Organized Online Discussion 5/13/08 - SIO Network

May 13, 2008

The following is a transcript on an organized online discussion that took place May 13, 2008, in the SIO discussion forum. SIO Network Leader James Cross moderated the discussion and asked the following three questions:

So many international partnerships start with an individual contact or champion. What are some strategies to ensure that an international partnership that is considered strategic for the university is indeed sustainable and can survive after the first contact or champion leaves or moves on? - Read the Responses

An important part of international collaboration often focuses on student exchange. What are some of the financial (tuition) challenges of "exchanging" undergraduate and graduate students from U.S. public and private institutions with undergraduate and graduate students from European and other institutions around the world? - Read the Responses

Can you share with us some examples of international partnership success stories and describe what your criteria for success are and what has made the partnerships successful? - Read the Responses

Full Transcript

James Cross: Greetings colleagues,

Welcome to our online SIO network conversation. Today we have three expert guests who have agreed to share their time and respond to three general questions. We hope that you will add to the conversation with additional questions and comments. Our program is scheduled to run from 12:00 p.m. to 1:00 p.m. EST.

Our guests are:

Marianne Hassan, Associate Dean for New Initiatives, Pratt School of Engineering at Duke University
Riall Nolan, Dean of International Programs, Purdue University
David Sammons, Director of International Programs, Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences (IFAS) at the University of Florida

Our first question is:

So many international partnerships start with an individual contact or champion. What are some strategies to ensure that an international partnership that is considered strategic for the university is indeed sustainable and can survive after the first contact or champion leaves or moves on?

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Marianne, could you please be the first to respond?

Marianne Hassan: As in all institutional level partnerships (domestic or international; research or education), both sides to the relationship need to have champions at multiple management levels and in the different aspects of the partnership. Having champions from the various on-campus constituencies are important: faculty, department chairs, senior management, school level admin, departmental admin, center directors, central administration (including but not limited to international office, visa office, libraries, etc.). First and foremost, the faculty need to be excited and committed to the project. When the faculty and their chairs support the initiative, everything goes a lot smoother. Go-to people at various levels are needed on both sides of the partnership, especially when the non-U.S. partner resides in a geographic area that is prone to a lot of change either economically, politically, or socially. Rapid and dynamic change may be advantageous at times, but it can be difficult for one partner to adjust. My experience is when a system is very dynamic, people move around and you may lose your champion, so having multiple people in decisionmaking positions is important.

Bottom line for an INSTITUTIONAL partnership: try to get as many people INVESTED in your project as soon as possible on both sides. This will help with internal issues to each institution and it will help provide continuity to the project in the event that people leave the institution or are reassigned.

I could go on and on, but I'm sure others have good tips and pointers.

Riall Nolan: We deal with two very different contexts in any university: what drives an individual faculty member and what will succeed (or fail) at the institutional level. These are not always the same things. The mantra that we repeat to one another is that initiatives need to be supported by the faculty, and this is true in a general sense, but initiatives do not necessarily have to come from the faculty in the first instance. I can give you some examples at Purdue of this, but perhaps later.

But to speak to the point: international partnerships may very well be the inspiration of an individual faculty member, but they need to resonate with departmental needs and strategies to succeed and endure.

This means that deans and department heads must not only tolerate the partnership, but actively support it. There needs to be a plan in place, sooner or later, for continued funding (you can't run long-term partnerships off short-term money) and—perhaps most important—you need a succession plan within the unit, so that knowledge about the partnership is transferred to people other than the original pioneers. Otherwise, when they leave or shift focus, you'll lose your gains.

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Laurie Koloski: Hi, I'm Laurie Koloski, director of the international studies center at William & Mary. I agree with everything just said, but one related question. Once you've identified a group of champions at various levels, how do you "distribute" the work to be done effectively? How do you get faculty involved without overtaxing them? How do you use staff effectively to support these ventures without them becoming the "catch-all" for the work that needs to be done? Thanks much.

James Cross: Hi Laurie, There may be other responses as there seems to be a slight time lag but I'll share my experience with two comments in response to your question.

Set up task forces or working groups of the champions that can meet regularly and follow through on program activities.
Ensure that you have a budget model that provides sufficient resources to support the partnership including personnel costs.

