Katia Passerini’s first academic year as president of Gonzaga University recently ended and yet, there's still plenty of work ahead. As we prepared to start our interview, she was reviewing items on her to-do list.
"I need to get more friends outside of the university. I spend so much time inside the university from morning to evening or traveling for work-related activities that I haven't had the time to enjoy the beauty that Spokane has to offer. I've done a couple of hikes, you know, obviously the theater, Fox Theater and the like, but I know that there is so much more," she said.
She was preparing for her first drive across the Cascades to Seattle and, soon, to welcome the Egyptian World Cup team to campus. Gonzaga is a base camp for the Egyptian side as it prepares for its three matches in Seattle and Vancouver.
Passerini mentioned that she had recently given a presentation at a Rotary meeting in which she talked about convincing more of the university’s students to stay in Spokane after graduating.
This interview was edited for length and clarity.
Katia Passerini: About 2,000 students graduate between undergraduate, graduate master education, and then law school, and we know that about 25% of that number remain in Spokane. We would like to continue to retain them, and so what I've asked all the great business leaders that I had in front of me is to think about opportunities to create pathways for employment for young graduates that maybe might be wanting to start an experience in Spokane. They might then decide to explore the rest of the country or the rest of the world.
We have a number of graduates that always go in the Peace Corps and other type of volunteering across the world. But what we know is that some of them at some point come back and they come when they are ready to have a family. They come back and they find Spokane to be a great place to raise children, and as you might know from Forbes Magazine about two, three weeks ago, Spokane was rated one of the top 20 cities in America to retire to. But I want to get them a little earlier than retirement.
DN: Why is it so important to get more than 25% or whatever the number is?
KP: Because they contribute back what they've learned to the community, so while we're happy that they go and spread their wings everywhere, there is a lot more that we can do for our community here.
We have done a study recently through our business school of the economic impact of a university like Gonzaga to the eastern Washington economy and we found that about $750 million is our impact in this region.
Our next step is to try to assess the impact in the whole Washington state and beyond. But that means that there are jobs being created, startup opportunities, contribution to civic engagement because our students are in the arts, in engineering, in business. So there are a lot of opportunities to give back to the community and I would love for them to consider giving back to Spokane, which is a place where I think they have received a lot because their education is not only inside these walls.
Many of our students volunteer in town, Catholic Charities and a lot of other volunteering opportunities with our Center for Civic Engagement and so continuing that pathway of giving back, it's incredible.
DN: Switching gears. What are the areas your university is delving into as AI? It's something that you're passionate about and interested in. You have an institute about that. As AI is evolving so quickly, what's Gonzaga's role in helping to promote it, regulate it, that sort of thing?
KP: Yes, regulate it. It's an interesting question.
The first thing with any technology that is exploding is you need to understand it, and you sort of have to follow the wave. There is what's called the Gartner Hype Cycle. Any emerging technology, at the very beginning there is a boom, everything becomes AI, even things that are not AI, and then there is a period of stabilization.
I think AI is a little different because we have had a boom for quite a while and we don't know yet the direction of that stabilization. You might have seen Pope Leo XIV has issued an encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, that talks about actually disarming AI, because of the concern that this idea of replacing human beings, their thinking and becoming an extension of human beings, could have indirect consequences that might displace work and people who do this work.
What we want to do as a university is learn the technology, teach our students who have to do it in the workplace how to use it correctly, but also understand those unintended consequences and help address some of those consequences.
For example, work is one that I can mention. You can see that in computer science, for example, a lot of jobs are being cut from major tech organizations. This is not new in technology. Tech organizations now and then, they do a recycling of their workforce because they might need new skills. But certainly we have seen also application in our computer science programs being slowed down because of what we see happening in the market.
But then there are other impacts, for example, on the environment. The request for electricity and energy for the data center that have to support the processing of these AI capabilities, it's escalating at a level that we don't know how to meet that demand yet. So we're working with utility companies like Avista to figure out what is the next step in energy and what type of clean energy could we also continue to develop, so that if we have to support this demand, it's not coming only from energy that is disruptive to the environment.
