782: How to Humanize a College Campus - with Dr. William Austin, President, Warren County Community College

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Welcome back, everybody. It's your time to EdUp on the EdUp Experience podcast, where we make education your business. We have passed 350,000 plays of our podcast episodes. I want to give each of you who is listening a huge shout out and say thank you for your support of this podcast. Those passing milestones give Elvin and me the juice to continue our literally insane recording and production schedule.

What do I mean? Well, I mean that I record every day, Monday through Friday from 12 to 1 Central Standard Time. And Elvin at night in the bathroom after his kids and wife go to sleep in his New York City apartment edits these episodes so that we put out at least a minimum of three episodes per week because nobody can interview amazing leaders at scale like EdUp does. But we do get tired, I'll be honest. And then I get this really interesting guest co-host combo that just gives me new energy. And I've got one today and I'm just going, I can't wait.

Ladies and gentlemen, here she is. She's the real one. She's Dr. Margaret McMenamin, and she is the president at Union County College. What's going on? How are you?

Dr. Margaret McMenamin: Hey there, Joe. Thank you for the wonderful introduction. I'm delighted to be back with you. And I'm also delighted to be here with our guest. I got a chance to hear the two of you talk before this episode, which was far more entertaining than anything else I've had going on today. So I can only say that this episode is going to be amazing.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Let's get him in right now so we can just start the fun. Ladies and gentlemen, here he is. His name is Dr. Will J. Austin. He's the president at Warren County Community College. Will, what's going on?

Dr. William Austin: Hey, it's great to be with you today. And it'll be a reverend, I can promise you that.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Let's see if we can slaughter some sacred cows today. Let's get a couple of them and slaughter them. Just get them out of the way. And you two apparently know each other, which was fantastic to hear the cows just being slayed the minute I got on the podcast here.

Dr. William Austin: I've been looking up to Dr. McMenamin for years. I mean, she is an amazing leader. She's been the ACCT leader of the year for the entire country. And it's a pleasure. I can't believe she took the time out to interview me. It's humbling is what it is.

Dr. Margaret McMenamin: Hi, no big deal, but I've known Will for 18 years. 18 years ago, I came back to New Jersey after, I don't know, a 30 year hiatus from the state. And I was looking for somebody who was doing the right thing. And I found that president at Warren County Community College in Will Austin. So I'm thrilled to be here and talk about some of the great things he's done and how he's inspired presidents like me to have the courage to do the right thing for our students.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Will, let's level set before we get too far out of the scope of what this podcast is intended to do. Talk about Warren County Community College. Where are you? Who do you serve? What do you do? How do you do it? Let's start there.

Dr. William Austin: So we're a relatively small college in New Jersey by New Jersey standards. We're actually in the mountains of New Jersey. Some people have been through the Delaware Water Gap. That's our community. But you know, I like to tell people if you ever saw the original Friday the 13th, that was actually filmed in Warren County. And I know quite a few of those people from the movie and they're wonderful human beings and the county kind of looks the same still to this day. 

So we try to do some innovative things here in artificial intelligence and uncrewed systems or drones. We try to really do a lot of things with agriculture too, because it's an agricultural based community. So about 2,000 students, roughly a couple thousand more non-credit career training kind of things. And we do the best we can by our residents. We try to do it very cost effectively. And we really do try to put students before anything else, because we don't have that many of them. So we got to take really good care of them and make sure they're all successful so that we get their children and their grandchildren at the college.

I've been president for 20 years and it's been an amazing journey and I'm looking forward. I just signed a contract to do another six.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: This is lunacy. 20 years. Yeah. So I mean, why? Why the heck would you do that? No, I mean, honestly, congratulations. What's the secret sauce, I mean, because you know, presidents are like in there for three, five years now on average. 20 years is very atypical.

Dr. William Austin: You know, I came here for three years and I never left. It's kind of one of those things. I came into a really pretty kind of an interestingly bad situation. Nobody's fault. It just kind of evolved that way. But there were three colleges founded in the last three colleges founded in New Jersey and they were founded by the chancellor as the chancellor's office was being dissolved and it wasn't technically legal. And then the politicians and my predecessor got into a scuffle and they went to the state Supreme Court and they almost closed three colleges over it. But the Supreme Court was kind of wise and they said, yeah, these weren't founded properly, but they've been around long enough. We're going to consider them colleges, but we're going to give you a couple of different rules. 

So one of the things I had to do when I got here was make peace with all the local elected officials. And that was probably - I probably had a background in politics and that wasn't particularly difficult. Once you start building a college for the community and they see the value, rather than see the expense or rather than see, with many colleges, I think, and you're seeing, and then the enrollments have become places of condensation, not condensate, but condescending in a way. And we tried to get rid of that. We tried to humanize the place, be really just people, residents. 

