CHAPTER IX On the last Saturday in April, the New York Times published an account of the strike complications which were delaying Alexander's New Jersey Bridge, and stated that the engineer himself was in town and at his office on West Tenth Street. On Sunday, the day after this notice appeared, Alexander worked all day at his Tenth Street rooms. His business often called him to New York, and he had kept an apartment there for years, subletting it when he went abroad for any length of time. Besides his sleeping room and bath, there was a large room, formerly a painter's studio, which he used as a study and office. It was furnished with the cast-off possessions of his bachelor days, and with odd things which he sheltered for friends of his, who followed itinerant and more or less artistic callings. Over the fireplace there was a large, old-fashioned, gilt mirror. Alexander's big work-table stood in front of one of the three windows, and above the couch hung the one picture in the room, a big canvas of charming color and spirit, a study of the Luxembourg Gardens in early spring, painted in his youth by a man who had since become a portrait painter of international renown. He had done it for Alexander when they were students together in Paris. Sunday was a cold, raw day, and a fine rain fell continuously. When Alexander came back from dinner he put more wood on his fire, made himself comfortable, and settled down at his desk where he began checking over estimate sheets. It was after nine o'clock and he was lighting a second pipe when he thought he heard a sound at his door. He started and listened, holding the burning match in his hand. Again he heard the same sound like a firm, light tap. He rose and crossed the room quickly. When he threw open the door he recognized the figure that shrank back into the bare, dimly lit hall. He stood for a moment in awkward constraint, his pipe in his hand. "'Come in,' he said to Hilda at last, and close the door behind her. He pointed to a chair by the fire and went back to his work-table. Won't you sit down?' He was standing behind the table, turning over a pile of blueprints nervously. The yellow light from the student's lamp fell on his hands and the purple sleeves of his velvet smoking jacket. But his flushed face and big hard head were in the shadow. There was something about him that made Hilda wish herself at her hotel again, in the street below, anywhere but where she was. "'Of course I know, Bartley,' she said at last, that after this you won't owe me the least consideration. But we sail on Tuesday. I saw that interview in the paper yesterday, telling where you were, and I thought I had to see you. That's all. Good night. I'm going now.' She turned and her hand closed on the doorknob. Alexander hurried toward her and took her gently by the arm. "'Sit down, Hilda. You're wet through.  He knelt down and began to unlace her shoes, while Hilda shrank into the chair. "'Here, put your feet on this stool. You don't mean to say you walked down, and without overshoes?' Hilda hid her face in her hands. I was afraid to take a cab. Can't you see, Bartley, that I'm terribly frightened? I've been through this a hundred times today. Don't be any more angry than you can help. I was all right until I knew you were in town. If you'd sent me a note, or telephone to me, or anything, but you won't let me write to you, and I had to see you after that letter, that terrible letter you wrote me when you got home.' Alexander faced her, resting his arm on the mantelpiece behind him, and began to brush the sleeve of his jacket. "'Is this the way you mean to answer it, Hilda?' He asked, unsteadily. She was afraid to look up at him. "'Didn't you mean even to say goodbye to me, Bartley? Did you mean just to—' "'Leave me?' She asked. "'I came to tell you that I'm willing to do as you asked me. But it's no use talking about that now. Give me my things, please.' She put her hand out toward the fender. Alexander sat down on the arm of her chair. "'Did you think I had forgotten you were in town, Hilda? Do you think I kept away by accident? Do you suppose I didn't know you were sailing on Tuesday? There was a letter for you there in my desk drawer. It was to have reached you on the steamer. I was all the morning writing it. I told myself that if I were really thinking of you and not of myself, a letter would be better than nothing. Marks on paper mean something to you.' He paused. They never did to me. Hilda smiled up at him beautifully and put her hand on his sleeve. "'Oh, Bartley, did you write to me? Why didn't you telephone to me to let me know that you had? Then I wouldn't have come.' Alexander slipped his arm about her. "'I didn't know it before, Hilda. On my honour I didn't. But I believe it was because, deep down in me somewhere, I was hoping I might drive you to do just this. I've watched that door all day. I've jumped up if the fire crackled. I think I have felt that you were coming.' He bent his face over her hair. "'And I,' she whispered, I felt that you were feeling that. But when I came I thought I had been mistaken.' Alexander started up and began to walk up and down the room. "'No, you weren't mistaken. I've been up in Canada with my bridge, and I arranged not to come to New York until after you had gone. Then when your manager added two more weeks I was already committed.'  "'What am I to do, Hilda?' "'That's what I wanted to see you about, Bartley. I'm going to do what you asked me to do when you were in London. Only I'll do it more completely. I'm going to marry.' "'Who?' "'Oh, it doesn't matter much. One of them. Only not Mac. I'm too fond of him.' Alexander moved restlessly. "'Are you joking, Hilda?' "'Indeed I'm not. Then you don't know what you're talking about.' "'Yes, I know very well. I've thought about it a great deal, and I've quite decided. I never used to understand how women did things like that. But I know now. It's because they can't be at the mercy of the man they love any longer.' Alexander flushed angrily. So it's better to be at the mercy of a man you don't love? Under such circumstances, infinitely. There was a flash in her eyes that made Alexander's flinch. He got up and went over to the window, threw it open, and leaned out. He heard Hilda moving about behind him. When he looked over his shoulder she was lacing her boots. He went back and stood over her. "'Hilda, you'd better think a while longer before you do that. I don't know what I ought to say, but I don't believe you'd be happy. Truly I don't. Aren't you trying to frighten me?' She tied the knot of the last lacing and put her boot heel down firmly. "'No, I'm telling you what I've made up my mind to do. I suppose I would better do it without telling you. But afterward I shan't have an opportunity to explain, for I shan't be seeing you again.' Alexander started to speak, but caught himself. When Hilda rose he sat down on the arm of her chair and drew her back into it. "'I wouldn't be so much alarmed if I didn't know how utterly reckless you can be. Don't do anything like that, Rashley.' His face grew troubled. "'You wouldn't be happy. You are not that kind of woman. I'd never have another hour's peace if I helped to make you do a thing like that.' She took her face between his hands and looked down into it. "'You see, you are different, Hilda. Don't you know you are?' His voice grew softer. His touch more and more tender. Some women can do that kind of thing, but you can love as queens did in the old time.' Hilda had heard that soft deep tone in his voice only once before. She closed her eyes, her lips and eyelids trembled. Only one, Bartley, only one, and he threw it back at me a second time. She felt the strength leap in the arms that held her so lightly. Try him again, Hilda, try him once again.  CHAPTER X On Tuesday afternoon a Boston lawyer, who had been trying a case in Vermont, was standing on the siding at White River Junction, when the Canadian Express pulled by on its northward journey. As the day coaches at the rear end of the long train swept by him, the lawyer noticed at one of the windows a man's head, with thick, rumpled hair. Curious, he thought, that looks like Alexander, but what would he be doing back there in the day coaches? It was, indeed, Alexander. That morning a telegram from Morlock had reached him, telling him that there was serious trouble with the bridge and that he was needed there at once, so he had caught the first train out of New York. He had taken a seat in a day coach to avoid the risk of meeting anyone he knew, and because he did not wish to be comfortable. When the telegram arrived, Alexander was at his rooms on Tenth Street, packing his bag to go to Boston. On Monday night he had written a long letter to his wife, but when morning came he was afraid to send it, and the letter was still in his pocket. Jennifer was not a woman who could bear a disappointment. She demanded a great deal of herself and of the people she loved, and she never failed herself. If he told her now, he knew, it would be irretrievable. There would be no going back. He would lose the thing he valued most in the world. He would be destroying himself and his own happiness. There would be nothing for him afterwards. He seemed to see himself dragging out a restless existence on the continent, Khan, Hyer, Algir, Cairo, among smartly dressed, disabled men of every nationality, for ever going on journeys that led nowhere, hurrying to catch trains that he might just as well miss, getting up in the morning with a great bustle and splashing of water, to begin a day that had no purpose and no meaning, dining late to shorten the night, sleeping late to shorten the day. And for what? For a mere folly, a masquerade, a little thing that he could not let go. And he could even let it go, he told himself. But he had promised to be in London at mid-summer, and he knew that he would go. It was impossible to live like this any longer. And this, then, was to be the disaster that his old professor had foreseen for him, the crack in the wall, the crash, the cloud of dust. And he could not understand how it had come about. He felt that he himself was unchanged, that he was still there, the same man he had been five years ago, and that he was sitting stupidly by and letting some resolute offshoot of himself spoil his life for him. This new force was not he, it was but a part of him. He would not even admit that it was stronger than he. But it was more active. It was by its energy that this new feeling got the better of him. His wife was the woman who had made his life gratified his pride, given direction to his tastes and habits. The life they led together seemed to him beautiful. Winifred still was, as she had always been, romance for him, and whenever he was deeply stirred he turned to her. When the grandeur and beauty of the world challenged him, as it challenges even the most self-absorbed people, he always answered with her name. That was his reply to the question put by the mountains and the stars, to all the spiritual aspects of life. In his feeling for his wife there was all the tenderness, all the pride, all the devotion of which he was capable. There was everything but energy, the energy of youth, which must register itself and cut its name before it passes. This new feeling was so fresh, so unsatisfied in light of foot. It ran and was not worried, anticipated him everywhere. It put a girdle round the earth while he was going from New York to Moorlock. At this moment it was tingling through him, exultant, and live as quick silver was spring, in July you will be in England. Already he dreaded the long empty days at sea, the monotonous Irish coast, the sluggish passage up the mercy, the flash of the boat train through the summer country. He closed his eyes and gave himself up to the feeling of rapid motion and to swift, terrifying thoughts. He was sitting like this, his face shaded by his hand, when the Boston lawyer saw him from the siding at White River Junction. When at last Alexander roused himself, the afternoon had waned to sunset. The train was passing through a grey country, and the sky over head was flushed with a white flood of clear colour. There was a rose-coloured light over the