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- [00:11]
A
Join Willie Walker, Walker and Dunlop's Chairman and CEO as we bring you fresh perspectives about leadership, business, the economy and commercial real estate. Willie hosts a diverse network of leaders as they share wisdom that cuts across industry lines. His guests are experts in their fields, from leading economists and CEOs to Harvard and Yale professors and everything in between. Our one goal is simple, providing you with unique insights, unparalleled data and real time market analyses.
- [00:44]
B
Welcome to another Walker webcast. It is my great pleasure to have my friend and the President of the smu, Southern Methodist University, Jay Hartzell, join me today day. I have to give some disclosure here in that my youngest son, Wyatt happens to be a freshman at SMU and as a result of that, I am wearing my my pony on my chest today, Jay and it's just a real pleasure to have you join me.
- [01:14]
C
Thank you and I appreciate it and it's an honor to be with you and, and to see you again. And I love the shirt.
- [01:20]
B
The, the shirt is a great one. Let me do a quick not that you need an introduction, Jay, but let me just run through a couple things from your bio that will give people some context to the questions that I want to dive into as it relates to higher education. Sort of your vision for what you're going to do at SMU and also, you know, some of the huge impact you've had on higher education and the University of Texas in your tenure there, both as the Dean of the McCombs Business School as well as president of the University of Texas. So Jay Hartzell is an American economist currently serving as the 11th president of Southern Methodist University. He was previously the 30th president of the University of Texas at Austin, holding office from 2020 to 2025. Dr. Hartzell graduated from Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas and received his doctorate in finance from UT Austin. He was a tenure track assistant professor of finance at New York University's Stern School of Business before returning to UT Austin as a faculty member in the McComb School. He was named dean of Macomb School in 2016 and became the 30th president of the University of Texas in 2020. He assumed his current role as the 11th president of SMU on June 1st of this year. You grew up in Kansas, Jay. Your dad was a. Well, you were born in Kansas. You grew up in Oklahoma. Your dad was a sports writer. Take us back to Jay Hartzell, 16 years old. Something tells me that the design of Jay's life was not to be the president of either the University of Texas Or Southern Methodist University. What'd you want to be when you were 16?
- [03:01]
C
Yeah, that's a great question. I think at 16 I wanted to be cooler, like. So I, my dad, the sports writer, passed away when I was 11. Mom married a Methodist minister who's actually a, a graduate vesting me from the Perkins School of Theology, which now I have cred with my stepdad that I never really was that, that relevant before, but. So I became a preacher's kid at age 13 or so and at age 16 he had been sent to Oklahoma City. I was there in a, in high school and really was trying to find my way. I was, School was, was fine. It came fairly naturally for me. I liked math and science. It was probably the beginning of people telling me I should be an engineer, but I didn't know what that meant and, but I had no idea what I, what I wanted to do. I, I was just trying to fit in in high school and figure out I had a job sacking groceries, bought my first car on credit with a cosign loan from my parents because they didn't have much money. And so it was like day to day, like, oh, I'd like to figure out how to get more girls to go out on dates and that kind of thing.
- [04:10]
B
So you go to Trinity. What made you, when you got out of Trinity, say, I want to keep studying, I want to go get my PhD, rather than saying I'm bounding off.
- [04:19]
C
Into the job world. Yeah, it was really my plan by that time. I think my kind of nutshell plan was get a job, get an mba, get rich. And part of it I think was back to the kind of preacher's kid moment where we didn't have much money and it bothered me. And so I thought, you know, I'm going to go figure out a way to, to, to, to do better financially, to be honest. And took the first job out of Trinity to go to consulting firm in, in Houston and great firm. But I got bored and had this kind of crossroads moment where I called back a Trinity professor who I had had in class and said, I'm at this job. I'm, I'm. I don't feel like I'm challenged at the moment. And I was thinking about an mba. What do you think? And he said, you should get a PhD and it fits you. And I'd worked with him as an undergrad for a couple years and he said, I'll write your letter to Texas. I know the professor, the woman who's running the PhD program. I'll write her a letter. You can pick three or four other schools to apply to. And so I took him up on it and applied to PhD programs instead of an MBA program. And this professor Laura Starks at Texas took a chance. I, I had not taken the classes I should have taken to get a Ph.D. in finance. I, I was never the part of the plan until that moment. And so I'm so grateful, you know, professor who gave me advice and with the letter professor who admitted me, she became my advisor and was what led to the job at nyu. So it's these doors that have opened up from that relationship with a professor and a student to. Those were two really important relationships for me.
- [05:56]
B
You wrote your thesis on the impact of the likelihood of turnover on executive compensation. I was sitting there when I read that Jay, I said to myself, man, I'm glad I'm not. The board member at SMU had to negotiate Jay's pay package.
- [06:12]
C
I'm not a good poker player, Willie. I tell you that. I probably just laid out my cards and said I'd love to take the job and something like that. But yeah, the idea behind the thesis was not very hard. It was if somebody's hard to fire, you should use more incentives. And it was a hundred page version of that. But wrote down a theory about it and then tested it. But that was the idea that if you have a weak stick, you need a big carrot.
- [06:39]
B
How'd you go from being getting a PhD in finance to melding that together with your focus on real estate? What was it that brought you to the real estate world? Because obviously, first of all, Walker nellops in the real estate finance world and lots and lots of people who are listening to this. But it is quite something to have somebody in your position whose background and work has really been very specifically in the world that we live in every day.
- [07:04]
C
Yeah, thank you for that. And it hit me when the announcement or advertisement for today came out and I started getting my real estate friends pinging me saying, I can't believe you're doing the Walker webcast. How cool. So it was, it was neat to have that kind of full circle moment. But while I was in the PhD program, I sat across the hall from another PhD student who was working in real estate. And he said kind of taught me into thinking about it. And in part, UT at the time Texas was better at real estate than a lot of kind of. I would consider straight normal finance. We had some good faculty there. That was part of it. I liked its tangibility. The fact that you can kind of see it in the world. It had enough of the kind of pure finance and economics questions about it. I find cities fascinating. So all that kind of led me to write papers in real estate plus regular companies too. And then when I got to nyu, they were happy that I did a little bit of both. So was Texas when they hired me back. And then kind of the pivot point was when I got tenure, UT asked me to take over our real estate center. So I did that. It was kind of my first real opportunity to have an administrative job like that. And it, it was another kind of those kind of career defining moments where that, that really influenced. Helped me learn what I love to do and open up a lot of doors for me.
