The Jennifer Kamara Podcast

Jon Levin: Stanford is a place to be curious and not judgmental. That's from Ted Lasso actually. So he, he said it first, When you, you're gonna hear, you're gonna be around all these different people. You're gonna hear them say things. There's gonna be, some people say things you just don't like, they land wrong on you. They might upset you, they might offend you.

try to be curious about it. Ask questions, push them on their ideas, but don't jump to conclusions about

Jennifer Kamara: today we have Dean John Levin of Stanford Business School with us. I personally am so excited to have Dean Levin on. I went to Stanford Business School, met my husband who helps us on the podcast here, and so this is like a big reunion for me. So thank you so much, Dean Levin for coming on a few words about you before we get started, so folks know. So. Dean Levin went to Stanford undergrad and then he went on to get a master's in philosophy from Oxford, a PhD in m I t collecting all of these degrees. Came back to Stanford in the year 2000, and my understanding is you've been here since then. Today you're the dean of our business school. Welcome, John.

Jon Levin: Jennifer, thank you. It's great to see you and uh, what a pleasure to get to be on your podcast.

Jennifer Kamara: Amazing. Should I call you Dean Levin or John? What would you

Jon Levin: You could call me either one,

Jennifer Kamara: I love, I love John. I'm just gonna call

you John. Uh,

John, I wanna invite you to tell us in a few words, who is John today?

Jon Levin: Oh, that's a great question, Jennifer. Good way to start the, start the podcast. Well,

You know, part of what, um, who I am today is, um, is of course my my family and the sort of life outside of work. And I'm incredibly fortunate to have three kids, one of Whom's already off at college, but two of whom just started high school, uh, at ninth

and 11th grade this year.

And so we're deep in, uh, start of school mode right now. My wife's a physician

and,

Jennifer Kamara: Hmm.

Jon Levin: And Anna has, you know, been with me for a long, long time and met in high school. I,

Jennifer Kamara: Oh wow.

Jon Levin: yeah, yeah.

Jennifer Kamara: did you start dating in high school?

Jon Levin: We started dating, um, our senior year in high school and even went

Jennifer Kamara: Oh my goodness,

Jon Levin: together. I.

Jennifer Kamara: That's so cool.

And did you, uh, how did it happen? How did it progress with you traveling to England and Boston? Was she around? Did you do lots of long distance?

Jon Levin: You know, it was, it was such a different time then compared to today, because we, we graduated from high school in the, in the spring of 1990, and I came out to Stan. We grew up in Connecticut in, I grew up in New Haven, Connecticut, and so when we graduated from high school, I came out to Stanford. And she went to Cornell.

So she was in the East coast and um, we didn't see each other that often and there was no email. I mean, I actually got an email account

my first week at Stanford, but I didn't use it for like a year and a half 'cause there was no one to write to. And it was sort of a new technology. So it wasn't for a couple of years that we started emailing.

Telephone calls were you had to pay for a long distance call. They were expensive, so we didn't talk on the phone. So we wrote letters, physical letters, um, for basically for like four years of, of college. And, uh, and then we see in the summers and a vacation. And, uh,

Jennifer Kamara: What a romantic

story.

Jon Levin: we still actually, I mean, Amy actually kept some of the letters.

I should have done a better job of saving some of the letters, but I, but I, she was the one who was, who was better at that. And, um, Anyway, then we, you know, then we, then we graduated and we moved to England together. And, and, uh, things sort of went from there and, um, been together ever

Jennifer Kamara: Beautiful.

Jon Levin: Uh, so that's the fir that's sort of the first, that's the personal part of my life.

And then, you know, professionally, like I'm here at Stanford, I'm in my office, and I, I've, like you said, I've had a, you know, I've had a really fortunate professional career that I basically. I came to Stanford as my first job to be a professor in the economics department back in 23 years ago, and, uh,

and never left and fell in love with this place and had been really fortunate to, to get to spend my whole career here.

Jennifer Kamara: It sounds like you, I do life design work, and so it sounds like you've figured out what your passion was early, and you were fortunate to be able to have found that early and you, you stuck along with it.

Jon Levin: Sort of totally serendipitous though, you know, like I, I virtually nothing in my career has actually been, it. It makes, you know, you know, it always makes sense looking backward. You sort of see how things develop, but I. Like, if you'd asked me at any point in my career, what will I be doing in, you know, a couple of years, I would never have been able to to tell you that.

And I, you know, it's, it,

Jennifer Kamara: And, and life

Jon Levin: a lot of serendipity in, in anyone's life.

Jennifer Kamara: Yeah. Beautiful. Okay.

So coming to your professional life, John, you are the dean of one of the best business schools in the world. Help the audience understand what does that job entail, and then I'm so curious, which part of it do you find the most meaningful?

