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[Auto-generated transcript. Edits may have been applied for clarity.]
Hello everyone, and welcome to conversations with COJO podcast.
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I'm your student host Anima, and today I have the pleasure to have speaking with David Earnest,
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Dean of the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences.
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A South Dakota State University. Thank you for joining me today. Thank you for having me, Amina.
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So our first question I would like to ask is you have worked as a teacher,
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researcher and administrator at various universities and how how have these roles influenced your leadership
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style at the College of Humanities and Social Sciences and your vision for the future of journalism students?
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That's a complicated question. As you know, I've worked in a number of different capacities teacher, researcher, uh, administrator and leader.
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And, um, it's interesting because as I was thinking about this question,
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I was thinking about what are the skills that unite those different roles and responsibilities?
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And it speaks to a little bit about, uh, journalism education. I think the skill that that is common among all three of those roles is listening.
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Um, it's a really important part of any of those jobs.
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If you're a teacher, an educator, a researcher, or a leader of an academic unit, you've got to have good listening skills.
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And of course, journalists have to have good listening skills to in order to do their job and to uncover information.
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And in good listening skills, is partly eliciting conversation and opening up the conversation with others.
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But it's also listening with critical reflection.
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Uh, you know, obviously if you're a journalist, you have to have a little bit of skepticism about what people are saying to you.
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And so you have to bring, uh, not just openness and empathy and kindness to communication, but also some critical faculties.
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And I think those are really, uh, important in the classroom and they're important in the laboratory or the research setting.
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And I think they're important, uh, in leadership as well. So I think those are some of the skills that have united my.
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Yes, I agree with you here. Um, what complex or unexpected problems did you have to solve as a dean?
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And what did they teach you about leadership and supporting students?
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So one of the funny things about being a dean is every morning, actually,
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even even before the morning, the night before, I'll look at my schedule for the next day,
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and I'll look at my calendar, and I'll think about all the things I'm scheduled to do and all the goals I have for the day.
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And some days I get none of them done. Uh, the very nature of my work is surprises happened, emergencies arise,
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and they require my immediate attention and whatever goals I had for the day I'll have to set aside.
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So, you know, some of the surprising things that I've had to deal with are, oh, you know, facilities problems,
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a burst pipe or a leak or a room that has, uh, water infiltration or something like that.
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Um, you know, personnel issues are a big part of what I do.
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Um, the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences has about 180 full time, uh, faculty and staff.
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And we have some adjunct to a temporary faculty as well.
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Uh, and when you've got that many people, you've got a wide variety of personnel issues that arise and needs that occur.
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So part of my job, I think one of the biggest challenges I've had as a dean is learning to be flexible is learning to,
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in a sense, uh, being a dean is not like being an engineer where everything's structured and built carefully.
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It's more like being a jazz musician, right? You've got some rules and some structure that you try to follow,
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but you got to be able to improvise and sort of feel the moment and innovate and lead your way through the moment.
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So I kind of feel like there's kind of a little bit of jazz and what it is that I do.
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I believe major students of, uh, music can be Dean as well.
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I think that's correct. It's a skill. It requires a lot of creativity.
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Okay, coach, I recently received accreditation from ACM, JMC, which underscores the quality of these education.
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What changes would you like to see in future journalism programs to better prepare students for the media marker?
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That's a great question. So for a little bit of background, I'm not a journalist.
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I'm a political scientist by training.
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So, uh, I know a little bit about journalism, but I certainly don't know as much as Doctor Westwick and the faculty and leadership of Kojo,
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of the School of Communication and Journalism. As you noted, Kojo recently received its Re accreditation.
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I believe it's one of the oldest or longest accredited programs in the country.
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And accreditation is, uh,
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basically it's an external organization that comes in and says we are meeting the highest standards of scholarship, research and teaching.
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And meeting those high standards, I think is important because we want to provide our students with the very best education and training that we can.
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Um, but as you note, the journalism and communication fields are constantly evolving.
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They're constantly changing. And so by maintaining accreditation, we have a mechanism for keeping up with those changes.
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And so when I think about the future of journalism education, I think about, uh, this is a time of of rapid, rapid change in journalism.
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We want to make sure that we are preparing journalists not just for the job today, but what the job will be in 10 or 20 years.
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And so that requires some innovation,
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and that requires a sort of looking ahead and sort of trying to envision what the world is going to look like in ten years.
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If you think back ten years ago from right now. So ten years ago would have been 2016.
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Nobody foresaw generative. Of artificial intelligence.
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Yeah. Right. Yes.
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Um, so in 2016, there was no way we could have anticipated what this innovation would do to media as a whole into journalism as a profession.
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Uh, and so when we think about how do we prepare our students for the future,
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part of that is how do we give students the skills to deal with an unknown future?
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Yeah, I agree with you, especially when I evolving practically every day.
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Yeah, it's in the eye of 2027 is going to be different than the eye of 2026.
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Okay. We'll see what's going to be at least next year. Yeah, yeah.
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Um, what skills, both technical and social, do you think will be most important for future students in 5 or 10 years,
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especially when we were talking about AI right now. So the biggest, the most important skills for students will be what educators call meta skills.
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Meta skills are skills about skills. How do we give you the skills to learn and train yourself as the industry evolves?
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And so when we think about that, we think about a number of skills that we really want to cultivate and develop in our graduates.
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Um, first of all, is creative thinking.
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Solving problems requires creativity, particularly when those problems are new novel problems like generative AI.
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We need to train our students to think creatively. They need to communicate effectively both in writing and in speech and verbal communication.
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We think an important meta skill is working well in teams.
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Um, the very nature of any problem that you can think about in journalism,
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communication or in other fields is no one person can solve those problems on their own.
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These need to be team based efforts. And then, you know, a fourth meta skill that we like to talk about is comfort with ambiguity.
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The world is a complicated place. Things are rarely black and white, as we say.
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They are rarely clearly right or clearly wrong.
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And so we have to think about those gray areas or those ambiguities,
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and we have to be comfortable with those ambiguities and some of the difficult tradeoffs that come as we try to solve those problems.
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So when I think about training students for the future, I think about training them to be creative thinkers,
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to communicate effectively, to work well in teams, and to be comfortable with the messy ambiguities of the real world.
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Yeah, especially. I think communication is the key,
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because sometimes the person who see only black and white and the other person in the different colors can change each other in the many, many times.
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Yeah, that's right. I think we, you know, communication across differences as your is your characterizing.
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You know, those differences can be, you know cultural or linguistic differences.
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But they can be just simple differences of opinion. Yeah. Right. And you know saying anything terribly novel here.
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But there's there's a lot of recognition that there's division in our society right now there that, you know,
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people talk about political polarization and that there are issues that divide opinion among
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citizens of Brookings or students on campus or citizens of the United States in the world.
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And how do we communicate across those differences? And I think those skills that I talked about are critical to that.
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Um, you know, we have to think creatively, creatively. We have to communicate effectively.
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And that's, you know, both speaking but but also listening and being receptive and again,
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acknowledging the complexities and the ambiguities of these issues and not treating them as sort of reductive,
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simple, one cause or one solution type problems.
