Ohio University Provost Donald J. Leo: Season Finale

Join us during the season finale, where we are lucky to connect with Provost Donald Leo of Ohio University. During this episode, Dr. Amy Taylor Bianco discusses Don's unique leadership journey, engineering, and the board game Clue! Stay tuned for Season 3 in 2025! 

For more information about the Ohio University MSM Program, click this link!

Check out the Robert D. Walter Center for Strategic Leadership program here.

OnBrand Podcast Studios produced this episode. Special thanks to Audio Engineer Alex Winnenberg, Producer Nick Winnenberg, and Marketing Specialist Cori Stokes.

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Transcript

UNKNOWN: 0:00

Thank you.

SPEAKER_00: 0:08

through the Robert E. Walter Center for Strategic Leadership at Ohio University's College of Business. I'm Amy Taylor Bianco, your host, professor, business psychologist, and executive coach. I'm here with serial entrepreneur and two-time Bobcat alum, Nick Winnenberg, who's on campus today as part of our alumni board. We are welcoming Don J. Leo, executive vice president and provost of Ohio University. Don has an extensive background in aeronautical and astronautical engineering, is extremely well published, and from a more popular side, check out his text on engineering analysis of smart material systems, which is something I have to get into what that means. He's also got an exhaustive list of citations and articles, but maybe even more importantly for us now, he's come to us from University of Georgia, where he was their first ever dean of engineering, leading strategy and engineering for them. He's also led very significant amounts of grant money, over$50 million in grants, and led large teams before. And we're really excited from his background at University of Georgia, Virginia Tech, Buffalo, Indiana. We're really excited that he's here with us as a Bobcat. And I have to tell you that he's been a great I've loved many of our provosts. I've been here a long time. You are the first provost that I have seen all over campus at all kinds of events. And that matters. That really means

SPEAKER_02: 1:47

something.

SPEAKER_00: 1:49

Just so many different events. You're out there getting to know people. remembering who you met like it's I mean that's skills that I yeah are incredible so how are you doing today

SPEAKER_01: 2:00

I'm doing really well thanks thanks for having me here

SPEAKER_00: 2:03

all right thanks for coming over to be to the Walter Center so I guess I first just want to ask you what does it feel like to be so you got here July 1st right so it's been what are we Four

SPEAKER_01: 2:17

and

SPEAKER_00: 2:18

a half months in. So it hasn't really been that long. And I can honestly say I've probably seen you at least six times, which is pretty incredible. Pretty incredible. But what has it felt like? What does it feel like to be on campus? What's your day to day experience? kind of experience at Ohio University. Yeah,

SPEAKER_01: 2:37

no, it's been great to be here. And, you know, I really have fallen in love with Ohio University. I think it's a great college town. I just love You know, the fact that the history and the legacy that's here in the university and the fact the university is over 200 years old. You know, the fact that it's deeply integrated with the community and, you know, just getting to know all of campus and all the great work that's going on with our faculty, staff and students, being a lot of alumni at various events. So it's just been a great four and a half months kind of getting to, you know, know campus and getting to know the people and getting to know the job.

SPEAKER_00: 3:17

So, okay, before we get too far in, I just have to hear a little bit about your background and your just kind of everyday, I don't know, growing up. Did you know you wanted to be an engineer? Did you know you wanted to lead people? Like, what were some early experiences?

SPEAKER_01: 3:32

Yeah, I'd say early on, I knew I wanted to be an engineer. You know, growing up, I loved learning about NASA and the space program and engineering. you know, that really informed me. You know, as typical with engineers, I was good in math and science, right? You know, that's often what the, you know, guidance counselor is saying. You're good in math and science. You should consider engineering. You know, honestly, though, I wasn't, you know, sometimes I talk to people who are engineers or maybe they think their children want to be engineers. And, you know, I wasn't the person putting stuff together or taking the car apart. And, you know, I, you know, I just love the math and science and went to the University of Illinois for my degree. And so and I was one of the, you know, I've come to learn that students often go to universities and change their major once or twice or maybe a little bit more. I actually was one of those people who never changed my major. So, you know, went through in four years. And, you know, you asked about whether I knew I wanted to lead people. No, I had no idea. That wasn't on the radar screen when I was making those decisions early in life. Early in life.

