796: How to Build a University from Scratch - with Pano Kanelos, President, University of Austin

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Welcome back, everybody. It's your time to EdUp on the EdUp Experience podcast where we make education your business. This is Dr. Joe Sallustio and it's been a little while since I've recorded here at my normal recording studio, standing up, talking to amazing leaders here and around higher education. I just returned from the Middle States conference, the Middle States Commission on Higher Education conference in Philadelphia, where I was able to interview about 10 people, commissioners for Middle States. I had the president, Dr. Heather Perfetti, and the chair of the commission, Davie Gilmore on at the same time. That was a very interesting conversation about accreditation and higher education innovation. It was just a lot of fun at the conference and validating, right? You know, we do so many podcasts. You probably wonder why, if you're sitting out there, why we do so many podcasts here at the EdUp Experience, how could we possibly do that many? And who could possibly listen to that many? Well, I don't know the answer, but I do know that there are so many interesting people to talk to that don't get a chance to get the mic as much as others. And so we like to spread the mic love around and get people on this podcast who have something important to say. Now, somebody with something important to say, we just don't know how relevant it is when he says it, is my guest co-host. You'll know him when you hear him and he's done a thing or two in his 40 years across higher education. Ladies and gentlemen, the one and only Dr. Bill Pepicello. Welcome back. It's been a while.

Dr. Bill Pepicello: It has Joe. Thanks. Good to be back with you. And maybe I can teach you something this time.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Said like a guru. Bill, how's retirement treating you? Are you finding nothing to do?

Dr. Bill Pepicello: Well, you know, retirement agrees with me because I'm basically a pretty lazy guy. And aside from the fact that I do some work on my own podcast, EdUp Insights, which comes out every Monday, and a little work on a play, which is available at Amazon. You know, I'm following your escapades all over the world.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: There's nothing Bill, like you getting comfortable to make your own selfish plugs here on the EdUp Experience podcast. You know, I appreciate you doing so. Everybody should check out EdUp Insights because I'll tell you guys what and I mean it. It is one of the very few higher ed podcasts that I listen to. Of course, I listen to the EdUp Experience, but it would be really horrible if that was the only thing I listened to - myself talk, right? Then people would question my character. So I listen to Bill. And I listen about your experience in higher ed. And I listen to the amazing people we have come to this podcast. And we've got another one for you today. A little known fact. Well, I'll get him on first, then I'll tell you. Ladies and gentlemen, here he is. His name is Dr. Pano Kanelos. He is the president of the University of Austin. Pano, how are you?

Dr. Pano Kanelos: I'm doing great. I don't often get applause at the beginning of a podcast. I love it.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: It is actually truly amazing that on your first day in your brand new offices that you have a crowd waiting for you to give you applause. Pano, so a little known fact, I saw your name and I said a Greek, he's got a Greek name, Kanelos, like he's Greek. I immediately my middle name, Konstantinos, comes right out of me. So, you know, I'm half Greek. So I have great appreciation. I can recognize a Greek name, I think. And I spent a lot of time in Greece, actually, over the last 10 or 15 years, which is like my favorite place in the world to visit. Anyway, connection now will be friends forever, because we're looking at the Greek heritage behind us. Tell us, how are you? How are things going? You're starting a brand new university, which, by the way, doesn't happen in higher ed very often, does it? You could probably think back and you're listening to this podcast, what was the last brand new university you could think of? It'll take you all a while. So this doesn't happen often, Pano. Tell us about the University of Austin and let's go from there.

