Jay Hartzell on Intersections Podcast

0:00This is the Dallas Morning News. So good, so good, so good. New Spring arrivals are at Nordstrom Rack stores now. Get ready to save big with up to 60% off Ragnboan, Martha Jacobs, Free People, and more. I didn't have no Rack as a Deedas. Because there's always something new. Join the Nordic Club to unlock exclusive discounts, shop new arrivals first, and more. Plus, buy online and pick up at your favorite Rack store for free. Great brands, great prices. That's why you Rack. This episode is brought to you in partnership by Clay Coulee Automotive, family-owned, family-operated automotive company serving the local DFW Metriplex for over 22 years. Clay, thank you for all you're doing to make intersections possible. Headquartered in Dallas, Texas, Argus Golf is a premier owner and operator of nearly 90 private resort and daily tea courses in the U.S., including Cowboys Golf Club. The world's first and only NFL-themed golf club and eight other courses right here

1:02in the DFW Metriplex. Argus is an innovative industry leader providing unrivaled lifestyle amenities that complement exceptional golf offerings. To learn more, visit ArgusGolf.com and thank you to the Argus team for all that you do to make intersections happen. SMU is fortunate to have Jay Hartzell, as I mentioned at the end of it. Talked to some of the individuals in the ball in the search, when his name came up, the search was over. Yeah, absolutely. Game over. UT, Dean McCombs, and then the 30th president of UT, has now come to a totally different institution, smaller, private, a little bit more intimate. It doesn't have to deal with the state legislature or something like that, but he really lays out the vision for what the future of the Mustangs is going to look like. Talked about momentum.

2:02$1.6 billion capital can't be completed. Really thought of as a great institution and a terrific place in Dallas. It's got real opportunities and Jay's going to relate those things to the ball. Tune in. Welcome to intersections. We take a multi-generational look at the critical issues facing America. Tom? I'm back to the corner again, surrounded by SMU, Jay Hartzell, the 11th president of SMU, came to SMU as from the 30th president of the University of Texas, Austin, terrific academic background, really on the business side, though, finance, real estate, and then had been at the Stern School back at NYU before going to McCombs and then eventually taking the presidency. Terrific to have you with us. I guess the first question is, you come from an institution of 55,000 plus students budget moving in on $4 billion to SMU, smaller school, great reputation, but smaller school.

3:07What was kind of the motivation to kind of move from large institution to a smaller one? Yeah, I think it wasn't, I guess it wasn't about size, but I guess part of it almost is. So, you know, if you get lucky and things go well in your career, you get to have moments where you think, you know, kind of make an impact. And there's something I can be part of that really is making a difference. And it felt like SMU was that opportunity. And you can't be in a high red and not know that the school's been doing better and better. It's been on their eyes and it's gotten a lot of, you know, pressing around that, but it's also known in the higher education world. And so it felt like a chance to join something that really has this, is in a moment. And it's a chance to hopefully make a difference. But when I got the job, I likened UT to a bit of an aircraft carrier. It displaces a lot of water, but it's hard to turn and SMU's turning and it feels turnable. So the flip side of that coin then, UT Austin, even for the president, more limited opportunities to, quote, make that difference. And I know you got to challenge you with the legislature will talk a little bit later

4:10you had people like governors and other folks like that, telling you what they thought was the appropriate action for the president of UT Austin. Yeah, it's certainly complicated. There are a lot of constituents, a lot of people who are very passionate about the place, which is wonderful. But then there's sometimes not a unified view on where to go. Of course, you report to the board and so that's where you take your direction from. But it is, it is hard and the opinions change, perceptions change, priorities change. And you know, there are times when you think, oh, this is going to work out in the following way. And then kind of reality hits and something else comes along and cause you to be distracted or causes you to exert your effort in a different direction. We'll get to some of that. But let's talk about SMU. So you've been here nine months now. So what are the surprises? Any surprises other than the fact that they gave him a degree? Now, I think a few, you know, part of it, until you really get into place, you're not sure where the pockets of excellence are, where the strengths are.

5:12You know, today, for example, I'm going to see the Meadows Executive Board and the Meadows School. And I knew of it, but didn't realize how exceptionally strong it is, especially in certain areas. Like, we've got an art history department, for example, it's on the cost of probably the top 10 in the country, but it's truly a special department. The museum there is wonderful. I learned about things like Guild Hall. We're really good in video game design, which I didn't realize. So that's been a lot of fun. I also think I didn't fully appreciate Dallas is a big part of the story, why SMU's been doing well, why it's an appealing job, why it's a great place to go to school. But I don't think I fully appreciate how much Dallas is really behind us. And you get here and even people that are at degree or two away from SMU are rooting for us, they want it to succeed and they're passionate about it. So tell us that first conversation where you heard about SMU and where you first got interested, give us kind of that background in story. Yeah, the first part, I think my wife mentioned it first, to be honest, as she way back when

6:13I was in grad school, she got a master's in higher ed administration. So she continues to be the chronicle of higher education, which is kind of probably weird, but true. And so she saw the ad posted and it was late fall of must have been 24, 23, 24, right? Yeah, 24 and she said, hey, you know, you got to think about this. It looks like a job that probably lines up more with what makes you happy where you get where I get joy. And I didn't sort of was a little bit dismissive of it that first time. And then got, you know, a phone call from somebody who's involved in both places and they said something like, you know, look, if you're ever going to think about another job, you're a young guy, you know, back to president number 30, UT presidents don't last forever. Nobody's made it 10 years. And so they said, if you're ever going to look, this is something you should look at. And it probably, you know, I started thinking about it. This opportunity might not be there in a couple more years. And so it felt like if I was going to make a move, you know, ever, it was the right opportunity

7:16the right time. You undergraduate was at Trinity. And then you moved on to UT for your doctorate. But take us back, grew up, morning Kansas grew up in Oklahoma. Where did the desire to go into academia come from? Did it come later on? But it was it really early on? No, much later. I grew up in Tulsa. My dad was a sportswriter. So that was a lot of my love of sports came about just the way I grew up. He had a rare cancer passed away when I was 11. Mom married a Methodist minister. Perkins grad. Perkins grad. Yeah. I was just kind of funny now. I have more credibility at home than I used to have. And so grew up that way. And, you know, honestly, part of my percent when I went to college, we were, I would characterize probably middle class maybe on the customer lower middle class and the money thing bothered me. So I thought, you know, it was the time of like the show, Family Ties and Alex Keaton and all that kind of, you know, so I thought I'm going to go find a way to get to big time

8:17business or Wall Street or something and go make money. But then along the way, partly because of Trinity, I had this experience there with a professor that I worked for a little bit, I named Phil Cooley. And it's sort of to spark this interest in teaching and then being part of an academic place. But you started out kind of more thinking about engineering than the business size. And you say one course changed that? Well, in fairness, so I didn't know what an engineer did. I don't think I knew any engineers. But I was okay at math. And if you're in high school, you know, with a high school at mine and then you're okay at math, people say you should be an engineer. So I applied at Trinity as an engineering major, also because of the liberal arts bent of the place. So I thought it would give me a little bit more well-rounded approach. And I got kind of cold feet over the summer. And it always been interested in the stock market and kind of the economy side. So I ended up taking the physics and calculus and stuff you'd have to take if you're an engineer. Sure.

