Ian F. McNeely, Historian of Knowledge and Dean

92-169. Ian F. McNeely

SPEAKERS

Will Bachman, Ian McNeely

 

Will Bachman  00:02

Hello and welcome to The 92 Report, conversations with members of the Harvard and Radcliffe class of 1992. I’m your host, Will Bachman, and I’m delighted to be here today with Ian F McNeely. Ian, welcome to the show.

 

Ian McNeely  00:18

Thanks for having me

 

Will Bachman  00:19

So Ian, tell us about your journey since graduating from Harvard.

 

Ian McNeely  00:24

I am a lifelong academic. So after I graduated from Harvard, I went got a PhD in History at the University of Michigan, then went back to Harvard to join the Society of Fellows, which we can get into later. But it’s this wild kind of postdoc with no requirements whatsoever. I met my wife there, so we got married, and she got a job at the University of Oregon. I got a job on the East Coast. The east coast institution was unable to find a job for her, but the University of Oregon did find a job for me, so we wound up becoming full professors there. By the end, lived there for 24 years, raised our three children there, and then just recently, in 2024 I moved to the alma mater of my parents, UNC Chapel Hill, where I’m continuing to be professor of history, but really, over the last 1015, years, I’ve gotten into academic administration. So my main job here at Chapel Hill is to oversee the education of all the undergraduates, which is a job I love. And it all kind of comes full circle to me. So not only did my parents meet here, but I kind of every day practically have lunch in the cafeteria where they first laid eyes on each other. They were both poor first gen students back in the 1960s higher education was transformative for them. I feel like I’m repaying that debt to not only this institution, but higher education generally. So if you really want to know where the story starts, it’s it’s with by birth and Harvard was just a great way station along the way to get credentialed,

 

Will Bachman  02:11

right? So there’s a lot of surface area for follow ups there. Yeah, but let’s talk about the Society of Fellows, something that I maybe was only vaguely aware of in college. But tell us what that’s all about.

 

Ian McNeely  02:25

Yeah, it had this mystique. I was vaguely aware of it when I was an undergraduate. And this is not in any way to boast, but at the time, I remember a Harvard quarterly article that said, like, environment for genius, or something like that. It was originally conceived in the 1930s to be an alternative to the PhD, which was thought of as being too Germanic, too structured, too pedantic, and to give at that time only young men, there were no women allowed until the 1970s a chance to spend three years completely unfettered by any academic requirements. And that’s the way it is to this day. It’s a three year fellowship. It has about 36 fellows at any given time. The only requirements are to attend a lavish dinner on Monday nights and Elliott House, where there’s a dedicated wood paneled room with the pictures of Puritans and whatnot on the walls, and then to attend to lunches. At the time I was there was Tuesday lunch and Friday lunch, just with the other Junior fellows. There’s a group of senior fellows who are Harvard faculty that come to the the Monday so it was, it was wild. There was, you know, and I don’t mean that in any Outre sense. It’s just a crazy privilege to have this fellowship, and again, that’s where I met my spouse, and she happened to have this thing as well. So it was a nice way to return to Harvard after six years after I graduated as an undergraduate.

 

Will Bachman  03:55

And how did you spend your time as a fellow with no responsibilities?

 

Ian McNeely  04:00

But I did. I mean, quite conventionally, most fellows do this tends to be a postdoc for people who have just finished their dissertations or are in the process of finishing them. So I converted my dissertation into a book, which is the main thing that in my field history, you need to do to get tenure. And I took advantage of the invitation to kind of Rome more freely. So I was trained as a German historian, both at Michigan for my PhD, and I’d specialized that in that as an undergraduate at Harvard, this was around 19, late 1990s the internet was really getting cranked up. I became really interested in the history of knowledge, in which Germany plays a key role as the progenitor of the modern research university. But I really wanted to get into the history of knowledge, just from from going all the way back. So, long story short, my wife and I co wrote a book called reinventing knowledge from Alexandria to the internet. She’s a medieval historian, so she kind of. Covered the first 1000, 1500 years. I’m an early modern, modern historian. I picked up around 1500 1600 it was a book that kind of hatched at Harvard, and then I the society fellows, then I taught it as a course at University of Oregon, and that was sort of the main pivot in my academic career and and one that ultimately led me into academic administration, which is something we can get into later

 

Will Bachman  05:30

as well. What is knowledge?

