Vice President Josh Gladden: Let's first talk about the role of public research universities in society, John. How do the crucial contributions of research universities, and specifically urban research universities like Temple, anchor their communities and regions? 

President John Fry: Well, Josh, you might say it's the worst of times and the best of times. It's been a hard year, with the challenges around uncertainty in federal funding and all the changes in the regulatory environment, so being a public urban research university in the last year has been challenging. On the other hand, what in my mind far outweighs the challenges are both the need and the opportunities. I don't think you could make a stronger case for the importance of a public urban research university in America than right now. Our challenges are so significant across society, across certain sectors. Our opportunities are great in terms of just the advent of AI and how we can begin to push new boundaries and fields. 

And so, yes, there are challenges, but the need for places like Temple University, Temple University Health, together in a city like Philadelphia with such great challenges, are limitless, in my mind. So relevance is sky high, never been more important. And now the question is, even with some of the constraints, how do we push our way forward and deal with these challenges in really practical ways? Because our city, our neighborhoods, desperately, desperately need us. 

Gladden: How do these universities serve as hubs for that flow of knowledge and the social connections that you touched on? 

Fry: Well, I mean, we're convening organizations. We obviously convene students and faculty together, supported by our staff in our communities in all sorts of concentric circles of interests, whether those circles take us to Washington, from a funding standpoint, or to Harrisburg, from a policy and a funding standpoint, to throughout City Hall and the various neighborhoods, which we seem to serve every neighborhood in the city of Philadelphia because we are Philadelphia's public university. We are Philadelphia's public health system. 

And so, we have the honor, the privilege and the responsibility of being convening organizations, and one of the things that I'm very excited about relative to our future is I feel like we're getting better at convening. We're much more externally oriented. Our ability to make partnerships, I think, is growing by the day. We've announced so many in the last several years. And so I think we're really starting to live into that mission of not only teaching, research, service, extension, but also bringing people together, and doing it in nonpartisan ways where everyone gets to have a place, gets to be together, gets to say what they want to say, even if sometimes it's challenging in certain cases. And as a result, I think it provides a forum for people to put their best stuff out there, again, whether it's in a classroom, in a research laboratory, on the quad, in a neighborhood, in all sorts of different parts of the city. 

Gladden: Yeah, that's great. How are you creating an environment for innovation at Temple to support your research goals and a robust research ecosystem here? 

Fry: Well, we have a robust research ecosystem. I think our sponsored research, thanks to you and your colleagues, and of course the faculty and the deans, has grown tremendously over the last decade. I think we're going to be north, hopefully, of $330 million, which is a really substantial portfolio of research. I know it's very weighted towards National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation. We're hoping, as you and I have discussed many times, to see more of a partnership with the Department of Defense, particularly around some of the work that's happening in the Navy Yard. So, I feel really good about where we are now. I'll feel a lot better, Josh, if $500-plus million is in front of our names relative to the amount of sponsored research, and I think that's entirely possible. 

I think that one of the really important ways of getting there is to do more with our health system, and in particular Fox Chase Cancer Center, because I think that is one of the jewels in the health system crown. And I think the relationships are at a point ... again, thanks to you and Rob Uzzo and Abhi Rastogi and Amy Goldberg, a great team of people ... we're beginning to converge on the things that we have a lot of mutual interest in and hopefully putting forward research proposals, getting more investigators from both Fox Chase and the university together. So excited to see that, but I think that it comes down to some very basic things. We need to provide our faculty with an environment where they have the support and the space and the funding to do their best work, because discovery is such a fundamental part of our mission. And we need to put discovery out in front of everything along with access and opportunity for our students, so those are the watchwords of our university. 

And so I feel like you and your colleagues have started to create an environment where that support is becoming more and more visible, whether it's in basic things like pre-award and post-award support, just the administration of these grants, making that smoother, easier, more accessible, leveraging things like AI to help make it more effective, and then the work that we have to do together going forward regarding space. I mean, one of the major priorities of both our strategic plan and our Research in Action goal, and also for our forthcoming capital campaign, is going to be investing significantly in scientific research facilities, core facilities, the technology that undergirds all that stuff. And so, the frustrations that I hear among our investigators is that we need better space, we need more support. Those things will come. We just need to accelerate it if we hope to achieve that kind of research funding in excess of $500 million, which I think should be the big goal on our horizon. And then if we get to that point, we can reset and think about the next steps going forward. 

Gladden: Yeah, I totally agree with that. I agree, I think $500 million is not out of our grasp for us if you look at the trajectory we've been on. And when I came to interview here, I saw that potential. The growth has been there, but there is more that we could do to support that growth. And really what we're trying to do here is we can put a dollar figure on it and we use that metric, but we're trying to grow the impact of the university on our local communities, and so I'm excited about that. I think we're very much aligned. 

Fry: Right, and I think the community-based research we can also undertake is really profound. And take a look at the 17 schools and colleges, all of which in one way or another are insinuated into neighborhoods and communities throughout Philadelphia. So the big, grand challenges that the NIH and the NSF and the DOD offer are wonderful, but so are the particular problems that we're all trying to solve together in our community, and our university can flex, I think, to meet all of those various needs. 