9:18But then took econ and fell in love with it. And so never went back to kind of the engineering side. So then when you went to UT for the doctorate and finance real estate, and then you spent a lot of time subsequently on some governance issues and those sorts of things, was the view to go into academia at that point or do you really see yourself pursuing kind of the hard finance business side? Yeah. I think the way I viewed it was I went there thinking I wanted to teach, thinking the place I'd Trinity was probably right in, but I didn't know any better. And then got into it, realized I liked the research, enjoyed it quite a bit. But what's nice about finance and to extend economics, you always have kind of an exit option. And so I always thought, you know, if I put up a reason it doesn't go great or I change a mind or I want to go make money after all, that I could go back to Wall Street. Well, then Trinity UT and then all of a sudden, now we're at NYU Stern. Yeah. So how did it bridge the gap for us on that? Yeah, that was a bit of a culture shock. And yeah, you know, I got really lucky.

10:19I had a couple of papers that were kind of on the way to be published as a PhD student, which is sort of what I do a sign of some potential in NYU took a big chance. I got there and there three of us hired and it was a guy from Stanford, a guy from Wharton and me. And I'm like, which one of these is not like the other ones. And but it was a wonderful place to be a finance professor. You feel like you're in the middle of it. You know, I felt like I had seen finance on TV and then you're in Manhattan and to big department, maybe the biggest finance department in the country at the time. And so it was wonderful. I love the job part of it. It turned out to be a hard place to live with two little kids. But as a professional star, I couldn't have asked for anything better. I'm going to send you back home. How did you get to UT? Yeah, that was part of it. They call me back after a couple of years at NYU. I was in my third year in the joke I've made, which is about right, is I hung up the phone and my wife had packed. And I knew I was in trouble because we would go to dinner at the time and she would spend

11:20some of the dinner conversations and say, where can you move next? Which is probably not a long-term outlook. So that's going to happen. Texas called. They wanted somebody who did the kinds of things that I could do teaching wise and research wise. And it was a, UT was still a special place to me and that was a great opportunity to come back. It's as a balance, a kind of work life. It was really special. So I wanted to get in here a little bit. You were on the Texas faculty for I think 20 years or so. Talk to us about your teaching style. What did the kids experience with you as a professor in the room? Obviously, you and I know each other as more of a personal relationship in the now SMU. But take us back to the days where you're teaching. Yeah, I loved it. And it was funny. When I first got to NYU to give you a little bit of context, I thought I'll be more professional and try to do it more seriously and all that and I bombed. And I went in my first year review and they said, we thought you were going to be good. I said, I did too. And so I went back to being me.

12:21And so I think one of the lessons, you know, I talked to young faculty. So the class ratings weren't good that first. They weren't. No. And I had done really well in grad school, but then tried to be more New Yorkie and it didn't work. And so part of the things I tell young faculty is, you know, be yourself. Be yourself. And so for me, it was more casual, a little pride, frenetic. The students, when I sort of first started teaching MBAs at Texas, they called me speedy J, because I was fast and taught fast. But you know, I enjoy the dynamic going back and forth, make it more interactive, co-calling. You know, Mr. Waldrop, what do you think of this and then, you know, right back at you? Are you sure that's all you got? You know, that to me gets people into the discussion. Of course. And that was, to me, it was part of the joys. That's probably the hardest part about these administrative jobs is I missed, I missed the teaching. You get away from the kids now. And as Kyle said, great career at UT, kind of moved up rapidly in professors, saying

13:23no. Professor, you headed up a couple of different, I'll call them institutions, but departments that eventually became the department head, then Dean of the McCombs School at a time when it really took off. Yeah, it was going, I was blessed there to follow somebody, kind of Tom Gilligan, who was a great Dean. I worked for him for Mr. Barmer Chair and then Associate Dean, Senior Associate Dean. It went off to head Hooverist too, exactly after that. Yeah, and so I got to be on, you know, in his kind of jet stream and it was, the school was doing great. It was a ton of fun. I think in hindsight, I've joked, I look back and realize how good the Dean job was. I became president and you realize, you know, Dean of the business school is a good job. You have autonomy generally, resources, you know, it's a place where you feel like you can do some things. So it was, it was really great, the passion alums, they love the place, students getting great jobs, students were really smart, so it was, it was fun.

14:24So then they come to you and tell you, hey, look, we've locked the school down because of COVID a couple of days ago and we want to make your president, but we're going to make you enter a president of UT. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it was bizarre. So did you feel like you were being thrown out or elevated? Yeah, at the time, it was a little, I've joked, it's a little like that show, designated survivor where there's a HUD secretary in the basement and everybody's blown up. Yeah. So I got a call on a Saturday, April, late March, early April, 2020, COVID, early COVID. COVID is about March 11th, exactly. The infamous NBA basketball match, so we're all working from home, right? I get a phone call on a Saturday, which is unusual from the president. I think he's going to ask what the provost child, the provost had left to go be a president, Stony Brook, and she's now president of Yale, she's, she's awesome. And it turned out he says, I'm going to announce I'm leaving on Tuesday to go be president of the Murray, and you may get a call later today to be an interim president. So you got to decide if you want to do it. And I came down, why does she, I told my wife, I got to sit down.

15:25She says, what's wrong? I think her lies are changing, and that was it. And they call later the day and said, would you be service interim president? I had never applied for a provost job for a president job. Was this his recommendation? I would guess, I mean, it must have been, I never pinned down on it, but I'm guessing because it needed to be, you know, you have to get support to, right? Even as the HUD secretary in the basement, somebody had to say you could do it. But that was it. I call on Saturday, leaked on Monday, announced on Tuesday, and there we go. And so that was probably the most jarring professional experience I've had, because my mind was not there. And then three or four days later, all of a sudden, we changed. They are. Now, and those first couple of years were challenging, challenging. Yeah. You went from interim, but to permanent, relatively quickly. So kind of spring through, through the summer. But then a lot of things hit on you. What led to them in such a quick fashion, you know, college president searches usually

16:29take six months a year, that's the way thing. But they went very quickly to make you permanent. What happened in that period of time? And did it turn out to be a test? Yeah, probably in hindsight. There were probably things I could have flubbed that maybe I didn't. I, you know, I sort of have joke that nobody else wanted the job at that point in time. But you know, I took over, just give sort of context. It was COVID three or four days before I started, it was George Floyd and all of the racial unrest and things that were going on in the country and certain college campuses. That all started. We had a controversy over the school song, a bunch of demand letters from student groups and faculty and all that going on. So all that was that summer. And I think, you know, it probably went as well as it could have in some ways, not to everybody, probably, but I think as a way to get through, kind of figure out how to relaunch school in the, in the age of COVID, how to try to get people and hold them together in some ways around a lot of the racial issues that were so tough.

17:31I think that must have been going well enough in the board's eyes. Talk about it with our audience. You transition out from a faculty member, obviously Dean and McCombs, but now you're the University president of UT. What does that mindset shift for you? How did, how did your life look like tangibly different? Yeah, yeah. I don't know if you can curse on here, I was going to say, you know, there was a little bit of that in the part, I think, honestly, the things felt so acute and pressing in the moment. There wasn't a lot of time at perspective, you know, it's not a moment where you sit there and say, let me back up and get the big picture because it felt like kind of blocking and tackling and you're trying to, I mean, COVID stuff was so time consuming and we were really trying to protect what was sacred and dear as a university, both in the sense of being able to, you know, serve our students, keep our research going, you're trying to keep animals in the laboratories going, experiments going, it's just all that. So there were moments where it was like, oh, this is kind of crazy, this is now my world.