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And so I agree with you.
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I think those communication skills that Kojo focuses on and cultivates are really critical, not just for the future of those professions,
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but I think are critical for our ability as a society to govern ourselves and to solve problems.
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Yes, we know as a as a professional person, but, uh, what does your typical workday look like for you as a dean,
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and what are the decisions that take up most of your time?
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So it's funny because I think of myself as a researcher and a teacher, and I do almost no research and no teaching anymore.
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Uh, that was it. That was, you know, early in my career. I did that every day.
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But increasingly, as I've assumed leadership positions, I've done less teaching,
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which I really miss, got into this business because I love working with students.
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Uh, I love doing research, and I miss that. My typical day is lots of meetings, lots of emails.
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I typically get, you know, 70 to 100 emails in a day.
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You know, some I can respond to in 10s, but some require quicker or more detailed and thoughtful action.
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I typically have between most days. I have at least five meetings, and some days I'll have eight meetings.
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And if you figure it's a eight hour workday, I'm in meetings every hour of the day.
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And and those meetings are both within the college, uh, you know, working with our faculty and our, our school directors in the college.
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But those meetings will also be sometimes with alumni, uh, sometimes they'll be with our community partners.
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I'm often in meetings with the university's leadership, with the president and the provost, uh, because they provide the vision for DSU.
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And my primary responsibility is to execute the vision that they have for the university.
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So I spend a lot of time learning from them about their vision and what they want.
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So that's that's kind of a typical day for me. Lots of meetings, lots of emails.
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Just saying I don't think I could have held so many meetings and so many emails civilly.
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Well, you know, it's funny and you learn as you go. It's just like anything, you know, you develop skills as you ease into a new job.
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And yeah, if you asked me ten years ago if I. Be able to do this, I probably would have said, oh, there's no way I could do that.
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I couldn't manage it. But yeah, you just, uh, you develop little skills and you learn how to manage things over time.
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And my job requires good time management. I have to think carefully about how to allocate my time.
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It takes some thought about what are the priorities. So, for example, this is an easy one.
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If I learned that one of the buildings is on fire, then I know, okay, that's my priority right now and everything else can wait, right?
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But then there are lots of things like, well, uh, there's this personnel issue.
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Uh, but I've got this meeting with the student. Which of those should I put higher on my list of priorities?
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And over time, you learn how to do that,
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to do your job effectively and serve the students and serve the mission of the institution according about what you told above.
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I believe that we learn throughout our whole life. That's right.
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And I'm sure you've heard this, and I'm sure, uh, the listeners of this podcast have heard this idea of being a lifelong learner.
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Right. And a lifelong learner is partly a skills based thing, you know, developing new skills.
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You know, when generative AI came along, I said, okay, I've got to learn how to use this, this new tool.
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And so I spent some time teaching myself how to do that.
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Um, but being a lifelong learner, are these skills, like, you know, how do I do my job better?
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Are there things I can I can think of differently? Are there skills I can teach myself?
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And I'll give you an example. Last week I was in Arizona.
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Um, Sdsu has a lot of alumni in the Phenix area, and so we go down there every year to meet with our alumni,
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and we go down there to tell them about all the great things that we're doing.
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And we want their support. We want our alumni to feel connected to our our university and our campus.
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We want them to feel like they believe in our mission, and we want them to invest in us,
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that they can invest in us with their with their time, with the, um, generously, with their resources.
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They can invest in supporting students. And but that means I have to be a storyteller.
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So when I go to Arizona, I need to think about, okay,
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how do I tell them stories about how their support has such an important impact on campus and on the experiences of the students?
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And so I've had to learn how to tell stories. I've had to teach myself how to tell those stories, and that's involved.
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I'm quite frankly, doing a little bit of research and learning from others about how they tell stories of impact.
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And so I find myself, even though I'm almost 57 years old, and I have lots and lots of classroom education,
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but I need to be a lifelong learner, and I have every day. I have to learn how to do things differently and better.
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Just think, what are some challenges higher education is currently facing and how do you usually approach solving them?
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So I've been and if you count my undergraduate years, I've been in higher education for almost 40 years.
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I started my college degree in 1987, so almost 40 years ago.
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And higher education has changed enormously in in those four decades.
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Right now, I think there are, you know, 3 or 4 primary challenges in higher education.
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Number one is the so-called enrollment cliff. Um, the enrollment cliff is that there are fewer 18 year olds going to college now.
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Um, there are fewer going to college now than there were 5 or 10 years ago.
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And, um, you know, you do the math when fewer people are going to college, um,
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than than some colleges or maybe all colleges are going to see declining enrollments.
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Um, that's that's it. That's an operational challenge because most universities like Sdsu, we need tuition dollars to perform our mission,
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to do our work, to educate, to create original research and scholarship and creative activity.
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So the enrollment challenge is one big challenge that we have right now.
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Uh, a second challenge is, is the affordability crisis. Um, as you know, um, inflation has been terrible for the last 5 or 6 years.
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Um, groceries are expensive, gas is expensive, rent is expensive.
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And the families that are sending their young men and women to college, um, are feeling,
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you know, the financial pressures of inflation and yet wanting to educate their children.
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So how do we keep college affordable for families for for the young men and women
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who are seeking college degrees and then the parents who are supporting them?
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So that's a second challenge. Um, and a third challenge, which I think is a related challenge, is I think higher ed has a bit of a credibility crisis.
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I think there are a lot of people in the United States who are skeptical that higher education provides value.
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And some of that value is is about affordability, right.
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Are you receiving for your dollar a valuable service and the education that we provide?
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But some of that skepticism is about, um, are we contributing more broadly to the social good?
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Are we making our communities, um, are we improving the lives of of the communities that we serve?
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And that can be communities like Brookings or South Dakota, that that could be the region and the country.
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And so I think there's a lot of skepticism right now that that universities and higher education are serving our communities.
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So we have fewer students. We have, uh.
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Cost pressures, and we have a lot of skepticism about the values that we provide.
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And. The person who thinks about that the most on a daily basis is President Dunn.
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Um, but as part of his as a junior member of his leadership team, um, that's a responsibility that I have to.
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And we have to work hard in the college to demonstrate to our students and to our community partners.
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That we provide value for what we're doing. And for me, uh, as the dean of the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, if, uh, you know,
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Dean Mariann Krug Krogan, the College of Nursing, she can go out and say, well, I'm training nurses.
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Uh, Dean Sanjiv Kumar in the Jerome J.
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Lohr College of Engineering can say I'm graduating engineers and we're going out into the workforce.
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Well in arts, humanities and social sciences. It's a little harder to say, what's the value that we create, right?
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And what I say is the college is a partner in the civic life of every community in South Dakota, and the civic life of a community can be the arts.
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Uh, it can be music. Uh, it can be museums. Um, it can we can be partners with community libraries, which we've done.
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We can be partners with community schools.
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And so in many ways, our students and our scholars are going out and serving the communities of the region and the state,
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uh, and bringing state of the art knowledge to those communities.
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So, for example, we have a researcher in the School of Management and Economics.
