Visiting Michigan: Balancing Local Impact with Global Reach

Part of the issue has to do with a counter narrative about the value of critical discourse, of asking difficult questions not only internally, but also of government, of society, of social mobility.

That was Santa Ono, the president of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, which was the latest stop on the Future you campus tour.

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I'm Michael Horn.

And I'm Jeff Salingo. So welcome everyone to Future you. A huge thank you to the University of Michigan for hosting us today. President Ono. Santa, if I may, welcome to Future You.

Thank you very much. Wonderful to be with you again, Jeff, it's great.

Yeah, it's great to have you here. And we've gotten to interview several dozen university presidents and a question that always sparks our listeners is learning about their career path to the presidency. So we'd love to hear about your journey to Ann Arbor and the presidency here.

Well, thank you very much. In a way, I've always been at a university. My father was a mathematics professor and I was born on a university campus at UBC and then followed my father to successive positions at Pennsylvania and then Johns Hopkins where I went to high school. I was then really just focused on being a biomedical scientist. And so I went through the ranks at Johns Hopkins and Harvard, but was really recruited to consider a career in administration by Earl Lewis, who had moved at that time from the University of Michigan's Rackham Graduate School to Emory University to be its provost. And through a search he picked me to be his deputy and to be a senior vice provost at the university. I just loved doing that, really working at enterprise wide level and really shaping that great institution to be an even better university and very proud of what we did together. I was then recruited to be provost and then president of the University of Cincinnati and then president of the University of British Columbia, where I was born and raised as a toddler, until I was a toddler, and then about a year ago recruited to the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, but also with campuses in Dearborn and Flint. That's pretty much my career. I'm a biomedical scientist. I do research in immunology, but now greater than 90% of my time is really focused on being a president.

We're here at the University of Michigan. You're a world class global research university. You're also a State University in this day and age, which requires a lot of balancing. And I think when people hear the, the University of Michigan, they think of where we are right now in Ann Arbor. But as you mentioned, you have these campuses also in Dearborn and in Flint. So how do you think about the different purposes of each of these campuses and how do you define the community that's part of each? So how do you balance this idea of Michigan being part of the world but important to this state of Michigan but also to these communities that you're in?

It's something that I take very seriously. And if you look at the history of the development of the University of Michigan system, if you think about the birth of the University of Michigan initially in Detroit and then migrating here to Ann Arbor, which was at its founding a very sleepy place with lots of fields and animals grazing. If you look at a picture of the original University of Michigan campus in Ann Arbor, it was very small, just a few buildings. And so if you think about how the university grew, it was because of the state. And I often like to say that this is not the University of Michigan, it's the University for Michigan. I truly believe, and many people in the institution believe that we owe something to the state of Michigan. And that's something that people feel very fervently. You're absolutely right that over the history of the university as it grew from one campus into a system of three universities, that each of the additional campuses, Flint and then Dearborn, served a different community. Communities that have evolved over time but have been critical for the success of the state of Michigan. Both Flint and Dearborn were very, very important, continue to be very important, but were very important as the state grew and succeeded in the auto industry. But they're very different towns as well in terms of their demographics, in terms of the focus of those campuses, in terms of the kinds of priorities, in terms of, for example, practice based education at Dearborn, but also the demographics in those two different cities. I take, and I think the university takes very seriously our role in each of these three different locations. We have great leaders of all three campuses in Flint with Donna Fry and Domenico Grasso at Dearborn. I'm really proud of their strategic thinking. I'm very proud of the role that each campus plays in their cities, but also the synergy that exists that we hope to grow between the three campuses.

Let's dive into the Ann Arbor campus where we are specifically. You've noted to us beforehand that you, you all have 150 programs in the top 10 globally, just an incredible stunning breadth and depth of excellence at the university. You all are obviously a magnet for talent around the world. Among undergrad applicants, you admit less than one out of every five applicants. You conduct research on pressing challenges confronting humanity, such as climate change, which we'll get into in the second half of the show.

But.

But you're also in the backyard of Detroit. As you mentioned, you were once located there. You're a state institution in Michigan. I'm just sort of curious about how you think about the intersection though of those overlapping communities and perhaps missions and where are there synergies, but where are there tensions or trade offs that you have to make and how do you see those evolving right now?

