Welcome back to Retro Tech. On today's video I want to try a method of capacity repair that has always intrigued me, yet I've lacked the confidence to really go in and try this. I was worried that doing this method may end up damaging a board by lifting up pads or pulling traces, and so I was always reluctant to try it or of course even recommend it, but today that all changes. We're going to do what they say should not be done, and that is to remove SMD capacitors from a Sony BVM card using pliers. That's right, we're going to use these pliers and we're going to twist and pull off SMD capacitors that are bad inside a Sony BVM video card. Now hopefully nothing will be damaged by doing this method, but that is always a risk. So please note that if you try this, there is a chance you will damage your board and pull up a trace or pull up a pad and have a lot more repair work on your hands. Now after we remove the caps we will clean and inspect the board and the traces and get it ready to be further repaired and serviced, so let's go do it. This card is a BA3 Sony video card, again from a BVM, and it's the BVM1316, and this particular card has tons and tons of capacitors that have failed on it. About every single SMD capacitor that is on this board has failed. Many of them have leaked their electrolytic fluid onto the board and caused damage to the solder mask, and so we're going to have to pull these caps out of the way so we can try to get in here and service and save this board, but this is the before condition of where we're starting on this video card. Now we can come in here with our pliers and just pull out these capacitors. I've already made the kit for them. Let's find a real nasty one in here. How about we'll start with this one right here and we'll just twist, spin it, it breaks free and those legs are so weak on there there's no way they're staying. And then you can see how the pad sits there and stays and so do the legs that were soldered. What's actually breaking is that that leg is the integrity is so bad on the leg of the cap that it breaks and the part that remains is the pad trace and then the legs of the capacitors themselves especially after 30 years. So you could see that comes off pretty clean and the other option would be to heat these up and try to pull these off but if you can see that black goo you can just imagine how much worse it would actually smell as compared to just how it looks. There's another one just pops right off and then pull it out of the way but yeah if you imagine trying to heat that up and get that out of the way we're still going to have to heat these pads up after I try to scrub with some alcohol and get the legs off there and get the pads ready for new caps but let's make this as easy and painless as possible. I'm going to just get this next one right under that and there we go. I'm going to continue doing this and we'll come back and take a look at this board once we've gotten all these off here. Yeah this is a good and juicy one too. Oh there's some fresh fluid right there, gross. The caps have all been removed except for four that were replaced prior to me getting in here and working on it and they seem to be in okay shape. They're actually electrolytics and they were done properly. Let's just look at some of these spots where some of this fish oil I mean it's even fresh see that one right there C411 super fresh on those two spots that spot right there has fresh fluid so this is a spot like right in here where you can see how the pads are still there and now you see those kind of discoloration of metal that's where the legs were and they broke free so the trace that it does all still still look to be there thankfully the board seems to be pretty heavy duty and maybe that means we can get it repaired what I've got to do now is just get it in here and let it take an alcohol bath and then get some brushes out and just scrub this stuff till we can get it all cleared up and then we can go and heat up the soldering iron and clean up these pads here's our board it's been sitting for a good little bit in some 91% isopropyl alcohol and I have used just an extra toothbrush and then I have an actual ESD brush to just gently wipe the board you know brush through and try to get as much of this slime and ooze off that I can you can already see some of the contacts in there for the caps that weren't so bad have come pretty darn clean already what I'm going to do next is I'm going to pull this board out of its alcohol bath we'll let it dry off all right the boards come out of its bath I've gotten it dried off and cleaned up we're ready to go in here now and clean these pads and get those old legs off a lot of them and then we can check it out and see how they look soldering iron is hot and we're ready to go in here and try to fix this board and clean these pads off I've just got some SRA rosin paste flux some fresh solder and then my tools over here to clean and apply the flux as we go hey everybody well unfortunately at some point after I set up my soldering iron and all my tools my camera cut out and I wasn't able to actually capture the footage of me going through and getting all the pads cleared off of both old solder and the legs from those capacitors we'll tell you that all I really did was heat up my iron and then put fresh flux paste on each one of those points right there where the capacitors were I heated it up and then I just cleaned off that with some solder wick so you can easily find tutorials on that and next time I work on this kind of a project I'll definitely make sure that shot it does not get cut out but I am sorry about that we're going to fast forward pass all that little procedure and get straight into a thorough inspection of how the board looks after we finished with that pad cleaning all right this is what our board looks like now I wanted to show you all the spots on here all right we've got some nice beaded solder on those pads everything's really as cleaned up as I could get it without causing more damage to the board and I did run continuity checks to every pad on here and every trace that looked like it was troublesome and they all tested to still work and that's a good thing so if we are successful in recapping this the board should function and then we should save hopefully all the functionality of this bvm by just fixing this one card the one thing I did want to note though is my concern now after cleaning all this are these exposed traces of copper and I need to get some solder mask or you know some trace mask to put on there and cover those traces up because current will run through there and then it'll be live current on all these points and I don't want that to you know impede or affect anything on here we'll try to make it look as nice as possible see there's some trace lines along here and I checked them for continuity and they will actually buzz for current and some of the spots here along the path and I don't want to really involve any additional possibility of interference or degradation down the road if possible at least not to this card because this one will be serviced to the point where it'll be as good as possible and if you want to follow along with the rest of this repair then please check back in but that's probably going to end it for today's session and then we'll go in and have to recap this and the next video on the actual restoration but that's how you get those capacitors off the pads by just pulling them and then you can clean everything up and get the board into this condition where you're ready for new capacitors thanks again for watching everybody I'll see you next time with some more retro content


And I wanted to start by referencing very quickly an answer that I gave to one of our senior faculty just as the day was beginning. He asked about the Livingston property and whether he could move into the house. And I told him the pro was that I'd already asked for that, but he was willing to share. So it would be fine. But we were thinking about it for very, very senior faculty who could just move in there and then kind of hang out with the Columban Fathers and talk about the good old days. But I don't think that's what we're going to do, but it's worth thinking about. So I wanted to start today by just some thoughts. I had written down some notes and then I thought, you know, I think before we get into this, I want to reflect a little bit on our amazing good fortune to be working in the world of higher education. I think that it's one of the things that, because we do it all the time, we kind of take it for granted, but it's really important that from time to time we stand back and just look at what we're doing. I consider it such a wonderful opportunity that I've had in my lifetime to be able to do this. I suspect many of you more or less have my story. Let me just ask a question. How many of you were first generation college students? That's a pretty respectable number, as was I. And I think about how that came to be and my enormous good fortune at being in the right place at the right time. My grandfather was a Scottish immigrant with a sixth grade education. When my father came of age during the Great Depression, there was no possibility of his going to school, to college. So he got a job. It was the depression jobs weren't very available, but he got one, stayed with that for 42 years. And he didn't like his job at all. It was just one of the things that he did as so many people have done over the years where you do it because you have to because you've got to provide for your family. And it wasn't until I came along that I finally got to do something that I truly love to do. And I've taken that a little bit for granted, but that in fact is not the norm. And I hope all of you feel the same way, that you're doing something that you love. And you've all worked very hard to get to this point. And it's important that we not just take it for granted, and it's certainly important that I not take it for granted on your behalf. I mean, I think that one of the sort of the paradoxes of working at a college is that we know that what we do is very, very important in the lives of our students, but we do it as tiny increments. We do it more or less in isolation from each other. We go into our classrooms and close the door, and then what happens is between us and the students. And I will reflect, and I'm sure you have the same experience when I was a full-time faculty member for 11 years. There were days, you know, that it just really, I was on, and I was, it was really great. And the students were going, oh, we get it. And in a sense, there's no one to share it with, I mean, with other than the students. I mean, there was, you can go tell somebody about it, but it isn't the same thing as being there. There's a sense that we're so close to what it is that we're doing that we don't really see the totality of it. We do these things in increments. The sum total of 40 of us teaching a course or a set of courses results in a baccalaureate degree. And we understand that intuitively, but it's as if we're doing this as a series of sort of one-offs. Each of you is responsible for that tree. Each of you is responsible for a course. But I'm going to ask you to stand back from that and see what a beautiful forest we have created with the trees that we are responsible for. And I want to tell you, and I say this in all earnestness, you are really good at what you do. You are really good. And I know this for a fact, because my and I do a reception for the graduating seniors every year, a couple of days before commencement, and the young men and women show up and they're wearing their best outfits. The guys look like they're wearing a tie for the first time. Ladies are all in high heels and dresses. And they're pretty excited because they're going to graduate in two days. But when we talk to them, increasingly we see this. Every year more of the same. They have tears in their eyes because they're not going to be coming back to their beloved Roger in the fall. They're going to go off. And they're leaving behind a world they have come to love. And they love it for all kinds of reasons. And every campus has students that love their campus. I get that. But I've never worked on a campus where the percentage of the students who have that deep commitment to the institution and a deep sense of regard for their great good fortune in having gone to this particular institution where they know they have been incredibly well-served by a group of highly committed faculty and staff committed to the student's success in a way that I haven't seen before when I've been on other campuses. This is a singular place. And so just on behalf of generations of students that you have served so well and the families who are so grateful, I just want to say thank you. I just acknowledge that you are a terrific group of people. So with that as a beginning, now I'm going to go into the bad news. No, no, that's not true at all. I want to actually move into some prepared remarks I had. There are, I think we can safely say this is an extraordinarily exciting time to be involved in higher education. Exciting as in, I wonder if the cliff is going to give way today. I mean, it's exciting in a sort of dangerous sense because we're seeing a world that we haven't experienced for a long time. There's a strong sense of anti-intellectualism in society right