On the first episode of Future Casting with Utah State, President Elizabeth Cantwell speaks to the University of Utah’s President Taylor Randall on pivotal challenges of higher education today. They cover redefining how their institutions will continue to meet their missions and serve the needs of their communities, while offsetting the decline of public confidence.
Full transcript:
President Cantwell: Hello, and welcome to the first episode of Future Casting with USU. Future casting is about scenario planning for the future and figuring out how we're gonna get there. I'm Elizabeth Cantwell, president of Utah State University. Today I'm speaking with President Taylor Randall of the University of Utah, on how our respective institutions continue to meet the needs of Utah, both now and in the future. President Randall, thank you for joining me today.
President Randall: Thank you for doing this, very kind of you.
President Cantwell: Taylor, I'm gonna I'm gonna just launch and hopefully this will be a little bit fun. Thank you for joining me today, President Randall. The purpose of these podcasts is what I call future casting, you might be really familiar with that with your background in business. This is very much a scenario-planning type of podcast. And for us, I think the opportunity is to really kind of talk a little bit about what is happening in higher ed, and where our incredible public-serving institutions are today, and where we're going to get to, and how we're going to get there. But I'm going to start with just noting that our institutions have been in Utah for a long time. And that is easy to see because we're both 17th presidents of our institutions. I'm not sure you knew that. But I just —
President Randall: Betsy, I didn't know you were number 17. I'm glad we share that.
President Cantwell: It's an odd little factoid. But it says we've been around on the planet as institutions for a really long time. And I think there's something to be said about the fact that both of us come from more of a business background, you have maybe a little bit more academic background than I do. I've only been in higher ed for about 10 years. But I find that the pace of change in higher ed is something that is challenging for my institution, I don't know how it is for yours. Do you see that? In your institution?
President Randall: Yeah, Betsy let me let me first, if you don't mind, just make a quick comment. I was absolutely thrilled when they appointed you as president of Utah State University, mainly because of that background that you bring, and I hope our listeners appreciate the incredible depth of knowledge that you have in terms of bringing research into the real lives via commercialization or any other means. I think what's exciting is we have two like-minded presidents who want to increase the pace of change at both of our institutions and collaborate while doing I think your assessment of your institution has been similar to mine in that if we can package What is great about both our institutions together, we can move the economy of this state, we can increase the competitiveness of our state and our nation in a variety of areas. And I'm just thrilled to be able to work with you.
President Randall: Well, blessings, and I would say back at you more. Dr. Randall, you've been just an amazing partner. As I get started, we say in the south dipped in the sauce of Utah, as well as really gazing at the institution that is Utah State University. And going alright, let's let's get let's strap ourselves onto the rocket and get rolling. From the future casting perspective. I'm one of those people that likes to look out a decade or even more, and ask the question, how are we going to provide the public service value that we provide today, in a decade when things like technology have really impacted our institutions? I could be wrong. But I think that the University of Utah is perhaps a little more invested in really looking at what and how technology will impact higher education. I don't know if I'm wrong there. But if I am correct, could you sort of give us a little sense of how you think about that as an institution and how it affects the kind of research that we will be doing and how we'll deliver that to the public?
President Randall: I think the University of Utah is invested in technology for the future, yeah.
President Cantwell: Yes, and really, I think you're a little bit ahead of Utah State University in terms of how you think about getting to really where the pucks going to be on the technology side. So we're, we're serving our impact goals, we're serving our students. And we're actually sort of serving those kind of new programs that we're going to have to develop and deliver it. I'll just point to AI there because I know your your institution is deeply invested in partnerships with a number of other institutions around how is AI going to impact our future? And this is, as you know, critically important for Utah, what are the new companies that are going to get developed? What are the modalities that are going to drive, not just higher ed, but K-12?