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He's an economist who was working on a program to improve digital access to rural libraries so that
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communities can have access to library materials without necessarily having to physically go into a library.
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So these are ways that we're trying to demonstrate that we create value.
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And that that's my job is to address the affordability crisis and the credibility crisis by showing that, you know,
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we are valuable partners and we are enriching, uh, the lives of citizens across South Dakota and across the region.
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You open the inner world of the professional as a dean and a whole other thing though, communicate with each other.
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And it's actually an interesting thing, actually.
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We have a really great leadership team here at Sdsu, and that's something that attracted me to this job.
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Um, you know, I had previously been a department chair, I chaired a department of political science.
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And, um, although I had I had considered maybe someday becoming a dean.
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Um, when this opportunity opened up and I learned about it, I realized what an excellent university Sdsu is.
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I realized Sdsu has superb leadership.
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And President Dunn and Provost Denis Hedge. Uh, I realized that the deans there are nine of us, uh, are fantastic academic leaders.
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They are all of, uh, all of my dean colleagues are the distinguished scholars and educators.
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Uh, I think they're really thoughtful and innovative leaders. And I was excited.
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I thought this, you know, yeah, there are challenges in higher ed,
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but this is a team that is ready to face those challenges and is ready to to thrive and innovate.
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So, uh, I'm really grateful to have such great colleagues with whom to work.
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Um. That's interesting, actually. I don't know how many times I will say this word, but you open so many insights.
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I can say that. Thank you. Um, so as you talk about, as you say, you as a university, uh, the next question is urged,
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uh, our university as a dean, after working as an administrator at USD.
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That's what rivals. Yeah. Um, what's the huge difference between these two universities, as you can tell and see.
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That's a great question because when I was at USD, I.
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I didn't know much about Sdsu, but I didn't think there would be that many differences.
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So I thought, well, they're both universities in South Dakota. Uh, we have the same Board of Regents that governs both institutions.
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I thought they'll be fairly similar universities. I couldn't be more wrong.
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The two universities are very different. Um, USD, um, is really focused on, uh, the classic liberal arts and USD, um,
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really values tradition and really focuses on its tradition and its heritage and its smaller.
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Uh, USD is probably about, uh, three quarters the size of Sdsu, so it's a little bit smaller than Sdsu.
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Um, Sdsu values its heritage and values history, but Sdsu also emphasizes innovation.
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President Don and Provost Hej are really interested in innovation in in research and scholarship,
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but also innovation in how a university organizes itself, how a university educates, and how a university serves its communities.
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And, um, Sdsu is a very ambitious place.
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And that attracted me. I was interested in being a place that wanted to do innovative things and wanted to, um,
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face head on the challenges that that our communities have and that higher education has.
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And so, um, I just felt this dynamism and this energy and this enthusiasm when I came to Brookings, that usds a little more laid back,
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a little more sort of focused on, on history and, and just doesn't have quite the same energy and dynamism that we have here in Brookings.
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So I've joked with people, I think it was easier for me to go from Vermillion to Brookings.
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If I had started in Brookings and gone to Vermillion, that would be hard. That would be kind of a they'd be kind of a difficult transition.
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So it was easy coming here. Oh, we'll learn something new about here.
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See. And uh, just again, uh, till the fact that it's just you'd better.
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Well, I, uh, I certainly think that because, of course, this is where I get my paycheck, so thank you.
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Um, maybe some, uh, some of the coaches, too, instead.
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Know this, though, but I heard you contributed to the Stanford newspaper as an undergraduate there.
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And what did you do there? And what skills did you get that you still used today?
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Yeah. That's correct. I was, uh, a writer, a beat writer and an editor, uh, for the Stanford Daily.
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That's the student newspaper at Stanford University. So I was at Stanford from 1987 to 1991.
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Uh, so again, uh, this was a different era of journalism, to give you some sense as to how different an era of journalism it was.
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Here's a trivia question when was the World Wide Web in a created?
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I believe in, uh, after 1991. It was after 1991.
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Yeah. So the World Wide Web as we know it today came online in 1992.
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So I was working at a newspaper before the World Wide Web existed, before the internet, as we know it today, really existed.
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And, um, I when I joined the newspaper there, I never really thought I would be a professional journalist.
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This was a student activity that I wanted to do that I thought would be fun.
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And so I worked in the sports department, and I spent a year as editor of the sports page.
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Um, the daily, as the name suggests, was a daily newspaper.
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So the Stanford Daily to this day produces five editions a week.
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Uh, it does not publish on the weekends, but it does a Monday through Friday edition.
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Um, which, uh, as I'm sure your Kojo students know, um, you put in long hours when you produce a newspaper and when you're doing a daily newspaper.
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Um, uh, we typically add two editors for each page so that we could, we could share the workload,
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and I would when I was editor, I'd spend 6 to 8 hours at the paper preparing for the next day's edition.
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And when we typeset, we would literally print out the copy and we would wax it.
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We had these big broad sheets of paper that would become our masters, and we would wax, uh, use wax adhesive to put it physically on the page,
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along with graphical elements with, with the foot, you know, uh, photographs and images and things like that.
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And so it was a fantastic experience because, uh, it was a labor of love.
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And you know what I learned? Um, was, uh, there too.
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You're working students who work in journalism know this. You're working under time pressures, right?
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You've got due dates. Things have to get done. So you quickly learn how to manage your time, how to set priorities, how to meet the deadlines.
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Um, and you learn how to manage conflict. Um, you know, the 1980s were a different era than today.
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Uh, the newsroom could be a. Uh, the spirited Place.
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Uh, I was working with other student journalists who were passionate, uh, creative, dedicated to their craft.
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All of us were working under time pressures. Needless to say, we were young people.
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So maybe we didn't have the most mature problem solving skills.
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And you'd have moments of tension and conflict. And so one of the things I learned in the newsroom was how to manage tension and conflict.
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And, uh. Um, I again, I think those are skills that have carried me, uh, through through my career.
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And so even though I never intended to be a journalist, I learned lifelong lessons working at the newspaper.
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And, uh, one of my favorite. Stories about the newspaper.
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So. So today the daily has a circulation of about 4000.
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Um, when I was there, uh, we had a higher circulation.
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The newspaper business was different back then, and I think we had a daily circulation of the, uh, 15 to 20,000.
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It was it was a good sized newspaper.
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And one of my favorite stories was, uh, I was on staff at the newspaper during the San Francisco earthquake of 1989,
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um, which was a moderate sized earthquake. But but the the earthquake knocked out power to much of the area for about, uh, two days.
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Um, we were the only newspaper in the area to publish an edition the day after the earthquake.
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Yeah, the San Francisco Chronicle didn't have power. The San Jose Mercury News didn't have power.
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And we were able to publish our paper the next day. So we we felt very proud of that.
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Now that's impressive, actually. Yeah. Okay.
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Um, you've lived in the big cities and decided to move to Brookings.
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Yeah. Can you point out the differences and similarities? So I've lived in.
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I'm a native of Colorado, so I grew up in Denver, Colorado.
