Station:    YouTube.com, IITV channel

Show:       Independence Institute TV

Guests:    Ganahl, Heidi

Link:        https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCu-w7huUgtiCV0MZHa5ltYQ

Date:        March 6, 2020

Topics:     Colorado Springs 

Click Here for Audio

HOST JON CALDARA [00:00:04] I’m John Caldara. With me is CU Regent and all-around great person, Heidi Ganahl. Thanks for joining us.

UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO REGENT AT-LARGE, HEIDI GANAHL [00:00:11] Thanks for having me, Jon!

CALDARA [00:00:11] All right. So we’ve talked a lot over the years and, um, I know people don’t understand the regents here in Colorado. We have elected regents. You are an elected regent, statewide, if that’s –.

GANAHL [00:00:26] Yes.

CALDARA [00:00:26] All right. So there’s one for every congressional district, and it is still a partisan seat. Correct?

GANAHL [00:00:33] Yes.

CALDARA [00:00:33] I love this because at least you get a sense of who’s on the board — at least a tiny sense. I know there’s a push right now to get rid of elected regents. I don’t know how they’re going to do this, why anybody would want it. Give me your feeling on it.

GANAHL [00:00:49] Well, I think there are — the powers that be want to have a bigger say in higher ed in Colorado and don’t necessarily agree with some of the decisions we make. So, I think that’s why.

CALDARA [00:01:05] But otherwise you have bureaucrats or the governor putting in the regents. Like, at CSU, the board is — board of directors —  and same thing with, I think it’s Metro State and others — these are appointed. And so whoever is in power, those are the ones who run the university.

GANAHL [00:01:22] Yes, Colorado is one of only four states that elects their board of regents. And it was written into the state constitution. Our constitution is from Michigan. I didn’t know that untill I became a regent.

CALDARA [00:01:31] Really?

GANAHL [00:01:32] Yes. And so they basically copied the Michigan State Constitution. So they elect their regents in Michigan also. And like you said, there’s one from each congressional district and then two at-large. And I’m one of the at-large. And we serve six-year terms. We don’t get paid, although we do get football tickets and all-access parking passes, which is very cool.

CALDARA [00:01:50] Can you sell those?

GANAHL [00:01:52] [laughing] No, no, no, we wouldn’t do that!

CALDARA [00:01:53] We should sell those!

GANAHL [00:01:55] That might not go over well!

CALDARA [00:01:55] I do want to talk to you about, particularly, political correctness on campus.

GANAHL [00:02:01] Mm-hmm.

CALDARA [00:02:01] Let me give you in my background real fast, which was, I was a cartoonist, [a] terrible cartoonist. I had a comic strip in the Boulder Dai– no, excuse me, it was the Colorado Daily. And I syndicated it to about 50 papers across the country. I wanted to be Trudeau or Berkeley Breathed from Bloom County. That’s what I wanted to do with my life. It didn’t work out, mostly because I couldn’t draw, I couldn’t spell, and I wasn’t all that funny. Other than that I was a really good cartoonist.

GANAHL [00:02:30] [laughs].

CALDARA [00:02:30] But I found that was my first real impact with the politically correct movement. That was in the late 80s, early 90s. And every time I got into a paper, I would get pulled out of a paper because I offended somebody. I was in a liberal arts college someplace, and a black trustee didn’t understand the term black humor, thought it was racist, and had me yanked out. I mean, this stuff was happening all over [at] the time. So, the cancel culture of, “You can’t say that,” I thought it peaked back then. What does that mean? [responding to Ganahls shaking her head and grimacing]  What is that? What does that ‘no’ mean?

GANAHL [00:03:10] It did not.  The narrator says [laughing], “It did not. It’s alive and well.”

CALDARA [00:03:11] Is it better? Is it worse? What do you see? Because you spend time there. I had hoped that by this time, whoever my successor is trying to be a conservative or putting out something actually had freedom to speak without being shut down for what he says.

GANAHL [00:03:30] It breaks my heart every day. I hear stories from students on both sides of the aisle that talk about what happens in the classroom, what happens on campus, what happens at parties. And it’s not always the faculty. The faculty get blamed, but it’s — a lot of times it’s the other students. And they have this mentality that if you disagree, you need to be shut down, and to be shouted down, or you need to just be quiet. There was an article — I can’t remember which publication, maybe The Atlantic, recently — that actually talked about the conservative ‘quiet culture.’ So everybody’s just quiet. They don’t fight back. They don’t push back. They’re just quiet. And that’s what I sense.

