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[MUSIC] >> Thank you so much Rick for being here today.
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As you can see we've got a lot of really interested people in the audience here for the first view from the top of the year, so thanks to everybody for being here.
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You and I had a chance last week to grab coffee and I walked away from that conversation feeling really excited about what we were gonna talk about here today.
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I think you've got an incredible story to share about leadership at Yale, which I'm sure everybody's heard of.
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Then going into your recent transition to Coursera, which is one of the most buzzed about companies in education today and, and, lastly, your thoughts on leadership generally and advice that you have about lessons you've learned from your career and thoughts you'd have to share with our student community here.
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So I'd love to get started by stepping back to 1993, to when you were first appointed president of Yale.
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And, in a lot of ways, this was a little bit of a turnaround situation.
1:02
You had a very signficant operating deficit of about $20 million.
1:07
>> Seemed like a lot at the time.
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>> A lot at the time, a lot now.
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You had strained relationships with the faculty and I think there were a lot of questions at that time about where Yale was going in the future.
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So how did you step into that role as president?
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What were your priorities as you thought about your strategy to address these issues?
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>> Well, you know, looking back, it was.
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it's surprising to see that, the, the, the major initiatives that I laid out in my inaugural address turned out to be the things that occupied me for 20 years, so it, some of it was not rocket science.
1:42
Some of it was pretty obvious.
1:44
We, we had a really terribly crumbling physical infrastructure.
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Most of Yale was built in the inter-war period, between World War I and World War II.
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And in collegiate gothic style.
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And had not been touched since 1945, so, or 40.
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So there was basically massive amounts of investment needed to bring the infrastructure up to decent condition.
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And that, that sort of decaying look of the campus.
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And the problematic nature of the city of New Haven, which at the time was very high in unemployment and the whole central business district, essentially one third vacant.
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Where the crime was, was rampant at an all time high.
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All of these things were causing us to lose market-share.
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For the best students in, in higher education.
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And so Yale was, you know, at edge of the best in the world but it risked falling out of that very top tier of universities.
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And so, investment in both infrastructure and the city were just looming large as powerful things that needed to be addressed.
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And then there were a couple of things I saw at that time, that were longer term that turned out to be major themes.
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One was internationalization, as Eugene laid out, and thank you, by the way, Garth, for that generous undeserved introduction.
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But one was internationalization because I just thought the world was changing and globalization.
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People weren't using the word yet in 1993.
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But but, but the phenomenon was, was clear.
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I mean, we needed Tom Friedman to give us the words, but we, but we had the song somehow.
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And, and and then the other was redressing the balance of Yale's strengths and weaknesses.
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That is, we had we were in danger of becoming so tilted towards the humanities, the social science and the professions and weaker and weaker in science medicine and engineering that I felt we needed to sorta put more balance into that mix.
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A lesson, by the way, which Stanford should learn in the other direction. >> [LAUGH] Right.
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>> If you want my advice. But, but. >> We do. [LAUGH] >> yeah.
3:51
So, so those were the, those were the big themes.
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And the first initiative.
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First really major step we're taking toward urban citizenship in New Haven, which was a, a major project.
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>> And tell us about that.
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What did you learn about working with the, the, the city at that time and also pitching that to your board and trying to get buy-in for that effort.
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>> Yeah, the board was there.
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Because the board was very nervous about the, the, the, the sort of reputation of New Haven as a dangerous place, and so they were entirely on board with, with investing significantly in the city.
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It was more a question of selling the, the faculty and the and, and the local constituents who felt you know, if Yale starts spending money to help fix New Haven this was like pouring money down the drain.
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And, and so we didn't start by spending money.
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We started by, by doing other things. The, the idea was.
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It, we had a 200 plus year history of town gown rivalry, ill will.
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Yale had, was this rich ivory tower institution in a poor and declining industrial city that, you know, that had been a prosperous industrial city, but it was, was in, was in a great decline as the manufacturing industry went away.
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Shirt-making industry went to the south.
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The munitions industry at the end of the Vietnam War basically shut down.
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And there was nothing left.
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Really nothing left literally. It was a awful.
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So so we had to we, we, we needed to.
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We, you know, we knew we, economic development was gonna be a major theme.
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But we couldn't just jump into that.
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We were just, we were not trusted.
5:23
So the issue was winning the bona fide's of community leaders.
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Of the political apparatus and of the other community organizations in the neighborhoods and in the clergy who have important political influence particularly in the black community.
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So we, we, we set about it by with volunteerism and really mobilizing.
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The, what was already happening, but organizing it in much more systematic ways.
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So basically, I made, I had every dean of every school rec, you know, told that it's part of your job description to have urban outreach and to get your students and faculty involved.
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So the drama school is doing improv theaters in near by neighborhood and the forestry environmental studies schools planting trees and creating pocket parks in neighborhoods, and, and we could go on and on.
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All kinds of, of initiatives on parts of of students and faculty.
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And, and after a couple years that, it really helped, we, we were really kind of, beginning to win the hearts and minds.
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Hey, Yale's different now, it's really engaged in helping the city and then being a participating citizen.
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And then it was only at that point that the mayor came to me and said, you know, we need to fix the downtown and the only, the only entity in the place with cap, with the capital and the vision and the self-interest to make that work is Yale.
