From Colloquium to Community: Brenda Thomas on Supporting Vital Faculty

In this inspiring episode of The Adjunct Files, John Roth and Maggie Hohne welcome Brenda Thomas, former FGCU Colloquium Director and current Faculty Development Specialist at Appalachian State University. Brenda shares her journey from adjunct to advocate, detailing her work with VITAL faculty—visiting, instructor, teaching, adjuncts, and lecturers—and the challenges they face. From peer observation initiatives to shifting departmental culture, Brenda offers practical insights and heartfelt encouragement for part-time faculty everywhere. Tune in for a rich conversation on equity, belonging, and the power of intentional support.

Theme music composed, performed and produced by James Husni. 

Adjunct Nation is a collaborative podcast under the auspices of The Lucas Center for Faculty Development at FGCU.  You can learn more by clicking on this link:

https://www.fgcu.edu/lucascenter/

Transcript

Welcome to the Adjunct Files.
We're a growing, diverse community who face challenging work in an ever-changing, higher
education landscape.
Your co-hosts for this podcast are with you in this.
I'm John Roth, Adjunct since 2015 and now a coordinator for Adjunct Faculty at Florida
Gulf Coast University.
I'm Maggie Hohne, Adjunct since 2022 and currently work in the Office of First-Year Seminars.
Together we hope to have conversations to empower, support, and elevate Adjunct Faculty.
This conversation today is one to do just that.
Welcome back to the Adjunct Files podcast.
Maggie, how are you doing today?
I'm doing great, John.
How are you?
Good.
We are so fortunate to have a compatriot, a colleague, someone who understands and is
part of the FGCU effect in the positive way.
Brenda Thomas with us, but she sadly is no longer here.
She has flown the coupe.
Literally.
Yeah, it's not a coupe.
And she's at Appalachian State.
Oh.
Amazing place.
Yeah.
Appalachian.
Nope, I'm going to correct you, John, because that's an important distinction.
It's Appalachian.
Oh, my goodness.
Yeah, you could tell I'm not from Appalachia.
Uh-huh.
And if you say it wrong up here, the locals will know that you are not a local.
Brenda Thomas is here from Appalachian State University.
There you go.
Did a marvelous job with colloquium here, right, Maggie?
Yes.
An incredible partner with the Lucas Center.
So it's great to have you, Brenda.
Introduce yourself beyond what I just shared.
I am tickled to pieces to be here.
I've been at App State for just a little over a year.
And very much miss my colleagues at FGCU.
I don't miss the hot and humid weather.
I am enjoying.
It's like 50, 55 degrees this morning.
Sunny, no humidity.
Windows are all open in my house.
But I do miss my colleagues from FGCU.
Well tell us about your journey.
How did you, you know, I knew you grew the program here colloquium so large and broadly
and used multitudes of adjunct faculty for it.
But how did you get from here to Appalachian State and what inspired that transition and
all?
So my position at App State, I am a faculty development specialist in the Center for Excellence
in Teaching and Learning for Student Success, which is like the longest center title ever.
We use the acronym, CEDOL, C-E-T-L-S-S, CEDOLs, rhymes with Beatles.
And my role in CEDOLs is mentoring career support initiatives specifically for vital
non-tenure track faculty.
So vital stands for visiting instructor teaching adjuncts and lecturers.
And that is a group of folks that is near and dear to my heart.
And the folks who are not on the tenure track.
I graduated from FGCU in 2009 with a Master's in Environmental Science and was pretty quickly
thereafter asked to teach as an adjunct in environmental biology course.
And I taught a couple of other courses in an adjunct capacity after.
And in that first semester that I was asked to teach, I was given a choice between two
textbooks, given a room assignment, and taught how to get into the learning management system,
which was angel at the time.
And that was it.
I had no support in any way, shape, or form other than lab as an adjunct.
I reached out to some of my colleagues in the department, which at that time was marine
and ecological sciences, and said, you know, help, can you share with me your syllabus,
some examples of assignments and things that you do.
And some are more than helpful in sharing those materials with me and others said absolutely
not.
That's intellectual property.
And I worked hard to develop this.
And so, you know, you're on your own.
So that was my adjunct experience.
And then I left FGCU for a time after I graduated, came back to teach as an instructor, teach
colloquium full time.
And that would have been around what, 2013, 2014, I think.
Todd as an instructor taught colloquium for a year, and then moved into the director position
of university colloquium.
And as an instructor, even though FGCU is not a 10 year granting institution, I still,
there still is a difference.
