and you look at their pharmaceutical ecosystem, for instance, compared to ours, it's 40 to 50 years ahead of us, and part of it is because of the way their education system works.

So you and I, let's have lunch. Let's agree to have lunch and get to know each other better, because I want to pick your brain on this more and I can see now why you were hired and why you did such a good job here. But let's leave that to lunch. Let's move back to you and when you got the job. I was also not aware of this until I read your biography, but Richard Bland was the only school left in this former William Mary ecosystem where William Mary had seated all these schools ODU, christopher, newport, richard Bland but Richard Bland was the last one standing that still had this affiliation with William Mary. When you interviewed, was this part of the plan that you thought that there should be a Declaration of Independence, or was that not on the agenda?

Yeah, At the outset I wanted to learn as much as I could about that really interesting history in Virginia. So a state that the General Assembly had decided the two flagship universities, UVA and William Mary, would essentially draw a line down the middle of the state and say UVA you take these institutions in your kind of section of the state, and William Mary, you take these institutions in your kind of section of the state, and William Mary, you take these. By the way, part of that William Mary ecosystem was also the Richmond Professional Institute at LVCU, Correct, Exactly, yeah. And of course Clinch Valley College. This was one of the points of interest for me taking the position, because my alma mater, Clinch Valley College, had been governed by the University of Virginia board right, so I was familiar with the structure in that way.

But the General Assembly deciding you know in that period of mass resistance, that they would get into these sort of economically disadvantaged pockets of Virginia through these institutions that would then feed to the flagships. I mean, I think roughly that was the concept. But then a few years later, literally a few years later, the General Assembly said hey, we're going to establish the community college system and have a college within 30 miles of every citizen of Virginia. So then, what do we do with these Richard Blands and Christopher Newports and Old Dominions and all the ones out West? George Mason, by the way, was governed by UVA's board.

I didn't know, by the way you're describing it, and I've been in the higher ed for 30 years and that just dawned on me as you described that. I go wait a minute, this all makes sense to me now. The Clinch Valley thing so George Mason was part of UVA. Then Mary Washington I knew Mary Washington was because that was a way around the single sex thing, right. The gender lawsuits, right. Okay, keep talking. This is fascinating, I'm sorry, keep going. This is great.

No. So in any case, you know I suspended disbelief, being a good English major as I, as I read and gathered information. But I will tell you by before the first year was over. You know, I was a direct report to the William Mary Board of Visitors and that board managed Richard Bland through a committee. So in the same way that there was an academic affairs committee, a finance committee, there was a Richard Bland committee, richard Bland Committee, so a committee of the board essentially heard Richard Bland's reports and recommended actions and then that kind of flowed up in the same way that other committee reports flowed up to the full board.

What became apparent as we developed the first strategic plan that went to 2019, is that it really, you know, what we lacked was, first of all, people who understood our region. Again, that regional focus, the business in our region, the people in our region. There just wasn't that understanding or appreciation, and I mean that in the dictionary definition of that term. So all good people. So it's not a criticism, it's just that when these people were appointed to the William and Mary board, they were never told they were also governing Richard Bland College. So for many of them, it's what is a Richard Bland College and you know some of them really took an interest, especially people you know who were first-generation college students themselves or, you know, knew somebody in the Petersburg region. They took an interest and that was great. But first commitment was always to William and Mary, of course. Of course it was Right.

So my position is that a governing board matters in higher education. A governing board is one of your, it's one of the legs of your three legged stool is you've got the faculty who are really stewards of the curriculum and making sure that that educational program is rock solid. You've got the board setting policy direction and you've got the president and the administration driving that direction. We had a wobbly stool without a governing board that was dedicated to Richard Bland and its mission. So yes, I began to seriously explore the option of an independent board early in my tenure but it took a very long time to line up the stars to make it happen.

