This is a transcript of the Spur of the Moment episode “A school system for everybody with Tony Frank.” It is provided as a courtesy and may contain errors.

Tony Frank: In as diverse a society as we live in, how do you keep those doors of access and opportunity open, and how do you make everybody feel welcome there? 

Jocelyn Hittle: Hello and welcome to CSU Spur of the Moment, the podcast of Colorado State University’s Spur Campus in Denver, Colorado. 

Tony Frank: We don’t want to tell people what to think, but we want to give them the tools to converse, to listen, to weigh information, and to decide for themselves how they want to be and how they want to exist in the world. 

Jocelyn Hittle: On this podcast, we talk with experts in food, water, health and sustainability and learn about their current work and their career journeys. I’m Jocelyn Hittle, Associate Vice Chancellor of the CSU Spur Campus, and I’m honored to be joined today by Tony Frank, chancellor of the CSU system. 

Chancellor Frank joined CSU in 1993 and has held various roles which we’ll discuss before becoming CSU’s 14th president from 2008 until he moved into a dual role of president and chancellor of the CSU system in 2015 and then into the chancellor position full-time in 2019. Dr. Frank has a degree in biology for Wartburg College, a doctor of veterinary medicine degree from the University of Illinois, and a PhD in residencies in pathology and toxicology from Purdue. Welcome, Chancellor Frank. 

Tony Frank: Thanks, Jocelyn. Thanks for having me on. 

Jocelyn Hittle: Happy to have you. So I’d like to start with your title and what it means. What does it mean to be the chancellor of the Colorado State University system? 

Tony Frank: It’s a medieval-type title and today probably most people think of a character out of Star Wars when they think of it. Universities tend to use the titles of presidents and chancellors interchangeably. Probably the best way to explain it is to say there are heads of campuses and then there are heads of systems composed of multiple campuses. At CSU, the chancellor title is the individual who is in charge of the entire system, and the presidents are those people who head the campuses. 

Jocelyn Hittle: Great. So can you talk a little bit then about the CSU system? We have multiple campuses that make up the system. What are those campuses and what’s the role of the system in working with those campuses? 

Tony Frank: There are four campuses, and you can count these things different ways, but I think of them as being four campuses within the CSU system. There are three face-to-face degree granting campuses. One is the state’s land grant university up in Fort Collins, Colorado State University Pueblo began as a lot of regional comprehensives did as a community college, back in the period of trying to improve literacy in the era of the Great Depression. 

It went through a variety of evolutionary steps, becoming a state college, eventually a university. And then in 2003, I believe taking on the name of Colorado State University Pueblo and becoming a full-fledged member of our system. Colorado State University Global Campus was created in about 2009. 

It was designed to be a place for working adults who either hadn’t attended college or who had attended college but hadn’t finished, and now we’re at a point in their lives where they could see how finishing a college degree, how getting that credential might really help them in their career. 

They have done a wonderful job at fulfilling that mission and are now expanded and also serving first time college generation students going straight out of high school. Then our fourth campus is brand new, as you know better than anyone, the Spur campus is. All three buildings have literally been open for just a couple of months now, and yet I think that’s one of our most exciting opportunities and something that I just am really looking forward to see how that plays out over time. 

Jocelyn Hittle: Great, thank you. So there really are a suite of different institutions with really different strengths. Can you talk a little bit about how the system is managed and thinks about these different universities and their strengths and complementarity and how they work together? 

Tony Frank: Sure. They are very different institutions and you could view that as a challenge. How does one compare a large comprehensive research university like CSU Fort Collins say to a non-degree granting institution like Spur or to Global or to CSU Pueblo, and yet I think that spectrum is one of our system’s greatest strengths. 

It covers almost the entire spectrum of American public higher education. In fact, exploring some new areas for it as we do at Spur. I think that says to potential customers, if you will, whatever you would like, whether you feel most at home at a large comprehensive research university, whether you’re looking for a graduate degree or a professional degree, or if you’re someone who is perhaps looking for a smaller college environment or if you’re a working adult who wants to finish out your education, we have a spot where you can feel comfortable and you can attain your goals. 