President Randall: You know, artificial intelligence, as you mentioned, is one of the things that we're going to be heavily investing in, we are going to dedicate $100 million over the next five to seven years to develop a variety of capabilities that are AI-enabled. Those will vary from just fundamental AI, thinking about AI to protect ourselves from AI in some sense to learning outcomes and how we actually employ in our classrooms and in K through 12, I think you and I both share a vision that if universities come together and identify those core technologies for the future, that we can then not only develop the technologies themselves, but while we do that, we will also develop the workforce that knows how to use them, deploy them and implement them in positive ways towards society. And we're in the early stages of forming partnerships with a variety of companies and foundations to move those initiatives forward. And I think what I would hope we see here in this state is that state leaders come together with our research universities, and we invest together in the areas that we find are critical for our state needs.
President Cantwell: Yes, and you and I have been on the same page, as we talk about a lot of these kind of future relevant technologies like advanced manufacturing, the entire realm of life sciences, but really, you know, biotechnology and biomanufacturing, we've talked about kind of think of the other areas that we really skimmed over together as impactful for the future of Utah. But one thing I would raise is, at least in my mind, all of those technological changes also impact the humanities and the social sciences and how we train our students on the people side of the equation. We just started something called the Heravi Peace Institute are both of us kind of enmeshed in the societal exploration and reevaluation of what is free speech. What does institutional neutrality mean, I feel like we have this opportunity to train future leaders around the leading the nation, and certainly the state in these important conversations.
President Randall: You bring up a really good point, and I'm excited about your new institute. If you look at the past, the advent of new tech technology often stretches, strains, exaggerates current social systems and current social biases. And so at the same time, you see technological change, you also have to do the hard work with human beings and social systems. You started off this podcast by saying it's a critical moment in higher education. And, in fact, if you look at confidence in institutions over the last decade, there's one institution that's lost more confidence in the public than any other. And that's, and that's higher ed, you know, it is time for all of us to deeply think about how we deliver what we're delivering, are we actually engaging with our communities that surround us? Are we allowing those with differing points of view on our campuses to speak? Does our curriculum match the challenge of a new era? And I would just say, I've appreciated your leadership in this area, because I think the things you're doing with your new institute, and the discussions you're having on campus, around speech are really fundamental to allowing us to have dialogues around technology as they develop.
President Cantwell: Yes, I will just underscore that, and you know, this, but my perspective is that one of the things that we as major public institutions can lend to this discussion is bringing the wide variety of scholarship that's out there to, you know, out into the open, so our students and our faculty and our communities can hear that scholarship and can listen and understand the many viewpoints that are out there. So I look forward to bringing as much of that from both of our institutions as possible, and really engaging with our entire state around that topic of you know, the flow of information, how you hear what you hear how you gather your own personal thoughts, and then interact with society for the betterment of other humans, that, for me, is actually kind of a ground, it's a baseline for where some of these amazing new technologies are going to take us. And I'm gonna frame around two areas, one that's really close to USU, and one that's really close to the U. For USU. We have, you know, responsibility for agriculture and the future of agriculture and the future of food are massively shifting, what modalities what technologies are used to grow things and farm, both farm and ranch, and then deliver that into production capacity, and transformation into things that people eat on your side, you know, that flows right into the massive transformation in healthcare that's happening as a result of both and, you know, crisper style technologies, but also sensors and, you know, I would call it the bioengineering world is shifting under our feet. We have talked about things like that, but I wonder if I could ask you how you think about the value of our R1 universities in translating technological advancements into the core, you know, outcomes that we are delivering in health care for our state.
President Randall: This is perhaps, I would think one area that generally in public is not as well known or talked about, as things like AI. And it's an area where putting the strengths of our two institutions together will be incredibly critical. Your role in the development of agriculture in the state, I think will be critical. The innovations in agricultural technology are enormous. We already have some incredible demonstration projects in this state around localized plant growing, which takes transportation out of the equation and helps back off our infrastructure. And I see I see Utah State University is actually being a leader in that area. Similarly, much of the innovation that comes into the human world comes out of agriculture. And so we have to start thinking about working together. In this area, we think you think about personalized medicine. You mentioned sensors, yes. Right. But you think about you think about personalized medicine. And it begins with a framework where we think that actual, the actual delivery of medicine is only really 20% of the care you get. And you think about nutrition, and all of those things that actually come out of agriculture that affect our overall health, those are broad areas, which in the future need a lot of development. And again, the hope is that the collaboration between these research universities can put the state in general on a trajectory of leadership.