Gladden: What do you think are the greatest challenges in our city and in our region right now? 

Fry: I think the greatest challenge is the lack of economic mobility for the citizens of our city. There was a study done recently that showed that out of the 50 largest cities in America in terms of economic mobility, Philadelphia was 50th. That's a real shame. 

Gladden: It is. 

Fry: And worse. And so, when I saw that, I thought to myself, "Okay, we can lament that or we can do something about that, and what is our university, the public university, going to do about that?" So, I think that this starts, honestly, with K through 12 public education. What is our role in terms of working with the School District of Philadelphia to begin to create a much more competitive public education environment for our students, and how can we get Temple, like Temple Future Scholars, to connect with these kids in seventh grade and maybe even one day earlier, when they're in early grade school? 

So to me, economic mobility begins with how do you connect places like Temple, other anchor institutions, educational institutions, with your local public school district? And then back to the point about working with other companies, how do we knit them into the equation so that the ecosystem, over time, is working together to articulate pathways from childhood through college to life after college, so that people who are here as part of our city always know that they have a next helping hand and a next opportunity to do something? And I believe, based on being 50 out of 50 in economic mobility, that we have a fundamentally disjointed system that we need to begin to fix. 

I think there is enormous amounts of goodwill in the city between city government, the local companies, the eds and the meds, many of the neighborhoods. We all want to work towards this. And the fact that we're able to call ourselves out and say, "We need to do better," I think is also a really important sign that we are committed to a better outcome, and now we need to do the work. And I think when you think about all the institutions that are so fundamental to all of that, Temple may be, in my mind, not just because I'm here, but may be the most important. Because as the public university of the city of Philadelphia, it is our mission to make sure that people have economic mobility, great access, great opportunity, and then mobility going forward. 

So I feel like we're the point guard for a lot of what needs to go on here, to make sure that one day we're not looking at the results that we have, but we're looking at a city where we're proud to say we're one of the top 10 in the nation in terms of economic mobility. And that is something we can do if we put our minds to it, and I think Temple's going to have a very fundamental role in leading that progress. 

Gladden: And that's so embedded in the DNA and history of Temple. I mean, that was our role from the very beginning and it continues to be our role now, so that's all very, very exciting. 

Fry: And when you think about the rich history in North Philadelphia, all it contributed not only to the city and the region but also to the country, this is the place where it should be happening. And that's why I'm so excited about the future of our neighborhoods, the future of our Innovation Corridor, the way this Innovation Corridor can connect to all the other assets that we have in the city of Philadelphia. And again, Temple is going to be in the thick of all that, and we just need to execute on our work. 

So, Josh, what better place to call home than Broad Street in Philadelphia, one of the great boulevards of our country, the spine of industrial Philadelphia that brought so much innovation and progress to our country? So, we actually get to work on this amazing street. Today we're at the Health Sciences Center, home of the iNest, which is one of the great innovations that you and your team have brought to Temple. We're a mile from this beautiful, amazing, richly diverse Main Campus, historic, founded in 1884 in a temple, such a vibrant hub for over 30,000 students.

And then just a couple miles from there, we have this brilliant new Center City Campus that we were able to acquire from the unfortunate bankruptcy of the University of the Arts, but we now have a close to 300,000-square-foot building at Broad and Walnut, which is the corner of Main and Main in Philadelphia. And then maybe one day, the possibility of going even a few miles further south to join with colleagues in the Navy Yard as they think about growing jobs, five, ten thousand new jobs, to support all the shipbuilding work that Hanwha Rhoads industries are going to be doing. I mean, who gets to have a campus that's like eight miles long doing health sciences, research one, university work, incredible concentration in the arts, and things like shipbuilding and innovation around manufacturing? I mean, could you think of a better place? 

Gladden: No. It's an exciting ecosystem to be on, right on that spine. Well, that's a good segue to the next question, which is on the Innovation Corridor. So tell us a little bit more about the Innovation Corridor and the impact it will have on Philadelphia and the region. What kinds of breakthroughs, opportunities and outcomes do you hope the corridor will accelerate? 

Fry: Well, I think the simple thing is first trying to connect the various academic assets and health assets that Temple has. So, I think the genesis of the early thinking is how do we connect the university and the health system together? There's only a mile between us, but it feels like a pretty long mile. And I think in the last year and a half, we've all done a good job, together. of getting to know one another better. So the health system, the university connected, together, and then we had this wonderful, serendipitous opportunity when the Terra Hall building came up for sale. We lament the fact that the University of Arts went bankrupt. We loved the fact that we were to help out over 380 students and give them a wonderful place at Temple to continue their studies and graduate. But then there's this brilliant building that had been so well outfitted by the University of the Arts that gives us our place to bring together Boyer and Tyler and so many of our amazing, off-the-charts academic assets that are around fine and performing arts and music and so many other things. 