18:36But I really feel like it was, there was a, in hindsight, I think there was a little bit of a unifying piece to it because kind of the team had to rally and come together to get some things done. So it didn't feel like I was on an island. Was it your team or a team you inherited inherited in here? It was tougher. It was tougher and it takes time to build the team and it was probably not until year two or three that I felt like I had the pieces around me that I was hoping for. But at the same time, you know, I guess because I'd been dean there, if I'd come from outside, I think that would have been harder. But having come in as dean, I knew the players. I was part of the team in a different way. You had been there a long time. It was different chair. Let's unpack some of that period though. You mentioned the George Floyd situation, the shooting, the environment, the feelings of the nation at that time. But you did some pretty significant things, dealing with that racial challenge at that time.

19:38You moved forward with a number of different diversity programs, renamed a building to the first African American student that had gone to University of Texas. And again, a lot of those different programs in that. What was the motivation? Was it responding to the political side or was it something that really you had seen over the course of 20 years there at the UT that had to be addressed? Yeah, I think it's a few things. It's a good question. I think, you know what, part of what hit me just to sort of tell you a bit of a story. So there's a guy named Colonel Leon Holland. So Colonel Holland was this really well respected alum of UT back in the early 70s. And one of what they call the precursors, one of the first set of African American black students to come is not a graduate. And I was talking to him around that time and he had been on a task force in the 70s asking why more black students weren't at UT. And he said it was the conclusion were two things. They didn't feel welcome and they didn't have the financial support they needed to be successful.

20:41And here we are 50 years later and you talked to the students, parents, people in the community as well as you two things. They didn't feel welcome and they didn't have the financial support. And so you have this sense of can't we do better in supporting the students? It's a hard place to get in for students who get in and can be successful there. What are we doing? All we can to let them know we want them and let them know that it would support them to be successful. So I think it was a moment where there were probably some things called to the front of the queue that probably could have or should have happened at different points in time. It felt more like that than it did something that was all politics. The first part of this century, UT saw a significant increase in the additions of minority students. But the problem was that they didn't stay there very long. In other words, the turnover and the leaving from the school was high. Both of those issues that you saw and what did you do on that ladder to try to address

21:45them? Yeah. And this goes back to, so there's one measure that you can look at as the rate of graduation. And there's the big gap and it's not just race. It's also first generation. I mean, there's social economic. Social media. But they're correlated for all kinds of reasons. But that gap was, we knew it and back to President Powers, you know, two presidents before me. He launched this really big effort to try to improve the graduation rates. And so I mean, part we were really proud of was that was narrowing. And I saw it as Dean, just as an example, because of the admission rules in Texas, you have students, 75% of the Texas students come in purely on clash rank. And so in one way, it's very meritorious, but in the other hand, you get some students who come from high schools where they're not that well prepared. And what we found is if we, if we did the extra work to get them kind of caught up, they could be very successful, even in one of the top five business schools in the country. So we felt like with the right effort, support mechanisms, we could position students to catch

22:49up and make that playing feel more level, but it did take some work. And so that I think was part of the, I think both effort in the pride that we took was that gap is narrowing all the time I was there. So these programs reached out to the minority community. I think well, well received, but you mentioned a moment ago, you ran into an issue kind of on the other side where you defended a song, the eyes of Texas, which was viewed by that minority community as being racist anti minority. You took the position that that was important to the school from a traditional standpoint. At the same time, roughly the same time in South Carolina, there was the Confederate flag that flew at the Capitol, finally, Governor Haley pulled back and said, tradition doesn't matter. It's how the community feels about it, paraphrasing, but that's it. How did you make that different conclusion and how did you look at it relative to all the progress that you had made on some of those minority programs of really lifting

23:52minorities up? Yeah. And I would tell you, I think that was a time that was probably the most stressful thing I felt like I was dealing with, and COVID felt like we were going in the, we were all trying in the same direction, where the, of all things your school song felt like the most potentially divisive, and I thought it was the most fraught with peril where people would end up at each other's throats, and you can pit the alumni against the student body. And so that, to me, was the most stressful part of that, of that whole first year. The part where, you know, I think was the right approach, but also maybe in hindsight, from a unity standpoint, we got lucky. The position was we do two things. We do research and we teach. So we pledge around this song to research it, and then we'll teach about it. And so we formed a committee of people from all kinds of backgrounds. We never asked a litmus test question, never said, how do you feel about the song, right? It was just different points of view. And we hit pause and said, we're not going to eliminate the song.

24:53This committee is going to do, go to its work. That gave a little bit of a breath in the community. People relax a little bit. There's no, like that took the decision off the table in the, in the very short run. The committee came back, and really the three or four big concerns about the song didn't prove to be true. And now if they'd found something different, do we end up in a different world? Quite likely. But everything from people thought Robert Lee's said it, said the words, the eyes of the South are upon you. They went to the Washington Lee libraries, did all the work to try to find, could define no trace that he ever said it. So facts are actually valuable sometimes. Yeah. You know, again, and credit to them, because they were also just getting, as you'd imagine, just pressured with, there's a public committee, they brought new, it was on it. And it was, and I know they felt it. And so, you know, you roll it forward, and really the, I think the story, the song is more a story of the South, of Texas, of UT, and it's more of a microcosm of that journey,

25:53which has some horrific parts to it, but also has a lot of progress. Yeah. 2024. Now we've got the situation with the Israeli war, Hamas, it said, rip Palestinian. It's kind of at a side. It was the first time, four years later, that now you've got both students and faculty demanding your resignation. Did you finally feel like you were a real president at that point? Yeah. I, it was, yeah, that was, I mean, you started in the country, it was rough, right? And another one of those divisive moments where you've got people from all kinds of points of view. And if anything, that, that moment probably got more of the external groups all engaged around the country, not just in UT, and you saw it just as an example, you saw it in the rest of the protests about half were UT people and half were not, we're not. So that was like, you know, and that was complicated, because you didn't know when you're dealing with the groups who's really behind it, who's kind of leading the narrative, but that,

26:57that certainly, I think across all of higher education was such a tough time. But you handle it differently, a lot of schools in Northeast, my word, they wouldn't use it, but they kind of caved and basically let the students take over buildings that said right, said right. As you point out, students and, and others, you didn't do that. You actually had external authorities come in, arrested 57 students initially, not that may charge us eventually, but, yeah, but people are all good enough, 50, 70, fair enough, and pulled them. So you took a different position in dealing with it than a lot of other institutions. Why, and in the end, was your side, or the way you took it the right way to do it? Yeah, so I think we had a little bit of a benefit of seeing what was happening at UCLA and Columbia, so we weren't the first out of the gate. So we had seen kind of the playbook that was unfolding around the country and what. And didn't think that was playing out very well. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And so kind of our, our, you know, thought was not that, not a place where there's an

28:01encampment where students don't feel safe going to class. Jewish students, particularly if they'll threaten, you know, like what can we do to protect the core mission, access to classes, our research has to keep going. So we had that benefit. We also had, I think, the clarity of, we had rules in place, for example, that you couldn't have a camp on campus. So we didn't have to, we didn't have to change the rulebook, we said enforce it. And so we, and we tried to be as clear as we could about, you know, here's a group that says they're going to do things like what happened at Columbia and at UCLA. And we said, that's not okay. You cannot do that. And they kept going. And then we had to call out the authorities. So I, I still feel like that was the right call. And, you know, I, there are times I think we could have communicated about it, probably better or differently. But at the end of the day, I think our approach was better than many of our kind of peer institutions and how they did it. So I want to talk about a couple of the accomplishments during your time as U.T. President