The thing that runs through all of those institutions in common, I would argue, is a focus on the students. Global exists for the reasons we just spoke about. CSU Pueblo exists for their students. CSU Fort Collins does as well. If there’s an American higher education institution that isn’t student focused in today’s era, then that’s an institution that’s not going to be viable. I just think that’s one of the best things about our system. 

Jocelyn Hittle: Can you talk a little bit about how the CSU system compares to other systems? How does CSU compare? Who are some of our kind of sister systems? 

Tony Frank: There are so many different ways systems are organized across the US. Probably most people would tell you the poster child, the most organized system is that in the state of California. They set up back in the 1960s sort of three university systems, California Community College system, the Cal State system, and then the University of California system. And they were all designed to have fairly unique roles and missions. 

That has advantages. It also has some disadvantages. The advantages are if you know where you want to go and what part of the system will take you there, where to plug in. California being very big geographically, it gave people a lot of local access points. 

The disadvantage of something like that is that a lot of learners change their path along the way. You might start out thinking this is one area of interest and you might wind up in a very different place, and having enough crosstalk, enough communication channels between the different systems and the different parts of your systems is really important. I’m attuned to that because certainly my career followed that pathway. It didn’t end up anywhere like I had originally thought it would end up, and so the different training pieces that I took along the way became very important. 

The biggest system in the country is the SUNY system, the State University of New York. Extremely large number of campuses spread across the state, over a million students. It’s just a very, very large system. Other large ones include the University of Wisconsin system, Penn State has I think 20 some different branch campuses. Then there are several that have five to six campuses in the range, Texas A&M comes to mind, and there’s a few like that. 

Here in our state, the University of Colorado, our colleague research institution, has the Anschutz Medical Campus, the flagship campus at Boulder, CU Denver’s undergraduate campus, and then UCCS in Colorado Springs. We’ve got, as I mentioned, the four campuses that I spoke at the start. I don’t know that we’re atypical, but certainly within the wide variation of systems that exists across America, we’re very, very different than some of the larger ones. 

Jocelyn Hittle: Are the systems typically, not to go too far down a system rabbit hole here, but are they typically the land grants and have expanded to encompass additional institutions, in part because that land grant ethos of connectivity to different populations? 

Tony Frank: A lot of land grants do have systems, but there are some pretty active systems that don’t include a land grant or have that in it. And there are some land grants that are standalone independent institutions, so it’s a bit of a hodgepodge. 

You’re right not to want to go too far down the system rabbit hole because if you said at the start of your podcast, “Hey, we’re going to talk higher ed administration today,” we’d have people rushing for the exits. 

Jocelyn Hittle: Let’s talk a little bit about higher ed administration. 

Tony Frank: Oh great. 

Jocelyn Hittle: So I just wanted to set the stage in part, because I think it can be confusing and people need to understand also that because you were formerly the president of CSU Fort Collins, that what we’re talking about now is that you have been chancellor of the CSU system now for, what is it, eight years. So there is a different kind of expertise and skillset that I’m guessing you’re employing. So can we talk a little bit about that? What is a day in the life look like for you as chancellor of a system? 

Tony Frank: If there’s one thing that characterizes, the day in the life of a chancellor, and this is probably true for the day in the life of a president as well, I would say, is that no two of them are alike. It’s very difficult to find a pattern in what those days are. There’s a certain seasonality to things. 

Right now, we’re in the middle of the legislative session, and so we spend a lot of time working with our representatives at the state level and also within the federal government as well. Other times of the year we’re out across the state much more listening to our constituents, talking to people about what the university can provide to their communities as a partner, what it is that we exist to do, making sure people understand the asset that Colorado State University is to the entire state. 

There’s also a certain amount of what I would consider nuts and bolts of administration. There are four people who head those campuses who I have regular meetings with. There’s Henry Sobanet, who’s our chief financial officer and head of governmental relations, our number two here at the system office. Henry and I are meeting regularly. 

There’s the Office of General Counsel, the Office of Internal Audit. There are no shortage of ways one can spend their time keeping track of all the different things that are being done. But if you’ve got great people in those roles, and I’ve always been blessed by working with really, really talented independent people, that part doesn’t really end up eating as much of your time. 