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So, with my blessing, go ahead and buy downtown, and redevelop it.
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And I mean, that was amazing, just from a historical point of view, that we had that opportunity.
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But it worked out really well.
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And we've got great retail.
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Great, great food, you know, really terrific restaurants in the downtown New Haven now.
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It's actually, truthfully, I hate to say this, but it's actually nicer than Harvard Square.
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>> [LAUGH] We won't compare.
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But you know, I think one thing that you were saying Rick, that you know, this, this idea of how you work with the faculty at your school. >> Yeah.
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>> I think is really interesting.
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Faculty are, are, generally tenured. You can't fire them.
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You can't force them to do what you want.
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So, how did you go about creating a vision and getting them to, to really have a consensus on that?
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>> Well this, it, all, all, this is all true for almost any constituency where you need their support.
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I mean, this would be true to any of you who are leading organizations and you wanna keep the, you know, your senior staff with you, you wanna keep the employees with you.
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Basically, a leader needs to articulate a vision.
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He needs to be clearly and coherently articulated.
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It needs to be tested with key people at the beginning before it's widely communicated.
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But then it's communicate, communicate, communicate.
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I mean it's just getting the message out and, and going and patiently talking about it with skeptical audiences. Answering questions.
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Being, being open and responsive to suggestions and change.
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But also not yielding on the core vision.
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And, you know, one, one of the great things about faculty is they're basically rational.
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And, and even though they're very independent.
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And so, persuading is possible, actually. >> Mm-hm.
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>> If you have, if you, you know, if it's a compelling argument eventually, you'll win.
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And, and, that, I think that's, that's, that was the way, you know, for things like, you know, investing in the infrastructure, you know, investing in the city and internationalization, all of those strategies.
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Really became I think a pretty common consensus with time, patience, explanation, lots of meetings with groups to talk it through.
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>> Hm, the on, on the topic of internationalization.
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You did face some push back on the decision by the University to open a campus in Singapore in partnership with the National University of Singapore.
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There was a lot of question around whether Yale should be partnering with a country that had some questionable stands on human rights in, in conflict with the way Yale felt.
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[CROSSTALK] And so how did you make that decision to really put yourself behind that decision, when you knew there was going to be public outcry?
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>> Right, well the si, so the initiative to start a liberal arts college in Singapore came very, you know, rather late in my presidency.
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We started talking about it in spring of 2009 after I'd been in my position for nearly 16 years.
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And and it was, it was a kind of a capstone of a major effort to do a lot of other things, globally.
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Lots of exchange programs.
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Research facilities in China, all kinds of other things have preceded this.
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So, the actual internationalization battle for hearts and minds within the university had already been won.
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What, what hit the nerve of some of our faculty, and I, I hate, leaders will always say this.
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But it was a really small minority of people who were really exorcised about this.
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The majority, as one, as one of my key advisors, one faculty member I've greatly respect said to me about this before it blew up. He said.
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He said you know the thing is you've got 15% of the people wildly enthusiastic about this and 5% are, are just really upset about it.
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And the remaining 80% actually don't know or care or just totally indifferent.
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He said, what you have to avoid is a situation where the 5% somehow get an issue where they can bring, where they can persuade the 80%.
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Well that was so pressured because it turned out to be what happened.
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The, the, the fa, the, these faculty members tried to pass a resolution that said we, you know, we support full human rights in Singapore.
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Well, who's gonna vote against that? Right?
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So it wa, it wa, it was, it, it, it was not that they censured our doing.
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And it was not a vote of no confidence in our doing it.
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It was very clever, and, and you know, so we took a few lumps in the press on this.
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Let me tell you why this is such a great idea though.
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Asia is crying out for the kind of critic pedagogy that focuses on critical thinking.
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You know, China trains e, enorm, enormous numbers of engineers and we, and Americans worry that they're going to eat our lunch some day because of this.
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And they look at us and they say, but all the innovation in the world is coming from the United States. And why?
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They have a very different method of educating people.
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They teach people to think for themselves, to be independent, to question the teacher.
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To, to speak up in class. To argue. We need more of that.
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And so the Chinese were kinda begging me to do this.
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To set up a liberal arts college within China.
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I thought that was an environment where it just wasn't ready for, for this kind of, of really free, free ranging intellectual battles and questioning authority.
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But Singapore frankly for all the reputation of it of the, they're trying to maintain a kinda tenuous hold on a, on a, on what is a peten, you know, what is essentially an island, multicultural island in the middle of, you know of a, a very dif, a very different, you know, ethnic pu, composition of Malaysia and China nearby.
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You know, yes the government has been authoritarian in many ways and the freedoms that we that we would like to that we enjoy are not present entirely there.
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But the universities that have always been in Singapore are kind of oasis where the rules are different.
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And where free speech goes on.
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Where academic freedom is practiced and friends of ours said, look this, if you are negotiating an arrangement with the Singaporeans you can trust them to abide by the, they'll do, they'll be straight.
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If you write it down in contract, they'll honor it.
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And so we wrote, we wrote a great contract which essentially protects it academic freedom on the campus.
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It doesn't protect students who wanna go march on the public in the public square downtown because that's not allowed in the city.
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We have to have a permit.
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But, but we can we have them define our campus as an indoor space.
