Audio Podcast

Text Transcript

Q1: How is Lasell addressing inequities in the world and on campus?

Heidi: Welcome back to the Teaching and Learning at Lasell podcast with Matt and Heidi from the TLC. Today, we're here with Michael Alexander, president of Lasell University.

Michael: Welcome. Thank you, Heidi. I'm pleased to be invited to participate.

Heidi: So, President Alexander, the pandemic exposed structural and institutional inequities around the world and in higher education. How is Lasell addressing those inequities in the world and on campus?

Michael: So we had an awareness from, you know, by reading about general society that there are structural inequities throughout the United States in the world and some of those are reflected in our institution. And we have inequities of our own that are built into the way we do things. The pandemic definitely brought this to light. Just shined the light on them and made it more clear about how certain groups of people are disadvantaged by the way that we do things, the way that we do things traditionally or, the habits we've gotten into or some of the things that happen as a matter of necessity. And so we have in the last year really been working on trying to ferret those out to figure out what are, the structural inequities and institutional inequities that are affecting our students and our employees. Can we identify them and then figure out how to eliminate them or at least mitigate them?

Turns out that's a really challenging thing to do. But we know what some of those are. Some of them are large and obvious, like the cost of attending college. We've been talking about that here for 10 years. We know is is too high for some of our students and their families. Anybody in the middle income levels or below have a very difficult time paying for a private higher education now. We, despite the enormous amounts of financial aid we give them, because we still don't cover the full need of anybody. And there are inequities built into that because the unmet need is greater, the greater your need. In other words, low-income students have more unmet need than middle income students. And that seems like, "Well, that's backwards. It should be the other way around it. Shouldn't it?" And except for the most elite institutions that have huge endowments, it's true for almost all private institutions that it works that way because if you did it the other way, you would find the low-income students still couldn't afford it and the middle income students would be getting less. And so they'd be less likely to come. You'd have fewer students and you wouldn't be able to cover your costs to operate the institution. There are financial models and mathematical models that show that. And we know from historical experimentations, with financial aid strategies that that's true.

So it's very difficult to address it. So we're looking at ways that we can become more sophisticated in our strategic use of financial aid to, without destroying our budgets, figure out how to allocate the moneys in a different way or we're in the same way. But to do special things for certain populations that just have no chance in order to -- we're not going to eliminate in the short term that problem -- But we could mitigate it if we could supplement the financial aid for lower income students in a particular way. So that's one. There are other ones that, you know, our faculty are are knowledgeable about and working on.

For instance, again, many students, they scrape together the money to pay tuition fees, room board, and they got to buy books or they got you know, they got to have some social library able to buy a pizza. And the book cost and course material costs can be really extreme. And and so lower income students often, you know, get books on reserve or you get used books that are out-of- date, or share books with somebody else. And that puts them at a disadvantage. They, they, they are...they start out, of course, at a disadvantage relative to people who can afford those things. So there's one we have attacked by, with an emphasis on OER and mobile access, putting all the materials on canvas that people can access without further cost. Moving to open educational resources (OER) is a movement here. We're trying to get to the point where it's universal and therefore everybody would be on the same playing field. There's ones that we've identified that we we don't know what to do about it.

For commuting students, transportation is a real disadvantage. People will take public transportation, take hours to get here and to get home. And that's money that they're not spending in class or studying or interacting with other students and their faculty. So they're at a disadvantage by virtue of where they happen to live and whether they can afford to have a car or not. We have we've looked at ways to do that by seeing is there some way we can design our own bus routes to alleviate that or get people here quicker and get them home quicker. The answer so far is no; they're too spread out that it would take just as long and it'd be expensive. So we haven't figured that one out.

Faculty will be interested that we've noticed that the way we do faculty promotions has some cultural bias built into it, that by having very strict, you know, by the book way of of having to prepare dossiers for faculty promotion, how they're reviewed, that sometimes, so that doesn't fit the individual circumstances of individual faculty members. So we we're looking at how can we be more flexible about that and recognize that there....there may be multiple ways to meet the requirements that would qualify somebody for a promotion to a higher rank. So there's, there's another one we're working on. So there's a whole lot of those.

It happens...it's happening not just at our institution. I work with other private college presidents. We meet every other Friday. 45 to 50 of us in Massachusetts. We work together on the pandemic for a long time. And that, that as we're that's winding down, we we want to keep working together because we were so successful, that we chose to tackle racial injustice is something we want to do something about. And so we're working on that and working on it. Not not just how we can learn from each other to improve inequities within our institutions, but also have a voice and have an effect on the issues of racial justice outside of our institutions in the world. And I think that's something all our institutions can do, not just not just get our own houses in order, but have an influence on how are we going to, you know, really reckon with that problem that's been hanging out there for hundreds of years -- And we keep making two steps forward, one step back -- and try and really, you know, finish off the job of of giving everybody an equal chance in our society.

