Matt Harmon: It's time for our end of the semester wrap up with university President Dr. Patrick Leahy. I'm faculty member Matt Harmon, enjoying the friendly confines of the studios of WMCX 88.9. This is Mom with Weekly. It's time for episode number 55. Thanks as always for listening A little bit after 12 o'clock on what we will call May Day. It is the 1st of May and it is fantastic to be back with you here on WMCX with our podcast. It is Mom with Weekly and we are good to be joined by Luke Moleski, who is the WMCX station manager. He is running the board for us today. I'm a faculty member, Matt Harmon. We are graciously joined once again by university president, Dr. Patrick Leahy for what has become now the norm being here in WMCX doing our Monmouth Weekly podcast live and getting the word out about what's taking place. Last time we spoke President Leahy, we were talking about a great many things mid-March, kind of the midpoint of the semester now at the end part of the semester. And I remember when we were on, I think I played a Sting Bruce Springsteen song leading into where we were. We just heard from Mr. Springsteen coming out of our break and leading into our podcast, which leads right into our first topic today, which was the American Music Center Awards that took place just what, two weeks ago, a week ago on campus? Patrick Leahy: How about last Saturday? Matt Harmon: Last Saturday. Not even a week. Patrick Leahy: Not even a week. It's amazing how much happens in six weeks on this campus since we were together last how nice to be with you and with Luke are in Game Host often at the basketball games as well Matt Harmon: As picked up on who he Patrick Leahy: Was. I saw him right away. I said, Luke, you're our in-game host at the basketball games. He does such a great job. So Saturday night was an unbelievable night at Monmouth University. If I may say I led up to it saying, Matt, that we were going to have in one place Bruce Springsteen, Patty sfa, Nils Lofgren, Stevie Van Zt, all in one place, and they were just the presenters. Have to think about that. So you add our honorees to that mix. Joe Eley, Tom Morello, smokey Robinson, John Fogarty and Emmi Lou Harris, and then two other of our previous honorees came back just because they wanted to. Jackson Brown and Darlene Love all of those individuals were in the House Pollock Theater on Saturday night for our third annual American music honors. It is quickly becoming one of the, frankly more prestigious recognition events in American music. And that's just not my opinion. I would say that I'm the president of the university and the chair of the board of the Center for American Music. So I would say that, how about this? Rolling Stone wrote an article, national article a couple days after and said that this event is already on par with the induction ceremony of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and this is just our third year. So just fantastic. Matt Harmon: Certainly makes you feel good about things, right? Patrick Leahy: Can you tell Matt Harmon: What was your favorite of the night? Patrick Leahy: Okay, so at one point after the nice things are said about the honorees and then the honorees accept the award, they walked to Center stage to play one of their songs and Bruce Springsteen and John Fogerty teamed up to sing Proud Mary. So that was the highlight of the night for me. Matt Harmon: And this is your land as well, Guthrie. Patrick Leahy: Yeah. At the end, this Land is Your Land. That song that we all remember learning as kids and maybe not fully understanding what it talks about. That was the last event, the last song of the night. And every one of those individuals I mentioned was invited up on stage to sing a piece of it. One of the verses. It was just amazing. It was an amazing night, not just for three reasons. One, it just establishes the Center for American Music on a national stage and brings great recognition of Monmouth University, et cetera. Great. Number two, it is a fundraiser. So we raised a record amount of money to help pay for the operations of the Center for American Music. Remember, the goal here is to make that a totally self-sustaining effort here at Monmouth. And then the third though was the people who we collected from around the country, a couple cases of the world here on campus to participate in that event. And then of course the subtle, not so subtle. Second reason is to expose them to Monmouth University and without fail, everybody who comes to this campus has experiences. The Great Hall and then the walk through the center of our campus in the evening. And then the experience at Pollock Theater says, this place is unbelievable. In fact, they sometimes say, how come more people don't know about it? And that's what we're working on, trying to figure out how more people can find out about what we're doing here at Monmouth. Matt Harmon: Third or fourth year that this is Patrick Leahy: Third year. Matt Harmon: Third year, Patrick Leahy: Just third year. Matt Harmon: And if I remember correctly, when we had Bob Santelli on at some point during the course of our series here, he had