 

Ian McNeely  05:33

What is well, I define that in the book as that which is created, curated and defined by institutions of knowledge. There’s no there is no one definition. It changes over time. So the structure of the book is laid out in a series of six institutions, the library, the monastery, the university, something called the Republic of Letters, which is a kind of constellation of the printed book, The Academy, the museum, the academic disciplines, is number five and the laboratory is number six. So what counts as knowledge in the library is that which can be written down and debated quite often in oral rather than written formats. That’s what the Greeks were all about. What counts as knowledge in the disciplines is what you and your academic peers across the world consider to be publishable. That’s, to some extent, the world we live in, at least half the academy now. And what counts as knowledge in the laboratory is that which can be tested in actual practice through scientific experiments and investigation, either on the natural world or the social world. And I think that’s what the internet grows out of, and the particularly AI grows out of. So the argument is that the knowledge has, at least in the Western tradition, six separate definitions, and it’s the institutions that define what knowledge is, rather than the entity of the content of knowledge itself,

 

Will Bachman  07:00

that’s very interesting. So it’s, it’s a very institutional definition of knowledge. What about vernacular knowledge? Is, is that a different category? Or do you think of that as a is it? Is it different thing? It’s something that everyday people know, like, for example, John stogo, some of us took talked about vernacular landscape, how to build a shed, how to, you know, build a road to your barn, whatever. That’s a kind of a different category that’s not institutionalized,

 

Ian McNeely  07:35

absolutely. And these things exist separately and to some extent, intention for 1000s of years. So, you know, you go back again all the way to the Greeks and the Romans, there was an explicit rejection of vernacular knowledge. It was the embrace of, you know, Greek and Latin language and poetry and the ability to speak well, and that was almost counterposed to the ability to do any anything in particular, you know, fix a wagon or make a bottle of wine, or any of that kind of artisanal, vernacular, everyday knowledge. And it’s only in our own times, and no historians, I think our own times is the last one or 200 years that’s recent by our standards, that that that ability, that kind of can do artisanal craft knowledge, vernacular knowledge, whatever you want to call it, becomes sort of institutionalized by being brought into laboratories and the facility that you have with scientific equipment, the ability to build a microscope, to conduct an experiment, in The medical field, to perform an operation, all these forms of kind of tactile, experiential vernacular knowledge become the means to to create institutionally legitimized knowledge that we recognize in scientific journals and Nobel Prizes and things like that.

 

Will Bachman  09:00

When you were, when you were a fellow, did you end up, you know, popping into any classes or, or did you go to, I don’t know, the History Department weekly seminar or anything like that. Or is it just head to Widener work on your book? You know,

 

Ian McNeely  09:15

it was, it was very monastic, to some extent, by choice. I, I, at that time I was migrating away from the discipline. Not that I had anything whatsoever against the history department, but I had literally been a history major since 1989 I got into it when, you know we were, we were first freshmen or sophomores, yeah, so that by the time I wound up back at Harvard, the society, I was most interested in talking to people completely outside my field. And that was what the lunches with the junior fellows and then the dinners with the junior and senior fellows gave me. So I would, I would pop into lectures and classes and things like that, just not in my field. Field. But above all, I would have conversations with people in particle physics. There were a bunch of string theorists there at the time. Nobody who wasn’t a string theorist could possibly follow what it was that we’re doing, but we were all interested in it nonetheless. And the irony of the stories that I walked in again there were the time, I think, 30 or 36 fellows, and the one person that I ended up marrying was the one other historian, and she does medieval and I do modern, and we bonded over a mutual disdain of the Renaissance, because it comes in between,

 

Will Bachman  10:36

okay from that period, connecting with people in other disciplines. Is there any one comment or conversation that comes to mind that shifted your thinking or that you know, you still recall?

 

Ian McNeely  10:54

Not that really. I mean, it was, it’s, it was such a diverse group of equals, like I can’t I mean, it was really the entire group, art historians, again, particle physicists, lawyers. I, you know, to me, it was, it was a chance. I’ve always been an arts and sciences guy. I’ve always been that’s why I ended up doing what I do today, which is to oversee undergraduate education on the arts and sciences and the Harvard society fellows, more so than anything else I’ve been associated with, really tried to cover the entirety of knowledge. So going back to what you’d asked before, I mean, like that was, you know, what is the definition of knowledge? It was whatever the 36 people in the room happened to be working on at that time, and so nothing in particular stands out. It’s the whole complex of things.