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I went to college in the San Francisco Bay area. I've lived in Washington, DC.
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Uh, I lived briefly in, in the Greater London metropolitan area, and I lived briefly in Sydney, Australia.
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So I've lived in some big, big cities. And before I came to South Dakota, I'd never lived in in a smaller town or a smaller city.
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And quite frankly, I didn't think I'd like it.
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I've always thought of myself as a city person, and I enjoy the amenities of a city.
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But I quickly discovered how much I like living in a smaller community.
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And especially in Brookings, Brookings is just about perfect for me.
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Um, so. When I lived in a big city, I enjoyed, um, having access to museums or the theater or the opera or,
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um, uh, and, you know, and endless variety of restaurants and things like that.
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But when my son was born, my son is now 25. He was born in the summer of 2000.
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But when my son was born, suddenly living in a big city became hard.
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Um, starting a family in a big city. It's expensive. Um, having a child, a baby or a toddler.
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Uh, getting around, dealing with the traffic, dealing with all those frustrations is hard.
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And so when I came to South Dakota, I realized, you know what?
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I'm ready to give up traffic. I'm ready to give up long commutes.
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I'm ready to give up all those headaches. And maybe I don't have access to quite the same museums that I had or the same arts opportunities.
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But I do have those. I have access to that in Sioux Falls.
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And so, uh, I just realized, you know, I'm at a point in my life where, um, a short commute is, is preferable.
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And, uh, and so I've, I've really enjoyed the smaller, uh, smaller town experience.
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And Brookings has just about the right size because, you know, you mentioned I worked at USD in Vermillion.
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For millions. Too small. Um, the university is the only business in town.
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It's the entire town of the economy. You know, here in Brookings, we've got duck products, and we've got Larson Manufacturing and we've got solvent.
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Um, um, we've got other industry.
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We've got other, um, workforce here that it feels just a little bit bigger, and it doesn't feel like it's quite the same.
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Fishbowl is a small town. So you get you get the amenities of a bigger town.
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Uh, but you don't have all the headaches of long commutes and traffic and frustrations like that.
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So, uh, so Brookings is just about right for me.
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Um, when you moved here for the first time, have you missed the bigger town or San Francisco or Washington?
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I do miss them. Yeah. Uh, and, uh, you know, um, for, oh, gosh, for 20 years now.
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Every summer I go back to San Francisco. Um, I'll spend a week in San Francisco, and, um, I, I, you know,
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I haven't lived there since my college days, but I had my favorite, uh, uh, hotel at which I stay.
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I have the restaurants that I know. I have my favorite neighborhoods.
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And I'll go out and I'll just walk all over the San San Francisco, um, wonderfully walkable city, so you can go out and walk and explore and enjoy.
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And it's got wonderful nature and beautiful scenery. And, uh, San Francisco has its problems.
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It's got, you know, crime and homelessness and, um, you know, economic inequality and, um, uh, it's not it's not a nirvana by any means or a utopia.
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Um, but it has sentimental meaning to me, and so I, I miss it, but I'll go back for a week and I'm fine, and and then I don't miss it.
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Okay. Yeah. Uh, so. Was it?
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Was. Any other decisions made you to move to Brookings? So.
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The nature of my work is higher education is a funny job because it's not the kind of job where you can pick where you want to live.
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Um, so I think the opposite example would be nursing.
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There's such a shortage of nurses in this country that if you hold a nursing license,
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you can almost pick where you want to live, because no matter where you pick, they're going to need nurses, right?
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The nature of higher education is, um, in your particular specialization, there might be only a couple of jobs open in a in a given year.
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So, uh, my partner is a professor of philosophy, uh, in at Saint Louis University in Missouri.
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And, um, she's in a very specialized field of philosophy, which is really 16th or 17th century Chinese philosophy.
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Well, in her field, there are maybe four jobs a year that come available.
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And so, um, she, you know, she can't pick and choose where she, she, you just apply for where the jobs are.
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Uh, and that's true with deans as well.
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Um, you know, and there may be, I don't know, a dozen or so dean positions that come available in a given year.
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Uh, and you just kind of see where they are. I was really lucky because this job came open and I knew South Dakota.
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Right? And, you know, when I applied, I bet you I don't know what the numbers are, but I bet you have 50 or 60 people applied for this job.
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And so I was really lucky that I was able to come to Sdsu, because as I said,
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when I learned about it, I learned about what a dynamic and innovative institution we are.
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And because I knew South Dakota, I said, I know I can be happy in Brookings.
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You know, if you asked me, David, would you ever be happy living in Nashville, Tennessee?
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I'd say, I don't know. I've never been to Nashville, like, you know, and sometimes in the job market,
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that's kind of what you're dealing with because the jobs are in places you've never been.
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So I was really lucky that this job came open in a place that I knew, and I knew I could be happy and I knew I could thrive.
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Oh, okay. Um, so let's talk about if you don't write about your personal life field, uh, uh, let's open up to students.
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Not as a dean, but as a usual person. Yeah. Um, well, you know, working.
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What do you enjoy doing? What are your hobbies? So I guess I have two hobbies that that I enjoy.
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Um, and I'll, I'll be forthright. It's harder to find time to do it these days.
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So. So one of the great joys about my job, uh, as you probably know, the college includes the School of Performing Arts.
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And so I spent a lot of time going to concerts.
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I go to, uh, you know, uh, dance recitals or music recitals and music is both instrumental and vocal music.
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Uh, and so I find myself spending a lot of time in the Oskar Larsen Performing Arts Center, um, as part of my job, you know,
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because as the dean, I want to support our artists and our students, but I also I also just enjoy it, and I love it.
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Um, but my true hobbies are, you know, one is playing the piano.
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Um, I'm a terrible piano player. And if anybody came up to me and said, David, we want you to play the piano, I'd say, I'm sorry.
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I just I just play for myself. Uh, and I don't get to play as much as I'd like.
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Uh, I used to play daily, and it's been a while since I've been able to do that.
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Uh, and then my other hobbyist photography, um, I really enjoy, um, nature photography.
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Um, I'm not you. I can't explain this for some reason.
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I can't take photographs of people, but I can take photographs of nature.
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Um, I mean, like, my photographs of people, I just I just never feel like I capture the essence of the person,
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or I don't feel like they're composed well, but nature, I, I, I seem, for whatever reason, I seem to do better with nature.
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So I enjoy getting out, um, in natural, you know, national parks or state parks, uh,
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with my camera and finding interesting lighting or interesting shapes or I've got lots of photos of birds, you know, San Francisco as an.
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Excuse me. South Dakota is a wonderful place for photography of birds because we've got seasonal migrations that come through.
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And so those those are the two hobbies that when I can find the time that that I really enjoy.
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And one of the great joys of moving to Brookings.
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Is I bought a house here in Brookings, and I got to to design the interior, and I got to use my own photographs.
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So, so the walls of my living room and much of my house have my own photographs on the wall.
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And these are photographs of nature that I've taken over the years. So, um, that that's a, that's a hobby that, that I really enjoy.
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Uh, when, when the weather's warm enough and I can get out and.
