Yeah

... um, and it wasn't just during my presidency.

I'd say all through kind of my climb up, you know, the administrative ladder, there were two audiences that were very, very loud in my ear.

One was the students, and the students were like, "Our needs are not being met.

We don't have the classes we want.

You don't have the degrees that we want.

We're going into debt." I mean, throughout my career, I have s- seen countless students sleeping in their cars, can't keep the food pantry stocked because the cost is so, so, so high, right? That's tough.

Okay

It's real.

It's real.

It's 100% real.

I'm sorry.

I'm sorry.

And I know.

And yet, I'm with you.

damn,

So which role has taught you the most about yourself?

Truthfully, I guess it would probably be this last role of kind of entrepreneur founder.

In my 20s, I thought that my PhD was the hardest thing I would ever do.

You know, and I graduated my PhD when I was 27.

And I thought I have just done the hardest thing I will ever do.

I have just, you know, faced my darkest nights and shadows.

And here we go.

Looking ahead, right, I would like to know, how do you think education will change over, like, the next decade?

But what did that make her? American, as in 100% American, or something else?

That was really the moment where I realized I have to live in that hyphen because I don't fit in either homeland, and there are a lot of hyphenated people like me, and so we can create our own homeland inside this tiny orthographic mark.

For her, the phrase living in the hyphen helps make sense of a life in America where you belong and you don't belong simultaneously.

People with hyphenated identities say, "Actually, no, this is meant to connect, not divide." And this is meant to connect to create something new.

To say, "Look, I'm not a type of American that is Japanese or a type of Americans that is Chinese, but I am Chinese American.

I am African American.

I am Iranian American.

I am a different type of American."

What did you start to notice that others weren't seeing?

You know, I started to see that increasingly the systems that are built to support society are actually in many cases harming us.

And the most clear examples of that actually came when I was studying in the Middle East and I was studying human trafficking.

And I found that paradoxically, the policies that were designed to prevent human trafficking were actually resulting in more human trafficking taking place.

So I'll give you an example.

the policy set for the United Arab Emirates was to reduce trafficking, the directive was given to tighten the borders and double the number of police.

But what happened was that when the borders were tightened, you still didn't address the fact that there was a demand for labor and there were people who, due to poverty and challenges, were being forced to move.

Now, how do cultural systems shape how people understand themselves?

here on the edge of the river that her journey with horses began.

No sooner had we, you know, parked and gotten out of the car, and suddenly I hear this like heart-pounding sort of thunder of hoofbeats.

And I'm like, what is that? And they're just growing louder and louder and louder.

And I stand up, and I turn right to left, trying to find where the noise is coming from.

And out of the sort of woods clearing comes this group of women, and they are just pounding forward on these most incredible horses I'd ever seen.

And I'm seeing these horses and these women and they're riding the horses and they're leaning forward.

Arms are around the neck of the horse, scarves billowing in the wind.

She tried to accept the fact that she could never, ever again in her life go back to Iran or her horses.