David Sammons: Laurie, let me try to respond to this question since this has arisen as an issue here in Florida as well. My perspective on this is fairly pragmatic: it takes work to do anything that is important and we sort out our time based on our individual priorities and the rewards that come from how we invest our time. I have been working hard here, as a consequence, to make sure that international engagement counts towards P&T. That's a start in terms of encouraging participation. Work flow and work loads sort themselves out pretty amicably in most instances because those who so engage care about what they are doing—and if it counts toward something more, that is simply "icing on the cake."

Mariane Hassan: Great questions. I could spend a whole lunchtime on this. Find people who demonstrate a PASSION for the project; find the folks who find the project and its goals to be personally fulfilling. By doing so, spending time becomes a pleasure rather than a job. Workload and effectiveness is a tricky balance. If you can segment the project into subprojects it is easier to find people willing to take the lead on smaller tasks. I try to take the time to talk about the project in a variety of venues (even at the pool with the kids) and I'm always surprised at the number of people willing to get involved whom I would have never thought. I got our librarian involved in our project with Saudi Arabia and I never would have predicted it or thought to go in this direction.

David Sammons: Good points from Marianne. Let me add the following: At UF, we assign a faculty member as "Program Manager" for each international partnership that we establish (we call these "Cooperative Agreements.") We ask the partner institution to make a similar assignment within their faculty ranks. The job of the program managers is to sustain the linkage with the partner institution, to nurture the partnership through programmatic leadership, and to assure continuous dialogue (and activity!) on programs of mutual interest. The UF program manager is also asked to file a report annually with my office that summarizes activities through the year—or that speaks to reasons for a lack of activity. We encourage the program manager to involve other UF faculty and staff in the emerging linkage with the partner institution as well. Thus, even after the initial champion leaves campus, our cooperative agreements can be sustained if there is sufficient continuing interest and momentum on both sides. However, we also impose a five-year horizon on all cooperative agreements to avoid carrying inactive partnerships on the books for long period of time.

Laurie Koloski: Could you (all) say a bit more about what these partnerships look like? I'm assuming there's a spectrum of possibilities here, but I'd be interested to know what sorts of things seem to work well. I know about Penn's program in Botswana, that's gone from one faculty member in medicine to many more in many fields, and that's fabulous, but something that clearly took a great deal of time, effort, and resources to build. What sorts of partnerships do you have now, and how do they work in practice?

Marianne Hassan: Laurie, I see institutional partnerships as distinct from school-level partnerships. I prefer school level, center level, or departmental level to start off. This insures there are champions and it limits the scope of the project. As momentum builds, so can the partnership. It takes a lot of time/effort regardless of what level one works at. Most of the vibrant international relationships that I see at Duke (from the engineering/technology side of life) are focussed at the school level or at a very specific project level, e.g., Engineers Without Borders relationship with a NGO in Uganda. With the growth of our Global Health Institute, we'll see more institutional level involvement, but the relationships are still focussed with strong mission statements and vision. The more focussed the partnership in terms of vision, mission, goals the better from my perspective. I'd rather have a vibrant and robust smaller partnership than a paper tiger.

JoAnn McCarthy: This is JoAnn McCarthy, formerly assistant provost for International Affairs at Penn. I've been following this interesting dialogue and just want to say something in response to Laurie's mention of the Botswana project at Penn and other comments that have been circulating.

Obviously, there are many kinds of partnerships (as well as accompanying agreements and models of administrative oversight) that are designed for different objectives. They require different kinds of administrative support systems and levels of oversight, but they all serve a legitimate purpose. "Strategic partnerships" are those that are consciously developed to move the institution along toward a certain goal. This could be as simple as putting together a student exchange, facilitate a joint research project, or generate foreign student enrollments...depending on institutional goals.

However, some are beginning to use this term to note relationships that have MULTIPLE objectives and thus become more complex to manage and need to have broad ownership while ensuring institutional-level management. Some, like Penn's Botswana project, may begin as a school-driven, uni-dimensional collaboration. With some nurturing and a lot of team work, the Botswana project expanded to encompass more than just a few med school faculty members working with the Ministry of Health in Botswana. Residents and interns were the first to come on board when they began treating patients in the local hospital. Once its "owners" realized the potential for expansion beyond clinical aspects of HIV, they began inviting other colleagues from across the university to bring THEIR expertise to various aspects of this complex social problem. Eventually, the locus of the broader institutional collaboration shifted from the Ministry of Health to a collaboration in capacity-building with the University of Botswana.