now. It's been there before. This is not new. But we're seeing it right now. There's a sense that what we're doing is very important but somehow not affordable. And so we get into this business of having to sort of justify what we do in ways that are kind of uncomfortable and we haven't really been used to it. There was an article in the Boston Globe on Sunday, an op-ed written by a former president of Harvard, Derek Bach. And President Bach was saying something I think I would certainly agree with him. And there's evidence to back this up. We need a lot more college graduates in this country than we have. We need a lot more because the economy is wanting to absorb college graduates and those college graduates just aren't there. There was a study that came out of Georgetown a year before last that looked at all the jobs that have been created since 2008 when the Great Recession began. And 73% of those jobs require a college degree. So the workforce right now is 36% with a college degree. So there's a lot of jobs that are in a sense going begging. And this is a headwind on the economy. And so there's that sense that we're asking ourselves the question in the collective. How would we do about that? You know, that's not in the game plan. It isn't a situation where there are lots and lots of colleges that's saying, let's go ahead and double the number of college graduates that we have at our particular institution. And yet the society as a whole says, but we need that. And yet society as a whole can't afford it. So we're in this quandary. And so Derek Bach's suggestion was let's put lots and lots more taxpayers' money into the hands of public institutions and have them double down in what they're doing. But that's not a new idea. And it's not one that's going to be an easy sell. But I think the question that I want to pose to us today is what role do we think Roger Williams should be playing as we strike, I won't even call it a balance, but as we consider two different ways of orienting ourselves, we could think about this from the standpoint of what is in our interest as an institution so that we survive and prosper. And we can think about, well, what's in the interest of the broader society? What does society need from us? We've said that our mission is to strengthen society. And our long-term goal is to be the university or become the university the world needs now. So we kind of know what the world needs. The world is saying, well, we need more college graduates. What are you guys going to do about it? So the issue for us is, you know, do we lead the charge? Do we risk being run over? We have to think about how we position ourselves here. And that's something we have to do in the collective. So I realize this year, I'm beginning my 50th year in higher education. So the question for me is, as long as I'm in the job that I have, I have the responsibility of trying to guide good decision-making here. But I'm mindful of the fact that you have a lot more at stake in the decisions than I do because you're going to be here a lot longer. So we have to do this together. We have to think about ways in which we communicate with each other to devise a future for ourselves that we are as much as we can be in broad agreement with. And so there are some ways in which we're going to approach this. I want to give you a little bit of background on this. So in June of this year, the cabinet got together for a retreat where we began to consider these questions. And one of the things, it was a facilitated retreat. One of the things we came up with in this retreat was that if there was one large kind of arrow that we could focus on, one thing that stood out that would say, this is the direction we have to go in, it's the idea of student success. And the broadest sense of that word, student success while they're here, student success once they graduate, what is it that enhances student success? If we have that in the forefront of our minds, we will make more good decisions than bad decisions. So we are going through a process right now where we're beginning to ask some detailed questions about how we take the new mission statement and the goal and forgive the word, but operationalize them. How do we make action statements so that these are not just aspirational statements that look good on a piece of paper, but they become a roadmap for how it is we go forward. On the 13th of October, the Board of Trustees will be having a retreat. And the objective there is to check in with them early on and make sure that what we're talking about isn't at odds with where they want us to go. So their responsibility is to guide at the highest levels the policymaking of the institution. Our job is to inform that decision making, but we can't control it. But it's, nonetheless, we want to give them good information. And as they begin to set the tone and the terms of engagement, then we're going to come back to the campus and talk more about how it is that we create this plan going forward that will allow us to see at any given moment what it is we're accomplishing. And one of the things that I think is sometimes difficult to do because we're so close to it is to see in real time what's been happening. I had a conversation the other day, I guess just yesterday with the Senate Executive Committee and we were just offhandedly, we were talking about some of the things that had happened just in terms of building improvements. And we realized that the people in the room, all of us, nobody had a total picture as to what had been happening. And we thought maybe what we should do is just put together a list that says, hey, these are the things that have been happening on the campus that represent improvements in the infrastructure of the campus. It's not like they don't happen at all, but no one person sees all of them. But with respect to overall progress, the kinds of things that are happening across the face of the university, one of the things that we have done this year and will do it every year going forward from now on is prepare a report card that gives you at least a flavor of the things that have been happening so that you can see at a glance what it is that the university has been up to. You will know some of them, but you won't know all of them. So having them in one place that you can just look at and say, okay, that's good to know.  So even though it seems in real time that you're watching the grass grow and the grass doesn't appear to be doing very much, you realize periodically, yeah, the grass is a little longer than it used to be. So we've got a report available today that you can pick up on your way out. We have lots of copies and just see the report card for this year. We'll do another one next year, but this will be a way of sort of monitoring our progress and guiding what it is that we're doing so that we don't get lost along the way. So I'm going to check my carefully written notes because I've wandered all over the place here. And I need to see where I am. I think one of the things we should do is recognize where we've had some success. So we've had quite a bit. I mean, I think my concern at the time that I arrived, I picked the great good fortune of arriving the year that the high school graduating class was the largest in the history of the country. And then right after I got here, it started to go down. I don't think those are cause and effect relationships, but nonetheless. And so we've been watching this downhill going on ever since. And it's particularly acute in New England and the upper Midwest, but for us, New England represents about 70%, 75% of our students. And so we're seeing a shrinking pie going on in New England. And the question that we had or I had at the time that I arrived was, how well positioned are we to succeed in that kind of competitive market? And the answer was not as well positioned as we should be. We were quite expensive in terms of our net costs. And we didn't seem to have enough of, excuse the word, of a brand that people saw how we differed from other institutions. And so we set about, through that affordable excellence initiative, to rectify that. So control the costs, put more money into financial aid, make certain commitments about locking tuition in for four years when people come. So they understand what their costs are going to be. And then push, push on the value proposition to say what you get here is a very deep dive into project based learning and into very close interactions, positive interactions between faculty and students. And that's been a bit of work, but it's fair to say right now that it's now working pretty well. And the litmus test was this year, because for the first time, we raised our price. First time in five years, we've raised our price. And we still had the third largest freshman class in our history. So that says that we're competing pretty well in a tough market. We've done this even as we've marginally reduced the discount rate. Our discount rate this year was a little bit below 40%. The national average is over 50%. So we're able to hang on to more of that money that students are paying. And have people still feel they're getting a good deal for the price. We look at some of the statistics, the national average, the six year graduation rate at public universities nationally is 49%. It's 58% at the private schools. Our four year graduation rate has gone from 57% to 64%. So our four year number is substantially better than the six year number at most of the other schools, both public and private. Now there are certainly schools that are doing just as well or better than we are, but we have nothing to be ashamed of there. Nonetheless, this is doing well in an area that schools in general are not doing very well.  You know, you'd like to know that you have some reasonable assurance of a good return on your investment, meaning to say that your child will graduate. And so graduation rates become an important criterion in where it is and how it is that parents help guide their child's decision in terms of where to come to college. So it's not something we can ever take our eye off the ball. And one of the things we should be asking ourselves is are we satisfied? Are we satisfied with our graduation rate right now? Could we do better? Should we try to do better? What might that be? It's not a question that we ask in isolation. I'll just mention that the California State University, the largest system of four-year education in the country, three or four years ago, decided it was going to try and double its graduation rate. Now the graduation rate overall was pretty miserable in the Cal State System, but they are well on their way. The Chronicle of Higher Education just published its Almanac edition and they listed the 12 universities in the country that have had the biggest increase in graduation rates over the last five years. And six of the 20 are in the California State University System. So they are a low-cost system with growing graduation rates. Now they're not, generally for most of the campuses, is not where we are, but they're still making that a focal point of how it is they're moving forward because there is that credibility question they have with the public. So you're going to continue to see more talk on graduation rates as something that people are expecting to have happen. So at the very least, we have to have that conversation on this campus. What steps can we take to improve freshman to sophomore attention? What steps can we take to improve graduation? These are not new questions. We've been asking these questions for a while, but I'm just saying it's one of the things that becomes sort of front of mind as an issue going forward because it's one of the things that people will use to evaluate us. And it's happening now. I occasionally get these questions. For the most part, parents are looking at other things, including what a beautiful campus we have. There's only so far you can go with selling the beautiful campus. We have to also talk about what happens on that campus. And we have an increasingly better story, but that's just one example of a place that we need to pay a little bit of attention to. We've hired, as you know, our first chief diversity officer because one of the issues that we have facing us is that the people who are coming through the K-12 pipeline right now are not clones of our current student body. They are increasingly first generation, racially and ethnically diverse individuals. Not all of them very well prepared for higher education. And yet they are the people that are there. We have to ask ourselves the question, what is our commitment to serve those students? And how do we go about making that happen? And one of the things that I know I'll just speak personally, I am not personally nearly well enough prepared to deal with a multicultural student body. So one of the things that I'm a Lambert, who's our CDO, is doing, is she has multicultural, something called Multicultural U. It's a semester long course for one of a better way of putting it, in two and three hour blocks, meeting every other week. And the cabinet is going through this right now. We had our first session this morning for three hours. And as the opportunity permits, this will expand to create more opportunities for more people to do this kind of work. I'll tell you at the end of the course, what I think its value will be, having gone