Jon Levin: Yeah, so business schools are really special places actually. They're, um, they're . In a way, I mean, there are other professional schools that have some of the same aspects of business schools, but there, but business schools occupy a very unique educational and sort of, um, role in the, in the world, which is, and particularly at a place like, like Stanford, which, you know, which has a dual mission of, of research, of ideas, of illuminating what's going on in management and in business and in the, and in the world.

And education, educating, you know, leaders for

business and for other sectors. Yeah. And what makes business schools? It, it, I didn't start in a business school. I never went to a business school. I was never at a business school until I became the dean of Stanford Business School. And so when I started, I actually didn't really completely understand the magic of a business school.

And I've sort of come

to appreciate, actually the truth is, I keep, I appreciate more and more every day. Like it's a, it is, it's an incredible mix. And to me, the mic, the thing that makes it so . Amazing to be at a business school, particularly to be at the Stanford Business School, is you just the set of people who are interacting every day.

You have these brilliant academic scholars who are at the tops of their fields. They're leading thinkers. They win Nobel prizes. They, they, they

just are, you know, they, they, they in love with ideas and also with how ideas kind of get out into the world. And then you bring in every year. We're just about to do it this year.

A set of students who come in, they're so aspirational, they're so talented, um, and they're so action oriented. Like they just

are gonna be there for just a short amount of time and they just wanna get things done. They wanna get out there, they wanna make things happen, they wanna change the world.

And that mix of sort of ideas and action is very unique in higher education. It's really special to be on a campus where people are mixing it up in that way and the students come, they absorb some of the thinking, they meet people, they go out and make things happen. They bring that energy and that sort of drive for like how do you get things done into the world of ideas, academic world, and you just get this incredible flywheel, which is

um, You know, which, especially basically your job is, you know, I tell people that the job of being a a, the job of being an academic leader, in a sense is not a complicated one. Like your job, your primary job is you go out and you get great faculty. Try to get the best faculty you can. You go out and try to get the best students you can.

You put them together, make sure they have the

resources that they need, and get outta their way. And like that's the fundamental strategy. sort of execute on that.

Jennifer Kamara: That's awesome. And as you were describing what business school is like, you're taking me back to R G S B days and it's so, so special. Like just, it feels like it's magic in a little bottle that you get to shake up and each time you shake it up, something new comes out of it and very special. So I feel like I, I get a sense of what's meaningful about it to you, to,

I wanna talk a little bit about how the M B A degree and program will evolve in these ages. So, we know that the M B a degree was formed around the boomer generation when we were training folks to be managers. A lot of the world today is changing.

We talk about ai, which we'll, we'll talk about shortly, but even how the generations think today. Gen Zers. Famously are less, for instance, status oriented than millennials or other generations have been, et cetera. And so I'm curious how your thinking and how we should be thinking, about how the M B A degree will evolve to cater to these new generations and how the world is changing.

Jon Levin: And, and you, and I think you, you raised actually a couple of really interesting points about the, the sort of way that that, um, the M B A degree and business schools have evolved, uh, over time business schools are unusual because there are professional school. They're

educating people for a profession where you don't need a certification to go into that profession.

So, you know,

unlike in law or unlike in medicine, you know, you don't have to have a business degree to be a very successful business person and business leader or entrepreneur, investor, and so forth. So they're, they're very tied in a sense to, to the, to the labor market and to people's careers and to kind of people's development in those, in those types of fields, and have to be responsive to that

Jennifer Kamara: Hmm.

Jon Levin: and the thing, have changed a lot as a result because for a long period of time there was a huge ascent of M B A degrees, that it was an expanding

Uh, area more and more people wanted that sort of professional managerial skills. The advent of sort of scientific management back in the sixties and seventies, which really came from business schools and infiltrated sort of really sparked the consulting industry. Quantitative finance, uh, operations got into so many thinking about organizational design, organizational behavior, so impactful.

A lot of that sort of got out there now. And so what is, what has sort of happened in, in the business school world is the demand for business education has continued to go up. It's gotten global, it's gotten more and more because the world is changing so much has become a kind of lifelong thing. Um, but the m B a degree has not grown, continued to grow.

It's sort of slowed down in a certain sense and, um, Part of what I think has happened there is that even though an M B A was not, you know, formally a requirement to get into certain jobs, there was a long period of time where an M B A might have been informally a requirement to get into certain jobs.

It was the, it was the, it was a rung on the ladder to move up if you were in finance, if you were in consulting, if you were in many large organizations to get into management. And that's mostly not true anymore. That you can, you can actually just continue up in lots and lots of professions and lots and lots of fields and lots and lots of organizations without stopping taking two years to get an M B A degree.

