In conversation with ... Lily Kong

In this episode of Not Alone: Leaders in conversation, host Rafael Bras sits with President Lily Kong to probe trust, purpose, and the future of universities through the lens of Singapore’s model and global headwinds. From neutrality to rankings and the 100-year life, we explore how institutions can rebuild relevance without losing their soul.

Topics include:

• Singapore’s planning state and education-led growth
• first-generation academic journey and gender in leadership
• causes of trust erosion and ROI pressures
• universities leading versus lagging across economic phases
• liberal orthodoxy and cultivating true viewpoint diversity
• institutional neutrality versus passivity and red lines
• rankings, bad metrics and perverse incentives
• the case for humanities and experiential learning
• crisis of direction and diverse institutional missions
• lifelong learning, demographics and the 100-year life

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Transcript

Welcome And Episode Roadmap

SPEAKER_03 0:00

Welcome to Not Alone Leaders in Conversation, a bi-monthly podcast where we delve into the minds and experiences of academic leaders who are shaping the future of higher education. Your host is Raphael Brass, professor at Georgia Institute of Technology and editor of Elsevier's Not Alone newsletter. In each episode, he will explore the complex challenges, decisions, and opportunities facing academic institutions today.

SPEAKER_00 0:29

Some of the topics you can look forward to in this episode are why trust in universities erodes, keeping education funded, universities leading or lagging, institutional neutrality, and crisis of direction.

Introducing President Lily Kong

SPEAKER_02 0:50

We're honored with the visit of Professor Lily Kong, president of Singapore Management University. Professor Kong is best described as an interdisciplinary social scientist with roots in geography. She studies cities and multiculturalism. A native from Singapore, she has a bachelor's and master's degree from the National University of Singapore and a PhD from the University College of London. By age 35, she was already a dean at NUS, where she spent an illustrious career serving in all types of roles, until she moved to SU as provost in 2015 and then president in 2019. She's the first woman to become president of a university in her country and the first Singaporean to lead her university. Welcome, President Kong to Not Alone, Leaders in Conversation.

SPEAKER_01 1:51

Thank you very much, Professor Rafael. Please do call me Lily, and if you don't mind, I'll call you Raphael.

SPEAKER_02 1:56

That would be great. Thank you so much. I appreciate it.

Early Life And Education In Singapore

SPEAKER_02 2:00

You were born in Singapore. In many ways, your history parallels that of the Singaporean Republic, founded in 1965. Can you share some of your early years whilst attending college a family expectation?

SPEAKER_01 2:19

Yes, indeed. Very much my journey has paralleled the Singapore journey. I was born in 1965, the same year that Singapore became independent. And so I grew up in a Singapore where the circumstances that we see today, the relative wealth of the country was not what it was at that point in time. And the independent government at that point in time placed a lot of emphasis on three areas: housing, health, and education. And education was strongly supported. I was the beneficiary of that. I went to a school in a period where there were huge investments into education. By the time I got to university, there were only about 8% of the population making it to university, 8% of each cohort making it to university. And so it was still a relatively privileged group. I was the first in my family, my generation, to go to university and have reaped many benefits from that. I went to university thinking that I would want to graduate and become a school teacher. My late mother tells me that when I was three, I would line the dolls up against the wall and play teacher. And so I've always wanted to be an educator, but at university I discovered the joys of research as well. And that was when I thought academia would allow me to combine the best of education and research.

SPEAKER_02 3:54

Very good. And as you were coming along, particularly in those early years, as you said, only 8% of the population was going to college at that point. There were probably very few women. I suspect. How did you navigate

Gender And Leadership In Academia

SPEAKER_02 4:16

being really in a tremendous minority, I am guessing? And did you experience the expected gender barriers that that exists everywhere?

