Production and distribution of city club forums and ideastream public media are made possible by PNC and the United Black, Fond of Greater Cleveland, Inc.. Hello.

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Hello and welcome to the City Club of Cleveland, where we are devoted to creating conversations of consequence that help democracy thrive.

It's Friday, October 18th.

And I'm Mark Ross, retired managing partner of BWC and president of the City Club Board of Directors.

What a privilege it is to be here today to introduce Ted Carter, the 17th president of the Ohio State University.

There we go.

Those that know me know I didn't attend Ohio State, but rather chose to attend Miami University, which at the time had arguably the best business school in Ohio.

Fast forward 40 years and it's a very different story as Ohio State is thriving both on and off the field.

And being totally honest is a lot harder to get into today than Miami.

Right now, Ohio State stands at the doorway of great opportunity firmly and uniquely positioned to be a leading national flagship public research university.

Appointed by the Board of Trustees on October 22nd, 2023.

President Ted Carter began his tenure at Ohio State at the start of this academic year.

Since then, he has dedicated his time to learning about the university community, getting to know its people and traditions, and understanding what makes this university uniquely great.

He continues a collaborative approach to leadership he honed during a four year, four decade career in higher education and the United States Navy before becoming a Buckeye.

President Carter led the University of Nebraska system, the U.S.

Naval Academy and the U.S.

Naval War College.

He is a retired vice admiral and Navy naval aviator who has given 38 years of service to our country and logged more than 6300 flying hours.

President Carter also has a passion for Ohio State's land grant mission, and he is committed to leveraging the university's size and expertise to improve the lives of Ohioans and shape the future of higher education.

Today, we will hear from President Carter on how he plans to build upon the university's existing strengths and strive for excellence in the 21st century.

Higher education.

If you have questions for our speaker, you can text them to 3305415794.

That's 3305415794.

And the City club staff will try to work them into the second half of the program.

Members and Friends of the City Club.

Please join me in giving President Ted Carter a warm and familiar welcome.

O. H. O. H. I always wanted to do that.

Thank you, Mark.

Mark.

Thank you.

That was a very generous introduction.

More than I deserve.

What an honor it is for Linda and I to be joining you here in Cleveland at the City Club of Cleveland.

Historic venue dating back to 1912.

I've seen the the wall of speakers.

It's very humbling to be on the stage in front of all of you today, knowing who's been here before me.

I'm going to talk to you for about 30 minutes and we're going to take some questions.

Part of this is so many of you here I haven't had a chance to meet.

Some of you I have.

So some of the beginning of this will be a little bit of a get to know each other.

I'm going to try to tell you some things that you don't find on a Wikipedia page, because that's the first thing people tend to do.

The most important thing you should know is everything that's happened to me that's good in my life has really happened because of Linda.

But beyond that and our family, it all started for me, believe it or not, in Cleveland, Ohio.

I grew up in Rhode Island.

Linda grew up in Baltimore, and as a senior in high school, I was involved in a science fair project that would bring me to the international Science fair that was held here in the spring of 1977.

Now, some of you may have been around then.

You might know that the International Science Fair, which is truly international, was hosted in Miami, Florida, the year before I went.

And the year after I went, it was in Tokyo, Japan.

But the year I got to go, it was in Cleveland, Ohio.

Now, last night was a magical moment.

No matter whether you are a Cleveland Guardians fan, baseball fan or just a sports fan in general.

I mean, Mr. Noel and Mr. Frye hitting two improbable home runs, bottom of the ninth to out extra innings, bottom of the 10th walk off home run.

I mean, it doesn't get any better than that.

It really does.

Now, growing up in Rhode Island, I was a Red Sox fan and I had been to a Red Sox game as a youth.

But the only time I'd ever been to another baseball stadium was during that trip to Cleveland.

I went to go see the Cleveland Indians at the municipal stadium, 78,000 seats back then for baseball.

I think they were about 2500 fans there on a Thursday afternoon.

I could hear the conversation in the dugout, but I still remember that like it was yesterday.

The point of telling you that story, not just because I did have some humble beginnings here in Cleveland.

I actually won an award from the U.S.

Naval Institute.

My science fair project was in oceanography using water daphnia or water fleas to detect water pollutants and wells in the state of Rhode Island.

And because I won that award as an applicant to the U.S.

Naval Academy, I went from being basically an alternate under the Senator Claiborne Pell to all of a sudden two weeks after I'd been here in Cleveland, I got accepted to the U.S.

Naval Academy.

So I'm not kidding when I say things happened here in Cleveland.

For me, that would change the trajectory of my life.

Now, in my 38 years of serving the Navy, that doesn't include the four years at the Naval Academy where Linda and I met.

She was a student at the University of Maryland.

I would just tell you that my career in the Navy was really kind of in the three chapters that would eventually prepare me to come here and be the 17th president of the Ohio State University.

The first chapter was, as you heard, flying in high performance tactical jet aircraft carrier jet aircraft, about 6300 flying hours.

But the point of that is I flew in three very distinct generations of fighters F-4, Phantom, the F-14 Tomcat, which was the majority of my flying career, over 4400 hours, just in that platform.

