It's hard to have first impressions in this year - such an unusual year. What are some of your all's
first impressions of Columbus and The Ohio State University and Ohio? Well,
you know, I really haven't spent much time in Ohio over my academic career. I've been here a
few times, given a few talks, visited my dear friend, uh Gordon Gee when he was president,
both times. So that's been fun. In fact, the last time he was here, we were in his former office,
now my office, and he was in one chair, I was in the other, so we switched. So, it was kind of fun.
Um, loved getting to know the students, the faculty, and the staff, the administrators.
I mean, everybody is just out to be excellent and do the best they can. So that's pretty inspiring.
Um yeah, I mean it's it's been an incredible six months. It's been challenging, and some
of the challenges are to arrive on a campus as a first-time president with uh the pandemic that we
haven't seen in a hundred years. Uh, you know, it was something that was all-consuming and still is,
but we've made great strides. I just want to give you an update: our on-campus positivity rate is
less than 0.2 percent. Yeah, amazing. So, it's it's really . . . hats off to all the students,
faculty, and staff that are really, you know, staying socially distant and continuing to,
you know, do the non-pharmaceutical interventions that got us here.
In addition to Covid, tell us about some of the other
ways you're focusing on these big issues that are facing not only our community, but candidly,
our country. Yeah, well as you said, we're facing some unprecedented challenges. You know, coming
to grips with racism and systemic racism and doing more than recognizing it, but contributing every
day to creating an anti-racist society, which is really what we're bringing together, and we're
doing it in a couple ways. One is through our task force on racism and racial inequities. In our task
force on community and safety well-being - I mean, these are two things where we're getting together
some of the great minds at Ohio State and coming up with - I just received recommendations from our
task force on racism and racial inequities, and I plan to announce a few of the things we are going
to do about that next week at my State, my first State of the University Address. So, I'm very
excited about that. I spend every Friday um from 1 to 2 30 with the task force, and it's it's really
um been very eye opening and and very very very good. So that's that's one thing...um,
our students want to be back in the classroom. We want to be back in the classroom with them,
and so really working daily on making that happen and students just like ourselves want to be with
others and they want to be together. And so this Friday, we will be looking at allowing events and
gatherings for less than 10 students - still keeping with the state guidelines there - so I
think that we'll continue to build on the momentum that we've done keeping our students safe. And,
you know, one of the things that's so special about The Ohio State University, of course,
is its land-grant status. So, trying to define and envision what that land grant university in the
21st century shall be. And clearly, we have the opportunity to define that because of our size,
scope, and scale. We have everything. We have seven health sciences colleges. We have,
of course, a great liberal arts, engineering, business - now I've started to mention them,
if I don't mention all 15, I'll be in trouble so wait till next week, or i will. We can do it
all. And so here's to me the exciting thing about The Ohio State University: It was built to allow
people from ordinary backgrounds to do extraordinary things. And that was my grandfather.
My grandfather grew up on a farm here. He came here to Ohio State when there were 770 students.
We have almost a hundred times that today. What do you think the community needs to be doing,
and what advice might you bring to civic and business leaders that are watching, in terms of,
if not a critical eye, a discerning eye that says what what can Columbus and Ohio be doing to
to better leverage my sort of favorite word, the university? Well, thank you for that question
because it's interesting - the company that I started after I left the Department of Energy
as under secretary, was a hydropower company. And we actually had clients in Ohio. And there was a
particular plant that I always wanted to buy and upgrade and modernize a bit. So the company called
me, the new CEO said, well we finally closed on that plant, which is not too far away. And I said,
that's great - will you take interns from Ohio State? Will you take interns from our mechanical
engineering, electrical engineering department or sustainability? I got back one word: absolutely!
So, I didn't have a . . . it wasn't a big company - it was distributed throughout,
you know, 10 states. But we had a ratio of about 10 percent interns every summer to the total
number of employees that we had. We had double digit interns, and we had them all at corporate.
And they all did great projects, and that informed their future, their career - gave us a chance to
see some of the new talent coming out and do some innovative things. And it gave the opportunity
for the students to transition between work in the classrooms and work at work. So, I think that's
the one thing that we could really use help with - is having our corporate partners really think
about internships and co-ops at scale, because I'd love to give any student that has a particular
interest, the opportunity to get out into the real world and learn what it's like to be part of a
workforce. And I think it's an appropriate call out to look for those places where
we can engage and give the students a unique opportunity. Because when we do, they're more
likely to want to stay here. When they stay here, they're more likely to want to grow a family and
grow this economy in the way that we want to. You know, and that's a really good point. If I could
just follow on with that for a minute, Alex. Because when we were on the partnership call,
there were some, some of the leaders were talking about that they are adding, you know,
20, 50 employees a week. And having . . being able to be that engine that helps the company scale up,
is what we want to be. So that means engaging early so that we can get the students into those
experiences, but also develop the curriculum, the certificates, the other sort of opportunities to
educate students coming out, but also educate the workforce that . . . We have programs with,
for example, JPMorgan Chase where we're doing data analytics. And we're teaching a data analytics
certificate for a, you know, a group or a cohort - that's another way that we can add value, and
that's what we want to do - we want to add value to the community. It's such a fabulous community.