When you're the president of a small rural college, the people who come to your school, they're not your students, they're your neighbors, they're your friends' children. So you really want to take extra care. And I think the secret sauce really is it was a place that fit for me. The people who were here were very similar to me. We saw the world a lot alike and it really made for a special environment. And I've stayed here for 20 years. And like I said, I signed the last contract and told them this is probably going to be it for me, my career in higher ed. So I'll come here, I'll be the president and I'll finish here.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: One more question and then I'm going to pass over to Margaret to take over. Do you have to take that 20 years in chunks? Like, do you look at it like four year cycles or the education changes, albeit not that much, but to stay fresh, right? You do anything for that long, you can become complacent. You can, you know, you walk in, it's the whole coffee stain thing. You walk by that coffee stain every day, never do anything about it. You don't even see it. How have you stayed fresh and have you look at that? How do you do - do you look at it in terms of cycles?

Dr. William Austin: Yeah, so it's interesting that you say that because I've just - I've been doing a retrospective and I'm trying to write a little chapter on the first 20 years. I consider this next one - I took a little sabbatical. This is my second presidency. So I'm going to call the first 20 my first presidency here. I'm going to do things a little differently, maybe even a little bit more outrageous the next couple of years. But I broke it down. It was about eight different major kind of events. So across the course of 20 years, probably about every three years, kind of did a renewal and a refresher.

Years ago, I wrote a book on strategic planning. Please don't buy it. It's dated now. But at any rate, I would always talk about a good plan as a three year plan. In some ways, I guess my life here was like a three year plan over and over and over again.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Everybody get ready for some of this outrageous, outrageous, outrageous. We're going to wait to see what happens. Margaret, over to you.

Dr. Margaret McMenamin: He is outrageous. And when I came back to New Jersey, some of my colleagues - I came back as an executive vice president at another community college, but when I got here, I was warned of one thing: stay away from Will Austin at Warren. And that's all you had to say to me. And I immediately took a trip up to Warren County Community College and said, I want to meet this man that everybody's warned me to stay away from. He's nothing but trouble. 

So Will, we've known each other now for 18 years. You have been - you were the first president in New Jersey to utter the word student success outcomes and start talking about our obligations beyond our access mission, but to actually helping our students be successful in school. Can you talk about how you launched yourself in that journey? Because now everybody's talking about student success and community college 3.0, what's happening even beyond college. But you were the first guy to say enrollment numbers are one thing, but where the rubber meets the road is graduation rates and success metrics. So how'd you get there? What happened?

Dr. William Austin: Well, you know, I had a really interesting first career job. If anybody's ever seen the movie Sister Act, Whoopi Goldberg played the good person. I was basically in my life, I was the bad guy in Sister Act. I would go around and close churches and schools. I actually had a history where I had to terminate nuns. Can you imagine that? They hated it from their position. So when you do that, you develop a very kind of interesting perspective on life. 

So one of the things that when I got into the community colleges, which I was really happy to do, I was a research and planning person. So I looked at the numbers and what horrified me was I think, you know, we were bragging about 18% graduation rates or some schools, some schools in New Jersey were at like seven, eight percent. People are bragging about, bragging about, you know, 12%, yeah, we made it to 18% this year. And I'm like, wait a minute, I went to school and an 18 was failing when I went to school. When did that become a success? 

So I said, this is ridiculous. And I would hear about the access. I'd be, well we're open admission. We take everybody. And I'd say, well, what is the - I grew up in poverty. So I, and I was able to emerge from it. And I'll tell you what doesn't help somebody. When you bring them into an environment and say, this is the world that's available to you. And then you fail them out and they never get to that world again. You have taken everything from that person. You've taken their money, you've taken their hopes, you've taken their dreams, and you sit there and pay yourself and you say, I'm the good person because I let you see what life could have been like for you. That's BS to me. We have to deliver on our promises. If you're not delivering on your promises, you know what they call that in business when you promise somebody something and you don't deliver? They call it fraud.

Dr. Margaret McMenamin: That's right. And first time I heard you talk like that, it was like music to my ears because I saw the continual train of students coming in with a dream, with a hope, bright eyed and bushy tailed and leaving with college debt and a transcript that could go nowhere and take them nowhere. So you talk a lot about how you made changes at Warren. And one of the things that I keep quoting you on is when you said anybody who's a veteran didn't have to go through developmental education. Now I think that Dev Ed is a disaster and I'm not the only one, obviously CCRC, the folks at Columbia University and the research center said that 15 years ago that Dev Ed didn't work, but we still - not us at Union, but many schools still required it. Tell us what you did with military. I know you do a lot with the military, but what'd you do with guys who are veterans?