through it, but I'm optimistic that this is something that is really going to help. Because the examples we already saw this morning are just a little too close to home, and make me feel a little bit awkward in terms of how well or ineffectively I have been in dealing with people from some very different kinds of backgrounds. One of the things that we have to do as part of our planning process is put together a multi-year budget, and we will be. But the issue with the budget is, well, what are the assumptions that we're making that go into that budget? And one of the big drivers, or two big drivers, what might we be doing in terms of increases in tuition annually? What might be our expectations? Because you need to have that for your model, even if it isn't something you end up actually doing. So we might start by thinking, well, we should be increasing our tuition by at least the cost of living, so we don't sort of slide backward. So that gives us some kind of a metric. But will we have more students? If we have more students, it makes it a bit easier to meet our budget targets. But if we have more students, who are those students? Are they more of the same students we have? That is to say, are we talking about increasing the size of the undergraduate residential population on this campus? Or are we talking about graduate students where the demand on infrastructure will not be as high? Are we talking about people that are coming through the School of Continuing Studies? Is it some of all of those things? Are we talking about current majors or will we introduce new majors? These are things that start to change the nature of the campus, and it's not something that I'm sure you'll be quick to agree that we should do casually. We need to talk this through. What makes sense? And then it's not as if we just control the process. You know, we build it and they will come. There's a real danger in doing that. We know, for example, coming back to something I said a moment ago, that the population of graduating high school students is getting smaller, not larger in New England. And we now are able to project out, since we know how many kindergarten students there are, we can project out all the way to 2032. And what we find is this, that things slow down perceptibly between now and 2023. There is a smaller and smaller class between now and 2023. And in 2023, we fall off a cliff. The numbers get very much less. We'll see about 15% fewer high school graduates in Massachusetts and about 18% in Connecticut. And those are the two primary feeder states we have right now. So for us to maintain our current supply of students from those two states means that we have to be much more effective in competing against the schools that are looking for those same students. So when we think about adding more undergraduates, we have to be realistic about who's out there. This is a population of students that right now is very well-served. I mean, if you're 18 years old and reasonably literate and you've got a few dollars in your pocket, you can go to lots and different places and they all want you badly. If you're anybody else, the options are far fewer. So there is a real question about how it is that if we are going to want to see as a country an expanded number of graduates, you can see where the options are. We could take in more students at the front end, but we only succeed with two-thirds of them. We could try and improve that number so that more people are graduating from the current supply. That would help. But if we do that, there's still not enough. At some point, we have to think in terms of how we reach populations that right now are not part of the world of higher education. And that represents one of those things that I think higher education historically has real problems with. And I mean to insult no one with what I'm about to say because I don't know what your individual position on this is. I'm just reflecting how it is that changes happen over time. There tends to be, at any given moment, a sense that the people we're educating right now represent more or less the right population of people that should be educated. Before World War II, it was 5%. We'll educate the top 5%. They will be the leaders. Everybody else will be the workers. Then that became very democratized after World War II. And now, you know, we've got to the point where it's 30 plus percent, 35%. But lots of other countries are educating at a higher rate than that. So is that the maximum we can do or should we be trying to drive that number higher? Because if it's really the case that the economy needs a lot more college graduates, we have to figure out where they're coming from. And that means looking at other places, including the tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, well, I'll leave it at tens of thousands. Somewhere between 80 and 120,000 Broad Islanders have a partial college degree. They are all amenable in theory to getting a four-year degree, but there are very few options available to them right now. Do we want to take that on? Not with the idea that we'd try and get 100,000 students, but the point is that's a population that's not being well-served right now. Everybody's focusing on the 18-year-old high school graduate. So we have to work through this process. And it's not something we can decide in an afternoon based on a visceral sense. It's something we need to look at some data on. So we're going to be putting together a variety of groups of people to look at this and then do this in a very transparent way so that whoever's involved in the conversation knows what's going on, but whoever's not involved in the conversation does as well because this will be done in a way where we can put things on our website internally so that people can access this. And if we need to, certainly open to the idea that in the spring, we could do another one of these State of the University addresses if that's what we're ready to do. But it's really important that we do this together. I don't want people saying at the end, I didn't have a chance to participate, decisions that are made about what was going to happen on this campus. It's very cultured. We're being made in my absence. That's disgraceful. It should never happen. You're right. It shouldn't. So we need to create opportunity for that kind of conversation to go on, but in an organized enough way that we actually get something done as opposed to just talking about it. So that's my commitment to you is to create that kind of an opportunity as we go forward. There are some other things that have gone on. I'll just mention two. One is that as you know last spring, we received a 10-year re-accreditation from NASC. I hope you know that. The previous accreditation wasn't so good. We had a lot of follow-on work to do. It was still going on when I arrived, but this time the maximum award 10 years was given. There were no issues that we have to work on as sort of to fix. There are some things that they want us to work on long-term, including diversity, but nothing that was flagged as a big problem. I was reminded earlier this week that I haven't yet posted that NASC report on our website, and I'll have that done before the end of this week. That's just me. I've neglected it over the summer. There's nothing that we haven't changed our mind on. The report itself was written so well by the people involved, Bob Cole and a bunch of other people, that NASC is now using that as their model going forward to other campuses that are starting their tenure, use the Roger Williams model. They really nailed it. So that was great. We had two grants last year of half million dollars each from the Hassenfeld Foundation and from Feinstein, and then we received just very recently a million dollar pledge from one of our board members who is also an alumnus. First time we've ever gotten a million dollars from an alumnus for purposes of moving forward with what we'll call the new engineering building. So this is by way of recognizing that other people are paying attention to what we're doing, and money is coming from places where it had not come from before in recognition of the quality of the work we're doing, and that's something we can all take pride in because we don't do this as individuals. This is part of the collective that we do, and while all of us have our individual role that we play, it's the collective result of those individual roles being done very, very well that make all the difference. I'll just mention in passing, we continually receive extraordinary high levels of praise from parents who are coming here for open houses or tours or accepted students' days. I've lost track of the number of people who have said to me, this is my third kid going to college. I visited more campuses than I can shake a stick at by far the best we've ever seen, and that's a reflection not just that we have it well organized, but the people they're meeting are people who impress them, and that's all of you who participate in that process. So we're going to reward you by having fewer of those in the future. Brian Williams has figured out how to dial back on the number of open houses and accepted students' days, because frankly, we're in danger of exhausting you, and that's not a good thing to do. So we think we can get away with having fewer of them and still have the same kinds of great outcomes. So back to the issue of growth for a moment. If we grow the campus by adding more undergraduate students, pretty much the case we have to think in terms of adding buildings. We've got to have some place for these students to live, and to eat, and to take their classes, and if there are more students, there are more faculty, and that means more offices. And so part of what we also need to do is to have a physical master plan that cites the buildings that are yet to be built. So the announcement that came out I guess today or yesterday about the acquisition which has just happened of the Livingston property across the way at least gives us some more property on which to think about how best to use it. But the reason we're not talking about how to use it, because we haven't had that conversation yet, that needs to be part of the master planning exercise that we'll be doing. And yet we have things that are underway. We've had two master plans in the last 20 years that never quite got to the point where they were formally adopted. So Edgar Adams and a class of students did a terrific job back in 2002 of getting a really good look at the campus. It had I'm sure value at the time, but it wasn't something that was adopted by the board. And then we had another. A firm came in about 2007 and 2008 and that report got tangled up with the departure of the board chairman and the president. And so again never went to the board for formal adoption. So we've got good material here and the plan is that we'll have a program run out of the School of Architecture this spring with a visiting firm of architects that will again guide a process using students and faculty to run a formulation for a master plan. Whether that will be the master plan or whether we'll have to do some carry on work we'll wait and see. But we're going to start by using in-house expertise. Now that doesn't answer the question of the siting of the second engineering building. And I'm not going to try and deal with that today, but I'm going to say today to you that two weeks from today in CAS 157 at three o'clock hour we will have a formal conversation, presentation Q&A on the siting of this building which at the end of last spring became controversial. It started as an annex to the engineering building on the north, I'm sorry, on the west side toward the parking lot. Architects said, we can't do that. A lot of ledge there. We're going to have to swing it to the other side and that's how it got to be parked on the east side of that building. And then we couldn't connect it to the engineering building because that connection was going to trigger requirements of bringing the original building up to current code. And that was a lot of additional cost without, we thought, a great deal of added benefit. So it became a freestanding structure. But it is the laboratory building for engineering. So it's not like you can park it anywhere and it'll do just fine. I mean, to maximum benefit, it should be very, very close to the engineering building. But not to anticipate the conversation. It'll happen in two weeks. I'll have the architects who did the design work present their material and then we'll just open it for Q&A. But that's not something I ever want to do again. I mean, we should be not making one-off decisions about where to put a building. We should be looking at it in the totality and saying, here are the buildings. We anticipate building over the next 10 or 15 years and here's where we have building sites available and here's where they should go. It doesn't mean it can't be revisited in some fashion but we're in danger of saying, we'll pick the best spot we have for building X and then when we have building Y, well, we've already used the best site. So now we have to find some other site and now we end up making decisions in the long run, make it look as if there was no planning at all. The buildings just arrived like mushrooms and popped up wherever they happened to be. That's not a good model for how to do business. So the consultation that we