And then the F-18 Super Hornet, the same airplane that's in the new Top Gun maverick movie.

I made over 2000 carrier landings 2016.

Because you don't forget any of them.

I hold the American record for the most aircraft carrier landings in history, and that was off 19 different aircraft carriers.

And the amount of flying that I did and the experience of having been a topgun instructor topgun graduate and doing that prepared me in the decision making type of things that prepared me for my life.

The second chapter of my naval career was becoming a nuclear engineer and eventually commanding the USS Carl Vinson, a nuclear powered aircraft carrier, the third in the Nimitz class line of aircraft carriers.

And then the final phase was this odd transition as a two star admiral coming off, bringing the USS Enterprise on her last deployment as a 51 year old aircraft carrier.

12 years ago, when you were celebrating the centennial of this great club.

I was out at sea on the Enterprise, bringing her home from an eight month deployment on her final ride.

And in that transition, I was asked to go lead the U.S.

Naval War College, and that would start what is now my 11th year of leading institutions of higher education.

So the US Naval War College only there for a year up in Newport, Rhode Island, back in my home state, and then the privilege of leading what I considered the best service academy.

Even its the second oldest, the US Naval Academy, and I was there for five years now in higher education.

That may not seem like a long tenure.

It's actually longer than the av But at service academy life, because of the pace and because of the rules, it turned out that that was the longest continuously serving timeframe for a U.S.

Naval Academy superintendent going all the way back to the Civil War.

So we had a long time then, and I did there at the Naval Academy.

And when I transitioned out of uniform, I was fortunate to be hired at the University of Nebraska where I started in 2020.

So, yes, just like all of you, we jumped right into COVID just a few months after that.

So four years total at Nebraska and recruited to come here to Ohio State.

And you should know, as I transition to where we're going to be going with Ohio State, the reason I said yes to coming here, not just because it's the Ohio State University that was obvious to me, to be quite frank.

I wasn't sure that an institution has story and is highly acclaimed as Ohio State would really be interested in hiring somebody like me.

I don't have a Ph.D.

I have a history in leading higher education.

My background is nuclear engineering and physics and oceanography.

But they were looking for somebody that be a transformative leader and they were looking for somebody that could take us through what I would call this intersection of the future of higher education at a critical time, a critical time not only for a state like Ohio, a critical time for our nation, and, quite frankly, the world.

And I'm very thankful to the state of Nebraska because I had that leadership opportunity at a large land grant, our one institution, also a member of the Big Ten.

But I really wanted to come to Ohio State because we're at a moment right now where our nation is wondering what the value of higher education is.

And I knew that the size of the microphone that I would have leading an institution, a great institution like the University of Nebraska, was not the same as what I could have to come here.

So I said yes.

And I will tell you, this is our 25th move.

Or so we argue over exactly how many we've had in our career.

We've lived in all four corners of the country and the middle, and now we're just a little bit right of the middle and overseas.

We lived in Japan twice, five years total, and this has been arguably not only one of the best moves we've ever had, but this is been one of the most welcoming regions of the country we've ever moved to.

And I know I'm in Cleveland, I'm not in Columbus.

But I will just tell you, as Lynn and I have traveled across the state and we've been here to Cleveland a number of times now, the people of Ohio are really, really special.

And I'm just honored to be here.

I feel like this is a place I was supposed to be all my life.

I just didn't know this was how it was going to happen.

So I started the job on one January of this year.

I spent a lot of time doing listening and learning.

I've been to all 15 of our colleges all four of our regional campuses, plus our Agtech Institute in Worcester.

I've traveled a fair bit of the state of Ohio.

I think I've been through about 44 of the 88 counties, and I've been in a listening and learning mode, and I wanted to do that because it is such a complex animal.

The Ohio State University, I mean, 65,000 plus students, 8500 faculty, that's the largest faculty, by the way, of any university in the country.

You look at faculty and staff combined, we're close to 35,000.

We're the largest employer in central Ohio and 117,000 employees, a Wexner Medical Center that takes care of 22% of Ohioans.

When you look at our $10 billion revenue, the medical center has half of that by itself.

And you look at what we offer as we went from an open enrollment program through the 1980s and became more highly selective in the nineties and really started going into that in the early 2000s and what Ohio State is today.

But I go back to what are the challenges for higher education across this nation?

You know, since COVID 1.5 million fewer students are in the roughly 5000 institutions across our country.

When you take a look at the conversation, in fact, Gallup just did a survey that ended in February, and only 36% of Americans said they had high confidence in post-secondary education or higher education.

That's not a good number.

Now, all large institutions have taken a pretty good dent in the confidence level.

But when you take in the fact that we have institutions, particularly privates in the Ivies that are now approaching or over $100,000 a year to attend.

So there's a real cost issue there.

And there is this idea of do you really need an undergraduate degree to be a useful citizen or get a good a job or to make a good wage?

And then there's this other discussion about are we indoctrinating students when they go to a public higher education institution?

Are we giving it a fair conversation across the entire balance?

And of course, we're more politically divided than we've ever been in our nation's history.

You put all that together and there's a question about whether higher education is either getting it right or whether it's worth it.