So, we have three really distinct campuses, health sciences, a comprehensive research university, and now this great arts campus at Broad and Terra Hall. So for me, it was just a matter of how do we link all these academic assets along the street, which is in a pretty manageable geographic area? And the key to what we do is that our job is to create an environment where people can find each other, where students can find faculty, where faculty can find each other, where all of them can find partners to bring into the various things that we're doing. We have all sorts of new partnerships that I think are starting to flourish, this wonderful connection between Tyler, for example, and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, America's first museum and first art school, founded in 1804, connected to Tyler right there. It's really, really powerful, and all we did was ask them, "Would you be interested in doing something with us?" And the next thing you know, we're right there. 

And so, I think that these kind of partnerships and the ones I think we'll enjoy, for example, in the Navy Yard are a matter of us going to various entities that are doing interesting work and saying, "What role can your public university play in your work?" whether it's around talent or it's around neighborhood revitalization or whatever it is. And so, what I'm finding in my time at Temple is that the opportunities are just wildly abundant, and we're just going to have to discipline ourselves to keep focused, and it's an important discipline to have. 

Gladden: It's funny you say that, because I feel like one of my struggles now is there's so many great opportunities out there in partnerships that it's hard to figure out which ones do we grab and run with first or try to do all of them. 

Fry: But Josh, I think one set of partnerships that I think we need to develop a stronger playbook for are our corporate partnerships. At my previous institution, Drexel University, we had cooperative education, which was one way of tethering the university to companies. And I think that in Temple's own unique way, we should be doing that in a much broader scale, because we provide so much of the talent that our local and regional companies and others take advantage of, in terms of Temple graduates being so well prepared, so eager to work and excited to be in a place where they can be successful. We need to have, I think, a much better strategy and deliberate strategy to build those corporate relationships. And then, I think near and dear to your heart is, okay, those relationships can be built around talent, but they should also be built around new ideas. 

Gladden: Uh-huh, discovery. 

Fry: Discovery, new company formation, joint ventures and things like that. There, I think we need to build more muscle and capacity. I think that's an area for both of us and our colleagues that we need to focus on. And when we think about research, yes, we think about the big agencies, but we should also be thinking about corporate research and clinical partnerships and things of that nature. There, I feel like Temple University and our health system have tremendous amounts of upside. 

Gladden: Good segue into the next question, what message do you have for our external stakeholders about Temple's commitment to innovation and regional impact? 

Fry: Well, first of all, we are open for business relative to forming new partnerships. We're absolutely interested in working with anyone who has any interest in what we're doing, but in particular, again, beyond providing great talent with all the many thousands of graduates that we have every year, we're really interested in your problems and how we together as entities can innovate to solve those problems, because we are about discovery, research and engagement and development. And I feel like there's so much more our university can do to partner up with all sorts of for-profit and not-for-profit organizations to help them innovate around solutions to their challenges. Because again, as the public university, that is our mission. 

Gladden: Well, and as we've talked about, to do really big things, we can't do that alone. Even as big and wonderful as Temple is, Temple can't do it alone. We need our regional partners to really advance those big things. 

Fry: Right, and we have to adopt the mentality is that we are not the solution looking for the problems. We are the partner looking for a like-minded partner to open our books together and say, "What can we do together that we can't do singularly?" And I think that there's obviously a big reason why partnerships are featured so prominently in our strategic plan, because it is going to be one of our core competencies, maybe our most important institutional core competency, is going to be making partnerships going forward. So, I would say to all those businesses, "Yes, we are absolutely open and excited and honored to be able to think about working with you." 

Gladden: Yeah, that's great. So, what does success look like? In ten years, how do you envision a successful Innovation Corridor? And as you and I have talked about, this isn't an overnight thing. These things take time, and the work you did in West Philly, it took time to take root and to grow and that we're laying some seeds now, but what do you see in ten years? 

Fry: Well, I think the most important part of this strategy is our ability to attract outside partners and capital to what we're doing. The formula has to be something like this. We need to make a series of investments at the university and at the health system that signal intent, clarity around that strategy, particularly Research and in Action and place-based work, and make it very clear that we're willing to put our capital where our mouth is. I love the Kimmel Pavilion, for example. All that steel right up at the gateway to our campus is a signal that things are really happening on Broad Street that are exciting and important and they're artistic, and they are things that invite the entire public in. So investments like that, investments like buildings that support science in key areas of our campus, ambulatory care centers, things of that nature, are really important to show the public that Temple itself is investing within its means. And at a certain point, people are going to look at that and say, "This is exciting. They have conviction, they have talent, they want partners. We should be there, too." 

So I think you can imagine, over the next number of years, we'll run a series of competitions and other types of activities where we're really drawing in others to help us go on with the next pieces of work, and the work in University City evolved the way it did and had the impact it did because it wasn't just Penn and Drexel and CHOP doing it. It was, yes, all the anchors making their contributions and making their investments, but then inviting others in to do so as well. And when you get that kind of critical mass of activity, that's when you know you have something happening. So yes, Temple and Temple Health need to be absolutely out there making these investments, and then we have to be open and willing to have partners help us do the rest.