Town Hall Meeting - April 2013

[ Music ] >> Hello everybody. I'm Michael Brown from Montgomery College Television and I'll be your moderator today. We're on the Rockville campus and we're in the Theater Arts Arena. We have lots of room over here. So if you're nearby or watching online, why don't you come on over and join us because Dr. Pollard is very excited to be hosting her final Town Hall meeting of the academic year today. Now as I said, I'm her moderator, Dr. Pollard and I like to joke a little bit that I'm sort of Scotty Pittman to her, Michael Jordan. >> Dr. Pollard: But I didn't get married this weekend. >>Mr. Brown: [ Laughing ] >> Dr. Pollard: He got married again. You see that? >> Mr. Brown: That's right. He got married again this weekend and the world's biggest tent or something like that. >> Dr. Pollard: Yeah, whatever. >> Mr. Brown: So, anyway, but my main job, aside from being Scotty Pittman to her Michael Jordan, is to make sure that she stays focused on your questions, and we get to as many questions as we can during the time we have today. If you're watching online, you can send those questions at any time to townhall@montgomerycollege.edu. Sorry about that folks. townhall@montgomerycollege.edu. And, again, we're going to try to get to as many questions as we can during the time we have. One favor. Please try to keep your questions short, and please introduce yourself or identify yourself before you ask the question. So without further ado, here's Dr. Pollard. >> Dr. Pollard: Thank you very much Scotty. Excited to be here yet again for the last Town Hall meeting of this academic year. Happy to be at the Rockville campus and spread these around over the course of the semester. I think we actually started the Rockville campus in the Gudelsky Building, and we're ending at the Rockville campus here at Theater Arts. Very happy to be here. Hope you all stay dry in the midst of the spring showers. And I was talking with the folks earlier, we're talking about all the stuff that's happening at the college right now, as we move toward the end of the semester. Of course, athletics, they were telling me that our baseball team is doing phenomenally well. Our track and field is doing very good as well. I heard our math team at Germantown won the math competition. What else is happening that I need to know of? Anything else happening? Big time? >>Audience: Five students were selected for the mid-summer undergraduate research. >> Dr. Pollard: Excellent. Five students were selected, and I think, are we the only community college that they select students from? >> Audience: There are probably two other first time we've had more than one in the summer. >> Dr. Pollard: That, I think, is very exciting. So five of our students. Congratulations. Very exciting. So we have a series of the way this typically works. I sometimes offer introductory comments. I'm not going to do that because we have a lot of questions. So I just wanted to say, welcome, you all feel free to ask questions. At the same time, I know several have already been sent in. And there probably be more coming in on the eline. So let's go to you Mike. >> Mr. Brown: Anyone in the room would like to start? No? Okay. We'll go to an online question. This is actually a remainder question from State of the College. >> Dr. Pollard: Oh, okay. >> Mr. Brown: And this is from Nancy Newell [phonetic], and her question is, you have highlighted a number of ways in which the college is leading the way in responding to imperatives and higher education. What are the most significant constraints to innovation that Montgomery College faces, and how can we as a community respond in an affirmative and urgent way to those constraints? >> Dr. Pollard: Nancy, that's a great question. Several things, I think, are probably come forth from it when I think about that question. One is actually something we have no control over in terms of innovation. It's the rapid nature of which time is accelerating the way which change is occurring. I shared in the say of the college that Al Gore just has this new book out, former Vice President, Al Gore, where he talks about the sixth technology drivers that are affecting change, but he starts off in the preamble to the book really talking about this idea of hyper change, that in the period that we're living in right now, that the idea of change has become so accelerated, it creates dissonance for us, literally because the idea that here's something you could have done that may have taken six months to accomplish right now at the click of a couple buttons, it could happen in minutes, if not seconds. So how do we begin to respond that the human brain technically heat would argue doesn't all that have capacity to deal with that type of dissonance that quickly. That being said, I think that things we can do to help prepare that. I think part of this is just the accepting the fact that environment is happening. But I also think , for me, that I spend a lot of time in and that should become very important now, talking with lots of people at the college about how we manage change. How we begin to manage innovation in a way that seems structured. That you still have a space in place for a randomness to occur, but at the same time, how do you honor where we have been, and at the same time, point to where we need to go as an organization. I've been spending a lot of time. I know that's actually my summer project is actually think about that a little bit more about how we structure and design change innovation in a way. Part of the other thing I think we have to know in order to do this is to create spaces where play can occur. You all know I have a six-year-old, and I had the pleasure. Robin had a girl's weekend this weekend, so I had him all weekend to myself. I actually say that because as a parent who is not the primary caregiver, this was fun to actually be the primary caregiver from the beginning of the day to the end of the day. We played hooky together on Friday. It was really fun. But what I would tell you about all of that is that to watch him play was interesting. At some point, I was irrelevant. He had his little Spiderman, he had his sword, he had his games, he had his books, he had his, you name it, and he could just play. And it was funny. At ever half an hour, momma, did you know that such and such and such could occur? Would you like to be in a time and space where you blink your eyes and you'd be in another place. Wouldn't that be really cool? And I thought just watching him play, and how the thoughts were coming to him. So I keep thinking, we really want to have innovation within our organization. How do we create spaces just to play? Where it's high risk and low risk at the same time, where failure is okay. Where something is truly innovative and out of the box is okay as well. That to me is what I spend a lot of time thinking about. But I think the only thing we ever really are constrained by is one, the ability to respond to changes rapidly as we have. Our own recognition that change is occurring, and how do we respond to that, and how innovation can occur. But also at the same time, to create safe places for us to have that type of play that we need to have in order to really create the innovation of the future. And I think we are doing a lot of that at the college. Go ahead. >> Mr. Brown: Any questions from the room? Okay. Let's go with another online question. This is from Monica Brown and Stephanie *** [phonetic]. >> Dr. Pollard: Okay. >> Mr. Brown: I hope I'm pronouncing that correctly. It's a two-part question. Dr. Pollard: What is being done about the textbook issue at the college? For instance, if you take Biology 204 at Germantown, and take 205 at Rockville, they make you buy the new lab and textbook as well, even though it's a continuation of the other class. And, a related question from a student Dr. Pollard just met, what do we do to insure student textbooks and lab manuals are quality? >> Dr. Pollard: Yes. It's interesting, that first part of that question is really at the heart of the academic new organization, which I know is a delicate subject for a lot of us in the college community, but let's be very real about this. We had a student constituency conversation with the Board, and I had a student at my table who launches into this descriptor about the fact that she is a premed. She's already graduated from Montgomery College, but she's coming back to take additional courses. And she described the fact that she's trying to take upper level physics and upper level biology class, and is unable to do so because at the Germantown campus there at the same day and time. So she was trying to ...