So what is an m b a degree about in a world like that where you don't need it as the rung step on that rung to get up the ladder? It means in an m b a degree today is, is not really about kind of climbing up in that sense. It's basically about . Pausing your career, or not necessarily pausing it, but sort of taking two years from your career early on and in a very short amount of time, getting the opportunity to explore many, many possible paths.

There's one of our faculty, nor says many versions of the future, you and um, and, and sort of seeing what would it be like to be an operator, to be an entrepreneur, to be an investor to. To work in all these different industries, to work in these different places in the world. And just the intensity. It's like having, you know, a hundred internships in two years.

You get this unbelievable. And then to meet all these people who have, are pursuing these different paths and I. I like to tell people that when I, I got a PhD that was like being given a powerful microscope to zoom in in the most specific possible way on one particular problem. This is like a telescope just opening up the universe deal.

It's the opposite. It's sort of, I wish I'd done an MBA in that sense. Like it's really great.

Uh, and um, you know, and that's what what it's about. And so MBAs are, are, have become instead of kind of just a, a step along a a, a sort of vertical career path. They're basically a way to take people who are coming in with all different backgrounds and kind of doing all different things and then mix 'em all up and let them see all these different things and then fan them out in these many, many different possible paths, uh, from there.

And that's makes the, that kind of makes being around the n b students incredibly exciting and fun because you just don't know where they're from and where they're going and

what's gonna happen and like what ideas they're gonna.

Jennifer Kamara: they don't know where they're going of the time too. Yeah.

Jon Levin: Uh,

yeah, and it, you know, it's, uh, so that's, I think that's, that's sort of the, that's how I think of the N B A today. It's this, it's this kind of, uh, launchpad for, for, for, for many, many different future paths.

Jennifer Kamara: love that. again, in life design, this is a lot of what we do and I wholeheartedly agree,

John. I still do get comments from folks who are anti M B A, who are saying the, is the M B A worth it? It's not really worth it. What do you say to folks like that? Is

Jon Levin: yeah, I mean there's different ways of measuring that. I think. You know, one way to measure is you can look at things like, um, . You know, the, the sort of r o i on the degree, and there's all kinds of calculations like that. Like what are people's starting salaries when they come in and they go at it actually, you know, by, by those conventional metrics.

MBAs are really good investments just generally speaking better than almost any, uh, graduate program, maybe the best of all graduate programs. Um, but that's a, not a good way to think about it actually. Uh, you know, the, the way I generally like to think about it is, For people who are in their, you know, most of the students who come to the M B A program are like you when they, when they come, they're, they're, they're kind of in their mid twenties or so when they, when they show up and they're gonna work for a long time after they leave, like maybe 50 years.

Given the way, you know, lifespans are increasing and, and health spans are increasing and . The way I think about it's, you just have to have a long horizon on the decision to come to school. That's our biggest challenge in recruiting students, is not to think about like, will this get me to a better place in two years or three years or four years?

But in 50 years, when I look back, am I gonna think I really wish I'd worked for all 50 of those years versus 48 of them? And having spent two years sort of coming to business school and, and seeing all these things and, and, uh, I think just both in terms of the ideas you get exposed to and the opportunities that open up and the things that later on will pay off.

'cause you got exposed to 'em and started thinking about them, the people you meet,

it's an incredible, incredible investment.

Jennifer Kamara: Yeah. To me, I always say to folks, it's a very personal decision and folks have different priorities. Maybe you have a sick parent or I don't know, finances or whatever it is that's very personal to you. So I always say it's a very personal decision. But for me, what makes it special, I would say, is a, what you mentioned about you get the time and space to explore many future lives of yourself

you get all the resources, the professors, the industry experts, and the space to be able to do that in a way that is really tough to do otherwise. Then B, the people to me are just the magic where you get access to the highest quality of folks. I think Stanford does an incredible job at recruiting and then also at developing the culture of the students, making sure like no asshole policy, things like that.

Like pay attention to what your friends are going through, be there for each other. They may sound really small, but I think when you pay attention to that and build that into the culture, it makes for a really caring, uh, Supportive environment, and then you carry that through for the rest of your life.

Like we say, we got married via Stanford, my husband and I, but also so many of our close friends folks, we talk about businesses with opportunities about we would not have met and think that's also a big, big part of it that I mentioned to folks considering business school or not.

Jon Levin: Jennifer, what? What was your consideration when you thought about going to business school? I'm sure you didn't need it to sort of have a good job opportunity.

Jennifer Kamara: Well, I had an interesting, path. I am from Sierra Leone. It's the, it's consistently in the bottom five poorest countries in the world. I thought I wanted to be a doctor. And then before business school I built a, an organization in Sierra Leone. I partnered with Kate's Foundation in Harvard Med School, and we were addressing the leading cause of maternal death in Sierra Leone. And that to me, within nine months, we were able to help Reduce the incidence of postpartum hemorrhage by 96% for the whole country. And then the Minister of Health adopted the program. And so I was 22 and I was able to impact, thousands of lives versus, for instance, my dad, who was a doctor in this very poor country where he was one of 50 doctors for 6 million people.