You know, I think that the University of Michigan takes seriously all of these sort of concentric circles of responsibility. As I was mentioning in my previous response, we owe a great deal to the state of Michigan, but also to Detroit, where we're founded. But we still have extensive and likely growing, a growing presence. That is something that we'll continue to be a priority. But as you have said, the University of Michigan now in terms of its activities, educational activities, research activities and healthcare, we really span the entire state of Michigan and our neighboring states as well in terms of the collaborations that we have in terms of research and outreach. But as you say, we also are members of both hemispheric and global organizations like the University Climate Change Coalition. As a hemispheric set of a network of institutions focused on climate action, we take that very, very seriously. We also believe because of the strength of our faculty, what I like to call breadth at scale, excellence at scale, that we have a responsibility because of our size, the excellence of our faculty, staff and students, that there are very few institutions that have the excellence, the breadth and the number of people that we graduate and individuals who train here and who go to other institutions. Very few institutions that can really have a transformative impact on the most vexing problems that we face as a civilization. So we take that responsibility very, very seriously.

Okay, so I want to stay there for a minute because big public universities, local community leaders, states, like to point fingers at them and say, you're not quite doing enough for the state. We know, for example, across the country right now that trust in higher education has dropped to historic lows. People just don't think it's doing enough as an institution, big I institution across the country, enough for the issues that we're facing today. So how do you combat these perceptions that Michigan is just this elite public university?

Now, I would Say, and I've speak to all people around the state, politicians and all people at the federal level as well, that you'd have to ask them. But I would say that they have noticed that we're at the table more, that we take this responsibility even more seriously than we have. I would argue that the University of Michigan has been involved at each of these levels of responsibility for a long time. But I'm very proud of the fact that our leaders, our deans, our faculty and our students are very involved at each of these levels through activism, through service. If you look at any of these initiatives that are occurring, say, at the state level, to your point, we are really ramping up what we do. For example, in terms of economic development and technology transfer in the state, the governor has really responded, Lieutenant governor has really responded by including us on significant committees and commissions. We are very involved with the other universities in the state, not only the R1 universities, but community colleges, to really think about how to create the talent and to retain the talent that's going to be required for the vibrancy of the state economy. And we're also engaged very actively with other institutions, but also the federal government ensuring that we remain competitive as a nation. And so I would say that I think that if you talk to people, I hope that they will point out that we're at the table and we're very engaged and we're ramping up our involvement.

So what do you think? You've been obviously in higher ed for a long time. What do you think is at the center then of this lack of trust or this declining trust and in higher education writ large across the country?

I think it's multifactorial. I think that one, it's the issue of communication. I think that the sort of view that universities have for a long time been in ivory towers is partially true. Universities haven't been very good at articulating their commitment. Their passion haven't really gone outside of the campus boundaries in some cases. I don't think it's true at Michigan. So part of it's communication. And if you don't talk about your involvement, people don't know about it and assume that it's not happening. So part of it is communication. I would say the other part of the distrust has to do with the question of ROI and whether or not people really believe that what students are experiencing on campus, in the classroom, in the laboratory, how it relates to their future careers and their future impact on the community and on society in general. I think that it's time for introspection. And we're doing that as an institution and sector is doing that as well. I think it's healthy. Many things have changed since I was a college student. It is important, I think, for all of us to think about how we integrate into society, how we start to look at what we teach and how we can prepare our future graduates to contribute to different fields. I think it's very healthy. It's happened in entire history of higher education and this is a good time for us to do that as well. Part of it is an appropriate question of alignment of what we do in the wants and needs of society, but also in terms of what our students want. Students are different from when you and I were in college and we need to listen to them and incorporate that into the path forward. I think it's healthy.

So there's the talk, the talk, communicate. There's the walk, the walk and ROI and so forth. The other part of this that you've mentioned to us is that you've said we want to play a bigger role in elevating Detroit. I'd love to know what that looks like tactically and on the ground.

Before I answer that, can I just. There was a third thing I want to talk about and I think it would be amiss for me not to mention that part of the issue has to do with a counter narrative about the value of critical discourse, of asking difficult questions not only internally, but also of government, of society, of social mobility. I think it's exceedingly important at these times for universities to remain committed to truth, to evidence based decision making, to reinforcing the importance of diversity of thought, of civil discourse. I think that many institutions have varied from that from decades ago and it's particularly important for us to recommit to that because there's the cornerstone of a just society is that kind of freedom of expression, diversity of ideas and civil discourse. And in the absence of that, we lose. One of the great attributes of a university is a diverse set of opinions of perspectives that together actually inform the

best path forward that makes sense. Let's go to the Detroit one. Just briefly, just talk about tactically what your work in elevating Detroit looks like.