grey rocks and hills and meadows. Off to the left, under the approach of a weather-stained wooden bridge, a group of boys were sitting round a little fire. The smell of wood smoke blew in at the window. Except for an old farmer jogging along the high road in his wagon, there was not another living creature to be seen. Alexander looked back wistfully at the boys, camped on the edge of a little marsh, crouching under their shelter, and looking gravely at their fire. They took his mind back a long way to a campfire on a sandbar in a western river, and he wished he could go back and sit down with them. He could remember exactly how the world had looked then. It was quite dark, and Alexander was still thinking of the boys, when it occurred to him that the train must be nearing Alway. In going to his new bridge at Morlock, he had always to pass through Alway. The train stopped at Alway Mills, then wound two miles up the river, and then the hollow sound under his feet told Bartley that he was on his first bridge again. The bridge seemed longer than it had ever seemed before, and he was glad when he felt the beat of the wheels on solid railroad again. He did not like coming and going across that bridge, or remembering the man who built it. And was he indeed the same man who used to walk that bridge at night, promising such things to himself and to the stars? And yet he could remember it all so well. The quiet hills, sleeping in the moonlight, the slender skeleton of the bridge, reaching out into the river, and up yonder, alone on the hill, the big white house. Upstairs, in Winifred's window, the light that told him she was still awake, and still thinking of him. And after the light went out, he walked alone, taking the heavens into his confidence, unable to tear himself away from the white magic of the night, unwilling to sleep because longing was so sweet to him, and because, for the first time, since first the hills were hung with moonlight, there was a lover in the world. And always there was the sound of the rushing water underneath, the sound which, more than anything else, meant death, the wearing away of things, under the impact of physical forces, which men could direct but never circumvent or diminish. Then in the exaltation of love, more than ever it seemed to him to mean death, the only other thing as strong as love. Under the moon, under the cold, splendid stars, there were only those two things awake and sleepless, death and love, the rushing river and his burning heart. Alexander sat up and looked about him. The train was tearing on through the darkness. All his companions in the day-coach were either dosing or sleeping heavily, and the murky lamps were turned low. How came he here among all these dirty people? Why was he going to London? What did it mean? What was the answer? How could this happen to a man who had lived through that magical spring and summer, and who had felt that the stars themselves were but flaming particles in the faraway infinitudes of his love? What had he done to lose it? How could he endure the baseness of life without it? And with every revolution of the wheels beneath him, the unquiet quick silver in his breast told him that, at mid-summer, he would be in London. He remembered his last night there, the red foggy darkness, the hungry crowds before the theatres, the hand organs, the feverish rhythm of the blurred, crowded streets, and the feeling of letting himself go with the crowd. He shuddered and looked about him at the poor, unconscious companions of his journey, unkempt and travel-stained, now doubled in unlovely attitudes, who had come to stand to him for the ugliness he had brought into the world. And those boys back there, beginning it all just as he had begun it, he wished he could promise them better luck, if one could promise anyone better luck, if one could assure a single human being of happiness. He had thought he could do so once, and it was thinking of that that he at last fell asleep. In his sleep, as if it had nothing fresher to work upon, his mind went back and tortured itself with something years and years away, an old, long-forgotten sorrow of his childhood. When Alexander awoke in the morning, the sun was just rising through the pale golden ripples of cloud, and the fresh yellow light was vibrating through the pine woods.  As the train rushed along the trestles, thousands of wild birds rose screaming into the light. The sky was already a pale blue, and of the clearness of crystal. Bartley caught up his bag, and hurried through the Pullman coaches until he found the conductor. There was a stateroom unoccupied, and he took it, and set about changing his clothes. Last night he would not have believed that anything could be so pleasant as the cold water he dashed over his head and shoulders, and the freshness of clean linen on his body. After he had dressed, Alexander sat down at the window, and drew into his lungs deep breaths of the pine-scented air. He had awakened with all his old sense of power. He could not believe that things were as bad with him as they had seemed last night, that there was no way to set them exactly right. Even if he went to London at mid-summer, what would that mean except that he was a fool? And he had been a fool before. That was not the reality of his life, yet he knew that he would go to London. Half an hour later the train stopped at Moorlock. Alexander sprang to the platform, and hurried up the siding, waving to Philip Horton, one of his assistants, who was anxiously looking up at the windows of the coaches. Bartley took his arm, and they went together into the station buffet. I'll have my coffee first, Philip. Have you had yours? And now what seems to be the matter up here? The young man, in a hurried, nervous way, began his explanation. But Alexander cut him short. When did you stop work? He asked sharply. The young engineer looked confused. I haven't stopped work yet, Mr. Alexander. I didn't feel that I could go so far without definite authorization from you. Then why didn't you say in your telegram exactly what you thought and ask for your authorization? You'd have got it quick enough. Well, really, Mr. Alexander, I couldn't be absolutely sure, you know, and I didn't like to take the responsibility of making it public. Alexander pushed back his chair and rose. Anything I do can be made public, Phil. You say that you believe the lower cords are showing strain, and that even the workmen have been talking about it, and yet you've gone on adding weight. I'm sorry, Mr. Alexander, but I had counted on your getting here yesterday. My first telegram missed you somehow. I sent one Sunday evening to the same address, but it was returned to me. Have you a carriage out there? I must stop to send a wire. Alexander went up to the telegraph desk and penciled the following message to his wife.  Can you come up at once? Urgent. Bartley. The Moorlach Bridge lay three miles above the town. When they were seated in the carriage, Alexander began to question his assistant further. If it were true that the compression members showed strain, with the bridge only two-thirds done, then there was nothing to do but pull the whole structure down and begin over again. Horton kept repeating that he was sure there could be nothing wrong with the estimates. Alexander grew impatient. That's all true, Phil, but we were never justified in assuming that a scale that was perfectly safe for an ordinary bridge would work well with anything of such length. It's all very well on paper, but it remains to be seen whether it can be done in practice. I should have thrown up the job when they crowded me. It's all nonsense to try to do what other engineers are doing when you know they're not sound. But just now, when there's such competition, the younger man gemured, and that's certainly the new line of development. Alexander shrugged his shoulders and made no reply. When they reached the bridge works, Alexander began his examination immediately. An hour later he sent for the superintendent. I think you had better stop work out there at once, Dan. I should say that the lower cord here might buckle at any moment. I told the commission that we were using higher unit stresses than any practice has established, and we've put the dead load at a low estimate. Theoretically it worked out well enough, but it had never actually been tried. Alexander put on his overcoat and took the superintendent by the arm. Don't look so chop-fallen, Dan. It's a nuisance, but we've got to face it. It isn't the end of the world, you know.  They're already nervous, Horton tells me, and there's no use alarming them. I'll go with you and we'll send the end-rividers in first. Alexander and the superintendent picked their way out, slowly over the long span. They went deliberately, stopping to see what each gang was doing, as if they were on an ordinary round of inspection. When they reached the end of the river span, Alexander nodded to the superintendent, who quietly gave an order to the foreman. The men in the end-gang picked up their tools, and, glancing curiously at each other, started back across the bridge toward the river bank. Alexander himself remained standing where they had been working, looking about him. It was hard to believe, as he looked back over it, that the whole great span was incurably disabled, was already as good as condemned, because something was out of line in the lower cord of the cantilever arm. The end-rividers had reached the bank and were dispersing among the tool-houses, and the second gang had picked up their tools and were starting toward the shore. Alexander, still standing at the edge of the river span, saw the lower cord of the cantilever arm give a little, like an elbow bending. He shouted and ran after the second gang, but by this time everyone knew that the big river span was slowly settling. There was a burst of shouting that was immediately drowned by the scream and cracking of tearing iron, as all the tension work began to pull asunder. Once the cords began to buckle, there were thousands of tons of iron work, all riveted together and lying in mid-air without support. It tore itself to pieces with roaring and grinding and noises that were like the shrieks of a steam whistle. There was no shock of any kind. The bridge had no impetus except from its own weight. It lurched neither to right nor left, but sank, almost in a vertical line, snapping and breaking and tearing as it went, because no integral part could bear for an instant the enormous strain loosed upon it. Some of the men jumped and some ran, trying to make the shore. At the first streak of the tearing iron, Alexander jumped from the downstream side of the bridge. He struck the water without injury and disappeared. He was under the river a long time and had great difficulty in holding his breath. When it seemed impossible and his chest was about to heave, he thought he heard his wife telling him that he could hold out a little longer. An instant later his face cleared the water.  