That's why I want to come to Ohio State.

And today I will tell you, after I've been to this listening learning mode for the last six, seven months and we're about to get into the action mode, I'm going to talk about that here in a second.

I will tell you that I found Ohio State is doing an amazing job.

The Association of American University surveys all of the members that are part part of that really proud organization.

We are the only university in the state of Ohio that is a member of the Association of American Universities.

They just recently survey, I would say recent, just like about a month ago, 1000 Ohioans, not Ohio State grads in the confidence factor of a thousand Ohioans by survey was over 75%.

High confidence in Ohio State.

So that's a flip over what the American public thinks about higher education.

So that's that's a little bit of good news.

But when you look across the board where we are today, U.S. News and World Report just came out with their rankings.

We went from 17 last year to number 15 across all publics.

And if you look a lot of our programs like the Fisher College of Business, our nursing program, where top ten nursing is number one in the country for publics.

So we have really excellent academic programs here.

We're also serving all Ohioans as selective as we are, a lot of people may not know is 67,000 students on board today, 73% of them are Ohioans.

The nation is seeing decreasing numbers today, not only an undergraduate but graduate programs today.

Right now, we have 11,400 graduate students attending Ohio State.

That's up.

It's one of the biggest numbers we've ever seen.

When we look at just the number of people that try to get into our undergraduate program.

I know I have a couple of people here today that have freshmen attending.

Congratulations.

That freshman class is the largest class in Ohio State history, 154 year history, 9530 students joined us from all 50 states and all 88 counties here in the state of Ohio.

And again, even in that class, we're over 65% Ohioans, 80,000 applications to get into that class.

So there is something special happening right now.

Today at Ohio State, I couldn't be more excited about that.

But we've got to think about how are we going to transform ourselves, how are we going to get past those concerns that I just listed?

And I've said this before, even though we were founded in 1870 as a land grant university, we're going to have to reimagine what it means to be a land grant university going past 2030 all the way to 2035.

So for the last month and a half, we have been in action.

We have been doing workshops with all different types of constituents across the state, not just faculty, staff and students, but our alumni, 620,000 strong, our very large donor base constituents across all across the state.

And we've been asking them what are the priorities that Ohio State should be paying attention to?

And on November 8th of this year, I'll be doing my investiture, you know, a storied tradition where the president is installed.

But I'm going to use my opportunity at the podium to talk about the next ten years.

And we're going to be launching our strategic plan, Education for Citizenship, 2035.

Now, some of you have heard that term education for citizenship.

It was a motto adopted by the university in 1938.

It's part of our land grant mission.

And I believe our job, our mission is to not only create the best learning and teaching environment in the country.

I believe our job is to create the pathway for the next great citizens of our country, the state of Ohio, and quite frankly, the next leaders for the state of Ohio.

In fact, my vision and again, I go back to why I came to this institution, I believe the Ohio State University is uniquely poised, uniquely poised to be the university for not only the state of Ohio, but for the United States.

That's the vision.

And we're going to do that by focusing on what I call strategic areas of focus.

And they won't surprise anybody.

It's going to be excellence in academics.

That's got to be first and foremost.

It's going to be research and development and done in a way not only to do things like solve cancer, but also across the board for Ohioans to change and save lives.

It also has to be world class clinical care.

As I mentioned, Wexner Medical Center takes care of 22% of Ohioans.

We're growing.

Central area of Ohio, particularly in Columbus, is projected to grow by another million people by the year 2050.

That's only 25 years away.

So we're going to be growing the medical center to make sure that we can take care of not only that region, but across the entire state.

We're also going to have a focus on making sure that we are creating a workplace and only draws the best talent and faculty and staff, but also retains them.

And then operations.

I mentioned earlier, we are a large, complex organization.

We are not for profit institution, but yet our revenues are somewhere between ten and $11 billion.

We maintain, you know, a positive balance sheet, but we've got to make sure that even though we don't have an unlimited amount of resources, that we are investing them in the right things going forward, which means that we know even in the academic side, we need more nurses, we need more doctors, we need more people that understand the future of agriculture.

One in seven people here in the state of Ohio are in the average agricultural business.

So we're going to be investing in areas like that and engineering, and we'll get into artificial intelligence.

Maybe in the question answer.

Then finally, the six focus of Operation Focus of strategic interests is going to be athletics.

Now, not many university presidents will actually put athletics into something that is important in the university.

But yet when those thousand Ohioans were interviewed and they said, What do you associate Ohio State with?

First, no surprise here.

No Buckeye football, of course, but beyond just a great football program, we have 36 Division one sports programs, over 1000 student athletes.

We're the largest, largest Division one sports program in the country.

The only other two that are close to us are Stanford and that other small little technical school called the U.S.

Naval Academy.

Believe it or not, they have 36 Division one sports.

But when you look at the budget, I mean, our athletics arguably only brings in about 3% of our total overall revenue budget, but it packs a big punch.

So when we're talking about a $300 million revenue generating entity, you might say, well, if it's that small, why are you even talking about it?

Because the landscape of athletics is changing so dramatically and so quickly.

Some things probably happened while I'm talking to you.