CALDARA [00:04:12] That’s heartbreaking –.

GANAHL [00:04:13] Mm-hmm.

CALDARA [00:04:13] –because the idea of going to college is to be exposed to things you’re not exposed to, to have different ideas. So a friend of mine is Ann Coulter. She’s a drinking buddy, and she’s a lot of fun. I remember years ago she came to CU and invited me to join her. So we’re there in Macky Auditorium, and she kept getting shouted down. A lot of people [were] screaming, “Liar! Liar!” And so she couldn’t talk over them. When she came back a few years later — I think it was a year or two ago — they changed tactics. They filled the room full of activists. And then about 10 minutes into her speech, they all got up and left. So all those seats could not be filled by all the people who wanted to come and see the event. They waited long enough so that the crowd outside would go away. And they denied people from seeing her speak. And I’m trying to think, what happened to good progressives? What happened to good liberals that said, “I’ll fight to my death for your right to say it. The ends don’t justify the means.”.

GANAHL [00:05:18] That’s right.

CALDARA [00:05:18] I don’t see them. What are you seeing? Is there an example you have?

GANAHL [00:05:22] Well, the best example I can think of is when we hired our new president [Mark Kennedy] and we had a forum up at CU Boulder. About eight or nine hundred people showed up. And it was a pretty controversial hire, because he happened to have been a congressman — or a conservative congressman — back in the 2000s. That was it. That’s the only reason.

CALDARA [00:05:39] That was the controversy! He was a congressman, and he was a Republican one!

GANAHL [00:05:44] Yes. Yes. And the whole place was filled. They were upset, angry, really just loud and boisterous. And one of the conservative students — she’s a senior — got up and said — you know, it was a Q&A — got up in front of the whole audience and said, “You know what? It’s really hard to be a conservative at CU, if you can’t tell.”  And the crowd shouted her out, shouted her down, and basically forced her to pretty much leave the auditorium. And she had to have a security person leave with her because she was saying that it was hard to be a conservative on campus.

CALDARA [00:06:20] I survived CU Boulder as a conservative libertarian, and it was hard back then. And I didn’t have a thousand people shouting me down. It is really intimidating stuff. And we’re teaching our kids: Shut the hell up–if you want to get forward, be quiet. I look at what CSU did with their speech code. You can’t say things like, “this is a cakewalk,” because somehow that’s racist.

GANAHL [00:06:48] Don’t say ‘America!’.

CALDARA [00:06:48] Don’t say America.

GANAHL [00:06:50] Yeah.

CALDARA [00:06:50] And people really don’t think this stuff is real. Tell me that it’s real!

GANAHL [00:06:54] Oh, it’s so real. It is so real. And I mean, the easiest way to avoid addressing it is to say it’s not real or that we’re making it up, right? But you look at the surveys that are being done, you look at the drop in admission rates, why is that happening? A lot of parents, as you go out and — I travel the state because I’m an at-large regent, and I travel the state and hear parents say to me, “I’m scared to death to send my child to one of these universities or college campuses. They might change. They might change — transform their value system or the way they believe, you know, and how we raised them.”  And more and more parents are deciding or asking their students to make a different choice. So, you know, conservative parents are going to start voting with their dollars, their tuition dollars.

CALDARA [00:07:39] It’s not not just the parents. I mean, I think about my daughter who’s thinking about college, and she is really hesitant to even consider CU. Because we live in Boulder, she knows how unfriendly it is to somebody with her point of view. She wants to get away from that. She wants to go someplace where she feels not threatened.  And that — it’s — they don’t think it’s real when we say, “No, this is real!”  What’s news for me, though, is I’ve always thought it was the faculty. I always thought it was the instructors. You’re saying not as much?

GANAHL [00:08:13] No. In fact, I think we have some pretty awesome faculty. I mean, the thing that does worry me is I think the latest stats are 94% of faculty on campus are left-leaning.

CALDARA [00:08:26] A surprise to no one.