Dr. Pano Kanelos: Absolutely. Well, thanks for having me on today. I'm really looking forward to this conversation. And to just start off with, you know, to kind of put in perspective how infrequently new universities are founded, we are the first new private university in the state of Texas since 1963. And to put that in perspective, Texas had 10 million people in 1963, and now it has over 30 million people. It's taken 60 years for a new institution to take shape here, a new private school. I mean, there've been some public institutions that have cropped up since then. So, you know, that sort of, I think, helps people understand not only how rare new institutions are, but maybe they'll get a sense of how challenging it is to start a new institution. Especially, I mean, we're in Texas where everybody's building everything all the time and yet new universities, not so much. So excited to be here. University of Austin is a project that started two years ago. November 8th, 2021, we announced that we were building a brand new university in Austin, Texas, dedicated to the fearless pursuit of truth. And exactly two years later, November 8th, 2023, we announced that we were opening applications for our first freshman class to begin in 2024. So, we sort of compressed the work that might take five years, a decade in terms of planning and preparation in terms of getting a new in-person four-year university started into two years and we're off to the races.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Amazing. Congratulations. I hold on. Amazing. See, it's better when somebody else says it. But so when you think about somebody comes to you and says, what business do you think you should start? Right. That would be relatively easy and or reasonable or not hard. You would pick basically any other business than a university. I don't even think that most people would ever dream that it would be possible to start a university. It just sounds hard. It's probably even harder than it sounds. Why was this so necessary, Pano, to start a new university? I mean, going into it, you have to have some reason. It has to have some, your vision, your mission has to be so strong because you've got to command market share. You've got to get all of these federal agencies behind you and state agencies and why was this so important to you and to those others that you grouped up with at the beginning?

Dr. Pano Kanelos: I think it's, I mean, at a personal level, it was important to me because university, the world of universities has been transformational for me personally. I mean, I'm a first generation college student. My parents were from an immigrant family from Greece, as we talked about earlier. My dad was in the restaurant business.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: When you're Greek and you move to the United States, they hand you the keys to a restaurant when you get off the boat. By the way, Gus's fish fry was my family restaurant.

Dr. Pano Kanelos: There you go. My grandfather Gus, yeah. Point in case. But the reason it was so important to me personally is that I've experienced firsthand how transformative higher education can be and feel like I owe a debt to higher education, to the university system that has allowed me to go in the course of a few decades from being a kid in the back of my dad's Greek diner to being a college president. And part of the reason I think that that was possible was because universities are a unique feature of the American legacy, of the American landscape. I mean, we're a nation that builds. We're a nation that creates new things. We're a nation that tackles problems by creating new institutions. And that's really the spirit behind University of Austin. I would say, you know, we, those of us who founded the university believe that we are at an inflectional moment in American history, that we're at a time where things seem to be falling apart and the best possible response is to build, to create new things. And that higher education should be at the forefront of that. You know, there was a time when, you know, if you think about the 4,000 colleges and universities that dot the landscape of the United States. They were all built at some point. And there was a time in our history when we were a growing nation bursting at the seams with energy, thinking positively about the future, that universities were a natural part, a natural extension of that growth, of that future looking, you know, hopeful spiritedness. So trying to capture some of that now. We think this is the time to build, it's time to create and to take the opportunity to rethink some of the features of universities as we do that, the financial model, the curricular model, the commitments we have to first principles. It just, more than anything, this is a project just built in the, sort of built by the impulse to contribute, to be additive to the American experience.

Dr. Bill Pepicello: Tell it like it is. All right, Bill, we've been waiting for you. Don't ruin it by asking a bad question, I've got a million questions on each of your statements.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Actually, before you go, Bill, I have a couple more questions. No, I'm just kidding. I like to mess with him a little bit.

Dr. Bill Pepicello: Yeah, he will. I'm going to start by saying that I've got a strong connection with you and that you were president of St. John's. And about a decade ago, I was at the Harvard Graduate School of Education for the Ask With seminars there. And I spoke with the then president, Christopher Nelson was his name. And we talked about old school, which was him, and new school, which in those days was me. Now I'm sort of just there. I'm really interested in seeing where you're going with University of Austin because as a liberal arts guy, all the online stuff aside, what I see happening with what you're doing is almost, and if you build it, they will come, philosophy. Because right now, you said you have the fearless pursuit of truth. And I want to ask you, what does that mean? Truth in today's society is really a moving, malleable target. And how are you going to navigate getting to that truth, given the political atmosphere and the economic atmosphere that surrounds us? How was that, Joe?

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Well, you asked five questions in there, so you got to just, you know, hedge your bet.