talked about we're kind of just scratching the surface of it. What's the next step maybe is what I would say to this. Patrick Leahy: We already have started dreaming up what the fourth annual American Music honors is going to look like. The big debate always, Matt, is should we move it out Pollock Theater? Because we only have 715 seats or whatever it is in Pollock, and we'd like to make it available to a much wider group. We could sell 10 times the number of, well maybe a hundred times the number of tickets, quite frankly. But Bruce really likes the intimacy of it and it's really, really special thing. And the knee jerk reaction would be, okay, how do we make this bigger and more commercial and everything else? And I don't think that's what we want to do with it. So what is next is perhaps the hope that we might broadcast it. So we do tape it in television, broadcast ready quality and PBS picks it up, runs it, runs it for us. The next step would be is there enough content here to sell it to somebody so that we might generate more resources to invest in the center and have it shown on a much wider platform. And I think it's pretty clear anyone who's been there that the content is worthy of that. It's just having to do the work to try to find that broadcast partner. I think that's what the next goal is. Matt Harmon: Guessing if Bruce says, I like the intimacy of Pollock, you pretty much stay in Pollock, right? Until maybe you can get him to change his mind. Patrick Leahy: I mean he's so incredibly supportive and collaborative in everything we do. But yes, the short answer is if you get a sense from him that this feels right to him, then I think we run with it for a while until we decide together that maybe we need a new venue. But I don't want to leave the campus. So the next venue would be the Ocean First Center, which would be great, as you well know, is an incredible venue and could be created in a wonderful concert like venue. But you just lose some of that intimacy and I don't think we're ready to lose that yet. Matt Harmon: So I'm looking at the headline from the Rolling Stone article. Bruce Springsteen Jams with John Fogerty, Tom Morello, smokey Robinson, and American Music honors a supremely lucky crowd of just hundred and 14 people witnessed live event on par with annual rock and roll hall of fame induction ceremony. There's no chance we could go to seven 15 number of people. Patrick Leahy: I think we could do that. Matt Harmon: Seven 15. Patrick Leahy: I think we could do that. Matt Harmon: We can't squeeze one more person in there. Patrick Leahy: I think we could do that. Matt Harmon: And you know who I'm talking about. Patrick Leahy: I think we could do that, but it must be somebody who's there working the event. Matt Harmon: That's fine. Patrick Leahy: Yeah. How about that? Maybe we can include one more person and do it under the rubric of he's working the event, trying to the event, try to get content for the next podcast, content Matt Harmon: For the podcast. That sounds perfect. I'm glad that we are recording this because I can play this in March and say, Hey, remember what we talked about? Patrick Leahy: I mean, let me just say one thing too. One of my goals in this, and we've even talked about it already, is I want to make it available. It's a fundraiser, so that's why that's the limited number of seats that we can make available to the campus community. But my goal is to find a way, even in Pollock, to open up the number of seats for students because we had a dozen or so students either working the event or there as my guest, I'd like to make that 50 or a hundred students so that students knew if they came to Monmouth and they had access to an event like that, that many more of our students would be able to enjoy it. We just are the tension between making it available to students and raising the money to help pay for it so we don't have to use resources from the university to pay for it. There's a little tension there, but I think given the way this is maturing, next year we'll have many more seats available for students and their faculty mentors. Matt Harmon: No pressure here, but six weeks ago when we spoke, we had said about a year, maybe a little bit in change, the building will open up. What has been done in six weeks is unbelievable to think how much work has been done. Patrick Leahy: Have you noticed that? Yeah. Matt Harmon: Crazy. Patrick Leahy: Yeah, knock on wood. I don't know if our audience can hear that, but it is on time and on budget. The hope is to have it ready to open in spring of next year. So still on track. Matt Harmon: You good to change topics, talk about something else. Alright, let's roll into something else that we discussed in March. Can talk a little bit more about in May the, I don't know what three year process of becoming, retaining, I should say middle states accreditation is over. I'm sure the next process will start quickly, but that is a huge hurdle cleared and by all indications, we can talk a little bit more about what the middle states process is, but by all indications, Monmouth it sounds like did as well as the school has ever