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[Auto-generated transcript. Edits may have been applied for clarity.]
Hello everyone, and welcome to conversations with COJO podcast.
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I'm your student host Anima, and today I have the pleasure to have speaking with David Earnest,
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Dean of the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences.
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A South Dakota State University. Thank you for joining me today. Thank you for having me, Amina.
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So our first question I would like to ask is you have worked as a teacher,
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researcher and administrator at various universities and how how have these roles influenced your leadership
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style at the College of Humanities and Social Sciences and your vision for the future of journalism students?
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That's a complicated question. As you know, I've worked in a number of different capacities teacher, researcher, uh, administrator and leader.
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And, um, it's interesting because as I was thinking about this question,
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I was thinking about what are the skills that unite those different roles and responsibilities?
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And it speaks to a little bit about, uh, journalism education. I think the skill that that is common among all three of those roles is listening.
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Um, it's a really important part of any of those jobs.
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If you're a teacher, an educator, a researcher, or a leader of an academic unit, you've got to have good listening skills.
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And of course, journalists have to have good listening skills to in order to do their job and to uncover information.
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And in good listening skills, is partly eliciting conversation and opening up the conversation with others.
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But it's also listening with critical reflection.
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Uh, you know, obviously if you're a journalist, you have to have a little bit of skepticism about what people are saying to you.
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And so you have to bring, uh, not just openness and empathy and kindness to communication, but also some critical faculties.
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And I think those are really, uh, important in the classroom and they're important in the laboratory or the research setting.
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And I think they're important, uh, in leadership as well. So I think those are some of the skills that have united my.
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Yes, I agree with you here. Um, what complex or unexpected problems did you have to solve as a dean?
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And what did they teach you about leadership and supporting students?
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So one of the funny things about being a dean is every morning, actually,
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even even before the morning, the night before, I'll look at my schedule for the next day,
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and I'll look at my calendar, and I'll think about all the things I'm scheduled to do and all the goals I have for the day.
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And some days I get none of them done. Uh, the very nature of my work is surprises happened, emergencies arise,
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and they require my immediate attention and whatever goals I had for the day I'll have to set aside.
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So, you know, some of the surprising things that I've had to deal with are, oh, you know, facilities problems,
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a burst pipe or a leak or a room that has, uh, water infiltration or something like that.
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Um, you know, personnel issues are a big part of what I do.
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Um, the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences has about 180 full time, uh, faculty and staff.
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And we have some adjunct to a temporary faculty as well.
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Uh, and when you've got that many people, you've got a wide variety of personnel issues that arise and needs that occur.
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So part of my job, I think one of the biggest challenges I've had as a dean is learning to be flexible is learning to,
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in a sense, uh, being a dean is not like being an engineer where everything's structured and built carefully.
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It's more like being a jazz musician, right? You've got some rules and some structure that you try to follow,
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but you got to be able to improvise and sort of feel the moment and innovate and lead your way through the moment.
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So I kind of feel like there's kind of a little bit of jazz and what it is that I do.
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I believe major students of, uh, music can be Dean as well.
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I think that's correct. It's a skill. It requires a lot of creativity.
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Okay, coach, I recently received accreditation from ACM, JMC, which underscores the quality of these education.
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What changes would you like to see in future journalism programs to better prepare students for the media marker?
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That's a great question. So for a little bit of background, I'm not a journalist.
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I'm a political scientist by training.
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So, uh, I know a little bit about journalism, but I certainly don't know as much as Doctor Westwick and the faculty and leadership of Kojo,
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of the School of Communication and Journalism. As you noted, Kojo recently received its Re accreditation.
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I believe it's one of the oldest or longest accredited programs in the country.
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And accreditation is, uh,
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basically it's an external organization that comes in and says we are meeting the highest standards of scholarship, research and teaching.
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And meeting those high standards, I think is important because we want to provide our students with the very best education and training that we can.
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Um, but as you note, the journalism and communication fields are constantly evolving.
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They're constantly changing. And so by maintaining accreditation, we have a mechanism for keeping up with those changes.
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And so when I think about the future of journalism education, I think about, uh, this is a time of of rapid, rapid change in journalism.
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We want to make sure that we are preparing journalists not just for the job today, but what the job will be in 10 or 20 years.
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And so that requires some innovation,
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and that requires a sort of looking ahead and sort of trying to envision what the world is going to look like in ten years.
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If you think back ten years ago from right now. So ten years ago would have been 2016.
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Nobody foresaw generative. Of artificial intelligence.
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Yeah. Right. Yes.
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Um, so in 2016, there was no way we could have anticipated what this innovation would do to media as a whole into journalism as a profession.
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Uh, and so when we think about how do we prepare our students for the future,
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part of that is how do we give students the skills to deal with an unknown future?
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Yeah, I agree with you, especially when I evolving practically every day.
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Yeah, it's in the eye of 2027 is going to be different than the eye of 2026.
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Okay. We'll see what's going to be at least next year. Yeah, yeah.
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Um, what skills, both technical and social, do you think will be most important for future students in 5 or 10 years,
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especially when we were talking about AI right now. So the biggest, the most important skills for students will be what educators call meta skills.
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Meta skills are skills about skills. How do we give you the skills to learn and train yourself as the industry evolves?
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And so when we think about that, we think about a number of skills that we really want to cultivate and develop in our graduates.
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Um, first of all, is creative thinking.
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Solving problems requires creativity, particularly when those problems are new novel problems like generative AI.
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We need to train our students to think creatively. They need to communicate effectively both in writing and in speech and verbal communication.
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We think an important meta skill is working well in teams.
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Um, the very nature of any problem that you can think about in journalism,
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communication or in other fields is no one person can solve those problems on their own.
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These need to be team based efforts. And then, you know, a fourth meta skill that we like to talk about is comfort with ambiguity.
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The world is a complicated place. Things are rarely black and white, as we say.
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They are rarely clearly right or clearly wrong.
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And so we have to think about those gray areas or those ambiguities,
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and we have to be comfortable with those ambiguities and some of the difficult tradeoffs that come as we try to solve those problems.
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So when I think about training students for the future, I think about training them to be creative thinkers,
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to communicate effectively, to work well in teams, and to be comfortable with the messy ambiguities of the real world.
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Yeah, especially. I think communication is the key,
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because sometimes the person who see only black and white and the other person in the different colors can change each other in the many, many times.
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Yeah, that's right. I think we, you know, communication across differences as your is your characterizing.
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You know, those differences can be, you know cultural or linguistic differences.
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But they can be just simple differences of opinion. Yeah. Right. And you know saying anything terribly novel here.
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But there's there's a lot of recognition that there's division in our society right now there that, you know,
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people talk about political polarization and that there are issues that divide opinion among
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citizens of Brookings or students on campus or citizens of the United States in the world.
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And how do we communicate across those differences? And I think those skills that I talked about are critical to that.
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Um, you know, we have to think creatively, creatively. We have to communicate effectively.
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And that's, you know, both speaking but but also listening and being receptive and again,
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acknowledging the complexities and the ambiguities of these issues and not treating them as sort of reductive,
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simple, one cause or one solution type problems.