President Cantwell: At the forefront. The other thing you and I have talked about with regard to this is that the capacity to transform our ability to deliver health written broadly to rural Utah is really embedded in a lot of these kinds of technology developments, certainly personalized medicine, if we can get it to the point where it doesn't have to be delivered at scale, but can be delivered person by person means that people who live in less dense areas can have access to remarkable capacities they don't have access to today. So I'm pretty excited about that, you know, that's, you know, serving rural Utah is a is a big piece of what we do. But I know we've talked together about how do we up the ante around health care in rural Utah by operating together. And hopefully, the state will be able to hear a lot more about that coming up, I'm going to shift just for a second because both of us just both of our institutions just participated in research on Capitol Hill. And what we were able to do there is actually show the power of being research-intensive institutions. But having all of our undergraduates have a chance to be exposed to that to learn how to think to learn how to operate in business environments, or, or you know, corporate environments to learn how to work through problems, whether they become researchers or not, I thought your students were amazing, I thought our students were amazing, I am really glad that we get to do that. I hope that we can bring other aspects of how we utilize our research intensity for the benefit of the students that we trained out to Capitol Hill and other parts of the general public.
President Randall: There are so many skills that one picks up as you work on a research project from a simple and I'm approaching this as a business-trained individual, that project management, the ability to deliver something difficult on a deadline is just fundamental to that, right?
President Cantwell: It is.
President Randall: So to your point of actually knowing how to operate in a professional industrial in environment. That's skill. Number one, you know, skill number two, that comes directly out of it is the actual, I mean, as you and I talked to those individuals, you probably found I walked into students that I had no idea what that what they were researching. And yet in five minutes, they could distill something complex into something I could understand and could then walk over and talk to you about how exciting it was. That's a skill, right? It's huge to decompose the complex into the simple. And then the final thing you realize in the economy of the future, we have to invest in the now and the workers we need for now and manufacturing. But these are the knowledge workers that will actually drive the ideas. And the fact that in each of those projects, we had over 100 kids that had discovered something new for the world.
President Cantwell: Yes.
President Randall: And knowing how to do it was just gave you incredible hope, right that this economy will continue to thrive and humanity's problems will get solved.
President Canwell: Absolutely. And to come back around to something that you said right at the very beginning. These are the kind of knowledge workers who will go create entirely new economic sectors for Utah and with really four years of exposure to Research, you can hear them in their mind going, Whoa, I could take this and go do that and start that I can talk to people about this. This is, it's not the only hope for the future of Utah, but it gives us the capacity to go rapidly into a changing future in a way that ensures that the state doesn't get left behind but also we may be the progenitor, the birthplace of entirely new capacities that the nation takes advantage of, for instance, I mean, I'm always I come out of the national security sector. So I'm always aware of what we need to do as a nation to stay ahead of our adversaries globally, or our competitors globally. And those kids are definitely a really good example of how we're going to do that.
President Randall: Betsy, would you mind if I ask you a question?
President Cantwell: Please do, I was gonna open it up to you.
President Randall: Because I, again, I think our listeners need to understand that your background coming out of the national security sector is really important. Translate your learnings at a national level into what we need to do as a state, right? Because I think this is something that is often just not well known. And it is really important for all of us to think about.
President Cantwell: So I love this question. I am primed and ready to answer it. Let me put that in, in two contexts. The first is kind of the technical leading to entirely new business sectors, we have the capacity because I've seen it done. I worked I don't know if a long time ago, 25 years ago, maybe maybe more even on the very, very, very first work that was ever done in the world on 3D manufacturing. It was done at a national lab. And I like to point out that between, say 25 years ago, and today, we have not only transformed traditional manufacturing, in other words, those techniques are out there in traditional production capacities in the US. But we have transformed and we have created entirely new modalities for manufacturing that have transformed our capacity to stay in the lead, in national security. But in many other areas, that's also given us an edge on what I call reshoring, very traditional, even low-margin manufacturing technologies, bringing that back to the US. So that's the technology piece. The other thing that I learned a lot about and have brought, I think to my 10 years of higher education is a perspective on both people and getting things done. So multibillion-dollar projects, using thousands of people driving everybody to a culture of let's get this done, let's make sure it gets done, kind of on budget, let's make sure we're bringing first of-a-kind stuff out into the world and we're doing it well takes a culture of future focus a culture of enabling people, a culture of believing in not just one another, but sort of all of that walks us away from the traditional higher education perspective of I call it kind of medieval or royal, the Royal President sort of sets the tone, and then the masses do what the tone is. This is a world where higher ed needs to be a place where not just our students, but our faculty, and our staff are enabled and they are driving the institution as much as the president is I think I'll leave it at that. But it's a big social shift. And I think it's an incredibly exciting opportunity for higher education.