He was able to help one patient at a time. And to me, that experience just It also matched my personality. I like to move quickly. I like to be working on different things. I'm hungry for impact. I fell in love with entrepreneurship through that, but I'd taken no business classes. I knew nothing about how to build a company, how to run things. I had been going on the trajectory of going to med school. And so for me, the M B A and specifically Stanford was The opportunity to learn in Silicon Valley about how do you build the best type of company. And it's interesting because I'm now an executive coach slash life design partner. I worked in entrepreneurship.

I still think I am still an entrepreneur. I'm building my practice. I get to support entrepreneurs. But then I learned after G S B that I really enjoy empowering humans to have huge impact, and that like these one-on-one conversations. Are my superpower, and also they really energize me. And so I think I would say just staying open to learning about what you like, what you love, and where you can have the most impact.

And going with that and also learning that life is also a continuous evolution. We change constantly and we make the best decisions with the information we have at the particular time. So GSB was wonderful for me to explore and go into startups, and there I learned more and I've, again pivoted.

Jon Levin: So your background was, was in, was in public health and in

um,

Jennifer Kamara: Hmm.

Jon Levin: Sort of setting up programs and, and, uh, but not in business. Did you,

how did you, why did you think that, um, why did you think that a business school would be the place to, to sort of learn about how to get things done as opposed to learn about sort of business?

Or was, did you wanna learn about business?

Jennifer Kamara: So I ended up doing G S B and H K S. , it was also, it was, I was thinking I want to help alleviate, health inequity in the world because Sierra Leone, where I grew up is, has tons of health inequity. Also, I'm half Ukrainian, and we know the war in Ukraine right now. I also grew up during a war in Sierra Leone, so just kind of, both countries have a ton of inequity in health education, things like that, and. My worldview is that to have a long-term impact, in societies and communities like that, you need to work with the government and the private sector. And so that's why I wanted to do both. And then specifically with the business degree, I wanted to, I. Be in Silicon Valley where it felt to me like, Detroit may have been the place to be in the time when we were making cars and you wanted to be in the car industry.

And I wanted to be in Silicon Valley in this moment of startups and building and learning from the best.

Jon Levin: One thing I love about your story, I mean, that's a, that's a, it's a, your trajectory is so interesting and,

and I think I. I think it's wonderful because it's not, you know, it's not what people would stereotypically think of as a business school

student, and yet,

if you were to walk around our campus and introduce yourself to a bunch of students, I think most people would be blown away by the number of students who come from, you know, very different types of backgrounds and career trajectories.

Um, some of which of course are, you know, more traditional business careers and some of which are not.

And, and also the idea that. Business schools, although they, they, there, there absolutely is a whole core of them that is sort of fundamentally about business and the private sector and how corporations work and, uh, and markets.

Um, a lot of what, um, students take away from a business school is really just about how, how could you make any organization work better and how could you kind of, um, Get any team to work better, how could you be an effective leader? You know, we're a, we're a school of business, but we're also a school of organizations and a school of leadership, and for some people, those turn out to be the skills that are the ones that they then put to use to be most impactful in their lives.

Jennifer Kamara: Because ultimately you're building a business, but You're building a business comprised of people serving your customers who are also people and it's important to be able to understand how people work and how do you motivate them and what are you not understanding about maybe this underperformer, are they actually underperforming or are they just uninterested? And how do you then put them in a role that they can, excel at? So a lot of these soft skills too, that G S V we were working on at G S V have been super handy and I'm a huge fan. Shall we, shall we come back to the evolution of the N B A

Jon Levin: Sure, sure, sure. Tell Tell what, what, where, where do you wanna go with it?

Jennifer Kamara: I wanna talk about AI because The world has changed since last December when OpenAI launched, this A g I and now we have these large language models. We have, I think now chat GT four, if not another version, and it's infiltrating so many industries. I use it a ton for my work. Lots of folks I know and work with use it as well, and so I. Imagine you've thought a ton about this, about how will we integrate large language models into the M B A education. I'm curious to hear some of your thoughts there

Jon Levin: yeah, it's, it's, it's really amazing, isn't it, that, you know, if we'd been having this discussion a year ago, all of this work was going on in computer science, and

people were advancing all these deep learning and using these bigger data sets. And so there, there surely were a set of people out there who kind of were aware of how much the technology was advancing, but

Within the span of a year for, for everybody to get, to see how far the, models

had come and the way you

could translate between, you know, natural language queries and all of the information on the entire internet and images. And it's, I mind blowing actually. I mean, it's just like a revelation to sort of see that.