- [08:23]
B
I'm, I'm going to be down in Austin next week speaking at your old real estate center and at McCombs next, next Wednesday night, which I'm very much looking forward to actually a week from today. What was it, Jay, do you think that, I mean it's, it's very evident given your career, both NYU and to UT and UT to smu, that people saw something in use. People saw, if you will, and this is in no way when say more than just a professor to denigrate anyone who's just a professor because thank thankfully they are professors and they are brilliant in what they do. But there was something in you that people saw that said, hey, he's got some leadership capabilities, he's got some vision. When, when, when did that become evident? Given that you just become a tenured professor at UT and all of a sudden they're saying, hey, will you run the real estate program?
- [09:13]
C
Yeah, I don't. I am part of it, I think. And the part I've had some self reflective moments around is that I had different crossroads where you're thinking about do I take this job or not? And that kind of thing. And the real estate center was the first of those. And you start to say things like, well, what am I relatively better at as a. I'm a professor that other professors, what's their relative skill set look like compared to mine? And vice versa. And I realize I like people probably more than the average professor. You know, most of us love to teach. That's a part of what draws us into the profession. But relatively speaking, I think I'm extroverted. So I, I kind of had this running joke. If you're an extroverted nerd, you become a dean. And so I, I think it was that kind of. I enjoy the people side of it. I really got joy out of making things happen for our students and you know, I, I could keep writing papers and I, I, I was okay at that.
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B
I was pretty good at it.
- [10:13]
C
But I found, I thought more impact, more joy, more satisfaction out of here's a new opportunity for students at scale. And, and so one of the examples you'll see when you go to Texas, we, we started the country's to my knowledge first fund where students could co invest directly in private deals. And, and that was a blast. And then you end up where students are able to go out and, and actually underwrite and present to an investment committee of people like you, not like me and that it was really cool. So if you see enough of that, there's probably a self fulfilling thing. I got joy out of it. I thought it was great work. And I guess, you know, you get a couple wins on the board and people say he's somebody who could make that happen somehow. And, and so it, it escalates from there.
- [11:00]
B
You have the same type program going on at Folsom at smu. And when I was down and, and obviously Joseph Cahoon has done a fantastic job at the Folsom School at smu. When I was down in Dallas to speak at SMU and went and visited with clients, two of them mentioned the investment fund. The investment fund was funding, it was investing in deals with them. And these are very, very sophisticated, both multifamily owner operators in the Dallas area. And it was just neat to hear how much they enjoyed the engagement with the students and that you know, it, the capital the school has raised behind that fund is real capital. I mean it's not like it's okay, great, let's go back and do it again and look at the videotape. It's, it's real money that's going into real deals.
- [11:41]
C
No, that's right. And I shout out to Joseph, so Joseph Gunn, who runs the Folsom center here, he was in my class way back when n school at Texas. We did the real estate center together at UT for about five years and then he got the chance to run it at SMU and has done a phenomenal job. And so when I, when I think about the strengths of the place, the real estate program and the Folsom Institute's a big part of that. And so that you're right and you know, we want to produce the students that are ready to be part of your organizations in a positive, productive way, fit in on a team, have great social skills, analytical skills, all of it and things like that fund are really great opportunities and tools to make that happen.
- [12:18]
B
So you're running McCombs as the Dean of McCombs, and in 2020, you get the sort of, if you will, call up to be the president of the University of Texas. Something tells me that that wasn't exactly kind of a whiteboard strategy that you and Kara had, like, sat down and said, this is. This is the end goal here. How did. How did it end up being that you became president of the University of Texas?
- [12:40]
C
Yeah, it's a great question. I. I think the closest analog is the show Designated Survivor, where there's, like, a HUD secretary in the basement. Everybody gets blown up, you know, So I was at ut, happy to be a dean, and never applied for a provost job, which is, you know, the kind of in between the deans and the president or president job. And really candidly thought I would do a couple of terms as dean if things went well, and go back to faculty and teach them play golf or whatever. And so that was the plan. And then all of a sudden, on a Saturday, the president texts me or calls me, and it was unusual to get that call on a Saturday. And I think the provost had left, and she's now the president of Yale. She went to pre president Stony Brook and then on now at Yale. And so I thought it was about the provost job. Who do I recommend? Would I be interested in that kind of thing? And so I was getting my mind around how do I respond to questions about the provost job? And he said, well, I'm announcing I'm leaving on Tuesday to go be president Emory, and you may get a call later today to be interim president of ut, and who knows what'll happen after that kind of thing. So I went downstairs, wide as a sheet, and my wife said, what's wrong? I said, I got to sit down. I think our lives are changing. And that was Saturday. It leaked on Monday night, announced on Tuesday. And it was just crazy. It was early Covid. So this is April 2020. We're working from home. All of a sudden, I'm going to be interim president of this massive university where I went to graduate school. And so it. It. Yeah. Talk about moments where you're like, whoa, that. That's not something I had. Had. Had seen coming. That was it.
- [14:14]
B
And then you're in the seat, and you, you know, you set a capital campaign. You started the. The what Starts Here campaign in 2022, I believe it was where you did the what Starts Here. You set out to raise 6 billion. And in December, right before you announced that you were moving to SMU, that capital campaign had raised $6.2 billion.
- [14:38]
C
Yeah, it was, it's, that was a lot of. Again, I think that stuff's fun. To me, it. So the kinds of impacts that that campaign had and will have for generations from, you know, new, new buildings, scholarships for students. My old colleague Crystal Conte would want me to say that I think a billion of that was athletics. So we'll get to that.
- [15:02]
B
We'll get to that in a second. But I find it to be really interesting, Jay, as I think about you and your new role at smu. Ut, the total UT system, as you know very well, but for people who are listening in, has an endowment of about $54 billion of that. From what I could read, UT Austin has about 30 to 35 billion dollars of the 54 billion in the UT system. But to think that you went and did a capital campaign to raise $6 billion and got to 6.2 right before you, after three years on it, the entire endowment of SMU is $2.4 billion. So I mean you raised in three years, 3x the endowment of SMU.