Well, you know, one of the first people that I had the privilege of meeting when I arrived here in Michigan was the mayor of Detroit, Mike Duggan, who's a proud graduate of the University of Michigan. And he's incredibly passionate about Detroit. He loves Detroit like no one I've met. And he's been very, very successful there's really a renaissance of sorts that you can see if you go there. I encourage you to go there. There are incredible restaurants, wonderful museums. The orchestra is really fantastic. You can see even within the year that I've been here, the impact of that kind of focused effort. Go into the mayor's council room. There are all kinds of charts. And he holds everyone accountable, including myself, even though I don't work for him to really be part of the solution to make Detroit better. And his enthusiasm is infectious. I want to be his partner because, as I said, the University of Michigan, the resources that we have, the place that we hold in higher education is due to the success of Detroit, is due to the success of Michigan. And we owe something back to Detroit and to Michigan to help make this an even more vibrant and economically successful part of the United States.

And do you believe. Just a quick follow up on that. Do you believe that the citizens of Detroit and of Michigan believe that?

Well, I would say we have work to do. To answer your question about how are we doing this, I'm sitting down and the deans, other heads of department are sitting down. We have hundreds of interactions across Detroit in education, in healthcare and economic development, in innovation, and we're going to ramp that up. And so that's how we're actually doing it. There's no substitute to rolling up your sleeves and working together, developing plans. And so, and that's not just with the mayor, it's his entire team. And I think that's going to continue to grow. Investments that are taking place in terms of infrastructure and programs are just breathtaking in the space. For example, education as an example, we're going to Invest more in K12 Education in Detroit and our Marcel Family School of Education. I'm very proud of their role with that. But that's just one example.

So one other question before we open it up to audience questions. Again, use the QR code to ask questions and we'll ask them from the stage here. So, you know, we were talking before we got on stage about football and Obviously the Big Ten Conference has expanded again.

It's no longer 10.

No longer 10. Hasn't been 10 for quite some time. But the other thing that we talk a lot on this podcast about is the future of higher ed in terms of mergers and acquisitions, but more alliances and how universities can work more together. And I've done a lot of work on the Big Ten over the years in terms of the history of the conference, which really started out as an academic conference more than athletics. And one of the things that I think really differs the Big Ten Conference from every other athletic conference, and you know this from being in other athletic conferences, is that academic opponent, the Big Ten Academic Alliance. So what else can the Big Ten do as the conference expands? As we think about the power of all of these institutions now that are going to be in the Big Ten to solve the big challenges facing the U.S. do you imagine the Big Ten Academic alliance and the alliance aspect of it to become bigger as a result of the expansion?

Well, certainly there are more institutions, and I can tell you, as a member of the expansion committee of sorts within the committee and presidents and chancellors, that as has been the case for a long time at the Big Ten, the strength of current and prospective members of the conference, one of the most important things that is considered is their strength as a. A research university, most of them public, as you know, with a few exceptions.

Two now, right?

That's right. Yeah. Two.

That's right.

Used to be one, but used to be one Northwestern, and it used to be University of Chicago, my alma mater. But, you know, it's incredibly important. I've been in other conferences. There's actually a facility, a vibrant facility in Chicago where that alliance members meet, not only presidents, but also faculty members, students and deans. And a lot of wonderful things have happened because of that alliance. And I can tell you in my conversations with the other presidents and chancellors that not only is that integral to each of our identities, but it is one of the most attractive features of the Big Ten. I'm really proud of the fact that the University of Michigan, when you go to the Union, the steps of which John F. Kennedy articulated his vision of a peace tour, I think at 2am in the morning, something like that, that on the sides of that front door are a scholar and an athlete. And some people often ask me, why is that important? Well, we are a very large institution with 19 schools, an incredible amount of activity just in Ann Arbor. But if I compare the University of Chicago and University of Michigan, I've been at both. I'm proud of both. There's something special about the athlete part, the way it brings people together in the big house, over 105, 112,000 people coming together. And if you actually walk around, you'll see people from Michigan, medicine from Kinesiology, from smtd, LSNA from Engineering, all cheering for the same team. And there's a saying, the team, the team, the team. And what's really special about the University of Michigan is whether it's athletics any of the sports, whether it's research, whether it's teaching, there's an esprit de corps that I've never seen anywhere. And I think that's part of the secret sauce of what makes the University of Michigan special, is that people will come together, maybe at a football game, maybe at a coffee house, and they'll talk about ideas. You know, I've been to many alumni events for different institutions, and what's unique about the University of Michigan is they'll talk a lot before the event and they'll stay the longest. And this love of discourse, of sharing ideas, about dreaming, about how as a community we can come together and do even better internally and externally, is something that I'm particularly proud of.