So Mamie Locke is my hero forever. Senator Locke was just fierce in understanding and driving independence for the college, senator Lashere's heired. She worked for the college, for Richard Bland, in my office for years and years, tremendous supporter. I could go on and on, but I will just say you know after many, many years, as is the way in Virginia, nothing happens quickly. My friends keep telling me that you know, after many, many years of people really kind of letting it sink in and understanding that there's a lot of potential for this college to do great things in our region and across the Commonwealth. That's when we finally got this passed, so I couldn't be happier.

Yeah, this has been terrific. I feel like I know a lot of things, particularly history, and I knew very little about any of this until you described it. But back to this crazy history which I didn't know. So Richard Bland was the last college standing meaning of all this legacy history. Because you think about Mary Washington, George Mason, ODU, Christopher, Newport, even Clinch Valley. I told you the story. That was 20, 25 years ago, that that got fixed. So what do you attribute it to? Do you think Richard Bland just kind of got lost in the shuffle, that it just, you know, nobody said, hey, wait a second, we've got this one school left that's still operating under the old system and there was no real energy to see that this got dealt with until Senator Locke dealt with it.

Brian, here's another bit of history that may interest you. Again, keep in mind what was happening in Virginia. Again, keep in mind what was Bland College. Virginia State University is both a land-grant institution. Many people don't know that. Also, people think of TAC as the land-grant, but it's also an HBCU. Most people do know that At the time Richard Bland was released was given granted by the General Assembly the authority to escalate. That's the word in code. It was granted, alongside Old Dominion and Christopher Newport in 1972, the opportunity to offer baccalaureate degrees. To the opportunity to offer baccalaureate degrees, the college actually did offer third-year coursework until a group of students at Virginia State University and faculty, working alongside Oliver Hill, a famous civil rights lawyer in Richmond, took up the case. There is an injunction in the United States Supreme Court that prohibits Richard Bland College from offering four-year degrees and that injunction stands to this day.

I'm speechless. I just don't even know where to go from here. Let me ask you back to. You said Virginia State. Right, I just I don't even know where to go from here other than then. Let me ask you back to. You said Virginia State, I can remember. Wasn't Virginia State also part of Virginia Tech at one point too, speaking of old relationships? Wasn't? I don't know that because because the land grant status, I think when the land grants were created, particularly in the south, there had to be an HBCU and a majority white, and I think there was some loose connection between Virginia State and Virginia Tech because of that Morrill Land Grant Act. I digress a little bit, but that's crazy.

Yeah that's crazy, though I've never. So that was the other part to this. I was trying to think, well, why did Richard Bland exist? And then I knew, about the same time that you came into existence, that Mills Godwin started the community college system, and then I thought so.

The other question I guess this is probably a good segue, because not everybody's going to like the rabbit hole that you and I have been enjoying being down and that is that I had a conversation the other day that there are a number of private schools in Virginia that used to be what used to be known as junior colleges.

Right, you know the Theorems and the Averitts and so forth, and I thought you know the Ferrums and the Averitts and so forth, and I thought you know everybody sort of ran to become the same thing, to become the sort of comprehensive university, and I thought we were probably better served in the old days where people, we had this sort of patchwork where if you didn't necessarily know what you wanted to do, you could go to a junior college and you could go to Ferrum and that was a good way to get to Virginia Tech, for instance. And now we don't necessarily have that pathway, and so this is a good segue to where, now that you've achieved independence from William Mary and you are still a bit of a unicorn You're the newest of the independents. What do you see? What is the pathway for Richard Bland for the next 25 years? What is the pathway for Richard Bland?

for the next 25 years. Brian, I'm glad you used the word pathway because that's very important in our sort of construct of who the college is and what our future holds. So future state is very much embracing that two-year general education, university parallel and I highlight and underline university parallel. The college, since 1960, when it was established, has taken very seriously its mission to provide a general education that enables students, regardless of how they get to us and we admit them our commitment to them is when you leave right, you are going to be ready to be a third-year student at William Mary or UVA or fill in the blank, and I give our faculty so much credit for that because they have held very high standards for the academic curriculum and they and our students have gone on to do. I mean, the alumni is just so impressive, and I won't go off on that tangent, but I will just say that I'm really proud that for all these years 60 plus years the college has maintained that quality.