It’s more that you’re there being informed about all the great things that people are doing in their units so that you can go out and be an effective advocate. I would say if there’s one thing that a campus head or a system head really needs to do to be effective, they need to be a passionate and authentic advocate for their institution or their set of institutions. 

Jocelyn Hittle: So given that every day is a little bit different, are there some things that have been a surprise to you moving into the Chancellor role? Well, not moving into it’s now been a while, but when you moved into it or might be a surprise to listeners that that’s part of what the job description is. 

Tony Frank: Yeah, I think there are two things that would probably surprise most people about the system head role, and both of them surprised me to very various extents. One of them is how limited your contact with students and faculty are. When you’re the campus head, that’s not an issue. You’re constantly interacting with students. 

When I was president with my colleagues on the faculty and you had friendships that span 30 years and a lot of those relationships and things, and you’re right there in the center of the campus and the decisions are campus-based, the system is more policy oriented. It interfaces more externally. 

Your connections to the campuses are still there, but they’re with campus leadership and they tend to be, again, around issues of finance and policy and making sure we’re adhering to regulations and getting the reporting structures and things of that nature. So that’s one that surprised me as I, and I think what surprised a lot of people is the lack of student and faculty interactions. 

The other, I don’t mean to be too negative about this, but there is a vein, a narrative, within American culture right now that is not particularly pleased with higher education and what higher education does. I think if you’re someone who has dedicated the vast majority of your life to higher education, it stands to reason that you’ll be passionate about it, that you believe it adds value to so many people, and I do. 

So in these externally facing roles, you maximize the number of times that you’re talking to someone who doesn’t share those values. At previous points in my career, if you’re the provost or the department chair, whatnot, you’re dealing with other people who are in higher ed and most everybody shares the view that, “Hey, this is a good organization,” or they wouldn’t be working there. They’d have gone and done something else with their life. 

So one of the things that surprised me is how you have to find a way to hear criticisms from people that you don’t think are necessarily accurate, but you have to be open to those, listen to them, and be able to respond in a way that hopefully engages that person so that when they walk away, they’re thinking, “I hadn’t thought of it that way. There are positives there that didn’t fit within my stereotype of higher education.” 

Jocelyn Hittle: That’s interesting. So it leads me a little bit to a question about what skills you feel like you’re using, and it sounds like listening, persuasion, authenticity, while still staying true to what it is that you value and believe in and are fact-based arguments are behind you, just say more about that. 

Tony Frank: It’s communication, in a word, but you’re exactly right. It’s how to listen, how to hear what someone’s saying and synthesize an effective response to it. How to take large amounts of complicated information and summarize them in a simple way. I often joke when I’m talking to groups, “It’s right after dinner, let’s talk about higher education finance.” 

Jocelyn Hittle: “And here’s some graphs.” 

Tony Frank: Exactly, exactly. How can you make that a simple, compelling story that keeps people engaged? How do you make it personal? The chancellor gives a lot of speeches, as do presidents. We write a lot of things that are read by various people. So the communication skills, oral, written, conversational. 

When I was an undergrad and I was getting a lot of these things as I was a biology major at a liberal arts college, I would’ve assured you that all of that was a complete and total waste of my time, because I was going to be a large animal vet. The Holsteins and the Duroc would not care about my communication style. 

I often tell that story to people reminding them that a lot of what they take in college may have a very, very big influence in your life, even if at the time you don’t think it will. 

Jocelyn Hittle: Absolutely, absolutely. So before we move into a little bit more of the story of how you got where you are, what’s important to you for the system over say the next three years? What are your goals? 

Tony Frank: Well, if I limited it, I guess, Jocelyn, just to our system, I would say I’m probably most excited about watching Spurs toddler our years as it stands up and begins to get its feet underneath it and what it can do. I think the idea of universities partnering with K-12, reaching down into communities to make connections with populations who maybe don’t see higher education as part of their future or their family’s life has got real dramatic potential for changing lives. I’m very excited about what Spur brings to the table in that regard. 

In the next three years, we’ve also got some new leadership, but some of our campuses, I’m excited to watch them get their feet underneath them and see how they do. We have different challenges in front of all of our campuses, and so each of them has their own unique set of both opportunities and challenges in front of them. 

Regional comprehensives across the nation are trying to solve the issue of declining enrollment. What’s that look like? How do you make a case to people that there’s a real value in attending a smaller regional comprehensive university? 