And we want to be not only that big voice in the Big Ten, I want us to be the voice nationally, because the thing we have to protect going forward is the student athlete.

Yes, there's going to be revenue generation.

Yes, there's going to be revenue generation that's shared with athletes.

Yes, there's going to be still name, image and likeness nil, although it needs to be bounded.

Yes, there'll still be things like Transfer Portal.

But at the end of the day, when a student athlete comes to Ohio State, we need to make sure that we're not bringing them there to be employees.

We're bringing them there to give them an education.

Some of them may go on to be professional athletes and we will embrace that.

But that part of athletics is so important and that I've said many times publicly, athletics is the front porch to our university.

You know, as Coach Ryan Day and I often talk, he reminds me that there are 16 million Buckeye fans nationwide.

I don't even know how we measure that.

It's probably more than that.

I know that when we unfortunately do lose a game, I hear from all 16 million.

Not to worry, we're going to correct that.

But as we think going forward, what we are going to care about and what we're going to do, it's always going to be first and foremost about our students, about making sure that we go back to our land grant roots and serve the state of Ohio.

And what I mean by that, even as we have to reimagine what being a land grant is going to mean going into 2030 and 2035, we have to have a pathway for every single student and adult learner here in the state of Ohio that wants to come to Ohio State.

And we do have that as selective as we are to get into the Columbus campus, those four regionals are open enrollment.

And if you are there for one year with a 2.0 grade point average, you're automatically accepted into our Columbus campus.

In fact, we average about 1000 to 3000 transfer students a year for people that take advantage of that.

And we want to continue to make sure that we advertise that, because I frankly don't think we talk about that enough and we will be investing in those regional campuses.

I want to make sure that they are up to speed not only in the academics that they offer, but in their structures, in their buildings and the people that we hire.

So as I look out on the landscape and as I look to the future, as we will do on November 8th, I will deliver the structural framework for education, for citizenship 2035.

It will be focused around those six areas of interest, and then we will start to fill out various specific initiatives that will be fit into those six categories and every single thing that we open up, whether it be some way to go towards affordability.

You know, a fun fact that people don't know today is at the undergraduate level.

Today, by the way, we graduate about 18,000 students a year of that crowd.

That leaves us today that just this is data that goes back to the graduating class of 2023.

58% of them leave with zero debt, zero debt, 58%.

If you wonder where that fits nationally, that's 20% better than the national average.

And for the other 42% that leave with some amount of debt, not counting the 58% zero.

The average debt of an Ohio State undergraduate is $24,000, also 20% the national average.

Now, I'd be happy to just sustain that and say we've got the affordability thing figured out, but we've got to do better and we will do better.

And I'm not prepared to tell you what numbers we're going to get to or what the eventual initiatives are going to be.

I just know it gets harder as you start to approach those upper levels.

Oh, it is so important.

So I want to not only be the place where people want to go, I also want people to say this is the best value education you can get for the dollar, whether you're in State Ohio or out of state.

So all of those will be critical as we look going forward.

I could talk a lot more about what the future is going to be, but I want to make sure I give everybody here an opportunity to ask some questions.

I think Mark's going to help moderate that.

We've got some microphones.

I know we're streaming online.

We'll be getting some questions from the audience out there.

And yes, I am on the record, but I'm always on the record.

But here's what I will tell you.

There is no question that is not on the table.

And I'm happy to talk about things that I did while I served in uniform, other institutions, or even about things that are happening here in the great state of Ohio.

All right.

We are about to begin the audience Q&A for our live stream and radio audience or those just joining.

I'm Mark Ross, president of the City Club Board of directors.

Today, we are joined by Ted Carter, president of the Ohio State University.

We welcome questions from everyone City club members, guests, students, including Ohio State alumni, as well as those joining via our live stream at City Club Dawg or live radio broadcast at 89.7 Ideastream Public Media.

If you'd like to text a question for President Ted Carter, please text 23305415794.

That's 3305415794.

And the City Club staff will try to work in the program.

May we have our first question?

Hello.

Our first question is a text question.

It says, What did you learn from your career as a pilot about facing adversity?

So this is a great question because I love to talk to students about the challenge that you're going to see in your life.

Not everybody is going to go flying high performance tactical jet aircraft.

I certainly get that.

But it doesn't matter.

All of us will get tested in a way that we just don't know what's going to happen.

So I'm going to and I were, you know, newly married.

My first squadron was Fighter Squadron 161, a storied squadron.

And we were flying off the aircraft carrier USS Midway.

So those are you've traveled out to the West Coast and fly in San Diego.

You'll see that's a museum piece down there.

USS Midway was a World War Two built aircraft carrier.

By the way, it was the largest ship ever built world.

Had that title for a number of years before something else surpassed it.

Flying off the USS Midway and the early 1980s, not necessarily in combat, you know, or the height of the Cold War.

The biggest challenge was just flying on and off the ship and dealing with Mother Nature.

You know, the ships, they bobbed through the water.

The event, I'm about to tell you is an example of what can happen to at a very young age.

I was 24 years old.

I was flying in the backseat of an F-4 Phantom pilot.

I was flying with was a Vietnam era and Vietnam era pilot.

