‘Let’s Get Back to The Work’: Starting the Year with Hope and Focus

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Teresa Valerio Parrot

Hello and welcome to the Trusted Voices Podcast. I’m Teresa Valerio Parrot alongside Erin Hennessy, and in each episode, we discuss the latest news and biggest issues facing higher education leaders through a communications lens. For these conversations, we’re often joined by a guest who shares their own experiences and perspectives, but we also make time for one-on-one conversations about what we’re seeing, hearing and thinking.

Trusted Voices is produced by Volt, the go-to news source for higher education leaders and decision-makers. Remember to visit Volt at voltedu.com and subscribe to Trusted Voices on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts, to make sure you never miss an episode.

Erin Hennessy

Ah! It’s season four! I just shouted in everybody’s ears.

Teresa Valerio Parrot

Season four, that’s a hell of a way to start the new season.

Erin Hennessy

Sorry.

Teresa Valerio Parrot

You start me shouting, start with a colorful language. Hi everybody, welcome to season four.

Erin Hennessy

Welcome to season four. We’re super excited that Taylor Swift is here to reveal the cover art for her 12th studio album.

Teresa Valerio Parrot

It seems like that’s the perfect way to kick off the season, as well as talking about higher education.

Erin Hennessy

Yes, Merry Taylor Swift-mas Eve to all who celebrate.

Teresa Valerio Parrot

And also I’m hearing everywhere I go, everybody is so excited that their kids are going back to school. So I don’t know what happened to everybody’s summer and what happened within their families, but if you have children going back and you are celebrating, congratulations to you.

Erin Hennessy

Yes, decidedly. It’s so funny to think about people going back to school, because we’re still a good three weeks out here on the East Coast.

Teresa Valerio Parrot

Oh, school started for some of our schools yesterday and for others start tomorrow. So we are right in the thick of it. And you still have summer vacation, but I’ve already had summer vacation.

Erin Hennessy 

Yes, I have four sleeps. Four sleeps.

Teresa Valerio Parrot 

Yeah, until you go. I feel like our choices of summer vacations perfectly exemplify the two of us. So do you want to tell everybody where you’re going?

Erin Hennessy 

Yes, and for those who might see a video snippet, I’m wearing my favorite Stone Harbor t-shirt today because starting when you are listening to this, most likely I will be in my beloved Stone Harbor on the Jersey Shore. I will be hopefully elbows deep in my tote bag full of books and not thinking about higher ed for two whole weeks.

Teresa Valerio Parrot 

Yes, and this summer I went to Italy and was a tourist for a week and then spent a week hiking the Dolomites, doing some really serious hiking and some serious elevation gains this summer. So I feel like each of our summers and our vacations represented us very well. I wore my Fight for Higher Ed t-shirts, as I’m wearing right now, almost every day of those hikes.

Had many layers on over those, but my husband was laughing that I had so many different options for my Fight for Higher Ed t-shirts, and I represented those for the Italians to see that I still was fighting the good cause in the Dolomites. So there you go.

Erin Hennessy 

Where else but in the Dolomites would you hope to encounter someone over whom you could fight for higher ed?

Teresa Valerio Parrot 

It was quite the conversation piece as we were sitting in the refugios having hot chocolate as I was peeling off my layers because I was resting. People were very curious about my t-shirts. So you are correct, Erin. It was quite the conversation piece.

Erin Hennessy 

See? Ground zero for the fight for higher ed.

Teresa Valerio Parrot 

Absolutely. So please join me in the fight.

Erin Hennessy

Yes. So we, now that we’ve completed our, did I do on summer vacation essays…

Teresa Valerio Parrot 

Yes.

Erin Hennessy

We are back with season four. We’re super excited about it. Can’t believe people still listen to us, but…

Teresa Valerio Parrot 

And we got good feedback this summer. People really enjoyed this past season and we are so thankful that everybody joined us.

Erin Hennessy

Yes, and we have, I think, some really exciting guests coming up this season. We’re going to stick with our format of alternating back and forth mostly with guests and one-on-one episodes. The other thing, we don’t do resolutions…

Teresa Valerio Parrot 

No, we don’t.

Erin Hennessy

…as we have discussed, but the other thing that we have talked about and want to make sure that we hold ourselves accountable around is while we’re going to…

Teresa Valerio Parrot 

A promise? Is it a promise?

Erin Hennessy

An intention, our intention.

Teresa Valerio Parrot

An accountability measure. How’s that an accountability measure?