We’ve all just done a three-year experiment in online education and there’s a set of pushes that talk about degrees and credentials or credentials I should say, and certificates that aren’t even necessarily degree oriented for jobs. What’s the future look like for CSU Global Campus and what’s it mean to be an online education in the post-pandemic experiment age? 

Then for a place like CSU Fort Collins that is a comprehensive research university and is experiencing enrollment pressures as demographic shifts cause more and more potential students to want to be at these large public institutions, how do you sustainably make that work? How do you make a large setting with this full spectrum of programs take advantage of all those opportunities and yet feel to the individual student like a place that they can call home and connect to? Those are very unique sets of challenges and I’m excited to see each of our campuses approach them. 

Jocelyn Hittle: Well, and it seems to me that each of those challenges might be challenges that are similar throughout higher ed. 

Tony Frank: That’s true. And if we were to talk about a challenge, I think one challenge that all of higher ed faces across the nation, it would go to the issue of this narrative that’s circulating out there, that college is too expensive. You rack up this huge amount of debt, it’s really not worth it. It’s not a good ROI. College isn’t what it used to be, and there are other things you should do with your time. 

I think that’s a very dangerous narrative for two reasons. It’s deceptively simple and I fear taking hold in a lot of people. Our polling shows that people in Colorado believe an education costs double what it actually does, and they believe debt levels are almost four times what they actually are. The second reason I think it’s a dangerous narrative is it is untrue. It’s demonstrably untrue by the use of things we used to call facts. 

We might call them observations now that can be observed and measured and recorded, but a college education is still, simply put, one of the best investments someone can make in themselves. Our price at Colorado State for tuition and fees for a year is around $13,000. Half our students graduate debt free, those who graduate with debt have around $25,000 in debt. 

That debt to starting graduate salary ratio hasn’t really changed appreciably in the last half century. Our customers seem to recognize that value. There’s a great deal of enrollment pressure at a place like Colorado State. America’s public colleges and universities are in fact a success story. Are there things that we could do better? Of course, there are, always. 

Are there populations that we are not serving effectively? Yes. And whether that’s us or someone else, we need to find ways to serve those people. A college education isn’t the right path for every person out there, and that shouldn’t be a negative thing. But everybody ought to have the chance for that college education and they shouldn’t be dissuaded from it by a narrative that convinces them or convinces their parents at a young age that this isn’t a useful pathway. 

We are part of an education system that was born literally out of the administration of Abraham Lincoln. I can’t even imagine that Lincoln could have thought about what we’d look like today and what these universities look like. I don’t think we can imagine what will look like 150 years from now. 

But if you think about the numbers of lives that have been changed through the simple basic principle that these places exist to create new knowledge, pass it to the next generation, apply it for the good of our society today, and in doing so, unlock human potential to deal with great global challenges, that’s been the same for 150 years. It’ll be the same for 150 years, and if you don’t think that adds value, then certainly higher ed is not a great place for you to be. 

Jocelyn Hittle: Let’s talk a little bit about how you got where you are. Obviously, there is great passion for higher education, but you hinted at this that higher ed administration was maybe not what you were thinking about when you were growing up in Illinois, that this would be where you are. So tell us a little bit about this. You grew up on a farm in Illinois, correct? And let’s just start there. 

Tony Frank: Sure. Sometimes people say to me, “When did you know wanted to be a university president?” I usually say, “About five years after I became one.” 

Jocelyn Hittle: Just in time. 

Tony Frank: If there is a theme to my career path, it is unplanned choices, and then enjoying them when you find yourself in that next moment that you didn’t anticipate. I grew up on a small farm in northern Illinois. My goal was to come back to that farm. There were different pathways that I thought about following, but they all included ending up back there. 

I found myself after undergrad at the University of Illinois in vet school thinking that I would go back, join a practice, helped my father farm and be a part of that. That was my plan all the way up until almost the end of my junior year. And then I met this girl and fell in love with her and she was a year ahead of me. She was graduating as a veterinarian and she was a small animal vet and was in an urban practice in Indianapolis. 