President Randall: You know I love what you said about these massive large-scale projects that look into the future. And I know you've had experience with a number of those, would you mind making it real? A little bit just saying like, I know, you could talk about the chips act. I know, you could talk about the life sciences industry and things you've done there, maybe maybe, maybe advise both our universities of how we would tackle a long-term commitment to the future in an area.
President Cantwell: And again, great question. So I'll start with something that was driven by 9/11. And hopefully, we don't have that kind of driver. But we needed to understand and as a nation, we're not in any way, shape, or form, poised to understand how to test and understand where biological weapons of mass destruction were, whether they were deployed, where they were being manufactured, et cetera. That driver and I would argue we have some really serious drivers for our economies today that aren't as consequential to life and limb but they are important for the future of the nation. That Driver Set Up first, I would say in the first year after 9/11, we probably had across the US a billion dollars and a great deal of that invested in the institution that I was at developing detection technology. Those capacities grew into a number of very traditional production capacities in the US, they became the basis of PCR technology that's on the market. Now that is transforming not just our ability to do life sciences and medical research, but it's also transformed our capacity to do things like test for COVID. So that's probably a 20-year timeframe, starting with a driver starting with where does the investment come from. How do we build and use our innovation capacity to get some new ideas into production? Then the testing of whether or not that production serves the nation becomes a consequence of what are our standards. How do we develop, you know, deployment technologies? If you imagine that in the context of going back to what you said earlier, personalized medicine, and the driver of we have got to be able to better serve the health needs of rural Americans, certainly rural Utahns. But rural Americans are suffering massively from a dearth of healthcare options, can we take that as, as you know, a command function, and really drive our capacities in that direction? Clearly, from what I said earlier, we can do that. It takes about 20 years, for any big win like that, I think that gets at the timeframes. There's usually large dollars involved. But once you do the original research investment, the large dollars come from consortium with companies with other states with some rooms, other governments, they become a much larger, much larger question. And I would end by saying, that's the kind of thing we need to do in Utah around energy. And you and I've discussed that as well. How do we bring the prodigious capacity of our universities on the research side, as well as the workforce side, to enable the transformation of the energy picture for Utah sooner than later, we need that.
President Randall: What's been fun to discuss with you is just how we move these technologies forward and how we actually take a long-term view. And I think both of us realize that our careers will probably end long before.
President Cantwell: They will.
President Randall: Before the fruits of these investments are seeing how are we going to ensure the things that we start actually get continued. And that when you and I actually stepped down, that the 20-year plan will continue beyond us.
President Cantwell: Off the top of my head, there are three things I can think about we and I speak broadly to our community, not just to you and I need to really get some consensus around the major areas we want to spend driving 20-year solutions for the state of Utah. Energy is clearly one of them, I would argue heart health care, there's probably three or four, I think we've really got to bring the coalition statewide together and ask how are we going to want to put those funding options together and who needs to be seated at the I'll call it the oversight table or the Advisory Commission table, making sure we're always moving in the right direction, once those kinds of constructs are set up. The second piece is to make sure that the President's that are hired for institutions like ours are people who both understand and value what and who Utah is, who understand and value that long-term perspective on the part of what we're supposed to do in our public-serving institutions, who understand and value the community engagement that those large scale long term research programs require. And who understands that we have to build in at the same time, the workforce that to be ready for when those developments are ready to go, which means we have to understand how to create some flexibility in the way that we develop our academic offerings, so that we're not just targeting students who can get jobs today. But one of two things, either graduates who are preconditioned to drive their companies and the places that they get jobs into that future, or we're building programs. You know, two or three years in advance of AI is a great one, you know, how do we really make sure we are driving the AI workforce of the future where we know the needs are going to scale up rapidly seven to eight years from now. It'll be 10x what it is today that requires us you and I, and our faculties and our Board of Higher Education compatriots to think about how we build flexibility into our teaching and learning capacities.