I won't ask what alumni enthusiasm does for your sleep schedule, but as we move to Q and A, there's a few questions. But for time's sake, we're going to just do one right now, which is that someone wrote, I imagine that admissions at such a competitive public university is quite complicated. A lot of your counterparts in the private university space can prioritize what they choose in admissions, financials, racial equity, things like that. But you also have to consider whether you are serving Michigan's best interests. How do you balance that, especially given the revenue disparity potential with out of state students versus in state?

Well, we are discussing this actively, several aspects of your question. It's multifaceted, what you ask. You're right. I mean, one in five is just the general selectivity. If you look at, for example, musical theater or robotics, it could be up as low as 3% of the students are accepted. So there are students that I know who have applied to Ivy League schools in Michigan, gotten into Ivy League schools and not Michigan. And so, you know, that is something that we think about. We think about, are we the right size? We are large. We are now the largest public university in the state of Michigan. But if you, Jeff, as you've written, if you compare our sites at Toronto or Arizona State or ubc, we're significantly smaller. And so I've asked just a fundamental question to our deans. Do you want to grow? And the answer from most of them is yes, but only if we can provide a quality of educational student experience that they deserve. So we're not just growing, and we're not going to grow for the sake of growing. But Jeff, you're right. There is something that we need to think about, seriously about. Do we make the Michigan educational experience, the total experience, available to more people? Because there's an important role public universities play. If you count all the graduates from the elite privates, they don't have the output that we do. So if you look at Michigan, Michigan State, Wayne State, Ohio State, Illinois, the big ten universities, our output is enormous. We have a responsibility to provide an uncommon education to the common person, which is our foundation to what we do as an institution. So we need to think about it. We are thinking about it. That's part of your question. The other part of your question was the differential in out of state. I actually think if you think about how we were founded, we're not really a land grant. The proportion of students here that are out of state is higher than at many other public universities. I actually think it's pretty healthy where it is. I wouldn't want it to change much more. I do worry about to part of your question whether we should grow so that more qualified Michigan students can come. But I actually think there is something that's positive to bringing the different kinds of people, students, personalities, perspectives from across America together in one campus. And so if you think about 36,000 undergrads, I think it's enriching for someone to be in a classroom, a laboratory, in a residence hall with people not only from Michigan, but people from the coasts. And it's actually good for the country actually as well. So we have to look at the right number. But I think that the mix is kind of magical.

Well, thank you, President Ono, for being with us today on Future youe. And we'll be right back after this break.

Thank you very much.

Thank you.

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Welcome back to Future you as we dive into this conversation with our panelists at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. And as a reminder, this is a stop on the Future youe Campus tour and it is brought to you by Dell Technologies and Google Chrome os. And on our panel today, we have Rob Ernst, the Associate Vice President for Student Life for Health and Wellness. He is also a physician, as we talked about backstage, and and is the University's Chief Health Officer. We also have Judith Pennywell here, the Director of the International Center. Thank you for being here. And Lashawn Jackson A senior in the school for environment and Sustainability. Welcome to you all.

Welcome.

Thanks for being here.

Thank you.

I want to start. We said we would dig into a bunch of the issues that came up in the first part of the conversation with President Ono. I want to start with a question that has probably impacted all of you, which is the growing mental health challenges impacting young adults. I want to see how this is playing out at the University of Michigan and what you're doing to address it. Rob, let's start with you. Given your role at focusing on health and critically wellness, which is obviously becoming a big issue on college campuses nationwide,

well, student mental health has been a big issue for a long time. And you're right, I think there's been a lot of concern that it's getting worse. I think some of the contributing factors for why there's been concern even before the pandemic was a sort of a growing awareness that the local community couldn't support the needs of students, particularly a big school like ours, that students come from all over the place and payment for mental health care can be really challenging. I think there's also been a trend which I thought was unsolvable 20 years ago, which was stigma around help seeking. That's very different now and has contributed to an increased demand for some of these what I'll call downstream services. And that's a positive when you've got a willingness to seek help or to help others around you. The third has been an issue that students have long wanted to get in early and get prompt service. The issue for access has been a problem. The model has often been short term, brief intervention, but increasingly now the students have been wanting longer term treatment. And many students have more experience with mental health care before they come to campus. So we're much more savvy consumers of mental health services. We're expecting more at least come to campus with an awareness of the differences between these modalities. We have been like many places, adding mental health providers and that hasn't seemed to move the needle during the peak of the pandemic. Our institution, understanding that this problem may even become worse given the distress associated with the pandemic, charged a team from across the campus to think about innovative ways to address mental health care. Some of the suggestions that came out of that were best practices around some of these downstream resources and partnering with telecounselling services. But we've also during that same time adopted the Okanagan Charter. That was really the charge to address the ecosystem and to really try and promote the entire place as a health promoting university, as an upstream approach in an effort to try and reduce the drivers of distress at a policy and a systems level.