SPEAKER_01 4:30

As a social scientist, I was in the faculty of arts and social sciences, as it was called then. And university at that point in time, and even today, you will see the disparities in gender profile between, say, the STEM disciplines and the humanities and social sciences. So I was in an environment where there were more women students, female students, than in the STEM disciplines. And therefore, as a student, I didn't necessarily feel the gender disparities that strongly. But by the time I decided that I was going to become an academic and join the profession, I quickly realized that even at the junior levels in academia, there were precious few women, even in the humanities and social sciences. Not to mention how as I progressed through the ranks, there were fewer and fewer of us. And that presented its own challenges. That presented its own challenges in many ways. When I was tapped on the shoulder quite early on in my career to say, would you be interested to join the dean's office and contribute to sort of leadership roles? It was fine as long as I was an assistant dean, doing things that what doing things that the sort of things that today would be done by an administrative colleague. So I would develop the faculty newsletter, I would run the open house for student recruitment, etc. And it would be fine because it was that sort of labor, if I might put it that way. But as I became a deputy dean, a dean, it became increasingly difficult. And so when I was appointed by some enlightened men to be dean at the age of 35, I remember a very senior male professor, professoral colleague who said to me, I'm used to working with people with 35 years of experience, not 35 years of age. And even though that sounds like it's a comment about age rather than gender, it's often crossed my mind that if it were a 35-year-old male who was going to be dean, he would probably have been thought to be extremely what's the word I'm looking for, full of promise and potential, etc. But at a woman at 35 becoming dean, surely this is not on. So that's just one example. Another example, if I may, is when in a previous institution there was a search for a very senior role in the university, and the thinking was that it had to be a STEM person because the university's predilection was for STEM disciplines. And it occurred to me so strongly and so starkly that immediately meant that a decision I made at age 16, where I wanted to really go into the humanities and social sciences, already automatically disqualified me from university leadership. And it wasn't just the fact that it was a decision made at age 16, it's the fact that you get so many more men in the STEM disciplines than there are women, which means that if there is a disciplinary bias in that direction, there is automatically a gender bias in that direction.

SPEAKER_02 8:07

Yeah, that's a very good point. And the you said something that strikes me as very true, and we all go through it, is the idea that you make decisions and even on uh unknowingly, in many ways, they they set a trajectory or an expectation. It creates expectations with those that you're dealing with. Sometimes the expectations you do not want. They try to straitjacket you in some way, and you have described that very well. I also want to follow another comment you made, I'm making an analogue to myself in here. When you became a faculty member, you're the first one in your family to go to college, and I assume got a PhD and become a professor. I recall my mother in particular really never quite understanding what I did. Did you experience the same thing?

Singapore’s Success And Social Planning

SPEAKER_01 9:10

I I don't think that was within her ken at all. She was, of course, from a different generation altogether, where she wouldn't even get to go to school. For her, the fact that I could get an education and get a job was good enough.

SPEAKER_02 9:27

Going back to your growing up in the state of Singapore, you your expertise in multiculturalism and cities is perfect to understand the most successful city-state in modern times. Singapore is a very small place, 760 square kilometers, yet it's an incredibly successful country. In a few words, is there is a secret sauce? What do you think is key to the success of Singapore?

SPEAKER_01 10:06

So a couple of factors which I think are critical to the success of Singapore, but which from some lenses, through some lenses, would be thought of as not very desirable. What are these factors? A high degree of planning, extremely high degree of planning, a very high degree of management and oversight, to the extent that some would say, especially in years past, there is an intrusion into private space. Let me give some examples. Why is it the case that Singapore could bring its birth rate down in the 1970s when birth rates were way too high? And that was because there was a significant amount of planning by the government to say this is the level of fertility rates that the country can withstand. This is the level at which we can support a good standard of living and so forth. And so, what did the government do? The government had a stop at two campaign. And I remember growing up with these images of two children, a boy and a girl, invariably with good teeth and nice smiles. And it was part of a campaign to say every family should stop at two. Later, when the campaign was so successful and the birth rates were coming down perhaps a little bit too rapidly, the government then said, the government of the day then said, have three if you can afford it. So it's not like everybody can have three children, but only if you can afford it. And so that's the degree of management and planning that goes into the city, the physical city, but also the social city, the society. And a lot of that planning has yielded many good outcomes, but you can also imagine for some, there is a sense of overreach in terms of planning and social engineering.