did last year where the engineers wasn't enough, we should have had a broader consultation with more people. I apologize for that. That was not a deliberate oversight but we'll take a step back and we'll see what options available for us right now and we'll make a decision and then go on but the plan will be that we'll actually have a plan for the campus as a proper by the end of the spring semester. One of the issues that we find is diversity is a problem from the student perspective in the absence of diversity among faculty and staff. So I was at what they call the fireside chat that the students had organized last week, two weeks ago, to just to hear what they had to say and one young woman, a young woman of color, stood up and said, I'm about to graduate and in the four years I've been here, I've had one person who looks like me standing at the front of the classroom, one woman of color. And she said that's just not good enough and I understand that and we've said very deliberately to diversify faculty, staff and students in that order in the goals that we have for this university but I got to recognize that the students turn over about 30% a year and the faculty turn over at the rate of 5% a year so it's really hard to go ahead and match that up. We've got to do better, we've pretty got to do better and in the administration as well, we just have to do better and that's what we're committed to doing but it's not easy and so that's not an excuse but it's something that we have to have as part of our applying process. We cannot continue to use students as the point of the spear. We can't diversify the campus on the backs of the students exclusively. We've got to do this with faculty and staff and that's easy to say and hard to do but it's just something we've got to take on. There's a part of all this that I haven't yet addressed and I'm going to do it quickly because I'm going to leave a little time for Q&A but all of this is going on against the backdrop of changes going on in Washington that seem to be affecting our lives in different ways every week and this is very disconcerting because what it does is it takes the known and turns it into an uncertainty. The students with DACA understood that they had a commitment from the federal government to protect their rights in exchange for registration. They could continue their education, everything would be fine and now that's suddenly very much in peril. Transgender individuals were told you're now welcome in the military, love to have you here and now changing presidents say well okay that's going to end. So of all the groups out there we choose to exclude you. We'll just take one stripe in the rainbow flag and tear it out. That group is no longer welcome in the military and what does that pre-sage as to where else they're not welcome? We've got moving goalposts with respect to Title IX. This is, we anticipate, we don't know yet but certainly it's up for grabs. Will there be a change in direction in terms of the evidence test used to adjudicate claims of sexual assault as far as the campus is concerned? It feels like we've already done all those things. We went through that, we had an answer and now it's being challenged again and what else is going to happen we don't know but the sum total of that is that the students I think as a whole are rattled much more than they have been in recent years. The Black Lives Matter issue has not gone away but in top of that we have all these other issues going on. And so the thing that I would ask of you is that you make a real effort even more than you normally would be doing this year to keep your students close, to try and understand where they're coming from. They're struggling with this. They do not have a lot of perspective. You know, reality is here and now. They don't know, they don't think in terms of everything that we think of, they think of as being history and so they don't, they didn't lived it.  I mean we have six DACA students but we have a whole lot of people who have friends and relatives who do not have proper paperwork and they're very anxious and we have people who are friends of people so it becomes an issue that is really much broader than it might first appear. And they're confused and they have certainly, I've heard from several students who've asked that I be more visible which I've said absolutely. We need to hear from you more often. Okay, you will. But I want to share that with you. I just, I think that the more that we are seen as being in tune with our students the better and the way to do that, I just like to ask this of you.  Places where the students can see that you are concerned about their issues, it would really help a lot. I don't want to ask one person to do a whole lot. I'd like to ask everybody one thing and just one more than you normally would do because this year in particular it's going to count. And what we know is that the campuses that are particularly focused on ensuring that the faculty and staff have their arms figuratively wrapped around their students are the ones whose graduates have the strongest feelings about that campus. And the group that does this better than everybody are the HCBU's. They don't always have the strongest students but they have enormous loyalty because there's that sense of shared purpose that they just do better than anybody and that's been validated by Gallup Studies and it relates entirely to how it is that that the university itself is committed to their individual success. So let me come full circle. I want to reiterate that colleges and universities serve as the vehicles for expanding and transmitting knowledge for the betterment of society. I think we know that. But they also function as the repositories of knowledge, thought, wisdom, and moral and ethical tenants accumulated by humans throughout the ages. We are society's critics and its champions. We aspire to make the world a better place. We protect, advance, and enhance the values that guide our nation. And never in recent times has this work been more essential and never in recent times is more under siege. It's not enough that we educate our young people through lecture and demonstration. We must also be seen as standing tall in the defense of what we know and believe to be true. Educational opportunities must be deepened and expanded, not narrowed and constricted as some in leadership positions are now advocating and our values must be spoken of more openly and with greater passion. We cannot allow a thousand years of hard-won enlightenment to be snuffed out on our watch. And so I urge that the faculty and staff of this university working together commit to becoming the model institution for our region and our nation. We can do this. I have every confidence. So thanks for coming today. I'm happy to take any questions or talk with you afterwards. But I appreciate you taking the time to be with me today. Just look for hands. Anybody with a question or a comment? Yes, Lauren. So Lauren's question is the apparent conflict between a smaller high school graduating class in New England in the coming years and any ambition we might have to expand our students. Those are trends moving in opposite directions. And so it takes a certain amount of puts but I think we can do that. But my point, my larger point was we need to make conscious decisions about what we're doing. And I'm not sure that that is the best way to go but at least we have to ask that question. For example, there are certain programs that we don't now have that we could have that would bring with them additional students. There's a certain confidence that we may have or not have about how well we can penetrate the market. I don't want to just say, well, that doesn't work. We're just not going to consider it. The bigger concern for me frankly is that adding more residential students immediately increases our cost for infrastructure. So whatever financial gain we get tends to get offset by the need to build those buildings. And I'll tell you in the short term, if I say to Jerry Williams, where's Jerry? There he is right there. Jerry, I'm thinking about going out for a $50 million bond issue. What do you think? He is going to lose his Green Apple lunch right there because we don't have that kind of bonding capacity. But it's something we might be looking at a little further down the road because those bonds, our current bonds, will begin to be retired in 2025. And one of the things we have to think about, we can't make a decision now to do something in the fall. Brian Williams will tell you, we need to start announcing what we're doing to high school sophomores. So we're three years out at any given moment. So this is just looking the long view, Lauren. So you're right in what you're saying. There's an obvious conflict between those two issues or two factoids. But it's something we still need to put through the mill. Anyone else? Yes, Brad? Yeah, I think we could run ourselves ragged trying to chase the newest trend and become nothing more than a reflection of the interests of students and parents at a particular moment in time. The parents have been very focused in recent years on making sure their kids get a good job. They are not paying attention to the fact that we just have had as a country the best job market for recent college graduates in a decade this past spring. So in a sense, they're behind the curve on this one. They're still looking for something that we're saying, well, that's no longer an issue. Our students are getting jobs. That shouldn't be where you're focusing on. And whenever I say to them, what you should be asking is how will your child end up having a great life? A good job is part of a great life, but they're not synonymous. There's much more to it than that. And they do that by being a well-rounded individual, meaning they're well-grounded in the liberal arts, and besides which, the liberal arts are the foundation for adapting to the kind of changes that'll be coming in the job market in the future. Whereas if you over-specialized today, you're just left high and dry in the future. So sometimes we have to come at this a bit more obliquely, but I'll tell this group, I have no interest in seeing us diminishing our support for the liberal arts. I think it's a mistake, and it's one that we have come to live to regret. Now, we still have to pay attention to how we make the bottom line work, but those are not incompatible, is what I'm getting at. Anyone else? Yes, I'm sorry. Oh, Sue. You say that there'll be incoming discussions about the student resources, every direction that we might look at, not just in terms of graduate, but other areas that will be different. So is that going to be part of the conversation? Well, I think it has to be. I don't want to do this in a half-baked way and say, well, we left all these things over there on the side because it was kind of too messy to deal with. I'd like to take advantage of the fact that we've stabilized in a way. I'm not nearly as worried about next fall's enrollment as I've been in recent years because I think we've finally established that we've got a good track record, and I think the people in admissions, enrollment management and marketing in general, our Crackerjack team, I have great confidence that working with the schools and the departments, that we will be doing the best presentation we've ever done to prospective students this coming year. And I think we'll penetrate that market very effectively. But so it allows us to look not just at our toes, but at the horizon. What is it we're trying to get to and why? And that's a decision that is so big, it needs to be shared as broadly as we can with the people who have a stake in this campus, which is all of you. So I know I'm going to get lots of guidance from the Senate, Sue, and I'm looking forward to that. I truly am. Yes, Joe. We're at the front end of that one, Joe, that the Livingston property will be part of the master plan process. There are certain things that would make sense over there and there are some things that don't. And so we have to think through what is the best use of that. And we also have to determine how many building sites do we really have on this campus. You know, we've got certain agreed upon setbacks from MediCom Avenue. There are height restrictions that we've agreed to. These are agreements that we may try and negotiate and change if we think they're in our interest. I don't want to assume that the status quo is what we have to work with, but we have to ask those questions now so that we are making the best decisions we can with the opportunity we have. That property across the street, if I were to say, let's build fraternity row over there. I'm pretty sure the Columban Fathers, among others, might say that's an incompatible use and that is zoned residential right now. So the town would have something to say about it as well. So we don't want to rush into anything, but it will be part of the consideration as to how best to use the land that we have to meet the needs that we have, I have determined to have in terms of siting of additional buildings. And we have to do that in order. I mean, we have to decide some issues about campus growth and where it's going to happen, how we handle the budget, and then where we put the facilities if we need additional facilities. It's four o'clock, I'm going to let you go. Thanks so much for being here.