LaShawn, how about the student body and your peers? We were talking earlier about how you started your first year here at Michigan Online and actually your entire first year online. So talk a little bit about not only has that impact to you, but how does that has that impact to your peers? What are you seeing among your fellow classmates?

Yeah, that was challenging for sure. I think there was. When you're growing up, you expect to graduate college, you expect to have your senior prom and then none of those things happen and you're like, okay, maybe we'll have freshman year of college. That didn't happen either. So it was very challenging. I think we talked more about it behind stage. Just talking about how it was hard to feel like you had an effect on the world. Like, I was just staring at pixels all the time for the entire year. I'm just like, what am I doing? I feel like a robot. But, you know, getting here and like meeting people in my same age group being a senior, we're like, yeah, it's the year for juniors. Like, we're gonna make up for all the time lost. And I think in that way it's been a positive outcome. And since that, we kind of recognize the time loss and want to do our best to make up for it. And I think that has kind of made my experience here a little more sweeter. Just to know that we came out of it and it wasn't all good, but it's okay now.

And do you feel like that the pandemic kind of hastened issues that were already there or how do you think it would have been different if you had started that first year here?

I think I don't know how different it would have been. I think we just. I don't know, I think I'd be less present because I wouldn't have, you know, like, I would expect these things, like, okay, this is normal. Like, okay, this is how it's supposed to be. But the fact that it wasn't how it's supposed to be kind of made you kind of step back and realize, like, oh, this is actually really special to be in a place and learn with others and grow with others. And I think I've grown a lot, like leadership wise and confidence wise. So I think in that sense, not having that first year of just being like a drone and losing all my social skills and then coming back and relearning all of them was really special for me. And I think, yeah, that's kind of the difference.

Judith, we've talked a lot on Future youe about the mental health changes, challenges facing colleges and universities and students at colleges and universities. I think we tend to do it from a domestic lens of domestic students. How about international students? Because often I don't think we're thinking of them and hearing in perhaps a different way, if we have to. What should universities be doing for international students specifically?

Right. Well, I'll start by saying our statistics, we have about a 17% international student population within our student body. And so that's a fairly large percentage. And of that, about 65% are graduate professional doctoral students, some of whom bring families. So when we think about international students in our office, we're really thinking about someone as young as 17, all the way up to 30s, 40s, that kind of thing, and their children and that kind of thing. So some of the things that we've done here, from the mundane, we have an international health insurance requirement, and that provides students and provides us with an opportunity to make sure that students are taken care of in the case of illness, injury or worse, and that they have access to all the different services that are offered here within the university community, Michigan Med in the overall community, or when they're traveling. So it's mundane, but it's important. Our counseling and psychological services caps they do amazing work. They have several groups targeted at international students, some of which they do in other languages, and they have several counselors who speak other languages. And I'm sure Rob is going to speak more about some of the collective impact work that we're doing. But they've made sure to include people from my office, including myself, to make sure that international student concerns and voices are being heard in the process.

It's a perfect transition because I wanted to move to collective impact and sort of the role that that plays won't surprise listeners to a very decentralized campus in the University of Michigan. And I want to turn to you, Lashawn, first, just because you've become very focused in your journey at the University of Michigan on this question of sustainability. You didn't start there, but you've come to there. So I'd love you to talk a little bit about the roles that you've held, what you're studying, and how collective impact has informed how Michigan has tackled this question of sustainability. And I just want to give you this. You had this great quote when we talked beforehand where you said that a flagship university Things could be a little lonely, but we're doing it with other actors, figures, communities that need to be at the center of these conversations and move.