And, and the fact that everyone got to sort of see it together

is, It's incredible. It, you know, does feel like a technological revolution, um,

Jennifer Kamara: Yeah, definitely an inflection point.

Lots,

Jon Levin: flashpoint and, and early days. I mean, it really is early

days to sort of like to think about where, where the technology is gonna gonna go. And I mean, you can already see like the energy here over the last year.

I mean, we're so lucky 'cause we're surrounded by a lot of the technologists who are pushing this. These, this technology for either on the Stanford campus or kind of around in Silicon Valley who are at the big companies or in in new startups. This is incredible energy, incredible excitement and, and the amount of just like interesting set of ideas that are coming up in like every direction is so cool.

I mean, it's incredibly energizing. Some of them are, you know, people thinking about, okay, how could you, this is an amazing technology. How could you use this to solve different problems in business? How could you use to improve business processes? How could you use it to open up new verticals by training it on specific data, you know, whether it's in, in healthcare or in, you know, communications or, uh, education.

Um, I think there'll be tremendous advances in scientific discovery because of ai. Because we're gonna

be able to, to to use analogs of large language models, not trained on the corpus of information on the internet, text and the internet, but say on, you know, molecular interactions or something to do, make advances in material science.

Um, there's the potential for big advances in education because it's gonna be, you know, what an amazing tool to be able to explore the world, uh, by . Just asking questions to a, to a computer. Um, so it feel, it really feels like we're at the, in the early innings of what's gonna be a, a, an amazing, uh, couple of years with some risks.

Of course, you know, it's, it's like any major technology. There's lots of ways that things could go wrong, and so, you know, we really want, everyone should be thinking carefully about that as well as the, the opportunities. But . It's been, it, it, it feels really exciting. I mean, it's gonna be amazing.

Jennifer Kamara: Yeah,

Jon Levin: and like we we're, we're gonna have so much going on this year in ai.

It's gonna be like the year of AI at different, and it'll be great. I'm not, I can't wait to see what I get to learn this year. It's from everyone,

uh, around me.

Jennifer Kamara: Does, can I ask, does the school have a policy against using Chat GT four courses right now?

Jon Levin: so.

Jennifer Kamara: I know lots of high schools do.

Jon Levin: Of course that came up right away last, you know, already last fall, as soon as Chachi B

came out. Because it turns out, you know, there've been articles out there, like

you can put in, you know, cases, case studies, for example, and, and Chachi will bring up a, you know, generally a pretty proficient, uh, summary of a case and what the answers the

questions might be.

Um, JJI B can do a lot of the assignments in some of our

like our first year analytics classes. Um, it's, uh, It's a, it's a pretty powerful tool. It's not a, it's not a a plus tool. You know, you're, you wouldn't, you're not gonna be the top student in the class if you're chat g p T, but you, you can do pretty well.

And the policy we took, and I think, um, it may evolve a little bit over time, was to basically let instructors, uh, figure it out themselves. And so some of our faculty have . Decided they're a policy where they, they don't allow it, uh, or they don't allow it in class. And some of our instruction, the policy where they just encourage it and they're trying to learn from the students.

So they're , they're

trying to get people to like you. So it's, we're in the

experimentation phase, I would say, at this point. And we're gonna

try a lot of things and talk about them, and we'll see where,

we'll see where it goes.

Jennifer Kamara: Yeah, we'll fail a little bit and we'll learn and we'll evolve as we go. Beautiful.

I remember you were at a conference this summer, I believe, with other deans of business school. Is that correct, John?

Jon Levin: Yeah, we had an interesting

uh, we did an interesting event that I organized in, in Washington DC

in, uh, in June, which was, um, for a, a, a group of, uh, of deans of, of business schools. We, we spent a day in DC Meeting with, with congressional leaders and, and leaders in the, in the White House. Um, to to kind of hear from, just to step back and sort of settle a little, kind of, you know, I think one of the really interesting things that's going on in business generally right now is that the relationship between business and government

is, it's sort of in a moment of, of change. It's been changing and it's in sort of a moment of change where things could go in different directions. So for example, the US has come back to industrial policy in a way that it has not for years and years, and was . And really hasn't even thought about actually. So things like investments in semiconductors, the, the way that the federal legislation has affected the energy industry and investments in renewables. Um, a change in posture on things like antitrust and, and regulation. Many of the national security issues that have a kind of economic business implications.

For example, the relationship with China, um, or the, the war in, in Ukraine. and you know, at business schools we don't necessarily teach about all those things because a lot of them haven't been on the table in decades, in some cases. And so . We then we, I thought this would be really interesting to go to Washington and kind of hear from some folks who are active in the, in the thinking about kind of regulation, about legislation, inspecting business, about kind of what the future of capitalism is gonna look like from, from that perspective.