President Randall: I don't want to keep asking you questions, so feel free to jump back in and ask me questions. But I love I've thoroughly enjoyed our conversations about the changing ways that we actually deliver education we start saying Thinking about not only just stackable certificates, this is the ability to deliver education in different times and places. And of course, your institution, given its land grant mission is very, very good at that with your different locations and the online capabilities that you've developed, so successfully. My next question would be in comment on where you see the delivery of education, going, particularly in these critical areas, and I can certainly comment on where we think it's going on on our side.
President Cantwell: So I'd love to hear your perspective, mine is that you know, because we already through the USU system, deliver everything from certificates to degrees to kind of regional for your bachelors, which are really targeted at local companies, to the kinds of graduate students we deliver out into the national scene from the Logan campus, we think a lot about that intersection of where is the value of in-person learning, where are the learning outcomes, better than they would be if they were delivered via any of the modes of technology? We've been in the online business for quite a while there's so much technology that enhances learning outcomes in online that we have got to get on that. And then the other thing that we see coming down the track is stuff, you know, for instance, truly amazing learning outcomes delivered via goggle-based apps and goggle-based teaching and learning. We know that some of our companion universities across the US are delivering things like Gen Ed, Bio Labs via remotely via goggle now there's a lot of work to be done there. But I think within a decade, we're going to see options for our students open up. And we have to keep our kind of eagle eye on what's best for the many types of students we have. And how do we optimize delivering as much as possible, I frankly think that's going to come through technology options that we either develop ourselves, because we certainly have the capacity to do that, or technology options that we have to become more facile at testing out in smaller components of our institution, we have the statewide mandate across a number of rural areas in Utah. These are places where I know that we can't build as large and online as an in-person presence as we can for the Logan campus. But we could really expand our offerings by asking the communities, you know, it's sitting at that intersection of what do you need today, and how do we build the technological capacity to deliver that to as many students as possible? I think it's interesting, there's no easy answers between that in person and online right now. But I think technology is going to get a lot more sophisticated. So as we keep our eye on learning outcomes, we will be much more, we'll use a lot more modalities and will be much more flexible.
President Randall: You know, I like what you said, particularly about the evolving technologies. And I would say we capture some similar themes. One of the things I've asked our teams to think about is how and where our students are actually getting their information. And let's just define information as I read a book and I can regurgitate it. And it turns out, it's not in the classroom, anymore. And so what I say occasionally, perhaps, to the offensive to some is it's time to really rethink the tyranny of the classical classroom. And the benefit of a research university is, as you stated, it's a lab, it's actually allowing a student to interact immediately with the real world in a practical, tactile way. And then we need to figure out how with these new technologies, we can deliver that information, and that knowledge and the skills while they're actually participating in the world itself. And those are the technologies that I think we're we're curious about, and they don't apply to every area to be sure, but they certainly applied to a broad set of areas on our campus, and, and we're hoping to explore some of those. But again, technology is the enabler, and that's probably another area we can work on together. What enabling technologies did we find?
President Cantwell: I was just gonna say, we should actually really work on that together. And I think, you know, and, and everybody knows that these kinds of explorations of options are as important for K-12 as they are for higher ed. One thing I just want to put a plug in because I've done this in the past when we're when we've been looking at a new technology option for the delivery of some version of curriculum is students are incredible. It's not just that they're willing to be either guinea pigs or participants. They have lived the technological world of education far more than most of us in at the faculty level. And they have incredible insight, about how to improve things. So the more we can actually build, I would call them these, you know, learning labs about the future of technology and its application to curriculum and teaching and learning, that we can involve our students, and give them the opportunity to actually not just tell us what they liked what they didn't like, but what would work better, I think we will be enormously, enormously successful, it's a little harder to find faculty who have these really complex lives, you know, this, I mean, they've got, they've got service, they've got teaching and learning, they've got research, to find the flexibility to do something in a completely different way, not knowing if the learning outcomes for their students are going to be better. I think that really drives a lot of my faculty as they know what works, and they're leery of changing something, in case it doesn't work as well. But students are more than willing to go there and really help us define that future.