Yeah, I think. Yeah, it's a lot, I think. Yeah. To begin, I think the most fulfilling experience I've had so far on campus was last year I served as co president of our Student Sustainability Coalition. And that's kind of where I was able to really work with others who very obviously cared about the issue of sustainability and making our campus and community better than it is and better in the future. And so through that, I think I learned a lot about what it means to have collective impact. I think it's obviously when you get together with people who care about the same thing, okay, you're going to work towards the same thing, but seeing the impact as well is just invaluable, honestly, I think. Yeah. When we talk about strategic visioning, like Santa mentioned earlier, I think it's important to elevate students and their voices in these spaces because I think my generation is the one that's kind of tasked with solving the world's issues, unfortunately. And while that is daunting, it does provide a lot of opportunity for us to kind of hone in and get together and be like, hey, I care about you. We care about each other. Let's get through this together and figure out ways to do it together. And with sustainability, I think on a campus level, I think it's important to, like Santa said as well, collaborate with others and realize that in these coming years, the world will be changing. And I think who we have by our side is just going to be paramount to how we get on the other side of that.

Judith, I'd love you to weigh in here just because obviously, collective impact doesn't just go through the work that students are doing here, but you're sending students all over the world. There's quite a global aspect of the University of Michigan. How are you thinking about these issues?

Right. Well, we think about education abroad, not just study abroad. We think about the opportunities that we can provide students to not only study, but to do research, to do volunteer service, to do internships overseas, so that they're getting these experiences not only in their field of study or in their area of interest, like, say, sustainability, but they're bringing back ideas and perspectives that continue to grow, enhance their ultimate educational experience here at Michigan. So sending them out into the world reaps rewards when they come back. We have probably pre pandemic, we're still kind of rebounding on the study abroad or the education abroad side. But we've had about 36, 37% of our undergraduate body do education abroad experiences. And I think that's a really, it's a tribute to kind of the academic departments here and the colleges and schools and how they're set up in. It might be decentralized, but they're definitely thinking about how do we best serve our students and educational abroad experiences in these particular majors in our field. So I think there's definitely it's a continuing opportunity that we need to pursue because I think it's very important for students to develop the types of knowledge, skills, attitudes that will serve them well regardless if they go on to grad school or. Or into careers.

Yeah. So Rob, let's let you lay out those principles then of collective impact that undergird not just the sustainability work, but also the health and wellness work that we were talking about and a lot of actions. It seems to me, at least from talking to you beforehand, that undergird when say University of Michigan says we have to come together as a community to tackle something and.

Right. I think it's because we're so famously decentralized and big issues that have a common agenda across a big decentralized place are a perfect scenario for collective impact, which is a framework to bring people together to bring about societal change. The important part from my perspective with collective impact is it has to be anchored to a common agenda for health and wellness. I mentioned a moment ago, during the peak of the pandemic, the Vice President of Student Life and the Provost charged this student mental health task force. As we were getting ready to lean into best practices for downstream interventions for student mental health that might have been exacerbated by the pandemic and then rolled them out to the campus. We consistently heard from faculty and staff, what about us? We're struggling too. Even if you only care about student mental health, building capacity for faculty and staff is the ingredients for an ecosystem that improves the well being of the whole community. The common agenda is how collective impact starts for health and wellness. I mentioned ago, we built our collective impact structure around an aspirational goal of being a health promoting university. We joined the US Health Promoting Campuses Network. We built a backbone which is really important. It's not just a commitment to try and be better. It's a permanent infrastructure that's well represented across campus with different stakeholders that they could bring to the table around this common agenda. The goal is to try and identify mutually reinforcing activities that lead to policy and system change. So that you can actually work upstream on the drivers of distress. The whole ecosystem improves that way. One of the early wins we had was, for instance, changing the start date for the winter semester pushed it back a week. There was a policy, we start winter semester first Wednesday after the first Monday. Just policy. Probably good reasoning for setting that up so that you can plan your calendars or something. But when the First Monday is January 1st, that means classes start January 3rd. And people just across the system said that that's not ready. It gave us a framework, it gave us a backbone structure, gave us a governing body and a platform to talk about this common agenda. Some of the tricky parts that are still work in progress are some shared measures. It's tricky when you're trying to measure things like how do you build resiliency in students, how do you measure someone's ability to define their purpose?

Or

how do you prioritize your health along the same lines as your academics? These are the things we're trying to figure out through this structure. At the same time, we also learned as we were coming together to work on a collective approach to Covid. Continuous communication is critically important. Along those lines, having a common agenda, building a backbone structure, identifying mutually reinforcing activities, identifying some common measures, and then continuous communication are the underlying principles for collective impact. We call ours the well being collective. It's a thing, it's not just an idea.