- [15:43]
C
Now the only, just clarifying in case one of my friends are watching. So, and you probably those of you who follow campaigns, there's a quiet phase that had been underway. So I can't claim three years for 6 billion. By the end, we were raising almost a billion a year. But, but everything else you said is right.
- [15:59]
B
It's, it's a massive look, it's, it's an enormous state school. It's got 600,000 alums. SMU has 125,000 alums. I'm not, I'm not trying to pre sell you to your board of directors that you're going to go out and raise $6 billion for SMU. But I, I do find it to be very interesting of having someone like you move from, if you will, a larger platform to a smaller platform, but have seeing what the scale of a larger platform can do. When I, when I came to Walker and Dunlop, I moved from running a company in Europe that had 3, 500 employees and a $250 million P&L to 46 employees and a $25 million P&L. And it's not that I showed up day one and said I know exactly what to do here, but having seen and operated on a larger scale, bringing a lot of those large scale tools and leadership skills to a smaller platform, I think allowed us to scale at A much more rapid pace. And I just sort of sit there and say, Jay's experience running such a scaled incredible university like UT and all that he did there and all of your accomplishments there, coming to SMU is just a wonderful setup for some pretty dramatic success.
- [17:09]
C
Oh, thank you. I mean, certainly, I hope so. And I think there's, I think the scale thing is part of it. The other thing that I talk about, I brought the provost with me. Her name is Rachel Mercy. And we've hired three new deans, or four new deans if you count an interim, plus an athletic director. And the other part, I would say back beyond scale, is knowing what great looks like. And I've been blessed to be at a place ut and I would say the same at NYU and finance. You get to see what you're aiming for. And SUV's got spots that are there, which is phenomenal. We're going to celebrate and grow those too. But we've got spots we're trying to raise. And having both understood kind of the complexity of a big organization and now having a team that has a sense of what we really want to create because we've been in those kinds of environments, I think is really helpful.
- [18:03]
B
I'm flying tomorrow to Charlottesville and I am going to their real estate conference on Friday to speak. And they'd asked me to come and keynote it, and my father went to uva and so I said to them, how about I do an interview with my dad? And they were like, wow, that'd be great. And one of the things we will split focus on on Friday, Jay, is that one of the great advantages I had, if you will, coming into a family company was that I didn't go straight from undergrad or business school to the family company. I went out and did a lot of other things. And going out and doing a lot of other things and working for firms like Morgan Stanley and TPG allowed me to have exactly the same thing that you have had, which is you get to see what it looks like and then you can build it. If I'd gone straight from business school to Walker and Dunlop, my world really would have been okay, well, this is what it looks like today. Maybe I can incrementally improve it to that sometime in the future. But having been at a firm like Morgan Stanley, for instance, it's like, wow, I, I really know what this could look like if I went and started.
- [19:01]
C
To actually build it out.
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B
And it's not as if Walker NOP's going to be Morgan Stanley. During my career, but a lot of the growth that we've been able to see and things we've invested in is because I had the opportunity to work in that kind of environment with those types of people and say, hey, let's start kind of tracking that down. And I, and I think your point about, you know, seeing what great looks like at UT and not that SMU wasn't great, but I think about the team you've brought on and also the, the business strategy, if you will, that you're going to bring to smu. And I want to talk about your competitive set and all that stuff in a minute, but I just find it to be extremely exciting. And I don't know of another university that has been able to attract somebody who had played at the level you played at at UT to come to a wonderful but smaller university and then be able to scale.
- [19:46]
C
Yeah, no, thank you. Thank you for that. And, and, you know, part of that, and you may want to go there, too, but part of that might be dynamics between, you know, big public, smaller private. I, I think, I think part of it also is, you know, if your career goes well and you're lucky, like, you know, and you've got obviously skill and luck, too, but you, you get to the spot where you make an impact, you want to make a difference, you want to make things change and, and happen and, and the ability to do that here with this platform, for all the positive reasons and its scale and kind of where it's been rising, but we have a chance to really accelerate that. That's a, that's a fun thing to get to do, a compelling thing to get to do. And I like in my, you know, UT to an aircraft carrier, it displaces a lot of water, but it's hard to turn and, and SME displaced with less water. That's true, but it's more turnable. And so it's, that's part of the joy of the job to me.
- [20:40]
B
Is there any, you know, you're going from a big research institution, medical center, and obviously the medical center is a huge piece of the budget, but, you know, you're going from a 4.4, $4.6 billion annual operating budget to a just a little bit under a billion dollar annual operating budget. I talked about the difference in the alumni base, the endowment differences. As you think about your day now, Jay, is it, is it, is it dramatically different from what it was at ut? Is there, is there something there that you now have time for that you didn't have time for at ut?
- [21:15]
C
Yeah, I think part of a couple things. One, I think part of it is the political stuff where, you know, my, the old job, I had days, I had sometimes, you know, sequences of days where you felt like you were playing defense against something and it was perception, political issues and all that, you know, again, all for a noble purpose, to protect the institution and its long run fortune. But it's. That feels for me personally, the way I'm wired, that feels disconnected from the academic mission. And here even stuff that feels like it's hard or thorny or is going to be tough, tough to work through, feels like it's front and center more directly with teaching and research and our students and those things. And so the days are more full of, I think, opportunities to see where you can make a difference on the academic side of the house, which I've been getting a lot of joy out of. There's all the other stuff too. I've got tons of people to meet. I don't know the players here, all that learning that's going on. But I think even when that settles down, more of my day will be spent on things that are kind of part of the core business, if you will.
- [22:27]
B
I know you, you're on a, on a walking tour. Tell me the most surprising conversation you've had on your walking tour. Whether, whether it was somebody in the food services group who said something to you, whether it's running into some alum who happened to be back to. To. To. To write a big check test. I mean, what's the most, what's the most interesting conversation you've had on your walking tour?
- [22:50]
C
I think maybe the most interesting because it was just out of the blue to me was so when I was leaving Texas, I got a gift of a coffee mug that had the SMU logo and says Guild Hall. And I had no idea what that was. I thought, okay, cool, thanks, coffee mug. And got here and realized we have maybe one of the top five video game design programs in the country. And so it's one of those, oh, wow, we do this, we do it really, really well. And to give you a sense of where we're going to head now, we're trying to take that and create an incredible program out of it for Undergraduates, we think 20 to 50 a year over time, at a truly bespoke honors level. But the point of that was more about, you know, you see these pockets of back to what's great. You have pockets of excellence that in fields that are just, you know, I don't know much about game design. And so to get in and learn about that is, is, is really fascinating. And then to figure out, okay, it's great in the graduate domain, how can we use this to attract more great undergraduates too?