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So it was one was one [UNKNOWN] And just, just a few weeks ago there was an there was a good example of this, a film, with, with this politically, critical of the, of the ruling party, was released in Europe, and it was banned in, for public exhibition in Singapore.
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But before the public ban occurred, we had already assured, been assured by the government.
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That yes, consistent with, with our understanding, you can show this on your campus.
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So, so we're, I think we've negotiated a pretty reasonable arrangement, and by the way, the, it's an incredible, the students we're getting are amazing.
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The curriculum is a prescribed curriculum that in the first year, that compares Eastern and Western intellectual traditions.
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In social thought, in literature.
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And looks at comparative social institutions.
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It's really a radically different kind of curriculum.
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And we're u, it's all small classes.
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All 15 or to 18 students at most, and it's going great.
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>> I wanna go back to- >> Yeah.
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>> Asia in a little bit once we move into your time at Coursera, because I know that's a big, a big market for you there as well, but after 20 years at Yale, you ended up retiring in 2013.
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That didn't last very long.
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>> First course I ever flunked was retirement. >> Exactly.
14:40
So, so I'm curious, you, you went from Yale where you had almost $20 billion endowment and 12,000 students to Coursera where you have $85 million in venture capital.
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And, nine million users at this point?
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I don't know what the- >> 10. >> North of 10.
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>> 10, 10 million users at this point, so growing exponentially.
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That's a, that's a huge change for you.
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What made you think, Coursera's the next step for me?
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>> Well I didn't think it when I, when I left Yale I as president I, I was out here, visiting as a, a, visiting professor in economics at, over at [UNKNOWN] and kind of thought I'd construct a life with a portfolio of things to do.
15:20
Like maybe some, maybe go back, do some teaching.
15:23
Either it's Stanford or Yale or maybe half and half and, and, then, then I would you know be on a couple of boards and do some public service commissions and studies and things like that.
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So I, I, you know I could see a pretty full life ahead, but then I somehow just you know.
15:42
Ran into the folks at Kliner-Perkins and and was convinced you know go, go, go take a look at this, and I went over to and signed on as you know to be a consultant essentially.
15:54
Come a week, a month in the last spring semester, and and I I basically got seduced in you know, they basically pitched me on actually we could you know?
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We have wonderful co-founders.
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They're Stanford professors.
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They're brilliant imaginative innovative but it we could use a CEO to help take this to the next level. And so I succumbed.
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And I must say it's more consistent with what I've been doing for the last decade or even, even 12, 14 years.
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Then I would have initially thought, that is, I've, the big focus on internationalization, one of, a- and, also Yale did play an early role in online education.
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We, we started, with Stanford, as a joint venture Stanford offered Yale.
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We did a little startup in 2000 called AllLearn.
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That was an aesthetic success but a financial flop. We had the wrong market.
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We, we, we, you know, that's one amazing thing about technology.
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We just sort of, just, we, we, we're stumbling like every, all people at the beginning.
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And we thought this was really for our alumni.
16:53
Well, that's much too narrow a market segment.
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So Yale, Stanford, and Oxford were putting on these great courses targeting their alumni just we just weren't getting enrollment and sustaining it.
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But then in 07 we started with open educational resources and like M. I. T.
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we put a large number of our best courses on line but not interactively not like Course Sera.
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Not like the current moot.
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There was just a camera in the back of a classroom you know capturing the lectures.
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And that was, that was great, it got a lot of viewership, but, nothing like Coursera, I mean when Coursera and Udacity and edX started to operate you could see that the world had changed.
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Internet bandwidth now supported large scale interactivity.
17:37
And it, it's, so, this is, this is an amazing opportunity to democratize higher education.
17:42
I mean, the reason I'm doing it is not, not the reason that most presidents and provosts will tell you that they're doing it.
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Most of them will tell you the main reason, the main thing that's in it for me is I can improve on campus teaching.
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Gotta get all this data on what works and what doesn't work, and I can use it at home.
17:57
But, to me, that's like saying the automobile, when it was invented, was a good tool for going to the grocery store, you know.
18:03
I mean, it's, it's, it, it misses the point that, that, that the, that the scale, itself, is unbelievably powerful.
18:11
And, the idea that a single Stanford professor, a single Yale professor, would teach a class, one class for ten weeks, or eight weeks, and teach more students in that class than they would teach in the 30 or 40 year teaching career at home, is amazing.
18:25
It's taking the resources that we, that we Universities invest in, great teachers developing their careers, becoming masters of a subject, becoming experts and giving that expertise to the world for free.
18:37
I mean, it's truly revolutionary and, and that's what's exciting about it.
18:42
>> It, it is very exciting, but how, how are you thinking about the research, Rick, that shows that the primary users of, of MOOCs at this point are college educated white males?
18:52
That, that sort of is contrater, contradictory to the goal that you have to provide access to millions of, of users, and learners worldwide.
19:01
So how are you and Coursera thinking about that issue?
19:05
>> The we are doing all we can to promote outreach to the populations that normally wouldn't have access to this.
19:16
But th, that is to say, sort of naturally you'd expect highly educated, affluent people later in life.
19:22
To, to, to sample these courses.
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That's sorta obvious, you're all gonna do it when you're, when, when you're looking for something interesting to do when you're 50 years old, you know, apart from your job.