But once in the light and air he knew he should live to tell her and to recover all he had lost. Now at last he felt sure of himself. He was not startled. It seemed to him that he had been through something of this sort before. There was nothing horrible about it. This too was life, and life was activity, just as it was in Boston or in London. He was himself, and there was something to be done. Everything seemed perfectly natural. Alexander was a strong swimmer, but he had gone scarcely a dozen strokes when the bridge itself, which had been settling faster and faster, crashed into the water behind him. Immediately the river was full of drowning men. A gang of French Canadians fell almost on top of him. He thought he had cleared them when they began coming up all around him, clutching at him and at each other. Some of them could swim, but they were either hurt or crazed with fright. Alexander tried to beat them off, but there were too many of them. One caught him about the neck, another gripped him about the middle, and they went down together. When he sank his wife seemed to be there in the water beside him, telling him to keep his head, that if he could hold out the men would drown and release him. There was something he wanted to tell his wife, but he could not think clearly for the roaring in his ears. Suddenly he remembered what it was. He caught his breath, and then she let him go. The work of recovering the dead went on all day and all the following night. By the next morning forty-eight bodies had been taken out of the river, but there were still twenty missing. Many of the men had fallen with the bridge and were held down under the debris. Early on the morning of the second day a closed carriage was driven slowly along the river bank and stopped a little below the works where the river boiled and churned about the great iron carcass which lay in a straight line two-thirds across it. The carriage stood there hour after hour, and words soon spread among the crowds on the shore that its occupant was the wife of the chief engineer. His body had not yet been found. The widows of the lost workmen moving up and down the bank with shawls over their heads, some of them carrying babies, looked at the rusty hired hack many times that morning. They drew near it and walked about it, but none of them ventured to peer within. Even half indifferent sightseers dropped their voices as they told a newcomer, you see that carriage over there? That's Mrs. Alexander. They haven't found him yet. She got off the train this morning, Horton met her. She heard it in Boston yesterday. Heard the newsboys crying it in the street. At noon Philip Horton made his way through the crowd with a tray and a tin coffee pot from the camp kitchen. When he reached the carriage he found Mrs. Alexander just as he had left her in the early morning, leaning forward a little, with her hand on the lowered window looking at the river. Hour after hour she had been watching the water, the lonely, useless stone towers, and the convulsed mass of iron wreckage over which the angry river continually spat up its yellow foam.  She asked, as she handed the coffee-cup back to Horton. Nobody blames him, Mrs. Alexander. If anyone is to blame, I'm afraid it's I. I should have stopped work before he came. He said so as soon as I met him. I tried to get him here a day earlier, but my telegram missed him somehow. He didn't have time really to explain to me. If he'd got here on Monday he'd have had all the men off at once, but you see, Mrs. Alexander, such a thing never happened before. According to all human calculations it simply couldn't happen. Horton leaned wearily against the front wheel of the cab. He had not had his clothes off for thirty hours, and the stimulus of violent excitement was beginning to wear off. Don't be afraid to tell me the worst, Mr. Horton. Don't leave me to the dread of finding out things that people may be saying. If he is blamed, if he needs anyone to speak for him, for the first time her voice broke, and a flush of life, tearful, painful, and confused, swept over her rigid pallor. If he needs anyone, tell me, show me what to do. She began to sob, and Horton hurried away. He came back at four o'clock in the afternoon. He was carrying his hat in his hand, and Winifred knew as soon as she saw him that they had found Bartley. She opened the carriage door before he reached her, and stepped to the ground. Horton put out his hand as if to hold her back, and spoke pleadingly. Won't you drive up to my house, Mrs. Alexander? They will take him up there. Take me to him now, please. I shall not make any trouble. The group of men down under the riverbank fell back when they saw a woman coming, and one of them threw a tarpaulin over the stretcher. They took off their hats and caps, as Winifred approached, and although she had pulled her veil down over her face, they did not look up at her. She was taller than Horton, and some of the men thought she was the tallest woman they had ever seen, as tall as himself someone whispered. Horton motioned to the men, and six of them lifted the stretcher, and began to carry it up the embankment. Winifred followed them the half-mile to Horton's house. She walked quietly, without once breaking down or stumbling. When the bearers put the stretcher down in Horton's spare bedroom, she thanked them, and gave her hand to each in turn. The men went out of the house, and threw the yard with their caps in their hands. They were too much confused to say anything as they went down the hill. Horton himself was almost as deeply perplexed. "'Mamey,' he said to his wife, when he came out of the spare room half an hour later. "'Will you take Mrs. Alexander the things she needs? She is going to do everything herself. Just stay about where you can hear her, and go in if she wants you.' Everything happened as Alexander had foreseen in that moment of pressions under the river. With her own hands she washed him clean of every mark of disaster. All night he was alone with her in the still house, his great head lying deep in the pillow. In the pocket of his coat Winifred found the letter that he had written her the night before he left New York, water-soaked and illegible, but because of its length she knew it had been meant for her. For Alexander death was an easy creditor. Fortune, which had smiled upon him consistently all his life, did not desert him in the end. His harshest critics did not doubt that, had he lived, he would have retrieved himself. Even Lucius Wilson did not see in this accident the disaster he had once foretold. When a great man dies in his prime there is no surgeon who can say whether he did well, whether or not the future was his as it seemed to be. The minds that society had come to regard as a powerful and trustworthy machine dedicated to its service may for a long time have been sick within itself and bent upon its own destruction. Epilogue Professor Wilson had been living in London for six years and he was just back from a visit to America. One afternoon, soon after his return, he put on his frot coat and drove in a handsome to pay a call upon Hilda Burgoyne, who still lived at her old number off Bedford Square. He and Miss Burgoyne had been fast friends for a long time. He had first noticed her about the corridors of the British Museum where he read constantly. Her being there so often had made him feel that he would like to know her and as she was not an inaccessible person an introduction was not very difficult. The preliminaries once over they came to depend a great deal upon each other and Wilson, after his days reading, often went round to Bedford Square for his tea. They had much more in common than their memories of a common friend. Indeed, they seldom spoke of him. They saved that for the deep moments which do not come often and then their talk of him was mostly silence. Wilson knew that Hilda had loved him. More than this he had not tried to know. It was late when Wilson reached Hilda's apartment on this particular December afternoon and he found her alone. She sent for fresh tea and made him comfortable as she had a knack of making people comfortable. What good you were to come back before Christmas! I quite dreaded the holidays without you. You've helped me over a good many Christmases!" She smiled at him gaily. As if you needed me for that! But at any rate I needed you! How well you are looking, my dear, and how rested! He peered up at her from his low chair, balancing the tips of his long fingers together in a judicial manner which had grown on him with years. Hilda laughed as she carefully poured out his cream. That means I was looking very seedy at the end of the season, doesn't it? Well, we must show where at last, you know. Wilson took the cup gratefully. No need to remind a man of Seventy, who has just been home to find that he has survived all his contemporaries. I was most gently treated as a sort of precious relic, but do you know it made me feel awkward to be hanging about still. Seventy? Never mention it to me. Hilda looked appreciatively at the professor's alert face, with so many kindly lines about the mouth and so many quizzical ones about the eyes. You've got to hang about for me, you know. I can't even let you go home again. You must stay. Now that I have you back, you're the realest thing I have. Wilson chuckled. Dear me, am I, out of so many conquests and the spoils of conquered cities, you really miss me? Well then, I shall hang, even if you have at last to put me in the mummy-room with the others. You'll visit me often, won't you? Every day in the calendar, here, your cigarettes are in this drawer where you left them. She struck a match and lit one for him. But you did, after all, enjoy being at home again? Oh, yes. I found the long railway journeys trying. People live a thousand miles apart, but I did it thoroughly. I was all over the place. It was in Boston I lingered longest. Ah, you saw Mrs. Alexander? Often, I dined with her, and had tea there a dozen different times, I should think. Indeed, it was to see her that I lingered on and on. I found that I still loved to go to the house. It always seemed as if Bartley were there, somehow, and that, at any moment, one might hear his heavy tramp on the stairs. Do you know, I kept feeling that he must be up in his study. The professor looked reflectively into the grate. I should really have liked to go up there. That was where I had my last long talk with him. But Mrs. Alexander never suggested it. Why?  Why? What? Dear me, I don't know. She probably never thought of it. Hilda bit her lip. I don't know what made me say that. I didn't mean to interrupt.  Well, it was like that. Almost as if he were there. In a way, he really is there. She never lets him go. It's the most beautiful and dignified sorrow I've ever known. It's so beautiful that it has its compensations, I should think. Its very completeness is a compensation. It gives her a fixed star to steer by. She doesn't drift. We sat there evening after evening, in the quiet of that magically haunted room, and felt the sunset burn on the river and felt him, felt him with a difference, of course.  With a difference? Because of her, you mean? Wilson's brow wrinkled. Something like that, yes. Of course, as time goes on, to her he becomes more and more their simple personal relation. Hilda studied the droop of the professor's head intently. You didn't altogether like that? You felt it wasn't wholly fair to him? Wilson shook himself and readjusted his glasses. Oh, fair enough, more than fair. Of course, I always felt that my image of him was just a little different from hers. No relation is so complete that it can hold absolutely all of a person. And I liked him just as he was, his deviations too, the places where he didn't square. Hilda considered vaguely. Has she grown much older? She asked at last. Yes and no. In a tragic way, she is even handsomer, but colder, cold for everything but him, forget thyself to marble, I kept thinking of that. Her happiness was a happiness adieu, not apart from the world, but actually against it. And now her grief is like that. She saves herself for it and doesn't even go through the form of seeing people much. I'm sorry, it would be better for her and might be so good for them if she could let other people in. Perhaps she's afraid of letting him out a little of sharing him with somebody. Wilson put down his cup and looked up with vague alarm. Dear me, it takes a woman to think of that now. I don't, you know, think we ought to be hard on her. More even than the rest of us. She didn't choose her destiny. She underwent it. And it has left her chilled. As to her not wishing to take the world into her confidence?  Hilda leaned forward. Yes, I know, I know.  My little Marie worshiped him. When she is dusting, I always know when she has come to his picture. Wilson nodded. Oh yes, he left an echo. The ripples go on in all of us. He belonged to the people who make the play and most of us are only onlookers at the best. We shouldn't wonder too much at Mrs. Alexander. She must feel how useless it would be to go about that she may as well sit still, that nothing can happen to her after Bartley. Yes, said Hilda softly, nothing can happen to one after Bartley. They both sat looking into the fire. End of chapter 10 in Epilogue and End of Alexander's Bridge by Willa Cybert Cather. Recorded in Los Angeles, California, December 2008.