Here I probably want to mix Pope Leo XIV with Pope Francis and his Laudato Si' encyclical that talks about we need to be mindful in taking care of the environment because this is our common home. So we are looking also at Laudato Si' in the context of environmental sustainability here at the university. That's closely embedded with the way that we look at AI technologies and their development. We have worked a lot on also integrating learning outcomes related to artificial intelligence in our curriculum, especially in the core curriculum, but especially with an eye of differentiating between technology use and understanding and ethical and philosophical grounding of the technology.
DN: So you're illustrating the points of view that there are some people who are really bullish on AI, and there are some people who think it's the worst thing that's ever going to happen. Your personal feelings along that spectrum, where do you fall?
KP: Well, I think technology is a tool and so it really depends on how you use it. I do believe you have to think about the time that it takes for a new medical discovery, we're talking about 10, 15 years from the conception of a new drug to market testing. AI can dramatically reduce that, which means it might treat diseases in a much faster way than we have seen in the past. So there are reasons to be happy about that and be able to embrace that.
But there is also a very real question about people and capabilities and their ability to learn as fast as a tool that continuously is learned because it's using machine learning. So it continues to incorporate information and give you additional information and human brains don't react that fast. We need to understand that we need to recognize the limits and our human limitations and be able to support a different way of even conceptualizing work.
Maybe if AI can do our meeting minutes quickly, well, that's a great opportunity. If we do that in 15 minutes, the other 45 minutes we can spend it into doing something either more pleasant or critical thinking or engagement within a community.
Paradoxically, I think that so much AI will continue to bring people back together in real spaces and not artificial spaces. I'll give you an example on exams. Exams for a long time have always been in writing or a paper. Today, if you don't know if it is a human or a machine, the ultimate Turing test doing that paper, what do you do? Well, you can have oral examinations and you can ask students questions on what they learned, right? So I think there actually is going to be a need to continue to bring people face-to-face to make sure that what we actually think is learned has actually happened.
And same goes for communication. Sometimes I receive emails that I don't know if are written by a human or if they're written by a machine. And so sometimes you just have to pick up the phone and is this what you mean? So I actually think there'll be a return to the people-to-people interaction as AI continues to dominate.
DN: I asked President Katia Passerini why the university created a task force on racism after an event earlier this year on campus.
KP: The task force was created right after events emerged after an event on campus, a celebration of the Harlem Renaissance.
The students continued some events off campus and there was an incident in which racial slurs were used. And as you know, today is a world where social media takes a life on its own. Over the
weekend, there was a lot of comments around what happened and what we did on Monday when the university reopened. We immediately looked at what are the facts, what do we need to do, and what is happening.
What we saw is that there was a lot happening on a third party application, which is called Fizz. It's an anonymous posting app where things take a life on its own. I don't know if you're familiar with the application, but it's an application where you join, and depending on which email address you have, you are part of a community. So every university, based on their email address, is a community and, in an anonymous way, generally students, although you don't know if they're only students because it's tied to an email address that could be assigned also to others, comment on anything that is happening in their campus community.
In some cases, that could be interesting comments on where to go for lunch. And unfortunately, in many cases, they're very difficult comments that borderline misogynist comments, racial, and a lot of, I would like to say, even sexual-based comments. So it's an application that is unfiltered, something that we are not directly in a position to control because it's not affiliated with the university. However, in the aftermath of what happened, we immediately sent a letter to Fizz, first to cease and desist, which, of course, because they are an independent application, they pointed us to their social media policy as a way to complain about posts that are discriminating or infringing their social media policies.
But what we did is we updated our university IT policy to also include that using your own personal email for inappropriate uses is a violation of our IT policies.
The difficulty for us is understanding who is behind those systems. So we have set up ways to at least be able to flag on Fizz messages that we understand violate those internal media policies. And we are considering additional action that we could do.
