Insider Series Transcript: Jonathan Holloway

Audio

Al Cubbage: I’m Al Cubbage. I’m an adjunct lecturer in the Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications. I’m also a member of the Leadership Circle and a graduate of Northwestern’s Medill school twice over. I've got an MSJ in journalism and then also one in integrated marketing. So, it’s a great opportunity to be [here] and I’m very pleased to be able to serve as the host for this.

As you know, we’ve done several of these broadcasts or actually audio casts, for the NULC previously and it’s really been an opportunity for members of the NULC to get a look at the inside of Northwestern University and learn more about what's going on at the University.

I'd also very much like to thank the members of the Leadership Circle for your generosity. We're very fortunate to have a strong and supportive alumni base and your leadership is among those that really makes that happen. So thanks to you for your generous donations to Northwestern.

Today we're fortunate to have Northwestern Provost Jonathan Holloway. Provost Holloway came about a year ago, a little more now, in 2017. He's a professor of history and African American studies and also is indeed the provost of the University. We'll have him explain what that really means.

Before moving to Evanston, Provost Holloway was at Yale College, where he was the Edmund S. Morgan Professor of African American Studies, History and American Studies. He’s a very distinguished historian, something I'm very interested in, so actually I look forward to talking with him a little bit about his research interests and the importance of history in today's world.

So, he did his undergraduate work at Stanford but my understanding is that he roots for Northwestern pretty much all the time now. So, Provost Holloway, thanks very much for coming here and tell us a little bit about how you came to be here at Northwestern and what brought you here.

J. Holloway: First of all, thanks for having me and for those who are listening and watching, thank you. Thank you for your dedication to Northwestern and for giving your time and treasure. We all appreciate it.

So, the quickest version of my journey here is that it was an accidental journey. In the sense that I had risen up through the ranks academically, moved into administration and was thinking what would be the next possible thing and the answer was clear, it would not be a provost. I did not want to be a provost because my simple take on the provost, and I'll explain a little bit of more of what it is, is the president is the good news person and the provost is the bad news person and I didn't want to be that person. I'm simplifying, of course.

So I was minding my own business, leading into the mid-point of my term as dean of Yale College, and one day my wife and I just sat down and thought, "What could be next? What might be next?" And we didn't know what the job might be but we thought if we could pick exactly, if we were to ever leave Yale, which we didn't think would be the case, where would we go. And we ended up with six places—we cut out whole regions of the US—five in the US and then one in England. And, I won't name the other schools but one of them was Northwestern. The other one was not the University of Chicago by the way; this is a Northwestern story, so that was a nice little exercise and that was it.

And then a month later, I get a phone call during which I'm told I'm nominated to be the provost at Northwestern. Out of the blue, didn't know Northwestern was even searching. I thought, "That's a little spooky." And then I agreed to talk with the president the following Monday, half hour conversation, still didn't want to be a provost though. Much as I admired Northwestern. And 15 minutes into the phone conversation with Morty Schapiro, I had a ... I remember hearing my mental voice go, "Uh-oh. This would be really interesting. Maybe I'll have to rethink the whole idea of becoming a provost."

And soon thereafter, I put my name into the hat and then on and on and here I am. But it was accidental. It was just a confluence of who knows what kind of events and I'm not sure I'd want to be a provost any place else actually. I'm really happy here.

Al Cubbage: Great, great. Well actually a provost is a word that's familiar in academia but much less so out in the non-academia world. I had a student once who asked me if provost meant kind of like being the sergeant at arms for a university and I had another person who said, well, it's basically herding cats. So, is provost somewhere in between those two?

J. Holloway: Yeah, somewhere.

Al Cubbage: Or a combination of them or what is a provost?

J. Holloway: Herding wet and angry cats at times. I mean, so the ... to be slightly technical and then a bit more descriptive, the provost in some schools it might be called the vice president of academic affairs or vice chancellor of academic affairs. The provost, that's the most common title in the US, is the chief academic officer. And in that capacity the provost is the senior member of the faculty, is a member of all the schools of the faculty, non-voting member, and reports directly to the president. And in the case the president can't perform his or her duties in an emergency situation, the provost is the person who makes decisions.