SPEAKER_00: 4:38

Was there a later point when someone... it's kind of tapped you or you kind of realize like, oh, okay, I'm, I'm now, I'm an engineer that is really good at math and science and does all these things. I also have all these other skills, uh, management people's, you know, all these other skills. And so did, did you start to think like, oh, maybe I could do something with that? Or did somebody kind of say you should try this position or.

SPEAKER_01: 5:02

Yeah. Uh, nobody asked me. You know, I, I, you know, You mentioned earlier I was at Virginia Tech. I was there for the first 15 years of my career. I actually have to give a shout out to the University of Toledo here in Ohio because I was actually there for the first couple of years of my academic career. But, you know, to your question, I think, you know, I... I think there comes some point in your career as an academic where you think, oh, you know, maybe I have an opportunity to have impact in a different way. You know, I think in any academic you want to have impact through your teaching, you know, through your research and scholarship, through your service. And, you know, and many people, you know, many great academics continue that and they do that through their career and they're very satisfied and they have a great career. I think to your question, you know, probably about six or seven years into my career at Virginia Tech, I really thought, you know, maybe a leadership position is something that I'd be interested in. I had done a stint at the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency. So the U.S. government has a nice program where you can actually go on loan to agencies in the Department of Defense. You don't have to change jobs. And in my case, I went on loan to the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency. And that was really transformative because I got to meet, you know, just a lot of really bright people. And I also got a chance to see a different different side of science and technology. So when I got back to Virginia Tech, I think that's another element that kind of sparked my interest to try to obtain a leadership position. That's when I became the associate dean for research and graduate studies there. So it was when you were on loan as an intern from that side of it as well. So let's go back. What was the, if you can, it might be top secret, if it is, you can feel free to just remove this from the podcast. I was going to say, what was the coolest project you worked on? I'm sure you

SPEAKER_02: 6:54

saw all kinds of

SPEAKER_01: 6:54

fun stuff, right? Yeah, I saw a lot of fun stuff. I You know, the coolest project, boy, that's a good question. You know, I was working in what they call their defense science office. And so they, in DARPA, they do a lot of very applied projects. I was actually on the other end, you know, as you'd expect with a faculty member. We had a great project, for example, that was started by a colleague of mine, Len Buckley at the Navy, where we were looking at new ways to decontaminate vehicles. This was shortly after 9-11, where they were looking at, you know, that's a great example. of a DARPA project where if you look at the complexity and the cost of that process for the military, it's very difficult to do in the field, it's very costly. And so what Len had started was a project where basically the paint that you would put on a vehicle would decontaminate it simultaneously. And so I continued that project and we ended up actually transitioning some of that because we had some companies and academics working on essentially a coding that would allow that decontamination to be done without those complex processes. So that's a neat example of the types of things that you could do at DARPA is kind of take a problem that's really important for the military, try to find a completely different solution, and then eventually have that solution go and hopefully become something that becomes practice in the military. That's awesome. Can you do the same thing to a toddler's bedroom by any chance? Well, actually... You know, some of the patents that came out of that were, you know, also people were trying to apply it to other types of decontamination. But I was only there for two years, so I don't know if it went that far.

SPEAKER_00: 8:44

But overall, that kind of fits with like when you talk about biologically inspired materials and systems. And I. I just wanted to get a little more. Is that an example of what you mean by that in smart materials? Like I'm trying to.

SPEAKER_01: 8:57

A little bit. I mean, I think a smart material is, you know, the area where I've done most of my research and scholarship. And that's a very broad area where, you know, essentially you're trying to. mimic nature to develop engineered systems that have the sort of sensing functions that we have, say with our nervous system, the same sort of actuation functions that we have with our muscles and the same sort of cognition functions that we have with our brain. And so that whole field, and this isn't just my research, the whole field of research is trying to take those things that we see in nature and incorporate them into engineered systems to make those systems better, safer, higher performing. You know, that's the general area that I've done research and scholarship in.

