Q&A with Brad Cook

Footloose

Before you were in Footloose, how did you find out about the film? I was in my senior year at Payson High School and I was in a psychology class. I remember the teacher introduced this new kid, ‘so-andso from Philadelphia, try to make him feel welcome,’ and I remember looking at him and thinking ‘he’s not from here.’ He had the spiky hair, the Chuck Connors high-top tennis shoes and a leather jacket. The next two or three days, he was there and then he never showed up again. About two or three weeks later, the school principal announced that there’s going to be a movie filmed at the high school and we as seniors could be extras if we wanted and we would get $50 a day.

Can you see yourself in the film? You can see me in some group scenes and in the parking lot scene, but there was one sequence from the movie where I really thought I was going to get a lot of film time. The situation was that I was standing next to some students. Kevin Bacon was to walk up the steps behind us and go through the door, and just as he went through, someone was going to say something to him, he would respond and then goes into the door. That was my cue to turn around and walk towards the camera and down the stairs. However, I ended up on the editing floor, forever quelching my movie career...

What was it like filming Footloose? We were kind of milling around on the first day of shooting, and we didn’t even know what the movie name was at that point. We were waiting to get directions, and that kid from the psychology class comes out, and the more I watched him, the more I realized he was more and more of a central feature of whatever movie we’re doing. Turns out, it was Kevin Bacon. (In the movie, his character) comes from some city and moves to a backwater, super religious and conservative town with this backwater high school, and they picked Payson High School to film this thing. He wanted to understand what it would be like to be an outsider, so he spent two or three days going to class and being a high school student so he could play the part better. What was interesting about that movie is that we had no idea at the time of who these people were, and we didn’t realize what kind of a signature movie for our generation it was at the time. I do remember how friendly and approachable the actors were and how fun it was.

Before SUU

What inspired you to play football when you were younger? My first experience with playing organized football was in Athens, Greece. I was born in Utah, but when I was 11, my parents moved us to Saudi Arabia, but on the way, we had a visa problem and got stuck in Athens. While we were waiting for our visa stuff to get worked out, I signed up for little league football at an American Airforce base, and fell in love with it. We finally got to Saudi Arabia and had the school year, and that summer, we came back to Utah. When we were on our way back to Saudi Arabia for the next school year, a similar thing happened. We got back to Greece and I played another year of organized football. From then on, I was just really in love with the game and when we moved back to Utah, I was a sophomore. Athletics was kind of my way to fit in as an outsider at Payson High, and ended up getting a football scholarship at Stanford.

What was it like balancing athletics and academics at Stanford? I won’t lie, it wasn’t easy. I remember my first semester there, calling home and saying ‘Mom, Dad, I don't think I can do this.’ To be a collegiate athlete, it’s almost a full-time job itself, and you have to be super disciplined. It was really challenging, but it was one of those things where once I went through it, I realized that that experience of being surrounded by really talented students just raised my performance.

What drew you to work in other countries before coming to SUU? An early life experience in Saudi Arabia was a defining experience for me, expanding my consciousness and giving me a real affinity for that part of the world. When I ended up going to college, I ended up focusing on the Middle East, and my first job out of college was at the American University in Cairo. I’ve been a satellite to the Middle East all of my life, and I’ve worked in Egypt, I’ve worked in Kuwait and I kind of knew that I wanted to work in higher education. I had a passion and an interest in that part of the world, and that’s what prompted my interest in a Ph.D. in that subject.

What drew you to work at SUU? Before coming here, I was the president of a women’s college in Abu Dhabi, but I had known Mike Benson. We went to the same college at Oxford, and then he became president at SUU… SUU was special to me because of the Shakespeare Festival; as a kid, my parents would bring us down almost every summer. I always had this admiration for SUU as a gem of the Utah System of Higher Education, and when the opportunity came to come and work in this position, it was really hard to say no.

Academics

What does a Provost do? The responsibility a Provost has is academic affairs. We spend our time ensuring that we’re hiring the right type of faculty, that we’re providing development opportunities for them, that we’re creating an educational experience that is sound and solid. We work on accreditation, new programming, and we’re always trying to review the learning outcomes that we want our students to have. I have the privilege to work with a really talented group of administrators and faculty.