So, it's the number two at the university. So that's the more technical part of it. But really my job, any provost’s job, is to maintain high level of standards and hopefully morale for the faculty, teaching and research faculty at the university. I am the lead advocate for the faculty towards the broader community and also internally. And then one more detail, two more details, is that as provost, the deans of all the schools report to me directly. So, anything touching academic affairs rolls up to my office in some shape or form. And then, as the provost I authorize the university budget. I don't implement the budget, but my job is to think about the strategies, long term trajectories of the university budget, and allocate resources accordingly.

Al Cubbage: And as the person who the deans report in to, that really is the person who has probably the most direct, maybe not control but direct monitoring of what's going on in the various colleges and schools.

J. Holloway: Yes.

Al Cubbage: And I think one of the challenges of Northwestern and maybe one of the benefits is the wide variety of schools we have for a relatively small institution.

J. Holloway: That's right.

Al Cubbage: Obviously, a state university has many different colleges and schools. Many of the Ivy Leagues for example, don't have that broad array of colleges and schools. I think for students at Northwestern that's probably a benefit, but from the administrative viewpoint is that more of a challenge? Having such a broad panoply of disciplines.

J. Holloway: It's a challenge and it's a healthy challenge and I'm okay with that, most days. Some days, not so much. I mean the fact is, one of things I've had the hardest time wrapping my head around is that as an undergraduate, a high school senior applying to Northwestern, you're applying to one of six different schools. And that's just unusual to my experience. It's not unusual to higher ed; it's just unusual to my experience. So, that's sort of an administrative conceptual challenge I'll say.

But, the variety of things I'm responsible for in terms of the schools is actually one of the great pleasures of the job. Sure, it can be tough, but just think about it. I get to have my fingers on people who have great passion on a wide variety of topics. I'll never be an expert in chemistry. I'm a historian. I'll never be an expert in theater or you name it, but I get to talk to people in all these different places who have made their lives work, becoming experts in constitutional law, become an expert in marketing, become an expert in communications. And so I get the job of listening to passionate people on a wide variety of topics. So I feel smarter, most days, because of that exposure.

Al Cubbage: And one of things I think is definitely a challenge again for the University and for you particularly, since you have budget responsibility is how do you balance those priorities? Every academic discipline wants to be the favorite child. That's the nature of those disciplines.

J. Holloway: That's exactly right, yes.

Al Cubbage: So, how do you make that mix of arts, humanities, sciences, all of the above?

J. Holloway: Well, it's a great question and it's one of the great challenges of the job. One thing that Northwestern really has going for it is excellence across so many different fields. You can think of schools that have really invested their resources in STEM-oriented fields. Or, maybe in humanities-oriented fields and that's what they're known for and that's a perfectly healthy, normal kind of model. Northwestern is crazy enough to be great in the humanities, in the social sciences, in the STEM fields and in the professional areas, theater, music, and law and so forth. It's great to be part of a community that's trying to be the best it can in everything.

But, how, is the big question, because even though we have a lot of resources at our command, the fact is the resources are finite. And so, one has to make tough decisions. Now, mostly that is held at the level of the deans and I'm going to trust the deans to be making those tough decisions about areas where they're going to search. Areas where maybe the fields have changed so much, maybe we're not going to search here anymore.

So, that is one level down in many ways. But, when it comes to the much larger picture in terms of whole areas of focus that does rise up to my attention. And what we have here at Northwestern is an exquisite strength in STEM fields and lots of strengths in humanistic and social scientific disciplines as well, and we need to navigate not just the people we have here now, in terms of faculty, grad students who are coming in with new set of ideas, new areas of inquiry. Undergrads who need the fundamentals. Sometimes it's equipment that we need to purchase to manage changing needs over time. And everybody wants to be the best.

So, you've actually summed up one of the great challenges of my job on a daily basis, about how to do that. And, it's funny, STEM faculty were concerned when I was hired because I'm an historian, “he won't know anything about my field.” So I surround [myself] with people who have expertise in that area. Historians in the department were worried that I was hired because as a historian, they were afraid I would not want to play favorites. So history was worried. I can't do anything about that except for, by my actions, demonstrate I want them all to succeed.

Al Cubbage: And I think certainly among undergraduates particularly, there has been increasing demand in or interest in those STEM fields. Again, one of the challenges is, seems to me, is how do you accommodate that growth? That's what the students really want. But, at the same time, maintain our historic strengths including history.