There still is a hierarchical difference between instructors who are just in air quotes, just
teaching, and the ranks of the professors who are also doing research as well.
So, so I have experience being a vital faculty member.
And so when I took over as colloquium director and working with those groups of folks in
very different ways, the adjunct faculty in particular, because university colloquium
relies so heavily on adjunct faculty, it was determined that those folks were not going
to have the same experiences that I did being thrown into a classroom and said, here, go
do this.
I'm sure it was a mediocre experience for me, and I'm sure a less than positive experience
for my students.
And I didn't want that for anybody.
I wanted adjunct faculty to feel supported.
I wanted them to come back, and I wanted them to have a positive experience in their students
to have a positive experience as well.
That is the motivation, the inspiration, and the reason why I love doing what I do,
how I got to AB specifically and why I decided to leave FGCU.
At the time, a year and a half ago, two years ago, I was in the process of wrapping up my
DD, which I was completing in the college of education there, at FGCU.
The two of my three boys had lived in FGCU in Fort Myers with me, had moved to Charlotte,
and things with university colloquium were changing.
The program was essentially being dismantled, and so I was looking for other opportunities.
So when the position at AB came up, and I realized that it was focused on supporting
vital faculty, I was like, yeah, I want that one.
And I'm an hour and a half, two hours for my kids in Charlotte.
And I miss fall, and I miss spring, and I miss topography, and all the things that, you
know, Appalachia has to offer.
Well, I'll tell you, my wife and I took a vacation a couple summers ago to that region,
Lake Junalaska, Boone, and the loved Boone.
Of all the places that we visited, Boone was the only place that I said, yeah, I could
live here.
Now, the roads, not so much.
How you will wind the Maggie, have you been up in the area, Maggie?
I have not, but I've only heard positive things.
Yeah, but the roads, some of the hairpin turns, and the no guard rail.
And you got to get used to that from flat Florida.
And my middle kid that lives in Charlotte, he's a car guy, and he loves driving fun roads.
And that was one of his biggest complaints in Florida, is they're straight and they're
flat.
There is nothing exciting about driving Florida roads.
Yeah, well, they're straight and flat, then there's a little curve, and then there's this
road that we took from Blowing Rock.
It turned into gravel to the air, the air be we went to, and the hairpin turns that
were half washed out, and I'm going like, what is going on here?
There is a road somewhere in western North Carolina.
I think it's over along the Tennessee border called the Tale of the Dragon.
And it is a known destination for car guys that like to drive it.
It is so so twisty and turny.
Oh, wow.
Well, great.
Well, wonderful.
Tell us, you mentioned in our talks before that Appalachian State and FGCU has similarities,
but also some differences.
Share some of those.
So the universities are similar in that they are both part of a larger state system.
The politics of the two states and those systems are also similar.
The app state is a little bit bigger than FGCU, but not by much.
App state just achieved R2 status.
And when I left, I think FGCU was moving in that direction.
So some of those same conversations are happening.
So similar in those kinds of ways, same kinds of missions, student success, incorporating
undergraduates into research, those kinds of things.
Where the biggest difference in the two institutions is the presence of tenure.
FGCU is not tenure granting.
Faculty members have a rolling through your contract.
And at app, that's not the case.
There is tenure.
And so for me, that has been by far one of the biggest learning curves is coming to understand
that.
So those are some of the immediate differences.
The communities that surround them are again, similar and different.
Boone, like Southwest Florida, is very much a tourist town.
There are seasonal residents.
So when the snowbirds of South Florida get hot in the summer, they come to Boone in this
region in western North Carolina.
And instead of a house at the beach, they have a house on top of a mountain.
And summers up here are just stunning.
And certainly not what they are in Southwest Florida.
So there's a lot of that.
Boone oftentimes feels like Southwest Florida for that reason, not environmentally, climate
wise, but as far as that tourist driven economy.
However, the culture of the communities is very different.
Abba Lacha, it can be a really tough culture to break into if you are from outside the
region.
And I have colleagues who have been it out for 20 years and lived in Boone for 20 years
and more, but still can be perceived as an outsider because they were not born and raised
there.
A very tight knit community.
And that certainly is not what I experienced in Southwest Florida.
Much more multicultural in Southwest Florida.
Lots of transplants, bigger population in general.
So there's similarities and differences both at the institution level and then within
the community that both institutions sit in.
How do you think that impacts the adjunct faculty experience based on those similarities
and differences you described?