19:32
The but the, but the but, but there's, you know, a couple of things.
19:38
So you, it's not surprising there's penetration there.
19:39
But there's a su, an amazing amount of penetration elsewhere.
19:43
I mean, what does it mean to be, to have a college degree if you're, if you're from a developing country with low per capita incomes it prob, it doesn't mean the same thing in terms of what you've been exposed to.
19:56
As if you've gone to an Ivy League school, or Stanford, or, or, or a, a first-rate institution in Europe.
20:02
I mean we are giving a lot of value to people, even if they're college educated in places where what they got in college is nothing like what you all got. So that's one.
20:13
T, two is, we are using various tools like creating live learning hubs in US embassies around the world.
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so where people who don't have the bandwidth can actually come and get access to it, and, and, have, have sort of mentored discussion groups.
20:30
The state department is very excited about this as an outreach, as a way, of, of, of getting to people in Africa and the Middle East.
20:38
And that's so that's underway.
20:41
It's going to spread and also cellphone technology is getting bandwidth and it's getting better and better in developing countries and we're now optimizing for mobile use.
20:52
I mean originally we, well originally four months ago we, we put, we put ,. The lectures only.
21:00
The videos on, on mobile applications.
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And now we realize, people are using it.
21:08
30% of the, of our, of our viewership is, or, of our, of our students are now accessing via their iPads or their tablets or their phones.
21:16
And so now we're developing by the middle of next year we'll have completely full interactivity.
21:20
Every, everything you can to do on a computer, you'll be able to do on the phone.
21:24
>> How are you thinking about who your main customer is, because you've got the Universities on the one side that are putting their content up on your platform? >> Right.
21:32
>> You've got the students who are using it, and you also have the business community where you have an opportunity- >> Definitely. >> To provide.
21:39
Support in terms of credentialing. >> Right.
21:41
>> So how are you thinking about those various strategies?
21:45
Are you sorta executing on all of those at this point or do you believe like Steve Ballmer does that you need one strategy and you need to do it really well?
21:52
>> Well we couldn't succeed by ignoring all three pieces of that, of that triangle.
21:59
That is we obviously need to appeal to the, we have to optimize for the learner experience that it has to be a really attractive presentation of the material has to be something people wanna re-engage in after they try it.
22:14
So that's, that's just product design and, and good pedagogy and using the research from all the data to make the user experience better.
22:23
We have to please our partners because our.
22:25
As this is Coursera specific now because you wouldn't have to go to this way, but our niche in this market is aggregating content from great Universities.
22:34
Many of the other people in the online education space are using faculty they hire freelance, which are largely from industry, not from Universities.
22:45
And that's, and for sorta business skills training, that's probably a pretty successful model.
22:49
That's basically what Udacity is doing.
22:51
They're, they're focusing narrowly on the tech sector.
22:54
Hiring industry people to teach courses on tech skills.
22:58
Our, our niche and our asset is relationships with now 128 Universities.
23:03
We're the best in the world.
23:04
And I think you know, it makes us different.
23:08
It, it makes the average quality of what we do way higher, I think, than any of the competitors, and, and so we're, we need to keep the partners happy.
23:16
And then the business community comes in because we need people to recognize, I mean our monetization strategy is basically education's free.
23:23
But if you want verification, a verified, you know, you want your identity verified.
23:27
And getting certified as having completed the course satisfactorily that costs $50, basically.
23:34
And we are now discounting the price in some of the developing countries.
23:38
And to do that you need, for that to be something people want to pay for when it's also free you need the business community to recognize.
23:49
Some of these courses, about half of our courses are, build skills.
23:53
The other half are general education courses.
23:55
At least those half of the courses that the business community says, oh, yes, we want people who've taken your data science specialization, or we want people who have studied Android programming on your, on your platform.
24:08
I wanna make sure to spend some- >> Yeah.
24:09
>> Time, Rick, on the fact that you went from really leading a room full of PhD academics, to looking out at a room full of MBAs and product engineers, right?
24:21
So how has your leadership style evolved since, moving.
24:25
From a very traditional University into a start up where you're not only dealing with a different type of employee but you're also dealing with two founders who are still very involved with the company.
24:39
>> It's, there's, it's different, that's for sure, but but as a general.
24:47
As a general matter, there's a lot that's in common in any leadership position, and, and I said it, you know, having a vision, communicating it clearly, picking the right people, putting them in the right jobs, enabling them, not micromanaging them.
25:03
You know, those are all lessons that are very very general.
25:06
And and, and, you know, running Coursera's sort of more, a little more, it's somewhere in between.
25:14
It's sort of what, more like running the economics department than like running Yale because it's a, it's a, it's a smaller population of people.
25:21
In the economics department, we had about, my time, about 50 faculty and, and.
25:26
And 30 or 40 staff, so it, it course, a little bit smaller than Coursera.
25:30
But, and so, you know, you have all hands meetings, you deal with the whole population.
25:34
You didn't do that in a big organization like Yale.
25:36
So you need to have you know, that ability to listen and process and or, organize people, delegate tasks to the right people. All that's the same.
25:46
What's kind of different.
25:48
Is the speed of the, of the required speed of decision making in this in this internet environment.
25:55
I mean, we're in a brand new start up business were constantly testing and iterating.