In our first strategic plan under my administration, we also added a second focal point and that is through partnership. Again, I believe so strongly in connecting resources and avoiding redundancy right in the interest of efficiency and, frankly, just doing a better job. So we have partnered, for example, with DroneUp, a company headquartered in Virginia Beach to train drone pilots. They get the industry training but they also receive a Richard Bland certificate in engineering technology. Our faculty have embraced that Again. Many people think, well, if a faculty is dedicated just to you know, liberal arts, they're really not going to be dedicated to more of these industry-recognized credentials. Not true. At Richard Bland, our math science faculty were eager to kind of partner with DroneUp.

Another example is we have set aside 80 acres of our 750-acre campus, probably half of which is wetlands. I do want to say that 80 acres for a new business innovation park, the idea being that our aspirational goal is that every student will get a paid internship, and the agreement for companies that would locate here is that they would give X number of students paid internships right here on campus, because transportation can be a problem and or it can be a problem frankly, because many of these companies, including pharmaceutical, you know they just don't have the bandwidth to take a lot of interns. So it's a great solution. Let's bring business right here to our campus. So we do have this kind of area of specialization in uncrewed aerial systems, and that's what we hope. To recruit to this business park Again, giving our students both opportunities on campus and in this kind of adjacent land to have robust internship experiences that just broaden their ability and deepen their ability to enter the workforce at whatever point they choose to do that.

Well, let me back up a little bit now that my head has exploded. Let me put my head back together again. When you said this lawsuit, which I'd never heard of before, about the four-year degree. So you still don't offer four-year degrees, we? Do not, and does that lawsuit take precedent, meaning you don't anticipate offering four-year degrees any time in the future, or is that not part of your strategic plan?

So we would not be I mean, we would be violating the law if we offered four-year degrees, because that injunction still stands, it was never vacated and there was not an end date to it. You know, the basis of it was that it would prevent Virginia State University from diversifying Gotcha. If you look at the demographics today, Richard Bland College is majority-minority. We are a very diverse institution, small, diverse, something I'm really proud of. So we have great pride in that diversity. None of the conditions I guess what I'm saying none of the conditions that existed in the late 60s exist today.

So there is just no longer an issue but to vacate that injunction. You know very much, that's what makes you a unicorn. You look now very much like the old junior college model. And we know now those don't exist anymore because everybody had UVA envy. Everybody wanted to be UVA. They wanted to be. You know. I mean, I'm a UVA grad so I can scratch my chin and think intellectually right. But here's the problem with that is that. So where does one go? And then I'll also say this, because I'm also a community college person We've asked our community colleges to do a lot.

We've asked them to do an awful lot. So you step onto a community college campus today and they're doing a lot of things. So if I'm somebody that specifically wants to go to Virginia Tech and I've been waitlisted or for whatever reason, I don't think I'm ready to go. It just seems to me you've got a pretty compelling case that of all the places I could go in Virginia, I should be at Richard Bland. Is that, does that not? Does that not sort of seem to be where you should? I'm not trying to make your case for you, but it just seems to me that that's a ready-made case and there just seems to be a lot of kids that are at that category. They don't quite know what to go. You're somewhere in between the community college and the big university, either the four-year university or the research university. Is that not the case?

Brian, you just told our story. I mean again, I would go back to university parallel. We are such a perfect choice for so many students who either do not have the financial wherewithal or who, frankly, just don't want to spend the money in years one and two in the general education curriculum. You know they're going to save buckets of money by attending here and then taking advantage of guaranteed admission to all the universities in Virginia, public and private. So, yes, you are 100% right, we do look a lot like a junior college. Where we differ is we do have 500 students who live on campus, so we're a residential campus. We also I mean, if you came to campus, which I hope you will it feels very much like a small private college. That's the feel you're going to get Students are. They can't, you know, they can't escape our nurturing kind of way of supporting them. And so we have learner mentors it's case management so that if a student fails a test, if a student isn't coming to class, we physically go and bring them back on track, get them into tutoring, whatever. So we are very intrusive. So it's not Richard Bland is not for everyone, but for the student with financial need, the student who's maybe not mature enough yet or perceives that they're not quite there to go to a UVA or a big university and get lost. This is a perfect place for them. They have so many opportunities for leadership, either athletics we have 200 athletes, student athletes on campus, through student government, student assembly there are so many ways they can own leadership roles there.