Let me welcome you welcome everybody to the future trends forum. I'm delighted to see and hear all of you today My name is Brian Alexander. I'm your host the cat herder and the creator of the forum And I'm really excited about today's guest We have a terrific person a great leader in higher education and covering some really really important topics Let me now introduce this week's guest. I'm absolutely delighted to introduce dr. Amy Novak She's the president of Dakota Wesleyan University She is a relatively new president there the first woman president of Dakota Wesleyan and She is raring to go with a whole bunch of ideas for innovation She's here to speak to us today about reinventing the modern university and also what it's like to do that in a rural setting We're really grateful for her to be here. Welcome president Novak Thank you Brian very much. Glad to be here. Oh Delighted to see you listen before we dig into to detail questions about policy. Let me just ask you an introductory question What are you going to be spending most of your time on for the next year? What are the big topics ideas the situation is going to be occupying most of prison Novak? Well, certainly the question for us in rural America is a lot about the labor force and really equipping the labor force to meet Emerging needs and so we're in a number of partnership Conversations with business industry the nonprofit sector to really explore Innovative approaches to higher education and responsiveness to the needs of our region That's a really that sounds like an ongoing effort. You'll be continually continually monitoring the area having conversations with people absolutely Well good for you excellent Well friends, I have a couple of questions just to kick things off But you all will have your own questions and comments So, please use the buttons on the screen that I told you about to throw up your hand So that you can join this on stage or to send me a question to ask professor Novak doctor Novak So let me press on this a bit. What what are the emerging needs for the labor force in rural America? Well, I think this is Rather complex perhaps for one many of the regions across rural America are short a labor supply or short Educated labor supply and so this poses some unique challenges. Our demographics continue to decline Or we're in regions where we're so far spread out that accessing education becomes more challenging and We're thinking constantly about how do we leverage? Technology, how do we think differently and entrepreneurially about the delivery of education as well as ways in which we can better link our business and industry partners with the university to build programs that perhaps are Codeweloping and co-preparing students for the world of work. So that might be more boldly integrating apprenticeships and entrepreneurship Internships right alongside the educational experience and so we're exploring ways to do that with greater Intentionality finally, I would add one of the emerging trends in rural America is also the recognition that perhaps what used to be the key Industry sectors are rapidly being disrupted Agriculture for example is being disrupted by precision agriculture and technology Use of traditional manufacturing are clearly being disrupted by by again technology and automation and so what are we doing to equip even adult learners for a new and really a new world and a new workplace and so we're exploring how to best do that in ways that are Perhaps not in the traditional nine month calendar are not delivered in the traditional 50 or one hour and 20 minute class period but rather are integrating a sensitivity to the workplace a reality around these people's lives and Building structures that we think are much more agile and friendly to learners across the lifespan Well, that covers a lot of ground. Can I can I follow up on a couple of those points? Sure Well I'm fascinated by this idea of technology disrupting the rural world I mean it Precision precision agriculture is just really astonishing everything from you know GPS and tractors to using big data to more closely analyze the results of seeds and You know thinking about technology also disrupting manufacturing Is one of the curricular areas then for your campus to really push on New forms of technology robotics data analysis that kind of thing I would say we're really robustly exploring how to integrate what I'm going to call digital literacy as a core component of earning So for years, we've talked about reading proficiency and numeracy as core competencies But we're really at a point now where digital literacy is equally important how people Understand the use of technology and its application in the workplace now. I'm blessed to be a mom to eight children I always joke with I always remind them that I'm frequently working on the demographics of South Dakota here, but anyway The reality is many of our young people May be equipped with a device, but how they use that to actually effectively improve their workplace May not be they simply don't come with that skill set So as digitally literate as they are about their social media platforms when it comes to asking questions around data and Analytics and information management and what's reliable and what's valid and what's credible We have really not invested a whole lot in our general education in doing that And that's one of the areas where Dakota Wesleyan is really moving forward with equipping students across the industry spectrum So not just in agriculture, but it's changing healthcare. It's changing manufacturing and equipping students to understand What role digital literacy will play in their lives as they move forward in the workplace? Fantastic, that's a great use of digital literacy Let me ask a Actually a question in two parts. You mentioned one of the challenges of trying to reach out to people who are physically harder and harder to Access How are you gonna match that as a university and they are you know push more more online and if so How do you shape that for the unique contours of a rural environment? So I think one of the one of our realities and it's a benefit is that many of our students come to Dakota Wesleyan having been in a virtual high school experience and because of the shortage of teachers in our across our state and frankly because of the regional Distance that many schools are struggling to find an adequate workforce in their schools We have a virtual high school within the state of South Dakota That means that many of our students upwards of half of them come to us already having had an experience in an online environment and so we're just building off of that and We have adopted at Dakota Wesleyan an initiative we call digital DWU and the goal of that is again to Harness the power of technology to enable students across the lifespan the learning lifespan who really learn with Technology as an aid and assisting them and one of the observations I'm sure you're aware of is that we also realize Students aren't learning the same way that brain plasticity and cognitive learning science has all informed us that the way we Introduce pedagogy the way we introduce content is really changing and we need to adapt to new types of learning styles in new ways In which people expect to be able to reach and access content So in some of our adult programs, for example, we're having a course that's offered once a week Partially online and partially on ground students then get the remainder of the course work In an online format in another one of our adult programs we have Are doing it where they come to campus for for a weekend they get introduced to a cohort of students The rest is done in online format in which they're doing applied projects linked particularly to their workplace And each of them has been assigned a life coach Who's basically working virtually with them on a weekly basis to help? Build structures of support and accountability. We're seeing tremendous success people in Remote locations across our geography across the Great Plains are now for the first time being able to access education whether it's a pastor returning to school to get a certificate and in Non-profit leadership or whether it's a nurse who was an LPN who now has decided to See what other skills she can develop as the rural health care situation continues to become increasingly complex So we're trying to be responsive by leveraging technology And new models of supporting the adult learner with these strategies So shifting not so on the one hand you have traditionally undergraduates So, you know roughly 18 year olds who already have some virtual learning experience due to your virtual high school And then more adult learners as well. I mean sounds like if the stereotype is that rural America is less technologically Invested than urban America. It sounds like you're bucking in that trend We're really fortunate. I think to have some business leadership in the state that recognizes When you're in a part of the world that sometimes our politicians on the East Coast call flyover country You have to think about the world in a little bit different ways. So they're highly entrepreneurial that is an ethos of this region and They've said to be competitive. We must invest in technology And we really have to equip the next generation of leaders with the skills to understand how to use it So there's been a significant broadband investment in the state and across the region which I think has Created a competitive advantage for our students and then many respects. They're farther ahead than other students who might be in urban centers Well, I can see that that investment in broadband is terrific and that's all too rare This brings me to a couple of questions And friends I I can ask president of our questions for months to come But your questions are really would drive the form and speaking which hello to people who have just come in a load of Mo Petzl Hello Rita Hello to Carl. Good to see all of you here. Hello Emily and Jacob We had two questions from people who are actually teaching right this hour But they really want to get the questions in and what them has to do a technology Excellent George station who is a longtime friend of the program asks about your One-to-one laptop program and he says first what on campus and virtual support can students expect a Very strong on campus and virtual support But I would say that the key so the students are able to access both the help desk as well as Online support if they're calling in from a distance at any time. So that's one of the Opportunities they have through the program, but one of the things that we've learned that's been probably most pivotal in the adoption of our digital DW initiative and this is an initiative primarily for our traditional students on ground although we offer similar Technological resources to our adult and online students is that the most important investment was in our faculty That if we're talking about a one-to-one initiative, it's one thing to have a device It's another to have a faculty member who is equipped to think about how to teach differently How to leverage the technology to really enhance teaching and learning if all the device is doing is just presenting Content in a way that's static. We probably aren't going to achieve an increase in overall learning outcomes, right? On the other hand, we're using the technology to truly create more robust Interactions to recognize that students are learning across a spectrum of learning styles and we can now present content to those different Types of students will have achieved a much greater success So I've been concerned for some time that the data around student learning and retention has remained relatively flat Seen robust increases or new strategies that have really bolstered How well students learn and retain the content that is presented I think technology offers a new portal if you will for us to be Boulder about what those learning outcomes can be and much more intentional how each more learning styles and so We're in just year two of this, but we're already starting to see some Significant improvements based on faculty feedback from the types of interactions the level of student