29:02Masters in AI and innovation was pretty neat. I think the other one that people are going to latch on to from this conversation is there's this thing called the southeastern conference. So how did that happen? Like what was the first phone call there? Were you in Cahoots with Oklahoma from day one? Did they join the party? Yeah. Talk us through that process because that really is one of the most dynamic kind of earth shattering moves in college realignment. I would say in the history of yeah, yeah, no, yeah, it infected SMU later with the actual. Yeah, I would talk about internally when we were going through this. We're going to tick over the first domino and see what happens, right? Because we knew there would be likely be responses. So I think we had a sense of the magnitude of it. So I get in and that, and that was part of that first year again, right? So we've covered part of it. And then the first year we changed football coaches, basketball coaches and conferences, nice first 12 months. You and Chris don't count. We're busy. Yeah. I just had a lot of time on sports school song in COVID.

30:06But Chris, when I got in the job pretty quickly, Greg Fimba's kind of gave me a heads up that we all kind of had a sense of which way college sports was heading toward, I talked about the gaps between the halves and the had knots were going to widen the economic forces were going to pull kind of the sector apart in some ways. And so Greg and then Chris came, Dalkonte came in quickly and said, you know, this is the way I think the world's going to go when we should be ready and be thoughtful. And then you had things kind of line up where you had an expiring, you know, grand of rights and media deal that could get me a window. You had a board of regions and leadership that was supportive of thinking about making a change. And so it felt like if we didn't kind of think about it and if it wasn't the time, it wasn't the time. But if we didn't do something, we might have missed the window. Sure. And then, you know, we had through Chris, we had a sense that oh, you might be reaching

31:07the same conclusion or getting the same way. But it wasn't a shame phone call. I called the OU president and I remember still I was pacing in my bedroom and Austin, I still remember them. You know, you have this moment where you remember, I'm sitting there going, so we're kind of thinking, you know, what are you thinking? And he agreed with all the kinds for all the same reasons we did. And then it became a kind of a, we're going to do this together thing. I thought it was important to protect rivalries to protect some of those traditions. If anything, we were reuniting with some rivals, which I thought was powerful. One just to sell. Exactly. And so, so I think that kind of idea of let's explore this together. I did, we have Joe Sensen, Joe Harris, the president there and I that we were each other's only friends. Everybody else is not so happy with this. So did you approach the SCC then, the kind of the two of you together? We did. So we had a first call with Greg Sanky and what was the reaction when you first put on

32:09that table? Well, it was, it was hard to say because and I'm not an attorney, but I'm sure he was going to all kinds of legal advice about how to be careful. And so it felt a little like a little performative, a little bit, not, you know, just sort of a little bit mechanical, but it was certainly warm enough to have another conversation. And so it opened the door for for their discussion, but I also know that he was treading a line. He felt like he had to tread. How long did it take to get done? Oh, I don't know. I haven't thought about that. It's probably, I mean, it was, it was months, you know, it took a while because it, and then if you even go even after the move kind of leaked that that next summer, we still didn't have the exact terms of the exit finished or done. And it finally took, I think it was, we joked it was like six party chess because it was Texas OU, the SEC, the big 12 ESPN of Fox, all had to get on the same page to get out. We got out in that beginning out of year early, but you can imagine all the different parties

33:10that had to kind of reach up an agreement that that was in the best interest. So so we, while we knew we were going to go, we didn't exactly know when or how, even when it got got, you know, went out in the public. So you led large institution into the SEC. Now you're leading an institution that's in the ACC, different situation, but we've got in one case, Rutgers plays USC. Another case you've got Berkeley playing Miami. Where does this all go? I mean, you look at the conferences, Janet, it doesn't make any sense at all. Yeah. We've lost one of the big five conferences, so we're really down down down to four. Yeah. And you're going to be a key player in this. Yeah. Yeah. Now, where do you think this goes? That's a great question. I think, you know, I think that the conversation moves around over time, and I think there are moments where if you ask people like, like me or my job, they would say, oh, it's going to consolidate further, but there's also moments like now, I feel like everybody's

34:13worried about just the economic model, student outcomes, the portal, all the other stuff going on. I think in some sense, that's where so much focus is at the moment, there's not the same conversation in the circles I'm in about further giant moves. I think it's a really interesting, tough deal because there's a tension you see in sports where clearly those who have resources want to maximize their impact and win, but it's also some sense that some semblance of parity is good. And so I'm hopeful that in the long run, the kind of forces for good competition and parity will put some limiters on, you know, I think I don't think it's healthy to have 15 great teams play each other, the biggest brands every year, only I think there's something special about the rest. And I think that's the question. If the big 10 and the SEC have they separated themselves and really it's a big two and kind of this big 12 ACC era is allatching for whatever they can get.

35:16Yeah, and that's part, you know, part of the ACC movement. This was underway before I got in the job, but you know, the ACC took this aggressive stance of changing the way the money's distributed so that it's not uniform, right? And that's in part an effort so that the most successful programs and you can define success end up getting more money out of it. And that should level the playing field among those top schools in the ACC, relative to the ACC in big 10, but it can't, you know, it's going to be really tough back to the question. It's going to be really tough in the long run if there's not a way to get the economics closer. And I applaud the ACC for the creativity to they found a way so that the, you know, schools who are generating the most revenue and are having the most success get more resources. And that hopefully will dampen some of this idea that we've got to reshuffle again. But you're not only kind of monitoring that you're the president's school. So you've got alumni, you've got the students and that sort of thing.

36:17College of athletics have been terrific in large part because there is that loyalty component to it. But now we're going to pay the athletes. Athletes can basically treat it as a revolving door with some now in their fifth school during their, during their career. What does that do for the school and for the long term kind of element of college athletics? And from your standpoint, bringing the school together and kind of rallying around the teams. Yeah. It'll be interesting how it plays out. I think, you know, on the one hand, all the same concerns you have, which is if there's just too much fluidity and people are just moving in and out and they feel like mercenaries, we're going to lose some of that specialness, right? That said, you know, for all the crazy stuff going on in college football, it was a great viewership year, right? So it was a successful year as an industry in college football. You know, I have the impression it seems even more difficult and basketball because, you

37:20know, both at, I think more at Texas, my last couple years than, than at SMU, but you seeing teams with nine new players a year and, and so the fans are having to relearn the roster every fall and, or spring and, and how's that work? So I, I worry about it. I also worry even more, honestly, I think some of the portal challenges are just not good for the student athletes and the number of students who go into the portal because the grass looks greener and then will not get a degree that, I think if we lead, that to me is a bigger concern at the, at the, at the, at the forefront of the issues than even the long-term picture. And I, and I worry a lot about not doing the students the best we can if, if they're moving from place to place and don't graduate. When we talk about some of the resources that SMU's providing their athletes around financial, you know, called literacy, but, you know, these are now professional athletes at 18, 19 years old. Yeah. Legal advice, counting advice, like talk about what SMU's trying to do to instill some of this in the student athletes. Yeah, it's, and it's all that and it's both, I think it's in the student's best interest

38:23and, and for us to do what we can. It's also, you know, part of schools like us are recruiting pitch is, you know, we're going to, we think about you holistically and, and want a position you to be successful. And that's everything from maximizing your opportunities, but also enabling you to, to, to make good decisions and, and, and, and those kinds of things. And, and one that's been really cool to learn about when I got here is the life after ball program and it's, it's exceptional. And the, the worth that goes into preparing the student athletes for what happens after SMU, I think it's, is special and, so back to Tom, your question, I, you know, I worry that student athletes in general, they might be three or four years at a place and then abandon that degree to finish up somewhere else for a short run benefit and miss out on the 40 year decision. You know, when we talk about, when I would talk to recruits, you'd say this is not a four year decision, it's a 40 year decision. And being part of an alumni base like SMU's is, is awfully special.