Matt: Thanks, Michael. Yeah, I think that's a really. Expansive series of ways to address that systemic problem in a ways that I don't often think about speaking personally, I often look at things from a faculty development standpoint. So what are we going to do in the classroom? How can we ensure individuals get success in the classroom? What kind of pedagogies and educational technology? And I don't even think about the cost of attending college so much as I think about the individual classrooms themselves. But it's such a big part of it. I really like what you said about open education resources into universal access to content, though I think that's a really important part because it threads into so many different things, both cost of the materials themselves, but also the stuff you said about commuting. It doesn't necessarily fix the problem of a person having their own bus route, but it does allow them to access the content in variable ways. Whether those will be written, whether those be an audio medium like the one we're in right now, it's a way to access the content that can help them figure out how to control their own learning. Absolutely.

Michael: Yeah. Yeah, really. And another one I didn't mention is -- but, but you and Heidi do work on and help us with -- is access to technology. You know, we're more and more dependent on technology. Our students come more sophisticated about technology, but they don't all have equal access to the technology. They can't afford a laptop, but they don't have Wi-Fi coverage at home or wherever they happen to be, particularly commuting students or students last year work remotely. That was another light that was shining and say, you know, some students were disadvantaged because of that. And then there's the, the underlying understanding of technology is different. How do we provide students with a fundamental understanding of technology? Some start with much more knowledge of that than others. And that's just something that everybody needs to do to live in our society. So that's another one. And then on our strategic plan, that's one of our objectives, is to tackle that one directly.

Matt: Yeah, absolutely. And there are a lot of assets and skills that people picked up in those last 18 months That can be really helpful, I think, at leveraging in the way and helping individuals. Heidi, do you want to talk a little bit about commuting?

Heidi: Now, the big news is that the 5:05 bus returns at the end of the month, so people will be able to get from downtown to Lasell in less than an hour. I'm excited about that.

Matt: Yeah, that's what I thought about when you brought that up Michael, because it is such a key component of things that you often overlook. Right? It's just in the classroom, but it's not just in the classroom. There's a lot of background context to how individuals learn and a lot of skills that you can leverage to ensure that they learn better. And the awareness of those challenges that they might be facing could turn them into assets depending upon how accessible the content you provide can be.

Notable Changes from the Pandemic

Michael: Well, you mentioned that people learned a lot of things during the pandemic that are going to going to benefit them and us going forward. And I think there's a lot of examples of that. You know, one of the notable changes I'd like to point out is kind of an intangible one that I think people learned...Everybody, all of us, learned to think more about others than just about ourselves. You know, in dealing with a pandemic, you know, people and all the restrictions, the safety restrictions we had, all the combinations we had to make, you know, and and the resistance to it, I think people learned that it's not just about "How does it affect me?" or "What what level of risk am I willing to take?" But "What risk do I create for others that I should care about, about everybody, the community safety, not just my own?"

That's true now as we're dealing with vaccinations; the biggest argument for why someone should get vaccinated isn't just that it protects yourself, but you're protecting everybody else by getting vaccinated or where you're putting others at greater risk if you don't. So I think we've learned a lot. I mean, I saw examples over the last year and a half, just example after example, of people being more tolerant, of being more understanding, of realizing that we had to work together to overcome this extraordinary challenge of a deadly pandemic. And people did that in our community. And outside of our community, I saw, you know, other institutions at the same experience where, where we really thought beyond ourselves and thought about, you know, "How do how do the decisions we make for ourselves affect everybody?" And that we ought to take that into consideration.

So, [for] example, last fall semester where we operated half our students were on campus, a third of them were remote, teaching hybrid, you know, a hybrid flex classrooms, all these new things and having to adjust, change things on the...I didn't get one complaint from an employee or a student the whole semester. I usually can't go three days without a complaint. I went a whole semester without a complaint, and I think that's because they understood that those things are petty. We have to think about the big things. You know, this puts a focus on the big things and the big things are working together as a community to care for each other, to keep teaching and learning going, because that's how we progress and that's how we prepare students to go out in the world, be successful.

Matt: Absolutely, I agree there's been a lot of that among all the faculty, staff and students who have been just heroic throughout these 18 months in so many ways. And I have another question here about social issues and ways that we can address, which you've actually talked about a little bit already, but would be helpful to dive into more now, I think.

Q3: Why does it make sense for Lasell to try to make big changes to address large social issues?

Heidi: Yeah. So Lasell is a relatively small university, but you're talking about big changes. Why does it make sense for little Lasell to try to make big changes to address large social issues?