engagement and also the academic outcomes That's huge. That's huge. Have you have you published any of that? Not yet because I don't feel like we have enough of a data set to make you know This is just year two. So we aren't at a point where I think we're comfortable saying Making any significant conclusions, but our faculty I would say roughly 65 to 70 70% of them have Recognized that there have been notable improvements in how they've been able to create engagement When we invested in them and they saw the strategies and began to apply them. There's also a much more robust sharing going on among faculty and That's helping create a learning environment in and of itself. You know, what's working? What's not working? What was a dismal failure and and oh boy that app looks like it could do something that I'd like to try So I appreciate the learning environment that this particular program has also facilitated Well, that's First of all, it's delightfully here. That's a great success and thank you for that rich answer to George's question He did have a follow-up Which was do all or most students have sufficient home internet access? So we have some grants within the region that allow all students to access it now whether they have a device Sometimes is a challenge. However, the both the high schools in the state are one to one And so if they are attending a public institution status out the coda In almost all of the cases they do have access to a device And they're able to device home with them So our school district in the Mitchell area actually has a one-to-one initiative from kindergarten to grade 12 Well, thank you for that great answer and George. Thank you so much for those questions Friends if you would like to ask questions along these lines wondering How does a virtual high school prepare you for for virtual classes and post-secondary if you have questions about the Technology to questions about the policy of this just go to the bottom of the screen and either click the raised hand If you want to join us up here on stage or clip a question mark if you want to type in a question You might want to think about if you're in a rural area Can these lessons apply to you? Can your campus figure out how to best meet or changing labor needs of the area or if you're not in a rural area? What does this tell you about this important sector of American higher education and not just American but worldwide? We have another question that came in from Professor Ed Webb at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania He's also teaching right now, but his question Let me read the one in the fold. It's a little long, but I see where he's going Does rural location push institutions to consider novel kinds of organizations or entities as potential partners in research teaching or co-curricular activities He goes on to say Conventionally academic institutions see partnerships with large businesses city governments, etc What does that look like if your neighbors are mostly farms and small-time businesses? It's a great question one of the things that I think we benefit from is When your demographics are challenging when your location is fairly rural You're forced to be a little bit more creative And it it generates probably a lot more ideation and innovation We just opened a new school of business or we celebrated the grand oak up the ground breaking of a new school of business Our primary target is equipping people for work in small and medium enterprise There is a really critical role for higher ed in in recognizing where they're at in embracing place-based education and Which does look different and creates a sense of civic responsibility around your place So our students for example do a lot of interaction guided by a very strong faculty in nonprofits in our region in responding to rural mental health challenges in partnering with The juvenile justice system as well as the Criminal justice and to look at the opioid epidemic. So we're trying to take place-based problems and creatively partner with nonprofits with small and medium enterprise with Government entities to think differently about how can we collectively come together to solve problems and The university provides an important role as a thought leader as well as providing An experiential labor force to begin to address these types of problems. So I'm not sure that we Seek I mean we just don't have Fortune 100 companies around here But if we can host forums if we can host events if we can do small intimate trainings Then I think we begin to see collectives of groups come together To share ideas to collaborate in ways that are probably a little bit different than what you might find in a more urban environment That's a fantastic answer. Wow. What a great vision Thank you Ed for that awesome awesome question On building on that we have a question from Robert McGuire. He flashes on the screen Robert asks is your location ever a selling point for perspective urban students and their families EG from Minneapolis Denver, Chicago so we have about 40% of our students that come from outside the state many from urban areas and for many of them we focus on the safety of our region as well as really the opportunities to connect directly with Experiences and learning that really gives them a hands-on exposure to whether it be healthcare or agriculture or small business development very intimately and right away And so we find many of our students who get here don't leave so we consider ourselves a labor force and order and part of that is creating a vision of what it is to be excited about rural America and not one not a vision that is about the doldrums of rural America and so One of the concerns for me in particular in the last Three to four years has been the really negative rhetoric that we've often aligned with The sense that it's well there are absolutely problem And I'm not going to deny the existence of those problems I think there's a lot to celebrate about small that small can be significant and we we use that to really create Customized and personalized opportunities for students and that's been compelling for many of the students that we recruit from outside of the region Small can be beautiful We have more questions that are piling in now, which is great And we've got one from Jacob Goel or gavel. It's always good to see you Jacob And his question has to do with distance learning. He asks how does the effectiveness of distance learning? Competition for enrollment with online degree programs based elsewhere based elsewhere How does it impact on the ground and hybrid programs based in rural communities? Let me flash on the screen again because that was a good one Thank you for doing that. That's a great question Jacob. I appreciate that So we've kind of done Targeting and so when we created the online and adult based learning programs We've really targeted niches in the marketplace that need a response and so we've partnered with the hospital system or we've partnered with a We have a Certificate in trust management, South Dakota holds the The most trust assets in the country second to Delaware because of some favorable tax laws We've partnered for example with the trust industry our adult programs and online programs are really designed to meet a particular market niche That is different to some degree than the more General student offerings that are preparing students for the traditional environment now We also partnered with some of our technical institutes in the state so students can take Two years there or our students can go take 36 credit hours in a very specialized area like precision agriculture or wind energy Or construction and then complete other credit our credits with us What we have tried to do is rather than look at the lens and say How do we not compete against ourselves? We've just said how can we create a slate of offerings where people can enter where it's most appropriate and We've seen the whole if we if you we've seen the whole ocean rise using To the idea that we are creating things that are competing with ourselves. I had a conversation a few years ago with a Head of an online university and they said that their biggest challenge was timing that when they started off they began by starting all classes that began in September and began in January and they really Just found that most of the students didn't find that interesting that in fact that the two days during the year where students were most Interested in starting class for the day after Thanksgiving and the day after Christmas So they had to just turn around and reconfigure their entire academic calendar But they also had to make available on-demand learning which is which is hard. I have to ask how have you done this? How have you taken Dakota? You know Wesleyan and then made this so that people can just start taking classes whenever they're interested How'd you do that? Well, I want to be clear. We don't offer on-demand learning as you just described it So students do happen to be right in a general cycle. It might be a good idea What I would say is as we've built programs We have sensitized ourselves to the nature of the program for example We have a nonprofit church leadership program. This is designed for pastors, frankly working in rural parts of American and asking themselves, how do I understand the business fundamentals of my church? How do I understand the economic development of these and partnerships that my church might be able to provide as a Non-profit intersecting with needs within a community. How do I think about philanthropy differently? So that program is designed around the church liturgical year when the churches do budgeting That's when we do applied budget project when it's the general time of year that churches are Inquiring about stewardship. We do our units on stewardship and the applied projects correspond with that So we have tried to develop these sort of niche programs in response to what the needs are of those industry sectors The LPN to BS and nursing program that I talked about a little bit earlier It meets one day a week and that day that it meets was a We we achieved a general understanding of the the major Healthcare partners in the region to say we're going to give you Thursday to have students there and then on the weekends they're going to have these clinical opportunities so that students can continue to work and As we've listened we've tried to develop a responsive curriculum So what I think is particularly unique about Dakota Westland has been our ability to invite The sectors that are in need of labor force and really say how do we co-create this And really after credit our faculty who have an openness to doing this because this is a different This is not your traditional model. So if business and industry says we are seeing deficiencies in professional communication What can we do differently in the classroom to deliver that those kinds of collaborations are really yielding some pretty compelling Work I would add one other thing when we recognize that students in the adult learning space for example We're saying to us. Well, we're struggling a little bit or we don't know that we have the support That was the you know incentive to really think through how do we add coaches to this mix? And so these life coaches and project-based coaches are really an interesting addition that have For the most part we've seen very strong outcomes because the coaches are really they're offering that ongoing support in a way That looks a lot different than just an online or a MOOC Environment where students are doing it at their own pace this is holding people accountable in a little bit different way and we seem to be seeing much higher retention and Impacts from those you know long-term impact from the kind of work they're doing That's terrific. That's that's a great great picture I have to say I Have so many other questions asked Based on what you're describing I want to follow up with a couple, but let me just ask everybody You can see how easy it is to ask questions and you can see how President Novak is so happy to answer them So please think about other questions or comments you have for example if you want to follow up more on the