I took her home and showed her the farm and told her how we could start a mixed animal practice and whatnot, and she assured me I’d be very happy there and then I should make sure I wrote. So I suddenly found myself in need of a plan B, which I had not given much thought to before, but I was lucky enough to be able to get into a graduate program and a residency at Purdue. I had done some research while I was in vet school at the University of Illinois, and that helped me understand that that was an opportunity that I enjoyed and wanted to follow. 

When I finished up at Purdue, I found myself really pretty well qualified for work in the pharmaceutical industry and actually had spent some time with what was then the pharmaceutical division of Dow Chemical. But my wife’s position at her practice changed. My position at Dow changed about the same time. We found ourselves both sort of at a moment in time where we didn’t have commitments to juggle, and we just had our first baby and our thinking was no more complex than, “It’d be nice to live out West.” 

So there was a job at Oregon State University on the faculty there that I applied for and was lucky enough to be hired for. We relocated to Oregon, spent five years out there. That was really the start of our life together. We buy your first home, start your family, begin to raise your kids, first real job, first time where you started thinking about putting money away as opposed to, “Hey, there’s extra pizza money this month,” and that sort of thing. 

I don’t know. We might well have stayed in Oregon. We were very happy there except that Oregon passed a property tax relief measure. It was called Measure Five. It was one of the progeny of Prop 13, if people remember back that far, which came out of California, that sort of limited tax structures. Those all come from a legitimate place where you could have a legitimate debate about the size of government and how to control it. 

But Measure Five in the state of Oregon cut the state’s property taxes by 50% over three years and the state of Oregon has no sales tax, so it was a bit like taking a two-legged stool and cutting off half of one of the legs. That of course rippled throughout the state government. It rippled throughout higher education. 

When it came to Oregon State, Oregon State’s president said, “Well, I’m not going to pass this out vertically or horizontally to all the colleges. I’m going to take a vertical cut and I’m going to eliminate the College of Veterinary Medicine,” which is where I was employed. In my office today, you can see my letter of timely notice from the provost at the time saying that come July 1st of the next year, I would no longer be employed by Oregon State. 

Now, as it turned out the state of Oregon on June 30th, the last bill the legislature passed was a bill to keep the vet school open off of lottery proceeds, but we had young kids, we had a mortgage. We didn’t feel like we could wait, and so we started looking around. I had a chance to be an assistant director of global drug safety for Pfizer, and I took an untenured assistant professorship at CSU, because we wanted to stay in the West and I didn’t want to wear a suit and tie and travel a lot. Of course, I ended up in a position where I wear a suit and tie and travel a great deal. 

Jocelyn Hittle: I was about to ask how that was working out for you. 

Tony Frank: That’s the kind of crack thinking that has characterized most of my career, but that’s what brought me and Patty and our family to Colorado in 1993. As you pointed out, I’ve held a variety of roles since being here at CSU. 

Jocelyn Hittle: Can we talk a little bit about those? There are several different positions that you’ve filled at the university. Can you say a little bit about that experience? You don’t have to go through each of them, but maybe some of the highlights or moments that particularly stand out for you? 

Tony Frank: I mean, once again, they’re characterized by a distinct lack of planning. I just happened to be chairing our department’s faculty advisory committee somewhere in the mid-’90s, I guess when our department chair abruptly resigned to go to work in the private sector. I agreed to be the interim department head for six months only. That’s the only amount of time I felt I could stay away from my lab and my grants, and I didn’t want to leave the classroom and whatnot. 

Jocelyn Hittle: What were you teaching at the time? 

Tony Frank: I was teaching pathology, general pathology to freshman vet students, renal and cardiac pathology to sophomore vet students, toxicology to juniors and then postmortem pathology to students in their senior year. That was a wonderful job. As I talk about it now, I think why didn’t I stay with that job? 

But as a department chair, I guess I garnered the confidence of some of my colleagues who asked the dean to keep me on. The dean and I developed a very close personal friendship. He asked me a couple of years later if I would serve as his Associate Dean for Research. I thought that was an or rather than being department chair. 

Turned out it was an and that connected those things. That’s always important. I tell people to understand when they take a new job. So I held both those positions for a couple years. That Associate Dean for Research position introduced me to research across the university and to central administration. When the longtime VP for research at CSU, Judd Harper stepped down, he asked me if I’d apply for that job. 