You know, the challenges for adjuncts seem to be pretty universal regardless.
One of the things that is different with our adjuncts here is the degree to which they
are scattered all over.
Some well outside the region, but outside the state even as well.
And actually that is the same for some of our full time faculty.
We have the main campus in Boone.
And then our College of Health Sciences is in a separate, on a separate campus on the
other side of town.
And then we also have a satellite campus in Hickory, North Carolina, which is an agri.
Mm-hmm.
Love Hickory.
It's about an hour or so down the mountain.
And so for that reason, we have full time faculty as well as adjunct faculty that are
just scattered all over.
And part of it is the cost of living.
I thought Southwest Florida is expensive.
The Boone area, housing is a significant problem.
There's not a lot of it to begin with.
I mean, you can imagine sitting on top of a mountain ridge, the options for buildable
land are pretty limited.
And then Hurricane Helene didn't help any because she took out so much of the housing
in the areas that were not, you know, not on top of mountains.
So there are faculty who live in the research triangle park area in Raleigh, in Chapel Hill,
faculty members that live on the other side of the state in South Carolina and Georgia
in large part because they just can't afford to live in Boone.
Well, you talked about vital faculty.
And if I don't know if you want to break them down, our institutions are different because
we do have some visiting faculty.
And we have instructors, but because we don't have tenure, they're different.
And there is still a difference between instructor and assistant or associate professor because
of research.
And I think there is a hierarchy.
It's right.
And, um, adjuncts are kind of a well defined pool here of just OPS semester to semester
contracts.
Who knows what's going to happen next semester here?
Tell us the breakdown and how many you are dealing with and trying to support.
So the, I have, I've been fortunate to have two supervisors, the, the director of mentoring
career support who is my direct supervisor and then our center executive director.
That really gave me the time and the flexibility in my first year at app to do some needs assessment
to get to learn who these faculty are vital faculty broadly and who they are where they
are, what their needs are.
So I did some needs assessment last year and surveyed the vital faculty, the full time
folks separately from the part time folks, the adjunct faculty because their circumstances
and their needs are so very different.
Looking at data from our IRAP, which is, you know, the, the side of the house that keeps
all of the data related to faculty and students and so on, about half of app states faculty
are vital faculty.
And that's, I just under a thousand.
And like 63% of vital faculty, 63, 64% are adjunct faculty.
So it's a big, it's a big number.
Yeah.
It's more than here.
Yeah.
We have, we have about 430 active right now.
You sound like you have about 630 in that category, a thousand overall, correct?
Yes.
Wow.
So what are some of the consistent needs that you found from that survey?
The same challenges that you'll find in the literature, these folks are working really,
really hard.
They're paid very, very little.
There's little, and a lot of it depends, and you know this, John, depends on the department.
Some departments are more supportive than others.
And I wouldn't want to be a department chair who's, you know, handling, scheduling and student
complaints and faculty grumblings and budgets.
They're the middle man between their faculty and the college deans and so on.
But it very much depends on the department, the kind of support that adjunct faculty get.
A desire for professional development, but from adjunct faculty, but oftentimes it's
not accessible.
Many of our adjunct faculty actually are staff members who teach a class or two.
And you know, they're for them and for so many others that I heard from, they have full
time jobs.
They're working eight to five.
And when most professional development opportunities are happening between nine and five, that
doesn't leave a lot of options for them.
So you know, those are the kinds of things that seem to be pretty universal regardless
of where adjunct faculty are.
Can you give us an example from your research in a department, maybe at App State, that's
doing some great best practices in supporting adjunct faculty?
Absolutely.
I met with a department chair last week and specifically selected this individual to meet
with because of his good work related to adjunct faculty.
Anytime I talk with one of his adjunct, I won't even say adjunct because he won't use
that craze.
There are connotations that go along with adjunct.
You know, it's an accessory.
It's something extra.
So he will not use the term and try to create that kind of a culture with others in the
department.
He will say part-time faculty as opposed to adjunct faculty.
In any time I hear from his part-time faculty, they talk about how well supported they feel.
He has developed, he's very intentional about making sure that part-time faculty are included
in department meetings.
There's always a Zoom option for them.
If they come, he makes sure to acknowledge that they have taken time out of their days
to attend.
He has an adjunct orientation that he does.
He has taken it upon himself to create an adjunct faculty.
I'm falling back into adjunct.
He would chastise me for that.
A part-time faculty handbook.
So he developed it.
He keeps it updated.