GANAHL [00:08:26] Right! And so, they’re not getting the other side of the story. Even if someone has the right attitude, a faculty member wants them to hear both sides, there’s still going to be some, you know, some bent, one way or another, depending on what they are. So I’d love to see more diversity of thought, more viewpoint diversity in our hiring, in our — in the folks that run the classrooms. But I also think it’s on the students to ask good questions and be curious and want to hear the other side of an issue. It’s what President Benson said:  “let’s teach our students how to think, not what to think.” But students have to be hungry for that and curious and brave enough to speak up and ask for both sides of the issue. And that’s one thing I’ve been really passionate about the last couple of years, is hosting debates. Every semester, I try and host one debate on campus just so they can hear different perspectives. So last semester we had Bobby Kennedy, Jr.and Alex Epstein debate the role of fossil fuels and climate change.

CALDARA [00:09:29] Oh, yeah!  For those who don’t know, Alex Epstein — do I have that name right?

GANAHL [00:09:37] Yeah, yeah.

CALDARA [00:09:37] –wrote an important book, no matter how you feel about the issue, because it’s an argument that never gets made. Who showed up?

GANAHL [00:09:42] Six hundred people.

CALDARA [00:09:44] Really?

GANAHL [00:09:44] Yeah! It was –.

CALDARA [00:09:45] Who won?

GANAHL [00:09:45] Um, I mean, it depended on who you talked to, but everybody walked out with an understanding and different perspectives. And I must have had 30 people come up to me and say, “Can you do more of this? This is great!” We had Nigel Farage and Vicente Fox debate a couple years ago on, socialism — or nationalism versus globalism. It was great! And we had students that were very left-leaning come up and say, “That Nigel guy was kind of cool! I liked what he had to say. I see his point of view.”

CALDARA [00:10:12] I went there [to CU]. They had the Conference of World Affairs.

GANAHL [00:10:14] It’s coming up in a couple weeks.

CALDARA [00:10:17] And it was a — it’s a conference of socialistic world affairs. There were no conservatives. And then they decided, well, we’ll bring we’ll bring one, you know, ‘headliner’ in so that all the experts that come in for this conference are still a bunch of left-leaning academics and writers, but they’ll bring in  one speaker to offset it. It reminds me of the — your Center for Conservative Studies. I forget the name exactly. And it’s good! You guys bring in a conservative once a year and he — or for a year.

GANAHL [00:10:50] We now have two!

CALDARA [00:10:50] Oh, two!

GANAHL [00:10:50] Yes!

CALDARA [00:10:50] Oh, my God! It’s a movement!

GANAHL [00:10:54] [laughing] It’s good! We’re making some progress, litttle by little.

CALDARA [00:10:55] And they — but they stay for a year and then they move on. And there’s two things that drive me nuts. One: you have to fundraise for this. So conservatives who want an alternative voice have to give the center money to go hire an alternative voice because our tax dollars won’t provide it. And it’s not a permanent position. It’s a visiting fellow. So they’re there for a year. And I’ve asked each and every one — every year we chat with them and I’ll say, “So, um, what — what has it been like? Are they treating you well?”  They all say, “Oh, they treat me great!”  To which I say, “Yeah, because you’re out of here! If you were — if you are on the faculty, if you are a tenured faculty, they would not treat you so well. Am I wrong?

GANAHL [00:11:39] No. I mean, I think it’s one good thing that’s happening that we have to keep supporting and lifting up. There are amazing speakers that come through there and they’re doing the right things. But there’s so many other things we need to do along with that. And one of those is supporting our conservative students on campus. I mean, there are some great groups out there that you can donate just a few dollars to, show up at their events, you know, help them speak out and be brave and push back against this. That’s one of the things we can do. The other thing is, you know, if you’re a student, be careful which program you pick. And–.

CALDARA [00:12:14] How do you mean?

GANAHL [00:12:15] Well, there’s a difference between being an engineering student and, um–.

CALDARA [00:12:18] A sociology student.

GANAHL [00:12:20] –a sociology student. Yeah, and you’re going to get different messaging. Or pick — you know, look at the colleges that you’re picking. Or, you know, just pay attention.

CALDARA [00:12:32] That’s a lot to put on a kid. I just want there to be some balance and I want them to feel like they can speak without being canceled, and that speakers can come without being canceled. What’s the final answer? Is there something in Colorado that protects people? You guys put out a letter, I’m trying to remember what that was. Give me–.