Dr. William Austin: Well, that was our first - we too have completely abolished developmental education at Warren and we've reached great success from it. But you know, these guys and gals were coming back from Iraq. They were coming back from Afghanistan. They had been running towns. They had taken over major operations. They had built logistics centers and they were really turning things around and that they got here and they got to our colleges and we said to them, that's worth - that's worth no credit. You know, well, you have some military, we'll give you six, we'll give you nine credits and I said this is ridiculous. 

So I said, let's redo their transcripts and let's look at it anew and we found out there were people we could give 45 out of 60 credits to. So we were able to kind of really move that forward for the veterans because again, what is the ultimate goal of an education? Is it to make someone take the same class over and over again? It certainly felt like that in high school and when I went to college, but it's not. Once you have some knowledge, let's think of like epistemologically about this, you know that. Why do you have to know that five times? Let's get new knowledge into people so they can think more broadly. I'd rather see people not do the same class over and over again, but let's say we gave them 45 credits and they said, no, we want more. Well, take something different, learn something you don't already know, that's going to help you more in life. 

So we don't think epistemologically about what we do. We don't think about knowledge that way. What we think about is Carnegie hours. And at the end of the day, too many administrators think about how much they can sell and they think of recruitment and registration as paying the bills and the faculty think about it as load. I need my load so I can make my money. That's not why we're here.

Dr. Margaret McMenamin: It is not. That's why we're here. We're here to educate the population and get the smartest citizens and residents and students that we can possibly produce. But we don't think that way. We think in terms of the structures that have been around for way too many years.

Dr. William Austin: You know, here's the exciting thing. I'm excited every day because I know artificial intelligence is going to wipe out some of this nonsense.

Dr. Margaret McMenamin: You bet it will. You bet it will. That whole issue of Dev Ed, I called it the machine. We had to feed the machine and we fed the machine with human life, with young people coming into our colleges with that dream and we threw them into the machine almost like Audrey the plant in Little Shop of Horrors. We fed these young naive students who didn't have pushy parents to save them. We fed them to the machine and they never came out with anything but debt and disappointment. 

Well, a part of the reason why we did that and I think how I did that is because we as an industry looked at things wrong. We looked at a student who was given transfer credit as a loss of revenue. Like I want them to take my classes. I want them to take my classes because I can charge them money for those classes. And if I give them all this credit, then I can't charge them any money. Well, what's more valuable, the short-term revenue you're going to get now or taking those credits, sending somebody off from Warren County Community College who goes, cannot believe how good an experience that was. You need to go there when you have educational needs and create a pipeline back. We didn't think about marketing. We thought about pipelines, immediate pipelines. That's why higher ed gets into the problems that we're in because we always think for the right now and not for the later.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Short term or long term?

Dr. William Austin: Yeah, the other thing that happened was, you know, we went to the legislatures and lobbied for this stuff. Yeah. So it literally became follow the money. The more developmental students I had, the more money I got for my institution. But it didn't matter what became of those people. So now we hear them doing it again. It's all over again. It's like, we'll bring them all back. It's the children of the people we did this to in the first place. Let's stop, let's get them graduated. Let's get them jobs. Let's stop selling them degrees that honestly aren't going to be worth anything in five years. You know what keeps me up at night? Wondering what degree I just sold somebody today that isn't going to exist in 10 years.

Dr. Margaret McMenamin: That's right. That's a fact. That's a fact. You got that right. Now, Will, you talked a lot about, a little bit about Warren and where you are in New Jersey. I know a lot of our listeners, their impression of New Jersey is the smokestacks near Newark Airport or the ride from Newark Airport into the city. New Jersey's got a lot more than that, but part of what in your area, the most beautiful part of New Jersey, the mountainous region in the Northwest, you talk often about the rural poor and the challenges that rural poor and rural community colleges have in serving those students. We all talk about the poor kids in our cities and how we need to help them. But can you give us an idea of some of the things you're doing to help rural poor and maybe some of the unique challenges that they have?

Dr. William Austin: I think one of the biggest things that people don't realize is we have one of the highest rates of illiteracy and there's no urban, there's really no urban area in our county. And people think, these are urban problems. No, these are American problems and poverty in rural areas hides, so does wealth, whereas it's very much in front of you in the urban areas. So you have to look for it, you have to start to understand it. And you have to realize that people don't see education, they don't value it in a lot of times in rural areas because it hasn't been part of their history. Part of their history was growing crops and growing livestock. These are really important things.

But thinking about, okay, I need an education that's going to take me to X, that's something that you have to really go out there and kind of sell and explain to people. And you have to also explain that we're not going to change it. We're not here to indoctrinate anybody. We're here to present every idea and let you pick what you think is going to fit your community and your values. And if you can build that, the people will come.