I believe to this day, Judd just wanted to make sure they had one candidate with a heartbeat who would say yes if the rest of the search failed, and that was me. But I found myself then taking the VP for Research position when President Yates retired. President Penley came in, asked me if I would serve as the provost and what’s now executive vice president, did that for five years. 

When President Penley retired, the board asked me to serve as the interim president and then six months later asked me to take on the job and then the chancellor position rolled around. That was also an and with the presidency, proving I hadn’t learned anything from the Department Chair Associate Dean position. And then in 2019, as you said, I became the Chancellor. 

There are different things about different positions. I think the hardest job in the university is being a department chair, because you’re not, you’re the functional level unit of administration. So the decisions being made at the presidential level, at the provost level, are coming down to you for implementation. It’s like being a lieutenant in charge of a platoon. 

You have to be right there to live with the consequences of those decisions and to help implement them and all of the issues that characterize human beings whenever they get together, personnel issues and different personalities and how do we cooperate and find ways to get along. All of those things are very acute at the department level. I think the Associate Dean and VP for Research positions taught me a lot about how you lead through influence in a position that’s about half service. 

Those positions exist to be of service to the research faculty to let them do the work that they exist to do, and yet still you’re also helping to set some direction mostly by influencing as opposed to line direction at a university you can’t and we shouldn’t be able to just say to a faculty member, “You’ll do this research.” That’s not how it works. The faculty member has to pick that up and want to do it, and then our job is to be there and to support them and to provide a great environment for that research to go on. 

Going back to the provost role, of course, I loved because it got me back into the academic side of things more directly, the educational side of things, I should say, but because that position was also the university’s chief operating officer in those days, it also got you completely involved in the budgets beyond just a managerial accounting sense. You really were responsible with working with the deans and the other VPs to prioritize the budgets and recommending those to the president who would work with the board and the chancellor to make the final decisions on those. 

Each job’s been different, and what I would tell you, Jocelyn, is that at each step of the way, I would’ve said, “Boy, that next job that I’m going to have, that’s the one I know I don’t want.” When I was department chair, I told my wife, “I never want to be in the Dean’s Office, that’s for sure.” When I was in the Dean’s Office, “well, this is actually pretty fun, but central administration looks like that is no fun at all.” 

From the VP for Research role, I thought, “Well, central administration is actually pretty exciting. You can get a lot of stuff done here, but that provost job is a mess.” And so it went. 

Jocelyn Hittle: You’re saying you shy away from challenges. That’s what I’m hearing. 

Tony Frank: I’m saying I have a hard time holding a job and saying no. 

Jocelyn Hittle: There you go. Well, so in some ways it sounds similar to stories I’ve heard others tell about their roles in whatever, as leaders of an organization and how they have developed through the different steps that take them up to being CEO or director or whatever position that they’re in. 

It doesn’t sound too dissimilar actually from folks in the private sector or in other portions of the public sector when it comes to things like communications being a huge part of what you do as you continue to move into leadership roles and that being conversant in how you manage a budget, these sorts of things are actually relatively consistent across sectors. 

Maybe you could talk a little bit about what you love about being in higher ed. You have spoken about why you’re passionate about it, but in the day-to-day, how does that play out? 

Tony Frank: I mean, some of my experience, some of why I value higher ed as much as I do is based in my own personal experience. I grew up out on a farm outside of town of 200 people, so it was a very rural, fairly isolated community. College, especially when my oldest brother went to college in the late 1960s, just sort of blew my little head apart. The idea that there were these places like these colleges and universities that existed, and my own college experience just really opened up my world in very profound ways that changed who I was as a person. 

For everyone who wants to have that experience, I want them to have that. I think you can make a case that students who are the first in their family ever to go to college, first generation students, they create a ripple throughout their entire family that just drives an enormous amount of change. No longer is that thing something that someone else does, something completely foreign. 

Now for that family, “Hey, Aunt Jocelyn went to college, I can do this.” It unlocks so many doors and so many opportunities. So I think one of the issues we have now that I’m really passionate about is in as diverse a society as we live in, how do you keep those doors of access and opportunity open and how do you make everybody feel welcome there? 