The yield of tomato cultivars Aviso F1, Bricsol F1, and Polonais F1 was compared in 2011 to 2013 using three types of synthetic and biodegradable mulches at the Wroclaw University of Environmental and Life Sciences. The results showed that Aviso F1 had the highest marketable yield on average by 33.1% and 64.7%, compared to Bricsol F1 and Polonais F1, respectively. Additionally, plants mulched with polyethylene and biodegradable film tended to have higher yields than those cultivated on nonwoven or without any mulches. This article was authored by Katarzyna Adamzuska Sawinska and Joanna Terksuk.


Llywodraeth yn rhoi Tyre i ddyn nhw i'n bwysigol yn ddiogelol i'r bwyllt. On yn gwahos gyda'r baen, sydd erioedr yn gwahos gyda'r bwysigol wedi'i drafod ei chyfrifio. Dyn ni'r bwysigol erioedr wedi'i bobl, bwysigol erioedr wedi'u bobl, bwysigol wahanol, I gweithwyr, i gweithio, i gweithwyr ar magazinei, ddCOrd, i gweithwyr, i gweithwyr, i gweithwyr, i gweithwyr, fawr, i gweithwyr, i gweithwyr. Ychydigfyn wedi i'n edrych eich cyfnwys, oherwydd hyn yn ymgyrch yn nad o'r dd Chair menthe, Yn cael ei ddod, y ffrwg tu? Yn y ffrwg, mae'n ddiwrnod a'r ddAxwani. Yn gweithwyr, ni'n desud dr Sea Dymann Akswani. Salaam a leicwm. Once again a privilege to have you on the show tonight. Thank you very much. Eternal ethics, forgiveness. So with that in mind, I'd like to start the show off with one key verse as it were. Surah Zomar verse 53. It reads as follows. I say, O my servants who have transgressed against themselves by sinning, do not despair of the mercy of Allah. Indeed Allah forgives all sins. Indeed it is He who is the forgiving, the merciful. With that in mind, what can you actually address in terms of this key verse? The Holy Grand has just been read out as it were.  Is to be a forgiving human being. Is to be somebody who manifests the forgiveness of God. The verse that you have quoted is probably one of the most beautiful verses on forgiveness that you'll ever come across in any religious text of any group of religious people in the world. If you were to break down chapter 39 verse 53, there's no way you'd have any fear of hell. Because you'll be saying that's a Lord who's so forgiving. There's only one place where I'm going and that is heaven. One way. Because even the way God talks to us is a lesson for us in the way we should think of when forgiving others. Without having a chip on one's shoulder when forgiving. Without thinking that we are so great because we've been forgiving. He still calls us his servants after we've transgressed against him so much. Cwyl ia ibadi. Mae ibadi. Not cwyl ia ddullam. You group of oppressors. Say to those servants of mine. And the fact that we're still in that world of abodeas and honour. Because really we have not been just with our Lord. Say to my servants who have been extravagant in some of their behaviours. Extravagant? I've completely dismissed your legal system for two, three, five, ten, fifteen years. And you've called it a bit of extravagance? What type of generous Lord do I have? Mae'r gharwnau cabi rabbi cael carim. What makes you doubt that generous Lord? So the Quran says say to my servants. And this verse opens up our discussion tonight. Because I think this verse should hopefully allow many of the viewers to forgive those who they've taken years to forgive by looking at the beauty of Allah's forgiveness. Say to my servants who have been a little extravagant against themselves. La taqnatw min rahmatillah. Do not be despondent of God's mercy. Inna allahia gferodd ddunubu jami'u. Allah forgives all sins. Inna hw wa'l ghaffur ddahi. For he is the most forgiving, the most merciful. I will repeat this many times in this series on ethics. There are certain ethical verses in the Quran like the verse we looked at with justice. This verse, other verses which should represent Islam. That other religions talk of a forgiving God. Other religions mention a forgiving Christ. But no one mentions a forgiving God of Islam. People like to talk of the fact that Allah has shedid al-aqab. Allah has most severe punisher.  Because there are countries in the world today that punish those criminals who have been unjust. Who have raped children. Who have spread drugs and destroyed people's lives. By the same time Allah 68 times in the Quran. 68 times in the Quran discusses divine forgiveness. You see for example Ilefyr, Ilefyr, Teilefyr, Mailefyr. All of the derivatives to keep reminding us. That don't doubt my forgiving nature. I'll forgive. And I'll forgive all sins. Therefore that verse should begin to motivate us today. Because there are some viewers who have not forgiven their exes. There are some viewers who have not forgiven their parents. There are some viewers who have not forgiven their cousins. There are some viewers who have not forgiven friends. That verse should encourage us to become a forgiving community. Okay, okay. So thank you for that brilliant introduction as a breakdown for that verse. Are we a forgiving community? No. We Muslims are not a forgiving community. We're ruthless. We're not a forgiving community. If we remember you've done something years ago, we'll destroy you. And if we heard that you've done something recently, we'll destroy you. Eternal ethics, the basis of it is willing to purify a heart full of malice, hatred. Animosity, anger. Rebellion. The Muslim community sometimes is a microcosm of the macrocosm of the human community. That's an unforgiving community. Someone does something wrong, we don't forgive. But when it's us, we beg for forgiveness. When others ask us for forgiveness, that listen, I was wrong that day. Please forgive me. What I did, I did not mean to do. What I said I was wrong. My attitude was wrong. I'm not infallible. I'm not error free. All of us have blips. Give me a chance. The Muslim community is an unforgiving community. Firstly, it doesn't have the bedrock of making 70 excuses. Which is a bedrock for forgiveness. But sometimes when someone does something wrong, we say, Allah, forgive me. Recognising Allah SWT softhearted. Man yw basa hardhearted. And while the Muslim community remains a community that's unforgiving, then we'll see trials and tribulations. A community that is not willing to forgive one another's faults and is always ready to blaspheme or slander one another is a community that's not going to see blessings. Because they drifted from the Quranic ethos and message. The Quranic ethos was that we're all God's creation. But that God recognises we have the ability to sin. But he's always kept the door open for us.  We saw that there were members of our community who in their teenage years dabbled with drugs. We saw there were members in our community who were in the world of the obscene or the world of the lascivious. Were drunk too much alcohol, committed adultery. But we closed the door of forgiveness on them even though our Lord kept it open. While we recognise that our Lord has kept the door of forgiveness open, then who are we to shut that door? Absolutely. The moment God shuts the door of forgiveness, then we shut. So sincerely, Mohammed, if you're asking me, are we a figure in community? We're not a figure in community. Right. I've seen it in my own career that there are moments where people will not let go of. Say, how could he say that? How could he do that? Buddy, firstly, nobody said that I'm maswm. But secondly, you have a problem with my lecture or you have an envy of my position or my popularity or my name or my...  Because I wronged you or because you have a problem with something else related to us? Now, you imagine that's just a micro thing. Imagine on the macro level how many people are not forgiven even though they've changed. Many of us messed up in our teenage years. Many of us did wrong. Many of us did wrong in our 20s. We have to keep the door of forgiveness open for each other. OK, OK. Thank you for that. But is the Lord, Allah SWT, is he Ghaffur? What does it exactly mean? Well, the root is to cover. OK. So, when we're saying, ghaffurli, it's God cover what I've done. Open the door for me again. You know, he's satar al-Aiub. He covers once for us. People always ask me what would you say are two ingredients for success, Islamically? OK. I'm like number one, recognising that all izzah belongs to Allah and all izzah comes from Allah. And secondly, that if it wasn't for Allah covering my faults, I wouldn't be where I am. The root, therefore, is to ask Allah to cover. OK. God, I messed up. I messed up. Don't embarrass me. Don't embarrass me. And don't just... I ask you not to embarrass me, but also, ya Allah, please, cover me with your glory. Yes, that grace. Cover me with your grace. So, the root indicates a covering which we seek. Libas is a covering. There's a libas.  There's a form of clothing that covers your private parts. There's a libas, which is... they call it as if it's a reish.  Yes, yes. The peacock. Proud. There is a libas known as taqwa. Not a physical clothing. The others are physical. There's a spiritual garb. Therefore, when I say, astaghfir Allah, I'm saying, ya Allah, cover what I've done. But give me a spiritual garb of returning in the favour of, not just your favour, but the favour of the mw'taqeen as well. Deep words. Ya. Alhamdulillah. Similarly, Sena, is the most high Lord Almighty? Is he tawab? What does that actually mean? You're talking of a Lord who accepts repentance all the time.  