Our interview last week with President Gould was not exactly what we expected it to be. We assumed that she would already have well-prepared, written down answers and that she wouldn’t answer any questions other than those we had sent her earlier. At first, before we met with her, her secretary wanted to make sure we didn’t have any extra questions, but when we sat down with her, she was very open and seemed happy to answer and address additional questions that we had that were not sent to her before. Also, when we came in, she said that she only glanced at the questions that we sent her several minutes prior to our arrival, and she didn’t have prepared answers or any notes written down. In the beginning, she told us that she will be completely open when she answers the questions, and she wants to make sure that nothing she says will appear on social media or the school newspaper. The interview lasted for more than an hour and a half.
What I particularly liked about the interview was that President Gould was addressing the specific issues that we had talked about throughout the semester in class. Rather than merely answering our questions in a simple manner, only addressing exactly what was in the question, she went into great detail when answering our questions, and after answering our questions she would often go on tangents talking about other things in higher education that she felt were important. She talked about how being in the NCAA division III has made her job a lot easier because she has been in universities that are in NCAA division I and that she has seen all the corruption that goes on with the college coaches and the people high up in the university that inflate grades of student athletes and put classes on their transcript that they don’t take in order to cover up their failing grades. This way the student athletes can help the university team win and the university will get more money from different contracts with broadcasters, athletic companies, etc. In Division III, President Gould said, none of this happens and sports are played “for the right reasons”. This is exactly what we had talked about during one of our classes this semster.
In addition to this, President Gould kept on emphasizing the importance of innovation and change in higher education. She gave an example of how some professors “don’t know what to do” because students aren’t very interested in French anymore and prefer to take other foreign languages such as Spanish or Arabic. She says that the wrong response is to try to get more people in the French class, rather, they needed to add more Spanish and Arabic classes. If more students want to learn languages that would be helpful to them and more relevant to them after they leave college, then the college should change and cater to the needs/wants of the students and not insist that since this is the way its been done for so many years we might as well continue. President Gould also talked about the importance of MOOCs and online courses and that colleges must realize that a lot of students that aren’t able to come to a physical campus would be able to get their degree from these online courses. She said that the majority of Brooklyn College students are not the traditional freshmen that attend school for four years; there are transfer students, there are students balancing work with school including students with families that they need to support at the same time, and the college needs to break away from its traditional ways and change and innovate in order to fit the needs of these students as well.
A lot of what President Gould spoke about were issues that we talked about in class, and I realized that I really learned a lot from this class because if I were to have this interview before the semester started, I wouldn’t have understood anything that would have been talked about.