Dr. Pano Kanelos: Let me start with the last one there, and then we could circle back around if I miss some if you'll remind me of the earlier ones. The purpose of universities has always been singular, and that is the discovery of knowledge, the transmission of knowledge, and the preservation of knowledge. That's why we create these institutions. And this is why they're so important, civilizationally. I mean, the depository of our thinking is in universities. And so, making sure that we're fulfilling the core mission of a university, the discovery of knowledge, transmission of knowledge, preservation of knowledge, should be the top priority of any institution of higher learning. Truth, I mean, here are two possible, let's call them pitfalls that one could face when thinking about the truth and thinking about institutions dedicated to the pursuit of truth. On the one hand, many individuals, many institutions seem to be sliding into kind of what's called the habit of relativism. The idea that there just isn't any such thing as truth, right? That it doesn't exist. Everything's kind of personal interpretation. It's all about power struggles and that, and you know, and so on the one hand, if truth is completely relative, then there's no point to having a university, right? How can you institutionalize the pursuit of truth if there's no such thing as truth? Okay, that's on one side. On the other side is what's called a kind of commitment to ideology. The idea that, yeah, there are things that are true and we've actually discovered exactly what they are. And therefore we just have to kind of implement. Like it's about taking action on some things that are irrefutably true. And whatever the politics behind it are, there's sort of an ideology that is fixed in place. And universities have to avoid that as well, right? Because universities cannot be committed either to the relativist dismissal of truth, or the notion that everything we need to know has already been discovered and now we just have to implement some sort of program or agenda that comes from that. The purpose of a university is to sail between, as a classicist, you'll get the reference, between the Scylla of relativism and the Charybdis of ideology. That's the purpose of a university.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Yeah, I picked it up too. Well, you're Greek, so you get that too.

Dr. Pano Kanelos: So, and so I'd say that that's what the fearless pursuit of truth is, to pursue something that is, you know, is radically important. Human beings are truth-seeking creatures to pursue that, knowing that we may never fully be able to discern what is true, but still being propelled to move towards that North Star.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: That's a fact. That's a fact.

Dr. Bill Pepicello: Well, let me just follow on that because what you just said sort of explains the philosophy behind the forbidden courses, which as I was perusing your website jumped out at me. As a classicist, I had pictures of Pandora opening that box. But how does that pursuit of truth explain the concept of the forbidden courses, because I think it's fascinating.

Dr. Pano Kanelos: Yeah, so the forbidden courses, just background for the listeners. The last two summers, as we've been sort of preparing to open the university formally, we've been running courses, non-credit courses, and we decided to offer courses during the summer to students at other universities to come invite them to come do seminars with us on topics that were pretty hot to handle. You know, whether it's things around gender or race or empire, and, you know, try to demonstrate that we can actually have civil discussions, complex, nuanced civil discussions about very difficult things by getting the broadest range of opinions around the table and then sorting out how we can speak to one another in a productive way. And the reason we call them the forbidden courses, I mean, it's kind of cheeky. We want to attract young people and tell them it's forbidden. They're gonna be interested. But it's not so much that you can't take a course on empire at university. But the way that we often approach these topics in university settings is prescribed. Or the way I might put it is the aperture for discussion is really rather narrow. I mean, if you're really gonna get to the heart of the matter around questions that strike at the core of what it means to be a human being, you have to allow for the broadest possible range of discussion, which means you have to allow for things to be said that might be uncomfortable for some people around the table. You have to allow people to say things that are bold and make mistakes, to take intellectual risks. Maybe they're wrong, but you have to provide a forum for that. So for us, it was more about creating an atmosphere of free and open inquiry, trying to bring people together to pursue this thing called truth. And I will say it's radically successful. I mean, we had, you know, I mean, thousands of applications from students at universities across the world to fill the first summer only 80 spots, the second summer 120. Students from many of the most prestigious universities coming to us saying, you know, I came because, you know, I'm coming from university X and I've always wanted to have this kind of discussion, but it hasn't been available to me at my own institution. And so I want you, so I'm taking the opportunity to do this here. So for us, the pursuit of truth is a kind of dangerous thing. And that's why you have to be fearless.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: So go ahead, Bill. I'll throw it back in a minute. I just, because Pano brought up something about people applying from all over. How do they apply? How many applied to the forbidden courses? To the university in general.