SPEAKER_02 12:12

Yeah, very good. Yeah, it but it certainly has been extraordinarily successful, and it's something that that many places look to to try to glean the formula how to do it. But as you said, it's not always possible in all different places. You've been in academia now for quite a while, and like me, have experienced extraordinary change.

Why Trust In Universities Erodes

SPEAKER_02 12:40

Possibly one of the changes that is impacting us now, in certainly in the US but all over the world, is the erosion of trust on higher education. It is not the same in every country, but it's at some level existing everywhere and spreading. What causes that in your mind? What is driving the distrust?

SPEAKER_01 13:16

So first I'd like to preface my response by saying that I think we're very fortunate in Singapore that we're not at that stage. And I'm I I hope I don't even have to add the word yet. But in many other places in the world, we see this distrust, and it's a very sad state. And there are various reasons for that. One, I think, would be question marks over the relevance of higher education to young people who are looking to join the workforce. Are graduates being prepared adequately for work? Second, I think the cost of higher education and the debt that people get into. And then the question that follows with all this debt that people get into to pay for their higher education, are they getting the adequate returns when they enter the workforce? And in many places, the answer to some of these questions that I've just posed is no. They're not adequately prepared, perhaps, and they're not getting the jobs. They're not getting, to put it in very almost crude economic terms, the ROI is not very good. In some places, I think there is also the perception of political bias and agendas in universities. So in the United States, for example, you would get a situation where Republicans especially think universities are too liberal and there is a liberal agenda. But even setting aside the politics of it, the larger question, and this does emerge in Singapore, this last question does emerge in Singapore, the question of how universities make a difference and contribute to economy and society. That universities are not existing for ourselves in a kind of self-indulgence in what we do, but that, say, the research that we do actually does make a difference, a positive difference to economy and society. And some of the distrusts that we see today in different parts of the world stem from any or all of these reasons that I've just cited.

SPEAKER_02 15:24

You mentioned when you started that you rather not use the word yet in Singapore, that implying correctly that Singapore still supports education. I, as a student of Singapore, and I have visited many times, one of the things that I have always admired of the strategy of economic development of Singapore is the emphasis on education, of making sure that the citizenship citizens are well educated and ready to be productive members of society. And they have invested extraordinarily large amounts of money in sending people to study and then slowly evolving to keeping them in-house because your universities are now world class. So this was a very well-thought approach, and I hope it continues. I would argue in the US it was the same, right after the World War II period, or until quite recently, that was the idea. But it broke down. And you pointed out to a few things, but are it broke down by issues that are not necessarily in control of the universities themselves, their external forces. So given that

Funding Pressures And Policy Trade Offs

SPEAKER_02 17:05

situation, what can we do? What can we do to change the trajectory?

SPEAKER_01 17:13

So I can't pretend I don't want to pretend to have a solution for other contexts, other situations. What I do know is that for Singapore, just because we have precious few natural resources, what some many would say none whatsoever, to the extent that we have natural advantages. One might say our location is a natural advantage, but we have nothing else. We have no natural resources whatsoever. And the only resource that we have is human resource. And therefore, this emphasis on education, this willingness to invest in education is absolutely the right policy. My worry is that as our situation evolves, for example, as we are a dramatically aging population, uh, the expectation is that by next year, which is two months away, we would have 21% of the population that's age 65 and above, which makes us a super aged society. Now, as this happens, you will get more and more of resources being directed towards healthcare for very good reasons. But then the resources have to come from somewhere. And those resources are built on a shrinking base, because if you have an aging population and you have a smaller tax base, you either tax the working population more or you have a shrinking resource base. And in either situation, what it means is that one has to be more frugal with other needs of the country. And so my worry is that as other imperatives come into the picture more strongly, such as healthcare, that education might begin to still be supported, but not be supported to the same extent as previously the case. It hasn't happened yet, but it is something that does keep me awake at night. So that critical balance between supporting myriad imperatives for a small country, defense, an aging country, health care, greater equality in society as income disparities grow. Therefore, our Ministry of Social and Family Development deserves the support as well. With all these different needs as our society evolves, we've got to make sure that we keep our eye fully and closely on support for education.