39:23And I think we lose something there if, if, if people are sort of sucked into making short term decisions. Athletics are big at SMU, they're big at U of T. How much of your time as university president? Yeah. Who you spend on athletics or did you or, do you think you will in the future? Yeah, it's episodic, you know, I, my guess is that first year of Texas, back to those big decisions, it might have been a quarter of my time. It was a lot. And, but I think also then when it quieted down, it was not. And so it, it's periods right now is probably more intense, but at SMU, but not all the way to what it was in 2020 to Texas when we were changing conferences. But I do think, because these issues are so pressing, there's a lot of conversations among all the president's and chancellors around, can we get legislative action? What do we want that action to look like? Can we level the playing field around the country a little more? So it's probably, it's gone up the last 12 months relative to two years ago, three years

40:25ago. Well, now you've got to deal potentially with a large scale executive order on NIL coming out of the White House. Yeah. How do you think about that? Does that play into your apparatus at all? Yeah, I think, you know, I think we all, we're at time, it feels like a maximal uncertainty. And so we're all making decisions based on, you know, kind of a set of facts and there's a lot of misinformation even, you know, you hear these rumors, oh my gosh, this is happening. And a lot of times you peel it back, it's not really true, but you hear about some of the packages that student athletes are purported to be getting and it's probably agent leaked. Of course. Of course. You know? Of course. So part is just trying to make sure we really understand what's really going on. And then, you know, I think we all want, it's a weird, unlike a lot of higher ed, we're in a moment in sports where we all love to see federal action. And you know, if otherwise it's a sort of race to the bottom among the states and, and because everybody wants to win, which I get, but then if we leave us, sort of, what kind

41:28of federal legislation do you want? I assume, and I trust, but, but what do you want that legislation? Yeah. I mean, look like the big items that I think are on are kind of wish list. There's one is to, to basically put a federal layer over the top so the states don't get to have their own way, because if the states all race to one side, right, then it becomes a race to see how aggressive they can be. So I think that's sort of first and foremost. There's a lot of debate and this is, this depends on the part of you talk to. There's a lot of debate around, should we prohibit student athletes from being employees? And that's a different issue in the south than in the pro-union states, right? Right. But that would be in a lot of people's wish list, but that has controversy to it. There's some technical things around kind of liability protection that I think that people would like to see on the table. And then the one that probably back to where you started that's probably the most ambitious is, is there scope for a limited antitrust exemption so that we can start to have different

42:32rules again? And I, you think about things like the portal or a graduation, like how much, how old can you be and still play college sports? Those are questions that require some rules, but if any rule is seen as infringing competition and as, as going to be the target of lawsuit, then we're kind of stuck. So let's bring this home. SMU, good size school, but not the size of Ohio State, University of Texas, et cetera. The cynic would say that SMU bought their way into the ACC. They will not have any television revenues for nine years, even when Berkeley and Stanford came in, they waited a couple of years, but their revenues start earlier. So SMU is kind of the outlier on that, but you've got a program that raised $50 million in the space of 30 phone calls plus or minus. So you've got some money. So how from your standpoint strategically does SMU stay competitive in this environment,

43:34knowing that there's some pressure on you, but there's pressure on the school to have an athletic program that is viewed as competitive nationwide with these big schools. So part one is we don't have to grow the budget to be Ohio State or Texas sized. So we believe in, I think, of proven that we would compete at a high level with a more modest budget. That said, it's probably still not big enough. We're trying to grow it, so we're trying to find ways to invest. But I think saying we have to reach the Michigan's of the world is probably not the right benchmark. We'd like to have a budget, I think we can be competitive if we're in the middle of the ACC budgetarily, and we're not there yet. So that's one part. Second part, we just have to have firm resolve that we're going to find a way to get it done. And it has been so such a positive for the entire brand and academic brand of the university. People want to pitch it as if it's you pick athletics or academics, I think SMU has proven

44:36these things with complimentary. And people talk about the ACC. Our provost is now in calls with the provost, including Duke, Stanford, Berkeley. That's a good list. And so we benefit from that association both on the playing field and that on the TV, but also academically. So we just have to find a way and philanthropy has been the hero. And the alumni get it and the people who have been donating understand that that is not only benefiting athletics, but it's benefiting the entire university. Okay. So let's say the faculty member comes to you and says, hey, hold it. You're spending upwards of 25% of your time. We're spending an enormous money on athletics. I thought this was an educational institution. Yeah. What do you say? The easiest proof point. And this would have been harder a couple of years ago when you're selling, trust me, the ACC is worth it, right? Now we can point and say applications were up 46% year over year for sure the ACC. No number for nominal number.

45:38And some would say, yeah, but we didn't grow the class or whatever it is. Some other way to argue with that, but we are now able to be more selective in creating the class we want and creating the student body we all aspire to have. So that it's that positive association and feedback. So I think it's easier now to answer the faculty who's concerned. I also think the back to the investment we announced a couple weeks ago, the $50 million we raised. That will help us not do even more to subsidize athletics, right? That's going to be financial support for athletics, which means that resources and academics can stay in academics. So it actually helps both that investment by the donors and athletics. Well, I think there's another proof point. When I was there 10 years ago, you never heard any of the professors talk about the sports. Yeah. I mean, you never saw them at games. You never heard them talk about it. And now you hear and see faculty members, deans, et cetera. It's almost like a recruiting tool.

46:38Talk about specific to the cox school business, which I was trying to do there to elevate, shaping that class, recruiting the kids that you want because you've really, I think the rules have changed. Once you're in cox, if you apply there, that's where you're at, but it's a little bit harder to get into once you're at SMN or not in cox. So talk about that. Yeah. And real quick, the one last point that you raised on the athletics, the part that back to the proof point, a lot of the SMU alums who were kind of death penalty just after the death penalty era didn't come back to campus the same way. And I've met a lot of them since I've been here who are so excited now. And I met the group this week who was back who were back for the Miami game. And they were like, what an experience. And we want them back. So there is a, I like in sports to connect to tissue. It brings the community together. So back to cox, cox is clearly one of the great strengths of the university. It is from an undergraduate standpoint at a big scale, probably the arguably the most in demand of any of our schools.

47:41Business schools in general are in a moment where a lot of students are thinking about business as a major for all the doors it opens up. And we were blessed to have a great business school. So where we're looking there is how do we continue to make sure we push, improve not only the faculty, the opportunities for the students, how do they distinguish themselves and be ready for the workforce. Dallas is a huge part of that. And so we're blessed to think about trying to do this if you're in, pick your favorite remote college town. And those students can't do what our students can do. And our students can go to class on Thursday and internship on Friday and a football game on Saturday. And so that access to the business community is incredible. So I want to push on this a little bit. Please. Let's see you don't get into cox. Let's say you're at Deadman or at Lyle or somewhere else. You're paying 80 plus thousand dollars a year. I was creating the event. It was right. And 80 thousand dollars a year to go best in you.