One-to-one laptop question or broadband questions, or if you'd like to ask about faculty development How do faculty become so open to experimenting this way and working online? If you have any rural specific questions, I mean, I'm thinking for example about the alternative energy as a business opportunity But also thinking about how does the how does Wesleyan you know respond to non? Economic needs as a handle students who want to express themselves who want to become something else to explore Let's have tons of questions and we're we're eager as they say in radio the lines are open So one question I'd like to ask You mentioned the medical sector a few times and then I assume this is the full medical sector I mean, this is you know hospitals clinics mental health radiology devices and everything else Now in the rural sector, it's a it's a tricky problem because as the population Plateaus or declines it gets harder and harder to get medical services out to people in the same time as the rural population Ages statistically they're more likely to require more and more services. So I'm curious how How are you seeing that play out in North Dakota outside of your university? But then what role can your university play in trying to trying to help that? So two great questions We're actually located in South Dakota. So I just got to make sure you're going just a little bit south of that border Just no worries So one of the challenges obviously that you've just identified is how do you reach people in isolated places? and We're fortunate to again. I think being a place where people have to creatively solve problems. So one of the very robust aspects of our Medical community is the advent of telehealth We recently partnered with the Margaret A. Cargill Foundation to do some work around equipping nurses in particular For rural America and that's a little bit of a different experience for a couple of reasons many times nurses in a clinic setting in a long-term care facility in a senior living environment are The key point of contact and they serve as a significant generalist someone might come into a small rural hospital with a Combine accident a hunting accident a Birth and they weren't able to get to a larger facility where that Could happen. So we have actually created clinical opportunities for students to learn how to really Understand the the work that gets done in telehealth how we communicate using Visual cues we work with doctors who are at a distance. What are the devices that need to be used so that doctors can Can understand what are the questions? How do we translate for the patient? so there's a vast amount of learning happening right now in Telehealth and creative ways to reach people. We're also seeing a significant increase in the discussion around population health management and What I call the biology of wellness So how do we take a more proactive approach in rural America to looking at health and wellness? even among older populations and what strategies in terms of putting nursing teams or Holistic health teams we're seeing places where a Chaplain and a nurse and a social worker make make be going out on rotation to check on people As a strategy around that population health management. We're also seeing more robust prevention strategies So seminars on mindfulness going out into communities or offering online forums where people can be learning about mindfulness and diet and general health Prevention now that's not to say that we've become a master of this because we haven't but we're learning and I think there's some creative approaches when we look at these integrated health teams that are being developed through our major medical systems here To creatively respond to this and we're seeing options around clinics that are not They don't look traditional People are going in seeing a telehealth advisor with a nurse there Getting feedback from Mayo Clinic or Sioux Falls or some of our more urban areas as a way to be able to Measure what's happening with that particular patient? Oh That's fantastic. It's a real it's a kind of classic vision of 21st century, you know life But you're realizing it in not the area that most people think of as being 21st century. I Like to think there's a lot of good things happening in rural America and these are some of them That's not that I think one of the real challenges we're trying to come to grips with is rural mental health and I'm not sure we we fully figured out how to address that yet at all There's a significant shortage of both practitioners And it's a much harder conversation to have mental health over a screen and so We are fortunate to have one of our psychology professors doing some very good work in exploring alternatives to providing Alternative strategies for rural mental health nice, I wonder if um if bandwidth permits, I mean I wonder about Virtual reality for that the there's already been some fantastic work in VR for PTSD And there's this argument. It's controversial that people have argued that VR is very good at Eliciting empathy from people that it makes people more present. So it may be that that's something That people are willing to really want to respond to No, this is terrific to hear Friends again, this is a the space where you can ask these questions And above all you don't want me running the entire show because then it'll it'll just be you know too much beard hair It'll just be impossible So while you're thinking of questions One thing I would like to ask is how how are you handling the demographic transition? That is the the population of your state is aging So the population that is traditionally gender-graduate is shrinking and the whole population isn't growing So you do you depend to a healthy extent on tuition revenue To keep the books balanced and the doors open the lights on Are you looking to for example? More aggressively move into adult education. Are you looking to recruit students online from beyond your state's borders? Or how are you handling this transition? That's a great question South Dakota has about just under 8,000 High school graduates a year and we have 16 Institutions of higher learning so you can do the math quickly With 2d1 institutions in the state. This is highly competitive and the decline is noteworthy I mean as you mentioned We're anticipating, you know between a 7 and 12 percent decline in the next decade Or higher depending on on that so that data however That's been presented. I think Nathan Grah's book is probably most noteworthy on this but That data assumes several things it assumes current state Which means it doesn't assume That we aren't figuring out ways to serve new populations. So one of the Growth sectors if you will for south dakota is the Influence of new immigrant populations That are supporting the egg technology and egg processing industries They traditionally have not gone on to college so What ways my universities like dakota westland create innovative solutions to that We've got a couple of programs that I we haven't started yet, but we're working on developing partners to create very meaningful Internships right alongside their class experiences In a very affordable way not on our campus, but in a different environment So I think that's a popular needs to be explored. I also think that We're recognizing Students and the industry Is demanding learning across the life cycle and so we're definitely exploring more robust offerings in our adult An online space our university is home to the late senator george mcgovern and That was his we are his alma mater and so Some of the programming for example out of our mcgovern center might in fact serve a larger niche population When we talk about issues of nonprofits and food security So we're exploring ways that we can leverage some expertise that we have among our faculty with Niche opportunities for adult populations that might serve not just south dakota But the larger region and perhaps a national audience for example this trust management certificate It's one of two nationally that is actually Approved by the american banking association to prepare students for to become Professionals certified trust professionals and so that has capacity to have a very national audience So I think it's thinking about what are the ways that small universities might develop niche programs That can have national space or alternatively. How do we keep equipping? Um with ongoing certificates and letting people ladder their certificates to degrees In the adult learning space that create opportunities for them to continue to To transition out of what might have been traditional spaces where manufacturing And now has been replaced by automation to new opportunities in those sectors. So Wow, that's a that's a terrific answer with a lot of optimism, which I really really appreciate Optimistic up here out here. It's snow today and I'm just saying that can't be Oh, sure. Sure. Sure. I just uh, we just moved from from vermont when we're used to first snow in september and the I love the way this is This positions universities a change agent for the community In a very visionary way We've another question from Robert McGuire. Let me put this up on screen Which is how do you feel? What do you feel is the role of faculty in the enrollment or recruiting challenges? um pivotal They just um, we just did a I think a fairly compelling faculty workshop at the beginning of this year with our with our faculty and one of the analogies we used was um baseball and we talked about coaches or admissions counselors sort of You know getting up to bat and setting the plate, but um, the faculty are the closers and so They really offer kind of the compelling case For why dakota westland? And so to that end the obligation we have as leaders within our universities is to make sure our faculty are equipped with those talking points And that those talking points and that branding and that visibility um are our Congruent across the university So one of the things we talk about here at dakota westland is our ability to be both entrepreneurial and innovative And our faculty then can share specifically how in biology that manifests itself or in biochemistry or in business or in education And and then we talk about what it means to be a university not just in the community But for and with the community and they give examples of how the experience of learning occurring within their content areas Actually strengthens our place Actually strengthens our sense of community So we talk about you know, what's our dna? I think we're innovative. We are entrepreneurial We are focused on our place and our sense of community We help students understand what it means to be part of a family if even if it's not our sense of biological one But what it means to be living in community? What does that obligate us to and then finally? We serve a significant portion who are first in their family to attend college who come from low-income backgrounds So we are a place of opportunity and we're going to take a second and third risk on you We're going to personalize the education That I think offers them a pretty compelling case. So when our faculty start telling that story Using their subject matter discipline in context. It's very powerful So we rely extensively. I mean i'm very transparent with our community We all collectively own our future. I don't own the future our students future collectively We create our future and we have to co-create and co-develop and when we do that with that kind of transparency I think we start to see really positive outcomes and we incentivize their entrepreneurial and innovative thinking so People who are doing that work, you know, they're being recognized. They're They're getting resources To be able to support those types of initiatives I really love that phrase that we collectively own our future We we had a quick question that came in via twitter From venessa veil who is an awesome person and a longtime friend of the program And she wants to know who this is a question back to an earlier point about the broadband access And she said She was wondering about people who don't have good broadband at home and who can't access local high school very well Do those people have more