GANAHL [00:12:52] Yeah, [we put out] a letter to incoming freshmen about how important freedom of expression is and free speech, etc. We also — I worked really hard for a couple of years with a couple of the regents to change the regent policy and law to get rid of — as much as we could — safe spaces or free speech zones on campus. And then we went to the legislature. Marcus Fotenos, one of the student leaders at CU Boulder, led that and got the law changed in Colorado.

CALDARA [00:13:19] From what to what?

GANAHL [00:13:20] Well, it just — it doesn’t allow college campuses to have, like–.

CALDARA [00:13:23] Speech zones.

GANAHL [00:13:25] Yes, speech zones. Now, that still happens. It’s just less prevalent.

CALDARA [00:13:30] The idea that the regents made a strong point of, ‘the whole campus is a free speech zone.’ You don’t — you can’t bottle them up here. And speech is speech, even if we don’t like what you’re saying.

GANAHL [00:13:42] That’s right.

CALDARA [00:13:42] How did — who fought that? Why was that–?

GANAHL [00:13:45] [unintelligible].

CALDARA [00:13:45] I mean, you were one of the first — you were one of the first colleges to do that around the country. And I think everybody should go to their alma mater with that letter and say, “Look what they passed!”.

GANAHL [00:13:54] Yeah.

CALDARA [00:13:55] “What are you doing at CSU? What are you doing at — at your alma mater?”

GANAHL [00:13:59] Yeah, it was it was a fight. It was about — I mean, they knew our intention was to support and help our students have more opportunity [to] be courageous and speak their mind. And I don’t know that, you know, that’s always the case. They, uh — some of the folks on campuses would rather just things be chill and one-sided. And that’s the way it goes. I mean, even when I ran for regent, the chalking that went on on the campuses–.

CALDARA [00:14:31] Chalking?

GANAHL [00:14:31] Chalking — it’s when they — you can chalk on the campus or write campaign slogans, etc.

CALDARA [00:14:37] On the sidewalks.

GANAHL [00:14:37] Yeah. It got disparaged, and the other sides didn’t. And [the] same thing happened with some conservative kids who ran for student body government at CU Boulder. It’s just — why does it only happen to our side? Or when the free speech wall got built at University of Denver and it got vandalized, ironically enough.

CALDARA [00:14:57] A free speech wall?

GANAHL [00:14:58] Yes, there was a free speech wall.

CALDARA [00:14:59] What is a free speech wall?

GANAHL [00:15:01] Where you can write your opinions and say what you want, yeah.

CALDARA [00:15:06] And it got vandalized?

GANAHL [00:15:07] It got vandalized, yeah.

CALDARA [0015:09] All right. I live in Boulder.

GANAHL [00:15:11] Mm-hmm.

CALDARA [00:15:11] You’ve lived there before, you’ve now gone to safer pastures, which is understandable. I find Boulder to be the most hateful, bigoted, uninclusive, least diverse community in all of Colorado. And the university just amplifies that;  that there are all these flowery words about inclusion, but if you’re a conservative, you’re not wanted. And it’s very clear. If you’re a gun owner, you’re not wanted. If you have a different take on climate change, you are not wanted.

GANAHL [00:15:45] If you want to open a charter school,–.

CALDARA [00:15:46] If you want to open up a charter school that has a classical, uh, you can’t do it. An arts charter school gets through. The other one doesn’t.

GANAHL [00:15:55] Seven hundred kids signed up for that school and we could not get it through. It washeartbreaking. And there’s — there are families all over Boulder County–.

CALDARA [00:16:03] Stop there, because folks may not be able to follow you there. That — Golden View Classical, and there is another one in DougCo, have a model that is called a classical model for charter schools.They study — guess what? — the classics: classic books, and Greek, and homework–.

GANAHL [00:16:19] And music and art and–.

CALDARA [00:16:19] Right. And it is so popular that people in Boulder ship their kids — if they’re lucky enough to get [in] — down to Golden. Golden has as many people on a waiting list as they have in the school. They went to Boulder Valley School District to open up their school. They got turned down, even though there were nearly a thousand parents going, “I will send my kid to this school. Let us there!”  But, no, because they have another viewpoint,.