48:41I was not a cox major. Yeah. And so I live this. And really the question gets really simple, really fast. Can you get a high paying job in a non business environment coming out of college? Can that happen? Is SMU providing a pathway for thinking a liberal arts student can go and be an innovator or someone out of engineering can go in and ultimately join the business workforce? Talk about that kind of value of the higher education outside of the business school for us. Yeah. Three parts. Part one, I do think it's important. There are a bunch of students and certainly parents, especially at our price point, who are thinking of the outcome as the job. Right? I sometimes push back a little bit and say, you know, this is a long game, right? And that first placement doesn't have to be the be all and end all. I think it's important to enable to focus on to support. But you know, we want students to find their passion. And if somebody decides they want to go out and, you know, shape the way that communities

49:42are going another way, that's I think we should support that. That said, that's your question about liberal arts, for example, versus business. I can argue this is a moment for liberal arts. I think if you look at what AI is going to be doing and is doing, you know, when I was in school, if you could solve a harder math problem than I could, you get a better job. And now the computer can solve that with arbitrary precision and milliseconds. And so the ability to do a better, you know, harder integrals is there's not a return to that skill the same way there was. So I think it's going to be a really interesting time for somebody who can think critically, read and write well, be part of a team has high EQ that kind of well rounded smart, intellectual, engaged, curious mind. And I think that that's going to pay off for a while. Now all that said, where we have some room to do better is how do we provide the same level of career support that we do in Cox really, really well for the rest of the university. And there are spots that I think are pretty good, but I think there are a lot of things

50:45we can do. So where I see it's investing a lot in the coming months and years is to make that kind of career readiness and function uniformly good across the campus. Let's talk about what SMU, US News and World Report, we can argue kind of all the goods in the bads of those rankings and those sorts of things. But people do look at SMU's rank number 88 in number 88, a comb is depending on the ranking, probably 32 to 40-ish somewhere in there, the law school, excuse me. You met Cox, probably. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm with you. The law school, probably in the top 50, but probably towards the back end of that 50. What do you do, Jay? I mean, clearly your aspiration is 88 is great, but it's not good enough. How do you move those numbers so that SMU is not only in effect, but it's not good enough? In fact, but also perceived within the world of higher education as being clearly one of the premier academic institutions.

51:47Yeah, and that's what I feel is my mandate, my job, my goal for the next, you know, as long as I'm in the chair, is to really help SMU get to that level of prominence and academic pre-minutes. So a couple of things, and Kyle's a much better tennis player than I am, but I think about what this says, we don't, on the rankings, we don't want to football. There are certain things you do rankings wise that you've got to be cognizant of them. Even if you hate them and you think they're, you know, capricious and arbitrary, they still matter. Right? So managing the best you can, but I think if you make that the objective, it's misguided. So part of why SMU dropped is they changed the weights in U.S. news on Pell Grant students, and they made it more important in a school like SMU, a lot of top privates like us. We fell. And so, so I think it's a, it's a lost cause to say our goal is to maximize the U.S. news ranking, but we have to be cognizant of them.

52:47Instead, what we're trying to do is focus on really three, I think it's the simple three things in some ways. The students we want to come to SMU, can we get more than to say yes, and we're going to find what we want. So I jokingly say we're not going full nerd, all right? We want to well round it's to do sure admittance increased your yield. Yep. Of our choice of what kind of student, faculty is the same. Can I get more professors who are, you know, who are looking at us and get them to say yes. And then the third is back to Kyle's question earlier, student outcomes. Can we get more top organizations, nonprofits, for profits, whatever, to come recruit our kids? And can we have more students go to the top graduate programs, law, medicine, PhD programs? So at the end of the day, if in 10 years, people get acceptance letters from SMU and Notre Dame. And they're thinking that SMU letters, the one I'm most excited about, that's what winning looks like to us. It's fascinating to see because Northeastern is the one school I know that kind of went

53:47through those rankings like a rocket, 200, not that long ago, now roughly 50 plus or minus in that. Talk about a program that I think you're trying to do interdisciplinary wise. But I know Lyle's involved in it, I know Cox involved to take a student and give them exposure to engineering, to business, to law, so that they come out, I think going at your comment a moment ago, how do you get somebody that's well-rounded that may not know the answer to that math problem, but they're well-rounded and have exposure to all of these. How important is that for SMU? Yeah, I think it's a real opportunity for us. And so back to this idea of the excitement over admission letter, it's going to take a while to get the entire university where we want to go, but we can be there in certain pockets faster. And so we've been looking at where are the opportunities to build a really distinctive academic program so that if somebody wants to come study this particular thing, where is good as it gets.

54:49And energy became one of those opportunities, not only the location to Alice, Texas and the alumni in that sector, the companies around us, that's part of it. But also to your end of your point, one of SMU's advantages, I say the walls of the silo are shorter at SMU. We can get more collaboration across the schools and colleges than other places. And the place I came from had a fantastic, has a fantastic petroleum engineering and a very strong business school, but there's no way to combine those. You can do it in sequence or if you take five or six years, you can do both. But it's hard at that place to pull it together. So we think SMU has an advantage and just really nimble flexibility. Exactly. And does that become your competitive advantage? I think it's a big source. So I think some of the big stuff, location, big competitive advantage, partly because there's a location, industry, partnerships, community support, community engagement is another advantage. And this ability to pull things together differently because of the size.

55:53So we're not, I think we're a sweet spot. We do all most of the big things you'd want we do. But you have a small classroom with a professor you know, you get the social life, which is great. Make sure you want to go back to school. And then you get arts and sports. So it's a really nice mix. I feel like that's our set of advantages. Kyle touched on when you're at UT and at McCombs, the masters in AI. Should we look and see new programs coming in or combinations that yield new programs? I think that's what you're going to see. We would like to grow. We've talked about as an opportunity for us. But one of the ways we see growing is to create more of these distinctive opportunities. And it might be 20 or 30 students a year. But if we start to layer those together. So the energy program you mentioned is one of them that is supported by this incredible gift from the O'Donnell Foundation. The other one we did, I mentioned video game design, turns out we're in the top five or six in the country in video game design. But that program never had an undergraduate degree.

56:55And so we do. And UTD does. Yeah. And we can do really, really well in that market and be the competitive from day one. And we think we can get 20 or 30 students, for example, a year who will pick us over Carnegie Mellon, USC, pick your favorite place because that's so good. So that's how I see competing. Big issue, but it's been dealt with is have SMU and really any institution in this part of the country, hit the R1, hit first level, first-tier research institution. You hit that now. Talk about the importance and where you see your research emphasis going. And kind of as a core layer to that, where does technology play overall in the SMU education? Yeah. Great. So, I've been talking about it, thinking about it, super grateful for all the work that got SMU over the R1 threshold. But I've also told the faculty, we're not going to talk about that all that much anymore because we've done it, right now it's what's next.