26:00
We have to do our product development rapidly.
26:03
Put something out there, try it, do some testing, improve it, constantly were just working relentlessly.
26:11
Day and night to make the product better and better.
26:14
Make it build new features make them make them work.
26:18
That's just relentless effort on a time scale of just higher pressure than your used to in the University setting.
26:25
And then there's questions about making strategic choices.
26:28
You know they're coming at you all the time.
26:31
And just as they are in the University.
26:32
But in the University you know everybody's used to.
26:34
Oh let's talk about this for three months before we decide.
26:36
I mean it just th, there's not that sense of urgency or well resourced you basically the business of daily education and research is gonna go on no matter what the President does.
26:46
And, and so it's different.
26:47
But in the, in the small company in a highly competitive environment where we're charting new ground.
26:53
You have to be prepared to react more quickly and, and and actually that means be prepared to make a few mistakes.
26:59
Because you can't get everything right without a lot of deliberation.
27:03
So you, you take some risks.
27:05
But that's what makes the world interesting.
27:08
>> Can you share any of those risks that you've taken that haven't gone so well?
27:14
>> Well we haven't made any of those bad decisions since I've been there. >> Of course.
27:18
>> But there were some made earlier. [LAUGH] >> Why even ask?
27:21
>> No, I, I I I think, I think there that we, we have we have tried to, to work with our partners, the Universities.
27:35
To, to, to renegotiate certain aspects of our arrangements with them and we've run into situations where they've been very adamant about maintaining one or two of the terms in our original agreement which I fully understand why it recog, why it recognizes their interests but on the other hand.
27:55
You know, it's not, not consistent with sort of, internet norms.
27:58
We, we're an internet company, and there are, there are how, what happens. Here's a good example.
28:06
What happens, this is one we just had a hard time.
28:08
We, we would like to do more to essentially be able to take down.
28:14
Comments on this, on our, in our interactions on our forums.
28:19
When, if, they start to get harassing or threatening or, or, or are, we've had some, there are some bad actors, we've had incidents that are bad incidents.
28:30
You know, and, the University perspective is that we don't take anything down, we just, we just, you know, we, we, we, we and certainly it's my policy at Yale, if, you know, hate speech is responded to with more speech.
28:44
You're basically, you, you tea, use it as a teaching moment.
28:47
You tell the community, this is inappropriate.
28:50
But we're, we're not gonna, we're not gonna take it, you know we're not gonna take it down.
28:53
But we're, but we're gonna tell you, we think this is inappropriate and here's why.
28:58
The internet's not like that.
29:00
All the big social media places you know are taking stuff down all the time.
29:05
And, and, you know, so getting, the Universities really aren't ready to accept that.
29:09
They want, they want the University kind of rules to govern them.
29:11
They don’t want an, of Coursera, taking anything down without their involvement.
29:16
And so we made em, we made kind of a mistake reaching for this, I think.
29:20
But, that we backed off and.
29:22
Okay, we won't do anything without talking to you first, but it's just the way, it's kind of give and take, you see, in these kinds of situations.
29:30
>> You've got a room full of potential entrepreneurs here, as well as, people who have a real passion for education.
29:36
So, outside of what Coursera is doing, what do you see, as the biggest opportunity for disruption in education today, and what advice would you have for the students here on how to pursue those opportunities.
29:51
>> Well doing, yes this, this new technology does have the potential to disrupt higher education.
29:59
But I think actually- The near term phenomenon, the phenomena for the next decade won't be that universities as we know them disappear, it'll be that universities actually have their impact amplified.
30:11
And, and, and become more important to society by virtue of having even more people you know, that they're engaged with. So that's one thing.
30:20
But what, but what in, what in ed tech?
30:22
I mean, you know, the promise that ed tech is going to deliver miracles has been around for a long time.
30:29
I remember when I started teaching as an assistant professor at Yale, all the excitement about what Carnegie Mellon then called programmed learning.
30:39
That, you know, we're going to replace lectures entirely with computer drills that are actually all print based, but due to this basically take you through material in a programmed way.
30:49
And if you get a wrong answer here, it leads you to this branch, and you get the following material, and if you get a right answer it goes to this path, and, it, that never happened. It's still a good idea.
31:00
I mean, a modern version of this would be an idea I had a Yale actually that we couldn't get high school teachers to accept which was we wanted to do a, have Yale Press do a really first-rate Chinese language, you know, teaching Chinese to English language learners.
31:16
And my idea was gamify it.
31:17
You know, it was basically have, have voice recognition technology, and have, and have you say something, you've confronted an obstacle, in, in a game you know ,and, and you have to communicate the words orally and the computer would fix it.
31:32
I thought that would be a great way to teach, you know, to teach language.
31:37
The high school teachers we consulted with didn't even want to touch it, so.
31:42
It's gonna be a long time before there's really revolutionary disruption in traditional education.
31:47
In the meantime, all this stuff added around the edges is gonna, like, like moves for university level stuff.
31:53
And like the Khan Academy in material and other things that focus more on K to 12.
31:59
I think it's going to be greatly enriching for people.
32:01
It's gonna make their lives better.
32:04
I think it'll, I think it's creating great social value.
32:07
I mean I'd encourage you to think about you know, joining a startup and try to help build something.