President Randall: Yeah, you know, I'm thinking back to my teaching career. And I can think of two moments where, in the middle of my class, I had three or four students stand up and say, you know, how come we're not using this technology in this class, because, you know, most of us are, are already using it. And it was either to communicate or to do an assignment. And I remember running back to my office going, Wow, I got I got two days to get up to speed on this. Right? And so you're right, we've got to be more open, to the innovations that our own students are bringing to us. And that's actually I think that's the fun part. That's why we're all in it. It is learned from those in our classes,
President Cantwell: You know, when I switched careers, from national lab to higher ed, it was incredibly gratifying to go step up off my desk from my office, walk down the stairs, and step outside and be surrounded by young people, the most invigorating thing, and I kept thinking, why didn't I do this before? This is so cool. So for all you young people out there, you are the best. You are the reason we do this. I'm gonna kind of lead us to a little bit of closure here. And just ask, I mean, I think there's a bunch of things about higher ed that are shifting. Now, I've alluded to what I think, you know, the driver is, it's the driver that created the land grants and the and the flagships in the late 1800s, which was a massive shift in how industries happen. But it's also how information is shared. And to roll us back to at least from my perspective, some of the discussions around our role as institutions of higher ed and things like free speech is an equal mandate to enable all of our communities and students in particular, to understand the veracity of the information that they're looking at, that they're hearing, that they're seeing with their eyes, mostly in video format. And in some cases, they are reading still, in things like books. To me, that's one of the areas that covers everything that we teach. It covers technology, it covers engineering, covers health care, and mental health, something we didn't even talk about yet, but it also covers journalism, it covers social sciences, what are people thinking about, the advent of this loneliness crisis, because of the lack of human to human capacity. We need to own the inquiry around those challenges with information and hopefully engage all of our public in helping us think about how we bring solutions to that particular problem.
President Randall: I liked the way you set that up. And I can tell you a little bit about the way we're thinking about us. You know, first and foremost, if you're going to discover truth, you've got to get all the options out on the table. Right. And so, you know, I recently launched a task force on viewpoint representation and expression. And the objective of that is just frequent is just very simply, to make sure that all viewpoints are present at the university. And that's kind of baseline. You know, number one, then to us, I think the second step is to ensure that there's a culture of dialogue and inquiry that allows debate around ideas to understand their implications to understand what might be good, what might be bad about them. And particularly as those of us have done a lot of research, know the limitations of what you have discovered, right? There is always a limitation to a theory or something that you've just discovered. And then finally, right the ability to draw your own conclusion from that process that you that you just went through. And those are the fundamental hallmarks of higher ed institutions. And when individuals come to higher ed, they should have that skill. And at the end of that, they should be able to draw a conclusion that is useful to them that they can use and apply. And we should be the purveyors of that skill.
President Cantwell: Hear hear. I think that's an awesome ending point for us. I cannot agree more. I do thank you for letting me this is my first podcast, my future casting podcast, I'm a complete aficionado of training people to think about the future, do some scenario planning, think about how you manage getting from here to there, and I can't think of a better partner and getting this kicked off. So thank you. Well, hopefully, you'll come back sometime. And we can, we can dig into some really interesting aspect of what we're doing either with technology or healthcare or energy, things like that. So thank you so much, President Randall. Really appreciate your time and your effort and your partnership.
President Randall: Betsy thank you for the opportunity to speak with you and I cannot wait to see the fun our institutes are gonna have.
President Cantwell: Absolutely totally, totally. Great. Thank you. Thank you, Taylor.
Future Casting with Utah State is a production of Utah Public Radio and Utah State University sponsored by the Office of the President. Thanks to Rob Pat, Chris Nelson, Teresa Keel, Justin Warnick, the USU Marketing and Communications team and producer Hannah Castro.