SPEAKER_03 20:01

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Are Universities Leading Or Lagging

SPEAKER_03 20:06

Experts from MIT, Harvard, UCLA, and beyond bring their conviction and compassion to a wide range of topics. Follow our channel for fresh content. And now back to the show.

SPEAKER_02 20:20

In a recent series of lectures, you do a fantastic job in going over the history of higher education. And you make the argument that universities have evolved over the ages quite dramatically, and that universities reflect the society they live in in many ways. So many universities began in the US, as certainly and in many other places, as religious institutions that then move into a secular entities. And then from ivory towers to driver of pragmatic knowledge. So are universities leading indicators or lagging indicators of the society? How do you see it?

SPEAKER_01 21:10

That's a great question. That's such a great question. I think university to university, context to context, situation to situation. I think that if you take Singapore, for example, at one point in time, much of what universities were intended to do and were perhaps indeed doing, was to produce workers for the economy, manpower, human resource, whatever term it is we want to use. And if we look at it from that perspective, and you look at it in the context of Singapore, where the economy, as with many other things, as I've mentioned, is very much planned, then universities are responding to economic needs. And in that sense, Is lagging, is following. But as the economy matured and the early sort of manufacturing needs of the country meant that engineering was very important, etc. And when that gave way, and we needed, we meaning Singapore needed new industries, new dimensions of the economy to take Singapore forward, the services became very important and financial services became very important. And again, the university was following in a sense. But as we progress still further, we developed still further, and innovation and entrepreneurship, new ideas, new products, new ecosystems, new services were needed. I began to see a reversal that the ideas, the research, the innovations were coming from university. And they and these ideas were leading the economy as such. And so I think depending on the situation, the trajectory of different societies, universities through time can be leading or lagging. And I'm just talking about it from the economic perspective just now. One could equally well be asking questions about societal norms and values and whether universities are leading the change, changes, or whether we're following and reflecting that. But enough said for now, I think I've given an example from the economic dimension of how universities, the same university, in fact, could play different roles at different times.

SPEAKER_02 23:42

In many parts of the world and uh in the United States in particular, universities have been accused by politicians of centers of liberal orthodoxy and intolerant to different points of view.

Liberal Orthodoxy And Tolerance Paradox

SPEAKER_02 24:00

I don't know whether that is the same in in Singapore or not, and maybe you can address that. But also the question is if the universities were lagging reflections, do can you imagine a situation where the universities will in fact swing to become more less liberal, more conservative in their thinking?

SPEAKER_01 24:35

There is an irony in some of the universities in different parts of the world that I've had the opportunity to work with, to collaborate with, and so forth, I would say that there are universities that are centers of liberal orthodoxy. Intolerant, actually, of different points of view. It's highly ironical that universities that you know promulgate liberal thinking can be very intolerant of different points of view. So just to cite an example, I like to think that there is no such thing as one democracy that is the gold standard in the world and the only kind of democracy. There are different kinds of democracies that speak to different historical and political and societal contexts. But when working with universities that espouse liberal democracy, and then see a different university in a different context that does not mirror that same kind of liberal democracy, immediately there is an effort to shut down and to say, you're not liberal and you're not democratic, and therefore we can't be partners, or we mustn't get into conversation, and there is almost a tone of intolerance. And that to me is deeply ironical. Deeply, deeply ironical. If we're thinking about a liberal mindset, then at least a part of it must be an openness to different points of view and different different histories and geographies that give rise to different constructs and different experiences.