Dr. Pano Kanelos: OK. Well, so we just opened applications for our first undergraduate class, as I said, on November 8. And this class, by the way, it's our first class. We're keeping it tight, calling them the Brave 100, the 100 founding students that are going to come help us found a new university. So we want to keep the class small. So we have 100 spots. We've raised full tuition scholarships for all 100 students. In the very first day on November 8, when we announced at 9:30 in the morning that we were opening applications, we received our first application at 9:31 AM.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Southwest check-in. Exactly. That's a great analogy.

Dr. Pano Kanelos: And by the end of the day, we had more applications than spots in the first class, by the close of business that day, so not even 24 hours. And here's the thing. We were going to the challenge of starting a new university, we were not allowed to do any marketing, do any advertising, reach out to any prospective student before that date. So this was a cold open, right? Because you can't tell students that you're going to accept applications for university until you receive authorization from your state to do so. So as soon as we received authorization, we turned around and started applications. So we had a cold opening. We just put on our website, we're opening applications. And we had no idea, I thought it was gonna be crickets. And now I think, in less than a month, I think we're approaching 500 applications. I could be plus or minus 100, I don't remember. I haven't been tracking it the past week. So we anticipate being, by the time we're done with our application cycle, being probably one of the most highly selective colleges in the country this year.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Are you kidding me?

Dr. Pano Kanelos: No, I'm not.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Wow. So it takes dollars, Pano, to do this, right? I don't want to gloss over that fact, because everybody out there is going, how do you even start a new university? I mean, you have to raise money. You've got accreditation that you have to file for. You've got to file this. You've got to file that. Every time somebody wants you to file a document, you've got to pay for it. You guys raised enough money to cover the first cohort, $130,000 scholarships for all of the students who are going to come in the first class. How does this happen? Who do you pull together? Is it like a crowdsourcing? Is it a referral-based network of people who want to disrupt the market? How do you sell this to those individuals who have the dollars and cents to make a difference here?

Dr. Pano Kanelos: Well, you know, as you know, every dollar that goes to university is a philanthropic dollar. So nobody expects any kind of return on investment. Or if there's an ROI, the return is something about making the world better in a way that's important to them. So that's the return. So the way that you make the case is by making the case that a new university, especially one constituted the way that we're constituting it, is adding something of value to the world. We have, as of now, two years into this project, we've raised over $200 million.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Wow.

Dr. Pano Kanelos: And have over 2,600 donors, including, at last count, 111, we call the founders level. Founders are donors who have made significant gifts, six figures plus. So there are a lot of people out there who are persuaded that the best thing that can happen to higher education is for new institutions to take hold.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: That is amazing. There's a reason for that. Right. So think about the dynamic here. So I'm maybe one of your 111 donors or 2600 donors. I've probably given to higher education before. Right. I probably have. Maybe I've given to another institution, my alma mater, you know, maybe in a significant way. I'm going to move my dollars over here to the University of Austin. The reason for me to move my dollars, to be convinced to move some or at least a part of them, is that this new university is needed or that there's something missing with our current universities today. What is the University of Austin's gap that it's filling? Is it that pursuit of truth where we're going to be able to have the hardest conversations that nobody else is willing to have? Because the funny thing about universities, and you know this, Pano, you read the news and watch the news the last couple of days. The number one thing, the universities are in the news. We're in the news. Universities. And no one's talking about education. We're talking about wars. We're talking about gender. We're talking about identities. And we're talking about mental health, but not about like academics, you know, graduating or enrolling. It's like everything else other than what the core of a university does. Anyway, long winded question to come back around and say, why would I move my dollars? Why have you seen those dollars decide to come over to University of Austin?