One major action, though, that I hope that we can take as a community, not only at Gonzaga, but I think across the country, is to teach students the respect of human dignity because anonymous posting is what it is and I think gives a lot of people liberty to say things that they wouldn't say face-to-face. Some of them are inappropriate. Some of them are completely unacceptable and demeaning. So I'm hoping that we can work on continuing to educate everyone in our communities to be respecting others.
DN: Having been around Spokane long enough, we've had task forces on racism and there's a lot of frustration that we don't feel like we're getting anywhere here. Do you sense that with this particular issue on campus?
KP: I do hear that from the students. I would say I was surprised because, for me, everything happened very quickly and I saw a series of issues brought forward that are long-standing. And so it's an important awareness because you can only solve a problem once you're aware of it. But it's the beginning of a journey that we have to do to try to fix processes and procedures that might not be supportive of the students in the way they want to be supportive. And that leads to working together with the students. They give us a number of requests, demands on things they would like to see changed. Some of them could be things that we can work immediately on because they are short-term type of goals. Others, changing culture takes a long time.
Certainly what the task force needs to do and wants to do, and also some more recent organizational changes that I've done to my cabinet structure, is this is going to be at the forefront of everything that we do because we need to get this right.
Now, it might not solve the problem forever. As you said, we have seen times where things happen and that's true for any problem. You have a change in administration, you might have different problems that surface. What we need to make sure is that we do create a pathway of working together towards the solution of some of the problems that were represented to us. Some we can solve directly, some we might need more collaboration with the community here in Spokane, and others we might not be able to solve.
DN: In a month, Gonzaga becomes a member of the PAC-12 Conference. What does that mean for you? How do you sell that to the community that may not be sports fans, that this is important for Gonzaga?
KP: Yeah, this is really important because it is through sports, in this case, the Pac-12, that we're going to spread our wings beyond where we are.
We have been, for 47 years, members of the WCC [West Coast Conference]. We have a lot of institutions that competed with us that are similar to us, private, small institutions, faith-based institutions, Jesuit institutions like us for the most part.
Now we're going to a new territory which is all large state institutions, Boise State, Oregon State, Colorado State, Texas State.
DN: It's the all-state conference.
KP: Yeah, so pretty much you will see Gonzaga State. But kidding aside, I think it's really good to be an outlier in a large state system and bring something new. We are obviously not competing on the football level, but on the basketball level, I think we are very good competitors that we can really play up a lot of those teams and play up at a very great level within the conference and in the nation.
But we can also bring some of the things that our athletes value, such as connection, holistic attention to not only your life as an athlete and on the court, but your life in the classroom and your life in the community. And we can create a lot of other opportunities for teams to engage beyond sports.
Prior to coming to the West Coast, I was in the east coast Big East Conference. Through the Big East Conference, a lot of the universities were doing research competitions, pitch competitions about business ideas, art competitions. We did animation and design competitions so that we were bringing other students with us to the different games. And then during the [Big East basketball] tournament at Madison Square Garden, the team of the research teams in the morning compete for winning a research competition. And then in the evening, they will be in the finals being recognized because they won the research competition. Those are all things that we can do to bring our students to other places.
What I think it's interesting is it's also new cities that we haven't been at yet and so it's also an opportunity to expand Gonzaga beyond our West Coast area.
DN: I know for years and years, there's been talk about Gonzaga as a Big 12 member or as a Big East member, as you just talked about, and you end up staying back out west. In terms of geography, is that the best thing for Gonzaga?
KP: I think it's very important because you need to remember that when you sign up for a conference, you're not signing up only for the basketball games, but you're signing up for all of your sports and it's very challenging.
Our student athletes are students and so we need to be able to put them in a position that they can do well in their academics as well as in their sports. If you have to travel across the country for each sport that you're working on, that brings a big tax, not just on the resources that you have to invest in a sport, but also on the well-being of our student athletes, and so I think this is a great place for us to be and we will play it up to the national level. That's the aspiration.