So I went to him and said, okay, what are your lessons?
Because these are some of the things that I would like to develop for adjunct faculty
more broadly across the university.
So I suspect he and I are going to be working together on a number of these things.
Mack, what do you think about that?
What you just heard from that department?
I think it's amazing.
And I would also be very interested just to see what all he does, because I think it's
just small things like that that make the biggest impact.
In faculty, you're not asking for you to build an entire new university just for them
and to extend your hours until midnight so we can all connect.
Just even something as simple as the invitation to department meetings is something that I
think is very beneficial and helps with culture and morale.
Just his insistence on change in the term.
In asking the rest of his department to refer to them as part-time faculty, I think is huge.
Where do you see the highest concentration of adjunct faculty within your colleges?
Like I know for us, we have a lot in health and human services.
I was just wondering what the breakdown is for y'all if you had that.
I do have that if you don't mind me taking a minute.
With my environmental science background, hold on, because I can't click and talk at
the same time.
I enjoy playing with data.
I don't enjoy analyzing data necessarily.
Like true on analysis, but I love looking at data.
Most of our adjuncts, 31% of our adjunct faculty are coming from arts and sciences.
The second biggest percentage is the College of Health Sciences.
I would just find the breakdown so interesting depending on where the universities are located
and what their strategic emphasis are.
Thank you for sharing that.
In most, within arts and sciences, the biggest percentage is 20% of them are English and
then 13% from mathematics.
Would that be because of general education requirements, potentially, the composition
and things like that?
Probably.
Yeah.
More than likely.
That would be my assumption.
Yeah, Brenda, one of the things I think I have an adjunct advisory board and maybe we'll
think through just changing that name as well from adjunct.
I think part of the reason I'm still using it, I don't know, just because people understand
but at the same time it is derogatory in some ways.
But when you talk to adjunct faculty, it doesn't bother them.
In some instances, maybe, but for the most part, it doesn't seem to bother them.
Right.
But anyways, we built Reynolds and I, you might know, we did some research and interviewed
department chairs because they're stuck in the middle of the hourglass, right, with all
this stuff from above and all these issues below them.
And it all runs through one individual or an individual and an administrator in a department
and just no training and only a three, four year time period and then you're back with
the rest of the faculty.
So you better treat them nicely type thing and it's a tough position to be in.
But we did find some best practices across the university.
And I think I'm going to just put together a report to send out to all of the departments,
just say, hey, these are some of the best practices that we see others are using here
at FGCU.
And we'd like to see if you'd consider adopting some of these and just leaving it open ended.
It does feel like sometimes I have to, you know, be diplomatic about it.
There's no mandates because every department is different.
I'd like to have a foundational like baseline for all all departments to do this.
But then there's got to be variations depending on the needs and the situations of departments
and units here that work with that joke faculty.
It's just that John, what I what I am finding is important.
Just making people aware.
Oh, yeah.
I mean, I think that's that's why some of the progress has happened here so far is simply
then people realize, oh, what?
There's how many?
I mean, they didn't even know.
Most people thought there might be a hundred or so, not 430.
They thought, oh, well, it's not that, you know, because when we're out of sight, we're
out of mind and we are out of sight most of the time because our teaching is either online
or in the evenings or here and there.
We're not on campus all the time.
We don't have offices.
We don't have the connections.
We're not typically here yet invited to department meetings or have separate meetings just for
the adjuncts at night so that the department can connect with them.
We're working on that.
It's just some of the simple stuff, right?
And I do think about the work that the Lucas Center has done to support adjunct faculty,
which is why you have the position that you do and why you all want a Delphi award
this year.
I'm so excited for that.
Yeah.
I was shocked, Brenda.
I didn't think I thought first year it's like, well, you know, we could try Bill because
we only did it in a month to put that all together.
He saw and I said, yeah, well, okay.
And then I looked at some of the previous winners and I said, yeah, we're not quite
at the comprehensive nature.
And yet when you start writing it all out, it's like, wow, a lot has changed.
So as someone who's worked as both an instructor and a director, how do you balance administrative
goals with faculty needs?
As you see both sides.
Yeah.
Do you have a balanced life, Brenda?
Do you have a balanced life?
I have no balance whatsoever and I'm okay with that.
It can be challenging.
It can be very challenging because as in, and I wasn't a department chair per se as director
of colloquium, but in a lot of ways I, I functioned as a department chair.
So, you know, in that role, you have to support your faculty.
You have to advocate for your faculty to make sure that they have the things that they need
to help students to be successful.