Erin Hennessy

Yes. It sounds a little aggressive.

Teresa Valerio Parrot

But that’s very me. Keep going.

Erin Hennessy

We’re going to have to talk about, politics and the federal administration. Cause that’s very important and getting closer and closer to how we do what we do all day, every day. But we are going to make room for conversations that do not focus on, current events or current challenges or what one of our guests last season called the shit show. So we’re going to do a little bit of both. So when we’re not talking about the administration, know that we know things are going on. But we also think there are a lot of other important topics to cover in addition to what the federal government has up its sleeve at any given moment.

Teresa Valerio Parrot 

And that’s really something that we’re focusing on as a team as well, because we could spend all of our time talking about what’s going on in Washington, D.C. and how that’s trickling down. And it means that we’re not getting to the work. And so I was just talking to a group this summer and I was saying, this is now business as usual, and this is now what we need to be focusing on and we need to still get our jobs done. So let’s get back to the work.

And let’s remember what all of the other bullet points are in our job descriptions. And this is perhaps one of the bullets. And I used to have a boss who used to talk about this and say, if you only focus on one bullet and you absolutely smash that bullet in your job description and you don’t focus on the others, you’re only doing 10% of your job and you fail. So let’s make sure that we’re doing the totality of the work. And that includes on this podcast.

Erin Hennessy

Yes. And now, to make a liar out of me and both of us, let’s talk about some stuff that’s happening out in the world. Again, this is sort of as has become our tradition, our first episode of the almost said semester, first episode of the season is when we’re sort of looking ahead, things that we’ve been thinking about over the summer and trying to pull up a little bit to maybe 20,000 feet, if not 30. So I’m going to start off with something that is going to sound like it’s super gossipy. And I definitely read it the first time for all of the gossipy parts of it. But there was a big article that dropped in the Atlantic this week called The Elite University Presidents Who Despise Each Other. If you could get any closer to higher ed click bait, my friends.

Teresa Valerio Parrot 

If you could get any closer to Higher Education Junior High.

Erin Hennessy 

Yes, in many ways. But, what I think is really important about this piece, and it appears sort of toward the bottom of it, is this piece sort of talks about a conversation that happened at a meeting of the Association of American Universities, which are the top 71 research institutions in the country and Canada. And it really puts a spotlight on the conflict within higher education, which I think is going to get bigger this year and is going to try and force institutions to pick sides more as we go through the coming academic year. But it’s sort of balancing the resistance, quote unquote, led by institutions like Princeton and Wesleyan versus the reformists, which the article’s author says is led by or represented by institutions like Vanderbilt and Washington University in St. Louis. And which one is going to sort of win out? Ted Mitchell from the American Council on Education had a great quote where he said, they’re both right. But the resistance this article indicates seems to think that once Trump is no longer in office, higher ed is going to be in a better place. That this is a very particular time bound set of circumstances that will cease to exist on January 20th in just a couple of years. And we just need to sit tight and fight back. And the reformists are saying these issues in higher education were present before Trump was elected the first time. And unless higher education takes seriously the valid critiques and moves to address those, we’re gonna continue to see trust in higher education plummeting, perception of our values, our value rather, and plummeting perception of whether or not college is a good thing for people, the country, society as a whole. So it’s a really interesting article. I give Rick Seltzer credit for putting it in front of my eyes yesterday. Teresa, know you read it.

What were you thinking?

Teresa Valerio Parrot 

So Rick also shared it with me and I also got it from a couple of other reporters and colleagues. I think I’m going to go back a couple of clicks as well. The session that this article comes from was a presidents-only session. So one of the things that I want to note is that there is a betrayal of trust among presidents that this landed in the lap of a reporter. I just want to make sure that we’re talking about that. So not only do we have at least two opinions of the future of higher education, we have a lack of trust among leaders of what used to be a safe space to have these kind of conversations. And the article talks about the fact that there was a panel where leaders kind of started to take on each other in what used to be a space that that was allowed, right? You could have differences of opinion and then this space where that could happen was shared elsewhere. I’m going to start there because I think that is a bigger conversation for us to have because it’s not just that we have two opinions about the future of higher education. We also have a new set of standards and of ways in which we participate with each other, in addition to how we think about the industry. I’m actually more worried about the former than the latter. Because if we aren’t even on the same page about how we can operate as colleagues, then I’m that much more concerned about how we’re going to work together as we try to muddle through these two different approaches. And…   

Erin Hennessy

Yes, well it used to be, sorry, go ahead.