done in the upcoming report Patrick Leahy: We did. It's a major caution because we're only basing that off of the review of the visiting team. They have to take their recommendations to the commission in June and the commission makes the final decision about our re-accreditation. We're not concerned about reaccreditation, but we'd like them to endorse the report that the visiting team is going to propose because that report is off the charts good Matt Harmon: If I'm reading right, zero recommendations and zero requirements. Patrick Leahy: So people who don't know how this works, I mean requirements, let's think of it as the most significant findings would be a requirement like you have to fix this or else we didn't have any of those. The next level or recommendations, which is you should fix these and we're going to come back in a year or so and make sure that you fixed them. Matt Harmon: Fair enough. Patrick Leahy: None of those. The next level is what they call collegial advice, like other respected administrators and educators from other schools make up that visiting team and they see things and say, Hey, I see what you're doing and I have some advice or some recommendation or I should use advice, some collegial advice around ways that we do it at our place or other places that we visited. You might consider this great. I think we basically take or take it or leave it, whether we take that advice, that's just the interest of a peer review, trying to make recommendations that could be Matt Harmon: Helpful, Patrick Leahy: Implemented for a continuous improvement, seven of those. And then the best is to get a commendation across the different standards. And we were hoping for a few and got 12 commendations. So I've been positioning as 0 7 12. And if that holds, again, have to be very careful. The commission has the final say in June, but if that holds, we will have sailed through middle states reaccreditation, which is a wonderful thing. It should be an endorsement of the work that you and I and Aaron Ferguson and everybody else here at Monmouth knows happens day in and day out. It's just nice to have third party validation of that Matt Harmon: Five year, eight, Patrick Leahy: Eight, thank goodness. But the next cycle kind of almost starts. So yeah, we do away. Yeah, I mean we will follow up on the collegial advice just to be professional and say, we thought about this, we considered implementing it and we did or didn't, and then we'll do sort of a midpoint and then we don't go through major middle states review for eight years, which is a good thing because as you pointed out, we start two or three years before that formal review to get the campus ready. And so a lot of people have been involved in this for a very long time and maybe it's appropriate for me to recognize three key people. Patrick Walden, who's one of our professors, B Rogers who's one of our administrators, and Christine Bennel, another administrator all under the watchful eye of our provost and senior vice president Rich Vit who started a couple years ago. This process started so long ago, Matt, that Rich was one of the original co-chairs on the middle states preparation team, and then he was placed in the provost job on an interim basis and had to sort of walk away from that and then named the full-time provost and had to walk away entirely and name somebody else. So you have those three people under Rich's watchful eye as someone who understands the process. I think what led to this really positive outcome, Matt Harmon: Collegial advice, continue with podcast was that in there, continue with live. I like when I make you laugh because you never quite know after five years of doing this, what exactly I'm going to say to Patrick Leahy: You, take the collegial advice, take the podcast to the next level, next level. Make sure that the host, Dr. Harmon gets into the American Music Honors event so that he can report firsthand on it Next year, Matt Harmon: 7 15, 7 15, that's the number you just said you're going to be thinking of 0 0 7 12. I'm going to send you random emails during the course of the year that just says Patrick Leahy: 7 1 5 7 1 5. Just so I forget, right Matt Harmon: Halfway through our May edition of the Monmouth Weekly podcast University President, Dr. Patrick Leahy, faculty member Matt Harmon, Luke Moleski, our engineer today, Dr. Aaron Ferguson, overseeing everything in the studios here of WMCX 88.9. Switch gears a little bit. We say a couple of weeks away from commencement, which is obviously one of the highlights of the entire semester. And over the course of the last couple years, Monmouth has brought it back to campus. I remember the days having read the names for the better part of a decade when it was one big ceremony at the PNC Art Center now broken up into a couple of different smaller ceremonies, was involved with one, my oldest son graduated in 2023, and it becomes a little bit more intimate. It's more work I guess on some regards because it's multiple ceremonies in a given day, but more of a, I'd almost say a mammoth feel to it because it's little bit smaller and a little bit more intimate. And