 

Will Bachman  11:52

All right, I’d love to fast forward a little

 

Ian McNeely  11:54

bit. Yeah,

 

Will Bachman  11:54

so you’re now Associate Dean for Undergraduate Education UNC Chapel Hill. What are the topics on your agenda that are forefront? And maybe I’ll even lead with, I’m very curious of how you’re thinking AI is going to shape, you know, the college education experience. There’s a New Yorker article this week, Hollis Robbins featured, she writes a lot about this, what, what’s your view of what’s going on and how, how’s AI going to shape undergraduate education?

 

Ian McNeely  12:30

Yeah, we’re still trying to figure that out. I mean, the AI is definitely on my top five things to think about at this point in US history. I also think a lot about the politicization of higher education and attacks on the curriculum and dei and we certainly experience that very intensely at UNC Chapel Hill. I think that’s true of a lot of other flagships in red states, but it occurs everywhere. I’ll get back to AI in a minute. I mean, the biggest concern I have, which is a problem that’s good to have, is that this sheer proliferation of knowledge means that it’s hard for students to find their way to all the cool things that we do. They tend to default to certain paths, like pre med or pre computing, and in that field, in particular, we’ve seen with AI, a drop off in the availability of jobs, because that’s what’s you know, the coders are being replaced en mass by AI. And so to segue from one to another, part of what I try to do is help students find their way to take advantage of the full panoply of Arts and Sciences, for that matter, professional disciplines, to diversify their intellectual portfolio, to put it almost in financial management terms, and use that as a hedge against the unpredictability of the world that we live in, whether that’s because of political instability or all the instability that’s brought out by AI. So when I think about AI, I have a kind of faith, and this is echoed by all the employers that I talk to, that when all the dust settles, AI is not going to replace human judgment or human expertise. It’s going to be a force multiplier for a lot of things that we do on a routine basis. Now it’ll be a lot more than a calculator, but it’ll be something like a calculator, in that calculators never replaced the importance of quantitative reasoning. It only made it that much more high stakes quantitative reasoning that we do. I think what AI does is apply that across the domains of knowledge, and in particular to text, but that nothing I’ve seen so far about AI or red leads me to believe that AI will fully automate or replace the types of judgment that you get from a well rounded liberal arts education, and that, you know, I’m paid to say that that may be self serving for me to. Say that. But when I try to gut check myself against people who are out there actually, you know, in the working world, people our age, who are in a position to hire new graduates and to run companies, that’s what they tell me. So that gives me optimism that that when all the dust settles. It’s going to be something that AI will be integrated fully into what we do, in the curriculum, but it won’t fundamentally replace the structure of knowledge that we’re working with.

 

Will Bachman  15:31

Okay, so let’s accept, for the moment, that AI won’t completely replace need for human workers. I hope, I hope not, but let me fine tune it a little bit. One can imagine that certain skills will rise in value and certain skills will decline in value, right? And certain, not necessarily whole fields of study, but the certain types of learning outcomes or skills, it’d be unlikely if they’ll all be exactly the same. You know, five years from now, if an undergrad is coming to you, or a parent of an undergrad is coming to you, saying, hey, what you know skills should I be focusing on getting out of my next four years? How does your answer change now with AI, what? What skills specifically do you think will be more in demand and which ones are decreasing in demand?

 

Ian McNeely  16:28

Yeah, I think communication skills, the ability to persuade, the ability to speak orally, to be quick on your feet, to think and to communicate and to into and to process information rapidly, but also to distill it and and frame it into the context of a running conversation. That also leads into, I think, an importance on teamwork. Traditionally, in academia, we do our assignments solo, particularly in certain disciplines where you you fill out a problem set or write an essay on your own. And I think the collaborative aspect of learning is going to be something we have to it already exists pervasively in in our academic departments, but I think we really have to elevate it. You know, I think a lot of the capacity for ethical judgment and esthetic judgment to work in the gray area, to look thing at things holistically. You know that you know, translates from, you know, an appraisal of a work of literature or work of art to some of the judgments that you have to make about what to do with a particular you know, result of finding generated by AI. It’s hard to specify it concretely, but I think at a general level, these are the same liberal arts skills that we’ve been teaching for a long time. And if anything, a lot of a lot of the distortions that we see in the classes that students enroll in, the majors that they take, have to do with gravitating to a particular set of skills around memorization or calculation or rote learning. I’m thinking particular in some of the pre medical or scientific disciplines that that really aren’t, you know aren’t going to be needed anymore. It’s, it’s, it’s the it’s the more high level skills that I think I’ll help we’ll get back to and that’ll even out some of the kind of imbalances that we see between STEM and liberal arts fields and the college going population.