GANAHL [00:16:48] Well, and one of the top performing schools in the whole state is Liberty Commons, run by Bob Schaffer, our previous congressman, and top — I think top — S.A.T. scores in the state.

CALDARA [00:16:59] –In the whole state.

GANAHL [00:16:59] Yeah, and Golden View is on its way. I mean, some of the top schools– at one point, I think four out of 10 were classical schools. And Boulder was not having any of that. And it — It was really upsetting.

CALDARA [00:17:12] It’s heartbreaking and it’s real. Before we go, let me ask you a couple of quick questions about your new your new hire. So you’ve got Mark Kennedy, who is now the president. People say we should know who everyone on that list was. So the Boulder Daily Camera, I believe, and others are suing to find out who applied for this job. That’s going to — if they’re successful, it’s going to change the dynamics of hiring throughout higher ed in all sorts of ways. Why didn’t you disclose who applied for this this job? You got lots of people who were interested.

GANAHL [0:17:53] We never have disclosed that in the process, when we’ve hired the other presidents. CSU didn’t disclose theirs when they went through the process. It’s pretty much — I mean, it’s a norm not to do that because the best people that you’re going to approach are already employed. And if their employer finds out that they’re looking for another job, usually it doesn’t go very well. And so somebody leaked the list, and sent it to a reporter.

CALDARA [00:18:16] Who leaked the list?

GANAHL [00:18:16] Well, there were only very few people that had access to the memo.

CALDARA [00:18:23] Who had access to the memo?

GANAHL [00:18:25] [laughs] Uh, I don’t know off-hand specifically–

CALDARA [00:18:27] Regents.

GANAHL [00:18:27] –but, yes. Yes.

CALDARA [00:18:27] Regents, and I’m assuming — was there an outside hiring firm that helped with this?

GANAHL [00:18:33] Yes.

CALDARA [00:18:33] Was the leak over there?

GANAHL [00:18:34] No. No, I can’t imagine.

CALDARA [00:18:36] So, it was in here.

GANAHL [00:18:37] Yeah.

CALDARA [00:18:38] And it was because this guy was a Republican congressman.

GANAHL [00:18:42] Mm-hmm. That’s my guess. Yeah, it’s been unfortunate, and I think, you know, we’ve all kind of moved on from it and tried to put it behind us. The lawsuit is still going on with the Daily Camera and they’re trying to change — going forward — how we can hire presidents at our universities and college campuses, which is re–. I mean, the recruiting firm told us, “You’re going to get a much smaller pool of applicants if you have three or five finalists that you put out to the public, and that publicly — because like I said, who wants to do that if you’re employed in a place, you know, that would be upset if you were going to apply somewhere else.

CALDARA [00:19:18] And when you boil it down to three, four, five, and you let the public know, then the lobbying starts. Then the attacks start. Then it becomes a political issue, not a hiring issue from the board. The analogy is, if you’re on a city council — when I was on the RTD board — and you’re buying — hiring a new city manager or a new executive director, you have interviews, you put together a group, you go through, and then you announce it. You don’t bring it to a public vote, because that’s what you’re elected to do.

GANAHL [00:19:56] Well, Jon, I mean, the whole process–. So, I was co-chair of the search committee with Irene Griego, one of the other regions, a Democrat regent. And we didn’t have to do that. We decided to make it bipartisan and do co-chairs. We had a 17 member search committee that was made up of alumni, community members, faculty, which was agreed on, jointly. The whole regent board agreed on who was going to be on the search committee — very bipartisan, very diverse. We did town halls. Irene and I did town halls all over the state, listening to people about what they wanted to see as attributes in our next president. And we vetted the process. We went through and made sure we still agreed that that should be the process for hiring. Everybody weighed in. Everybody was kumbayah about it. Went through the process. The search committee came up with six candidates out of 180 that they forwarded to the regent board. And the board of Regents interviewed and selected the one finalist, which was Mark Kennedy.

CALDARA [00:20:54] So, reviewed all of them and selected one.

GANAHL [00:20:58] Yep. So this — the high — the six people who the regent board interviewed were selected by a 17-member search committee that was very diverse, very bipartisan.

CALDARA [00:21:10] How many people applied?

GANAHL [00:21:13] I think about 180.