And we had just gone out and done normal nine operations in the northern Sea of Japan.

Water temperature was very cold and low.

Forties.

We're coming home on a night mission.

And when we left the ship at about 10:00 at night, Sea State was very calm.

It was just great.

But when we came back, the sea had really kicked up.

So the USS Midway, almost at 1100 feet long, 40 feet from the flight deck to the waterline, displaced about 90,000 tons of water fully fully loaded.

The thing was bobbing around like a toy boat in a in a bathtub.

And typically, when you don't land after the first couple of times, you'll have to go up and get fuel from another airplane.

That's part of the airwing on board the ship that can refuel.

You.

And we typically keep two, sometimes three airplanes up to give that type of fuel for those that are having a challenge landing.

Well, this was one of those nights after the first three attempts to try to land.

We didn't even touch the deck.

The deck was pitching so badly.

In fact, I think on the second or third attempt, I saw the screws, the propellers of the aircraft carrier, the tips come out of the water that's talking a flight deck movement of over 30 feet.

So that's how bad the flight deck was moving.

So we had about 14 airplanes that were trying to land on this cycle and just everybody's navy on a couple attempts, but most everybody's landing.

And now we're on our sixth, seventh, eighth attempt to land.

And we still haven't land.

We've already refueled twice.

When we get to landing attempt number nine, we touch the deck, but we flew past the wires.

When you land, you've got a full power and bang, we're back up.

And now we're refueling for the third time.

There were only two tankers left in the air.

The one we just tanked off comes down, lands on the first attempt.

Of course.

And after landing attempt number ten, number 11, the captain of the ship finally came up and started to talk to us.

Back then, we didn't talk on the radio.

We use radio silence and now we're back getting back up on the tanker.

And this is the last piece of fuel that's left in the air, and there's no place else to go.

We're operating blue water operations, so we can't go land somewhere in a runway and we can't land another aircraft carrier.

So as we've just gotten our last drink of fuel and of course, the pilot that was in that last tanker, he eventually went on to be a Blue Angel pilot, Hound Dog McLain.

I still remember him.

He comes down and yep, he landed on the first attempt.

But Hound Dog did something very brave.

He gave us £1,000 of his own landing fuel weight, and he also broke radio silence at night on the back radio and said Steamer Pilot was flying with a steamer and not because he liked liberty is because he had high blood pressure.

That's another story.

And slapshot, this is your knight in the barrel.

And that's what we aviators typically called a night where it was hard to land and it was our knight in the barrel.

So after we made landing attempt number 12 with no success, the captain of the ship came up on the radio and it was like the voice of God.

Stammer Slapshot, you have three options.

You can come in and land into the net or rig the barricade.

Which of those of you seen the Top Gun maverick movie?

How the movie ends when he flies into that big net?

By the way, that's the hardest thing to do in aviation because you have to cut your engine before you come down.

So you commit to a smaller piece of the flight deck to plop your jet on at 150 miles an hour.

And it's at night and the deck is pitching.

Oh, yeah.

And the net had never been tested for this type model series, Airplane So that's what's going through in back of my mind at 24 years old.

The second is you can fly up the side of the ship while you know how much fuel you have, and we're down 2 minutes and do a controlled ejection and our helicopters will pluck you out of the water with 30 foot waves.

Now, back then, when the water temperature that we would wear wetsuits.

But, you know, it's the 1980s and, you know, we were invincible.

So it was always better to look good or better to die than look than look bad.

So a lot of us and this is what happened on that night, we were wearing a wetsuit.

Dickie, meaning we didn't have wetsuits on because it was uncomfortable.

You never going to have to jump out.

So that was going to be a bad idea because life expectancy in water temperature that without a wetsuit on was going to probably be in about a minute and a half and the helicopter has to find you.

And then the third option was come in with your hook down and land in the three wires like you've been trying to do the last 12 times and have been unsuccessful.

This is the life lesson Steamer.

Very experienced pilot, over 500 carrier lings.

I didn't even have 100 yet.

He said slapshot.

What do you want to do?

He asked me.

He didn't have to ask me.

I mean.

And he'd been trying to land this airplane for 2 hours.

You know, I was in the back seat being a supersonic cheerleader just kind of tell him how good he was doing.

And I said, Well, this thing's never been tested.

Go in the net.

I definitely don't want to go in the water unless we have to.

How about we just land this sucker?

So he came around on attempt number 13.

We were three stories above the flight deck.

We came in with a strategy that we're going to come above the flight deck, whether the decks up or down and then just dive into the wires.

And if we strip the landing gear off and we stop, you know, hold on to it, if we see sparks are flying, will eject.

So that was the plan.

And sure enough, as we came across the flight deck, three storeys high at a rate of descent, that would be the equivalent of sitting in a £50,000 thing and jumping off a two storey building, just dropping yourself to the ground.

As we came down on the flight deck, the flight deck had been up and even with our ready to send flight that came down, we caught the last wire trapped.

We stopped.

That was the night I found out I was going to Topgun.

So, you know, sometimes art does really imitate life because that was almost like the scene out of the original movie.