32:12
The idea that we're gonna completely disrupt the educational system, as opposed to just reaching more people who are outside it, or improving the experience of those who are inside it is probably just a little early.
32:25
Well I've been speaking a lot here and asking you a lot of questions, Rick, so I want to make sure to open it up to our audience and we have two mics that will be passed as well as our hashtag gsbvftt.
32:38
So we'll be alternating between questions from the audience here and questions that Ryan will read from Twitter.
32:46
So, Brian, do you have one ready to go? >> Sure, yeah.
32:51
So we've gotten a few questions from the audience on on Coursera and on your role at Yale. >> Mm.
32:58
>> And one that keeps up that you might have an interesting perspective on is, what's your pitch to colleges or universities?
33:03
Is it solely about amplifying the message of universities?
33:08
How do you deal with the threats they, they perceive Coursera or MOOCs having to the traditional model and is there a, a place for a sort of a moral responsibility of universities to provide education to the masses?
33:21
>> Yeah, so that is, I mean, the, the, the scale that this offers has been my, my principle pitch to universities.
33:29
And it's actually a har, it's actually a kind of a hard sell.
33:32
I mean it's not, it's, it's.
33:33
[COUGH] I, I think part of what I, what I have to do personally is, is to, is to carry that message.
33:40
I mean I, I think that it's the, and, and one of the advantages of having been a university president and dealing now with university leaders is I do have some credibility.
33:50
So people are kinda surprised when I say my first, you know, the first, the first thing about this is not improving on campus teaching although it, it's great for that and will help you do that.
34:04
If that's what you focus on, you're sort of missing what's really, what really matters.
34:07
So I have been pushing primarily the notion that this should redefine the mission of university.
34:14
Our mission, the mission of the university in, if you go to most people's missions statements, will have something to do with the creation and the dissemination of knowledge.
34:23
Okay, so we create knowledge through our research.
34:26
We disseminate it through our publications and teaching.
34:29
But we publish to increasingly small audiences.
34:32
You know, I mean, many professionals publish their articles and are read by, you know, 100 people in their field. And that's pretty good.
34:40
We disseminate it through teaching. Okay.
34:43
And the teaching, in many places, like GSB, is wonderful.
34:46
But how big are the classes?
34:47
And how many students do, does a professor reach?
34:50
This offers a op, you know, you know on average maybe 100 or 200 students a year is the, is the contact a faculty member has.
34:59
And with the Coursera of course you reach tens of thousands.
35:02
And, and that's revolutionary I think, and it gives the university a chance to make a difference to wor, you know global development.
35:12
To, to give economic development opportunity to people all over the world.
35:16
And to give life long learning opportunity to those who you know, don't need the economic advancement, but just are curious.
35:23
Just want to learn more, want to grow.
35:25
So it's an amazing, I think it's amazing.
35:27
That is basically my pitch.
35:28
I mean, yes, we'll support your on-campus with classrooms. I mean, it's great.
35:33
It's, yes we'll give you data. You can analyze it.
35:35
You can figure out which questions in your quizzes are, are not working.
35:40
And you can improve your lectures that lead up to those questions.
35:42
There are a whole lot of things we can do that way.
35:45
And yes we can generate revenue for you, but frankly, we think we can at least, but frankly that revenues not, the scale at which we can do that is not gonna be a game changer for 128 different university departments.
35:58
We had even if we were distributing half a billion dollars, that's not a huge number for universities you know to have so.
36:07
I think it's mainly the, it's mainly think about about what, what is the social role of the university?
36:12
And technology has enabled universities to move beyond the education of the elites of highly selected elites, to the, the, the world.
36:22
And I think that's incredibly powerful.
36:27
A question from the audience.
36:31
>> I, I'd love to ask about challenging decisions you had to face kind of at the end of your time at Yale.
36:36
you, you sorry I'm, I'll stand up so you can. >> Oh yeah thanks.
36:38
>> You were one of the hardest things you had to deal with at the end of your tenure at Yale was expanding the residential college system.
36:45
And obviously running into the financial crisis.
36:48
The the economics of that became challenging. >> Yep. [LAUGH].
36:52
>> It was really rumored that one of the other view for the top speaker's offered a very large gift in order to, you know, name one of those colleges after that person, and it was rumored that Yale turned that down.
37:04
I realize that that conversation is probably confidential and don't want you to have to delve too much into that.
37:08
But can you talk a little bit about the challenge you have as an executive between profitability and kind of organizational values and how you think that situation potentially exemplifies that and how you think about that at Coursera as you obviously deal with a number of, kind of, important morals and values in education but also needing to drive profitability? >> Good question.
37:31
So you know, we, we, we have, have.
37:33
We put a lot of money into our facilities and it's only after we get half mostly renovated that we decided expansion would be a good idea.
37:42
You know, if you know the Yale system we have these very, particularly since they've been renovated, amazing facilities to house undergraduates that are.
37:52
That create social environments and great communities and have amazing you know, facilities to support that.
37:58
We wanted to build two more.
38:01
It was high, high on the agenda right before the crisis hit.
38:05
And along with a lot of other capital projects that we just basically froze at that point.
38:14
I, I won't confirm or deny the, the rumor you heard.