access through public libraries or through cell phones Uh in the rural areas, there are fewer public libraries, right? They're just aren't I mean we're talking about many of our students come from high schools in which their class had fewer than 15 students So the likelihood that their community has a library may not be high Many of those students bus in an hour an hour and a half to get to some of their rural schools So those the cell phone has become pretty pivotal We have continued to work as a state and we've been beneficiaries of some national programs as well To be able to strengthen broadband access She's venesis correct though. There are absolutely students who can't afford the device Which is why In many of our school districts, we've adopted the One-to-one initiative so students have that device to take home with them as a strategy I would say though on the whole The bulk of the state Is accessible and does and can access through their cell phone or other tools Their classes or their content or libraries libraries are also available in some of our our larger communities that might have 8 10 12,000 people in them. So But I want to be clear When I talk about the virtual high school, what happens is that sometimes students will come to a school that let's say the total population K through 12 is 120 students They may not be able to afford a teacher to teach calculus or physics Or someone who's going to just work in that small community So the virtual high school really fills the role of that class Or of offering that foreign language I mean those the upper level math and science and the languages is where we see the most struggle in our smaller schools Whether that education matches the experience someone has in the classroom, you know, it continues to be debated But on the whole it's better than not having it, right? So It's it's an experiment in progress But I as a whole the state has really made a pretty robust effort And we've been fortunate again because of some access to both federal grants and state resources that have invested in that Well, that makes a big difference. I really appreciate the nuanced question Are the nuanced answer to a really really good question And let me see if we can get venice on stage. Let's see if speaking of rural broadband Let's see if her for video will allow it venice I'm up Yes, and I appreciate your your last answer um, I'm I'm not an active educator anymore. I accept that I'm I'm still dabbling and ankle biting and sharing information Trying to figure out something appropriate to call myself um But I I sometimes go with guerrilla educationist But also rural I live in and you will be familiar with the part of the with the with just this part of colorado northeast colorado Yes, you know, that's next door practically Sterling that are you in the sterling area? Yuma Yuma. Okay. Okay. So the even smaller right got it. It's got a high school graduating classes. I think run around 50 um and um They've got um They're expanding they've been doing dual credit and uh, they're still sort of the access prom But it's probably better than some of the small communities around um, although I'm sure that they're probably this, you know It's probably a lot of people can't afford the access because there's not colorado doesn't have as good a sort of rural rural broadband access program as Your place does But I think they're supposed to be working on it, but I keep hearing we're working on it We're working on it. I since I moved here three years ago And I'm not seeing a whole lot of progress. Um Yuma may be get is supposed to be is in the process of getting fiber optic cable in a limited area But I suspect it's going to be very expensive and really oriented to businesses There is a lot of big ag up here as well as small still small farmers Uh, and so I'm I'm totally familiar with the like all the stuff the stuff with the crop stuff and the Yeah, the precision actually precision tools. I think has a big location near here too Or you know an office and outlet they're they're they're active here with with the large farms And um And yuma has just opened up they're getting oh getting a branch of the sterling uh northeastern Junior college here in yuma just open opening up this hopefully opening up this spring And but they've been working with them for dual credit classes um in the high schools um And uh, I was and particularly and and I'm I'm I'm the grandparent of two middle schoolers One of whom is adapts very well of the local school system and the other one is He doesn't he's He makes videos and he If they ask him to write something creative in class. He doesn't it's not really what they want And he's he he goes to the office a lot and his brother doesn't So they're thinking about online middle school So I was wondering what you would at the same time for self-interest I'm interested in all the things you're talking about but at this particular moment I'm particularly interested in in your experience with working You know with working with the online school with the online schools Does connect I think connect academy is is in colorado has colorado has a connect academy um And I'm wondering how how those work not just in high school, but maybe even middle school Right, I'm not sure that I have a lot of experience that I can respond to in that In that regard and I apologize about that. I'm really just familiar with what we have in the state of south dakota Um, I have heard people who have tried to access that but I think you're pointing to actually a bigger question And that is um, uh an ongoing question of how we're engaging young men in middle school Quite honestly, I think it's a it's a it's an opportunity ripe for some innovation and creativity And um, maybe a new framework. Um, I you know, I mentioned early on I had eight children six of whom are boys and So I'm particularly Sensitive to exactly the situation you're describing. I'm not me at home. Yeah, I'm not sure that all of us have figured out um Or at least we need to acknowledge that there may be new ways that we need to begin to Look at our education across the spectrum and in particular in that middle school and high school And even at the college level because the decline in the number of male graduates Is pretty staggering and we're going to have to get Um much more creative about how we engage them in learning and so I empathize with you and I Don't know that I have a lot to offer in terms of online middle school Well, I'm I'm I'm sending out Messages to people I know who might have a sort of peripheral involvement or could at least well It's sort of like any kind of search you start off with finding somebody who can point you to the next place Sure, absolutely I am familiar with that connect um the connect ed platform I don't know of people who've gone through it. So I don't know if I can comment on It's efficacy or how well it's worked for them. So Well, I know that there's pop this or or how does the the public online high schools compare public public online k12 Although it's hard to imagine public kindergarten until the I mean online kindergarten So but that's just an aside But the the public versus the private how do you have any idea how those compare? I don't I apologize. I just don't have a lot of uh background in that sector Well, it's a good question. Um, and venessa, thank you. It's so good to see you Yes, I'm glad you know, it's a well, I probably I probably was one of the I I didn't I meant to get word out on this sort of locally and I yesterday uh, but uh didn't get to it and I said I wanted the beginning and tagged I tagged uh to school board members nice and the local chamber of commerce and the uh, the northeastern junior college uh And um, say piece basically who are who all involved with the uh with the junior college here And interested in you know that I thought a lot of this and I've bookmarked a bunch of so I've got a bundle of links for for the your your your dw you you uh digital which is fast that page the page for the dw digital Yeah, they all the facts and all the sort of question things. That's a great resource That I'm going to be sharing with the we you got to figure that there's a problem with the system somehow when um When when you've got What and the thing is is you know, there's like like yeah the teenage boys, you know It's or preteen boys particularly when they're just sort of testing Um, I don't know. How did a wane do in up in vermont at that stage? Well, I can tell you later. Um, that's that's my son. Um, who is uh, who is awesome The reason I can tell you later is because we're out of time. Oh, I'm sorry. Well, I'm glad I got up. I'm old. I'm really glad you got I'm really glad to see you and we'll share the recording um Take care venessa Thank you Let me just say first of all President Novak, thank you so much for taking the time with us. Um, I I'm I'm so exhilarated by your vision And I'm also so thankful for how thoroughly and with what nuance you answered all of our questions. Thank you very much Um, the opportunity. Oh my pleasure. Um, one question is what's the best way to keep up with you and your campus's Brilliant activity Well, I'm on twitter. So it's at president Novak So certainly you can check that out. Um, you also can be directed to our website. Um, w w w dot d w u dot edu And our facebook page Is also connected through dakota wesley and university. So very good to check those things out All those will work. Thank you so much. Um, and uh Well, we have more questions, but what we'll have to do is we'll have to follow up with you. Um, That sounds great. When you uh, when you finally decide to publish some of that data, uh, we'd love to be able to share it around And um in the meantime, um, thank you all so much But um, don't everybody go, uh, we have to tell you what's happening over the next week. Um, so, um, let me say, uh First of all next week, uh, we have an experimental session. We're gonna have maria anderson One of my favorite people she's the founder of course tune a math prof a futurist And she and i are going to bounce off of the current events in higher education technology. This is a experimental panel We're gonna look forward these current device current inventions and current news to see what they tell us about the future So that's going to be next week. So please join us for that Now, uh, we have um our video archive people have been asking about this Our video archive is available at tinyurl.com slash fdf archive So if you'd like to dive in there and see uh, we'll get previous guests We'd be glad for you to do that And if you want to keep this conversation going, there are all kinds of ways Or just use the hashtag ft te You can follow us on twitter. You're gonna follow us on facebook You can have join us on groups and facebook or linkedin or a slack group and we'll be glad to hear from you In the meantime, thank you so much for coming. Thank you for your questions and thoughts. We'll see you next time Take care. Bye. Bye