57:57And that R1 in particular really weighs weights, federal grants, postdocs, PhD production. So it's one kind of research. And so we have a much broader sense now of, it's everything from a faculty member who's a poet to a dancer to an economist to an electrical engineer, right? And based on most metrics, the engineer will show up because they get grants and they do a certain kind of work. But all those other things we care about too. So I think a huge part of our effort and emphasis is going to be hiring more great faculty. And we need some senior faculty to come in and really set the tone of where we want to go. We've got some incredible faculty already, but we want more. So the part that's been fun in today's landscape of some tough times in higher ed, I've said it, we're back on offense. Like we're going to go higher, great faculty, and it's a good moment for us to get some to say yes for all the kinds of reasons you can imagine. Let's, let's talk a little bit wider in higher education for just a moment because as you

59:01just pointed out, it's, it's an interesting tough time in higher education. If you look at trust in higher education, probably the lowest it's ever been. On one side, you've got groups saying it has gone so far to the left, it's woke. It has no relation to this country and no relation to the economy. You've got other people saying, hey, look, probably talked about SMU. It's now a country club. It's reserved for the elite, et cetera. On the first part of it, have we gone too far left in higher education that we've lost the trust of the people and that higher education degree that you're receiving is really a moot point? Yeah. So I think a couple of things. I think part one, there's no way somebody can look at the data and not worry or conclude that we've lost a lot of the public trust. I mean, there's just data is damning. There's a big party divide. If you look at blue versus red, right, that there's a divergence there in how people view

1:00:02higher education. It's not uniform. The polling and other results are actually much more supportive of our research. So where the public has a much more positive opinion is our role, especially around medical and healthcare research that higher ed is contributed. So it's not a uniform piece to it. And then back to the question about the return and all that. I think it's important to note that despite all the kind of overarching narratives that tends to paint higher ed with one brush. And if you look at the data arguably, the returns to a college degree are higher than ever. The gap in college degree, graduate lifetime earnings and non-college graduate earnings is wider, not narrower. Now the problem in part is there's a lot of heterogeneity in what we mean by a college degree. And in general, it's not schools like SMU or UT or Michigan or Pickett where there's a debate about the return to a degree. The demand for what we do is higher than ever.

1:01:02Where you see a lot of kind of, I think, more soft spots. Some of the four profit institutions that I think have been out there with a different business model. And I think, you know, for reasons some of its demographics, some of its other things, there are parts of kind of the higher ed stack where the return is more questionable. And some of that's what students choose to study. Not all degrees have the same kind of monetary return to them. And some of that's where they end up going to school. But what role does the institution have in that? And UT was kind of signal out in some cases for having degrees where arguably the entire job opportunity was probably one faculty member somewhere in the Midwest or something. So a lot of degrees that have, again, no relation to the economy, arguably don't prepare the government who would use the words gainful employment. Where do you go with that?

1:02:02Where you've got a lot of programs, I'm not sure SMU falls into that, but a lot of programs that just really have no value. What's the responsibility of the institution? And when we send a student out that has a lot of debt on one of those programs, we know there's one job and that's all it is. What's the responsibility of the institution when the federal government in effect is going to pick up the bad loans? Yeah, yeah. So for first part, I think it's the responsibility of institution to be transparent. And so I think the efforts, and you've seen this nationally, but I think it's also incumbent upon us to see what else we can do to be able to communicate good data so people can make informed decisions. So if somebody comes and chooses to major and pick your favorite area that sounds like it's not employable, that they're making a choice. You know, I, in the SMU context, part of what I've been struck by the Meadow School that I'm seeing today, for example, has a stellar placement rate and as an art school.

1:03:06So there are ways, in this matter, what you're really a question, Kyle, there are ways to support that and help students find a way. I also think it's a little bit harsh to say, like I think, you know, we've got a school of theology. And so if you go become a Methodist minister out of the Perkins school, the return on that is not the same as a Cox graduate. But I mean, how do you put saving souls, you know, into the NPV analysis. So I struggle sometimes with the... But there are positions in our economy for that. Yeah, sure. I agree with that. Part one is informed choices by the consumers. I think the debt is a completely relevant and realistic question that I think this is back to me, the distribution of universities, where that debt problem has been so acute is a certain kind of university, generally, their exceptions. But it's generally not SMU's or Texas's. Our students have good opportunities and not that we don't want to minimize their debt and worry about all that. But a lot of that narrative, which is genuine, is really around for profit and certain kinds

1:04:10of, for example, online master's degrees, where there's not enough is payoff to that kind of thing. So I get the concern and I think we need to focus on, you know, how do we support students outcomes thinking about that, but also helping them make good decisions. Nationally, too, the affordability question, which we've kind of got around in the one way or another, but the affordability question is there. We look at the cost of a college education in the last couple of years, clearly a significant increase over the inflation rate in the natural economy. We've also seen a lot of money that's gone into what I'll call non-educational pieces. Athletics may be part of it, but it's more than that. It's the right, rock climbing wall. Yeah. It's a lot of overhead used to be and probably when you started in, it's turned, there was one or two deans, now there is how many associate deans infrastructure, a lot of overhead and that sort of thing that's non-educational.

1:05:11How do you get the affordability question, because we can't continue on this path and bring students in. Yeah, yeah. A couple things. So one part, I think, is there are services that I think the call to market, but our students are parents are demanding that I think are, are reasonable expectations. So think about career services. So the size of that unit at Stern or at McCombs or at Cox, then again, I think you can debate, we probably need even more of that in the rest of SMU, not less. So that's a place where there's been, if you just looked at staff positions relative to faculty or students, you'd say, look at the bloat, but I would argue, we want people helping students connect to the job market, right? And so I think that's been good. Mental health. There have been massive investments in mental health services by most good schools and higher ed. And again, I think that's a, that's a good and needed thing. But I do think it's incumbent upon us all to think about where can we be more efficient? What are things that are, you know, it's really hard for universities to quit doing something?

1:06:16It's hard for us to unwind. So part of where we're going to try to go, we're going to try to be innovative and push some boundaries, but a lot of the philosophy will be make this a two or three or four year pilot project with what we call one time money. And then let's write down what success looks like today. And then in three years, we can make a decision as it worth continuing. And so I think it's culturally important for us to be, in some sense, you know, coldly rational about where those investments should keep going versus not. I think something we're all struggling with too. And I think private sector is, you can answer, but is also where can we start to use technology more wisely, just to run the business more effectively? And you know, all the same stuff you see in the newspapers about AI and corporations, universities are starting to wrestle with. How can we just make it either better experience or more efficient experience? Against trust, against affordability, against gainful employment.

1:07:17You're looking for the first time at a reduced market. The number of students coming in is going down. Well, my estimate, my guess is half of the higher education institutions at some point in the future. So I'll play economists first. I won't give a time frame attached to it, so what it is. They probably go away. Is that a fair judgment and who wins and who loses in this new environment? Yeah. I think the directionally, that's the right direction. I don't know if half is right or not. I think one of the big kind of mystery variables in that equation is immigration. So the data just came out in the last week or so that early returns are that international student life, I think, fell by about 34% last year. So combined the kind of bust of demographics domestically with less foreign inflow from

1:08:18talent, then the math gets really hard. Well, economics, a lot of those students were full paying, as opposed to percentage at SMU are actually full paying today and not subsidized by financial aid. And we don't, and then this is kind of how this plays out back to your question about who wins and loses. We don't have that many international undergraduates. We've got a lot of our international flows on the graduate side and that's a different sort of math. But then where we get impacted is if you pick it hypothetically, if do lose some international students who would have been coming who were full pay, they let in some domestic students off their wait list, that might have been one of our admitts. And so even though we're not directly exposed to the same risk factor, it's a back to your question. I think it's almost like back to sports. It's almost like a draft, it's a talent draft. We pick where we pick, Harvard picks where they pick. So who loses? It's the ones who pick last.