But at the same time, I was the one that was responsible for making sure that we had all
of the sections of colloquium up that we needed and that, you know, that's like 50 in any
given semester because otherwise there's going to be in within budgetary constraints
to make sure that those sections were staffed because otherwise, Maggie, as you know, there's
chaos when students need a seat to graduate and they can't get it.
So it's not always easy.
And some of the most challenging moments that I had as director were the moments that I needed
somebody in a section at the very last minute and it was going to be an adjunct faculty
member or worse were the moments that I had to pull an adjunct faculty out of a section
that they had been assigned.
And that was by far the hardest because sometimes those adjunct faculty needed that paycheck,
but there were political reasons and budgetary reasons that that was the choice that I had.
So it's not easy.
And it's not easy when you care about those people that you know you were impacting.
What are some of the roadblocks you might have encountered or some resistance in trying
to change the culture at your institution with part-time faculty and the support and
just how they're integrated into the university?
At FGCU, at app or in general?
I would say at App State, maybe you learned something here at FGCU with your past experience
being the director of the program and how does that kind of translate into your current
role?
Yeah.
Yeah, that's a good question.
So one of the things that I worked hard at when I was at FGCU as director was helping
the adjunct faculty feel like they were a part of the department.
We tried some professional development, get together kind of workshops that would bring
everybody together and it just didn't work well because the adjunct faculty, they have
to be there after five o'clock most of the time and by that time the full-time faculty
didn't want to be on campus and so we gave up on that.
What I tried to do instead, the way that I tried to do some community building, some
collaboration was through peer observation.
So as director, adjunct faculty are supposed to be observed, I don't know how regularly
what defines regularly at FGCU.
That seems to vary by department as well.
As director, I tried not to be the one doing the observations because I'm the one that's
deciding if these people get a second or not and so it was incredibly intimidating if I
walked into a classroom to do that.
But I also saw it as an opportunity to build community and so I tried to recruit some of
my full-time faculty to do those observations because then they were getting to know the
adjunct faculty and vice versa.
It was a way to help them feel connected in addition to potentially improving what was
happening in their classrooms.
So when I got to AppState and I spent part of my learning process over the last year was
getting to know and to understand what the annual review process included.
So there is tenure but for vital faculty, there is an annual review process just like
we go through at FGCU.
And in my needs assessment in my surveys, what I was hearing from full-time and part-time
vital faculty was that peer observation was not happening for a variety of reasons.
People that are doing the reviewing are busy, they have teaching responsibilities, research,
whatever.
And so the vital faculty, they are supposed to be having these things done but they also
recognized the value of having a peer observe them.
That it was an opportunity for them to improve their teaching through that kind of collaborative
process with a peer.
So this fall I am working with a colleague in the center who is an educational development
specialist.
So there are a group of them that focus on the pedagogical side of things more so than
the career support that Tracy and I do.
So I am working with one of the ed specialists and we are facilitating a peer observation
of teaching workshop to improve the process.
And this was particularly relevant for me related to adjunct faculty because if adjunct
faculty are not being observed then decisions about assigning them courses in the future
are going to be based purely on student evaluations.
And the research shows that those can be problematic.
And it is the same for full-time vital faculty but for adjuncts in particular.
If nobody is observing them then the decision makers are relying on student evaluations.
So Meg and I are working on this peer observation of teaching workshop to improve the process
to have folks think intentionally about all of the vulnerabilities involved in that process.
The biases about teaching that they are bringing to an observation, the value of a pre-observation
meeting and a post-observation meeting all of those things.
So improving the process itself but also growing a pool of people who are going to
feel like they understand what they are doing.
They are going to feel equipped to do an observation and to do it well.
And I suspect that by growing that pool of people it is going to be easier for a department
chair to say hey I have 10 adjuncts that need an observation done in this semester who is
available and willing to do that.
So that is one thing that I have been pretty intentional about trying to bring to app to
support adjunct faculty.
It is a huge job Brenda.
You are one person and you have a thousand people.
You have a couple of people on your team but still the ratios are just way off.
It is almost as though it is larger than a size of a college in terms of the number
of people that you are trying to network with.
It is just people don't realize that.
It is like this position, there is 430 here.
So it is not like that is larger than most of the colleges in terms of how large their
faculty pool is that they are working with.
Not to say that the work is even similar but it is just the ratios are just amazing
that we can get anything done.
What do you hope starts happening or where do you see things going in App State?
Well I think again elevating awareness is the first step.