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And so I agree with you.
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I think those communication skills that Kojo focuses on and cultivates are really critical, not just for the future of those professions,
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but I think are critical for our ability as a society to govern ourselves and to solve problems.
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Yes, we know as a as a professional person, but, uh, what does your typical workday look like for you as a dean,
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and what are the decisions that take up most of your time?
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So it's funny because I think of myself as a researcher and a teacher, and I do almost no research and no teaching anymore.
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Uh, that was it. That was, you know, early in my career. I did that every day.
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But increasingly, as I've assumed leadership positions, I've done less teaching,
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which I really miss, got into this business because I love working with students.
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Uh, I love doing research, and I miss that. My typical day is lots of meetings, lots of emails.
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I typically get, you know, 70 to 100 emails in a day.
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You know, some I can respond to in 10s, but some require quicker or more detailed and thoughtful action.
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I typically have between most days. I have at least five meetings, and some days I'll have eight meetings.
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And if you figure it's a eight hour workday, I'm in meetings every hour of the day.
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And and those meetings are both within the college, uh, you know, working with our faculty and our, our school directors in the college.
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But those meetings will also be sometimes with alumni, uh, sometimes they'll be with our community partners.
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I'm often in meetings with the university's leadership, with the president and the provost, uh, because they provide the vision for DSU.
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And my primary responsibility is to execute the vision that they have for the university.
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So I spend a lot of time learning from them about their vision and what they want.
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So that's that's kind of a typical day for me. Lots of meetings, lots of emails.
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Just saying I don't think I could have held so many meetings and so many emails civilly.
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Well, you know, it's funny and you learn as you go. It's just like anything, you know, you develop skills as you ease into a new job.
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And yeah, if you asked me ten years ago if I. Be able to do this, I probably would have said, oh, there's no way I could do that.
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I couldn't manage it. But yeah, you just, uh, you develop little skills and you learn how to manage things over time.
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And my job requires good time management. I have to think carefully about how to allocate my time.
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It takes some thought about what are the priorities. So, for example, this is an easy one.
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If I learned that one of the buildings is on fire, then I know, okay, that's my priority right now and everything else can wait, right?
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But then there are lots of things like, well, uh, there's this personnel issue.
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Uh, but I've got this meeting with the student. Which of those should I put higher on my list of priorities?
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And over time, you learn how to do that,
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to do your job effectively and serve the students and serve the mission of the institution according about what you told above.
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I believe that we learn throughout our whole life. That's right.
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And I'm sure you've heard this, and I'm sure, uh, the listeners of this podcast have heard this idea of being a lifelong learner.
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Right. And a lifelong learner is partly a skills based thing, you know, developing new skills.
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You know, when generative AI came along, I said, okay, I've got to learn how to use this, this new tool.
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And so I spent some time teaching myself how to do that.
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Um, but being a lifelong learner, are these skills, like, you know, how do I do my job better?
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Are there things I can I can think of differently? Are there skills I can teach myself?
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And I'll give you an example. Last week I was in Arizona.
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Um, Sdsu has a lot of alumni in the Phenix area, and so we go down there every year to meet with our alumni,
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and we go down there to tell them about all the great things that we're doing.
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And we want their support. We want our alumni to feel connected to our our university and our campus.
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We want them to feel like they believe in our mission, and we want them to invest in us,
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that they can invest in us with their with their time, with the, um, generously, with their resources.
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They can invest in supporting students. And but that means I have to be a storyteller.
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So when I go to Arizona, I need to think about, okay,
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how do I tell them stories about how their support has such an important impact on campus and on the experiences of the students?
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And so I've had to learn how to tell stories. I've had to teach myself how to tell those stories, and that's involved.
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I'm quite frankly, doing a little bit of research and learning from others about how they tell stories of impact.
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And so I find myself, even though I'm almost 57 years old, and I have lots and lots of classroom education,
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but I need to be a lifelong learner, and I have every day. I have to learn how to do things differently and better.
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Just think, what are some challenges higher education is currently facing and how do you usually approach solving them?
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So I've been and if you count my undergraduate years, I've been in higher education for almost 40 years.
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I started my college degree in 1987, so almost 40 years ago.
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And higher education has changed enormously in in those four decades.
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Right now, I think there are, you know, 3 or 4 primary challenges in higher education.
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Number one is the so-called enrollment cliff. Um, the enrollment cliff is that there are fewer 18 year olds going to college now.
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Um, there are fewer going to college now than there were 5 or 10 years ago.
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And, um, you know, you do the math when fewer people are going to college, um,
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than than some colleges or maybe all colleges are going to see declining enrollments.
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Um, that's that's it. That's an operational challenge because most universities like Sdsu, we need tuition dollars to perform our mission,
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to do our work, to educate, to create original research and scholarship and creative activity.
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So the enrollment challenge is one big challenge that we have right now.
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Uh, a second challenge is, is the affordability crisis. Um, as you know, um, inflation has been terrible for the last 5 or 6 years.
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Um, groceries are expensive, gas is expensive, rent is expensive.
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And the families that are sending their young men and women to college, um, are feeling,
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you know, the financial pressures of inflation and yet wanting to educate their children.
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So how do we keep college affordable for families for for the young men and women
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who are seeking college degrees and then the parents who are supporting them?
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So that's a second challenge. Um, and a third challenge, which I think is a related challenge, is I think higher ed has a bit of a credibility crisis.
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I think there are a lot of people in the United States who are skeptical that higher education provides value.
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And some of that value is is about affordability, right.
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Are you receiving for your dollar a valuable service and the education that we provide?
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But some of that skepticism is about, um, are we contributing more broadly to the social good?
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Are we making our communities, um, are we improving the lives of of the communities that we serve?
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And that can be communities like Brookings or South Dakota, that that could be the region and the country.
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And so I think there's a lot of skepticism right now that that universities and higher education are serving our communities.
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So we have fewer students. We have, uh.
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Cost pressures, and we have a lot of skepticism about the values that we provide.
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And. The person who thinks about that the most on a daily basis is President Dunn.
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Um, but as part of his as a junior member of his leadership team, um, that's a responsibility that I have to.
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And we have to work hard in the college to demonstrate to our students and to our community partners.
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That we provide value for what we're doing. And for me, uh, as the dean of the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, if, uh, you know,
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Dean Mariann Krug Krogan, the College of Nursing, she can go out and say, well, I'm training nurses.
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Uh, Dean Sanjiv Kumar in the Jerome J.
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Lohr College of Engineering can say I'm graduating engineers and we're going out into the workforce.
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Well in arts, humanities and social sciences. It's a little harder to say, what's the value that we create, right?
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And what I say is the college is a partner in the civic life of every community in South Dakota, and the civic life of a community can be the arts.
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Uh, it can be music. Uh, it can be museums. Um, it can we can be partners with community libraries, which we've done.
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We can be partners with community schools.
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And so in many ways, our students and our scholars are going out and serving the communities of the region and the state,
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uh, and bringing state of the art knowledge to those communities.
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So, for example, we have a researcher in the School of Management and Economics.