But I think one of the big problems, a lot of people do start presidencies at rural areas. I would be one of them. I grew up in a rural area, so I kind of understood. And then they go to another place and it's kind of like the stepping stone. But they come in with this attitude of I'm going to fix you. I'm going to teach you opera. Well, these people love music, but they love bluegrass and country and there's nothing wrong with that. You know, you don't have to necessarily, you can appreciate opera from that standpoint, because it also affects that music. But meet people where they are. 

What I see is people come in and they go, they move into these rural areas or they come to the rural area and they go, we've got to fix everything here. There's nothing wrong here. The people in rural areas are wonderful, beautiful people who love their neighbors. They love everybody. And they get such a bad rap that you really have to embrace the community, get involved and say, you know, rural poverty represents the vast majority of poverty in the United States. Michael Harrington found that out in "The Other America". Rural poverty is the numerical majority of poverty. And the problems are unique because the services aren't here to serve anyone. 

But when you try to argue or you try to advocate for the rural poor because they are invisible, they are the other America, it's often like, well, they're not really, they don't vote for the kind of things, those kinds of services. We're not going to give them any. So you have to get out there, you have to really fight to get your fair share. And you do come back to this mentality. And I know sometimes this kind of statement gets a bad rap because of the way it's portrayed in the media, but it is true. One of the things I say most often in this community is we have to take care of our own. Nobody from the government is coming here to take care of us. When they founded this college, one of the last ones, the way we got the initial funding is all the other colleges had to be generous and offer us some. Yeah, well, the generosity wasn't there. So we've been struggling since the day we were born.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Are you kidding me?

Dr. William Austin: No, I'm not.

Dr. Margaret McMenamin: I actually found somebody from the government previous from the government that I wanted to see if he agrees with you. And this is what he said. Tell him like it is. So he agrees. Well, I mean, you've been part of the slow revolution in higher ed transitioning us from bragging about enrollments to focusing on student success. That was the slow revolution. But the pandemic and technology has accelerated all the change in higher ed. The next 10 years are going to be dramatically different. But Warren's ahead of that curve in many ways. And one of them is one of your pet programs, if I'm allowed to call it that, your unmanned, your drone program. I know it's UAS, I'm not sure what it all stands for, but you're a national leader in drone work. Tell us about that and how that happened and where is it going now?

Dr. William Austin: Surprise. They passed the law in our part of the state years ago that said, you can't really develop any of the land up there because we need it. We're going to need it for food, which is coming true. And we need the water supply to remain safe. But what they forgot to do when they took away everybody's land rights was to compensate them in any way, shape or form. So really we were on a kind of 15 year legacy to try to figure out our journey, to try to figure out how to monetize our land back and get our value back. 

And really one of our commissioners who had been a former board chair, Ed Smith, came to me and said, we got to go out to NJIT. I've seen these things called drones. And I said, yeah, I saw one over my house one time. It's annoying as hell. And he said, no, no, we got to go. It's a business. So I went out. We started to work with our state technology group and I started to realize that they're just making me a pre-engineering program. That's not going to work for all my residents, but it's work for like eight people. 

So I went down to Embry-Riddle and worked with them and then I pulled the two kind of ideas together and we created and we rebranded that part of our operation Warren UAS. And Warren UAS, I'm proud to say, is also available at Bucks County Community College. So we're expanding the program and letting people just have our curriculum and we provide the instruction. We're partnered with Embry-Riddle. When I say partners, I've never had a partnership like this in higher ed. We literally write our syllabi together. Our faculty and their faculty are writing a textbook together right now. We go down there, they come up here, we share back and forth. Their students become our instructors and vice versa. And we actually have a national network of pilots that we work together to get people jobs around the country. 

So it's really been an amazing thing. We have like 80 drones. We've gotten millions and millions of dollars in grants, which has transformed things. And we knew that if we could give our kids something no one else could take from them, this knowledge that's going to be machine-based, because in the future, don't care what you're going to be, you're an archaeologist. You're working with a machine next to you. You're working with magnetometers, LIDAR, thermal. You're finding out things that you're finding out, improving history didn't happen before. 

And, you know, one of the great things that happened in my career, I left higher ed one time and then ended up in the community colleges. And when I left Temple University, they literally told me, and I love David Ellis, and he said these words, because you don't burn bridges, Will, you incinerate them. Because at the age of 20, I think I was probably about 25, they offered me the directorship at an R1 level research center, and I turned it down to go to the community colleges. So I never had that thing about, I want to be a four-year university, because I already left it. I chose the community colleges.

But what I said at Warren is I said, why can't a community college have an R1 level research center? Why can't I have that back? So I built one, it's called the Dr. Joseph Warren Robotics Research Center and we're funded. We're on our second year mark from Congress. We have grants coming in and it really is. We do research. We do agricultural research with Rutgers. We do research with aviation entities around the country. We send our people out to train. We train prison guards in Oklahoma. We work with big power companies. We work with big gas companies. And we work with New Jersey Transit. 