J. Holloway: That's exactly right and then again, this goes back to deans making strategic decisions and choices. One has to be careful, though. You mention computer science; it's a perfect example because of changes in digital technology and capability. Think back five, seven years ago. The thing that was going to change higher education were MOOCs, Massive Online Open Courses. And, there were a number of exceptional examples of one professor teaching 10, 20, 30 thousand people at a time. But there were some deep fundamental flaws in terms of how MOOCs would become truly operational and so, we still have a couple of MOOCs at Northwestern. But in terms of a cutting-edge idea that's going to change the way higher education is structured and functioned, I'm not going to be inclined to move superfast in that direction because universities are big complex, traditional places. And sometimes that's good and sometimes that's not so great.

But, if we had to try to move things really quickly, one the system can't accommodate moves like that but two, what if it moves so quickly to a place that by the time we got the ship there, there was no more dock? No more port, right? That's what happens with MOOCs in a sense. So we'd have to be always careful, while we're balancing these things to make sure we're not chasing the hot new trend, because, hot new trends by definition don't maintain themselves in that way.

But, having said that, you look at computer science, exponential growth for all kinds of reasons that we understand, and so you do have to make some choice at some point. And Julio Ottino, our dean at the school of engineering, has done that by restructuring the department. I mean you simply can't even teach courses; the demand is so high. You can't staff the courses. At some point you have to be a realist, also, so a bit of it is prognostication. A bit of it is being a realist, a bit of it may be being a traditionalist. I can't tell you that this is, you know, take this, this and this and these amounts and you get the right answer. It's sort of a constant judging based on your own accumulated experiences, knowing the larger industry, and having a sense of things where you sort of find the right mixture, right? Find the right balance.

Al Cubbage: Which I guess brings me back to the thing of, given that the demand is so strong for the STEM fields and given the sometimes skepticism about the value of the humanities. Northwestern still places a great deal of emphasis on those things. We sort of do it the old-fashioned way. We have a full professor teaching a relatively small class in the undergraduate level. Why do we continue to do that if it seems like the demand is going in a different way?

J. Holloway: Universities are this interesting mix in terms of daily life. They need to always be about change, always be about the new idea. They need to exist at the cutting edge of things, but they also are the custodians of great traditions and values, so things that we need to know to function as a society or as a culture, or as a nation, or as a planet. The University has to be doing both things, in my opinion. And a great research university is unafraid of the challenge of balancing the brand-new thing, the cutting-edge research, and being a custodian of old ideas. Because the fact is, the new ideas, so many of them, are building upon these older foundations, these older things that are loosely called truths. This is why the liberal arts, broadly speaking ... And by the way, STEM is part of the liberal arts. People often think it's not. Liberal arts is not just humanities and qualitative social sciences. It is the breadth of the undergraduate curriculum, as we do it at Northwestern.

That four years of undergraduate experience, teaching undergraduates for a moment, is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to be exposed to all these great ideas—new ones and old ones, across the breadth of what is known. Think about it, across the breadth of what it is known, and then to process it and digest it, so I want my STEM students to have an understanding of the value of history. It is less important to me that they remember dates and places, frankly. That is rudimentary stuff. I want them to have the critical apparatus to understand why. If they are trying to build a new widget of some type, they need to know that when devices are introduced into a culture, looking back in history, things change. The need to be able to anticipate consequences. History will do that for them.

Or if they're going to think about artificial intelligence, a massively important field. If we don't have our engineers or computer scientists in artificial intelligence also thinking about ethical questions about what does it mean to be human, I am very nervous for the future. So I want our STEM folks to be exposed to deep, profound questions that are at the base of value systems. They will do better work in whatever their STEM field is, and vice versa; I would not want to take my philosopher or English lit major, and whatever, and send them out into the world without understanding the consequences of digital revolutions, or understanding very basic elements of the role of science in thinking about the world. We need them to know all of these things. One of the great strengths of Northwestern is that we give them that opportunity.

Al Cubbage: Turning from ... Because you mentioned research, I think it is important to understand how much of the University's real day-to-day efforts are in the research field. I think Northwestern now has about $700 million in annual external funding for research. Much of it within the med school or biomedicine on the Chicago campus, but elsewhere as well, and that's certainly something that has grown significantly over the past 10 or 20 years. Why is it important for Northwestern to play in that big research game? What is the benefit to the University? Not so much worrying about the educational aspect, although I know that is important, but why do we want to be part of that?