SPEAKER_00: 9:46

That's great. So do you still have kind of an interest? I know you're like you're now at this, you know. I don't know, 10,000 foot view of it all. But you still have like some of the things that you like, a conference that you like to go to or something that you kind of, I don't know, nerd out on, geek out on.

SPEAKER_01: 10:03

It's so much fun. Yes. I mean, one of the challenges, you know, being a dean for a number of years and now being a provost is just the time that you can focus on those sorts of activities. But, you know, at UGA, I was still doing collaborative projects. You know, it was hard to necessarily lead research and scholarship projects or grants just with the time commitment of being a dean. But I work, for example, with folks in our agricultural program where they were doing agricultural applications, but they, you know, my expertise was in the sensing and the computation. And so I was adding value to those types of projects in a really a completely different field than I had earlier in my career, which was a lot of fun. And it allowed me to do those sorts of things, you know, to collaborative fashion. I used to call it keeping my brain elastic. So it's sometimes as a dean or now as a provost your brain can atrophy a little bit and so those projects were a lot of fun because you know they kept me engaged in the research and scholarship and um you know got me away from some of the day-to-day activities for those for being a dean or provost so do you think we'll ever get to a point with smart materials where you can have like self-healing like you can with skin right great question and um There's some researchers at the University of Illinois that have made great progress in that area. I think we're still away from having the type of healing you see in what you mentioned skin, but they've developed very interesting materials that you can put into composites, for example. And then as the composites. break and crack, they actually release a chemical that allows that crack to heal. Oh, interesting. Yeah. Nancy Sotos and Scott White were two of the leaders in that field. But I think there's still a lot of work to be done in that area, mostly because biological materials, the things that we take for granted in our natural systems, we don't have a lot of those in engineered systems that that mimic that sort of function very effectively. So I think that's one of the challenges in the field is we've made a lot of progress, in those systems integration, but creating the materials that have the same sort of properties and functionalities, natural materials, is still a stretch at this point. Gotcha. So if I get a scratch in my car, the paint can't heal itself yet. Oh, well. We're working on it. We're working on it. That's what I heard. They're working on it. Good to know. Good to know. Good to know that that's going forward. Yeah. It's going forward. You can't go backwards. No, no. So regretful my Subaru will still have that dent, but

SPEAKER_00: 12:42

that's fine. Well, I see all that you're doing, and I've done like as sort of a metaphor for like really what you're working out in a university you've got all these areas and one thing I noticed right away is your interdisciplinary focus and kind of interest in all the areas which sometimes is hard to do when you have a whole new job to do and you have but I see like a genuine a genuine interest like oh how does this over here relate to that over there that's you know on the other side of the campus or you know completely different research streams so how does that kind of work like play into what you think about a university and how we do things.

SPEAKER_01: 13:20

Yeah, no, I'm glad you brought that up because, you know, I really enjoyed early in my career You know, I'm an engineer, but it was fun working with chemists and biologists. And what I've sort of noticed over time is as a dean or now as a provost, I just really like learning about all these other different disciplines. And, you know, that's a lot of fun. And I do think it helps me in my current role because, you know, I love going to different parts of campus and, you know, the fine arts and the arts and sciences and business and, you know, just learning about the work that's going on. So, you You know, these are the types of things as you reflect on as you go through your career. And, you know, I think a lot of that was kind of born early in my career because I was just very interested in working with people outside of my particular discipline. But I think it's been helpful in my roles as dean and a provost because I've just enjoyed getting to learn about disciplines that I don't know much about. And I think that's helped me make better decisions and helped me lead those organizations more effectively.

SPEAKER_00: 14:19

That makes so much sense. The jury may still be out here

SPEAKER_01: 14:22

in Ohio, but four and a half months in, it seems to be working. Four and a half months, just doing great. Yeah, no doubt about it. Thanks for a lot of great LinkedIn posts. Oh, I'm sure. You had to reuse at that

SPEAKER_02: 14:34

point, right?