 

Will Bachman  18:37

It’s one, one aspect that occurs to me is that when we were undergrads, I don’t know, I mean, in some courses, sure, memorization was important, but broadly, there was an emphasis on having the right answer where I would it feels to me like the ability to ask the right Questions will be rising in status, and the ability to answer those questions is relatively lowering in status, because now AI is at our fingertips and ready to answer whatever questions. So it’s it’s becoming more important to be able to come up with insightful questions.

 

Ian McNeely  19:17

Yeah, I couldn’t agree more. I feel I majored in history. So this may be different for different majors who are listening. I already felt in virtually every class that I took, whether history or or across the genetic curriculum, the core curriculum, that there were none of the classes presumed a right answer, with the exception of a few of the kind of STEM classes

 

Speaker 1  19:44

that

 

Ian McNeely  19:45

it really was already there was a premium put on interpretation and judgment, and so those I did, I haven’t perceived a change in what’s required of today’s students vis a vis what I was asked to do in college. The thing. Thing that I worry about the most is that students are losing the ability to do the kind of cognitive heavy lifting that is required to sit in front of an empty computer screen with a blinking cursor and start from scratch and form a sentence, and know how to compose that sentence, and then by that very act, and sort of know where the logical or semantic gaps in that sentence are. Instead of having an AI, do that for you, and you go back and correct it when I have it, what I have when I’m looking at an AI output of some piece of writing, I know where to spot the weeks, you know, the weak links, either logically or or empirically. You know, because I’ve, you know, I grew up in a world where I had to write all this stuff myself. I don’t know that students who who aren’t able to shortcut that entire process of learning, writing and thinking that we all went through, how they’re going to get that backfill that set of skills. I think it’s a soluble problem, but we haven’t figured out how to solve

 

Speaker 1  21:06

it

 

Will Bachman  21:07

yet. What’s your recommendation for a current college student on how they should be using AI, like, don’t use it at all. Or, here’s like, how to you know what? What are some appropriate and ways that you think people ought to be using?

 

Ian McNeely  21:25

I think it’s on. I mean students. The one thing I’ll say is students, at this point, know more than their faculty. Students are more aware even of the dangers. Students will often themselves put AI at arm’s length, because they feel all too clearly what it’s doing to their minds. And so you know, by default, answer to your question for any other situation would be, listen to your professor, but your professor is more likely to simply give you the stiff arm and say, don’t use it at all, because I haven’t figured it out what it means for me yet. And in the in that gray space, until we in that space of ambiguity, until we as a Professoriate, figure out what what is to be done, I would, I would gravitate in the opposite direction. I would take a pad and a pen and sit under a tree and write out things by hand, or if you want to be high tech about it, I would take your phone and dictate into it as you’re walking around under those trees, and I would form those notes. I would get those raw thoughts out there as a way of forcing yourself to develop that kind of, you know, to sort of, you know, to do that cognitive heavy lifting before you go to AI. And then by the time you do that, you’ve got an outline, you’ve got a set of ideas on paper. There are your own, they’re not machine generated. And then you can use AI to refine what you’ve done and clean it up and fix the semicolons and, you know, all that kind of stuff. So I guess first step, put AI aside and get real. Get way analog on the whole thing.

 

Will Bachman  23:11

There’s a French concept, I’ll probably mispronounce it, but it’s called defer machine professional about how your professional training kind of shapes your thinking. And I am curious how, if you have any thoughts on how your wife being a medieval scholar and you being a pre modern, modern scholar, how have you noticed any different mental models or ways that you think about the world between the two of you, having studied these different periods, has that shaped your perceptions things that you notice, or ways you interpret things?