CALDARA [00:21:15] Really? Did my application get lost in the mail, because I didn’t hear a thing from you guys.

GANAHL [00:21:19] [laughing] Next time.

CALDARA [00:21:21] Next time.

GANAHL [00:21:21] Okay.

CALDARA [00:21:21] The — It came down –.  The original vote, wasn’t it unanimous?

GANAHL [00:21:27] Yes, it was 9-0. Everybody was so excited. We agreed that he was by far the best candidate. And then there’s a 14-day period where it goes public, and he travels the state and meets with stakeholders and does these forums and — yeah.

CALDARA [00:21:43] But was he hired at that point?

GANAHL [00:21:44] No, not till the 14 days is up. And then we [unintelligible].

CALDARA [00:21:47] Why is there a 14–?  I–I’m not — I’m confused.  Why is there a 14-day waiting period?

GANAHL [00:21:47] Yeah, I think it’s in the — it’s in Colorado law. It has to happen. .

CALDARA [00:21:55] Really?

GANAHL [00:21:55] Yeah, I’m pretty sure.

CALDARA [00:21:55]  That’s for people to yell and scream that it was the wrong thing

GANAHL [00:21:58] Yes. Yes.

CALDARA [00:21:59]  Are you happy with him?

GANAHL [00:22:00] Yes, he’s doing a very good job. And I think the legislators that I’ve met with, on both sides, are very happy with him. He’s doing a great job of building a strategic plan — a vision for the future — which was his first task to accomplish. He’s bringing the regent board together and having us work together on issues differently than we have before. And it’s, — you know, don’t believe everything you read in the headlines. We’re actually doing a lot of good work. Jack Cruel and I just got — just addressed application fees for veterans in Colorado. Regent Smith and I are working on a sustainability initiative. I don’t know if you’ve seen what Rick George has done at the stadium with the really cool aluminum cups and–. .

CALDARA [00:22:44] Oh, right. Yeah, I’ve heard about it.

GANAHL [00:22:45] –ways that we can–.

CALDARA [00:22:46] Oh, wait! Wait a second.! Now, when I went to there, we used to have the Solo cup fights.

GANAHL [00:22:49] Oh, yeah! That was so fun!

CALDARA [00:22:51] Right. We didn’t see this. So, in the kids’ section — where you didn’t sit down — about a quarter into the game, it turned into this melee of people throwing their beer cups at each other.

GANAHL [00:23:02] Yes, I remember!

CALDARA [00:23:03] And it was just — and it didn’t –.

GANAHL [00:23:04] Or oranges, if we wanted to go to the Orange Bowl.

CALDARA [00:23:04] And it didn’t stop until the end of the game. And that was it. And now you’re going  to replace them with aluminum cups?

GANAHL [00:23:12] They’re — they’re really cool. They’re very light, actually. They’re probably even lighter than a–.

CALDARA [00:23:16] Can you whip them?  Can you throw them?

GANAHL [00:23:17] I’m not going to say! I’m a regent! I don’t do that anymore!

CALDARA [00:23:23] Um, talk to me about the cost. As I’m getting to the to the age where I’ve got to put my kid through college. Oh my God! It was expensive when I went to school.

GANAHL [00:23:34] Yeah.

CALDARA [00:23:34] The degree hasn’t changed. Everything else in life has gotten cheaper. Airlines have gotten cheaper. Technology has gotten cheaper. Communications have gotten cheaper. College keeps getting more expensive. Why?

GANAHL [00:23:51] Well, there’s two reasons, in my mind. One is that it actually is more expensive to deliver the kind of degrees that most students are gravitating towards: STEM degrees, engineering, technology, etc. That’s one small reason. The bigger reason–.

CALDARA [00:24:06] An econ[omics] degree 30 years ago, and an econ degree now, is basically the same thing, isn’t it?

GANAHL [00:24:13] Point taken.

CALDARA [00:24:14] Your sociology class is the same then as now, with a few tweaks. All liberal arts degrees are basically the same and could be delivered online for five grand. I don’t — I’m waiting for this bubble to burst and it hasn’t burst yet because I think we all remember our four-year –in my case, seven-year, but — experience in college.

GANAHL [00:24:38] Yeah.

CALDARA [00:24:38] You know, the time you just wanted to stay at college and it was a great thing. And we want our kids to have that. But I don’t want kids to go into 100 grand worth of debt for an American Women’s Studies class.