And then we could bring it back and help us think about what was going on at our schools. And maybe share also with folks there, uh, a little bit about, um, what we were trying

to do and how we were thinking about educating future business leaders. And it was great. We had a wonderful day. We learned, I felt like we learned a lot.

And, uh, um, it was really, uh, it, it was really great. And particularly, you know, if you're out on the West coast in Silicon Valley, sometimes our federal government, Washington DC can feel

kind of far away and it was really great to get out there and do some listening, uh, on, uh, in that part of the world.

Jennifer Kamara: And did you feel like you are bringing Topics from that into the curriculum.

Jon Levin: I think we, there's, there's no question. We are, I mean, one change that I've seen in at, at Stanford and, and it, and it may well be true in other business schools today, is I see more interest among our students today in the public sector and public leadership than I can ever remember seeing here at, at Stanford in the past, after, you know, many years being on the, on the faculty.

I mean, you're an example, you went to the Harvard Kennedy School, of course is in

parallel with your, uh,

with your business degree. And, um, you're not alone in doing that. Um, I think it's a great thing. I think it's actually just a wonderful thing that students would be coming to a business school and they'd be thinking about what is my path to having, uh, impact in the world to serving and so forth.

And, and maybe they're not gonna go into. We do have a student right now who's running for Congress, but um, that might not be a typical path. Uh, but to think

so in my career,

Jennifer Kamara: know, there's no typical

Jon Levin: yeah, I could bring those skills into the public sector

and you know, it's a, we have an incredible point of pride now 'cause one of our alums is the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.

And that's a

wonderful thing to

Jennifer Kamara: right.

Jon Levin: someone doing, doing, you know, doing

Jennifer Kamara: Rishi, AK

Jon Levin: Another one

is running for president right now. So we've the president of the United States, in fact. So we have, we, you know, it's, it's great to see, uh, our alumni

at,

Jennifer Kamara: who?

Jon Levin: Doug

Bergham is running for, he was just in the debate for the, the G O P debate, uh, last week.

and,

and, uh, he's a incredibly successful entrepreneur and governor of, uh, North Dakota.

Jennifer Kamara: Amazing. Um, yes. I think just as a student of both, I feel like it is incredibly valuable to understand how the policies in government affect the markets and how both are intertwined. it was incredibly valuable for me. In my experience too at G S B, there were some classes that felt more economics or policy, base that were popular.

I see the synergies there and I think that is gonna be a great addition to the program.

I had a fun question. Did Rishi soak visit Stanford on his California vacation? not, you need to give him health for that.

Jon Levin: Was visited Stanford before he became Prime Minister. Maybe I.

Jennifer Kamara: He's gotta come back.

Jon Levin: Uh, I a, a year and a half ago and,

um,

Jennifer Kamara: Oh, nice.

Jon Levin: and came to the, came to the G S B and met with a bunch of people and was, um, and was very impressive, had embodied all of the characteristics that you wanna see in a Stanford G s B alum in terms of intellectual curiosity and engagement and, you know, thinking about, uh, the future.

He was the, at the time, the, the Chancellor of the ex checker, the finance, uh, minister for, for the uk. Um, but we didn't see him on the, uh, on his, on his last visit. So hopefully on his next visit, we'll, uh, we'll get him

to come, to come give a talk to the students.

Jennifer Kamara: Exactly, and promote more public policy interest.

Uh, on this topic, John, I actually wanna talk about free speech and including that as well in the curriculum. So for me, institutions.

I think Are a space for the exploration and debate of ideas and institutions are neutral and it's healthy to be able for students to be able to have conversations with one another where they disagree. And it's all about connecting with one another. And. Honestly, being able to see each other as human beings and learn from one another. We had an incident at law school in March of this year where some students, disagreed with an invited speaker to campus. Uh, I think he was conservative and he had some views on maybe Covid, L G B T Q, um, et cetera, and disrupted his speaking. And, the then dean of the law school, Jenny Martinez, issued a letter and an apology stating that The institution wants to stay, in support of free speech. And I loved, what she said about re we want to ensure that folks reconsider assumptions and biases that we connect and see one another as people and our responsibilities to treat one another with dignity. And she's now, I believe, provost of Stanford. And I know that the law school then included a mandatory, training on free speech. for their students. I'm curious, how are you thinking about this for the business school? I think it pertains, I'm curious to hear your thoughts here.

Jon Levin: so I mean the, the ability to . Freely exchange ideas and to, you know, try out different ideas from different perspectives and to debate them and to question them and to interact with ideas, even ones that are challenging or you might find somewhat offensive. I mean, that is, that is what has to happen on a, on any university campus and protecting that ability is, you know, that that's a, just a fundamental, um,

That's a foundation of any academic institution. And, you know, Jenny Martinez's letter was a great articulation of that because, and you know, it's one of the, the, there have been many great things that's been a, there's a long history of that going back many, many years. The kind of foundations of academic reform, actually some of them go back to Stanford back in the,

more than a hundred years ago.