But the point was, I could ask something with little experience at 24 years old, and somebody listened to me and it turned out okay.

So again, I use that experience when I'm even coming up with a strategy for the future Ohio State.

I want to listen to our students.

I listen to what they say.

I want to hear what their input is, because I got asked that type of question in a life or death situation.

You know, many, many years ago about another question.

Hi, good afternoon.

My name's Elise Jablonski.

I'm a graduate of both the Northern England School.

So very happy to hear your comments today.

And I work in University Circle.

AH Ed's mentioned cultural district here.

I'm curious if you could speak to your thoughts on are the strategic plans, thoughts on the university's role in its local community and its surrounding neighborhoods and even in the city of Columbus?

Yeah.

So I would just say, knowing what I've learned and knowing the great history of Ohio State, the University always been the best community partner because it's been successful for so long.

It didn't have to be.

And as many of you know well, here in the great city of I mean, Cleveland is one of the biggest, most original, powerful cities in the state of Ohio.

Columbus grew pretty much as Ohio State grew.

And now it's one of the most vibrant areas, not only in the state of Ohio, in the country.

It's one of the fastest growing cities in the country and a reference to population growth.

We have a responsibility to be a good partner with our community and with the whole state.

I think it's part of when I talk about the land grant mission and what you will hear and see is us focused very much on pretty much every committee and every council in the city of Columbus, from the partnership to the business roundtables, because I think it's really important.

I also believe that we have a responsibility to make sure that our graduates, again, over 70% coming from the state of Ohio.

We need to show them everything that's an opportunity in the state of Ohio.

And to me, that means internships.

Now we're very good at doing internships.

The large companies in Columbus throughout the state are very good at recruiting and getting our students who want to come and do paid internships.

But when you look across the spectrum, and I know all the other public and private institutions in the state of Ohio are wrestling with this too, how do we get our best talent to stay in the state of Ohio?

And that means we have to show them what the art of possible is.

So I would like to see us do more.

Part of some of the initiatives that you're going to hear us talk about is making something that we don't do today is making internships mandatory.

I want every student, every single student at the undergraduate level to have gone through a meaningful experience, meaning internship.

And it doesn't just mean to go do a summer, get paid job.

It could mean an overseas educational experience.

It could mean working for something like the State Department in a foreign nation or working for a nonprofit will build this thing because right now we don't have the full platform again.

We do job fairs and we do some of these things pretty well, but I think we can take it to the next level.

And we're working with Jobs, Ohio and some other parts of the state here to think about how can some amount of money get brought forward to those smaller and medium sized businesses that can't afford to do paid internships so they can attract those students and also show them what's happening out there?

Because those internships eventually turn into what I call two way interviews.

It's the employer who is making the decision about whether that student would be right to come work for them.

But it's also the other way around without students saying, Do I really want to come work here?

And it's not going to just be one and done.

I think everybody should have multiple opportunities.

So I think that's an important part and it's also an important part of being a community partner.

Now you all know Intel's coming, right?

$20 billion investment.

That's an important partnership that we're going to have with them.

We're already doing that.

We're we're part of a 20 school consortium building academic careers for the future of that company.

But we also do that with Honda.

We're about to start doing that more with a company called Mitsubishi.

We're doing it with Amgen, who's going to bring pharmaceuticals to the state of Ohio.

So every large company that's either here or are coming here, we're going to have a big, strong partnership.

And it won't be just us alone.

We'll be doing it with other schools here in the state.

So thank you.

I'm going to actually elaborate on that last part of your question.

I don't want to talk about students or sports.

It's really the issue of how do you align the how do you support the interests of the economic growth for the state of Ohio?

How do you find those resources?

You employ some of the most talented, brightest people in the state.

How do you make sure they are also working for the growth of Ohio?

Yeah, well, first we got to make sure that we talk about it.

We got to make sure that we put something that's measurable and put targets out there.

I promised the governor that we would track where our students go and that we would help, you know, shape where they might go.

I'd like to go talk to more of these big companies and say, look at how much money you're spending and investing in recruiting nationwide.

What have you took some of that money and said, I'm going to create a cohort of 30 or 40 students a year, pay for them full ride to come to Ohio State, but guarantee them if they keep a certain grade point average and they intern for you that they're your employee for five years guaranteed.

Now, that might sound like a service academy model only.

There's kind of interesting parallel to that.

But you know what?

It works.

And I've already had a chance to do that in the state of Nebraska before I came here.

So the big companies can do that.

The smaller ones, maybe not so much, but when you look at the the partnership part of this, there's also a research part to this.

So right now west of our football stadium, there's an area on our campus called Carmen ten, and we've already put up two large research facilities there.

Peloton is a big constituent there.

But just since I've been here, we have now completely filled out both buildings.

We are full.

We have no more room for companies to put part of their operations and do research with us.

But that's just two buildings.

That's a tremendous piece of property.

We're going to be expanding that over the next ten years to include building apartments, restaurants, a place where you can work and live and be there.

And that's where we're going to start this partnership with other big and medium sized companies to do research together.

So I see nothing but really positive growth here.

And when I say we're going to grow as a university, I want to make sure that we grow with purpose.