J. Holloway: I think universities have this great moral obligation, and I really mean seriously, a moral obligation to marshal all these resources, to ask all these questions in service of making the world better. And so much of the medical sciences research, and that is more than ... That's, gosh, over 70% of the sponsored research dollars are being done by the medical school, which is not all that unusual if you have a large medical school at a university. So many of the questions that the faculty and researchers down on our Streeterville campus are asking will be the leading us to things that will make the human condition better, and make the world better. We need to ask those questions.

I don't know what our function is, at a university, if we are not committed to ask questions wherever we are about the human condition, and how to make it better. The research is also happening up in non-medical fields, as well, but by the nature of .. You mentioned the $702 million, actually, the sponsored research. That's federally funded dollars for the most part, and those are going to be related to STEM fields and mostly biomedicine. That is the nature of the funding machine. Certainly, there are several grants in ... I'm thinking of the School of Communication, related to, that's health-related, audiology, but also the School of Engineering has a fair number of grants as well.

As a historian, I have had a pretty successful career as a historian. I've written several books, but in my 23-year career I have secured one major fellowship. It was to pay for part of my salary for sabbatical. The university takes part in that. I have raised, in my career, $25,000 for the university. When you think about research grants, you need to understand the complexity of the ecosystem, that they are mainly geared toward the sciences for the reasons I already explained, but the research agenda of the university is much larger than that. But most of the research agenda, in terms of individual actors, not scope of dollars, is really quite inexpensive. I built a, like I said, successful career as a historian on a research budget of probably $6,000 a year, which wouldn't even cover a day for an astronomer. The cost of getting access to a telescope. I thought I would have memorized that number. It is shocking, actually.

Al Cubbage: Right. Yes, and they can't use the one they have here on campus at the Dearborn Observatory, is my understanding.

J. Holloway: No, they can't.

Al Cubbage: One of the things that I know has been a challenge for research is, as you say, the kind of massive infrastructure that it requires. We have rehabbed and renovated significant buildings on the Chicago campus. We built a new building. We have another new building that is about to open, correct?

J. Holloway: That's right, Simpson Querrey opens this winter/spring. It is a soft opening. They cut the ribbon in June, I believe. That is a massive investment of resources by the University, by the Medical School, significantly. Once those floors start getting filled in with laboratories and scientists and researchers, that is going to be a powerhouse space. It's basically allowing the research enterprise to grow exponentially. We won't realize that growth for at least three or four years after building has opened, because it takes time to get things rolling.

Al Cubbage: What sort of research will be done in there? What sort of things would they be looking at in terms of diseases or anything?

J. Holloway: I can give you one example, for instance. Northwestern is probably the place in the world to study nanotechnology. Nanotechnology is a beyond microscopic study of organisms and life, and actually engineering the mechanics, so drug delivery systems being managed through nanotechnology is one of the major research enterprises going on. There are whole teams of researchers. We are talking one major faculty might have a lab of 40, 50, 60 people working on developing new ways to use ... to develop new delivery systems through nanotechnology, or in the case of one of our fairly recent great hires, John Rogers, developing new ways to deploy wearable technology. He is going to have laboratory space down there, as well as up in the Evanston Campus. The building is breaking new ground, metaphorically, in terms of what kinds of questions we are able to ask, and what kinds of answers we will be able to deliver. It is exciting.

Al Cubbage: Yes, absolutely. I know that while NIH funding and government funding is important for that, the obvious question here is, how about the funding we are getting in terms of donations from our alumni.

J. Holloway: It's enormously important. Northwestern is a community of 30,000 people. Add up all the different people working together; it's a small city. Any given moment, something is broken. At any given moment, a new thing is happening. At any given moment, X ... You know, you fill in the dots. One of the great challenges is maintenance. I'm not talking maintaining the building, but adding to it, certainly maintaining the building is part of it, but maintaining a culture, maintaining a research practice, maintaining ethos, and none of those are free.

As much as we might like to talk about the sheer brilliance of people around us, having that community gathered together, and having the resources to be able to exercise their intelligence, costs. People talk about, from the undergrad perspective, the cost of attending a school like Northwestern. It is expensive, but even if you are paying full tuition you are not coming close to covering the expense of running the University for one person. These are very expensive enterprises, research universities like ours, that rely on federal funds, rely on corporate philanthropy as well, and rely on people like you, who believe in this place and are willing to invest your hopes and your treasure in this place to make sure it keeps running smoothly. It is no simple thing. We know that and so we are appreciative of all the help we can get.