Um, and, uh, Stanford was a place that . Actually, some of the ideas about academic freedom came from, and tenure came from because we, we had some, um, episodes back in the early days when Jane Stanford was trying to fire faculty and didn't like what they had to say and so forth. And, and that actually was the, the impetus it's, it's appropriate, uh, that Stanford is, is a, you know, should be a leader in this area.

Jenny's memo was wonderful because she pointed out, first of all, that actually there's, there's legal protections for speech, particularly a place like . Like San California, where the First Amendment is essentially the, the, the binding policy on campus. Um, but that's not the main reason to do it. The main reason to do it is because you need to, you need to protect universities as places where you can have an exchange of ideas and where you can kind of explore every angle.

it's also a foundation of inclusion. You try to collect people on campus. Who come from different backgrounds, who have different perspectives, who have different expertise. And part of enabling that mix of people to learn from each other is giving them the opportunity and encouraging them to speak up and share their views, whether they're, they have political differences or they come from, you know, just totally different perspectives come from different countries or what have you.

Jennifer Kamara: Yeah.

Jon Levin: Um, and it's incumbent on us to make that happen at the business school. You know, I start, when I welcome Susan about to do it in two weeks. One of the

things that I tell the students when they arrive is I always, part of my talk is I always talk about exactly this point. And I, the, the, what I tell them is, um, Stanford is a place to be curious and not judgmental.

That's from Ted Lasso actually. So he, he said it first, but um, uh,

Jennifer Kamara: That's great.

Jon Levin: That when you, you're gonna hear, you're gonna be around all these different people. You're gonna hear them say things. There's gonna be, some people say things you just don't like, they land wrong on you. They might upset you, they might offend you.

try to be curious about it. Ask questions, push them on their ideas, but don't jump to conclusions about, particularly about the person and that, you know. So we started that way and. Makes it, what really makes it happen on a campus to sort of be able to have that environment is probably the students and probably the faculty.

It's partly faculty, then going into classrooms and establishing classrooms as places where you can really test ideas and push ideas. And we have some faculty who are incredible at doing that. You probably had some,

Jennifer Kamara: Mm-hmm.

Jon Levin: really good at kind of teasing out different perspectives and making sure that you don't have sort of a, a, a kind of.

Creeping quiet among certain parts of the, the class and, and, uh, you know, as a leader of the institution, you have the responsibility to make crystal clear that this is a core value of the institution and to back it up when there's problems. But it's really a collective responsibility of everyone to kind of make sure that the institution is able to have that kind of openness, uh, to ideas and speech and, and discussion.

Jennifer Kamara: Do you feel like, there will be more training for faculty and students just as a refresher? I.

Jon Levin: Yeah.

Jennifer Kamara: Personally really liked a lot of the trainings in the fall quarter, for instance,

for new students,

and feel like this could be a

Jon Levin: there, there, there,

is. So we've, for a bunch of years have been teaching, uh, done workshops for faculty about, kind of, about managing difficult conversations in the classroom and, and try to help faculty think about

Jennifer Kamara: Hmm.

Jon Levin: either, how do you open up discussions, Or if something goes wrong in a classroom, which you know is happens,

uh,

Jennifer Kamara: happens. Yeah.

Jon Levin: how do you kind of turn that into a learning experience if you can?

I mean, it's, it's hard in the moment, so it's not that you can, you know, a hundred

is not a realistic, uh, batting average for, for kind of doing that. But how do you kind of be prepared for that? We have a new, we actually just put in place it's gonna go for, it'll be in place for next year's incoming class.

'cause we just, the faculty just voted it last spring. We just put in place a new requirement that we called the Engaging with Differences requirement

Jennifer Kamara: Hmm.

Jon Levin: students, which, um, came back for a whole. We had a kind of a whole year of discussion among the faculty and with students and, and, uh, um, uh, other folks at the school a bit.

We actually started from thinking partly about how do you teach students, prepare students to manage in a more diverse workforces in a time of more polarization and contention. And so part of that is sort of managing diverse teams. And, and part of that is actually being able to talk to people, , and have kind of

civil discourse and debate and discussion, uh, disagreement effectively.

Jennifer Kamara: I think that's huge. Being able to have conversations civilly with folks you disagree with, because that's a lot of our world today, and that's the only way we will make actual, real progress and preserve inclusivity.

I.