A joint effort centered on helping them establish Botswana's first med school; a graduate program in nursing; and an interdisciplinary research center on HIV/AIDS gave focus to initial efforts. This allowed new partnerships to emerge with the two institutions' nursing schools, and faculty from Wharton, Annenberg (communications), Law, Social Policy, Education, and Arts and Sciences, which expanded the engagement across the university. It is now an umbrella for partnerships of any kind between the two institutions that address the medical, social, legal, and economic fallout of this tragic pandemic. There are multiple owners, but one chief administrator responsible for coordinating the various intersecting vectors that are associated with Penn in Botswana. The international office provides logistical support to keep this all in motion.

I believe we'll be seeing more of these interdisciplinary, issue-driven partnerships that synergize and leverage institutional resources to really "make a difference." They will engage faculty in joint research; allow undergraduates and graduate students to translate knowledge into action through research and service; provide opportunities to draw in government, NGO, and private partners; and leverage the networks and resources of alumni in the region.

This is a new level of "strategic" partnership that will present a major challenge to SIOs to help identify key global issues that a broad sector of the campus could embrace; find faculty "champions" to provide visible (and inclusive leadership); keep track of growing levels of activity; manage resources; keep communication flowing both horizontally and vertically/internally and externally; and expand the number of "players" on campus. One size does not fit all when it comes to drawing up MOUs for such undertakings, so one has to think outside the box about how to codify such relationships, document their progress, and shape them as they grow.

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Laurie Koloski: David, quick questions re: the program managers idea, which I like very much.

(1st question) Do you offer any sort of compensation to these faculty, either in the form of time (teaching releases), salary, etc.?
(2nd question) Do faculty who serve as program managers feel they're getting the proper recognition (in terms of merit review, promotion, tenure, etc.)? Thanks.

David Sammons: In answer to your first question, Laurie, I offer the following:

We do not offer anything but our thanks (as well as backstopping and support) for the good work of our program managers. I should mention that these individuals are generally the individuals who come forward with the notion that a particular institutional partner would be a good one for us to link with in our work. Thus, they start their labor on behalf of the partnership from a deep-seated commitment to making it work. We rarely impose partnerships from this office. As others in this forum point out, starting small and focused is a smart way to go—and I would add, start with a committed faculty member or group.
I am not sure how our program managers feel except that they persist in their roles from year-to-year, presumably finding personal rewards in so doing. Quite often, I find that those who take on the role of program manager are individuals who are productive across a spectrum of activities, so discerning how much of the reward structure can be attributed to international vis-à-vis other aspects of their professional lives is not simple or direct to measure.

(2nd question) The principal financial challenge with student exchange agreements, in my experience, has been sustaining a numerical balance in terms of numbers of students each direction. Our policy here and at my former institution is to "trade" tuition (i.e., our student pays here but goes to classes at the partner institution and vice versa) so that to maintain the program requires a reasonable balance in numbers of outbound and inbound students. This has been problematic in some instances, especially in those programs in which coming to the U.S. is more attractive to partner country students than is the outbound (our student) side of the equation. When I say "reasonable" balance, I refer to the fact that we look at balance over a period of time—not year-to-year. That period has been variable but can be as much as five years. A secondary challenge is that some of our partner institutions do not charge tuition in the conventional sense, hence their students get a "free ride" from the tuition that our outbound students pay to their home institution. This has caused resentment in some instances but we have always pointed out that the tuition that our students pay at home must be considered an investment in their education and that the payment here would have been made if the individual had not chosen to study abroad. Nevertheless, we need to assure that the student gets a quality experience at the partner institution—and that requires careful thought and assessment beforehand.

Riall Nolan: As regards the second question, there are lots of "challenges" here. One is to remind folks that the word "exchange" really means "exchange"—movement in both directions. We have made a lot of progress at Purdue at bringing our exchanges into balance. Other institutions may not care very much about that, but as a highly visible public land-grant, we would be foolish not to. What we exchange, however, is not money, or time, or students. We exchange credit. And this gives us quite a bit of flexibility in determining what will count for credit on our side. And in a partnership, that credit can then accrue to our partner, who can use it to send students to us. So, for example, we have Maymester courses of about three to four weeks duration. If we send 10 students to Chinese university for three weeks, and they receive three credits each, that Chinese partner has 30 credits to "spend" at Purdue. Which means that they can send, say, two students for a semester each. We also don't mind mixing and matching undergraduate and graduates, or people from one college going out and people coming back into another college, as long as we have discussed and agreed to this beforehand. Our biggest problems come when people here "pull the trigger" on an "exchange" relationship without involving us, and it winds up costing someone a lot of money. This doesn't happen very often, but when it does, it is very messy. We encourage faculty (and given them grants for this) to go and "map" the curriculum of a partner. This helps facilitate later exchanges enormously.