Dr. Pano Kanelos: I think that's sort of I'd give a sort of two-pronged answer to that. The first I would say is an answer about principles. So, we are standing up robustly for what's called intellectual pluralism, the idea that in a liberal democratic society, we have to be as intellectually pluralistic as possible. And I think for a good number of people, they feel, whether it's justified or not, it's a different question, but they feel that many institutions of higher learning have allowed politics to seep into the bloodstream of the institution, whatever your politics might be, that somehow this compromises the operations of the university in pursuit of truth. So an institution that is purposefully dedicated to intellectual pluralism, to civil discourse, to open inquiry, I think that this is planting your flag there, I think has been a very powerful thing for many people to respond to. And then the other is on the kind of let's call it curricular level. This goes back to, I think, one of the embedded questions that Bill asked earlier about how we're handling the liberal arts question. We believe absolutely that liberal education, liberal arts education is essential to a transformative experience in higher education. But we also believe that you have to learn how to convert thought into action, theory into practice. So how do you take a liberal arts education as a foundation, one that is steeped in literature and philosophy, the arts and the fundamentals of mathematics and the sciences and discussion and the great human questions? How do you take that and also provide an education that will allow young people to graduate and flourish by doing things in the world, being active and being builders and creators and that sort of thing. So for us, that's, I would say kind of our special sauce is a kind of synthesis of the foundational liberal arts education, which lives primarily in our first two years. And then we'll call the intellectual foundations program, which is a single curated program that all of our students take. That's kind of like St. John's college, totally curated dedicated to the pursuit of the great human questions. And then move them on after that into what we call our centers for academic inquiry, which are really places where scholars and real world practitioners come together to solve problems. So students go from the intensely liberal arts experience to being a junior fellow at one of these centers that are focused really on applying knowledge to problem solving in the world for the common good.

Dr. Bill Pepicello: Well, I know you have passed muster with the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board. Kudos. That is one of the most difficult asks known to man and I've done it, so I know. And I know you're now looking at an initial accreditation. But what I wanna talk about a little bit, I understand what you wanna do clearly, but how will you go about it is sort of my next question. The first two years are a program, but to put on my accreditation hat, well, is it credit hours? Is it courses? How do you know when you're done? And where do you go from there?

Dr. Pano Kanelos: Yeah. I wish there was a more creative way to answer that question, but it's really kind of conventional. I mean, in order to be authorized to be a university in Texas, we have to have a credit hour based system. So we're on trimesters, three semesters, so it's 180 credit hours. And we divided those into these different formative experiences, that intellectual foundations, which is really, it really meets all of the criteria for a general education sort of component of a degree. But rather than have a gen ed component where students are sort of arbitrarily sort of bundling together a bunch of courses, this is a single bespoke program that goes through the general education requirements. And then after that, there are branches that go into the social sciences, humanities, and STEM disciplines, each with their own kind of core set of core courses. And then kind of wrapped around that is a lot of, it's called experiential learning, tied to the extended courses that they take. We can't break the 180 credit or 120 credit delivery system model and be accredited and be authorized. But my approach though was that, so I'm gonna say something controversial, forgive me if you disagree with me, but I actually think that the American undergraduate experience is too long. I think one of the reasons higher education is so expensive is because we have a fourth year of it. And then, you know, if we had a three year undergrad degree model, it would radically reduce the cost of higher education. I also think from my experience having run colleges, having been a dean, having been a faculty member, that at least a quarter of what you do at most colleges could be excised without any loss. So when we were looking at our own curricular system, I'm like, okay, we have to do a four year model with no choice. How do we essentially pack two different full and comprehensive university experiences into one degree to maximize the value of that? So that was the approach that we took.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: It will be interesting to see, by the way, because you know there's two universities out there that have gotten a 90 credit hour bachelor's degree approved. And I would love to see, I'm throwing it out there for all of my accreditation folks that I know listen, I'd love to see a new university, like University of Austin be able to do something like that, because it would really tell us the value, you know, rather than a university with 150 years old, 150, 200 years old, doing it because they think that way, or a new university going into it that way, it would tell a different story. I agree with you, Pano, a lot on that fourth year.

Dr. Pano Kanelos: I would be thrilled to do that. I've just, you know, we can only ruffle so many feathers at once. And so, so, you know, we're going to go with the more conventional path. And I'll say like, look, it seems to me axiomatic that if graduate degrees can be of varying lengths, why can't undergraduate degrees? Why aren't there certain courses of study that undergraduates take that should be shorter, longer, depending on what you're studying? And so being able to experiment with these things and I'd love to do this in the future, I think we've got to get our sea legs under us first.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Pano, I've got to ask you this, Bill. I've taken over. I've got to ask one more and then you can have the rest. I'm going to ask you a question that you ask yourself, that you've asked yourself or somebody that put together your website asked it. And it kind of goes like this. Land, brick and mortar? Are you serious? Isn't everything online now, Pano?