Al Cubbage: Northwestern has been very generous, as you said, providing financial aid for students so that, for some, the cost is basically nothing.

J. Holloway: First of all, in bringing in students who are coming from very modest resources or coming from a non-college-going tradition, this is important work. Because we are not changing that individual's trajectory, we are changing the whole family's trajectory by the way in which the student will go on and be able to have a more fulfilling set of opportunities down the road. That's good, ethical work, and some can say we shouldn't have to do all these things. Alright, you can debate that if you want to, but I would much rather have a society, beyond Northwestern now, where we are doing everything we can to lift everybody. A rising tide lifts all boats.

Certainly, if we do not educate our country, we are in trouble, simply. From the standpoint of just enlightened self-interest, we had better be in the job, I want to be in the job, of educating as many different types of people as we can. This is also really important for everybody, undergrads now again, because being exposed to people from very different backgrounds and traditions, languages, religions, political philosophy, you name it, it is good for everybody. It makes running the University on a daily basis much more difficult. It makes more difficult teaching in the classroom. It makes being in student affairs more challenging. But if we aren’t ready to accept those challenges, those challenges that are reflected in our nation on a daily basis, I don't know what we’re doing.

So I want the challenge. I want to be able to do what we can to help out people from modest backgrounds. We are not talking about reducing the level or the quality of the talent here, by the way. These are enormously talented people, very bright and gifted, but they happen to go to a school with no computers or no AP classes, or run on down the list. So this is a social good, and this goes back to something I was saying earlier in the conversation: that's what the University should be doing.

Al Cubbage: Talk a little bit about what we are doing in terms of residential experience as well is the academic experience.

J. Holloway: Thanks for raising that. Patricia Telles-Irvin, the vice president for student affairs, has been doing a fabulous job managing ... She manages housing ... of managing the renovation, or the rehabilitation, or the building of new structures entirely, and what she is doing is building to the best practices, industry-wide, about a dormitory no longer just being a sort of monkish room; a room with two beds, two dressers, and two desks. The way the industry has evolved is trying to have spaces within the residence hall where students can convene socially. Lounges essentially, but lounges in a different kind of way. Not just an entry lounge by the front door, a desk-attended area, but lounges where they can ... Think of a coffeehouse environment where they can bring their work, sit down on comfortable furniture, do their work on their laptops and just fix their own food. This kind of socializing is very healthy just for students meeting new people, decompressing, you name it. And then also building in exercise spaces in residence halls, maker spaces in residence halls, so you can tap different types of interests; I mean, because we're bringing in people from so many different places and so many different hobbies or pursuits that the more we can capture or provide opportunities for those kinds of interests in the residence hall, the more we'll be able to help these students out, and the more students will actually be able to say, "Here's this maker space. I'm really good at this thing. I can bring my friends involved who don't do this thing, and we can do this together." That's building communities in whole other kinds of ways.

So she's been doing a really great job in thinking of these residential communities as sort of complex organisms that reflect the complexity of the student body. It's great.

Al Cubbage: I know that one of the things some of our older alums would remember were the old fraternity houses on Lincoln Avenue, sometimes not so affectionately called Peanut Row--

J. Holloway: Peanut Row. Yes.

Al Cubbage: Which is now a beautiful new residence hall, 560 Lincoln, that I think just opened last year.

J. Holloway: That's right. That's right. And 560 embodies a lot of the things I just mentioned. It's ... It is a stunning building actually. There are some differences in the quality of the housing that will be a natural challenge over the 10-year plan that Patricia Telles-Irvin has put into place. But boy, the renovation of Willard, the renovation of dining facilities in Sargent and Norris and Allison, and 560 Lincoln, Slivka before that. It's really a pretty significant upgrade.

Al Cubbage: Yeah, yeah. Again, I was fortunate enough to see the renovated Willard, I guess last spring, and what a change that was. It was always kind of a fun old place, but now it's a really nice fun old place.

J. Holloway: I wasn't here to know the before, but the after? Check it out. It's pretty great.

Al Cubbage: Yeah, no, it's a huge change, it really is.

J. Holloway: Yeah.

Al Cubbage: Let me turn for a moment though, to graduate education which is, housing's not really as much of an issue for them, although, to an extent.