Laurie Koloski: Fascinating to hear about the possibility of exchanging credit; hadn't ever occurred to me, but now I'm having one of those "d'oh!" moments. We do very well with exchanges at W&M, even though we follow a rather more traditional path of exchanging students, each of whom pays home tuition and, in some cases, home housing. It's obviously a terrific deal for in-state students, but even out-of-state students pursue these exchanges. It's been an effective way for us to get past the restrictions on in-state students (we're required to have 65 percent in-state students) and the very selective admissions for out-of-state students. Since we don't really have the ability to actively recruit international students (for the above two reasons), this is our best bet for bringing in a regular cohort of undergraduate international students.

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Norman Peterson: Norm Peterson from Montana State and the current IEL-KC chair here.

This is turning into a great dialogue, so keep the comments and questions rolling in. It is good, useful advice to seek multiple champions across the campus in different positions, but does it mean that an institution should strictly limit its institutional partnerships to only maintain a few partnerships that can garner this multi-level support? Is it better to have, for example, four institutional partnerships that have multiple champions, than 10 that depend on one or two key supporters? Many of our partnerships exist to allow reciprocal student exchanges and can serve this function well with relatively low involvement of faculty champions. I guess my question how do we prevent the perfect from getting in the way of the good?

Riall Nolan: To respond to one of Norm's points, I think it's useful to point out that many schools have several different types of agreements, some of which cover specific units and activities, and some of which are university-wide. At Purdue, for example, we now have three types of agreements:

Letters of Intent, which can be signed by individual units and which are nonbinding declarations of willingness to collaborate. They may be very specific or very general, depending.
Activity Agreements, which are highly specific, and are indeed contracts, because they involve money and other valuable considerations. Again, these can be on behalf of one academic unit or several.
Memoranda of Understanding, which are university to university, but are also highly general and non-binding. We use all three of these in different ways. And we find that our partners appreciate the degree of flexibility.

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Marianne Hassan: Riall, how do you prevent a proliferation of the LOIs? We stopped doing LOIs b/c of a proliferation of paper tigers and we had no way to systematically track them. Do you have a routing process or a registration process for LOIs?

Riall Nolan: We do have a tracking system. Everything has to come through our office eventually. With the LOIs, of course, we can simply advise units on what to say and what not to say, and let things take their course. With MOUs and Activity Agreements, there is a routing system for these which involves us, the business office, contracts and eventually the provost. Units simply cannot sign whatever they wish. But copies of all three types are filed with us, along with a narrative which describes who did what and when. It's very helpful, actually.

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Riall Nolan: I think one of the most interesting aspects of my work with institutional partnerships is that of the other partner. As complex as our own institutions are, our partner institutions are equally complex, but often in very different ways. To cite but one example that I am sure we all know about: most of our institutions subscribe to some form of "shared governance" where the faculty determine a great deal of what gets done, but many of our partner institutions overseas are much more top down (and seemingly little the worse for it).

So I am always interested in learning more about how our partners do, and see, things. And I'm particularly interested in how they see us.

Which leads to my question: do any of you think it would be helpful to have another online discussion like this one, talking about partnerships with U.S. institutions, but involving more (many more, hopefully) of our international partners? I'm sure we could arrange this.

It might be highly instructive to hear from our colleagues in other countries about the issues, frustrations, or challenges that they perceive or encounter when trying to initiate or manage partnerships with us.

What do some of you think?

Susan Lambert: Susan Lambert from UNC Charlotte and member of the IEL team, here. Riall, I think that's a fantastic idea. We could all learn a lot from the interaction with our colleagues overseas.