We're just a different kind of college and, again, if you don't like extremely rural, beautiful, quiet surroundings, you know not a lot going on in terms of community activities, except for hopping on the bus, which is something that we've just brought into play in the last two years.

Now they can get on a bus, go to Petersburg, go to Richmond. So you know it's a great environment for students who want that heavy support network, a lot of scaffolding, and who really need a space where they can broaden, where they can broaden their dreams, their view of what their future might hold. I was having this conversation with someone recently. They were saying well, this is a place where you can make your dreams come true. Right, the Disney theme. And I said for many of our students, we need to help them sort of open the doors to see that there are bigger dreams than maybe they brought with them when they first entered. So we are doing a lot that a big university can't do. Majority of our classes are taught by full-time faculty. Most of our faculty have terminal degrees. It's just a different kind of environment.

Well, I'm so excited I'm ready to go back to school. I'm too old, but, in full transparency, tell me about your tuition and how does your tuition stack up? I mean, I presume you're probably a little bit more expensive than community college, but not as expensive as a traditional four-year school in Virginia.

You're exactly right and that's the target. We are very focused on affordability but that you know that wraparound support costs a bit more money. So we are a bit higher than the community colleges but definitely more affordable than the four-year comprehensive, four-year comprehensive. So we really track against, you know, the Radfords and the Longwoods and the Mary Washingtons, the comprehensive colleges in the state, and we do very well in comparison.

Look, very few people leave me speechless, and I wasn't expecting when I, you know, like I said, we'd never met before I wasn't expecting the President, Richard Bland, to leave me speechless, but you've left me speechless, Tell me. I guess we talked before. You came on briefly today and you've announced you're retiring and I joked with you and said that you know, being a college president isn't a very easy job these days. 14 years is a very long tenure compared to most college presidents. You can say what you want to now not that you will long tenure compared to most college presidents. You can say what you want to now. Not that you will.

But looking back on this really lovely, illustrious career you've had and, by the way, I will also say thank God for that friend of yours in the ninth grade or whatever I feel like that. You know we all have angels, right, I've had angels in my life too, and that particularly, and I'm from a non-raditional background, like you are, and there's people who take an interest in you and we wouldn't be where we are today without them. So I didn't want to go without acknowledging that friend who put you on that pathway. But looking back on this illustrious career of yours, would you have done anything different?

Brian, I am very humbled, I feel as though, for a kid who grew up in Pound, virginia, with virtually no resources, I mean a really great family and they taught me such fundamental values and forever grateful for the upbringing I had.

But yeah, we were definitely considered below the poverty line. I just can't imagine that. I can't imagine a life where I could have, you know, had more opportunity to help people who really just in so many ways are the members of our communities and our society, who just need that tap on the shoulder, who just need that little bit of a leg up to make a huge impact both in their lives. And often there's the ripple effect of, you know, the people we're educating then go on to make sure that their kids and grandkids get a college education and to be part of that. You know, a small part of that is just the gift of a lifetime. I just I'm grateful that's my primary position that I that I have every single day, I'm just grateful and believe that, as you said, there are angels that really make sure that if we have you know, if we have the right attitude, if we have curiosity, if we have interest in other human beings and their well-being, the universe kind of takes care of us and puts us where we need to be.

You're sort of exiting the plane at a good time, we're losing altitude and you've got a parachute, but as you go, what would you whisper in the ear of the pilot about the future of higher education? Because I do feel like we're at this amazing juncture now. We've never even in the time you and I are probably about the same age. When you go back and look at when we started and where we are now, I just feel like that we're at this crossroads where things could get better or things could get a lot worse, and I'm just not sure which one it's going to be. And I'll give you my thesis after I hear your thesis. But what do you think we need to do to ensure that people like us, that our first generation, continue to have the same access and the same opportunities that we had?