Teresa Valerio Parrot

Well and I think it’s fascinating, Ted Mitchell, who we had on the podcast, and I’m so grateful that he joined us, talked about the muddy middle of institutions in higher education. And I was kind of struck by that because that we’re going to start separating out different types and spheres of institutions also feels like we’re starting to create haves and have nots. And that makes me very nervous at a time when I think, and I know I’m an optimist and many times a Pollyanna, when I think we should be coming together. So, all of the different stratifications that we’re talking about and a time and a place where we can’t trust each other makes me that much more nervous for the next three and a half years because we’re only six months into this administration.

Erin Hennessy

Yeah, it used to be the golden rule in higher education that you never publicly criticized colleague institutions, colleague leaders.

Teresa Valerio Parrot

Correct. I still abide by that rule as much as I can.

Erin Hennessy

And I am really surprised that Ted Mitchell commented for that piece because I…

Teresa Valerio Parrot

I’m surprised it got leaked and I’m surprised that there was a comment, both.

Erin Hennessy

Yeah, because there have always been haves and have nots in the higher ed and for the association community at least. It used to be that we would be very, very careful to make sure that we were representing both the haves and the have nots and making sure that the association community could serve as a point of convening and of collegiality and this just felt very, very different. I’m not, I don’t think anyone would accuse me of being a Pollyanna, but I’m not surprised these kinds of schisms happen. It’s the fact that they are public and that they are being leaked. It just feels so different from five years ago or 10 years ago.

Teresa Valerio Parrot

We are not only as an industry showing our slip, to use a phrase that my grandmother would have used, but we are also as individual leaders showing our fear. And both of those tell others that we’re vulnerable. And I’m sorry, but this is a time where as an industry, we need to come together and be strong, or we will continue to be picked off, which means that this pedagogical disagreement about what is the future of higher education is just going to be nothing more than navel gazing and more institutions will be picked off.

Erin Hennessy

So we’re starting with a real bang. Welcome back.

Teresa Valerio Parrot

There we go. Yeah. Yeah. I’m ready to go back to the Dolomites and sing the Hills Are Alive and, and run through fields while my husband films me. And you can hear him laughing hysterically in the background.

Erin Hennessy

Sure. Yeah, okay.

Teresa Valerio Parrot

I’m ready. Duolingo is helping me learn Italian, just so that you all know, friend me on Duolingo and let’s both learn new languages.

Erin Hennessy

Okay. Let’s hop around a little bit here. Let’s hop to one little small glimmer of potentially good news that your hosts, Teresa and Erin will tear apart and help you realize it’s actually terrible news. While we were on break in July, our good friends at Gallup, released some new data. Headline is The U.S. Public Trust in Higher Education Rises From Recent Low. Top lines, obviously there’s a lot of data here to dig into, but Americans’ confidence in higher education has increased with 42% saying they have a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in it, up from 36% in each of the last two years.

At the same time, the share of those with little or no confidence has declined from 32% a year ago to 23% today. This represents the first time Gallup has measured an increase in confidence in its decade-long trend. Confidence in higher education remains well below where it was in the initial Gallup measure in 2015, when a majority of 57% were confident.

Go ahead, Teresa, make ‘em cry.

Teresa Valerio Parrot

Well, so I read the data and I was like, well, I mean, at least they don’t hate us as much. And then I went to LinkedIn and I was surprised by people, some of whom are data wonks who were saying the drought is over and we’re all saved and everything is peachy. And I was like, wait a minute, I’m the Pollyanna and I am the one who is going to point out that you need more than one data point before you have a trend everybody. What the actual are we talking about here? This is a sign.

Erin Hennessy

Maybe.

Teresa Valerio Parrot

But also I think at some point people are kind of feeling sorry for us and they feel like we’ve had the snot kicked out of us for so long that at the very least the data shows that there’s a mercy rule here. And that’s how I really took it is that at the very, very least let’s see what next year’s data says and let’s dig into this a little bit deeper because I kind of feel like – I live in Colorado – we’re like the Colorado Rockies right now. And everybody is just calling the mercy rule and wants us just to get some rest. And then they’re going to tell us what they really think about us. But I didn’t see this necessarily at this point as our comeback, right? Don’t call it a comeback. Thank you, LL Cool J. I think instead, let’s get more data. Let’s get more information.