Most universities in the country today measure themselves against one thing.

Well, two things.

And when it comes to research, they just tell you how many dollars they do in research.

And I can tell you the exact number, 1.4 or $5 billion last year, by the way, that was number one in the country that was ahead of Harvard.

It was the head of USC Chapel Hill.

That's great.

What did you do with it?

You know, so there's that part.

But the other piece that most universities measure is a graduation rate.

You want to talk about retention rate.

How many of your freshmen stay for their sophomore year, how many graduate in four years, how many graduate in six years?

That's where most universities stop.

I want us to pay attention to that.

After not only did we graduate 88% today, of those students that started with us, what did they go do with it?

Where did they go afterwards?

That, to me is the real measure of success and.

Although we do track it, we don't track it enough.

We're going to do a lot more of that.

I President Ted, my name is Andy Beamer and I am of the jacket.

Thank you.

I'm the scholarship chair for our local Ohio State Greater Cleveland Alumni Club.

This year we we've raised over $34,000 for scholarships.

Thank you.

And I've heard you speak before, and I think the audience would be really interested to hear about your interaction with your good friend Tom Cruise, teaching him how to become a Top Gun.

Yeah.

So when I went to Topgun in 1985 and now I'm 25 years old and the movie had not started yet and they brought the first Hollywood writers to Miramar in San Diego.

Top guns a real thing.

It was there, and back then it was a five week course.

Today it still exists.

It's in Fallon, Nevada.

It's a six month course now.

But back then it was just an air to air superiority course.

And we were in about week two.

It was all F-4 Phantom, by the way.

We were the last F-4 Phantom class to ever go through Topgun.

And when they first brought the script, it had already been determined by the Navy that they were going to do this movie.

So the Navy said, yes, we're going to do it.

But the Topgun instructors who were elite topgun instructors, I mean, when you say best of the best to become a Top Gun instructor, it was really something.

They did not like this movie idea at all.

In fact, the first script was stupid.

It had airplanes taking off of the Indian Ocean and landing in San Diego, so they had no concept of what it even meant to be on an aircraft carrier, the time and distance and all that.

So it was determined that they're bringing this actor, Tom Cruise, to Miramar right away and that top is going to fly him.

So you can imagine they not only didn't like the script, they didn't want to do any of this thing.

So when Tom Cruise and his handler first came to Miramar, instructors wanted absolutely nothing to do with it.

So they tagged me and another student to go to the Miramar Club.

Meet Tom Cruise, beat him some beers and make sure that he was inebriated enough so it would be a little painful for him the next day when they threw him in a swimming pool to go through his swimming test because you had to go through all that in case, you know, God forbid, you had to have ever had to eject.

So, you know, the funny part about it is, first of all, he was the nicest guy in the world and he was very interested in what we do.

Couldn't understand that, you know, when we told how much we got paid, he's like, why would you do this?

I mean, I still remember that conversation.

And of course, I think he had like a half a beer.

Enough people knew who he was because he had done risky Business and all the right moves in northeast Ohio.

You probably know we have a number of institutions of higher education that are struggling or closed and they're private.

And there were public ones as well that are struggling.

I'm wondering if there's any sort of strategy where the the Ohio State brand, you know, can in some ways be imparted on those other smaller universities and everyone shares in the greatness that Ohio State's been able to achieve.

Yeah, but also a great question.

By the way, the state of Ohio is one of the most popular post-secondary or higher education states in the country.

14 publics, you know, one flagship land grant are one.

But as has already been mentioned, we've got other great publics like Miami and Ohio University, and I put them all right up there.

And I've gotten to know all of my counterparts quite well, 24 regional campuses, again, concept born out of the 1960s, where we'd make these institutions have regional campuses so that you could get to any of our public institutions within some hour or hour and a half drive 23 community colleges.

So when you look at where we are, I mean, just at the public institutions, we've got a wide array, even though we are big geographic state in a big population.

And then, as you mentioned, the privates, 50 private institutions that are not for profit.

And then another 30 that are private, that are for profit.

So we do have a tremendous amount of post-secondary institutions across the state.

I would point out, first and foremost, there is enough population and enough need for higher education.

That is, we change this conversation from the seat of Ohio State, that we don't compete with each other.

And that's a natural tendency.

I saw that in Nebraska.

I've seen it states like Maryland.

Pennsylvania is another fine example that had this really big growth and public and private institutions.

And they've been struggling more than almost any other state.

And they've done some things that we can learn from in terms of trying to combine institutions When one is struggling and one is medium, what ends up happening is the struggling one drags a decent one down.

So as we look at what happens, particularly in the rural parts and by the way, we're part of that, our four regional campuses are in rural Ohio.

We have somehow done okay.

Now, not all of my regional campuses are growing at the rate I want Lima in particular.

But if I go back and look just two years ago at the enrollment and then look at the enrollment that we just did, again, we went against the national trend.

We're up 20% in enrollment at our regional campuses.

And I look at my peers in the public education system, the other 13 most of them are flat or went up a bit.

Community colleges, the Tri-C, I know you're doing well, 60,000 plus students, largest community college here in the state.