SPEAKER_02 26:22

Can institutional neutrality truly exist in your mind?

Institutional Neutrality Versus Passivity

SPEAKER_01 26:31

Yeah, it's a really good question. You use the word passive and then you use the word neutrality or neutral. And I would make a distinction between the two. A passive stance would mean let's roll over and let things happen to us. And whoever wants to say whatever, that's half of the court. A neutrality, a stance of neutrality, on the other hand, to me is an active stance where there is an active effort to ensure that there is not an ideological or political promulgation of one single point of view. In Singapore, I think this is something that is held quite quite sacred. I want to I I think I would use the word sacred in the sense that universities are meant to be neutral grounds. And how does this manifest itself? You don't get political parties on campus, you don't get campaigning on campus. If there are speakers around a topic, the encouragement is for different points of view to be represented, say on a panel or in the classroom. And I fully recognize that not everybody in academia in different parts of the world will agree with that position. If we are professors, we profess something. But in Singapore, it is a profession of knowledge and expertise as opposed to a profession of ideology. Now, in reality, can that happen? I think there can be every care that is put into curating panels that are diverse in views and opinions and positions. But I also think that the individual faculty member will have his or her own positionality. How we grow up, where we grow up, what experiences we went through all shape our thinking. And in the same way that we can't pretend as an academic to be able to be completely neutral, completely objective, because we all carry with us something of our own history, our own positionality, surely some of that will come into the classroom. So I think it's a constant line that needs to be walked. You started the conversation by referring to a multicultural city that Singapore is highly successful. That sort of multiculturalism where there is a significant level of harmony, a lack of promo acrimony and so forth, that has been carefully tendered, including in educational institutions, in the ways of institutional neutrality, that is held as quite important. But I want to recognize that even with the best of efforts, there will of necessity be individual personal positionalities that get that influence how we teach and what we teach.

When Neutrality Meets Red Lines

SPEAKER_02 30:10

But to quote, for example, university president, a former university president here in the United States, there are times where it is hard to imagine that an institution takes a neutral position. The example is let's imagine that some people come without damaging the libraries, but bring their own books and burn them in your campus. Just start burning books as a message. Which historical past, way past, has occurred. Actually, not that long ago in China. Should the university take a neutral position about that? It is a political statement.

SPEAKER_01 30:58

Indeed. So I thank you for that provocation. I would say that there would be clearly some very egregious examples and situations where there cannot but be a position taken. And I think then the wisdom is in the judgment that one makes as to when the line is crossed.

SPEAKER_02 31:25

That is exactly the point. Yes. There will be times where that will be an impossible position. And then it's a matter of the leadership of the judgment of good leaders making the right decision at the right time. I think that's crucial. Let me move to a topic that I know is close

Rankings And Perverse Incentives

SPEAKER_02 31:45

to your heart, which is the future of education in general. And you have expressed concern about rankings. In fact, you draw a direct line in many ways between rankings of universities and the prevalence of to be extreme, academic dishonesty. The incentive to be dishonest for the sake of moving ahead, whether it's in rankings, whether it's in evaluations. Can you talk a little bit about that?