So we do get our kids to Newark. They stand right on top of the train station remapping their roof because their plans and their architectural designs are over 100 years old. They need to redo a lot of things. So our students go out there. That's right in the Newark flight line so that we get the best of all worlds in terms of the rural, the urban for our program. We love doing that. But where it's taken me and where I've wanted to go with this is we're finally on the point where we're going to build a, you know, we're about to really work with the USDA to build out a food processing plant for New Jersey. But we want to do it with robotics. We want to do it with artificial intelligence. We want to mass produce food.

We know what's going to happen in Ukraine. We know we're in a dystopian World War III that's nothing like the movies or Einstein predicted. And this is going to affect food production. And we saw this with the supply chain. So we want to be able to produce as much food as we can and get it out. We want to fill these food deserts in New Jersey. We don't want to talk about food deserts, stand outside of them, cry and say, I wonder if food's going to come. We're going to make the food. We're going to grow the food. We're going to process the food. And we're going to get the food into these places once and for all.

Dr. Margaret McMenamin: Well, you're about all kinds of incredible things, you know, from drones to these initiatives with agriculture, et cetera. But how do you do it? Higher Ed is so slow to change. And we are the most agile parts of higher ed, the community college sector. But you got to admit what you've been able to accomplish is remarkable, just if you put it relative to other colleges, other presidents. So how did you do it? I know Joe's got a big college audience here, a lot of community college leaders, lot of higher ed leaders listening to this. How did you do it? How?

Dr. William Austin: I can't remember who said this, but somebody once said the problem with higher ed is there's a thousand years of tradition tied down with 150 years of bureaucracy, which is 200 now. So here's the problem. That's it. You got to get rid of that mentality. We did think - I took the board down and had them take the Accuplacer and we had a medical doctor from Johns Hopkins fail it. That allowed us to get rid of developmental ed. Because it's like, if the medical doctor graduated Johns Hopkins can't get through that, who's getting through that stuff? That's ridiculous. It wasn't testing anything that had to do with what we were doing. 

So we continue that. And eventually we realized, what we know as faculty today, those 45 hours - three classes at the university, five classes at the community college or some variation of that. That was invented in the early 1900s, again, Johns Hopkins University. And you know what I call that? I call that one of the worst failed social experiments of all damn time. It doesn't work. Community college teachers here five days a week. Hell, in the drone program, we're here seven days a week. We love what we're doing. We need to find people and hire people into what we call teaching administrators. We're going back to the Henry Dunster model, the first president of Harvard. He wrote the curriculum. He built the facilities with his own hands. He taught the students, you do everything. You get rid of the us versus them. I mean, not that we can get rid of it fully. We still have some legacy thems and they call themselves, they call us them. They call themselves us. They regularly, they create this dysfunction and it's ridiculous. This is lunacy.

Dr. Margaret McMenamin: You're bored. I get it. So I always said, you need a courageous president to get the change done. But there's a fine line between courage and stupidity. And if you don't have your board backing you up, how'd you get the board to support you with all the - I get it. You got the medical doctor to take the Accuplacer. I use that technique. Everybody failed it. It was great. And it helped us. But all these - we don't like change in higher ed. How'd you get the board on board?

Dr. William Austin: Yeah, so you know what it is? It takes time. You know, one of the things is you gotta be president longer than three weeks. I mean, you really do. You gotta start slow. We didn't do major - very honestly, we did not do the major things that we were doing until I was eight to 10 years into the job. You had to build the trust. You had to build the integrity. The board had to know you were gonna stay. You weren't just gonna flip the switch, do a bunch of things, and then run out of town. They had the trust that you were gonna stay there and see these things through to the end. 

You have to go through your crises. You have to go through your bad publicity and you have to be standing when it's over. The board saw, if you don't talk to - here's a little secret. If you don't talk to the newspaper to get one story, if you keep trying to defend yourself, they get 15 stories and eat you alive. So you stop talking to them because they're not helpful to you. Because they don't see the chance. They like the conflict. That's part of the problem with the world. 

You know, I was a sociologist before I was a rocket scientist, but I teach space classes now. But before I did that, I was a sociologist. You know what? We taught conflict theory. That was a theoretical model. You weren't supposed to make conflict in every part of every damn part of your life. And you wonder why the world's in conflict now. There has to be peace. There has to be love. There has to be all these other things. There has to be balance. So you take on one challenge at a time. You don't take on 50 challenges. You don't throw spaghetti at the wall. You come up with a plan and you say, this is what our community needs. And these are the tough decisions that are going to be made.