What does the Harris poll say? What do other polls say? Let’s dig into this and ask some further questions. But before we all get a little too comfortable thinking that everybody loves us, let’s make sure we understand why they didn’t have trust and let’s make sure that we’re fixing that before we think that we’re back to being beloved.

Erin Hennessy

Yeah, we didn’t fix it, friends.

Teresa Valerio Parrot

We didn’t fix it.

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Erin Hennessy

I do think, you know, if I could flash forward five to 10 years from now, I will be very interested to look back and see exactly to your point. I think people have been kicking us for a long time as an industry. In many ways, rightly, in some ways gratuitously. And, you know, we all went through this experience early in the summer where all of a sudden Harvard was the hero and everybody was sort of stunned to be rooting for Harvard, but it’s easy to kick an organization, an entity, a person when they’re down. And then when they’re suddenly in actual real peril to say, oh, well, you’re not, you’re not that bad. Um, so I agree with you.

Teresa Valerio Parrot

Right.

Erin Hennessy

So, I agree with you. Ron Ross who taught me stats in college. I got an A only because I took it over Jan term, would say to you, this this is a moment in time. This is a snapshot of one moment of time in how you know of how 1400 US adults felt in June and who knows once, you know, the Columbia settlement has hit. It sounds like the Harvard settlement is imminent.

Even though the court actions are still ongoing, there are a lot of other settlements that sound like they’re imminent and I don’t know if that’s accurate or not. We’ll see what happens with this number. We’ll see if some institution bungles their negotiation with the administration and things take a turn. There’s no way to know where we are for sure until we have a couple of years worth of data from any poll.

Teresa Valerio Parrot

Exactly. it’s collective information that gives us a better sense of where we stand.

Erin Hennessy

Yes, but also let’s not just lean on the polling. We need to be talking to lawmakers. We need to be talking to business. We need to be talking to students and families because that’s where you’re going to get the real information that’s directly relevant to your campus.

Teresa Valerio Parrot

And where we were talking in May, which would have influenced a June poll. In May, our final episode, we were discussing how institutions were shifting the ways in which they talked about what they do. They were really talking about impact reporting. What is the impact they have on the daily lives of individuals? They were no longer just talking about activity and what they wanted to push at people.

And that means that we might be seeing how some of that was starting to resonate. Maybe. But really, impact reporting takes a long time to really resonate with people. We were starting to see the shift in approach. And if we really think that there’s going to be resonation, it’s going to take longer than a month.

Erin Hennessy

Yes, yes. And we have no idea what the fall semester holds for us and the spring semester. And so those kinds of headlines, things that come out of what happens on our campuses this fall and spring will also continue to inform public perception. And we need to be smart about how we’re handling what could be another challenging academic year.

Teresa Valerio Parrot

Yes.

Erin Hennessy

Speaking of, I’m going all over the place here. I try, I was going to try and segue.

Teresa Valerio Parrot

Thank you for leading us, yes.

Erin Hennessy

I was…I…four days out from vacation. You can talk me into doing absolutely anything if it gets me one day closer to vacation. One of the other things that I wanted to highlight for folks, and again, this is flies in the face of our, intention not to spend…

Teresa Valerio Parrot

We’re just catching up from the summer.

Erin Hennessy

Yeah. Recently, the President issued an executive order that requires colleges and universities to be more transparent about admissions data, particularly around academic qualifications and race. So in response to that executive order, the Secretary of Education directed the National Center for Education Statistics to collect quote, “universities’ data on race discrimination in admissions.” And I just wanna read this little bit. “As part of their regular data reporting process, institutions of higher education will now have to report data disaggregated by race and sex relating to their applicant pool, admitted cohort and enrolled cohort at the undergraduate level and for specific graduate and professional programs. This data will include quantitative measures of applicants and admitted students’ academic achievements, such as standardized test scores, GPAs, and other applicant characteristics. And the Secretary has also directed NCES to develop a rigorous audit process to ensure the data being collected is accurate and reported consistently across institutions.”

Teresa Valerio Parrot

So I flagged that same sentence.

Erin Hennessy

I’m going to just lean real close to the microphone and say, nobody works at NCES anymore.

Teresa Valerio Parrot

So that’s why I flagged it, because if they have been directed to develop a rigorous audit process, that means that they’re going to have to have somebody do it for them, right? Somebody is going to have to be contracted to do this. Hmm, what do we all think that means? So, please, to our producers, keep all of my size in while Erin was reading that language. Because the reality is most of this data has already been collected. Y’all have this. It’s part of the common data sets, but the common data sets haven’t been encouraged for the past few months. So this data exists.