SPEAKER_01 32:21

Yes, very happy to. It's a topic that's very close to my heart. I would want to preface my comments by saying that rankings in the abstract are not necessarily bad. I prefer banding to rankings, but let's stay with rankings for a moment. I think the concept of rankings is not necessarily bad if we have if it gives us a way of sort of benchmarking ourselves against others for the purposes of improvement. The challenge is when we don't use appropriate criteria and appropriate metrics, and we succumb to the seduction of simplicity. So if you have rankings that have multiple criteria and they help us understand a university and institution better, and we look at the detail of this data that's collected, then there are ways in which it tells us something about an institution. We can privilege those dimensions that we care about and put less weight on others that we think don't matter as much to us and so forth. The trouble with many rankings is that everything is reduced to a single number. And that seduction of simplicity is a real challenge, that a university ranked number 20 is necessarily better than a university ranked number 25. I think that's just rubbish. If you look at the criteria that are used in rankings, if the quality of teaching and learning is reduced to a single number like the student-faculty ratio, we know so much more goes into the quality of the teaching and learning experience than that. And yet we allow ourselves to be measured on that basis. Or perhaps I shouldn't say we allow ourselves. Sometimes we have no choice because we get ranked whether we like it or not. If you think about research and you think about fundamentally why do we do research? Surely we want to make a difference to the economy, to society. Granted, there are some areas of research where that difference is going to take decades, maybe longer. But some research has much more imminent potential for impact. But if all we care about are our citation counts and our age indices, then I think we're missing something. And if we're chasing, so we know institutions, we know of institutions who will play the game. Let's get together a bunch of academics, our faculty, to write review papers because review papers will get the higher citations. Right? How do we get into a citation game, as I wrote in my book titled Universities Reinvented, that there are citation cartels that develop. All that is incentivizing the wrong behaviors. So it's not necessarily rankings as a concept that's problematic, it's the criteria, the metrics, and how it's driving behaviors that I think is problematic.

SPEAKER_02 35:44

Fully agree.

Reviving Humanities And Experiential Learning

SPEAKER_01 36:40

So there are various dimensions. If I confine myself to the classroom for a start, then I think that the greatest irony is the decline of the humanities over the last few decades. And I think that if we are to expose ourselves to literature, to history, or to witness the frailty of humanity in a story that's compellingly written, if we look at what's happened in history and how power can corrupt, etc. Right? These are things that we learn through the humanities, and through that we understand and appreciate human qualities so much better. And yet, less and less students are exposing themselves to that or being or having the opportunity to be exposed to that. Now that's just it in the classroom. I would say that outside the classroom, every opportunity we can to have young people, or maybe not too young people who come back to school, be exposed to working together with one another, to learn the intercultural nuances and understanding, to learn to collaborate, work together. That comes through experiential learning, whether it is exposure through exchange programs, the crucible experience that I talked about in my book, or whether that is through community work, volunteer work, service learning work, or whether that's just living in residence where you have to learn to live cheek by jowl with someone else, or a range of other students with different backgrounds, different experiences, and learn to navigate that. And the human individual is made up of multiple intelligences, to use the phrase that was so famously developed by Howard Gartner.

SPEAKER_02 39:04

One thing you talk about also, which struck me as very interesting, is you make the statement that universities are having a crisis of direction. To me, that implies that you're the you're saying that there should be more directed

Crisis Of Direction And Diverse Missions

SPEAKER_02 39:25

efforts to address key problems. My concern and what I'm asking you about is who has the crystal ball to really and truly direct to see where we should be going.

SPEAKER_01 39:52

My answer to that would be that perhaps there's not just one single crystal ball, but that there can be a multiplicity of crystal balls, in the sense that we don't all have to be the same one kind of university. Indeed, I think we serve society and economy and humanity better if there are multiplicities of universities. So part of the challenge, I think the crisis of direction does stem from certain quite dominant rankings, and it's pushing us all in one direction as if there were one crystal ball. And I think that there are different kinds of institutions that are needed for different segments of society or for different societies. So there is absolutely a place for the community college not to be thought of as second rate or whatever. There is a place for the liberal arts college, there is a place for the technical, vocational teaching and learning, there is a place for the R1 university. But let's all try to do the best by whichever segment of society that we're trying to serve and not try to all, and I will use this verb very consciously, degenerate to a single mean.

SPEAKER_02 41:25

I want to touch to an on a topic that I know you have written and spoken about, which I also find very fascinating. It's designing for the 100-year life. And you speak about structuring academia to serve an individual like me. 75 years old, still feeling good, still able to interact, to hopefully produce. What how do universities restructure themselves

Designing For The 100 Year Life

SPEAKER_02 42:00

to handle that demand for education as we live longer and longer?