Dr. Pano Kanelos: OK, I'm mindful of the fact that I'm talking to somebody affiliated in a former incarnation with the University of Phoenix.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: It makes it so much fun.

Dr. Pano Kanelos: And because I'm a sort of a person who hates to disappoint people, I won't say anything along... I won't discredit online education, but what I would say is this. For what we're trying to achieve, which is not simply to offer degrees, but to create, you know, the most rigorous, intensive undergraduate experience to prepare the next generation of leaders and builders and innovators. I really feel like that experience can only be intensified if it's done in person. So do I think there's room in education for online classes, programs, degrees? Yes, but I think there is a need for the sort of thing that we're trying to achieve to take essentially 18 year olds, maybe not exclusively, but essentially 18 year olds and transition them into being highly effective, flourishing, powerfully prepared adults. To me, in-person education is essential.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: That's a great answer. Thanks.

Dr. Bill Pepicello: Well, thanks for that very rude interruption because you saved me from having to ask that question and raising the online hackle. One of the things that people don't know, I know Joe knows this for sure, is that University of Phoenix actually began face-to-face. And at its height, I oversaw more than 200 physical campuses where we had hundreds of thousands of students and eventually a lot of those migrated online, but face to face was where we started. And I couldn't agree more about, especially the first two years of what you're talking about, Pano, because what you're talking about is a sort of a decompartmentalizing of education and particularly of liberal arts or general ed and making it an integrated body of knowledge, which is what it should be. And I think if it's presented that way, that strengthens your argument that you don't need as much of all this stuff around it. You can cast off some of the administrative chains, which I think you're going a long way towards doing. And frankly, and if you ever get a chance to listen to my podcast, EdUp Insights, which is out every Monday, I talk about this a lot, somewhere Joe is shaking his head. I strongly believe that part of the problem with the first two years in general education and in liberal arts is that we've made it cumbersome. I mean, what is there, and I'll go to Joe's marketing background, that's sexy about the term liberal arts or general education, it sounds like, my God, it's like going to the dentist. What you're putting together is something that makes it all relevant. I couldn't support that more. And I certainly would support a shorter time to degree. And Joe and I have discussed this on many occasions. So I think that's really terrific. And the face-to-face, which again is reminiscent of St. John's. Do you ever see the migration to an online component?

Dr. Pano Kanelos: I don't for the core undergraduate experience, but I certainly think in the, at the graduate level, as sort of, you know, adult education level, possibly even we're thinking about dual credit at the high school level. So I can see, I can see online extending from the core programs. But no, as I said before, for what we're hoping to accomplish with the undergraduate program, I don't really see significant online possibilities, unless they're radically supplemental, just small things on the side.

Dr. Bill Pepicello: Well, I think I surprised Christopher Nelson when we were at the Harvard Graduate School. I didn't disagree with that at all. I sort of had the opposite approach that you did. And what I had to say was, I think that face-to-face instruction is absolutely essential. And that there's a place for both going forward, but it needs to be done in a rational way, which I think a lot of people haven't done.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: This is such a good discussion because it's about value proposition, right? Part of the value proposition of University of Austin is going to be, we're going to do it face to face. We're going to do it old school. We're going to put you in a room together and you're going to have to figure out your differences. And that's part of what makes that education special. And I think on the other side for, you know, as online education expanded for adult learners in particular, that's a different story. We're talking about two different in many respects, two different students. And I think your university could be a lightning rod for, man, I wish I wish I had a university like that when I was choosing. Or I want somewhere where I can go and have this tough conversation that I'm being told I can't have somewhere else. Why can't I take a class challenging these assumptions of things that have to be because somebody says they have to be that way now? Where's the... So the pursuit of truth is an important part of this, which is why I'm assuming no religious affiliation, specifically devoted to fact and truth and that's going to be important part of the value proposition, isn't it?

Dr. Pano Kanelos: Yeah, I mean I don't know that I would put those two things together that a religious affiliation is automatically against fact or truth.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: I put Bill on a podcast with me, so I like to put two things together that don't fit well.