He gives you ample opportunities. You call him ghaffur. He's always forgiving. He's ready to cover up what you've done. OK. You call him tawab. He's always accepting your repentance and your return because taubah. OK. And if you're looking at derivatives such as words like awab, to always be returning back to the part of Allah swt. When I say astaghfir Allah Rabbi wa atubweli, everyone understands it as I'm asking Allah for forgiveness. No. I ask you, O Allah, to cover what I've done, return me to your glory and allow me to return with the garb of repentance. Therefore, when a person talks to Allah and recognises that he is tawab, recognises that Allah always accepts our taubah. If you have a taubah that is a sincere taubah, not a taubah, the way it's like, you know what, I'm going to ask Allah to allow me back in and then I'm back out again to where I had asked him to forgive me for going to those areas, then no, that's not a sincere taubah. When I therefore recognise that my Lord's forgiving and that my Lord keeps allowing me to return, why would I want to disobey that Lord? The test for me is when I see that he opens the door of forgiveness and allows me to return, have I done the same with his creation? That's the test. It's one thing recognising that Allah is gafor, that Allah is tawab. Can you manifest them in your life? Subhanallah. When someone comes and tells you, Mohammed, I did something wrong, cover them, bro. Please, I was wrong. Do you allow me to return back into your life? I messed up. If you turn around and say, no, then you've not understood the serious and our point that has become a manifestation of Allah's name. Allah, he said, was adil, established adala. Allah, he said, was gafor to be someone who provides forgiveness. Allah, he said, is tawab allowed people to return. That's where the test is. Okay, okay. And now just all of Allah's names are beautiful, as it were. So he's Allah, Rahmanirahim at all. And that's the beauty, the silver lining. Okay, okay. Is that it's his mercy that gets us through all of this. Right. This is the silver lining. If we were to be judged by God's justice, none of us will get to heaven. It's because of his mercy. His mercy. And it's his mercy that ensures that we're forgiving. So where's your mercy? When you recognize Allah's gafor and you recognize Allah's tawab and you recognize that Allah is Rahmanin Rahim, then exhibit these in your life. Be godly individuals on the earth. What do you think it is that attracted people to certain personalities? It's when those personalities manifested godly attributes. Many times we hear that line. They manifested a godly attribute. What does that mean? I recognize that my Lord has forgiven the worst of the worst. There's a story in the Quran. There was a man who they found he used to dig the graves, undertaken. They used to dig the graves and put the body in and so on. They found that this man would have physical intercourse with dead bodies. I'm sure there's a word for it. Physical intercourse with the dead. When they found this person, how he had come to the Holy Prophet peace be upon him and his family and he had said to him that you know, I've done something so bad. I want God to forgive me. But I doubt God will forgive me. The Holy Prophet peace be upon his family obviously knows these verses. He knows that Allah swt has said tell my servants that you know what don't worry, I'll forgive all sins. Don't worry, God will forgive you. What is it? Tell me, what is it? What do you want to say? There's no way God will accept. He's like, I'll just go ahead and tell him. There's no way God's going to accept. He's like, well if you tell us then we'll see if there's a way. He's like, I'm the ones who dig up the graves, bury people. Last time there was this beautiful body of this girl and I had physical intercourse with the dead body. The Prophet said to me, you get out. I feel the flames of hell about to touch me. Nobody would. Who would forgive him? All of us would kick him out of our kingdom of our cities. Has Allah ever rejected one who has called out his name and has not forgiven him? This person went to the top of the mountain, he was barling, crying crying non-stop. I asked you somebody who was slept with a dead body. You would think that's the worst sin. No way can you be forgiving. No way. Who would forgive you? Allah forgives all sins. This person one day the comes to the Holy Prophet and tells him glad tidings. Allah has forgiven him because he sincerely repented for the sin that he's committed. When Allah is willing to forgive somebody who slept or had physical intercourse with a dead body, how can I not forgive my relative who did not invite me to a wedding? Sometimes you hear people saying you ask them why don't you speak with your relatives anymore? You know what they didn't invite me to a wedding or they called me late or on Eid they came two days later and they should have it's not that bad. You break up a whole family, a whole community on the basis of these fickle things that your kids cannot even play with their cousins anymore because of your lack of forgiveness from one another. Ehl el-bayta, alem resalaam, always in their life would stress that keep on trying to find the doors of forgiveness for those who have wronged you. You look throughout their lives therefore part of their eternal ethics lessons is that if my Lord is so willing to forgive somebody like this, Quranically then why am I not willing to forgive those who have had misdemeaners less than this? Yes, amdur allah. So with that in mind the action of sinning and then let's bring in an ingredient of knowledge and consciousness does the consciousness or level of knowledge in a human have a role on the repercussions on that sin? I think there is a difference between someone who commits a sin arrogantly and someone who doesn't negligently. What about knowingly? Knowingly where their conscience doesn't tell them anymore that this is wrong you are in a dark pit you are in trouble knowingly but inside you still feel some guilt the doors of forgiveness are still open. You see we discuss on many shows and many lectures which have been given the difference between nafsil ammara, nafsil lawama nafsil motma innan nafsil motma is that divine status where you become the manifestation of God's attributes on the earth you reach the level where you want to see the manifestation of forgiveness Hossein Ben-Haleen Carbona you want to see the manifestation of justice Hossein Ben-Haleen Carbona you want to see the manifestation of being jawad Mohammed Ben-Halee Al-Jawad in Baghdad you want to see the manifestation of sari'r riddla Halee Ibn Musa so that's al motma innan lawama is I'm still a sinner but I feel guilt when I do something so there's this feeling that we may of all there are some guys these days who are in the world of drugs some are doing weed, marijuana some are balloons I never thought a balloon could help a person get stoned but hey that's the world we live in and there's still a sense of guilt in the morning after there's still a sense that I've see I sometimes think when Allah SWT is angry with us when we sin we know that it doesn't harm him in any way us sinning I think he's angry that we have disrespected our nefs that he's given us that you could do much better than that I've given you part of the divine spirit that's what you do with it come on it doesn't affect him but for us if there's still that guilt the doors of forgiveness are still open ammarah however nefsil ammarah is a different story nefsil ammarah is when like bro who cares God and day of judgment and all of that stuff let's just have a good night let's just do all of this that person is in a state but I will say something there have been people in that state they could still found their way back as in do you go from ammarah to lawama to matma inna there are some who in a split second went from being on the depths of jahannam to all of a sudden being Ansar el Hosein it can happen really but it can but it can there are some famous personalities who in the depths of darkness in terms of sin who ended up being God's greatest worshippers it can happen but why are the person admits and that's the beauty of du'ahs like du'ah atoba I love du'ah atoba because du'ah atoba shows you ethically the meaning of forgiveness and how God's doors always open for you but you've just got to talk to God admit your weakness this is a big thing I admit to Allah that I have faults I have weaknesses I have moments where I'm not strong enough to stay away from said help me keep the door open for me because without you I am nothing that admitting makes a big difference du'ah atoba of Imam Zain el Abedin many people only recite it in Shahar Ramadan 23rd night of Ramadan for example you see people will read du'ah atoba not just that we have du'ah atoba we have ghusl atoba ghusl atoba is when a person says I've been on the drink for months I've been on the drink for years today I'm gonna have a fresh ghusl wash myself thoroughly as a metaphor for washing away my sins so we have ghusl atoba we have du'ah atoba if Allah has given us so many of these how could we not be forgiving to people look forgiving to people doesn't mean I be lovey-dovey with them bro you know what I forgive you now let's hang out let's go to each other's weddings let's love this joke but just keeping the door of mercy open because that one door of rejection of forgiveness can cause repercussions and dangers in society the mosque is split the community split but a door of forgiveness can bring a softness in society as you can see it now in shala we'll go for a break see you right back in shala bismillahir rahmanir raheem as-salamun aleykum warahmatullahi as we approach the festive seasons of Eidol Adha and Eidol Ghadir many of us will be celebrating these joyous occasions by getting together with our families and having meals at restaurants or perhaps even at the local Hoseinia whilst there will be thousands of orphans living in and around the city of Karbala who will be celebrating Eidol in poverty while we celebrate the sacrifice of Nabi Ibrahim and the appointment of Amirul Moominin with delicious meals and fancy delicacies they will be celebrating Eidol by staring at poverty point blank with this in mind Imam Hosein Development and Relief Foundation is embarking upon a campaign to be able to bring joy to the lives of the orphans and make Eidol Adha and Eidol Ghadir a festive occasion which they too can celebrate we aim to provide these children with gifts take them out to a restaurant and enjoy a full course meal followed by a fun day at a local fun fair and through this we are hoping to be able to bring a smile to one of the orphans in this difficult life that they are surrounded by you can be a part of this campaign by contributing $10 today and through the will of Allah and the grace of Imam Hosein Abul Fadlil Abbas together as a Shi'a umma we can take care and change the lives of the orphans of Ali Muhammad Eidol Ghadir is a day in which we give thanks to Allah the Almighty by bestowing us with the love and leadership of Imam Ali In honor of this greatest Eid Imam Hosein TV are giving the loyal and devoted viewers a free Imam Ali t-shirt pledge a little as 7th hound a month to support the right to work for Imam Hosein TV by educating the Shi'a community worldwide once you have pledged you will receive an Eid gift from us to you to become a monthly partner text in our whatsapp us hashtag Khadirshad to ask 447-939-917-163 or visit us on our whatsapp www.mhosein3.tv