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He's an economist who was working on a program to improve digital access to rural libraries so that
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communities can have access to library materials without necessarily having to physically go into a library.
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So these are ways that we're trying to demonstrate that we create value.
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And that that's my job is to address the affordability crisis and the credibility crisis by showing that, you know,
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we are valuable partners and we are enriching, uh, the lives of citizens across South Dakota and across the region.
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You open the inner world of the professional as a dean and a whole other thing though, communicate with each other.
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And it's actually an interesting thing, actually.
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We have a really great leadership team here at Sdsu, and that's something that attracted me to this job.
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Um, you know, I had previously been a department chair, I chaired a department of political science.
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And, um, although I had I had considered maybe someday becoming a dean.
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Um, when this opportunity opened up and I learned about it, I realized what an excellent university Sdsu is.
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I realized Sdsu has superb leadership.
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And President Dunn and Provost Denis Hedge. Uh, I realized that the deans there are nine of us, uh, are fantastic academic leaders.
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They are all of, uh, all of my dean colleagues are the distinguished scholars and educators.
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Uh, I think they're really thoughtful and innovative leaders. And I was excited.
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I thought this, you know, yeah, there are challenges in higher ed,
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but this is a team that is ready to face those challenges and is ready to to thrive and innovate.
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So, uh, I'm really grateful to have such great colleagues with whom to work.
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Um. That's interesting, actually. I don't know how many times I will say this word, but you open so many insights.
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I can say that. Thank you. Um, so as you talk about, as you say, you as a university, uh, the next question is urged,
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uh, our university as a dean, after working as an administrator at USD.
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That's what rivals. Yeah. Um, what's the huge difference between these two universities, as you can tell and see.
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That's a great question because when I was at USD, I.
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I didn't know much about Sdsu, but I didn't think there would be that many differences.
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So I thought, well, they're both universities in South Dakota. Uh, we have the same Board of Regents that governs both institutions.
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I thought they'll be fairly similar universities. I couldn't be more wrong.
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The two universities are very different. Um, USD, um, is really focused on, uh, the classic liberal arts and USD, um,
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really values tradition and really focuses on its tradition and its heritage and its smaller.
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Uh, USD is probably about, uh, three quarters the size of Sdsu, so it's a little bit smaller than Sdsu.
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Um, Sdsu values its heritage and values history, but Sdsu also emphasizes innovation.
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President Don and Provost Hej are really interested in innovation in in research and scholarship,
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but also innovation in how a university organizes itself, how a university educates, and how a university serves its communities.
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And, um, Sdsu is a very ambitious place.
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And that attracted me. I was interested in being a place that wanted to do innovative things and wanted to, um,
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face head on the challenges that that our communities have and that higher education has.
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And so, um, I just felt this dynamism and this energy and this enthusiasm when I came to Brookings, that usds a little more laid back,
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a little more sort of focused on, on history and, and just doesn't have quite the same energy and dynamism that we have here in Brookings.
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So I've joked with people, I think it was easier for me to go from Vermillion to Brookings.
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If I had started in Brookings and gone to Vermillion, that would be hard. That would be kind of a they'd be kind of a difficult transition.
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So it was easy coming here. Oh, we'll learn something new about here.
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See. And uh, just again, uh, till the fact that it's just you'd better.
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Well, I, uh, I certainly think that because, of course, this is where I get my paycheck, so thank you.
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Um, maybe some, uh, some of the coaches, too, instead.
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Know this, though, but I heard you contributed to the Stanford newspaper as an undergraduate there.
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And what did you do there? And what skills did you get that you still used today?
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Yeah. That's correct. I was, uh, a writer, a beat writer and an editor, uh, for the Stanford Daily.
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That's the student newspaper at Stanford University. So I was at Stanford from 1987 to 1991.
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Uh, so again, uh, this was a different era of journalism, to give you some sense as to how different an era of journalism it was.
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Here's a trivia question when was the World Wide Web in a created?
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I believe in, uh, after 1991. It was after 1991.
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Yeah. So the World Wide Web as we know it today came online in 1992.
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So I was working at a newspaper before the World Wide Web existed, before the internet, as we know it today, really existed.
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And, um, I when I joined the newspaper there, I never really thought I would be a professional journalist.
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This was a student activity that I wanted to do that I thought would be fun.
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And so I worked in the sports department, and I spent a year as editor of the sports page.
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Um, the daily, as the name suggests, was a daily newspaper.
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So the Stanford Daily to this day produces five editions a week.
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Uh, it does not publish on the weekends, but it does a Monday through Friday edition.
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Um, which, uh, as I'm sure your Kojo students know, um, you put in long hours when you produce a newspaper and when you're doing a daily newspaper.
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Um, uh, we typically add two editors for each page so that we could, we could share the workload,
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and I would when I was editor, I'd spend 6 to 8 hours at the paper preparing for the next day's edition.
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And when we typeset, we would literally print out the copy and we would wax it.
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We had these big broad sheets of paper that would become our masters, and we would wax, uh, use wax adhesive to put it physically on the page,
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along with graphical elements with, with the foot, you know, uh, photographs and images and things like that.
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And so it was a fantastic experience because, uh, it was a labor of love.
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And you know what I learned? Um, was, uh, there too.
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You're working students who work in journalism know this. You're working under time pressures, right?
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You've got due dates. Things have to get done. So you quickly learn how to manage your time, how to set priorities, how to meet the deadlines.
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Um, and you learn how to manage conflict. Um, you know, the 1980s were a different era than today.
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Uh, the newsroom could be a. Uh, the spirited Place.
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Uh, I was working with other student journalists who were passionate, uh, creative, dedicated to their craft.
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All of us were working under time pressures. Needless to say, we were young people.
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So maybe we didn't have the most mature problem solving skills.
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And you'd have moments of tension and conflict. And so one of the things I learned in the newsroom was how to manage tension and conflict.
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And, uh. Um, I again, I think those are skills that have carried me, uh, through through my career.
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And so even though I never intended to be a journalist, I learned lifelong lessons working at the newspaper.
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And, uh, one of my favorite. Stories about the newspaper.
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So. So today the daily has a circulation of about 4000.
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Um, when I was there, uh, we had a higher circulation.
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The newspaper business was different back then, and I think we had a daily circulation of the, uh, 15 to 20,000.
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It was it was a good sized newspaper.
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And one of my favorite stories was, uh, I was on staff at the newspaper during the San Francisco earthquake of 1989,
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um, which was a moderate sized earthquake. But but the the earthquake knocked out power to much of the area for about, uh, two days.
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Um, we were the only newspaper in the area to publish an edition the day after the earthquake.
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Yeah, the San Francisco Chronicle didn't have power. The San Jose Mercury News didn't have power.
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And we were able to publish our paper the next day. So we we felt very proud of that.
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Now that's impressive, actually. Yeah. Okay.
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Um, you've lived in the big cities and decided to move to Brookings.
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Yeah. Can you point out the differences and similarities? So I've lived in.
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I'm a native of Colorado, so I grew up in Denver, Colorado.