SPEAKER_00: 14:36

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And so you're in charge of, like, so what does a provost do, right? A provost is in charge. I

SPEAKER_02: 14:43

have no idea. You have no idea. Okay. You heard it here first. I thought that's why I was here today. Exactly. We can give you

SPEAKER_01: 14:49

Can you give me a minute to Google it? Chat GBT, what

SPEAKER_02: 14:57

does a provost do?

SPEAKER_01: 15:01

What does a provost do? Well, you know, I... I mean, just... Yeah, I mean, strictly speaking, Provost is the chief academic officer of the university. So, you know, I'm honored to really represent the academic enterprise here at Ohio. And I, you know, and I use the word represent intentionally because I think in an academic institution, yes, you lead people. Yes, people report to you. But, you know, really, it's a much more collaborative environment. And, you know, in an academic institution, institution, you know, the faculty have control over the curriculum, right? So, you know, I think in many ways the provost, even though that individual is the chief academic officer, in many ways they're in a support role throughout the university, you know, supporting the activities that the faculty want to accomplish, you know, working with the deans to, you know, make sure that they're, you know, the curricula that they have is serving our students the best. You know, there's also, of course, financial aspects in terms of the make sure that we're using our resources and being good stewards of the mostly taxpayer dollars that we get. So, you know, I think that role of chief academic officer really crosses the boundaries from, you know, supporting the faculty in the units and what they want to accomplish, but then also, you know, working with them closely to make sure that we've got the resources that we need and the resources that are being allocated effectively so that we can all be successful.

SPEAKER_00: 16:32

That's great. I see that with, and that's really helpful for, I just was thinking like a lot of people listening or a lot of students and alumni who know that that's a big important job, but might not, you know. Most people

SPEAKER_01: 16:44

don't know what a provost is. It's probably not like common knowledge. Everybody knows who president is. Most people know, you know, so I was talking to a group of faculty recently and I said, you know, because often I talk to students or parents and I sometimes will explain what a provost is, you know. With the faculty, I said, I'm assuming that you know what a provost is, even if you don't know who your provost is. You

SPEAKER_02: 17:08

know that there is a

SPEAKER_01: 17:10

provost.

SPEAKER_02: 17:11

That's great.

SPEAKER_00: 17:12

But I love the idea of support because I think a lot of people think it different ways, but I saw you write about it as supporting faculty and administration to be their best, like supporting everybody to create this, I don't know exactly how you said it, but this inspired community. We can do great things together. And I see that with your lead of the dynamic strategy implementation, which has been really fun. I think people have made the dynamic strategy under President Gonzales, made it a really involved and really, actually fairly fun process to create a dynamic strategy. kind of big thinking and ideas and everybody was part of it. And now, gosh, the implementation. So a whole other side of things. So how do you manage that or what does that look like?

SPEAKER_01: 18:02

Yeah, well, you know, during the interview process in the spring, I'd say two reasons why I thought this was a great next step for me. One was President Gonzalez. You know, the fact that she was, I think I could sense that You know, she had a lot of energy and wanted to move the university forward. So I was really looking forward to working with her. But then the other piece was the fact that, you know, that really I felt the dynamic strategy process last year before I arrived was just done very well. You know, I could sense that it was a very inclusive exercise, the way it was set up, the way the faculty, staff, students were engaged, you know, the way we reached out to communities. So that made a very positive impression on me that the... I was going to be stepping into a role that was going to help move that strategy forward. And if you're the president's remarks at the State of the University, she likes to say that she gifted it to me