Imam Hosein TV your gateway to Karabala Assalamu alaikum and welcome back to our live show Eternal Ethics, Forgiveness Assalamu alaikum Assalamu alaikum Just going back to the points that you mentioned earlier so we've gone through the points as it were of the qualities of forgiveness as it were now we're just going into the point of do why do the prophets ask for forgiveness when they are Muslim first and foremost they teach us how to ask for forgiveness otherwise how would me and you speak to God is there anyone better than those chosen by God to teach us how to talk to God and how to ask for forgiveness from God you know when we were younger go to school and you know you've been naughty parents will be like you go to that teacher and you apologize properly so sir I'm sorry I promise I won't do it again please give me one more chance show an etiquette we wouldn't do that we just go up to the teacher and say I'm sorry but when your parents gave you an etiquette you look at Duaq Qumail Amirul Muqmini what does it people think because Imam Ali is a sinner that he's talking to God and saying Allahumma phirlede nabilati because he's a sinner he's teaching me and you the way the Holy Prophet peace be upon him taught us how to pray the Holy Prophet would say As-salamu alaika ayuhannabi he's teaching me how to talk to Allah and likewise with these Duaqs Duaq tobes not Imam Zeyn el-Abideen is a sinner Duaq ysdashir Duaq mashlu Duaq Abu Hamza Duaq Joshan el-Kabir These Duaq Qumail Duaq Tawassun Duaq Nodba All of these are teaching us how to talk to Allah Yes I defy anyone to show me the etiquette of talking to Allah by personalities living in the time of the Prophet peace be upon him the way Ahlul Bayt talk to Allah I don't just respect Ahlul Bayt because they're the Prophet's family Any Tom Dick and Harry can tell you Imam el-Hasse Imam el-Hossein are the grandchildren of the Prophet and any Tom Dick and Harry can tell you that I respect them and they're on top of my head and they're the best of people and they are meant to be honoured and so on but I don't respect them because they're the grandchildren I respect them because when I wanted to see spirituality there was no door that I could knock on except this you show me a companion of the Prophet Muhammad peace be upon his family who left any supplication behind with the quality of Duaq Cumail or Duaq Esdashir or Duaq Makarama el-Akhlaug or Duaq Sabaach Show me so I can follow them You can show me people who lived around the Prophet who turned out to be politicians people who turned out to be commanders of army but none of them have left behind a supplication to talk to Allah None of them How could someone 20 years earlier was bearing his daughter alive and another one who was bound down before idols How can he be the same as the one bought up in a house which inherited Abraham's legacy Therefore for us it's an honour that we read the way they talk to Allah and the etiquettes they've shown us Going into the social aspects as it were of tonight's show we've got a question unfortunately he's using the name Sami, he's a drug addict and he's been a drug addict for years and at the same time he's also got an addiction to pornography What would you say about that in terms of him coming closer to Allah? Where no one to judge him There's too many people who think they're Maliki or Medin in the Muslim world and all I can say to Sami is firstly thank you for your message secondly at a spiritual level that's still okay because you're still reflecting on your sins there are people out there who sin who don't care there are Muslims out there who believe that the way they look religious externally even if they have the worst hearts even if they have unbelievable amounts of envy they think they can get away with it No, you don't get away with it The barathe is as vital as the barathe and when Sami says to me that he's a drug addict Sami there's ways of working on this don't think that Allah swt doesn't recognise your plight he does and don't think that Allah swt does not look at you graciously he still will but you've got work on yourself as well and if there's an addiction to pornography you're not the first and you won't be the last there are millions out there both people of religion and people outside of religion who find that they have no boundaries to sexual pleasure no limits and that they could satisfy themselves in every way that they want whereas we say that there are certain boundaries don't want to suppress it don't want to suppress a natural instinct but you also don't want to go to an extreme because I think everyone recognises that extreme and anything is unhealthy but Sami if you doubt God will forgive you I told you earlier there was a guy sleeping with a physical relationship with a dead body and God forgave him you're on the world of drugs, the world of porn immoral, no doubt but hopefully a world which if he leaves his details afterwards we will endeavour to help inshallah that brings us nicely onto this point of the types of istic far how many types of istic far are there say that well there is an istic far which is recommended there is an istic far which is wajib then there is an istic far which I think is forbidden and there is debates surrounding it so recommend an istic far in Salatul Wit or Salatul Leil it's recommended to do istic far a number of istic far you ask for forgiveness of people that's right 40 more minutes and that's the beauty of Salatul Leil that in Salatul Leil you end up asking for forgiveness of people it's as if Allah inculcates that ethical trait in you without you knowing that your worst enemies their picture comes up in your head and you're like ok ychferlif mwlaen and that's a wonderful spiritual moment I don't think any of us and me included have ever fathomed the spiritual wonder of Salatul Leil of namaz-e-shab and there are traditions that also indicate to us that if you commit a sin as long as by night time you've asked for forgiveness Allah will delete it there are traditions along those lines and there are traditions from the Holy Prophet where he says the kafara for our sins in the daytime of Salatul Leil it deletes them not an excuse by the way there'll be some viewers out there thinking you know what let's just make sure we get back home in time and we don't want to go towards that direction so there's a recommended a recommended istighfar would be cwnwt of Salatul Witre after tasbihaethil arbaeth SubhanAllah wa'l hamdolillaw wa'l ailehaill Allah wa'l awkbar in Salat then at the end we always say astaghfyr Allah Rabbi wa'u atwpo ilai for example those would be definitely the recommended so they're the mustahab ones mustahab then you have obligatory let me give you an example of a wajib istighfar we mentioned in our show on justice that the Arabs would tell their wives you are to me like the back of my mum if you can't pay the kafara for that then the kafara would go towards istighfar so it would be wajib for you even in Hajj time there are certain things if they're repeated a couple of times you may end up having to do istighfar as a kafara kafara forbidden they say to pray for the hypocrites and those pagans that's forbidden any they normally base it on the verse in Sora Toba Sora 9 verse 113 to 114 which discusses the uncle of ibraheem and discusses the holy prophet it is not fitting for the prophets and those who believe to ask for forgiveness for the polytheists even if they were relatives or near ones to them as Abu Lahab was of course a near one to the holy prophet he had promised his uncle I'll ask for your forgiveness but the uncle turned out to be an enemy of Allah swt so you got recommended istighfar wajib istighfar and forbidden istighfar ok thank you for that the actual nights now for istighfar are there any designated nights? are there best nights? are there good nights? it's useful and I think these nights such as Leila Tilqan these nights such as Thursday night these nights such as the night of Ashura a night where people or the day of Ashura and people do amal of Ashura these are to remind us not just that Allah is all forgiving but that now you should let bygones be bygones don't sit there saying ya Allah forgive me forgive me forgive me and your cousin is literally five seats away from you and when he asks you for forgiveness you never forgive you've got the whole conundrum wrong the equation you've messed up the equation was if I can ask Allah for forgiveness then I should forgive the creation so on these nights take advantage of the fact that Allah's door of forgiveness is always open by opening to others as well ok one of the most quoted points of istighfar in a door invocation form in a door invocation form is istighfar what does this actually mean and does it have any conditions I seek forgiveness from Allah swt and now I'm returning back onto his path the main condition is that you've regretted what you've done before the main lesson is that when Allah has allowed you back him start forgiving others and allowing them in ok ok so one should ponder actually this is what's the problem in the Muslim community is that there are a lot of rituals that are done without reflection reflection I am now coming to Allah swt on the 23rd night of shahar ramadan leilatol qad Allahom maghfer li'l ddynob allathe tunazilol bala Allahom maghfer li'l ddynob allathe ta hbysodddoa Allahom maghfer li'l cwlla tham din and I've got for example somebody there from my friends they've asked for a year for two years please forgive me I was wrong and you'll say I'll never forgive them no chance I'll forgive them this is not Islamic ethics Islamic ethics is to try and always have that mercy in your heart to welcome them back not for their sake for Allah difference if it's for them you'll find it hard but you're saying Allah you told me you love those who forgive I want to be in the echelons of those who forgive you want to embody that quality I want to embody, why? If me and you now we're both lovers of Ahl al-Bayt and we've both done Ziyar we've both done Hajj but we've got this problem with each other and we both think we're going to Jannah I don't want to go and you're probably thinking if I'm in Jannah you don't want to go either we sort out things now or there's a good chance we're going to be waiting a long time right have you ever thought of the fact that there are people in this world you don't really like they're the same method as you love Ahl al-Bayt as much as you how are you two going