And I would prepare my board and I'd say, these are the criticisms we're gonna get, but we're gonna see it through. We're gonna be resolute in our determination. And let me tell you something, because my dissertation chair, Ann Molder, who was kind of a famous community college person in her own right, said to me, "Will, you'll be a great leader if you do the right things right and you do not take the criticism to heart." I mean, it affects every human being, but you let it roll off your back and you continue to do the right things. She also said something else to me. She said, "Really smart people don't make great presidents." So I said to her, "How do you think I'll do?" And she said, "You'll be just fine."

Dr. Joe Sallustio: You just made the list. I love it. You just made the list. All right, so I keep telling my staff, 10 years from now, I think higher ed will be unrecognizable. I think things are going - I mean, it may be less time, but you've been a terrific predictor of what's to come. You have been. You talked about what's gonna happen in New Jersey and a lot of that's come true. So what do you think it's gonna look like with AI, with all the technological advances, with the cultural shifts in America, everything that's going on? What's higher ed gonna look like in 10 years, not just look like - I know what a JPEG is somebody might say AI.

Dr. William Austin: Well, now that Hank Hill has tuned in, let me try to say, here's where I think it is. You know, I was really fortunate that, you know, I talked about the poverty I grew up in, but I had an opportunity to go to a really nice school that really transformed my life. And they had me back to do the drones and it's seven times the size of when I went there. So great to see all these young kids that are gonna come out and be leaders of the future at that school. But they asked me this. They said, what is it gonna be like? And I said, look, here's what it is. You gotta stop thinking about higher ed the way we think it. It's not going to be this rote kind of memorization. It is going to be dynamic. You're gonna have the answer. You already have a Google 0.01 seconds to get you an answer to anything. And if you put the AI into the Google, it really gives you some fantastic quick answers. That's gonna continue, only it's gonna speed up.

What you're going to see is we're going to have more thoughts possible because of this. So what I like to think is instead of trying to rethink the same thing, think about your life. The fashion hasn't changed in 40 years. The movies are exactly the same. I can predict the ending of almost any movie out there every single year. There aren't new ideas, but if we embrace this technology, if we embrace this AI, we can do what my old philosophy teacher, Rick Boothby said. We can get to the point again where we think the unthought thoughts and those are the thoughts we need. We don't need more people screaming climate change, climate change. We need solutions. 

I tell people I don't care what caused climate change. How do we solve the problem now? Stop with worrying about who's at fault and start saying how are we going to get here? That's why I got involved in space operations and went back to Riddle and got another degree in that because here's what I know. Whatever we build for outer space to put people in space, it looks like we're going to need on this planet. And I tell people I'm a big Stephen Hawking fan. He said, we have a hundred years left. Well, that was 10 years ago. So we have 90 years left to become an interplanetary species. So we need to be working on these kinds of things. And the nice thing is, as we work for human survival in outer space, it's going to help us survive and deal with the climate issues on this planet. 

We are a very fragile, frail species, and we think of ourselves as superior because we don't realize that we are part of nature and the animal kingdom out there. We just happen to maybe be at the top of it according to some people, or we may be the conscious thinking, but this AI is going to transform the way we can think. They already are putting computer chips into the brains of people with Parkinson's. It will not take very long before we are putting something inside ourselves that will hold all the information. What do we do with that then? We need to be thinking about what we're going to be thinking, the problems we're going to be solving.

And we need to get back to hard work and the ability to do things. Because some of the things AI can do will transform our ability to see the world, change the world, perceive the world, and solve problems. But we still are going to - all the robots in the world can't do certain tasks, and we have forgotten how to do those. So part of our drone program is soldering, microchip soldering, working on electronics, all the things we shipped over to other countries that when the time comes and we need them, there won't be anybody here with the expertise. So we're bringing all that back too, because we know we have kids that come into our school, they're not gonna be mathematicians, but man, they probably can fix your refrigerator, they probably can fix your ATM machine, they're gonna fix the things you need to survive, they're gonna build the systems that keep us alive during climate change, and we need to be educating them as well. But we spend too much time worrying about who's a master of Beowulf.

Dr. Margaret McMenamin: Well, you got teenage children. I know that. What are you telling your kids they should major in when they go to college? Or if they should even go to college and if so, what degree they should pursue. What are you telling them?

Dr. William Austin: So, you know, I'm a strange guy because the way I grew up, you had to work. You're not a strange guy. Come on, man. All my kids went to work when they were 14. We have an amusement park, wonderful place called the Land of Make-Believe. I think it's America's number one amusement park. Family Park. They all worked there from the time they were 14 and the wonderful people who run it. They expect hard work of them. So all my kids came out with a work ethic and that was really important. 