here on campus at the Ocean First Bank Center, Patrick Leahy: All of what you just said is by design. When I arrived and I started feeling how beautiful and special this campus is, it just didn't feel right to me that we would put undergraduates through this incredible experience, I hope, life transforming experience here on this incredible campus and then graduate 30 minutes up the road. And what is a perfectly nice PNC Bank Arts Center. I'm not saying it's not a nice facility, but 30 minutes up the road. And so when I arrived, I said, let's ambition to find a way to bring it back to campus, and all the legitimate logistical issues arose. Well, we don't have enough space for one large ceremony. We were just working through that, Matt, and you'll recall Covid, that the pandemic came and we knew our students so desperately, even in the midst of Covid, wanted to have an in-person event rather than a virtual event. So we held on, held on, held on, and then when the governor, you'll remember allowed us to have 500 people at an event outside, we did nine ceremonies in three days outside to try to accommodate that. And we learned some things at the time. So when things settled, we decided we could do it here on campus, but we'd have to break it into three ceremonies. The Ocean First Bank Center is not large enough for everyone at once. So we break it down into three ceremonies and a couple of things we've learned in petitioning the students and their families. First of all, you've sat through commencement ceremonies before. Matt Harmon: They're tough, they're Patrick Leahy: Tough. Everybody, every parent loves to watch their son or daughter cross that stage. It's having to watch everyone else's son or daughter walk across that stage, which gets tedious. So one of the things we've heard is that the Ocean First Bank Center is a perfect venue when we break it into, let's call it 300 or so graduates at a time, and then their families, and it fills up the lower bowl and we can use the jumbotron really well and all that. So we do three in a day by design, and the feedback we get has been very, very good. I mean, I'm not saying everybody loves it. I'm sure some people would suggest, why don't you just do one giant one outside in the stadium? You could. But then that opens up a whole host of logistical problems trying to do it outside. And I don't just mean rain, I'm talking about the wind. You know how the wind can blow here. I Matt Harmon: Remember the one year that it was outdoor and it was windy as anything. I was reading names and students would come up, they give you their card with their name and it would just fly away. Patrick Leahy: Yeah, yeah. So I just feel like we have the place, we have the best arena for an institution like us anywhere around, frankly, around the country. Why not use it? So that's what we do and I'm looking forward to it. I think I've said to you before, I have the unbelievable privilege. This will be like my 70th commencement ceremony that I've been a part of. I've only been to president of University 13 years, so why is that? Well, four years is a graduate, one an undergraduate one here, three undergraduate ones a summer commencement, a winter commencement, the nine one year in Covid, seven the following year in Covid. Add all those up. And I've had a chance 70 ish times to sort of preside or participate in a commencement ceremony. And I always say they never get old the energy when those graduates show up in the Ocean First Bank Center and the parents are all screaming and clapping and they're yelling for each other and the students are looking for their parents up in the crowd, that never gets Matt Harmon: Old. You know why I think that's important to follow up with is that you have four children. You have experienced a couple of graduations already, so you still are in that spot still going through it with two that at some point will graduate college. You still know what that's like to be a parent sitting on the other side of it. Patrick Leahy: And I always say that actually at the ceremony that I know what you parents are going through. I mean, I really know what you parents are going through. The line I always use, and you've maybe heard it a bunch of times, is there's a great irony in life, and that is when raising kids, the days are incredibly long, but somehow the years are incredibly short and there's no time with that. Sentimentality is more prevalent, I think, than at a college commencement ceremony when all of a sudden the parents are watching their son or daughter across that stage and wondering, what, didn't we just bring them home from the hospital? What the heck is going on here? And Matt Harmon: Also a lot of, I wonder what's next? Patrick Leahy: And then it becomes, I wonder what's next? And so because I've lived that myself, I know how they feel. Yeah. Matt Harmon: Coming up second week of May 2nd, full week of May is when graduation will be here on campus, which leads into a class leaving, which means there is another class coming. We can transition in the remaining few minutes that we've got here talking about, I know last year, tough