J. Holloway: Yeah.

Al Cubbage: But I think, really one of the things is, Northwestern continues to have, and actually has grown, its PhD programs, not just in the STEM fields, but in the humanities as well.

J. Holloway: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Al Cubbage: We're certainly renowned in a number of those departments, in the humanities as well as in the sciences. But graduate education is something where we're cranking out PhDs. Okay, well, there's a tough job market for PhDs in a lot of the particular humanities fields.

J. Holloway: Yes.

Al Cubbage: Why do we need to have, want to have, as much emphasis on the graduate education as we do at Northwestern?

J. Holloway: That's a great question. And my quick answer, I know I give long answers, but my quick answer about graduate education is that there are two aspects at a university like ours, a great research university, that have inefficiencies built into them. But if we don't do them, then we should not ... We should close up shop, in my opinion.

And one of those is having a first-rate library. In a digital age, why are we buying hardcover, you know, hard books? There are many reasons we're doing that. And if you look at space in a purely cost per square foot, a library is incredibly inefficient. But you can't measure the value of a library, I don't think, by literally looking at how many dollar per square foot. It's much more valuable than that.

I think of graduate education in the same way. We are in a class of schools ... We're actually industry-leading in terms of providing fellowships for our PhD students, so that the cost of attendance is mitigated to almost nothing. So it makes graduate education, it's very expensive, and in that way it's “inefficient.”

Al Cubbage: Right.

J. Holloway: But if you don't have grad students working alongside faculty, so much of the research component of the university, which is critical to its work as a social good, disappears. The grad students represent, more than anybody else, the cutting edge of research, because they are the ones, whether they're in history or in chemistry, who are being tasked with, essentially, find the new thing.

Now, a historian and a chemist charge that student in different kinds of ways. A historian says, "Go explore," and the chemist says, "Here's a challenge." But without those grad students doing that work, going out into whatever their area of exploration is, and coming back, the research engine grinds to a halt. So, now I'm not saying that the grad students are there solely to help faculty do the research, but they are critical to that piece.

They are there to replenish the faculty at the national, international level. Yes, the job market's tough, especially in the humanities. But these things go in cycles, and we are in a moment, a long moment, certainly, where the job market is really fantastic in a lot of the STEM fields.

Al Cubbage: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

J. Holloway: Frankly, because as a nation, we were so underinvested in STEM for decades, and now this is a moment of incredible reinvestment. And also digital revolution, all these different things are feeding into it. So the job market for engineers, for chemists, it is just fine. For historians, it's a greater challenge. But, if we are going to be that complete research university, we must be prepared to explore in all these areas, and we must have the researchers doing it, which are the grad students. We must have training the next generations of teachers. Those are the grad students, to help out in this regard as well, and we need to replenish ourselves.

So here's a bigger question when it comes to thinking of areas of strength and weaknesses. And this is a question that I put to the deans of the schools. So if we are great in chemistry, which we happen to be, and if we're not so great in some other department, how do we allocate graduate resources? Do we throw a lot of resource at the department that's really struggling? Maybe you do, because maybe you can fix it. Or maybe you don't. And that's what I've charged the deans to do that kind of analysis over this year, to understand where we move our graduate resources.

So, we're committed to graduate education, to funding it at the highest levels we can to be competitive, and it is a very competitive market. Our grad students do very well in the market, broadly speaking. And I'm also committed to charging the deans to give them the freedom to move their graduate allocation resources around, so that one department may get more resources in the future than another department. But that is, aside from giving the deans the right to do that, it's not my position to get down to that level or micro management.

Al Cubbage: A couple of years ago, we were fortunate enough to have Fraser Stoddart, one of our professors, win the Nobel Prize. I was of course, there when we did the announcement. And I was very struck by the fact of, he took that moment to talk about the importance of global education, international education, that the number of students who come to the United States in order to study at the PhD level, and the importance of science to be a global enterprise and international enterprise. And what is the value of having international students in our PhD programs?

The whole university says it wants to be a global enterprise. Well, is that part of the plan? Is that how we do it? Or how does that relate?

J. Holloway: So one of the things, one of the issues out there is especially in some of our science fields, we have a significant representation of graduate students from China especially. And one of the fears throughout higher education is, what happens if the Chinese government makes it that much harder for their students come to study? It poses a real risk to our science. There's no debating that fact. We'd have to find some other kind of solution to proceed. That's something we're concerned about deeply.