Here's an example that presents quite a challenge to me. The SIO at most Korean universities is an appointed, short-term, faculty position. The president or provost appoints a faculty member to serve as SIO for one-two years. After we get to know each other many of them have admitted to me that they didn't want this position, but had no choice but to do what was expected of them. The outgoing SIO doesn't transfer much more than a copy of the MOU to the new SIO so I have to start to build the relationship almost from scratch every time this happens. I keep a brief history of our activity with each institution and send this to the new SIO along with a message of congratulations on his/her new position and an expression of how much I am looking forward to working with him/her. The international office staff members usually remain in their jobs for a long time. They have been invaluable in this process so I cultivate my relationships with them as I am building relationships with their new bosses. Does anyone have a good strategy for keeping the institutional relationship growing under these circumstances?

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Julie Blair: Downing Thomas here as associate dean for International Programs (Univ. of Iowa). Relating to question #1, what is the best way for the SIO to be seen across campus as a player in international linkages and partnerships? I can easily imagine that a medical school dean might feel that she or he can go it alone; yet many potential benefits to the campus may be lost because the medical dean may not see the supplemental benefits to other parts of campus to his or her partnership.

David Sammons: Here at Florida, we have a "Cross Campus Coordinating Committee" that brings together all international program officers from across the campus once a month. The time is used to exchange information from our various units, to seek ways of better integrating our work with that of other units, and simply for the stimulation of being in a room full of individuals who care about international engagement. As the international director in the Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences here, this has been very good for me both in understanding the broad issues across campus as well as conveying what we are doing to a larger audience. It takes proactive effort on our part to link across the campus, but it is a necessary part of the job.

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James Cross: Since we only have one hour I am sending out the second question. Please feel free to spend more time on the first one.

An important part of international collaboration often focuses on student exchange. What are some of the financial (tuition) challenges of "exchanging" undergraduate and graduate students from U.S. public and private institutions with undergraduate and graduate students from European and other institutions around the world? Again Marianne could you lead the initial response?

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Marianne Hassan: Undergraduate exchange is difficult on three counts for private institutions: tuition, visas, and enrollment pressure. We just dont have the space for undergraduate visitors that aren't part of a true exchange. We find our students reluctant to go to many of the institutions that want to send students to Duke. We are budgeted in a very decentralized way at Duke so tuition is real money. with tuition in excess of 30K, it is hard for visiting international undergrads to pay our tuition. our students won't tolerate paying Duke tuition if they are going to a public school elsewhere in the world. The Pratt School of Engineering hasn't solved the tuition differential problem. I have no good solution to suggest.

Riall Nolan: We have some of the same problems that Marianne mentions, foremost among them being the issue of having many institutions that want to send students to Purdue, but few Purdue students wanting to go there. We don't see a problem with our students paying Purdue tuition to go elsewhere, however. But on the imbalance issue, we have had to look hard and long at institutions which approach us wanting to send students, and we spend considerable time with our academic units here to determine whether there is any real possibility that Purdue students will want to reciprocate. If there is not, we regretfully decline the opportunity. And we consider the sending of Purdue students to be primarily an academic unit's responsibility, with us in an enabling role. If the unit does not see value for their own students, it will never really work.

Marianne Hassan: We try to avoid the use of the word "exchange" in our MOUs. We use a lot of different language to describe people moving back/forth. Two big areas of growth for us are: study abroad programs and experiential learning opportunities. Study abroad are formalized and have structures to them. The experiential learning opportunities are turning out to be life changing for many of our students. These hands-on learning experiences are very popular and get students into the field and out of the lower 48. Anything to get them out of the lower 48!

Sammons, David: The principal financial challenge with student exchange agreements, in my experience, has been sustaining a numerical balance in terms of numbers of students each direction. Our policy here and at my former institution is to "trade" tuition (i.e., our student pays here but goes to classes at the partner institution and vice versa) so that to maintain the program requires a reasonable balance in numbers of outbound and inbound students. This has been problematic in some instances, especially in those programs in which coming to the US is more attractive to partner country students than is the outbound (our student) side of the equation. When I say "reasonable" balance, I refer to the fact that we look at balance over a period of time—not year-to-year. That period has been variable but can be as much as five years. A secondary challenge is that some of our partner institutions do not charge tuition in the conventional sense, hence their students get a "free ride" from the tuition that our outbound students pay to their home institution. This has caused resentment in some instances but we have always pointed out that the tuition that our students pay at home must be considered an investment in their education and that the payment here would have been made if the individual had not chosen to study abroad.