The difference is now there’s nobody there – because y’all laid them off –to actually do anything with it. So help me understand and balance what your goals really are. Because you could have actually not just developed a rigorous audit process, but used the audit process that you already had. Because the data was being collected, it was accurate because people had to sign off on this and it was being reported consistently across institutions. I’m unclear what we’re trying to accomplish now, besides something that is performative.

Erin Hennessy

Right. Well, and it sort of goes back to the conversation when these cuts at department of ed and other agencies were initially announced. It’s simply breaking it with no regard for how the system actually works and could be shifted to pursue the president’s policy goals. They just wanted to fire people.

Teresa Valerio Parrot

This would be a perfect item for someone to email to DOGE to look into because now the development of a rigorous audit process is going to be expensive. This would be waste. This would be the swamp.

Erin Hennessy

And it would not be quick.

Teresa Valerio Parrot

No.

Erin Hennessy

…putting together that system

Teresa Valerio Parrot

Again, it exists. We don’t need to develop anything, y’all. It exists. Bring the people back.

Erin Hennessy

Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yep. Okay. All right.

Teresa Valerio Parrot

I always say, and you know this, whenever there is a review, whenever there is a new process, ask what the charge to that group is because you’re going to very quickly understand what they actually want to get out of the process. And we now understand.

Erin Hennessy

Mm hmm. Yes. And this brings us back to questions that we had last season, which still haven’t been answered in terms of what is going to happen with all kinds of data that was previously collected by NCES to feed the iPads machine and feed College Navigator and feed a lot of other tools that our students and parents are using on some level to assess the institutions they are considering enrolling in. And it’s going to take decades to get back to where we were.

Teresa Valerio Parrot

Well, I’m about to ask or suggest something that I know nobody’s going to follow up on. But if we truly are talking about disaggregating data specific to diversity, this would be an ideal time for us truly to do that. There are many groups that have been suggesting for years that we disaggregate this monolithic group that we call Hispanics, that we disaggregate this monolithic group that we call Asians. That we disaggregate this monolithic group that we call Black, Blacks. If we were to do that, then we would really start to understand who is and isn’t an underrepresented group in higher education. And there are a number of academics who say we really need to be thinking about diversity in very different ways. So yeah, Yeah, let’s go ahead and do that, Department of Education. Let’s look at these numbers in very different ways. Let’s look at the data. Let’s disaggregate in ways that academics have been encouraging for years. Let’s look at some of these numbers to see what we really have. I think there are a number of people who would support that.

Erin Hennessy

And do give us a call when that’s ready. We’ll be right here. It’s trustedvoices@tvpcommunications.com. Okay, I’m gonna start to head us towards the exits, because…

Teresa Valerio Parrot

Because when I do go to Italy, I’d like to come back.

Erin Hennessy

That’s well, I mean, you could run a business from over there. One thing that we wanted to flag as just something for our colleagues on campus to be keeping an eye out. There’s an organization called Indivisible, which is a progressive activist organization. Spent a lot of time the last six months organizing protests against Tesla dealerships and they have voter registration pushes and all kinds of stuff.

But something that they are doing caught my eye the other day because they are now targeting, asking students to help them target, elite institutions that are quote “caving to Trump’s authoritarian demands” end quote. And there is a link in the show notes that takes you to the landing page for this campaign, talks about Columbia settlement, Penn, Harvard, Brown.

And really, I thought this was interesting because it is shifting the focus from the administration to the institutions and encouraging, students, alumni, parents, grandparents, faculty members, or donors to reach out to universities there, the universities with which they’re affiliated to tell them, quote, “do not enter into any deal with the Trump administration. Don’t enforce policies that discriminate against trans students. Don’t turn over internal records for political purposes and do not silence student dissent under the guise of neutrality.” There is a template email, a call script. So I don’t know how much energy this will attract and how many phone calls and emails this will drive. But I did think it was interesting to see that this shift is happening where now universities are to our earlier conversation, maybe not necessarily just the victim, they are now being targeted as complicit in the Trump administration’s attacks on higher ed. And that’s going to be an interesting thing to consider as we have students back on campus and we’re looking at potential protests, sit-ins, teach-ins and other kind of coordinated activity.