The fourth generation legacy student whose parents went to Colorado A&M, whose grandparents went to Colorado A&M, whose great-grandparents went to Colorado A&M should feel really welcome on our campus. The DACA student who wants to be a pediatrician should feel really welcome on our campus. Somebody who’s never had anyone in their family who’s ever attended college should find their place and their path, their community, a place that welcomes them, affirms them, supports them, and helps them get across that finish line on our campus. 

The theme through all of that, of course, is these people all hold so many different backgrounds, so many different ideas, and they’re still developing them, and that’s great. We don’t want to tell people what to think, but we want to give them the tools to converse, to listen, to weigh information, and to decide for themselves how they want to be and how they want to exist in the world. 

That’s an interesting mix of tolerance, of viewpoints that you might not accept and passion in arguing your own and how we create that environment that teaches people how to sift through complex information, arrive at their own opinions, articulate them, defend them if necessary, and yet have their ears turned on so they’re hearing other people and allowing them to do that same thing. That’s a pretty interesting mix of things that I think it’s a part of who we are as human communities, of course, but I don’t know of any place you just see it happening in such real time as you do on a university campus, and I just love that environment. 

Jocelyn Hittle: I agree. It’s hard to find it again later in life, and I think in some ways I find myself seeking out ways that we can have conversations like that when you’re not in at the dining hall for an hour with someone who you just met who is a friend of a friend and disagrees with you. 

Tony Frank: That’s exactly right. When I became a vice president, somebody gave me a piece of advice that I took to heart, and I think I’ve told every new president that I’ve talked to since then the same thing, that there will be moments where you’ll be confronted with a challenge where you will have absolutely no idea how to address it. 

In those moments you need to find a place, an idea, a thing, that really gives your batteries a quick recharge, that sort of re motivates you on why this is. And for me at CSU, that was always the plaza outside the Laurie Student Center, the Clark Building’s right there. 

When classes would let out, especially near the middle of the day, you would just have that plaza flooded with thousands of students, and you’d think of all the diversity of backgrounds, all the different ideas, all the different goals, and yet they shared one thing, that they could take their talent and their ideas, this place could help hone their talents, help them achieve their dreams, and all of that collective energy was going to be the wind in the sails of the next generation. 

And that it’s always been that way, that each generation says to the next, “Come on in, help us. It’s your time.” And that next generation takes their turn at the wheel and we make progress. As human beings, we don’t get it perfect, but we’re on this relentless march to being better, and we get better because of that next generation. 

That was always the thing for me that just really energized me, and I always thought that if you were in a higher ed position and could capture that moment, you had a nearly endless supply of energy. 

Jocelyn Hittle: Well, it sounds like you’ve said that being chancellor, you have less of that. Sounds like you need to schedule in some visits to the plaza or to an equivalent space in Pueblo where there’s all that energy so that you can recharge your batteries, get that little bit of inspiration again. 

So my very last question for you, Dr. Frank, our Spur of the Moment question, so we know that Abraham Lincoln has been very influential for you. Who is the person that you quote second most? 

Tony Frank: Yeah, that’s interesting, probably Thomas Jefferson. 

Jocelyn Hittle: A little known voice. Why Thomas Jefferson? 

Tony Frank: I think, for one thing, Jefferson was very committed to the idea of education. He sure he founded a university obviously and was one of the fathers of public higher education in America. I also think Jefferson spoke eloquently and passionately about the mind of man and how important it was to be able to think for yourself and make your own decisions and sort through the complexities of a world. 

I think we have a tendency today to think about how complicated the world is around us, and it’s complicated, but is it substantially more complicated than it was to start a new country out of the British monarchy in the late 1700s? I think life has always been complex and probably always will be, and the ability of human beings to step forward, sort through complex information and find solutions as a group that works for the majority, I think is, it’s a reason for hope as we look at all the things around us. 

Jocelyn Hittle: Well, thank you very much, and with that, we will wrap up. Appreciate you joining me today. 

Tony Frank: Thanks. I liked being here. 

Jocelyn Hittle: All of the information about the CSU system can be found in this episode’s show notes. The CSU Spur of the Moment Podcast is produced by Kevin Samuelson and our theme music is by Ketsa. We hope you’ll join us in two weeks for the next episode. Until then, be well.