- [23:54]
B
And when you, when you think about, I've heard you talk about a number of things on what you're trying to achieve for SMU students. First of all, you want to create one of the great urban private universities in America. And I've heard you underscore urban a number of times. Dallas is an exciting town. You've lived in San Antonio, you've lived in Houston, you've lived in Austin. Is, is, is, is Dallas too fancy for Jay and Kara?
- [24:24]
C
It is fancier, I'll tell you. I, I, I have been to more like buy a table of charity events in, in the last couple months and I went in years in Austin. I, I've been broken norms here by not wearing a tie and, and that I've had more people ask about, oh my gosh, you're not wearing a tie, then, then I can probably count. Dallas does seem fancy. The people have been very warm and kind. I think there's enough movement into Dallas from people from all over because it's, because it's booming that I think they're welcoming. It's not, not a place where if you're not a fourth generation person, you don't feel welcome. So that part's been, been wonderful and, and, but I, I don't think Austin's gotten way bigger and we talked about it a lot, but you get here and you see the breadth and depth of the business community, of the arts, of, of all of it and it's, it's really remarkable how, what's going on here.
- [25:18]
B
And so when I think about that though, when you think about the peer group that you want to be competing with and the, in the great urban universities with the underscoring of urban. So the competing, if you will, with, you know, schools in Washington, D.C. and in Nashville, Tennessee, not necessarily in Ithaca, New York or Ann Arbor, Michigan. I mean, is that, is that, is that fair? I mean, in, in the sense that there is something unique to those schools that are in urban cores that allow them to do things that a more rural setting doesn't attract.
- [25:56]
C
Yeah, I think so. I think if you look back at higher ed in the last 20 or 30 years, a lot of the most remarkable climbs, a sense of universities have been in cities. And so two examples that I think about in way better over decades are nyu, where I taught before for a little bit and usc. And I think a lot of that was being part of, connected to and being able to leverage New York and LA and their rise. I think that's going on with Vanderbilt. I think Daniel Diemeyer is a really smart guy and he's got a lot of great ideas, and Vanderbilt is able to take advantage of the fact that Nashville's booming. So I think that's part of it. I think today's young people want to go to school in a vibrant setting where they've had a chance to do this in the classroom and do this outside the classroom and even do this off campus that, you know, our students can take a class on Thursday and an internship on Friday at a real serious firm. And so that kind of thing is possible. In Dallas, it's easier to recruit faculty here. More and more professors have dual career concerns than 20 or 30 years ago, where it was typically a single sort of wage earner. So you've got to solve a dual career problem. Faculty, especially the kind of faculty we attract, typically want to engage with the city around them. If it's education faculty, they want to be around a big K12 system. If it's our arts faculty, they want to be around a dynamic art scene. So all that is just easier in a city. So I think that's kind of the why the cities are winning. I still want to eventually beat Cornell for talent. So it's not that I don't care about the competition. I just think being in Dallas is way more advantageous than being in Ithaca today.
- [27:40]
B
Does the cost of housing differential between Dallas and Ithaca cause an issue?
- [27:45]
C
It does, and it is a concern. Part of what I worry about is costs rise and if. If students, faculty or staff get dispersed to the fringes of a city, the commuting costs are high and time or money and do they come to campus the same way? So Dallas is affordable by all normalized metrics. But, you know, it's been. People have been pushed to the suburbs more because of the city's success. And so I think focusing on the student residential experience, I see us adding more student housing over time, both at the undergraduate and graduate level. For all those watching, we're thinking of doing that with partners because, you know, I'm getting used to a smaller balance sheet than I had at the old job. But I do think that kind of housing dynamic is part of what is special at a residential college experience place. And SMU certainly like that.
- [28:40]
B
I know it's very early days as it relates to recruiting new faculty and professors to smu. But if you look at where you're recruiting faculty from versus where you're competing for students with, is there a difference there?
- [28:59]
C
That's a great question. I think the main difference, there are probably a few more places that are exceptionally strong on a kind of student dynamic where their faculty might not be there yet. And I'm not saying this is a direct competitor, but give an example. Williams and Swarthmore and Amherst, incredible liberal arts colleges. But they wouldn't have the same kind of research heavy faculty that we're trying to build more of. And so we've got kind of the core and soul of a liberal arts university, but we've got these great professional schools around it. And so we end up sometimes competing with a smaller, more teaching oriented university which may not have a faculty member that we want to go after the same way. And then we'll also compete with a more research dominant university that may not have the student experience that we're creating.
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B
I've heard you talk about that, Jay, as it relates to this wonderful liberal arts college underneath the graduate schools and as it relates to AI and AI sort of disintermediating certain jobs. Last night at dinner I mentioned you before we came on live that I had a great dinner last night and one of the people at the table has a son who's a computer science major at Stanford right now. And if you, if you looked at what the job opportunities were for my friend's son four years ago when he was applying to Stanford to be a computer science major, it was sort of there. I don't know that there was a better place that you could sit there and say, you go to this school, you study this curriculum, and the job on the other side is going to be this amount of money. I doubt there's another, you know, sort of graph you could put together that said this is the biggest payday you could get. And now all of a sudden the sun's coming out and he's going to go back and get a master's in history. So he's going to defer going to the job world for a year. And then his dad said to me last night he thinks he's going to be more attractive in the tech world having a history degree. And it made me think about what you'd said as it relates to sort of is this the renaissance of liberal arts given what AI might do for some of the hard computing skills?