But my wife is a mathematician. You know, I have degrees across from social science all the way to the natural sciences. And I said to them, STEM, STEM, STEM, have the ability to fix a ride. You have the ability to fix pools. You understand fluids. So my oldest is engineering. My daughter is industrial design and my youngest who's in with me now is - he's over in our program. He's doing the drones and he'll probably take that and all the hands-on skills with all the machinery over there because they fabricate drones. They do 3D printing. They do fusion 360. You come out of our program knowing you can work in any robotics industry in the world. You come out of it and you're there, then get the engineering degree. Put the theoretical with the practical and you'll be unstoppable in this society.

Dr. Margaret McMenamin: Now some people would disagree with you, Will. Like I have a cousin who said liberal arts, given all those changes going on, should have humanity. We should be graduating humanities graduates, liberal arts grads. Critical thinking. They learn the critical thinking stuff. What's your thoughts on that?

Dr. William Austin: I definitely believe you use it for the critical thinking. I'm not going to deny that, but here's what's going to be the great thing. And the economists are predicting this. This isn't Will Austin. They've literally said we are developing the, this is their words, not mine, useless class. It will be the new class. They will have no utility in society. They will not be able to work with machines. They will not understand science. They will be basically what we will have to do. And Andrew Yang, when he ran for president and mayor of New York, kind of pointed this out. We need universal basic income for people, UBI. Well, we're gonna put people on UBI.

That does not sound like a great life to me in a capitalist society. And I know people will say, it won't be capitalism. Capitalism is evil. 1%ers are evil. Let me tell you something. Here's my theory on that. It's the best of the worst systems, right? But the capitalist at the top, he needs me to have enough money in my pocket to buy that product that's being produced. You know who doesn't need me to have money in my pocket? Chairman Xi. He needs me to be a slave. He needs me to do whatever he says. My economic power is a threat to him. So the capitalist is going to look out for me as a person. All these other systems are going to make you enslaved. And I know we're not allowed to use that word anymore. That way people could convince us to be slaves because we don't even remember what it was. 

So I believe in freedom and I believe in capitalism, but I believe that when you get there is to be a practical member of society who can do things, produce for society and get people what they need to survive. But there will be lots of people who will only be surviving. In my mind, a purposeful, useful life is the only one worth living. What you're gonna end up with is little boxes and my fear is, and I always think dystopia, people say, they always talk about utopia. I remind them, that's a British satirist idea. It's never occurred in reality. Dystopia though has, so we should be on the lookout for it. 

Imagine a society where machines do most things, the AI does the thinking. And there are some of us who are working with these machines. What happens to the rest of us? We end up, and I fear, and Christmas is coming, so be sure to watch, it's a wonderful life. We're gonna end up with too many people in what I'm gonna call Pottervilles of the future. And we gotta be protecting about that. So when I'm building academic programs, I'm thinking, how will this protect my residents, my kids, my students, my neighbors, my friends, families from these Pottervilles that are gonna be coming? Because what are we gonna do with all these people who have no utility?

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Bullseye. Well, I don't know, but Joe, now you know why I wanted to talk with Will on your show, because this is rich stuff, but I want to move a little bit from the futuristic to the more immediate challenges in higher ed. And you hear about our colleagues in the South, in Texas, in Florida, in Ohio even, Virginia, North Carolina, getting some political intrusion into the operations of the college based on DEI issues. Here in New Jersey, we're in a DEI cocoon. There are no issues related to DEI here. We can say the words and talk about it on campus, but there is in the Northeast, you hear stories about political intrusion into higher ed. Do you want to comment on that? Because I'm sure some of the people listening are living with someone looking over their shoulder or maybe whispering in their ear about what they should do.

Dr. William Austin: Yeah, I mean, we talk about New Jersey as a very blue state, but I happen to live and work in a very, very red county. I mean, this is Trump country in Warren County. That is who will win the next time there's a little election, it's who won every time he has run here. He will get the vast majority of the votes here. And they hired a guy who taught race and ethnic relations. That was my background. Lifetime member of NAACP, who brought that idea and said, look, to have a just and fair society, everyone needs to be an equal part. 

But the way I talk about it isn't the way we talk about it in New Jersey or the presidents talk about it in New Jersey. I talk about the opportunities and the successes of individuals. And I show them that when we give people the access with the outcomes, we will see everyone succeed. And it changes perspective. More and more diverse people moved out to the rural areas during COVID. But we're not gonna ever say it, Warren, we're gonna lower our standards. That's gonna tell somebody we don't think you're good enough to meet them. That's ridiculous. Everyone who comes here can meet our standards. I can prove it to you. 

The year the Chronicle of Higher Ed said we were the 11th most successful community college in the country, my wife and I went into the iPads. We dug through it. You can read about it. There was an article in Diverse Issues in Higher Ed. She's a mathematician. We dug into the data. We found out that we were under 50% for overall graduation rates, but we were above 50% for African-American black graduation rates. And we were above 70% for Hispanic Latino Latinx populations. You know why? Because the standard and the expectation for everyone is the same. And those individuals jumped through all the hoops and worked even harder and got ahead and they're having great lives because of it. 