Jon Levin: And I'll tell you the, the, the part about that, I'm excited about the requirement we're in the process of figuring out exactly what courses and, and activities will satisfy it and kind of what, what will be co-curricular, what will be curricular. And I, I'm, I'm very optimistic about how it's coming together, but the part about it actually, that to me was, um, At least so far, almost the most important part was the discussion that happened last year on the class in, on the campus, partly between students and faculty and hearing what students thought.

And there was actually a tremendous amount of alignment between the students and the faculty, which was incredible. And partly among our faculty. I mean, we have a faculty just like our student population, that their views are all over the place. . People don't appreciate that because like Stanford, they tend to pigeonhole us as, you know, people,

everyone votes in one direction or something like that.

That's not, you know, if I walk outside my office into the fact that that's just not true. In our, in our building, people have all different views actually. And the fact that, you know, last year we got to sit down and probably over, of course to me, spent three hours just talking about some of these issues about diversity on campuses, about speech, about academic freedom.

People had such strong. Views and such passionate views, didn't agree, but really listened to each other. And at the end, we're able to come to an agreement about here's something we can all get behind. We all believe in. Um, it was great. I, I mean, I, we, our, you know, our faculty meetings are private, but

I,

if we'd had a camera in there, I would've been proud to have people see that this is the kind of discussion that can happen, uh, on a, on a, on a campus in, in 2023.

Jennifer Kamara: It does feel like one of the things you need to get this done is folks at the table willing and eager to participate. And that sounds like what you just described. So that is such a nice feeling.

And we're wrapping up soon, so I wanna end with you mentioned you're welcoming these students in two weeks back to campus soon. What do you hope for the year ahead

Jon Levin: well first of all,

I love that. I love, I mean, you probably remember I, the day you arrived on campus. It's my favorite day of the year. I love it when the students

Jennifer Kamara: It's so fun.

Jon Levin: this like, unbelievable. I was just great. Like the beauty of beginning to be on an academic campus is on a, a business school anywhere is you just have this cycle of renewal built into your year, and this is the.

The rebirth part

of the year when everyone comes and like the energy level just goes, you know, to

Jennifer Kamara: I feel like this is the rebirth, and then at the end when we graduate, it's like the Phoenix Rises again from

Jon Levin: So that's that I love too. That's by the way amazing too.

But it's, it's just this, you know,

Jennifer Kamara: Yeah.

Jon Levin: it, I, I sometimes, I always tell people, you know, about, uh, the, um, we had a faculty member at, at, I, I'll come back to your question. We had a faculty member at Stanford a long time ago named John Gardner and,

uh, he was a, he was a, a great faculty member and a real, uh, leader in the world and he started Common cause he was in the, in the cabinet, uh, secretary of, uh, health,

human Welfare back in the, the early seventies, and then taught for many, many years at Stanford.

And he's a great book about on called On Renewal, um,

which is, it, it's kind of about, partly about personal renewal. Like how does, how do you kind of keep renewing yourself as a person and partly about organizational renewal. How do organizations keep from going to seed and, and kind of find new horizons and universities?

I always think reading that book, which I've read many times, like some of that is built in, we get that renewal, um, as part of our structure. So that's, I'm looking forward

to so much. I can't wait to see our students and they're gonna, it's gonna be so much fun. And am I looking forward to this year?

I am looking for, I'm, I'm just looking forward to that. Interactions that we're gonna have. I, it's such a joy after a couple of years of the pandemic, some of the

euphoria of just being together and interacting and being in classrooms is still there and nurturing that feeling of energy and connection and optimism that's big on my list for the year.

And that kind of just, yeah, just that joy basically of being together.

Jennifer Kamara: Yeah,

Jon Levin: incredibly excited about everything that's gonna happen in AI this year. I'm incredibly excited about everything we've been doing around business sustainability. That's gonna be

really great.

Jennifer Kamara: Got a new school.

Jon Levin: we're gonna, you know, we have a new school at Stanford of sustainability and we've been doing a lot of things with them.

Classes and conferences and programs and entrepreneurship. We're gonna offer undergraduate classes this year for the first time at the

Jennifer Kamara: Oh, nice.

Jon Levin: and I'm super excited for that experiment. We're gonna try to rethink. Sort of business education as a part of a broader liberal education.

And, uh, I'm just excited to kind of be around all the, the people at Stanford this year and, uh, see what happens when people start to dream things up.

Jennifer Kamara: That's lovely. I think we'll end there. I think that was beautiful, John, this was so great to have you on. I am also looking forward to seeing all the change in technology and applications that we get to see, and I'm very, very jealous actually. I think the new student energy is so, uh, infectious and I'm, I'm looking forward to that for you too. Thank you so

Jon Levin: I am too. You'll have to come back and visit us on campus at some point this year, Jennifer. So it's, it was really, really a pleasure to get to do this and to to see you and congratulations. Everything you're, that you're doing right.

Jennifer Kamara: Thank you so much.