What inspired the Festival of Excellence? It started because we end up sending a lot of our faculty across the country and sometimes all over the world to present their ideas, yet we don’t even know about that on our own campus. I got thinking along with some other faculty that it would be great if we could just pause for one day and celebrate the incredible talents and gifts of our faculty and our students and even staff. We just dedicate one day in which we can get to know each other, the ways in which we celebrate and encourage each other… It’s a day in which we celebrate each other, ideas and creativity. We’re probably not that unique with campuses doing this, but we’ve had increasing numbers of presentations and poster sessions, and I think it’s what good universities should be doing. We should provide as many opportunities as we can, for students especially, to develop presentation skills. It’s one of my favorite days on campus.

Talk to me about the formation of the EDGE Program. We didn’t really have a strategic plan when I got here, and I thought as the Provost, it was a really great chance to do a SWOT analysis: strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. One of the strengths that always emerged from those conversations was how much SUU was already doing in applied education, engaged education and experiential education. The faculty involving the students in undergraduate research, community engagement, volunteerism — there’s a whole host of ways in which service learning was being harnessed here… It’s a program that has had some resistance to it, but by and large, students that go through it have been able to use that entrepreneurship idea or their student abroad experience or their undergraduate research project to get a job; that becomes a focus because an employer wants to know how you can differentiate yourself from competitors. It’s been the right thing, and the University has gotten incredible national recognition for it. Often, many students just want the easiest sort of path through, but this is a chance for you to own a part of your education, you get to decide.

Why is integrative and experiential education important? The way we learn, we don’t necessarily learn in siloed ways... We can probably have a better apprehension if we start thinking about how math relates to science, or how science relates to humanities. We could have a course called ‘The Chemistry of Color,’ where we have two faculty that take their curriculum but find a way in which we can integrate more productively.

Going Forward

Describe the digital badges that will be offered next fall? They are a way in which a student can augment his or her degree with between nine and twelve credits. We’ve got six digital badges that we’re getting approved by the Board of Trustees, so students can get a badge in technical writing, social networking, entrepreneurship, data analytics — this is just the start of a lot of different badges. We’ve designed it such a way that students can get the badges within the 120 credits, so it’s not an add-on that will extend the time to graduation or cost more money. Often, employers aren’t sure what to do with a liberal arts degree, and to be able to have that badge or several badges will help these students. The research shows that with these stackable credits, it really increases the earning potential of these students.

What else is new for the fall? We’re developing this really interesting hybrid American Institutions course… Most institutions have three separate courses, but we want a course that is going to be super media-heavy and integrative, so we could bring in experts in history and economics. We’re going to try to weave in the very best thinkers in the world and bring it to bear on this particular course, so it’s not just one person standing up and talking about this stuff. The course is called SUU 1776, and it’s been a great idea from faculty.

Going forward, is there anything you want to bring to SUU? I’m really hoping that this campus can continue to be more global, more diverse, more equitable and more inclusive, and that extends into our academic programs. I’m providing what I’m calling ‘curriculum innovation grants’ to faculty who build new courses or redesign their own that either have a global dimension to them or rework it to consider other books and authors and figures that aren’t just white guys. There are a lot of people that are from diverse backgrounds that can shed as much or more light on a particular field if we just open up our curriculum and consider other types of works to expand our horizons. That’s a great goal of mine, that we continue to foster diversity and inclusivity. The global dimension is always near and dear to my heart.

What do you love most about SUU? I love SUU for so many reasons, but one of them is it’s a place that is willing to try things. We’re small enough and nimble enough that we can do innovative and interesting things. Not all of them work, but that’s okay, because that’s an important message to our students: it’s okay to fail. In fact, failures can be our greatest teachers. So if we’re not willing to experiment and risk and innovate, how can we expect our students to? We have faculty that are coming here because of that ethos, because of that spirit, and they’re willing to use technology in interesting ways, they’re willing to work together in interesting ways. I think we’re changing the academy in really cool ways in southwest Utah; people wouldn’t imagine that it’s such a dynamic place, and I’m very proud of that.