year, right? With, and most schools at higher education, certainly at the private level, and I think a lot of public schools would say the FAFSA situation was very difficult to navigate for colleges to figure out what kind of aid, because so much of where a student is thinking about going is predicated on the financial implications of it. I went through it last year with my second son who is up at Springfield College in Massachusetts. We felt pretty good about it, but we're still waiting on some of the documents to come in and say, alright, it, it's X minus Y. This is what it's going to cost you. And for a lot of people, that process took way longer. I know that has in theory been fixed for this year, but I don't know that the challenges in some ways have stopped for a lot of schools at higher education. Patrick Leahy: I mean, as you point out, I think that particular challenge has in fact been fixed, but that doesn't ameliorate the challenges of enrolling a class today. It's just we've been talking about it for years. It's going to get more challenging. The demographics are shifting. You add to that now concern among some 18-year-old high school graduates as to whether they see value in college that's having a material effect on the number in particular of young men who are enrolling in college. It's a challenging time to enroll a class. I'm not going to kid you, especially in the northeast here. I mean maybe if you were in the south or southwest where the population's generally still growing, it's a little bit easier. So some of the policy challenges have been fixed, but the market challenges are with us this year, next year, every year we continue to work together, Matt. So it's going to be a challenging thing, but knock on wood, again, I'm feeling pretty good about where we are. It's going to be the, once again, probably the finest class that we've ever enrolled. When you look at the profile, the academic preparedness, our commitment to access, et cetera. The question now is what is the number going to be, and I'm not sure we know that yet. Today is the national deposit deadline, as you know, May 1st. So every hour, well, I'm sure more frequently they're pressing the refresh button to see how many deposits are coming in, so I'll have more to report at our next podcast as to exactly where things land, but I feel pretty good about it given the challenges that we're facing. Matt Harmon: Without naming anybody that you would have this conversation with, I'm sure you talk several times over the course of a year, month, week, whatever timeframe you want to get in there with leadership at other colleges and universities, this is a nationwide issue. I know you said, all right, take the school in the southwest part of the country. Clearly in the south it's a little bit of a different element, but the corner that is Mid-Atlantic northeast region, if you're a private university and has it really trickled down to the public schools now where everyone is kind of probably having the same conversation and everyone in admissions across the country today is hitting that refresh button to see did we get from seven 14 to seven 15? There's a subtle hint in there with seven 15 and where are we going to go from here? This isn't a mama thing. This is a geographic region thing for sure, and probably more countrywide than anything else. Patrick Leahy: And think about it if it's a demographic thing, a market thing, and that is that there are just generally speaking, fewer high school graduates, number one, fewer high school graduates, demographics, and then you add to that fewer high school graduates who are looking to matriculate in a four year college. Now you have a much smaller pool with all these schools in the northeast hungry for students. That is good and bad. Let me tell you why it's good, because if you are a student, the price of education is being driven down. I mean, we talk about we're a private institution, our list price is significant. Nobody pays our list price. So once we discount through merit-based aid to reward students for their excellent academic work and through need-based aid to try to help the parents make it affordable, we knock that list price way down in half. I mean, frankly, much more comparable to some of the public schools that don't do the discounting like we do. That's a good thing for the consumer. It's a great thing for us in terms of our ability to be accessible to families that might not otherwise afford it. It just puts a ton of pressure on our ability to operate the school. So when push comes to shove, every organization on Earth save for maybe the US federal government who deficit spends all the time, every other organization on Earth has to make sure that that they're bringing in revenues is equal to or exceeds that which they are spending expenses. So Matt Harmon: At least get to zero basically. We got to figure that out. Patrick Leahy: I mean, you got to figure that out. People often say to me, do you think that running a school is running a business and I know what they're getting at. I mean, there's value to running a school that is not captured in most