- [31:06]
C
I think so. I think it's going to be that moment for liberal arts. I've Talked about this renaissance moment and I thought about my own, you know, journey where when I was getting my PhD, if, if you could solve a harder integral than I could, then you might get a better job. Like the math was a currency that we were sort of trading on. And, and now you roll the clock forward and all those hard math problems, you can approximate with computer in milliseconds to however degree of precision you need. And so it's kind of become a commodity. And, you know, we still need to understand what's going into the math setup, but that that's no longer the thing. And I think in the same way, technology is going to be an enabler for people that may not know how to write as good a code, but if they understand what's going on in the models, understand the limitations, understand the issues with them, but are empowered by them, I think there's a thing there. I think that, you know, if they can read and write well, communicate all, you know, interpersonal skills, analytical skills, all those classic liberal arts traits that are empowered by technology, AI, for example, I also think they're going to be more flexible. Because I taught finance, I think of optionality a lot, and options are with more of volatility tie. And if we're in a very volatile period of time over the next several years because of technology and all the uncertainty that's creating, you want to be flexible, you want optionality. And I think a liberal arts degree has a lot of inherent optionality to it.
- [32:39]
B
How do you stay up on the technology? I think about all the moving pieces to. I mean, in my world, I've got a tech team. I try and keep track of what my competitor firms are doing. Constantly asking our clients, do you see anything that a competitor firm is doing and what have you? You have some of the greatest minds out there as it relates to both computer science as well as probably professors as well as researchers coming to you and saying, we ought to insert this into the curriculum. How. I can only imagine that that's really difficult to sort of saying, okay, let's stick to the kind of the core curriculum and what we. The way we've gone about teaching students for decades, centuries. And then the, oh, this is a, this is a serious shift to the way that we ought to teach. How are you personally sort of staying on top of it to sort of then be able to either take recommendations or push recommendations away as it relates to significant changes to the way students are being educated at smu?
- [33:38]
C
Yeah, I, I think it's a couple of the same Kind of similar things you were talking about. One is this is back to again, sort of the Dallas thesis. Part of what is super helpful to us and certainly to me, is to stay in touch with corporate leaders, hirers, the kind of the. The people are going to hire our, you know, our eventual graduates because we end up. We have a lot of conversations around how are you thinking about hiring? What are you looking for? How is that changing? What do they need to be able to do? SMU is strong in that area, but we gotta fiercely protect and grow that reputation. So I spent a lot of time saying, we want to hire the people, we want to produce the people you want to hire. And so help me understand what that looks like. And then I spend time with faculty. One of the real joys, it sounds weird, but one of the joys of the job is to presidents have ultimate say in promotion and tenure. Who gets promoted among the faculty, who gets tenure? So I read all those files. So you get to see what faculty are working on and you get up to date on the research side that way. And then I think part of what we're working through now is this plan of the current working idea is to essentially ask every department to think about the journey a student is on. Where do they start and where do we want them to end up? So I think generally you could probably agree by the time they graduate, they should have certain technical skills, be able to use AI, use models, use technology. But we also understand they need to understand the first principles. And so I'm optimistic that if we get departments to think about, we agree that they should understand these first principles and they should be ready when they enter the workforce in the following way. Now it's just a question of how do we get from here to there over four years? And I'm hopeful that that will enable kind of the faculty to see that we've got to do this in a systematic way. And it's not just each one off professor deciding in my class, I don't want it, and Willie's class, he wants it because I think that that's. That's going to be a road to kind of a haphazard, incongruous student experience that doesn't. Doesn't think about the student's best interests at heart. It.
- [35:45]
B
It's interesting, Jay.
- [35:46]
C
It.
- [35:46]
B
It reminds me from a kind of a pedagical standpoint.
- [35:49]
C
The, the. The.
- [35:51]
B
When I was at hbs, my first year, we had a class that was called Financial Reporting. Something else. And it was. My professor was a guy named Bill Bruns. And we're about a month into the class and obviously hbs.
- [36:05]
C
But we're about.
- [36:05]
B
A month into class and I, and I went up to him and I said to him, you know, are we ever going to sit down and learn T accounts? And I'd done, I'd taken accounting courses, I knew a kid, but you know, like just sitting there and running through T accounts to make sure that everyone in the classroom was going to know that. And Bill Brunson in a, in a, in a very non arrogant way looks at me and he goes, willie, you're graduating from the Harvard Business School. You're going to hire accountants. You're not going to be an accountant. And, and, and, and it, and at the time it struck me as like the most arrogant thing ever said. Like, come on, like, you need to understand basics of all this stuff and, and what have you. But to the pedagogy of what HBS was trying to do was trying to teach people who understood the framework of accounting but not be an actual accountant and then be able to make the decisions that they're trying to train us to make. And, and when I hear you talk about the skills you're trying to teach the students at smu, it makes me go back to that in the sense that you could either, you know, teach a lot of accounting, if you will, or get the technology to do the accounting piece, but unless you are able to understand what doesn't make sense clearly today with AI, I, I had something, I just asked an AI prompt the other day for something and it was just so wildly wrong. It was actually doing research on you and I just like picked it up and I was like, I was like, that, that's wrong. I mean, that's just this hallucination of all hallucinations, but you had to have the broader context to understand the data, be able to say it. And I just, I find it to be such an interesting thing. And there's obviously no quick, easy answer to it, but I would think that the curriculum at SMU over the next four years will change dramatically.
- [37:39]
C
I completely agree and I've characterized it partly as we're going to have a small segment of our population that are producers of AI, LLMs, all that stuff, almost all of the student body should be ready to be a consumer of it and empowered by it. And to your point, we've got to be able to be fluent enough in IT to understand what's going on in those black boxes, to know this is a bad answer, a good answer. This is a ethical limitation or that might be an issue with the data set it was trained on. All those issues people have to be understanding of. But and I part of the fun here. Back to your question earlier about the, about the size and scale. We can just move faster. I mentioned this, this Guild hall program, this idea about video game design. We started having conversations in the summer about could this become an undergrad program. And we think pending approval from our board in December, we'll be advertising that program for students starting in September. So to go from idea to students pursuing a brand new major in a year in higher ed, that's super fast. I guess that, my guess is that would have taken us two or three years back at ut.
- [38:50]
B
Yeah, and what's interesting about that Jan, is you know, if you look at the, the annual gaming industry spend versus records, television and film, I think records, television and film is, is something like a 25 billion dollar industry. And the gaming industry is 80 or 85 billion on an annual basis. So you know, it is almost 3x the size of television, film and records all combined. And so that clearly is a, is a, is an industry worth training to, if you will.
- [39:19]
C
Yeah, I, I think so. In Dallas, I last I heard was I think third or fourth in the country in kind of the market share, if you will, of the gaming enterprise. So it's also a large part of our calculus is where does Dallas have strengths and where do we have strengths? And then we start to lean into those things where Dallas is overweight and we're pretty good at it. We have at least a good starting point.