Okay, I want to get to our last set of questions and again, we're going to have questions from the audience as well when we have time. But I want to return to the topic we explored earlier with President Ono around being this global university, but also being anchored here in Michigan and Ann Arbor and Detroit specifically. Judith, let me start with you on this and then we'll move to Sean and Rob. Can you talk about the university's international goals and how they intersect with being a good member and partner in the community? Because again, some people might say, well, we're a state university in the state of Michigan. Why do we need international students?

Right.

Well, as you mentioned before, we're in the backyard of Detroit and a stone's throw from Detroit is another country. It's Canada.

Right?

So we are international by nature. And I don't think it's incongruent. I think you can be a public serving institution and a global institution at the same time. The types of things that we're teaching, the ideas and concepts our students are learning, the research we're doing, it's all global. We've learned something from the pandemic We've learned something from tactics like climate change and sustainability. We can't just do it in a vacuum. We have to be thinking about more than our community. I think our goals around engaged learning, making sure students have opportunities to grow inside and outside of the classroom and figure out how to solve big problems. Because, as Lashad mentioned, her generation is going to solve the problems for us. I think that's all part of our work. And if we have a diverse student body coming from around the country, as that was noted earlier, as well as around the world, 125 countries, we want to make sure that we are thinking about things not only locally, but globally.

So, Lashon, what has that meant for you? We talked about around the country. You're from Georgia, but how is the worldwide view of higher education here and how has that changed or enriched your experience here as an undergraduate?

Yeah, there's no denying that the University of Michigan is very well resourced. I think I've had a lot of opportunities like this that I've taken advantage of, and I will always be grateful for those. I think what's more important to me, though, is the what we do with where we are, not necessarily how we're ranked. I think it's important. Like you were saying. I think it does. It is international by nature, but starting small is also very key. I've learned a lot about community building and community resiliency in the past couple of years. And I think learning to take care of yourself and others first, I think can radiate out in unimaginable ways, honestly, to the local community, state, community, national, international. So I think really just does start small, and I think that's cliche, but I've learned that it's true, and I've been working to practice that in my life, and it's been really fulfilling.

And Rob, how about you, in terms of what are the things you're thinking about that maybe your colleagues at other universities don't necessarily think about because you have this huge footprint around the world?

Well, there's some responsibility from a practical standpoint. As Judith mentioned, we have students and other affiliates traveling around the world, just like we have to do in our own backyard. We have to understand the health and safety of our folks when they're not here, and that's part of the work. I think the way I would think about this is I was reminded when I was listening to the earlier segment with President Ono, when he talked about the importance of a student experience. It's a transformational time, you know, It's a long time ago for me, but always energized when I think about that opportunity for students to transform themselves. And that happens in the ecosystem that's enriched by diversity and diverse backgrounds and experiences. The Okanagan Charter, I mentioned earlier, this international charter. It's grounded in principles of equity and diversity and really speaks to the interconnectedness of people, communities and the entire planet. If there's any. If there's pain in one of those, then it gets transmitted to others. But if there's goodness in your enrichment by the experiences of others as well. So I think diversity is a key ingredient to an ecosystem for transformative experiences.

We have some great questions coming in on the iPad, I think. Do we have time for two or do we have to.

We could do.

Okay, we'll try. All right, Rob, I think this is probably going to be for you, but if you all have a perspective, jump on in. The first one is students are seeking more mental health support, yet many faculty are untrained with assisting and filling the support that's needed. So how can we re envision graduate training to prepare the future professors to be able to handle this new part of the job?

Right, Right. Yeah. I actually think one of the things I'm super excited about that's coming out of the well being collective and was identified by one of the work groups charged by our backbone structure was how do we build faculty capacity, understanding that they are on the front lines and oftentimes seeing students in distress. And we're going to work with our center for Transformative Learning to try and come up with a systemic model for building faculty capacity on how to have the tools not just to identify students in distress, but to actually intervene and then connect into the system. I think that's the other key part is to build a system that is a continuum. And it's not just a one size fits all. It's not just a mental health issue. It's a counseling deficiency. We have other opportunities to address some of the specific issues that may be in place. For instance, we have a wellness coaching program that's really gaining popularity around motivational interviewing that can explore issues around behavioral issues or addictions and things like that. Recognize that oftentimes students feel more comfortable seeking help out of a medical provider. Having a model that's connected across the continuum, built to make sure we address some of the more significant things through partnerships.

But.

But not a one size fits all. And you're absolutely right. Having some tools to build capacity for our faculty who want to be partners in this, who really are on the front line. Very much. Very much.