SPEAKER_02: 18:55

after

SPEAKER_01: 18:57

I arrived. It's a gift that I accepted gladly. And I think we have an opportunity with the dynamic strategy to really you know, have positive impact on the university in the next few years. And, you know, the president emphasizes that this is a three-year plan. So we need to move quickly. We need to move deliberately. She, you know, of course, we've embraced the fact that we, you know, we want to continue the level of engagement with the campus community, not only here in Athens, but also in our regional locations, our medical campus. You know, we want the whole campus to be involved in the implementation. And so I'm really pleased that that she's dedicated some resources to the initiatives that she announced in her State of the University, additional resources for experiential learning opportunities for our students. I did find out that our experiential learning applications have tripled this semester, and I think part of it is due to the fact that she emphasized that and has put additional resources towards that. We've got a faculty hiring initiative that we've made decisions on, and I'm very pleased that in those hiring initiatives, and all of the colleges have received some resources to hire tenure track faculty to move the dynamic strategy forward. There's gonna be a new teacher certification program next year, similar to the AI program that occurred in experiential learning. Center for community engagement. So all the activities and initiatives that the president announced, I think those are the next step in the implementation of the plan. And the last piece is putting a, kind of a governance structure in place that makes sure that we continue strong engagement. So she mentioned that we have executive leadership teams that are overseeing the four pillars, but then we have an implementation advisory group that will be announced by the end of the semester to really provide feedback and allow us to course correct and give us guidance as we move the implementation forward. So, you know, I'm excited because, you know, the president's, you know, wants us to move quickly, which is a good thing, but I think already the investments that are being made, we're seeing that those are continuing the interest in the dynamic strategy. And I think we set up a governance structure so that we can continually assess ourselves, look at the metrics that we're using and course correct and really meet the goals that we've set out for ourselves over the next three years. It's hard. It's definitely a hard challenge. And I think one of the things and the focus of this podcast is looking at leadership, how you develop as a leader and what are some of those skill sets you have. Obviously, you're a fantastic leader. What I would struggle most in that position is you have You have a bunch of different deans, you have different organizations on campus, you have the students, you have the parents, which let's be real, they're probably the loudest, right? So how do you go through and change that message or how do you get buy-in from all those different unique communities all around the same plan? Yeah, it's a great question. I think there's multiple pieces. One is I think you have to be a good listener. And, you know, you alluded earlier to just getting out and about around campus. And, you know, part of that is a strategy just to build trust and promote collaboration. And I think that's an important piece, you know, to kind of listen and, you know, understand people's perspectives. You know, if we think about the dynamic strategy, for example, you know, I've heard a lot of perspectives in my time getting around campus. Those have helped us inform, you know, how we want to move forward in the implementation. You know, I think, you know, academic leadership in many ways is different. You know, I mean, in the sense that the fundamentals have to be very collaborative and make sure, you talked about interacting with different constituent groups. I think you have to be able to articulate what's the value of the work that you're doing to those different constituent groups. And that value to the faculty may be different than the value to the students, may be different value to the staff, may be different the value of alumni. And so I think one of the exciting parts of it, but also the challenges is thinking how you can articulate that value to those constituent groups so that they understand how they fit into the whole and how they, you know, can help us move this university forward. And that's a fun part of the job, but also I think one of the more challenging parts of the job. Because what you're seeing is they have different sources of value. They value different things with the same plan. So it's highlighting their values to bring them into the bigger picture. Yeah. And, you know, because if you think of the dynamic strategy as an example, you know, the value to the students as we talk about these new opportunities for experiential learning, you know, to the value to the students is you know, the fact that we're investing in instructional excellence, you know, will improve their student experience. You know, but then that's different maybe than the value to the faculty, right? You know, the value to the faculty is, you know, they get to advance professionally in a way because of some of these advanced investments, or maybe they get to engage students in a different way through experiential learning opportunities. So, you know, it's, I think being able to articulate those, that value to the different constituent groups is something that's very important in moving these initiatives forward. Love that.

SPEAKER_00: 24:28

A couple things that you mentioned that I just wanted to highlight because I think they're so important for listeners, especially people who are maybe Bobcat alums who are very supportive of our institution. But there's also a lot of criticism around higher education right now. And you're saying the dynamic strategy is a three-year strategy, which just most universities have five-year strategies. That's kind of the norm. So how is that... different and perhaps responsive to like the business, you know, side of it.