GANAHL [00:24:53] Well, I mean, part of the problem is that the state used to fund the majority of our tuition. So, it’s — the formula has flipped. So now, we’re responsible for paying the majority of tuition. The state pays — in Colorado — very, very little of it. It funds about 8 or 9 percent of our budget, and we have $5 billion budget. So, that has happened. The other thing that happened was the federal government got involved and it started, you know, managing the student loans. And if a college knows that there’s a certain amount available to charge for the degree, what happens? You know?  You take the incentive to compete and be very lean and mean out of it. Another thing is the administrative bloat. We now have –.

CALDARA [00:25:35] Yeah, talk to me about this one.

 

GANAHL [00:25:35] It’s a little — it’s just — [it] doesn’t sit right with me. We are spending so much on administrators now in educat — in higher education. I mean, the faculty should be really worried about this, because they’re making a lot of the decisions that the faculty used to get together and make, right?

 

CALDARA [00:25:54] Well, the difference between faculty and staff is what? I’m assuming faculty — you’re talking about the professors, the teachers, the guys who are–.

GANAHL [00:25:59] Yeah, the teachers, the researchers, frontlines.

CALDARA [00:25:59] Right. And just like in K-12, we keep thinking that we’re gonna get more teachers, when in fact we get more administrators. While the amount of teachers per group of students has remained the same over the last decade, we’ve got growth [of] like 60% in administrative staff.

GANAHL [00:26:19] Right.

CALDARA [00:26:19] Who are these people and what are they doing?

GANAHL [00:26:21] Well, think about all the federal regulations that have been put in place in the last 10, 20 years. And think about how important it is to always be protecting everything that’s going on at the university. And so, it’s just, um — it’s unfortunate. I’d love to see the money go straight into the classrooms, and overall, to reduce the cost of college. I think that we can do better there. CU is actually pretty efficient. President Benson did a good job — and I think President Kennedy will continue to do that — of keeping an eye on that. But we can still do a lot of work there and drive the cost down that way. You know, if you want to send your child to college and have it be somewhat affordable, make sure that they have a good idea of what they want to do, so they’re not switching degrees a lot. Make sure they get as many AP and concurrent enrollment classes in high school as they possibly can. Make sure that they go to a college that is affordable and that — I mean, housing can burst the bubble, right there, right?

CALDARA [00:27:19] That’s like CU, then. CU is not a — CU is —

GANAHL [00:27:24] Or Denver. It’s expensive to live in these communities. And then finally, make sure you graduate on time. Only–I think–.

CALDARA [00:27:31] [facetiously] No, no.  No, no, no.  Never. Never do that.

GANAHL [00:27:31] [laughs].

CALDARA [00:27:31] I tried to stretch that out as long as I possibly could.

GANAHL [00:27:31] Once you’re paying the bills for your son–. Well, you know, what they’ve done now is shifted to talking about six-year graduation rates.

CALDARA [00:27:43] You’re kidding me!

GANAHL [00:27:44] No, and so when you hear graduation rates, ask them how many years. I think nationally, it’s like in the 40s for 4-year graduation rates.

CALDARA [00:27:52] You’re kidding me!

GANAHL [00:27:52] Forty percent, 45%, maybe. So that’s something to keep an eye on, too. But really, it’s about having a pretty good idea of what you want to do when you head in to college.

CALDARA [00:28:04] Do you ever think that online education is actually going to replace it?  The idea that, you know, you go to CU so you can sit in a lecture hall with 400 other kids listening to a — not the professor,  but the professors assistant give a class, I’m thinking, “Wait a second. We could hire the best professor or the best teacher and they could teach multitudes online. And then we could have ways to do it. When does that happen?