SPEAKER_01 42:09

So I think we need to think about university education as not just a three or four-year degree program and then and then that's it, and we're made for life. And I know very few people today would think that anymore, I think. The book Living a Hundred Year Life suggested that if if we are to live a hundred years and we want to have the kind of the standard of living that we had at the point when we retired or close to it, then chances are we're gonna need to work till about 80. And if we're to live that length of time and work that length of time, there is no way in which whatever we learned between the ages of 18 and 24 or 23 is gonna last us that lifetime, especially given the rapidly shrinking half-life of knowledge and skills. And so when I went to college, whatever I learned might have lasted me, I don't know, for 20 years. And today, whatever I learned in college might last me for two years before things change, if even that long. And so we're gonna continually have to learn, relearn, unlearn, learn again. And that means universities need to play a role in that continuing learning. When I went to college, we had a continuing education arm of the university, and what it offered was causes in things like ikibana, flower arrangement, or whatever. I don't scoff at that, that's important for different reasons, but universities need to offer continuing education in ways that are in step with the changes in technology, in economy, in society. Judges who became judges before blockchain and cryptocurrency are going to have to sit in judgment of cases that involve them. How on earth are they going to know about those things if they don't go back to school, so to speak? And so universities, I think, have a role, a very significant role in lifelong learning and need to see ourselves in that manner. It's for this reason that when I was provost in 2017, we established at my own university something called the SMU Academy. And we have been rolling out more and more courses, short courses for people who are already in the workforce who think that they need to come back and learn and relearn and so forth. And so we have 14,000 full-time matriculated undergraduates and graduate students, and we have 36,000 non-unique individuals who come for these short courses now. And you see the relative balance shifting. The undergraduate and graduate courses will always remain there and important. But with a shrinking birth rate, your undergraduate population is at best stable. If not, it's going to reduce. This other space is going to be important for the economy, for individuals, and for the survival of universities.

SPEAKER_02 45:26

Absolutely. Unfortunately, I would have to say that few universities, despite recognizing the situation, have made the investment to really and truly restructure themselves to provide that education for the mature student, if I can put it that way. Most universities are lagging behind. If they did so, they will also find that there's a whole population that would also help solve some of their financial problems. It's not only doing a good thing

Lifelong Learning As Public Good And Revenue

SPEAKER_02 46:00

for society, but the po but that population is becoming bigger and bigger, larger than the normal population we are used to catering to.

SPEAKER_01 46:13

So that's exactly what's happening here at my own institution. That it is a public good, but at the same time it's a revenue source for us. And we use that to subsidize the other things we want to do, research and the quality of undergraduate education.

SPEAKER_02 46:32

President Kong Lili, if I may say, I could talk for hours with you, but it's unfortunately not possible at this time. It's really been a pleasure. I've learned a lot just listening to you and in preparing to this conversation for this conversation. And I'm sure that the listeners of Not Alone, Leaders in Conversation, will feel the same way I do. Thank you so much. And to the listeners out there, I urge you to let us know what you like or dislike via the platform of your choice. But most importantly, we would like to get your comments on the ideas discussed on this podcast or on any of the other ones in the Not Alone series. Again, Professor Khan, Lily, thank you so much. I really appreciate it. And I hope that, in fact, next time I'll see you in person.

SPEAKER_01 47:28

Rafael, thank you so much for the opportunity. I've enjoyed the conversation and you stimulated many thoughts in my head. Thank you.

SPEAKER_03 47:42

Thank you for tuning in to this episode of Not Alone, Leaders in Conversation. We hope this discussion today sparked new ideas and left you with plenty to think about as you continue to lead in your own institution. If you found this conversation interesting, insightful, or thought provoking, please share this episode with your colleagues, peers, and friends. And don't forget to subscribe to the podcast on your preferred platform so you can stay up to date with our latest episodes.