- [39:43]
B
When I think about that, you've got the new stock exchange that's opening up this coming year. You've got the Dallas Fed, you've got the Bush library, you've got, but I think the second largest Spanish art collection in the world. Am I, am I, am I right.
- [39:56]
C
On that at least?
- [39:57]
B
Second.
- [39:57]
C
Second best, I think. Second best.
- [39:58]
B
Second best. Yeah. There's a lot there to leverage off of. How do you, how do you figure out which one of those platforms, if you will, to be able to put capital behind then grow? Because as I hear you talk about gaming, it's very exciting because you've clearly figured out somewhat of a niche industry there that is obviously an enormous industry. But if you can create a best in class program, you can attract the young talent. How are you going about defining which one of those platforms to kind of put capital behind?
- [40:32]
C
Yeah, the current way we're thinking about it and if, and if you've Got sort of a fifth factor that I'm missing. Let me know. But so one is kind of our startings conditions. How do we have some strength there yet or not? Because I think it's just harder to build from zero. Obviously part two is sort of, there's probably a word something like relevance, like some fields just matter more in today's context than others. And if, if you had a choice between a, you know, two different departments or different kinds of programs, some are going to have a bigger reach and impact than others. The third is investment scale. So if we don't have a medical school, we've got a great medical school just 15 minutes away, 20 minutes away. So I don't see us building a brand new medical school that has implications for what kinds of things you want to do because you know, the scale of wet labs is just different, that kind of thing. And then the fourth is Dallas. Where does Dallas in particular have, have extra distinction, you know, things that are hard to replicate if you're in East Lansing or you know, Ann Arbor. So, so that, that's the way we're thinking of the filter and then. But a lens of what will also in that set will enable us to attract Ideally something like 20 to 50 to, you know, and up, up from there really special undergraduates a year around those areas. So if, if you mentioned the, the Bush Center, Bush Library, we're really excited about. They've got a new CEO, kind of Shiloh Brooks, who came from Princeton, just joined. He's on our faculty. We can do something special with, with him and with Bush. And if that lets us attract really more, I call it right tail talent, just really, really talented students in the way we care about talent like well rounded, social and smart. I think there's something there. So that's a way to filter it is think through those things. Plus do we feel like we can use it to attract really exceptional students.
- [42:26]
B
To come, as you say, might not build a medical school? I would remind you that Michael Dell did show up up in Austin and say let's, let's go build a medical school here. And today they have an incredible medical school and your alumni base is equally as affluent as the UT alumni base. So maybe Michael Bell doesn't, maybe Michael Dell doesn't show up. But something tells me there might be an SMU grad who shows up and says we need a medical school here. As you think about the skills that you're trying to, to give your students, it reminds me a little bit of a, of a Warren Buffett Axiom, which is that he only looks for three qualities in people. Enthusiasm, intelligence, and integrity. And if they don't have the third one, the first two are very malicious. So, you know, enthusiasm, intelligence, and integrity. Can you teach integrity?
- [43:21]
C
Yeah, I think. I think. I think some of that does come in hardwired to be honest about how you grew up. And. And it's sort of unfair because some people have advantages there that others don't, but it's the way it is. I think some of that is the way they come to us. But I do think you can talk about it. I think you can also put students in situations where they get to brush up against those issues with lower stakes. We'd rather have them face a ethical or integrity type issue under the. Under the sort of safer confines of a university setting before they go to your organization. I think there's value in bringing people back. So I'll give an example. When I ran the real estate center, the guy who ran it the most with me from the industry side is Mark Gibson. Now, I'm, well, fantastic human being, right? And Mark came and talked to the students. Mark was really focused on making sure that as we built out a better real estate curriculum, we talked about ethics and integrity and those issues, and insistent, which was a great point of view to have. And so we brought him in and he told this story about being 23 years old, first possible commission on a real estate transaction. He got some information, and it meant he had to go to his client and disclose the information, but he knew he might lose his first commission. And it was actually information in the client's favor. So it wasn't like it was something that he could talk himself into if he really wanted to. And he did the right thing. He went to him, just disclosed information, deal fell apart, went away from a commission, and then, you know, later became CEO of HFF and went to jlo. All that. And. But our students were struck by. Here's this person I think of on this pedestal, and when they were 23, they had this challenge, and you could see, and they talked about it for weeks afterwards, that hearing people wrestling with things, I think is important. So I do think you can hone it, develop it more. I think there's a baseline that somebody's got to sort of adjust off of when they get here. But I think those experiences, those stories, those opportunities matter.
- [45:36]
B
How much of that is classroom learning versus campus learning. One of the great things that I consistently hear about smu, and I could sense it when I was down there visiting A couple weeks ago is that it's just a, a, it's just a great student body. They're just great kids. And there's a lot as it relates to being in a, in an environment, a social environment, not just in the classroom, that people do convey certain ethics, norms, ways of behaving. How, how much time do you have to spend on, if you will, curating that side of the college experience versus just the classroom side of the experience?
- [46:18]
C
I, I think here it's, I don't know if it's, I don't know what percentage yet, but I can tell you it's significant, meaningful and important. So I think part of why students are coming to us and part of why the school has been rising and, and part of our value proposition both to the students and employers and parents and all of it is that sort of well rounded concept of a student. Back to your Warren Buffett definition. And so I think we've got to be protective of that and nurture it. Part of questions I've had from alumni, for example, have been, we appreciate that you have greater academic aspirations for the university, but don't lose the heart and soul of the place and turn it into something where you haven't been. And so I think that's part of continuing to protect and nurture that kind of out of classroom social dynamic and set of experiences. It's also a real strength. I need to lean into our strengths. We, we. I can imagine a world where we end up where our goal might be that every student have an experience in Dallas before they finish and meaningful, like an internship, some kind of deep research project, something that is important because that's a great way to back to your question, to teach those other kinds of skills that you know as a professor, I can do parts of that, but in the classroom setting, it's a lot harder than when they get out and are in an organization working with others, trying to figure out how to do that well.
- [47:39]
B
And as part of that residential living, you talked about trying to expand the residential living experience, if you will. I think about clubs, I think about fraternities and sororities, and I think about also the types of students that you're bringing in as you're looking at an application from regions of the country right now, about 50% of your students come from Texas and the other 50% come from out. Talk for a moment about, if you will, over overweighting or underweighting in any of those aspects of the overall SMU experience.