38:17
But I will say this, I think that, so we basically committed, decided at the time of the financial crisis that if we were going to go forward with colleges, we're going to have to raise 100% of the money.
38:28
We, we, we, that we going to have to be essentially an all cash transaction.
38:32
We weren't gonna take new debt to finance the new colleges.
38:35
And we would have to absorb the incremental operating cost and operating budget.
38:39
We would have to have enough, you know, projected future surplus so we could do that.
38:43
So all, it was, it we were not gonna rob anything existing in order to, in order to expand.
38:51
There's no question that had we wanted to allow donors to name these colleges, we probably could have raised a substantially greater, we, we, we're, you know, we're naming towers and, and courtyards and entryways.
39:07
But the, the names of the Yale colleges, you know, originally were selected by the Yale Corporation to honor, you know, important founders of the university or great Yale, you know, Yale-worthies.
39:19
Great, great, great citizens and contributors to public life or intellectual life who came from Yale.
39:25
And my board did not wanna name a college for a donor. And I, I, I have to say.
39:33
I, I ha, I was very ambivalent actually on that subject personally, because I really wanted to see this project go forward and we have lots of things named for donors at, at, at, at Yale, but I, I saw the argument and I, and it was a pretty overwhelmingly I mean the, the Yale Corporation which is a small, very highly deliberative body.
39:54
Was pretty strong about this.
39:55
And so we had to disappoint at least one prospective donor, who, who would have, who would have done this.
40:03
I maybe, I guess, didn't answer it.
40:04
The general question is yes, there's always a tension between values and prac-, and practicality.
40:11
But I, I have to say, at an institution like Yale, the choice comes down on the side of values way more often than not.
40:20
And, and and actually I would say this is probably more salient for all of you, take it out of the Yale context.
40:29
I mean, one of the things I always ask myself.
40:34
It whenever we had a tough issue, any, any tough issue was what is the right thing to do.
40:40
I mean that is you can make all kinds of expedient arguments on one side or another.
40:45
And it's the temptations when you're running a big institution like Yale.
40:50
Because it is so much in the public view and so much of what you do is scrutinized by so many different people there is always a temptation to say, oh, this is one we can sort of hide.
41:02
We don't have to deal with it.
41:03
We can shove it under the rug.
41:05
You can't, you just can't.
41:07
There is nothing, nothing gets shoved under the rug, I mean basically, you have to assume.
41:13
I, I, I live my life like I had to assume that everything I did or said could appear in the New York Times.
41:19
I mean, it, you just, you just, you can't hide anything.
41:23
So you might as well live by your values because in the long run, that's the best way to live.
41:27
>> Could you respond to the second part of the question. >> Yeah.
41:30
>> Relating back to the- >> Yeah you know I still, I still, I still feel that way, it's just, it's a little it's a it, it the, the profit motive, it, it means that one of your objectives at least is, you know, to make something.
41:48
You gotta be sustainable, you've gotta bring your terms to your, to your owners.
41:53
that's, but that's a value that also has to be weighed against the mission. I.
41:58
>> [COUGH] >> You know, you know, we haven't decided if Coursera to become a B corporation, but it, a, a company like Coursera is certainly a candidate for that because we do have a mission, which is to deliver you know, to deliver universal access to the world's best education.
42:12
And we all believe in it and we wouldn't have had, we wouldn't have succeed in getting the great employees that we have managed to attract without that mission.
42:20
If we were just another tech start up with, you know, that wanted to make a lot of money.
42:25
I don't think we would have done, we, we, we are competing with Google and Facebook for engineers.
42:31
Some of our senior execs have left companies like Google, Facebook, Netflix, to come join us.
42:37
So, you know, they're not there, they're really not there because they think we're going to get rich.
42:42
I mean we may all get rich, but that's not why we're there.
42:46
We're there because we think this is a important issue.
42:48
[BLANK_AUDIO] A question from this side?
42:54
>> Going back to the theme of universities [INAUDIBLE].
43:00
[BLANK_AUDIO] >> Well, yeah.
43:33
So, let's start with why you should still pay.
43:38
I, I, I paid two years of actually more.
43:41
My, my daughter took an engineering degree too.
43:44
So and I paid a lot of undergraduate tuitions at Stanford.
43:48
Four you know, three times four. So and I'd pay it.
43:54
The and, and and it's still worth it because what you get in the live experience with such amazing fellow students and, and with the live contact with mentors and professors.
44:07
It, it, we're not gonna be able to supply that on the internet anytime soon.
44:12
I mean what where making available and democratizing is essentially the content.
44:16
So if you wanna master content the, the, coursera is a great tool.
44:20
I, I if you wanna, you know, really do a deep dive into forming relationships that are going to mean something to you for a lifetime.
44:32
To learn all the soft skills, and, and, and interpersonal skills, and skills of leadership, and fellowship, and teamwork that you need in life.
44:41
There's nothing like these great universities.
44:43
There's just no experience comparable.
44:45
It's a, this is an immersion experience with a lot of brilliant people, you know, who have enormous potential to do great things in the world.
44:52
And you get to benefit from it.
44:54
It's worth many times what you pay for it actually. So, so.
44:59
I, I don't think, you know, GSB is [LAUGH] Is going down, down any time soon to the internet.
45:06
I'm not worried about that.
45:09
So I think the, you know, I think things are re, I think it can be reconciled.