1:09:20And it's going to be really hard. I think if you're kind of a, not a great state school or private school, private school especially, because how do you compete when you're trying to charge the same sicker price we are? Yeah. But it's different. One of the fun things about that is, total students are going down. But students to the south, southern schools are actually going up. One thing I want to touch on, I may make another enemy here on this question. The future of student life on campus, fraternity sororities, Tom, I think, aptly use the phrase that SMU could be sometimes described as a country club. How does, well, first off, is there a future in fraternities and sororities given, I would say, some of the controversy that goes on in college campuses. And in an age where there are potentially fewer students coming to a university, is the diversity happening at kind of like an almost a rate enough to where SMU can market itself as not a country club?

1:10:20What kind of student are you really looking for given the history of the school and also what that student life generally lends itself towards on campus? Yeah. And they're probably at least, with all the difference, three or four questions baked into that question. So part one, and I mentioned this a little bit earlier, we've got, I think, a great spot in higher ed. What we're looking for this kind of well-rounded student, smart, but entrepreneurial, leadership traits are important to us. We think we can do more and develop what we're calling principled leaders in that effort. We tend to get high EQ socially minded students who can fit in an organization, be part of a team. That's back to that full nerd comment. So that's one part. Second part is many of those students are looking for a social environment outside of the classroom that is fun, dynamic, they make friends, they, you know, a lot of why we all remember college fondly is the lifelong connections that happen then, right? And I've joked, you know, when I asked you what was special about SMU, it's probably

1:11:22not going to lead with calculus, too, you know, it's a people. And so all we can do to support kind of the relationship development, I think, is super important and critical for us. And I think Greek life is one of those things. I had a pledge brother who called me the day and was debating a job change and just wanted somebody to talk to who was far enough away from it, but was at least a trusted friend. That stuff, you know, here we are, you know, almost 40 years later and having the same kinds of conversations. So I think that, I think for us, a pleasure role will continue to play a role. Then part of what we're working on also is we're the other opportunities for students to kind of find their people and feel like they're part of a community. Diversity is the treasure. It is. And so, you know, that might look different for the video game design students than the finance majors, stereotypically, but so we want to support it all. So I think it, you know, part of what we're going to try to focus, we're calling it the bucket exceptional experiences.

1:12:23How do we focus on the experiences of a student in part outside the classroom so that they feel like they find their people and have a great, a great holistic set of opportunities? Cool. So I think that's the question. And we can let you go. We can probably wrap it up. Deadman Law School. Moving to East Campus. Yeah, look at the time we got to go now. Yeah. Deadman Law School moving to East Campus. So I want to touch on that but we also want to touch on Ford Stadium and he, you know, potential kind of athletic upgrades on those turns. Yeah. First, take you to the law school. What, what went into that decision and give us the vision for it? Yeah, a couple of things. And this is back time back to your point. So part one, it, and of all the parts of the university, I've seen this at the two big places. I've been for a long time, places that care the most about those rankings law for whatever reason is like law takes the difference between 15 and 14 seriously. And so they, it's, it's, it's important for us to be not only to get stronger and elevate our position, but be seen as doing so. So part one is we think the law school has a chance to be in the top 20, top 25 in the

1:13:27country, but it's going to take some work and, and we want that to happen. If you think about this market in Dallas, the job outcomes are there, the bar passage are there, but we think there's more we can do. And we think we can lean into the intersections between law and business, law and technology, law and entrepreneurship, right, places where Dallas has a sweet spot. And, but a lot of that's going to require new facilities part of the puzzle. We need, we need to focus on the students and the faculty, but also the, the physical environment. And having that be east of 75, let's more that happen. You can imagine startups, incubators, corporate governance center, the Texas business courts, things can come together differently than they can in the Northwest corner of campus. That, freeing that up also allows us, if we start more of these innovative, cool programs has space to grow. And, and I wouldn't want the undergraduates, the undergraduates, I think having them cohesive is, is important. So if something's going to move, it makes sense for a graduate, something.

1:14:29So that, that is part of it. I think it's going to be incredible in the long run, not only for the law school, but for Dallas and for SMU. And then on the stadium, you know, we are going through now the, sort of the planning stages of what some redo would look like of Ford Stadium. It, you know, my language is sort of a net present value problem. What, what we'd like to do, how can we pay for that? I think there's no surprise based on what's going on nationally and in Dallas. We need more premium experiences. Yeah, I think that's the question. That's it. And so, you know, the, and this is true nationally, the, the days of the kind of everybody excited about their $30 ticket to sit in the stands. Yeah. That's not interesting. That's interesting. Proposition. And so we need more, whether it's suites or clubs or just exceptional opportunities where people feel like, you know, that was a memorable Saturday afternoon. We need more of that. And so that's going to take some, some redesign and some redo, but I think, you know, the, the ball drip in zone has a nice rain to it.

1:15:33So 20 years from now, I'm a new student where I'm one of those alumni that hasn't been around, but now comes back to the campus. What's different about SMU in 20 years? I think what's different, I think part will be similar. I think you'll, you'll have, you'll see it as this place with this, what I call the full college experience, the, the professors, the students, getting to know each other, small classes, social life, athletics, arts was a big deal to you back in Trinity. I mean, that's part of why I took the job to, right, because I saw what that did for me, right? And we've all seen it. So that, that part is the same. The part that I think is different is people are realizing that if you pick, I don't know what, be by then, one of these 20 areas that were truly among the leaders in the country in those 20 disciplines. And people say, you know, SMU is more of a thought leader, a place where great ideas are coming from. And some of that's happening now, and I'm really appreciative, but we can do more. And so, you know, we are, I'll give you one example, we're really excited about the

1:16:36future of economics. If you're in Dallas, right, it's an economic hub. It's a great liberal arts discipline where it has some of the core of reading, writing, critical thinking. We have 765 econ majors now, it's almost about a tenth of the university. And so it's critical, and we've got the Federal Reserve. So that's a place where we're going to partner with the Fed, figure out how to bring some great faculty, open some doors for our students, can they, can more of them intern at the Fed, can more of them, that's the career placement. So you can see, I think, for example, in 10 years, we're viewed as a top 25 econ department. And so if we do more of that across the board, I think it's back to this idea of, it's got all the special stuff, but it's also, you know, that sought after destination by even more of our students and faculty. I didn't go to SMU, but I have had a chance to be involved in a number of the schools over there. And I can tell you how important SMU is for Dallas and how well it's respected across

1:17:38this country. I had a chance to visit with some of the folks that were on the search committee after President Turner announced that he was going to leave. And I can tell you when Jay's name came on, the game was over. And it's easy after this hour or so visiting with him to understand why that's case. We started out with the question of, why did you get interested? I can tell you SMU is awfully happy. Oh, thank you. And I think the entire community is, Jay, we appreciate you being with us. Thank you. Appreciate it. Thanks for your time. Thank you for watching today's episode. Again, today's episode is sponsored by Clay Cooley Automotive, a family-owned, family-operated automotive company serving the local DFW Metriplex for over 22 years.