First, I think we have to embrace AI, and we have to have a cold eye to make sure that we're not embracing it too enthusiastically and of a whole cloth.

But I do think AI is going to play a tremendous role in higher education, all of education going forward.

I think it's going to be bringing that human element to determine how we can utilize this incredibly powerful technology to do what we haven't been able to do up to this point, and that is customize education for different types of learners. So that's where the real magic is going to happen. If we're able to utilize our human resources and this powerful technology to convey both knowledge and skills to help people kind of grow in their learning and their degree attainment, that is going to be tremendously powerful as a way to ensure that we have better results. As you know, we don't have great results in terms of getting people to the finish line. So many people start higher education but they don't get a degree or a credential. I believe if we can get this mix right of the Socratic method of the person who is working directly with the student, but also utilizing that technology to teach them just in time in the learning style that they have, that's going to be just the game changer in higher education.

What's your theory? Well, here's my. You know, look, I heard a long time ago this is a bumper sticker, but one either embraces change or change shall be visited upon you. So, and I'm telling you I've been in higher ed for almost 30 years and we do not embrace change. We find all sorts of ways to embrace status quo. I think right now it sort of gets around cost.

I think that we just sort of stick our heads in the sand and we just don't want to—we justify it. We've got all sorts of—I've been listening to this for 20 years that the state's not doing its fair—you know, there's all sorts of reasons how we justify it. And I think we've got to begin to think of whether it's students or parents or whomever as sort of our partners, and try to be better partners in this, to try to say you know, what can we do to make this better? And what can we all do to make this better? But that's what I believe, meaning that the system is not functioning very well right now, and I like what you said. Meaning what are the new things out there and how can we embrace that, how can we do all this differently? And you know, look, the UVAs and the Virginia Techs are going to be just fine. I mean, I had a professor at grad school at UVA. It's when Internet education first came along and somebody said will it disrupt the University of Virginia? And he says no. He said this is Disney World. He says Disney World will always be OK. He said it'll disrupt the people that are not Disney World, and he was exactly right, meaning it's disrupting the people where they were not able.

But I also feel somebody said once that these universities have gotten to the point where it's all about turning people away, that it's all about the rejection numbers versus larger endowments, smaller acceptance rates, and there's something that's for a public university that just doesn't feel quite right and that probably also needs to be addressed. All these are wildly unpopular things to say, but also feel that that's a good thing about getting older is we can say unpopular things. So that leads me to my final question for you. I once also heard somebody say that our lives are in thirds right, that our first third of our life is a young person and a young adult and the second third is when we're making, you know, a living and then ultimately living our career. And our third third is, you know the encore, the final act as we try to decide what's our legacy going to be. So what's your third? Third? Are you just going to walk away from it all, or are you going to find some way to stay involved?

I'll take sabbatical leave next year, so beginning in summer of 2026. And during that time I'm looking forward to exploring ways that I can continue to contribute, especially in Southwest Virginia, my home, and so I'm going to look at writing grants to address some of the fundamental discrepancies, disparities in education in that community. And so my goal is, whatever role I play, I just want to continue to support people, and especially people who just don't have the circumstances, the resources to be able to make it a guarantee that they're going to be successful. I want to try to bridge, you know, that entry to higher education and to a better life in the way that that teacher did for me.

Well, it sounds like you're trying to earn your angel wings. I think you've been earning your angel wings all along, but it just sounds like it's a. I can't imagine a more productive use of your time. And it just sounds lovely and it sounds like you've had a. It sounds like you've had a wonderful life.

Absolutely yeah. Thank you, Brian. It's such a pleasure to talk with you.

Yeah, was there anything else you'd like to add before we wrap up?

No, I'm always delighted to talk about higher education, and you've given me a wonderful venue for doing that, so thank you for the work you're doing. It makes a difference.

Well, thank you very much, Thank you for listening to the Virginians of Interest podcast.

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