to be in Jannah together now you might be able to say that listen I'm going to buy a part of Jannah that they're not going to come near me there's no way Allah SWT let's a person in Jannah who still has that in their heart look at the Ahl al-Bayt al-Bayt the person who came sincerely to them to ask for forgiveness it makes a difference I'm not talking to those who continue to be arrogant those who actually came to ask for it, they didn't keep it in their heart they didn't say you're wrong me how dare you, who do you think you are the doors are open ok, thank you for that ten minutes left in tonight's show there's still a few more questions to get through how forgiving really were the prophets of God many examples in the Holy Quran what's your favourite example of a prophet in the Quran in terms of how forgiving he was Allah SWT which prophet in the Quran which prophet in the Quran do you find that he was forgiving to maybe family members or to people who had wronged him when he was younger is there any prophet that comes to mind I'd say definitely you'd look at Yusuf of course his brothers Yusuf's forgiveness was divine that was a real lesson his brother has messed up his life we don't forgive people because they gave us a cheap gift his brothers caused him to be arrested his brothers caused him to be in prison his brothers caused him to not see his dad for his whole youth I ask everybody when you claim to love Nabi Yusuf and you claim to be a follower of Nabi Yusuf do you have the forgiveness in you similar to Yusuf when his brothers recognised that it was Binyamin and Yusuf there do you have that same forgiveness there are many of us who hear these stories doesn't affect us there are some of us who hear stories or prophets forgiving we don't forgive our parents if they wronged us no one's saying to you that they're going to be amazing when you forgive them do it for Allah's sake so when I look at the story of Nabi Yusuf, I love that story because Nabi Yusuf with all his trials and tribulations he could have easily pointed out one of them and said you know what, you messed me up that day you were rude to me that day you were arrogant towards me that day you always open your big mouth no same words the Prophet, peace be upon his family used the day of the opening of Mecca how much Abu Sufyan wronged the Prophet how much Wahshi killed the uncle of the Prophet Hamza Prophet could have easily said as some would do put them down on the ground now behead them if he was a man who spread the religion by the sword he could have beheaded them he could have finished their lives don't be offended by it today is a day of mercy not a day of slaughtering so these prophetic examples are not just stories on the manabre we hear in Muharram the aim inshallah is to implement this yes, yes, absolutely now we've mentioned names that Allah Subhanahu Wa Taala has Ghaffur Dawab Rahman Raheem what are the best words to ask when asking for God's forgiveness the best words would be how excellent question how do we actually go about humbling ourselves you're humbling yourselves and talking to Allah humble yourselves with those who seek your forgiveness first don't be humble before Allah and then with others you suddenly become arrogant when they're in their weak moment when someone's in a weak moment they're like bro, I'm sorry sister, I'm sorry I use when talking to Allah the Duaas of the Qur'an the Duaas of the Qur'an I'd say there's one in particular la ilaha illa al-laan Subhanak to admit that I was unjust la ilaha illa al-laan that famous liquor from Nabiunus that has many secrets behind it absolutely, absolutely by the grace of Allah the you mentioned about Salat-e-tahadju but if we can just revert back so now how great is a night prayer when forgiving and seeking forgiveness you know you want to forgive somebody there are moments where people wonder have they been forgiven by anybody over acts that they had performed and you find that Salat-e-lail is where you can forgive people without them knowing wow, it's beautiful you don't forgive people showing off there are people who like to forgive others but you have to bring the whole clan, the whole tribe the whole community and then I will say okay, I forgive you then there are those who forgive not looking for fame not looking for anything in return purely for the pleasure of Allah I did not worship you out of fear of hell for it's the worship of a slave nor did I worship you Allah because I wanted heaven for it's the worship of a businessman I worship you because I found you worthy of being worshiped that's the worship of a free human being when I forgive when I forgive, I become free excuse the tattoos on my hands which say both words forgive, free when I forgive, I become free when you don't forgive, you're still in shackles even if they're not literal chains you can't let go negative energy, I don't need you know what, we're all fallible it's okay, you don't have to say sorry to me sorry to me forgive forgive so and so forgive me I could say to you al-af 300 times in Namaz-e-Shem sorry, sorry, sorry but why is it when someone says to me al-af I don't listen insha'atil le'l when I'm telling my lord al-af I'm sorry, I'm expecting my lord to answer me but when people say to me after they say sorry to me I don't care what stories they have we as Muslims it's not the length of our beard it's not the tightness of our hijab it's not the sifha that we have in our hands it's the soft heartedness that is fundamental okay, we've got about three minutes left Sayinah there's a question from Ali Sayinah, my parents have robbed me I find it very hard to forgive them yes and what would you say to him and he hasn't alluded to what the reasons are and that's to be fair irrelevant whose parents haven't wronged them whose parents aren't perfect and you're not perfect I'm sure you wronged your parents a lot I'm sure they were nice your parents spent awake while you were comfortable therefore look at those who've been wronged before you like the Ahlilbait were wronged by many but they kept the door of forgiveness open inshallah Ali you can keep that door of forgiveness open for your parents as well and hopefully that will bring a change in both your lives final two points before we close tonight's show is it not that we're seeking to be a manifestation of God's names when we forgive so that's just the first question and also arguably the greatest moment of forgiveness occurs on the 10th of Muharram between Hore and Imam Husayn islam so if you can close with that and just before that if we can talk about the manifestation of Ahlilbait are the manifestation of the names of Allah on earth and none more pure and none more beautiful than Husayn bin Ali at Karbala no doubt not just Hore there were more than Hore who came to his side there were over 20 who joined him on the morning of the 10th of Muharram didn't say no to any of them welcome they blocked water from his children didn't say no they caused fear in the hearts of his sisters didn't say no they are the ones who would lead to the eventual hate shown towards his family in Kufa didn't say no who am I to say no when my lord after every verse which mentions punishment says but I am forgiving in the Quran you see a verse on punishment then you say but Allah is forgiving in the Quran when there are certain sharia codes which people attack Allah says but the best thing for you to do is not to implement the sharia code but the best thing for you to do is to try and find a way of forgiving the people Imam Al-Husayn in one afternoon taught a lesson for all of us not the beauty of your voice in Quran or how many had you been to are you willing to forgive someone when they ask people forgiveness and that's why you found Harbin Yazidariach in tears when he saw how soft hearted Imam Al-Husayn was he welcomed him he forgave him he buried him he looked after him and he will never see an eternal ethical lesson on forgiveness like Imam Al-Husayn's lessons on the Temple Muharran Asaentol Sayyadna Shukrin and it's been an honour and a privilege personally I'm sure for Imam Al-Husayn TV and also the viewers to have you on this great show and I'd like to say considering we're discussing the eternal ethic of forgiveness please forgive me and please forgive Amir in any way if we've ever offended you or hurt you in any way whatsoever we're fallible human beings and we hope that you would forgive us in the way that Allah SWT you hope that you have forgiven us from him Insha'Allah Ilahi Alayhi Asalaamu Alaykum Ida Ghadir is a day in which we give thanks to Allah the Almighty by bestowing us with the love and leadership of Imam Ali Alayhi Asalaam in honour of this greatest Eid Imam Husayn TV are giving the loyal and devoted viewers a free Imam Ali T-shirt pledge a little as 7th hound a month to support the right to work of Imam Husayn TV with educating the Shia community worldwide once you have pledged you will receive an Eid gift from us to you to become a monthly partner text in our whatsapp us hashtag KhadirShat to ask 447-939-917-163 or visit us on our website www. ImamHusayn3.tv Imam Husayn TV your gateway to Kerebola Bismillahir Rahmanir Raheem Asalaamun Aleykum wa Rahmatullahi as we approach the festive seasons of Eidol Adha and Eidol Ghadir many of us will be celebrating these joyous occasions by getting together with our families and having meals at restaurants or perhaps even at the local Husaynia whilst there will be thousands of orphans living in and around the city of Kerebola who will be celebrating Eid in poverty while we celebrate the sacrifice of Nabi Ibrahim and the appointment of Amirul Mu'mineen with delicious meals and fancy delicacies there will be celebrating Eid by staring at poverty point blank with this in mind Imam Husayn Development and Relief Foundation is embarking upon a campaign to be able to bring joy to the lives of the orphans and make Eidol Adha and Eidol Ghadir a festive occasion which they too can celebrate we aim to provide these children with gifts take them out to a restaurant and enjoy a full course meal followed by a fun day at a local fun fair and through this we are hoping to be able to bring a smile to one of the orphans in this difficult life that they are surrounded by you can be a part of this campaign by contributing $10 today and through the will of Allah and the grace of Imam Husayn Abul Fadlil Abbas together as a Shi'a umma we can take care and change the lives of the orphans of Ale Muhammed