businesses. And so our goal is not to generate resources the way you're required to do in a business to return to shareholders, but if we want to be viable for the long run, we have to make sure that revenues exceed expenses and we're not spending money that we don't have. So in that regard, it is, I guess like running a business. You know what I mean? I just don't like to think of it as such because we manage and we measure what we do here way beyond just our p and l. Matt Harmon: I'll close this part of it, and then we will finish with a quick athletic update, which we always like to do. If you're a Monmouth and you said someone goes on the website and looks at total cost all in whatever that exact number comes out to be, but to your point, that number isn't really the number. How does a school like Monmouth put themselves in a position where the normal everyday person who might want to say, how much does Monmouth cost? And the first place they're going to go is Google, or in today's world, AI or the website, and they're going to see a number that's going to scare them right away. How does a mammoth position themselves to make sure that people know that's not really the number because it's sticker shock is what it is? Patrick Leahy: Yeah, yeah. The first mantra would be just apply. Just apply. Let us do some work. It doesn't take that much to apply. If you have any interest at all in Monmouth, just apply. Let us do some work and we'll come back and show you what the net price is. And I think we just have to continue to get people thinking that private institutions all over the country do in fact discount to try to make their unique educational proposition as affordable as possible. We do it here, as does every other private school in the country save for the medallion schools whose brands are so good that they don't have to discount their price. But the rest of us are looking to shape a class by trying to reward, as I said, the students who deserve aid because of their great academic work, bring those kind of students here for you faculty members to teach and try to be as accessible as possible by delivering need-based aid. When you put that all together, our net price is way, I mean, like I said, it's almost half. It's about half of our list price is Matt Harmon: Finish with this. I know two quick things before we wrap up. One athletics had their annual awards banquet just the other day. I am reading this from the monmouth hawks.com website, 51 Monmouth Junior and senior student athletes named to s Alpha Sigma Honor Society, which means they receive a varsity litter in their sport. They're a junior or above and they've earned a 3.5 or higher. GPA Monmouth has 51 students that were recognized among other recognitions that took place. But that one from the idea, and I know this is extremely important to you. One, your son is a member of the basketball team. Two, you're a huge fan of what goes on athletically. And three, most importantly, the term student athlete has a lot of meaning at a school like Monmouth, Patrick Leahy: And that's evidence of it right there. I mean, to be that successful in the classroom and then to be as competitive as our teams are on the field of play is evidence of the fact that we still take, even in a very dynamic collegiate athletics environment, we still take and will take seriously the idea that you are a student first, an athlete second, and you can integrate those two in a way that could create a life transforming experience for you. Matt Harmon: Spring sports not quite wrapping up, they'll go literally to the end of May. Graduation will have come and gone, and you'll have sports like softball, baseball, track and field still going on. Spring is always interesting here at Monmouth because in some ways not meant disrespectfully. It's a challenge because a sport like a baseball or softball, how are you going to compete with teams that play in a much better climate in January and February to get yourself ready for the season? But I know like men's lacrosse, huge win over the University of Delaware during the course of the last couple weeks, and I know baseball's still alive to potentially see if they can sneak their way into the CA tournament. It's been another great athletic year overall. Patrick Leahy: I mean, you mentioned that Monmouth men's lacrosse win over Delaware. I mean, Delaware's a perennial national power. I mean, they're often ranked in the top 20. We got a chance to play them, took 'em to double overtime, won that game, and that game was broadcast live on SNY, one of the 70 count 'EM 70 broadcasts that we were able to put on television this year in major recruiting markets up and down the East coast, many of which you announced did a few. I did a few. So to have a great win like that, an exciting win, that could be the kind of win that propels our mental cross program, the ca is a very tough lacrosse league. We knew that going into it. Same thing in baseball, as you said there, Southern teams, they just have access to better weather athletic facilities all year that we don't have. But baseball, as you said, hopefully they could sneak into the