Keeping edge faculties, their triumphs, their challenges, the value of them.
Making that on the radar of upper level administration is critically important.
We have started that process.
There was an opportunity, was it over the summer that a VP of something in academic affairs
realized that we had access to.
It was a professional development opportunity.
It was asynchronous online.
She had a conversation with my center director saying, here is this thing.
I am thinking about making this available to whoever it was.
Because I did that needs assessment and was able to share that report with my center director,
she then in this conversation with this VP was able to say, why don't we make this available
to adjunct faculty?
We did.
Over 30 of them participated in this online asynchronous through, what is it, 1HE?
It is a highly respected professional development organization focused on higher education.
Oftentimes it is just that is the first step is awareness.
Why I am excited to work with this particular department chair?
Because he is raising awareness of adjunct faculty, challenges, triumphs, all of those
value, all of those things, not just within his own department, but with the council of
chairs more broadly.
That is an important first step.
Maggie, my brain is going off in all different directions.
I am thinking we need, Brenda, is there ways that we can partner together in either research
or whatever moving forward?
I think it would be really beneficial to us here at FGCU to have you involved in any research
that we can do jointly or any partnership and sharing ideas and swapping things like
that.
Yeah, I would love to do that, John.
I enjoy staying connected to my Lucas Center peeps anyway.
Any excuse to do that?
I am happy to take a look.
Any help we can just boost you up and your work and get you to be a Delphi winner in the
future would be awesome.
I tell you, when I saw that you all had won the award and it was the Facebook post or something
social, I shared that with my center director and with the director of mentoring career
support and Lindsay's response was goal.
Yep, someday we need to be doing the good work that you, John and Maggie and the Lucas
Center, all of the things that you have initiated at FGCU are just remarkable.
Any shout outs you want to do down here?
We miss you.
There are so many people, I'm sure, that you just would want to shout out and say hi
to you from here, all your colloquium peeps.
Yeah, and Bill and Jackie Green, both.
Bill Reynolds and all that.
So both are people that I consider to be mentors and who helped to move my career toward
where it is now.
So certainly the two of them.
But Don Kirby as well, Don is VP of whatever Don is VP of or associate provost or something,
whatever her big title.
But Don is the one who said to me long ago, she, I reported to Don as colloquium director
and Don is the one that said to me one day when I had a master's degree, when are you
going to get a terminal degree?
Because you're not going to retire from FGCU.
And so that's when I started thinking about the EDD.
And then two vital faculty members in particular that I miss terribly.
Chad Evers, who is full director, and I still keep in touch with Chad, but I miss Chad dreadfully.
And Georgia Strange.
I thought you'd say that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Adjunct faculty extraordinaire.
Lucas, adjunct faculty fellow at one point.
And I still keep in touch with Georgia as well.
And yeah, and I miss her terribly.
She's a good human.
All of those folks are good humans.
Any last minute words of encouragement to any adjunct faculty who might be listening
to this podcast?
I would just say thank you for what you do.
Because the institutions who employ you could not do what they do without you.
And just know that you are seen and you are heard.
And not necessarily compensated and supported in the way that you should be.
But there are folks out there who do hear you and do see you and do value you.
And we're doing what we can do to change the culture.
Amen.
Amen to that.
Well, Brenda, thanks so much for this time.
It's been great.
Maggie, what do you think?
This has been amazing.
And I'm just very excited for future collaborations.
And I think there's a lot of opportunity between our universities and the work we do.
And I'm just really excited for what's next.
Yeah, especially if we get to visit app state.
Yes.
Mm hmm.
By the way, Brenda, just a weird thing.
Do people from that area actually go to Danel Boone in?
Or is it just totally like everybody goes like, yeah, no.
And do you know?
No.
Yeah.
And that's a good question.
I've never honestly have never been.
You haven't been.
I've been.
But I've been.
It's kind of like homestyle cooking, you know.
And now that you say it, John, maybe I've never been because my colleagues never go.
Maybe that says.
Mm hmm.
That does say so.
I think it's just one of those touristy things.
Yep.
We end up at Fizzed is a restaurant in town.
That's really good.
The Boone saloon.
I spend more time in the Boone saloon than I do in the Daniel Boone.
So there you go.
There you go.
Cool.
Well, thanks so much, Brenda.
Maggie, this was great.
We'll have to get together again.
It was good to visit with you guys.
Okay.
Bye bye, everyone.
Bye guys.
Bye y'all.
The music composed, performed and produced by James Husney.