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Robert Neuenschwander: I have been following this discussion. Lots of great ideas and comments! Do any of you use a Web-based management system for your partnerships, e.g., have a world map where faculty could select a country or region and pull up your agreements, summary of partnership activities (and when they took place), resources for faculty in developing agreements or programs, etc. Or if you don't have such a system, know of folks who use such a system? I would be curious to hear what you all are doing...

Riall Nolan: Yes, we use a kind of relational database for this. Some of it is on our Web site, so that faculty can quickly check what we have. The rest is internal, in our IT system.

Katherine Bellows: Dear Bob, we are in the midst of setting something like that up here at Georgetown. Several universities have these types of sites established—see Yale and Duke for starters. Collaboration with our IT people has been our biggest stumbling block—in that we need their help to create the framework. We hope to have something more concrete later this year to share.

Robert Neuenschwander: We recently created a space on our main Web page for all of our international linkages. They are listed alphabetically by country and then alphabetically within each country. At the top of the compendium is the alphabet so that one can click on a letter and bring up countries that begin with that letter rather than scroll through the entire list. Each listing is skeletal but includes the name of the institution, the general nature of the relationship, the date established, the date it will expire (or has expired), our own faculty contact and a space for a brief coment. We find that the list also serves faculty members looking to locate someone on campus with an interest in a particular country or region.

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James Cross: Here is the third question.

Can you share with us some examples of international partnership success stories and describe what your criteria for success are and what has made the partnerships successful?

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David Sammons: One of our stand-out programs is facilitated by a cooperative arrangement with EARTH University in Costa Rica, an agricultural institution in the eastern part of the nation. The partnership has been driven in part by the fact that a senior faculty member as well as the President of EARTH are graduates of UF and maintain strong ties to us through that legacy. In addition, a substantial number of our faculty (including senior administrative leadership) have been to EARTH and share a commitment to the partnership at multiple levels: academic, research, and Extension. The partnership has numerous components including student exchange, faculty sabbaticals, joint conferences on key issues of mutual interest (e.g., bioenergy), exchange of information on governance and policy issues, sharing of expenses associated with the partnership, etc. The partnership endures as a success story because it is so broad based on both sides. Success is gauged by durability (at least a decade at this writing), by shared interests and commitment ($$$ from both sides to make the relationship work), and by virtue of the synergy that has been generated by the relationship—permitting gains to both sides of the partnership.

Marianne Hassan: We look at success in two ways: did we accomplish our goals and is it sustainable. For my Saudi project, we're halfway to accomplishing our goal of deploying a BS computer engineering program for women. Sustainability is worrisome. Turnover, politics, student interest, faculty recruitment, finances are all variables that could halt the project. If this goes further, we'll have an assessment professional work with the team. Maybe this is too simplistic, but right now most of our projects are very goal/mission driven.

Riall Nolan: One nice example is our "Sohmen Program" named after the Chinese alumna who endowed it (her Chinese family name is Bao, but she's married to an Austrian named Sohmen. . . ) which provides for exchange of students and faculty between Purdue and two Chinese universities.

This is an interesting example of a combination of top-down and bottom-up initiative. She originally donated the money, and was very specific about the choice of university. Neither university was considered truly top rank by Purdue's faculty, who initially sniffed at the offer. Our office saw it differently (I'm with Marianne, get 'em out of town by any means necessary), and as a golden opportunity to build faculty interest in China.

She provided the money, but let us basically design the program, as long as Chinese and American students and faculty were moving back and forth. So we involved two of our colleges, one of which was initially reluctant, and got the program started. It has now proved to be not only one of the most popular exchanges on our campus, but it has wrought a real sea change in the thinking of both participating colleges, and especially in the initially reluctant one. We now have "champions" for this program at several levels, plus a growing cohort of what I might term beneficiaries, since we designed it to give both as many of our faculty and our students exposure to China. For the Chinese students and faculty, we chose to provide intensive rather than extensive experience, meaning that far fewer Chinese come to Purdue, but they come for much longer, and have more involved interaction with us.

So the stars were aligned: we had the money, we had some initial direction and framing from our office, we had the support of our president and provost. And fairly quickly, we had the support of key faculty members. But had we waited for faculty enthusiasm, we would never have gotten the program that we have now. Initial reaction from the deans of both colleges was lukewarm. This changed fairly quickly once things got underway. And the response from students, and faculty alike, has been very strong.

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James Cross: Thank you everyone for participating in this conversation. Please keep the discussion going.

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