- [48:15]
C
Yeah. And so it's interesting, I'VE had more meetings about Greek life, careers and sororities here. In my first. Whatever it is, five or six months now that I had my entire time.
- [48:25]
B
At UT, it's an important part here.
- [48:28]
C
It's probably 40 to 50% of the student body is in a fraternity of sorority. So that's an example of one of those things that does a lot of that, that culture building, both how does a campus function, how do students get along, how do they learn their full skill set, leadership, all that. So that's part of it. But then what does the rest of the student opportunity set look like for students either and their sorority or fraternity, but also if that's not their passion, how do they find another way to engage? So I think that is something that we'll continue to try to find more opportunities. Helping students feel like they belong here and they have kind of find their people, I think is important. And, you know, we, we want to produce leaders. We want to produce people who want to create things, build things, work well in teams, all that stuff. And those clubs and organizations are a great way to ensure that, that, that happens. And it, you know, it could be. Look, I, you know, my, my, My guess is that fewer of the video game design students we want to attract will be in a fraternity or sorority, and that's, that's great too. But there'll be a video game design club club that gives them an outlet that they get to feel like, you know, and, and experiment and learn how to. How to lead and be part of our organization too. So that, that I. Part of what I like about SMU is it's in a bit of a sweet spot where it's big enough to have a wide set of opportunities. You don't have to be any one type of student here, but it's also small enough where you feel like you can find your people and find your community and find your faculty members really easily.
- [50:01]
B
I know that applications were up 56% last year at SMU, which is a huge step up.
- [50:08]
C
I.
- [50:10]
B
Clearly moving into the ACC had a lot to do with that.
- [50:16]
C
How.
- [50:17]
B
I mean, to ask you the question, how important are athletics to, you know, academics and to university success? I, I think it's pretty clear that it's a very significant part to it all. I think Back to when Alab announced they were going to pay Nick Saban $6 million to move from LSU to Alabama. And everyone thought that Dr. Witt had lost his wit by. By making that offer to, to Nick Saban. And obviously, if you look at what it has done to the University of Alabama as it relates to everything from attraction of students to attraction of faculty to all sorts of things on the academic side. There's like award after award that Alabama's been able to win since they got the engagement of the alumni bases to the degree that they have on football. Moving into the acc, I've heard you interestingly talk not only about the fact that it's great because of the profile that it gives both your athletic teams, but then also the engagement that you get. You know, your provost being able to engage with the provost at UNC and UVA and the, the kind of the club and, and, and one of the things I found interesting about your comments on that, Jay, was just. I think many people think of like, oh, the Ivy League. It's this like really exclusive league and it's just for sports though. But, but you also have all of the, you know, sort of collateral discussions that go on amongst the Ivy League institutions. That's gotta be both super exciting for you as it relates to being part of the acc. And I guess the question would be, where do you take it from here?
- [51:51]
C
Yeah, no, it's so spot on, I think, to give you just a concrete example of it. So we played Boston College last weekend up in Boston and, and for the first time, we decided to use this as a chance to bring up. We brought up eight of our nine deans for the various schools in the college, came up and met with their Boston College and BU counterparts. And then the dean of the Meadow School of the Arts met with Emerson College because that's very close and that kind of thing. There are certain places that in the league where SMU used to play where that would not be an appealing proposition, which wouldn't be that valuable. And so to get to go and have those conversations is great for us. Lots of lessons learned. Academics aren't uber secretive or competitive about these things. So we're pretty open shares. And so it's really valuable in that way. And you never know what will happen. It might be that Somebody produces a PhD student from an ACC school and they think of us in a different light as a place they want to go be a professor. And so that, that just association and learning and being part of that network, I think is going to be incredibly valuable. And I've heard it from the provost, I've heard it from the deans, and I can contrast it. I mean, candidly, there are more schools in the ACC that I'd want to be associated with and learn from academically. Than either the SEC or the Big 12. And I've been president in those groups too. And so it's a really special group of universities.
- [53:22]
B
Yeah, you're you, I, I believe you're the only university president who's been in three leagues in two years.
- [53:28]
C
Yeah, yeah, I, I, I, I, I told Commissioner Phillips to from the acc. I said I, I hope I'm done. Like I don't, I'm not looking for a fourth. And so yeah it was, it's what a crazy time in, in sports.
- [53:41]
B
But I, but I find that to be so interesting. I mean when I was down at SMU last month, you all were playing stance Stanford on Saturday and on Friday night a bunch of my Stanford buddies had all flown into Dallas and first time that Stanford had played SMU and they all, you know, there were people both from Texas, but I had a buddy of mine from West Texas who flew in and we all went out and had drinks in Dallas that night because they were all there to watch the Stanford SMU game. That in and of itself as it relates to the Stanford alumni days sitting there being like we're going to fly to SMU to go watch the game, it would just seem to me and by the way I'm sitting there with my friends who went to Stanford and two of them have kids who go to smu. You know, it's sort of like it's, it's just, it's neat about the way that you get that sort of, I would say to some degree the halo effect from athletics into it. And it is distinct in the ACC from some of the other leagues. Not that the SEC doesn't have fantastic academic institutions but you know, a lot of people have sat around and said that Vanderbilt should have moved from the SEC until this year to the ACC because they're much, they're a lot more like UVA and UC UNC than they are some of these big state schools.
- [54:50]
C
I agree the only place close academically as far as just heft and might is probably the Big Ten. But there's a lot of big state schools to your point and for us to be around the Dukes and Wake Forest and Boston College and you can go down the list but there's a lot, it's a great blend of institutions in that way and not to mention joining with Cal, Berkeley and Stanford. So I think that's right and, and you know, hopefully a few of those Stanford alum come to town and they say maybe my, my son or daughter should look at SMU for college and, and they start to think about us a little bit differently than they might have before.
- [55:26]
B
Yeah, no, I mean, I, I think it's a. I think it's a huge opportunity for you all. And Damon Evans you brought across from Maryland. I believe in Damon's seven years at Maryland, they, they, they won men's soccer, women's lacrosse, field hockey, men's lacrosse. Yeah, I think they won like, seven national championships while Damon was there. Clearly had a. I actually, just as a stat that I kind of geeked out on a little bit, was his win percentage of all teams at Maryland while he was the ad. You may know this.