 

Ian McNeely  23:53

Yeah. I mean, what answered your question is that we are two peas in a pod, and, you know, in the same profession. And if there’s anything else going on in the world besides history, the world of history professors, we’re the last persons to notice it. But within that framework, we actually are very different. So she’s a medievalist. The challenge of that period is there’s so little documentation written down that survives in that 1000 years. So she can pile, if she piled up all the sources available on her period and all the things that she’s written about it in a separate pile. That separate pile might be taller than the first pile is exquisitely intensive, close reading on the micro parsing of details, of nuances of words, of gaps, of things that aren’t said, of fragments that get garbled in translation and transmission from ancient manuscripts that are poorly copied over generations down to the present. And so that’s a that’s an act of creative imagination that is particular to her field. My field. I’m a modern historian and a German historian at. Down. The Germans are notorious for creating bureaucracy and paperwork. And my very first book was on, of all things, the role of writing in German culture as a vehicle of power. And so, you know, to me, living in a world of information overload is not new. And you know, AI is just a magnification of things that have been going on for hundreds of years. My, my I gravitate intellectually to problems of that nature, and trying to look at the, sort of, zoom out and look at, really, the, you know, the structural underpinnings of what any phenomenon is that I’m studying. And that’s, you know, going back to the book on knowledge, that’s what I tried to do, like, I’ve got 2000 years of history. CO wrote this book with my wife, and I’ve got to figure out, like, a way to simplify it and boil it down, because there’s too much information if I’m going to cover all of knowledge from Alexandria to the internet. So I came with both at six institutions, and that’s a very that’s a very different set of mental outlook and set of skills for what my my wife does in her work. And you know, it’s an axis that you could probably apply to a lot of different occupations as well. But that kind of big picture, even at the risk of oversimplification, is kind of what I gravitate to

 

Will Bachman  26:18

over the past two decades, especially the past couple years, how has the nature or definition or history of knowledge changed?

 

Ian McNeely  26:30

I mean, this is hard to separate from my own administrative career, because I after got into if I published the book on knowledge, I got into academic administration because I felt at some level that that knowledge was changing, or universities were changing, that a lot of the things that I took for granted, and I don’t know if you or other listeners would would take for granted that knowledge was something to be pursued for its own sake, that Harvard in particular existed to, you know, to study philosophy and economics and literature, you know, as their own reward, even if it turns out that 40% of our classmates went on to lucrative private sector occupations. That was the thinking that that now more than ever, and especially in a country the United States that has always valued practical applied knowledge over pure abstract knowledge, that everything we do in universities now needs to be justified and either economic or scientific or even moral terms, but it’s not something that needs or can be justified, in a kind of ivory tower way, as being purely curiosity driven. And so again, I kind of got into administration where I sort of feared that that was what was happening, and I needed to get to, sort of get get into the inner workings of the institution to see how that was going to play out, and do what I could to kind of preserve that and to make the case that indeed, there is no tension at the end of the day between pure knowledge and applied knowledge, that you do these kind of liberal arts, arts and sciences, types of things, and you will indeed get a job someday, maybe a lucrative one, maybe a powerful one, but one that’ll that’ll benefit society in one way or the other.

 

Will Bachman  28:22

Okay, time for some oddball questions.

 

Ian McNeely  28:24

Yeah,

 

Will Bachman  28:26

what is something that you think everyone should try?

 

Ian McNeely  28:31

What is something that I think everyone should try, going to a country and attempting to speak the language that you do not speak at all, learning, learning the word for thank you in that language and knowing nothing else.

 

Will Bachman  28:50

Danka,

 

Ian McNeely  28:51

because, yes, like, like, you know, I feel very strongly as a very, you know, part of a very privileged generation in history, very privileged demographic, living through a time when the the primacy of the United States, which never should have been taken for granted, certainly cannot be taken for granted anymore. I really dig humility. I won’t say humiliation, but humility and I just love, you know, like feeling like a complete idiot in another culture you know so going to a place where you only know thank you, because that’s the only thing that you can express, is gratitude to a fellow human being who can run circles around you linguistically for for not letting you die because you’re

 

Will Bachman  29:37

and where did you go, where you did not speak the language?

 

Ian McNeely  29:40

Um, I mean, I, I would say probably Japan would be the my most intense. I haven’t spent much time there at all, but I’ve never felt, you know, both so much a fish out of water and so spiritually at home. You know, it just, you know, you can’t read the script, the the. The smells and the sights are different, and yet, at some visceral level, it felt like if I had been born I had my life to do over again. I would either study Japan or be born Japanese. I felt something so kindred about the culture, even though I could not I didn’t study Japanese history. Certainly don’t let the Japanese language, but it was that very sense of being a fish out of water that made me feel resonant with the culture.