Yeah. So the next question is also about mental health supports. And it refers to. And I have to make sure I get my zeros right here. But staff make up 50,000 people on the Ann Arbor campus and yet don't receive many of the mental health supports given to faculty and students, particularly the added breaks for mental health. How would you address this inequity? I don't know. Who wants to. Something we've actually talked a lot about is that universities think a lot about student experience, think a lot about faculty experience. They don't always think about the staff experience.

I'm happy to jump in here as well and say that increasingly and in fact all the time. Now, I grew up as a campus health provider and I use those words specifically. Many people say they run a student health center. I call it campus health. And that encompasses the entire ecosystem. As I say, I think becoming increasingly apparent that a university even like ours, that provides a very generous benefit package and says, you're a free agent, we're going to give you this generous benefit package. Now go figure out where you're going to get your needed care. Many employees are finding, like I said earlier with the students, that the surrounding community doesn't have the capacity to meet those needs, particularly those most in need. This is the really challenging part. And our university has had employee assistance programs which grew out of specific, often concerns with performance and things like that. But over the last 10 years are increasingly being turned to. As a mental health provider, we've got to come up with another approach on the downstream. It's complicated, but I do believe it's why I'm so bullish about working upstream on the drivers of distress. And if we can really work together and think about the. The ecosystem and try and turn down the temperature through systems and policies just like we should be doing for environmental justice, then I think we won't have to be so dependent upon the downstream resources.

It's training and retraining of supervisors as well to watch out and be cognizant of the fact that staff are facing some of the similar issues that we're seeing in other parts of the community. So our HR policies and our supervision supervisors training can use a boost in this area, I think. And that's something that we have to continue to think about in order to be successful in the future.

Yeah, I also think it's a culture shift as well, I think, encouraging people to just show up as they are and feel comfortable in the spaces that they're in. I mean, we go into work and we have to do this job and go home, but I think we spend a lot of time here and I think encouraging people to just be themselves and show up as they are and how they need to be and communicate that, I don't know how that works. I still am trying to figure that out, but I think that's a key element as well.

But even for faculty, the faculty don't have to be perfect in front of the classroom. Exactly. So that's all we have time for today. For the three of you, this has been a great conversation. I don't know about you, Michael, but this whole day or this whole hour that we've been together here, I'm just thinking of the, of the ideas that President Ono talked about in terms of growing and balancing that with quality. He made reference to Canada, obviously, where he was here previously at the University of British Columbia, where the universities there, the top quality universities in Canada are much larger than the top quality universities in the U.S. that was one big takeaway I had of that. Judith, what you said about education versus study abroad, that we need to think more broadly about the work that students are doing abroad then. Third Sean, just in terms of the work of sustainability, I moderated a panel recently where the top threat to American higher ed is. We often think of it as enrollment, we often think of it as finances and things like that. But everybody on the panel identified sustainability and environmental sustainability as one of the biggest threats to American higher education. I'm just fascinated by your trajectory here because I often think that American higher education is very good at training people and educating people for other industries, but not necessarily thinking about themselves, not necessarily thinking about the institution itself. And that you're becoming so involved in the institution here, I think really speaks volumes for what I think could be a model for other colleges and universities to really get their students involved at solving the problems locally, not just nationally and internationally. Michael, I don't know if you have any additional thoughts.

Yeah, just a couple building off that. I mean, I'm always struck when I'm at a university at how running a university is like running a city or a state in its own right. Right. And that speaks, I think, to giving students and others in the community more opportunities to be. Be part of those problem solving on the campus itself. And then I was just struck, Rob. I'm always struck by just how the stigma around mental health really has gone away and the ripple effects that that creates, both not just for the downstream conversation, but for the upstream and more of the preventative approach to not just mental health, but wellness more generally is so critical, I think, on our campuses. And lashawn, you talked a lot about how missing that year really led the students and you to really want to seize the opportunity of being in this place. I think a lot about this because we often talk about, hey, what if it was a three year degree instead of a four year and stuff like that. But I think more than that, showing up then on campus was the other part of what you said as you are and being able to present yourself and get into these complicated conversations and have civil discourse like Santa talked about in the first half, that is often missing from universities, unfortunately. And wrestling with the trade offs between all these questions that we've been debating is a real big part of the work of the university. So really appreciate you all engaging in.

Yeah.

Please join us in thanking all three of these panelists today.

Thank you.

So we're going to leave it there. In addition to our panelists, thank you to our sponsors, sponsors again, Dell Technologies and Google Chrome os. Thank you to President Ono, of course, and thanks again to the folks here at the University of Michigan and all of you for joining us today. Thank you very much for being here and thank you and have a good day.

Sam.