postseason, but even if they don't, you know how proud I am that they went to Washington DC and swept the Georgetown Ho. Matt Harmon: I know that was a big one for you. Patrick Leahy: My alma mater, three straight. They have wins against, they beat Villanova on the way down there. I think they have wins against Pitt in the a CC. They have their first ever wins against the College of Charleston, Matt Harmon: And by the way, beat up on Princeton and Rutgers. Patrick Leahy: Oh, I was just going to say, and not to say, not to mention a big 10 opponent in Rutgers. Beat 'em handily, I think, and Princeton. So they've had a really good year. I mean, you play so many games in baseball. It's hard to put, how many games do they play? 60 or something like that. I Matt Harmon: Mean, they're 44 in right now. Patrick Leahy: Oh, 44 in, so 60 games maybe. But those are marquee wins for us, and this is evidence that we don't hide from anyone. We'll play anybody, and we often play those games up successfully. Matt Harmon: Did you call one of those games? Were you on the Rutgers or Princeton game? Luke? Luke: I was actually in here board oping. The Rutgers game. Matt Harmon: The Rutgers game. Luke: So yeah, I got to listen to it and yeah, a great game by moot. They absolutely destroyed them. It really wasn't even close throughout any point of the game. Matt Harmon: Always nice to beat an in-state Patrick Leahy: Team for sure. But an in-state team that's playing in the Big 10, I mean, that's fantastic. Matt Harmon: Finished with this. I think it's next at the end of the month, sometime over the course of the next couple of weeks, the annual get together to honor those that have been with the university for a delineation of different years, and those that are retiring, some awards that get given out, that's kind of, that's the commencement for staff and faculty that takes place at the end of every academic year. Patrick Leahy: That's a good way to think about it. We try to do it after commencement when the traditional academic year is complete before the end of our fiscal year, which is June 30th, and recognize everyone who's been here. I think we started 10 years, Matt Harmon: 10, Patrick Leahy: 10 years, 15, 20, 25, all the way up occasionally. I don't know if we have one this year, but occasionally we hit 50 years of service to Monmouth and our students. It's a great opportunity for us just to pause for a minute, and I hope convey to the faculty and staff here that this place wouldn't do. It's able to do without them, and we try to do that every year at May before the end of the fiscal year. Matt Harmon: I hope that come the start of next semester, we'll get you back in here to WMCX. We could maybe incorporate Luke. He could be in Game Host and he could be Mammoth weekly host. Patrick Leahy: I like it. Matt Harmon: Sounds great. Patrick Leahy: What do you think, Matt Harmon: Luke? We could pop him on the air every once in a while. Patrick Leahy: Yeah. I love the way you kicked it to him for a little student perspective on Matt Harmon: Well, I know that because Rutgers game, he's in my advanced sports broadcasting class, and I thought he was on one of those games. I was wrong, but he was bored ing and he will be the returning general manager of WMCX. Fantastic. Luke: I will be back next year. I can't wait. Matt Harmon: Fantastic. Patrick Leahy: What a great job you do. Matt Harmon: The gray hairs will continue on. Dr. Ferguson's head with Luke back as general manager President Lehe, thank you so much for coming over here, spending some time with us here at the radio station. Always look forward to catching up and doing this, and I love that The last now three episodes, you can always go back and listen to 'em. They go up on all the podcast platforms. They'll be published over the course of the next 24 hours. But the live element and implementing students such as Luke is something that we've talked about for a long time, and as you said, thinking of ways to continue to get the message out of what makes Monmouth really special. I think this is a great way to do it, so appreciate your time and effort towards that. Patrick Leahy: It's such a delight for me, and I always say kudos to you, Matt. It was your idea initially to do this during Covid and it's been your energy to sustain it for the last, what, five years or so? Matt Harmon: Yeah, five years. Patrick Leahy: I know it's dropped from weekly to monthly to a little bit. We don't want to overburden our listeners, but it's been your energy and enthusiasm that has kept this going, so I'm really grateful to you. Thank you. Matt Harmon: Our technical assistants, always a thank you to Eric Reher. Dr. Aaron Ferguson, student advisor to WMCX, Luke Moleski here today running the board for University President, Dr. Patrick Lehe. I am faculty member Matt Harmon. Thanks so much for listening to us here on Monmouth Weekly. Be back soon. Enjoy what may brings graduations, commencements awards, and a look ahead to the next academic year, which comes very, very quick. We say so long here on May 1st. Thanks again for listening to us here, WMCX 88.9 and Monmouth Weekly.