The fact is, US universities are the diamond in the world of higher education as a class, as sort of a national representation. We have the best universities in the world, in terms of the sheer number of great universities. So we are a place of desire for an international community to come and study. That's wonderful, and Northwestern is right in the mix of all of that.

The fact is, especially abetted by the digital technological revolution over the last 10 years especially, and it's amazing, it's really about 10 years. The ease ... The barriers have been lowered in terms of how faculty are reaching and connecting with other faculty in other places around the word. And, take Vicky Kalogera and her work in astronomy, the LIGO work. That was over a thousand scientists around the world working in real time, collaboratively, to develop an answer.

Now okay, maybe that was driven by the technological demands of the question. But the fact is, I'm a historian in the United States. I get better work done if I'm talking with a historian who's not from the United States, because they ask questions I won't think of, because of a whole different perspective of understanding a nation. Those are just two big and small examples.

Research is better when we start crossing boundaries. And so grad students really represent this more than any other entity. We see it also in the faculty, but grad students are the engine of this. And so we've got to maintain our investment in that regard. That's just the nature of how we ask questions and answer questions these days.

Al Cubbage: Good. Good, good. One I always ask people, and I'm just curious, what are you reading these days? Any recommendations?

J. Holloway: Oh gosh, you wouldn't want to go down my rabbit hole. So, in my spare time, of which there's not much, I'm working on, very slowly, this larger book ... I specialize in post-emancipation American history focusing on the African American experience, and I'm working on a book called The History of Absence: Race and the Making of the Modern World. So right now, this is the third draft chapter I'm working on. The first chapter was on race and museums. I'm simplifying. Second one, race and universities, actually. And this third one is on race and currency, like money.

Al Cubbage: Dollars?

J. Holloway: Yeah, dollars and coins. So I've written this ... I have to give a keynote address in about three weeks that is called "Currency: Race and the Making of the American Ideal." And so I ... It's a three-part essay that focuses on a critical reading of— and currency not just dollars and cents, but things of value, and how they are read—currency is of value, right? So I'm looking at ... I'm doing a reading of a specific headstone in a Concord, Massachusetts cemetery from the Revolutionary era, and how it had currency or value with abolitionist rhetoric.

Al Cubbage: Hm.

J. Holloway: And then talking about Confederate scrip, or money--

Al Cubbage: Oh, yeah.

J. Holloway: And then the first ... Abolitionist tokens, Confederate scrip or money, and the first US coin featuring a free African American, and that's a Booker T. Washington coin from 1946. I never knew this thing existed until this summer. So I'm looking at coins. And then in the final section of the paper, I'm looking at passports.

Al Cubbage: Oh.

J. Holloway: And especially the re-envisioning of the U.S. passport in 2007. So what am I reading? I'm reading The History of the American Passport. That's the title of the book. I'm reading essays on theories of numismatics, and I can tell you all kinds of things about the classic age of commemorative coins and the modern age of commemorative coins. I didn't know this existed until six weeks ago. Yeah, it's about a headstone, a coin, and a passport, but it's really about beliefs.

Al Cubbage: Right, right.

J. Holloway: That's what the essay is really about.

Al Cubbage: Yeah, why is this piece of paper worth, yeah.

J. Holloway: Yeah. We invest value in it. And that says something about who we are as a nation, as individual actors in a nation. So, I'm having a heck of a time. I'm having a wonderful time doing this exploration and learning new things.

Al Cubbage: Yeah.

J. Holloway: That's the whole point. And the day I stop being curious about new things in my field is the day I really should retire.

Al Cubbage: Good, good. Well hopefully, that's not any time soon. So I think we've pretty much reached the end of our time. I'd like very much to thank Provost Holloway for joining us.

J. Holloway: Thank you.

Al Cubbage: It was a fascinating interview for me, and hopefully it was for our viewers as well. Again, we very much appreciate the support of the NULC members. Our next Insider series is going to take place during winter quarter, and that will be with David Figlio, who is the fairly recently appointed dean of Northwestern's School of Education and Social Policy.

So, look for an email, you NULC members, inviting you to join us. And we certainly hope that you'll plan on joining us and watching at that time. If you'd like to, there are recordings of the previous NULC interviews. Those are available online at wewill.northwestern.edu/nulcinsider. So again, thanks for your viewing, and thanks very much for supporting Northwestern.

J. Holloway: Thank you.