GANAHL [00:28:33] Well, I think what’s going to happen — and it’s already starting to happen, and luckily President Kennedy is on top of this. He talks about the fourth industrial revolution and how artificial intelligence is going to dramatically change and disrupt everything. So we’re gonna go more towards experiential learning, adaptive learning, where you’re actually doing the thing that you’re trying to learn about, or you are going out visiting, you know, communities where what you want to learn about — if you want to learn about, you know, architecture, you’re actually going out into the field and seeing how it’s done. And then, I think online is going to play a big role in, a) reducing the cost; but b) it’s going to dramatically change the way that you get a degree and move people to lifelong learning. So you’re going to get more certificates, digital badges, certifications. At “She Factor,” my new company, we’re looking at digital badging, where the girls can earn a digital badge by doing certain activities, watching a video, taking a quiz, and then they can put it on their LinkedIn profile. And then employers eventually will search by badges, not necessarily, you know, this much experience, this degree. I mean, Google and Apple and a couple other companies just took the requirement for a college degree off of their hiring process.

CALDARA [00:29:48] Yeah, they totally should.

GANAHL [00:29:48] So, be ready. Actually. –.

CALDARA [00:29:50] All right, so I’ve got an idea.

GANAHL [00:29:52] Yeah.

CALDARA [00:29:52] You’re an entrepreneur. You make these things happen. So I’m going to give you the idea. You go — you can become wealthy with it.

GANAHL [00:29:56] Okay.

CALDARA [00:29:56] Here’s what I really think the issue is, is that we do romanticize the college experience–.

GANAHL [00:30:05] Oh, yeah.

CALDARA [00:30:05] –going to the game, going to the student union, going to the parties–

GANAHL [00:30:08] Fraternities, sororities.

CALDARA [00:30:08] Right!  –all the stuff that makes the college experience. I I look back at my college years, and — [have you] ever noticed that in the mental files that you have that is your life, your past, you know, the college files — I mean, they’re just stacked, rows and rows of file cabinets. And then from college to today, it all fits in, like, one manila folder.

CALDARA [00:30:28] [laughs]. You know, you just remember all that because it was new.

GANAHL [00:30:32] Yeah, it was fun!

CALDARA [00:30:32] It was different, it was fun, it was scary! You know, it’s scary then, it’s fun in retrospect. It’s all wild! And so, sitting at home in either your apartment or your mom’s house on a computer, getting the class isn’t the same. So here’s the idea. We buy an old campus someplace, we buy a campus that has all the stuff: the student center, the dorms, the this, the that. But it’s an online school, so people come to do their online classes. So there might be from 100 hundred different universities, and some of them might get together for their classes here or their classes there, but they’re all being taught for five thousand dollars on online universities, but they’re living together away so they can have the sororities and fraternities and beer parties and the student union and all the rest. So, — because that’s what we’re paying for.

GANAHL [00:31:25] It’s like a camp.

CALARA [00:31:27] Yeah, It’s a camp. Get away from your parents. Learn how to live on your own. Here’s a safe place. Here’s a dorm, and the food, and the cafeteria. But instead of paying gobs in tuition, you’re paying a couple thousand because you’re doing it online.

GANAHL [00:31:39] Yeah but then you’ve got to pay just live on the facility, and join the fraternity, and go to the football games, so — yeah.

CALDARA [00:31:42] Yeah, but you’ve got to pay for [unintelligible] stuff.

GANAHL [00:31:42] It’s a good idea!.

CALDARA [00:31:42] But my guess is–.  Yeah, but — all right, you’re not doing it.  I’m bringing it to Shark Tank [referring to the reality TV show].  Those guys are going to do it!

GANAHL [00:31:54] [laughs].  I’ve got my hands full right now, Jon!  I’ll put it on the to the ‘To do’ list.

CALDARA [00:31:57] — put it on the the ‘To Do’ list.

GANAHL [00:31:58] Yeah.

CALDARA [00:31:58] Hey, thanks so much. This has been great. I’m grateful that you’re there. I’m grateful that other people are there. I’m grateful that you’re able to speak out, because regents traditionally don’t, you know, because they swim in the university world, not in the taxpayer world, not in the student world. And so, I’m grateful.

GANAHL [00:32:19] Well, thank you for having me. It’s important to talk about this stuff and it’s important to talk to parents and students about how they can do things differently, and have more success when it comes to speaking out or reducing their tuition or, you know, graduating on time.

CALDARA [00:32:34] What do I have to do to get the honorary doctorate? We’ve talked about this year after year after year. You guys make that decision, don’t you?

GANAHL [00:32:43] Yes. We have a committee. I’ll talk to the committee.

CALDARA [00:32:49] Heidi, thanks a lot.

GANAHL [00:32:50] Thank you. See you, Jon!