Dr. Pano Kanelos: But yes, we have a totally secular university and what I'd say is, you know, one of our operating principles, for example, in the classroom is that every opinion must be heard, but every opinion must also be backed up by evidence. So evidence-based reasoning, right, I think is critical. And I think this is, maybe this kind of harkens back to the online in-person question. If the mode of instruction is essentially passive, right, so a lecture, you're gonna get a whole bunch of people in a room and you're gonna lecture them, you're gonna talk at them, then the difference between online and in person is nominal, right? Like then, you know, and there's room in the world for lectures. I listen to lectures all the time online. I actually love it. But for what we're talking about, especially in our intellectual foundations program is education as conversation. In other words, education as a kind of network of human dialogue and ideas. And for that, you really have to be able to understand one another with nuance in a kind of personal way. That opens up the possibility of conversations that go deeper, that go below the surface. And, you know, look, I don't think any university should be all about talking about controversial ideas all the time. I mean, that's not the point of university. But a university that's capable of having adult and productive conversations about controversial or difficult things, is capable of having an adult and productive intellectual life. So you don't have to always be talking about gender. You could be talking about Elizabethan poetry. Sometimes we talk too much about the controversial stuff in our culture and we forget about other things that matter. But even by becoming the kind of person who can sit across the table from somebody else and listen, respond thoughtfully, offer your ideas fearlessly, have, you know, I'm often asked what we're looking for in students and I say, we're looking for three qualities. You know, we're in Texas now, so it sounds like a country music song. Our qualities are grace, grit, and gratitude, right? If you can bring those qualities to the table, all right, then the world of ideas can flourish and you can learn and grow and you could also teach. You know, it becomes a kind of virtuous kind of conduit of ideas being shared and expanded upon, enhanced and embraced by everybody involved. That's true education. I mean, this is, you know, that's the heart of it. Not that, it's not about the accumulation of information. It's not about, we could do that with our cell phones anytime. I can look up anything I need to know in the world right now. It's not about accessing information. It's about intellectual transformation. In other words, making yourself a better thinker, a more critical thinker, a better human being, a more critical human being. That's what education is.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: All right. Well, we're at time and Bill likes to ask five part questions so I can't give him another one. So I'm going to just finish up here. Bill, anything else you want to add before we go?

Dr. Bill Pepicello: I just want to summarize something from my perspective and then I'll turn it back to you. And I promise I will not ask a question. This is pure commentary. What I see Pano doing at University of Austin is there are two things. He's providing a base from which we can discuss the controversial cultural drift that's going on in the United States right now, and sort of staying above the fray in that way and coming down into the fray only to serve as sort of moderators or arbitrators of what's going on and bringing some sort of sense of direction to it. There, I'm done, Joe.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: No, that's great. And Pano, we really appreciate your feedback. We hope you had a good time today, at the very least, as you talked about University of Austin.

Dr. Pano Kanelos: I love it. Not only were there applause, there were gongs and other things along the way. That was excellent. Now, this is a conversation, I really appreciate it. And I love that you guys are out there in the public as well talking about these things persistently. I mean, there's nothing more important than education. So thank you.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Thank you, sir. And congratulations to you and staff for your first official day in your new offices. What a great milestone. Now you get to decorate and have a home. So it's becoming real. It becomes real for the leaders, for the staff, and will soon become real for the students. I encourage everybody to check out University of Austin at UAustin.org. I think I got that right. And check out Pano. You can find him on LinkedIn, anywhere else. Before I go, my guest co-host, ladies and gentlemen, you know him. He's a guru of online learning. He's Bill Pepicello. And Bill, thank you again for coming back and helping out.

Dr. Bill Pepicello: Thanks, Joe. Always a pleasure to be with you.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Ladies and gentlemen, my guest is your guest. His name is Dr. Pano Kanelos. He is the president of the University of Austin, UATX. We love it that you came here to tell your story, Pano. We hope you had a good time and thanks for coming.

Dr. Pano Kanelos: Thank you, guys. Great conversation. Thank you.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Ladies and gentlemen, you just EdUpped.