Good morning. Welcome to Grand Rounds. Everybody must still be at the Academy. It got done yesterday though, right? So, he's coming back this morning. Everybody's recovering from Academy, I guess. So, we got the last of our three visiting medical students today. We're gonna start with Romulo Albuquerque. He's been working with a doctor on body here. He's a medical student at the University of Kentucky and works with Dr. On Body's brother, Jay On Body. And his a lot of there doing work with, who also does work with VEGF. So, we'll start with him. After that will be David Gray, who's been working with Dr. Dries and Dr. Mamelis. Well, first, Romulo will be talking about a new member of the VEGF family and then David Gray, David Guy, rather, from Virginia Commonwealth, who's been working with Dr. Dries and Dr. Mamelis will present a patient with an anterior segment mass, a patient of Dr. Dries. And then lastly, we have Stuart Walther from Texas Tech. He's been working with Dr. Tasky and Dr. Dries and he'll round us out talking about CMV retinitis. Anyway, I'll turn the time over to Romulo. So, do I need to put the earpiece or will people hear me okay if I talk through this one? All right. Well, good morning. It's a pleasure to be here today and I'm very thankful for the opportunity to share with you some of my research efforts that I have in Kentucky. I'm... Although I come from the University of Kentucky, I'm not a native of Kentucky. I show on during the Feynman from New Mexico because of my last name I am not. I'm a native of Brazil and some of the Brazilians in the audience gonna pass the Albuquerque is a very common name in Brazil, very common last name. But I hope to excite you as I hope to get you as excited as I get about this new VEGF receptor that I have found. So the objectives of the talk today is to review briefly the history of angiogenesis of the field of angiogenesis. I also hope to define the two domains of angiogenesis and its molecular drivers. And I like to share with you how this discovery of this new receptor came about. And also maybe show you some data that convinces you of the biological role of this soluble VEGF receptor 2 and its clinical implications. So I, you know, as in describing the history of angiogenesis, I could not not talk about Dr. Fogman. So Dr. Fogman published a paper in 1971 where he proposed that if we understood how to modulate the growth of blood vessels, we could actually treat cancer and perhaps cure cancer. And his idea was published in this New England Journal of Medicine, paper in 71. And it's funny if you, if you PubMed angiogenesis before 71 or at 71, you get like three papers. And I did a PubMed search yesterday on angiogenesis, and there are nearly 50,000 papers published in angiogenesis. So his idea has really taken off and the 20 years following his, the launching of his idea, this field really thrived and in this very short amount of time we cloned VEGF. We made knockout mice that lacked VEGF and we really understood vascular biology and how vasculine does your growth factor plays a role in it. And I enjoy talking to ophthalmologists about angiogenesis because you guys are really in the forefront of this transformation. You're really practicing anti-vegeta therapy and seeing how many patients worldwide is actually benefiting from this idea of blocking blood vessel growth. So this is a table, a figure from the anchor trial showing that Lucentus has really changed the way that macular degeneration is treated. But ophthalmologists also have a tendency to really focus on one aspect of angiogenesis, which is hemangogenesis, which pertains to the growth of blood vessels and kind of neglect linked angiogenesis. And I'm really interested in this aspect of angiogenesis, and I'll tell you why. So more accurately what we know is that VGFA primarily drives hemangogenesis through activating VEGF receptor 1 and VEGF receptor 2. And it's actually VEGF-A is a target of Lucentus. On the other hand, we have a cousin molecule known as VEGF-C that drives lymph angiogenesis by primarily activating VEGF receptor 2 and VEGF receptor 3. And this field was kind of revolutionized with the discovery of soluble VEGF receptor 1 by Kando and Thomas in 1993. These guys show that this molecule is a splice variant of VEGF receptor 1. It's a very powerful inhibitor of VEGF-A, hence it's a very powerful inhibitor of hemangogenesis. Our laboratory in conjunction with Bala's laboratory actually showed that soluble VEGF receptor 1 is expressed in the cornea, and it's singularly essential to maintaining the cornea devoid of blood vessels. However, the concomitant absence of lymphatic vessels in the cornea is really not well understood. But while I was working in this paper that we published about soluble VEGF receptor 1, I actually made an observation that when looking for VEGF receptor 2 in the cornea, instead of finding the 230 kilodoutons band that corresponds to the full length VEGF receptor 2, what we found was a 75 kilodotons band in the cornea, which led us to ask the question, could this be soluble VEGF receptor 2, just like soluble VEGF receptor 1? And so we devised this hypothesis that there was a truncated form of VEGF receptor 2, and I've done some homework in gene analysis, and I actually showed that this truncated form was very likely to be a splice variant of VEGF receptor 2. The full length VEGF receptor 2. So I continued to do my homework and actually clone the mRNA that codes for soluble VEGF receptor 2, and if you translate the sequence, you actually get a protein that is composed of the six Ig-like domains that forms the actual cellular domain of VEGF receptor 2, and it also has a unique C-terminus, which we exploited to make an antibody that was capable of detecting soluble VEGF receptor 2, but not VEGF receptor, the full length VEGF receptor 2, which is shown here by this western blood, the 75 kilodotons band corresponding to soluble R2, but not the 230 kilodotons band corresponding to membrane bound VEGF receptor 2. So at this point, we were armed with tools to actually study the spatial distribution of soluble VEGF receptor 2, and primarily in the cornea, and inside the hybridization actually localized soluble VEGF receptor 2 to the cornea epithelium, and we actually devised antibodies, that antibody that I showed you, we actually studied the expression of soluble VEGF receptor 2 also spatially within the cornea, and you can see that it's very highly expressed at birth, so this is P0, and then it's expressed throughout the entire cornea thickness, but then its expression becomes confined to the cornea epithelium, and if you look at the conjunctiva corneal interface, there is a very clear demarcation of SVAGF receptor 2 here shown in green in the corneal epithelium, but not in the conjunctiva, and you can also see for this corneal flat mount that it's very highly expressed in the limbo area of the corneal, but not at the central corneal, not as much I should say. So at this point, we were convinced that we had established the existence of a new receptor, but we had no idea what it actually did. So I actually, in some preliminary studies, I showed that this receptor, soluble VEGF receptor 2, actually interacted with VEGF-C, physically interacted with VEGF-C, and then I also showed that in vitro assays that it blocked VEGF-C signaling, hence we hypothesized that this molecule would be anti-lynf angiogenic. Because it was so highly expressed at birth, then we were interested in understanding why it was its role in corneal development, and to do that, we created a mouse that was deficient in soluble VEGF receptor 2 in the cornea, and here's a demonstration that these knockout mice, they do not have soluble R2 in the cornea compared to the wild-type mice, which you can see the epithelium does express soluble R2, and these mice had a really an astonishing phenotype. These mice were born with their corneas spontaneously invaded by lymphatic vessels here, shown by this corneal flat mount, which was very, very astonishing phenotype, and it was very powerful because we were very excited about this because the blood vasculature was unchanged, and this was unprecedented, because the two vasculatures are usually very well coupled, so for the first time we were seeing uncoupling of these two vasculatures, which was unheard of, but why was I really excited? Well, so it's well known that regularization in the cornea is a very negative predictor of transplant survival, and the theory is that the lymphatic system actually here, shown as the afferent pathway, actually works to drain antigens and antigen presenting cells from the donor cornea that then migrate to the lymph node and activate the whole cascade of that ultimately leads to a transplant rejection. So maybe by modulating this afferent pathway, it could actually impact the survival of the corneal transplant, and this has never been really fully understood because the because these two vasculatures are coupled together, no one could ever really tell what was the particular role of lymphatic versus blood vessels in this context. So we, to really move this project forward, we looked at what was the role of SR2 in repartive corneal injury, in repartive lymph angiogenesis, and we actually showed that in using the suture induced corneal angiogenesis assay by placing two 11-oh sutures in the mouse cornea, and given time these blood vessels and lymphatic vessels would grow, so we actually showed that if I deleted soluble R2 from the cornea as I did in the developing mouse, you have a drastic increase in the levels on the density of lymphatic vessels in the cornea, but no change in blood vessels shown here in red, but you can see that there's a drastic increase in lymph angiogenesis, and then the opposite was also true. So if I over expressed soluble HG2 in the cornea, you saw a decrease in the levels of lymph angiogenesis, whereas the levels of blood vessel density was actually unchanged. So we're pretty convinced that we had now a tool to manipulate lymphatic vessels without really affecting blood vessels. And the ultimate proof would be to actually show that if I treated corneas with soluble VEGF receptor 2 and blocked lymphatic vessels from growing into the graft, that I would actually impact the survival of corneal allografts, and we use the mouse model of PKP, and you can see here this is a Kaplan-Meier curve showing, in the control group, you can see that at eight weeks post-transplant, that there is actually a 40% survival compared to a group in which we injected soluble VEGF receptor 2 immediately before transplantation, which doubled the survival rate. It was nearly all of the corneas survived. So and this was even the more astonishing because this survival was accomplished even in the presence of blood vessels crossing through the interface between the graft and the donor, really implicating that lymphatic vessels are the key negative predictor of transplant rejection. So I have really cherry-picked things from this paper that we published to be able to talk to you in the time that was allotted to me, but if you're interested, you can actually go ahead and read the full paper. It was published in Nature Medicine last last year, September, and we actually got the cover. We're pretty excited about that. So I will conclude and summarize by telling you that soluble VEGF-R2, I hope I showed you enough data to convince you that soluble VEGF-R2 is a splicing variant of VEGF-R2. That soluble VEGF-R2 is the first reported endogenous specific inhibitor of lymphatic vessel growth and also that soluble VEGF-R2 works to aid in the creation of an alien-thatic cornea and also that it inhibits reparative lymph intergenesis and it enhances the survival of cornea transplants. And this we've been moving this project forward and we're actually looking at fugue dystrophy. We I actually found out yesterday just got a paper accepted in which we're looking at cancer metastases and there's a lot of other models in which you're exploiting this molecule for other clinical applications. I would like to acknowledge all of my lab friends and our lab family, we call it. These guys have been critical in in helping me move this project forward. Good science is not done without good collaboration. So I'd like to acknowledge all of these collaborators around the world and the other thing that good science is not done without is money. So I need to acknowledge Fight for Sight, Research to Prevent Blindness, the MD-PAGD program at the Inverse of Kentucky and my biggest source of funding which was Hachia Krishnan-Bhati Balas Prada who really supported me financially and intellectually through this entire journey. With that, I will entertain any questions and you guys, if you like horses, you should come to Kentucky. Thank you. Sure. Actually, so the when I talked about maybe exploiting it in fuchs dystrophy one of the ideas is that I've been looking at, we have a library of corneas that I've been looking at and it appears that fuchs patients have higher expression of solivore to hence, lymphatic vessels cannot grow into the corneas, but if it could actually make lymphatic vessels grow into the corneas stroma even though there is endothelial dysfunction in edema, maybe we could prevent edema from forming with lymphatics coming to the corneas. So this is an idea we are actually exploring. Thank you very much.


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