Michael: Well, I think it is a very vital question. It's a central question, if you think about it, why do we exist at all? Why does Lasell exist at all? It exists to make social change, to be able to produce graduates who are who start as late teens and leave as long young adults who are prepared to enter the economic mainstream, to contribute to society and our economy, to be able to afford to buy their own homes and raise your own families and provide educational opportunities for the next generation. And it's by doing that in our small way that we contribute to the advancement of society. I mean, that's our that's our purpose. And so we do that through teaching and learning. We are a teaching institution.

And so it makes sense for us to help people prepare for the challenges they're going to face in their, in their future lives. And this applies to graduate students too, how to, whether those are lives in their careers and their jobs and their personal lives, and their family lives, that in facing how to live under a pandemic, that that means tackling social issues. And I'm currently trying to talk to people about, hey, let's choose one. Let's choose a social issue to focus on, let's choose one. Because if we do that and, and attack that social issue, that social problem in our classrooms and our curricular environment, in our, in our activities and what we care about, what we research, what we write about and what we teach, we can have a more profound effect on that problem. We can bring attention to to our university and our schools, which will benefit us. And I think it would be fun to have a shared experience of working together for a common cause on something, and it's going to make a difference.

So I think it's central. It is our essential purpose to improve society through the graduates we produce, through the research and scholarship that our faculty does, through the accumulation and dissemination of knowledge and skills.

Matt: Thanks so much for your answer. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense, and that in many ways is what connected learning is, and that really does get to the question of "Why should we tackle this social issue?"

Q4: What do you think connected learning will look like in the new normal?

That's what we're here for. So I guess that brings us to our last question. And it's a question we've asked of everybody who's been here for a summer podcast series, which I think are drawing to an end, but will probably morph into a fall podcast series from here on out with maybe a different theme. But since we're here, let's ask that question. What do you think connected learning will look like in the new normal?

Well, first of all, I'd say our faculty are more equipped to answer that question that I am. Yet, like everything else. I have opinions on it. And and it's always a risk to, you know, to ask any college president to pontificate. So, so I will. Look, I think there are...Lasell university is a teaching institution. And I think we as we've mentioned before, we and our faculty and our students learn new technologies, the tools, new ways, new approaches to be more flexible, to adjust to different learning styles for different students, and that that all improves our ability to connect what they're doing in the classroom with what they will face in the outside world.

We're already facing the outside world and to to make that connection even more solid and to do it more consistently across our whole institution. In addition to that, we are working hard to align ourselves more with what industry is looking for in our graduates. That's part of our a large part of our career readiness focus going forward, that that we make sure our curriculum are aligned with what they're going to need to know and be able to do when they go out in the world and to, and to develop partnerships and affiliations with industry that will be beneficial.

For example, I'm working with two faculty members, Cris Haverty and Leanna Farnam and Donnell Turner, on trying to develop a credential that would be sponsored by the biotech industry that our students could earn. That would signal employers that when they leave here, they're already prepared to step in and do the job, that they have been properly trained, that they've had experience through their internships in their lab work to be able to step in and contribute in ways and to be valued employees. That would that would see a career opportunity in the biotech industry. That extends also to the new sub-industry of bio manufacturing, which is, which everybody suggests is going to be growing fast in this area, so that there's one concrete example and that kind of thing is happening elsewhere in other programs. I'm just happened to be helping with that particular one.

And we're determined to get there where where we can certify or show that, that our graduates are prepared to do such work in a way that employers can depend upon that will give our graduates a leg up in being employed and and making more money when they start. So, so those kinds of things are developing.

And will be part of the new normal; they fit with being more flexible in how we teach. And I think one of the things in terms of the the methodologies of delivering connected learning, we're going to see all faculty inventing all kinds of different ways, not just the way they did last year, but but doing combinations of things. Instead of having a class be two or three times in person, maybe they'll have a once a week in person and then do the rest asynchronously or hold one class in person, one on Zoom, and to create more flexibility for students and for faculty, the use of their time, more time for internships, more time for athletics, more time for studying, more time for social life, to have a different mix of of the ways that people can learn to do it, to allow different people to learn in different ways.

So these are all things that I see are going to happen kind of naturally coming out of of what we have experienced. And look, I don't think there's...I don't think there is going to be any normal; there really wasn't normal before. There's not going to be any normal in the future. They're going to be more variety, more opportunities, more creativity, how we deliver, connect, learning to our students.

Matt: Absolutely, I agree, and I don't think I have anything to add; I think that encapsulates it pretty well. Heidi?

Heidi: Yeah, that sounds exciting. Thank you.

Matt: Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much for joining us today, Michael. We really enjoyed having you.

Michael: Thanks for having me. I'd be glad to do it any time.

Outro

Matt: All right. Thanks so much. Thanks so much for listening to us, everybody. Faculty interested in learning more about teaching and learning here at Lasell can visit MyLasell at https://my.lasell.edu, or you can send us an email at TLC@lasell.edu, or give us a call: 617.243.2001.

See you later!