- [55:57]
C
Oh, I don't.
- [55:58]
B
Okay, 68%. And so that's, that's, that's pretty great across all sports over his seven years as AD at. At Maryland.
- [56:07]
C
And.
- [56:07]
B
But I guess the question I have for you on that, Jay, is that the world of D1 athletics, and particularly basketball and football, is so incredibly competitive and so incredibly expensive. How do you kind of manage, like, one of the things that you accomplished at ut, which was incredible, was for the last two years, you've won the Director's Cup. To those who don't know what the Director's cup is, it's the best NCAA program in the country. Stanford had won the Director's cup for eons, by the way. To anyone listening who wants to have a stat on what nc, what university has the most NCAA titles, it is Stanford University with 136 NCAA titles, which is far and above number two, and number three, which are USC and UCLA and, and interestingly, Utah is number four and UVA is number five. But my, my, my, my question to Jay is, first of all, you clearly understood at UT how important athletics were. So I think anyone sitting there saying, like, okay, he's come in smu. SMU has moved into the acc. He'll just, like, jump on and play on that. You clearly understood the importance of athletics in UT by winning the Directors cup for two years. But at the same time, UT spends 2x the amount of money on their NCAA athletic program than. Than. Than SMU does. You spend about 120 million and UT spends 240 million. How do you, how do you play at that level, particularly given the brand that SMU has in both football and basketball.
- [57:33]
C
Yeah, and it's, it's stress is stressful.
- [57:37]
B
So I can imagine.
- [57:39]
C
No, and all that, everything says. Right. You know, part of why it came is the ACC dynamic. I mean, that's partly what has captured this SMU kind of rise. And so it drew me Here on Drew Damon here. A lot of us are here. And it may not directly as Damon, but at least indirectly because of that.
- [57:56]
B
So I think part of part.
- [57:57]
C
Part one, there's no doubt for us to continue to do what we want to do, we have to be competitive in football. And it is just the financial engine, and we're blessed. You know, we just inked Coach Lashley to an extension the day that we. We beat Miami with the storming the field and the goalpost and a little bit great day.
- [58:18]
B
And my son Wyatt was out there. He tells me a live video. He sent me a live video running out onto the field.
- [58:23]
C
Yeah, yeah, it was so great. And I. I didn't appreciate. You know, there were alumni grown like our age crying and. And SMU had not beaten a top 10 team at home since 1974. So that. I mean, that's a day, right? And so anyway, the point of that football absolutely had to be competitive. So you have to prioritize football. Basketball is price, you know, second on the list, but also important. And we have a great history there and a great coach in Andy Enfield. Women's basketball is important. I think it's an opportunity for us. We. One of the changes that Damon made right away and the job was to hire Adea Barnes from Arizona, where, you know, she'd gotten to the national title game. She knows what great looks like, and I think she's going to be phenomenal. And then back to kind of this question about scale and budget. Then we got to pick spots at Texas, basically everything we thought should be in the top five. And, you know, my. My second or third year there, Vic Schaefer, the women's basketball coach who was amazing, he got to the Elite Eight and. And said something like, jay, I thought I had a good year, but I had a. Below the median year at Texas. We had had. I think we'd had like 10 of the programs, had gotten to at least the final Four. So anyway, the. The point of that is Texas feels like it's got the scale and the budget to do it all at a very high level. And that's. That's the. The goal. It's. And I don't like to lose anything, but I. I am cognizant that we're gonna have to pick some spots. And. But. But football and basketball are absolutely necessary to. To do what we want to do, even. Even academically. To the earlier part of the conversation, I.
- [59:57]
B
As you and I discussed when I was down in Dallas with you, I know you need about a $15 million gift to do it, but a men's lacrosse program to go up head to head with UVA and UNC and some of the other great ACC schools I think is a, is a, is definitely a needed add to, to the SMU rost.
- [60:17]
C
Will. Yeah. The, the interesting stat that I, I, I can't if I looked up before we talked or after we talked about it, but I think there's something like about a hundred D1 men's lacrosse athletes from Texas and 170 from California. Yeah. Neither state has a D1 program.
- [60:33]
B
Yeah, no, it's, it's got a very good, I got a very good friend of mine in Dallas who's runs a very large real estate company, and he's got two kids who grew up in Dallas and are both playing D1 lax.1 at Duke and the other one's. And I can't remember where, but. No, I mean, there's both Southern California as well as Dallas have become hotbeds for great, great lacrosse talent, and the kids shouldn't have to travel to New England to go play. To go play great lacrosse.
- [61:01]
C
Yeah. And the two I got hit up almost immediately about, you know, think about it, were lacrosse and baseball and softball. So SMU has none of those. Do women's or women's lacrosse or baseball or softball. And, and, you know, it was probably week two when I started getting the have you thought about baseball? Have you thought about lacrosse? Questions.
- [61:23]
B
We are. I could keep talking to you for hours, but I want to be conscious of your time. And we've been on for an hour. I have to say, with a. I've got three boys. They're all at three great colleges. But I would say that the excitement around SMU is palpable, and a lot of that is due to you and your leadership.
- [61:40]
C
Jay.
- [61:41]
B
It is, I also think, very interesting for people to think about the fact that to attract someone like you, that move into the ACC was a component part of it. And that's not necessarily to say athletics. It's to say what is it that you can do to your institution, whether it's a company, a church, a school, whatever the case might be, that makes it so that you have a kind of a hook, if you will, to get great talent to join you, that if you just stayed on the current path, that wouldn't have presented itself, if you will. And I just think it's, it's a super exciting time, and I'm just extremely appreciative of you spending the time to share your thoughts about where you're going to take smu, and as a. As a parent, I'm going to watch it for the next four years, which will be really fun.
- [62:25]
C
Yeah. Thank you. And. And the only thing that I think you've done that's given more joy than today is to let Wyatt come our way.
- [62:33]
B
He's excited to be there, and thank you. I look forward to seeing you when I'm next in Dallas. And really, really appreciate your time today.
- [62:40]
C
Yeah.
- [62:41]
B
Thanks a lot.
- [62:41]
C
Take care, everybody. Appreciate it.
- [62:42]
B
Thanks, Jay.