SPEAKER_01: 24:57

Yeah. No, I think that's insightful because I think, right. I mean, it's, it's a tough time for higher education. I just returned from the APLU meeting where we, you know, there was a lot of discussion around, you know, the, you know, eroding faith in higher education, the, you know, view of higher education being too costly. Right. And, I think if you drill down to the data in many of those examples, the data still supports the value of higher education. But I think that's also, you talked about the dynamic strategy. I think that's why it's even more important to articulate that what we're doing, we understand that there's an urgency. We understand that to maybe push back on some of this criticism we should demonstrate that we're being responsive to the needs of our students, our communities, right? And we don't want to wait five years to do that, right? We want to do it now, and we want to do it in a deliberate way. And I think the planning is very important with respect to articulate to all of our stakeholders that we're being good stewards of the resources that we're given. And we're a public university, so a vast majority of our resources come from taxpayer dollars, and so... I think having a strategy and being able to articulate why we're doing it to improve the student experience, to increase engagement with communities, to improve the instructional excellence of our faculty, to discover new frontiers of research and scholarship. I think the strategy helps us articulate that because it shows people that we have a plan and we want to use our resources effectively to carry out that plan. So I think comes together to try to address some of those criticisms that we often hear today about some of the values and challenges in higher education.

SPEAKER_00: 26:55

That makes sense. And you're saying, and then we're going to measure how we're doing so that we can keep, you know, keep changing with... You know, the times.

SPEAKER_01: 27:03

Yeah. And, you know, one of the criticisms of higher education often is that we don't hold ourselves accountable. So the fact that we'll have metrics, for example, on student persistence and retention and graduation rates, you know, having, you know, it doesn't surprise you as an engineer. You know, I believe, you know, when you measure something, you you're signaling that matters. Right. And then it allows you to to measure your progress. And so setting, you know, setting up those Those metrics allow us just to say, these are the things that are important to us. These are the things that we're looking at. And it allows us to, over time, track our progress. And if our progress isn't sufficient or if our progress isn't good enough, we need to sort of step back and understand what we can do to improve that and hold ourselves accountable to making things better for our students and making sure that students and families are getting the best value out of our university. So it's an inspect what you expect mentality.

UNKNOWN: 28:01

Mm-hmm. Nice.

SPEAKER_01: 28:01

You'll have to remember that. I like that. There you go. I didn't make it up. I didn't

SPEAKER_02: 28:05

forget who made it

SPEAKER_01: 28:05

up, wasn't me. It was Nick Winneberg. See her here first. Yeah, that's right. Anyway, I'll send you the book later. Thank you. Anytime. Go ahead. I do have a... Sorry. Go ahead. Dr. B... I'm very excitable. Dr. B bet me that I wouldn't do this. You said you're an engineer. I am. What's your favorite engine? Favorite what?

SPEAKER_00: 28:28

Engine. He just likes to ask these kind of questions. The question, I

SPEAKER_01: 28:33

was like, she said, what do we talk to an engineer about? I said, what's his favorite engine? Oh, my favorite engine? Your favorite engine. Oh, boy. The Rankin engine. No, I don't know.

SPEAKER_02: 28:44

You don't have to have one. You don't

SPEAKER_01: 28:45

have to have one. The Rankin engine. Actually, here in Athens, it should be the Stirling engine. Oh, right. Because we have a great company that does the ultra-cooled engine. So there

SPEAKER_02: 28:53

we go. That's

SPEAKER_01: 28:54

right. That's right. You feel better. Would you like me to draw out the thermodynamic cycle associated with that? That

SPEAKER_02: 28:59

would be

SPEAKER_01: 28:59

fantastic. You probably would. time because we can we have a whiteboard okay good answer

SPEAKER_00: 29:06

so while we're on those kinds of questions so we also um do you know the game clue i do know the game clue i

SPEAKER_01: 29:12

always

SPEAKER_00: 29:13

lose oh that's funny okay well um

SPEAKER_01: 29:16

my wife always beats me

SPEAKER_00: 29:17

she always beats you okay well um speaking of experiential learning and all the different things that are going on on campus there's so many parts i'm excited about but in terms of experiment experiential learning we're doing something um interesting and different with students that any college of business student can do we hope to bring it out further but it has to do it's a leadership development kind of thing and we are creating as part of it the game of Clue and all credits go to Amy Toth for all of her all of her industrious work on it but if you were to be a character in Clue who would you be if you were to be one of the

SPEAKER_01: 29:56

characters well that's easy Professor Plum really of course Really? Oh

SPEAKER_00: 30:02

my gosh. That's incredible. Here you are. You are in the game. Oh, that's a nice

SPEAKER_01: 30:08

suit. This is Provost Plum. This is Provost

SPEAKER_00: 30:11

Plum. I love it. This is Provost Plum.