Teresa Valerio Parrot

And I think this goes back to if you work on one of these campuses and you work either you’re a leader there or you work in marketing communications, you’re in the C-suite, whatever that might be, thinking about how this also positions you and how you will need to work through this. Because for so many of these institutions, they entered into some of these because they thought they were getting out of the crosshairs. They thought that this would move them towards being able to do their jobs. They thought maybe this would make them more agreeable to those on campus because they would no longer be under fire. And instead, they have moved to a place where they are even more vulnerable now with their own internal audiences. So think about what this means for you, what this might mean for your institution, psychologically what this means for you as a leader, if you are in one of these spaces. Because I think so many leaders thought, okay, I can take a deep breath now because this is over and it’s not over. This is the next stage. And for many of these institutions, as we saw, there’s a line in there that says, “and we can come back at any time” from the administration. So you’re really on a dual vulnerability space here, right? With the administration and with your own internal audiences. So this is really us saying, take a look around. See where you are, see where your institution is, and this is a perfect time for some planning. And if you’re not one of these institutions, there are 4,000 institutions that could be next. So do some planning, think about where you are with your audiences, think about where you are on many, many different fronts, because there but by the grace.

Erin Hennessy

Yeah

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Erin Hennessy

One of the challenges I think that sort of comes out of this, and you’re right, I think institutions thought if they achieved a settlement, that was going to be the end of the whole book. And as we’re seeing, it’s just the end of the chapter, but keeping in mind that these settlements and considering settlements is going to play differently with a variety of your internal audiences. And there will be some of them who will push you to do more. You know, as we talked about earlier, to stand up, to be part of the resistance. There are other audiences, perhaps older, more conservative, thinking about the donor audience in particular, who just want this to be over, get our names out of the paper. There’s a lot to try and navigate in working through how you communicate about one of these settlements, the potential for a settlement, investigations from the federal government. It’s going to be a really interesting academic year.

Teresa Valerio Parrot

Yes, I had a conversation with a reporter about this and she anticipated that researchers at Columbia were going to be thrilled about the settlement. And I said, maybe, maybe not. And she said, why? And I said, because there is a shared governance component, should have been a shared governance component here that I’m not sure was lived. And if it wasn’t lived, that really creates distrust between the administration and the faculty. And if it wasn’t lived, that’s a hell of a way to start the academic year. So maybe they were excited to have those research dollars reinstated, but with the potential for the administration to be able to come back and with if shared governance wasn’t lived without that shared governance trust, you really are starting off the academic year saying, let’s go ahead and not trust each other as we go into this academic year. That’s tough.

Erin Hennessy

And let’s, yeah. And let’s also think about where these settlement dollars are coming from when you’re paying 200 million to get 500 million. Not a math major, but, that $200 million needs to come from somewhere. You aren’t waiting for the 500 million to come in and then writing a checkout of that. So where are these dollars coming from? And how are you communicating your values as an institution when you decide where to take those settlement dollars from?

Teresa Valerio Parrot

Right, and if and were, and it sounds like there’s now negotiation or at least the want of negotiation by the administration for the first public with UCLA. As a public, that value and values conversation is entirely different. And that really shifts some of the language and some of the approach.

Erin Hennessy

Yes.

Teresa Valerio Parrot

Woof.

Erin Hennessy

Woof.

So buckle up kids. It’s gonna be an interesting one.

Teresa Valerio Parrot

Yes. So please know we are going to do our best not to just make this a conversation about the administration because we know you have other bullets in your job description and so do we. Having said that, please send us your ideas, send us your thoughts, give us feedback. And Erin, have a fantastic time at the beach.

Erin Hennessy

Thank you. And, Teresa?

Teresa Valerio Parrot

Yes?

Erin Hennessy

Don’t call me.

Teresa Valerio Parrot

I promise. I’m gonna go for a hike.

Erin Hennessy

Excellent. Welcome back to season four, friends. We’re excited to talk with you, and thanks, as always, for tuning in.

Teresa Valerio Parrot

Thank you. Bye bye

Erin Hennessy

Bye.

Teresa Valerio Parrot

Bye bye.

Thank you for joining us for this episode. You can find links in the show notes to the topics and articles referenced as well as a copy of the show’s transcript on the Volt website, voltedu.com. Remember that you can always contact us with feedback, questions or guest suggestions at trustedvoices@tvpcommunications.com. 

Follow Trusted Voices wherever you get your podcasts and be sure to check out Higher Voltage and Campus Docket, the other podcasts on the Volt network. Until next time, thanks to Erin Hennessy, DJ Hauschild, and the Volt team – including Aaron and Maryna – for a great episode, and thank you for listening.