 

Will Bachman  30:30

Okay? Off block question number two, what is a habit that you have intentionally adopted sometime over the past five to 10 years that you would recommend

 

Ian McNeely  30:41

five to 10 years habit, yeah, I don’t want to say the five o’clock cocktail, because that’s gone Way back five and five years. Okay, you know,

 

Will Bachman  31:00

I I mean, I feel like I I’ve gone through a lot of the this is

 

Ian McNeely  31:09

going to sound like an abstract answer, but, but somewhat that the cliche of a middle aged person is that they kind of realize they have something to give back, and they embrace a certain humility about where they reached in life, and I I did not come to that easily. I was very ambitious in college. I remained ambitious for the decade since that, I was always looking for the next promotion or the next recognition or a book prize or a professorship, and that may be, to certain extent, insecure and envious of other people’s accomplishments. So I I’ve developed as a habit in my professional life, empowering others and and and almost in a Buddhist way, giving up the desire to control the outcome of what I’m doing professionally in the hopes that others will, will, will pick up the ball and run with it. So just to give you a quick example, at my prior institution, I helped found a new School of Global Studies and languages. And throughout that time, I was like, kind of halfway. Part of me was gunning for the executive directorship of that that was going to prove that I could run this thing and be the boss. And about halfway through the process, I realized that I was going to consciously prepare for my own exit, that I was going to work as hard as I possibly could to make it possible for me to walk out of there, hand off the keys to the person who replaced me, and that enabled me to give up all the anxiety in the insecurity, the jealousy and the envy that I otherwise would have had had I gunned for the job and been passed over for it, and so that that is really almost like a habit of of what I do, and it to sort of share, share the credit, hog the blame, you know, act in solidarity with others that did not by any means, come naturally to me as a very ambitious Harvard undergraduate.

 

Will Bachman  33:14

Let’s talk about college. Tell us about any courses or professors that you had at Harvard that continue to resonate with you in some way.

 

Ian McNeely  33:23

Math, 25 a Mark McConnell, when, when I got there, there were, I think, three different levels of math, yeah, and that was the top level. And I thought of myself as a real math jock, and I was rapidly disabused of that notion that I realized that there were a lot of people better at math than I was so Mark McConnell, I’m not sure what happened to him. I don’t think he stayed at Harvard, but he was a fantastic instructor. And, you know, we started that class with set theory, and we didn’t get around to defining the number one until, like, late October, okay, and, you know, obviously, I did not become a mathematician, but I felt that class more than other, any other sort of taught me how to think and to think rigorously, and, you know, precisely, because it’s, it’s not in my field, or not a humanities, you know, it’s that kind of bridge between across the arts and sciences that I kind of value most. The other one was guy named Peter Baldwin, who taught course on European political development 1850 to 1950 and that’s what convinced me to become a European historian myself. And I looked him up, like 30 years later and asked him for book recommendations for a class I was teaching. And he’s like, I can’t, it’s just wild, like, I, of course, I never knew you, but I’m so, so happy that you looked me up. And I think he had wound up being one of the major funders of Wikipedia. So he’s gone off and done well for the for the world.

 

Will Bachman  34:59

How did he. How did he manage to be a major funder of Wikipedia?

 

Ian McNeely  35:02

I think his his wife is the heir to a very large Swedish fortune, and so they have the wherewithal and the Civic philanthropic commitments to do that, and that’s at least what I’ve read about him and his family.

 

Will Bachman  35:19

Amazing Ian for listeners who want to follow up and keep track or or reconnect. Where is the best place for them to go online?

 

Ian McNeely  35:31

Yeah, probably just the UNC history website. So if you, if you Google UNC history, McNeely, MC N, E, E, L, Y, you’ll get my faculty page. I’m kind of, I don’t lurk online much. LinkedIn kind of gives me the creeps. It reawakens this, this ambition and envy that that I spent so hard to put to rest. But I welcome any and all contact, and people can feel free to email me at the address there. I love to hear from people that that shared this experience with us of going through Harvard at that time.

 

Will Bachman  36:07

Fantastic. Well, Ian, thank you for joining today.

 

Ian McNeely  36:10

Thanks so much for having me. It’s great to catch up and to be asked about one’s one’s journey.