And I am tired of saying people can't. No, everyone can. Everyone can learn everything. You can learn math. I've proven it in the drone program. I don't tell them they learn math, but in order to get through one class, they have to analyze with root mean square error. Who knows that? That is like statistics five. You don't get to that statistic until - but you can do it. You have to teach people what they're capable of and you have to let them remember some. There's nothing more condescending than someone born in privilege telling someone else, I'm gonna help you because you don't know what privilege is. This is nonsense. 

The people that come from areas and neighborhoods like I came from and I've lived in the vast majority of my life till I was a college president, they have grit, they have determination. They've overcome so many adversities that you'll never even understand. What they need is compassion from you and a lack of judgment. They don't need you telling them that they're not a good person or they're not right or they don't think right. Let them share their experience with you and change your damn perspective for a change.

Dr. Margaret McMenamin: Well, Joe, I think we've got this wrapped up here because we've got a president, President Will Austin, a guy who I was told to avoid 20 years ago and who has continued to inspire me. And I know that through listening to this podcast and maybe having a chance to interact with him in the future, that future leaders in higher education, future leaders of community colleges, and certainly current leaders in our sector can get inspired to learn, to do the right thing, to focus on student success, to help people change their lives, transform their lives through education. And I mean, you still got it after 20 years, there's some folks who need to be sent out to pasture, but it sounds like you're going to be raising hell in Warren County, New Jersey and rocking the world up there with these opportunities. I know you set the bar high and I know that you, you know, beyond inspiring me, there are a lot of presidents who look up to you. So I want to thank you for joining us on this. Joe, I don't know if you have any follow-up questions.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: This is just - I don't need to do a darn thing. This has been the greatest episode of my life. I just sit back and listen. It's fantastic. I mean, you guys -

Dr. William Austin: You're both very kind.

Dr. Margaret McMenamin: No, I mean, I'm just so tired of listening to presidents who just nod their head and say, not today, or maybe look at the calendar and say, I don't want to approach this challenge because I'm going to retire in a few years and why should I rock the boat? And let's just keep doing what we're doing and the outcomes remain the same. So - hopefully we get a few more good presidents out of this who can help turn more ships around in the harbor. 

Will, leave us with your vision for the future of higher ed. What do you see on the horizon?

Dr. William Austin: The vision is if we don't change, we're going to be changed by society. They're already rejecting us en masse. I mean, there's tons of, there's more kids than ever and they're not in our schools. So we ought to be asking ourselves a tough question. But I will say this to anybody who does follow me. When you do these kinds of things, expect the personal attacks, expect it to be vicious, expect lies about you, expect to be obliterated in the newspaper. But tell yourself one thing, a president at Niagara Community College years ago, said, how did you do it? When I was this middle stage chair, he said, you know what? Once they take your pride, they take your dignity, they take everything from you. You have the mission and the students, and then you start to win.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: If you're an aspiring president or a current one and you're looking to step up your game, get on a microphone with Margaret and Will and your job is to take one third of the conversation. And if you could do that, you're on your way to success because these guys know that and I kid, but you guys are absolutely incredible. This has been, I mean, I have some favorite episodes of this podcast after after 700. This is a top five for me. I don't ever say I don't say that very often as top five.

I enjoyed it, being a part of it. The passion is absolutely fantastic. Will, you're an absolute pleasure to have. And Margaret, you know how I feel about you. I can't wait to meet you in person. Having you back as a co-host was just as good as having you as a guest host. So I'm just going to leave it there, because I want to tell the audience, you need to follow these guys. If you want to do things differently, you want to challenge the status quo, find people that are challenging the status quo. You're going to find my guest co-host and my guest today. Thank you guys, Margaret. Thanks for being my guest co-host. How'd you feel about co-hosting? You feel good about it?

Dr. Margaret McMenamin: It was a great ride. And certainly I love being on the ride with you and with Will Austin, President Will Austin and you, Joe. Thank you so much.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Will, did you have a good time today?

Dr. William Austin: It was absolutely fantastic. Thank you so much. And thank you to you and thank you, Dr. McMenamin. You are, you're my inspiration. No, don't kid yourself. She doesn't realize how many times I was low and ready to give up. And it was her words that brought me back. She'll motivate the heck out of you.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Ladies and gents, my guest co-host today. Her name is Dr. Margaret McMenamin. She is the president of Union County College. She's in Jersey. So is our guest. He's our guest today. His name is Dr. Will Austin. He is the president of Warren County Community College. Check out these amazing schools and these amazing leaders. You've just EdUpped.