SPEAKER_01: 30:13

Did you prepare that or did you just know? We know. Professor Plum.

SPEAKER_00: 30:17

Professor Plum is it. Well, it's perfect. And I think she did a wonderful job. And we haven't revealed it all yet. So by the time the podcast comes out, they'll know. But that is you. You've got a life sized character. And President Gonzalez is in it. We've got everybody. In the

SPEAKER_01: 30:35

game, they didn't call the person Provost Plum because nobody would have known.

UNKNOWN: 30:39

It's true.

SPEAKER_01: 30:41

It's true.

SPEAKER_00: 30:42

We'll say like ultimate professor.

SPEAKER_02: 30:45

There we go. We'll find a way. Chief

SPEAKER_01: 30:46

professor. Yeah, I'm in. We'll find a way to label it. But we definitely use that image as the header for this podcast.

SPEAKER_00: 30:52

Yes, we definitely are. We definitely are. So anything you're excited to leave us with or just kind of tell us about your next, I don't know, your next main or kind of what you're looking at going forward. That's kind of

SPEAKER_01: 31:03

neat. Wow. Well, you know, I I'm really excited in my first four-plus months. I feel like I've really gotten to know campus. I have one-on-one meetings with the president every week, and I did announce a couple weeks ago that my honeymoon is over. Not because anything bad happened, but just because I feel like I've taken in a lot of information and it's time to turn it around. You know, I'm really excited about the foundation that's already here and just how we enhance and elevate it in the future. You know, there's so many positive aspects of this institution. You know, I mentioned the history and the legacy, but, you know, the already strong foundations in experiential learning. And, you know, I have to do a shout out to the business college because I think you already have incredible activities in that area. You know, my... colleague, Dr. Eric Muth, who joined as a vice president for research and creative activities. You know, him and I have gone to a number of the research activities. He's gone to many more than I have. But, you know, I'm just... so impressed with the research and scholarship. I think the opportunities we have is how do we just grow all of it? That's the challenge that we have. How do we take the strong foundation in experiential learning as an example and make it even more important element of our university? How do we take the investments in instructional excellence? One thing we haven't talked about is the president's desire for us to become a T1 institution in addition to being an R1 institution. So how do we move that forward. And then, you know, how do I as provost work with others on campus, people like Eric and others, so that we just, we grow the research and scholarship and, you know, effectively utilize our regional campuses. You know, I think all those are, great opportunities and that's what's exciting about the next few years because I think we've laid a strong foundation and now the honeymoon's over time to get to work moving

SPEAKER_00: 33:10

forward you got the energy behind it you got the plan in

SPEAKER_01: 33:12

place

SPEAKER_00: 33:13

and moving forward we're very excited to have you here today it'll be fun to have you back you know a year or so and just kind of see what your reflections are you know what you're thinking at that point so thank you so much thank you I really appreciate you

SPEAKER_01: 33:27

having me there's one Last question. You or me?

SPEAKER_00: 33:31

Not me.

SPEAKER_01: 33:32

If you're a Disney character, which would you be and why? I already did the Provost Plum. That's a whole new one. Provost Plum. We got What's the Sterling Engine? Disney character.

SPEAKER_00: 33:44

I still haven't given Nick an

SPEAKER_01: 33:46

answer. You still haven't. We've been friends for decades.

SPEAKER_00: 33:49

I know. I don't

SPEAKER_01: 33:51

know. I'm not sure I can come up with a good Disney character. Dr. Gonzales was, do you remember? Moana? Was she Moana? Yeah, Dr. Gonzales was Okay. Genie. That's probably a good spot. That's a

SPEAKER_02: 34:07

good

SPEAKER_01: 34:08

spot.