45:13
Now the, the, the question does come up, what hap, but what about the experiences that really aren't like this?
45:19
So, what about, what about second tier.
45:22
Third tier institutions that basically aren't residential.
45:26
Aren't, don't have communities.
45:28
People commute in to to a community college, take a course and they go home.
45:33
I mean, could the internet, you know.
45:36
Could, could a Coursera replace that?
45:37
I think the answer is yes. It could.
45:39
You know, it could become a cheaper, more effective way.
45:43
The so to learn, to learn what students having that kind of experience can learn.
45:48
So there, yes it will have caused some kind of disruption and there will be some dis some dis relocation of of students towards just getting credentials online rather than getting degrees.
46:01
How massive a change it will be over what time frame I'm, I'm my guess is.
46:06
Moderate, and over a [LAUGH] long time frame rather than a lot sent over a short one.
46:13
>> Another question from Twitter. >> sure.
46:15
This one's from Gabe Alazondo, and it touches on something you just mentioned a little bit. >> Right.
46:20
>> That the disruption of higher ed is going very slowly, and you've seen that over time.
46:25
Is the main missing ingredient the student interaction that you just spoke about?
46:30
And if so, how do you feel about sort of hybrid models like the Minerva project or other companies that might be trying to combine mass education with those student student engagement models?
46:42
>> Well, Minerva's not a good example, that's ultra small scale.
46:44
That's not, so that's a that's a different, that's using both online and and live methods for a very highly selective group that's.
46:54
I think different the I think yeah the missing pieces so far are not for it's, it's the it's the network effects of bringing everybody together into one physical location that which is both peer to peer learning and, and learning social skills.
47:12
And it's also critical thinking because the classroom experience which could be replicated online I think with live video chat but that would have to be small scale.
47:22
I mean you, you I don't think you could have 2,000 students online and do the, do the kind of critical thinking.
47:30
Tool development that's sort of the, the, the questioning, the forcing you to defend an argument.
47:35
I mean, that's very personalized.
47:37
And it works very well in a 15 person seminar.
47:39
It works even better in an Oxford tutorial but, but these are not the things that, that the internet can replicate.
47:48
So it's, so it's a number, you know it's the re, it's the, it's the whole residential on campus experience.
47:53
It's a big part of it and and it's the intimate contact with faculty and it's and it's the highly interactive classroom.
48:04
all, all of those are ingredients of what you get in the, we, we are not delivering now.
48:08
I think technology can deliver some of that but not all of it.
48:15
>> Sorry, can you stand up and.
48:19
>> When you mentioned the [UNKNOWN] having companies hire people that have done some of the courses that you- >> Yeah. >> Made available.
48:28
Is there any help that you can give to for example emerging?
48:41
Are you, the question is how do you help, how can you help companies in emerging markets to, to, to decipher what are the courses that might be valuable to them? And, yeah, yeah, the.
48:54
This is a work in progress, but it's something we're very mindful of.
48:58
And so yes we've talked to a bunch of large global companies who employ people around the world, and try to elicit from them what kinds of courses are valuable, what I expect will happen hasn't happened yet.
49:14
But I, I'd love to see, actually on our site, a kind of posting that, you know, Price Waterhouse Coopers recommends that's a global company, it has over a million employees world-wide.
49:29
Recommends these five courses, or these ten courses; these would be useful to us, to us.
49:34
I mean and I I and I you know we've had conversations with some of the corporations about this and I think, I think we'll get there in the next year.
49:41
Probably have some of that and that will be a helpful guide.
49:44
Basically allow companies to to demonstrate you know indicate what courses they they want.
49:49
Obviously they can do it in their job. Rex as well.
49:54
So but you know actually posting guide post on our site would actually have externalities because of the P. W. C.
49:58
says this is a valued course for us.
50:02
A smaller accounting firm in you know in Latin America could could look at that and say yeah that that makes sense to us too. Yeah.
50:12
>> Well, we're about to run out of time Rick, but I do want to end with one question that I think will, will speak to a lot of people in the audience because it's on the GSB application.
50:23
And that question is, what matters most to you and why?
50:26
[LAUGH] >> I'm tempted to say that the Giants win the World Series.
50:30
[LAUGH] Because I'm a lifelong fan.
50:32
[SOUND] But that's, that would be frivolous.
50:38
[LAUGH] When I got appointed exceed, a little side line, when I got appointed president of Yale I was asked by the New York Times, is this the most exciting day of your life?
50:48
And I responded no, not as exciting as when the Giants moved to San Francisco. I was eleven years old.
50:55
My wife almost killed me with that remark.
50:56
>> [LAUGH] >> I mean the birth of our children, you know, I mean.
51:03
[LAUGH] There are some things more important.
51:08
[LAUGH] >> But what matters between, I, I, you know, it, it, it may sound trivial and trite and it can be said by many people, but making, making a difference in the world.
51:20
I mean doing, I, I come out of you know, a tradition.
51:24
I had a mother who raised me to sort of understand you know.
51:30
You're a person with a good mind, and you have an obligation to, you know, to make a difference in the world.
51:36
I mean, do something of value to others.
51:38
So, I'd say that's what matters to me.
51:41
>> Well, thank you so much, Rick. [APPLAUSE]. [MUSIC]