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I went to college in the San Francisco Bay area. I've lived in Washington, DC.
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Uh, I lived briefly in, in the Greater London metropolitan area, and I lived briefly in Sydney, Australia.
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So I've lived in some big, big cities. And before I came to South Dakota, I'd never lived in in a smaller town or a smaller city.
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And quite frankly, I didn't think I'd like it.
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I've always thought of myself as a city person, and I enjoy the amenities of a city.
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But I quickly discovered how much I like living in a smaller community.
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And especially in Brookings, Brookings is just about perfect for me.
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Um, so. When I lived in a big city, I enjoyed, um, having access to museums or the theater or the opera or,
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um, uh, and, you know, and endless variety of restaurants and things like that.
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But when my son was born, my son is now 25. He was born in the summer of 2000.
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But when my son was born, suddenly living in a big city became hard.
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Um, starting a family in a big city. It's expensive. Um, having a child, a baby or a toddler.
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Uh, getting around, dealing with the traffic, dealing with all those frustrations is hard.
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And so when I came to South Dakota, I realized, you know what?
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I'm ready to give up traffic. I'm ready to give up long commutes.
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I'm ready to give up all those headaches. And maybe I don't have access to quite the same museums that I had or the same arts opportunities.
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But I do have those. I have access to that in Sioux Falls.
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And so, uh, I just realized, you know, I'm at a point in my life where, um, a short commute is, is preferable.
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And, uh, and so I've, I've really enjoyed the smaller, uh, smaller town experience.
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And Brookings has just about the right size because, you know, you mentioned I worked at USD in Vermillion.
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For millions. Too small. Um, the university is the only business in town.
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It's the entire town of the economy. You know, here in Brookings, we've got duck products, and we've got Larson Manufacturing and we've got solvent.
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Um, um, we've got other industry.
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We've got other, um, workforce here that it feels just a little bit bigger, and it doesn't feel like it's quite the same.
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Fishbowl is a small town. So you get you get the amenities of a bigger town.
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Uh, but you don't have all the headaches of long commutes and traffic and frustrations like that.
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So, uh, so Brookings is just about right for me.
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Um, when you moved here for the first time, have you missed the bigger town or San Francisco or Washington?
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I do miss them. Yeah. Uh, and, uh, you know, um, for, oh, gosh, for 20 years now.
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Every summer I go back to San Francisco. Um, I'll spend a week in San Francisco, and, um, I, I, you know,
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I haven't lived there since my college days, but I had my favorite, uh, uh, hotel at which I stay.
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I have the restaurants that I know. I have my favorite neighborhoods.
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And I'll go out and I'll just walk all over the San San Francisco, um, wonderfully walkable city, so you can go out and walk and explore and enjoy.
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And it's got wonderful nature and beautiful scenery. And, uh, San Francisco has its problems.
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It's got, you know, crime and homelessness and, um, you know, economic inequality and, um, uh, it's not it's not a nirvana by any means or a utopia.
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Um, but it has sentimental meaning to me, and so I, I miss it, but I'll go back for a week and I'm fine, and and then I don't miss it.
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Okay. Yeah. Uh, so. Was it?
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Was. Any other decisions made you to move to Brookings? So.
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The nature of my work is higher education is a funny job because it's not the kind of job where you can pick where you want to live.
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Um, so I think the opposite example would be nursing.
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There's such a shortage of nurses in this country that if you hold a nursing license,
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you can almost pick where you want to live, because no matter where you pick, they're going to need nurses, right?
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The nature of higher education is, um, in your particular specialization, there might be only a couple of jobs open in a in a given year.
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So, uh, my partner is a professor of philosophy, uh, in at Saint Louis University in Missouri.
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And, um, she's in a very specialized field of philosophy, which is really 16th or 17th century Chinese philosophy.
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Well, in her field, there are maybe four jobs a year that come available.
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And so, um, she, you know, she can't pick and choose where she, she, you just apply for where the jobs are.
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Uh, and that's true with deans as well.
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Um, you know, and there may be, I don't know, a dozen or so dean positions that come available in a given year.
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Uh, and you just kind of see where they are. I was really lucky because this job came open and I knew South Dakota.
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Right? And, you know, when I applied, I bet you I don't know what the numbers are, but I bet you have 50 or 60 people applied for this job.
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And so I was really lucky that I was able to come to Sdsu, because as I said,
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when I learned about it, I learned about what a dynamic and innovative institution we are.
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And because I knew South Dakota, I said, I know I can be happy in Brookings.
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You know, if you asked me, David, would you ever be happy living in Nashville, Tennessee?
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I'd say, I don't know. I've never been to Nashville, like, you know, and sometimes in the job market,
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that's kind of what you're dealing with because the jobs are in places you've never been.
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So I was really lucky that this job came open in a place that I knew, and I knew I could be happy and I knew I could thrive.
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Oh, okay. Um, so let's talk about if you don't write about your personal life field, uh, uh, let's open up to students.
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Not as a dean, but as a usual person. Yeah. Um, well, you know, working.
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What do you enjoy doing? What are your hobbies? So I guess I have two hobbies that that I enjoy.
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Um, and I'll, I'll be forthright. It's harder to find time to do it these days.
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So. So one of the great joys about my job, uh, as you probably know, the college includes the School of Performing Arts.
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And so I spent a lot of time going to concerts.
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I go to, uh, you know, uh, dance recitals or music recitals and music is both instrumental and vocal music.
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Uh, and so I find myself spending a lot of time in the Oskar Larsen Performing Arts Center, um, as part of my job, you know,
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because as the dean, I want to support our artists and our students, but I also I also just enjoy it, and I love it.
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Um, but my true hobbies are, you know, one is playing the piano.
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Um, I'm a terrible piano player. And if anybody came up to me and said, David, we want you to play the piano, I'd say, I'm sorry.
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I just I just play for myself. Uh, and I don't get to play as much as I'd like.
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Uh, I used to play daily, and it's been a while since I've been able to do that.
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Uh, and then my other hobbyist photography, um, I really enjoy, um, nature photography.
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Um, I'm not you. I can't explain this for some reason.
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I can't take photographs of people, but I can take photographs of nature.
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Um, I mean, like, my photographs of people, I just I just never feel like I capture the essence of the person,
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or I don't feel like they're composed well, but nature, I, I, I seem, for whatever reason, I seem to do better with nature.
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So I enjoy getting out, um, in natural, you know, national parks or state parks, uh,
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with my camera and finding interesting lighting or interesting shapes or I've got lots of photos of birds, you know, San Francisco as an.
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Excuse me. South Dakota is a wonderful place for photography of birds because we've got seasonal migrations that come through.
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And so those those are the two hobbies that when I can find the time that that I really enjoy.
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And one of the great joys of moving to Brookings.
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Is I bought a house here in Brookings, and I got to to design the interior, and I got to use my own photographs.
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So, so the walls of my living room and much of my house have my own photographs on the wall.
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And these are photographs of nature that I've taken over the years. So, um, that that's a, that's a hobby that, that I really enjoy.
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Uh, when, when the weather's warm enough and I can get out and.