Yeah, but to your point, there's a lot of smaller private those at around 1500 or fewer students and I'll go back and you know Stacy Stauskas here is on the board at Wittenberg and she's a grad proud grad there.

They're struggling.

They just cut arts and some languages, not huge numbers of students, but they're not even being grandfathered.

They've got to go find a home for them.

And I think that trend is going to happen more and more.

Doesn't mean that, you know, Wittenberg is going to close, but it is a red flare going up and we've got to now pay attention that we're not here to rescue everybody.

But I do think that when things happen, there's enough of us in our institutions around us that we can pick up and support across the board.

We've got to find more pathways and bridge ways from any of these institutions that I mean, I know there's a lot of students, a lot of families here whose dream is to send a student to Ohio State.

I want to make sure that anybody that wants to come to Ohio State can make that a reality.

But I also know that there are going to be people that just want to go to community college.

Our son and my son, Christopher, went to community college in the state of Virginia, and then he went on to Denver where he got his degree and he's been very successful.

So we know the strength of going to community college and, you know, going on beyond that, I want to make sure that we have that pathway and bridge way.

We have not historically been very good at taking other universities or community college credits and transferring all.

Then I don't want to have you with an associate's degree with 60 credit hours and show up at Ohio State and find out that only 25 of them count.

We're going to have to take a look at that and maybe do a better job.

But I will just say this to answer your question.

If we're going to be a rising tide as Ohio State, we've got to be able to lift all the boats.

All the boats.

So, yes, I am all in on making sure that whatever we do not only does not negatively impact other institutions, public or private, but it will raise them with us.

Good afternoon.

We have a text question How is the university adapting curriculum to artificial intelligence advancements and preparing students for its impact on the job market?

Yeah, I'm so thankful this question came up because I promised I would talk about it.

A lot of people don't know that have been thinking about and actually applying artificial intelligence at Ohio State since 2018 2018.

Now this is warms my heart because while I was running the U.S.

Naval Academy, we did a curriculum review.

And as you can imagine, service academies don't change their curriculum very often.

It's been about 50 years since we have changed our curriculum and we created mandatory cyber education courses.

And I would argue that they are the beginning of understanding artificial intelligence.

Are the same.

So now today, at a place like the U.S.

Naval Academy, they have that in their curriculum.

We have not changed our curriculum at Ohio State to make anything that is associated with or even integrated just yet with understanding the basics of artificial intelligence, because it's here now, whether we know it or not, we're living with it.

And I will just described artificial intelligence and kind of three different bins that we're going to have to understand and integrate cross-disciplinary think, not just like create a brick and mortar or a curriculum that's dedicated to artificial intelligence.

I'm talking about touching every single course and every single thing that we do.

But when you think about what artificial intelligence is today, there's what I call playing offense.

You use a sports analogy.

This is using a tool that can go into huge amounts of data and come up with an answer faster than just normal computing or what a human can do.

And sometimes even the the efficiency of a few minutes or a few seconds faster with the right answer can be the difference between a life or death, particularly when it comes to doing analysis in medicine and other applications such as that.

So those are the positives that we can get out of that.

We're doing a lot of that today.

The negative side are the playing defense is understand the nefarious parts of what artificial intelligence can offer to people chat cheap to use as a cheating mechanism to write a paper would be just an obvious example.

But there are also cyber intrusions piracy, stealing that could use artificial intelligence to do not so good things.

And the third one that most people don't think about or talk about enough is the energy consumption from using artificial intelligence.

So chat GPT a lot of people become familiar with that.

The operation of that for a single day will power 180,000 homes, 180,000 homes.

So this excessive amount of use of energy to do quantum computing, to do generative artificial intelligence, to go into these massive terabytes of information, to pull out an answer that we're using at our fingertips or our cell phones every day is burning up energy at a horrendous rate.

So if we don't address that either through our own research or understand that we're going to start running ourselves out of energy, we're going to start to see rolling blackouts.

Even the state of Ohio, we're going to have to take that on.

And it's going to have to be institutions like Ohio State that's going to tackle that.

I would submit to you that over the next ten years, we will invest somewhere between half and a full billion dollars in artificial intelligence.

In terms of how we apply it, it's research we're going to have to.

Brace it.

It's going to be in just about every single thing that we do.

So, yes, it will be a critical part of our strategy.

And finally, I would tell you that if our students, when they graduate here, even this next couple of years, if they are not be able to articulate and manage themselves within an artificial intelligence world, they will not be ready for the workforce.

Every employer is going to expect students come in and understand not only the benefits but the detriments and how to manipulate the elements of artificial intelligence.

So we we have as a requirement, a mandate to make sure that we make sure that our students are ready for the future of the workforce, the jobs that are going to be available to our students by the year 2030.

Over half of them don't exist yet.

So we're going to have to be prepared to make sure that we can be dynamic enough to prepare those students, those future students, those future citizens through education and ready for that job market.

Thank you very much to President Ted Carter for joining us at the City Club today.

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And that brings us to the end of today's forum.

Thank you once again to President Carter.

I'm Mark Ross, and this forum is adjourned for information on upcoming speakers or for podcasts of the City Club, go to City Club Dawg.

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