Understanding the New Federal Digital Accessibility Ruling for Higher Ed
New federal guidelines surrounding digital accessibility are quickly becoming top-of-mind for colleges and universities. Paul Schantz, Director of Web and Technology Services at California State University Northridge (CSUN), explains that by April 2026, all university digital content—think instructional materials, audio and video, documents, forms, and websites—must meet the WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility standards. While CSUN is ahead of the curve, many institutions are scrambling to get their content and platforms into compliance.
Paul detailed that compliance isn’t just about web pages; everything down to a simple flyer or form posted online must be accessible. CSUN benefits from the Universal Design Center (UDC), a group that educates the campus community and conducts “spot checks” on high-traffic pages. An important takeaway: even third-party platforms, like chatbots or forms from vendors, need to be accessible—and working with responsive vendors can drive improvements not just for CSUN, but across their entire user base.
Building a Digital Accessibility Culture Through Committees and Training
CSUN’s long-standing commitment to accessibility is evident in its committee structures and large-scale collaboration. Their Universal Design Center provides ongoing training, while the institution’s involvement in the Accessible Technology Initiative ensures system-wide best practices are shared among all CalState campuses. Paul highlights the importance of integrating accessibility into procurement processes. By reviewing vendor-supplied accessibility documentation (like a VPAT or HECVAT), and directly testing products, they ensure any new tools meet compliance before being adopted.
Marketing and communications teams can smooth the process by being proactive—requesting documentation from vendors before bringing a potential tool to IT and procurement, and ensuring all email campaigns and web materials adhere to accessibility best practices.
Forming an AI Task Force to Support Campus Operations and Student Engagement
CSUN is also laying the groundwork for exploring artificial intelligence on campus through a new AI task force. This cross-campus team is designed to guide responsible AI adoption in three areas: research, teaching and learning, and administration/operations. Early use cases include employing AI to parse student engagement data, which could provide personalized event recommendations or uncover new ways to improve retention and graduation rates.
Paul’s big-picture takeaway: whether it’s accessibility or AI, staying ahead requires teamwork, proactive planning, and a commitment to student success.
Read the transcription (coming soon)
Shiro [00:00:15]:
Welcome to the Higher Ed Demand Gen pause podcast hosted by Concept three d. If you like our content, please follow and subscribe to us on your different channels. As always, I’m Shiro Ettore, your host. And today I’m very excited to talk about a new federal digital accessibility ruling you may not know about, plus starting an AI task force. And I’m very thrilled to speak with Paul Shantz today. He is the director of web and technology services at California State University, Northridge, or will maybe address it as CSUN today, to talk about the topic. So welcome to the show, Paul.
Paul Schantz [00:00:53]:
Hi, Shiro. Thanks for inviting me.
Shiro [00:00:57]:
It’s it’s great to have you, and I believe it’s our second time on this, podcast. So it’s great to have you again.
Paul Schantz [00:01:05]:
Always good to be a a returning guest.
Shiro [00:01:08]:
Absolutely. We like you. I do have a nice breaker that I’d love to ask again, which is please tell us what you love about higher ed.
Paul Schantz [00:01:17]:
Honestly, it’s the people and serving a higher purpose, that’s not necessarily associated with the bottom line. It’s about developing people, and it’s a mission that I’m proud to be a part of. And I I think that most of my, colleagues in higher education have similar feelings about it.
Shiro [00:01:36]:
Thank you for sharing that. Well, let’s let’s jump in real quick. I know you’ve been on the show already, so maybe just a one minute quick background on your role.
Paul Schantz [00:01:46]:
Sure. Sure. Again, my name is Paul Shantz. I am the director of student affairs information technology at CSUN, and I oversee a web application development team and several web applications along with the associated infrastructure on Amazon Web Services. A couple of those web applications, as you sort of alluded to there, support our students that are served by our disability resources office and the National Center on Deafness, which at CSUN are two actually two separate departments. These apps provide academic and testing accommodations for our CSUN students who need them. I also oversee about 50 websites for our divisions, departments, and various programs. I’m also responsible for a student data warehouse that contains a few million records.
Paul Schantz [00:02:32]:
And I oversee the server infrastructure for our enrollment services areas supporting operations like the card office, like student photos and this sort of thing. Additionally, the student affairs office of assessment reports to me, which includes assessment activities, program evaluation, the annual strategic planning process, compiling and publishing our division annual report, which I’m in the process of doing right now. And I also represent student affairs on several campus level technology committees. So it’s a little bit.
Shiro [00:03:07]:
Just a couple of hats, That’s awesome. And if you’re curious, our previous episode was episode 95, so you can go check that out where we talk a little bit more about, website marketing language and also, how you can use card data, student card data for student retention as well and engagement as well. So that’s episode 95 if you wanna check it out. Well, let’s, let’s jump into the topics here today. So, Paul, can you tell us what the new DOJ ruling on digital accessibility is?
Paul Schantz [00:03:41]:
Well, it’s it’s not so much the DOJ. It’s it’s a change in the ADA, implementation, and how people need to and organizations need to respond to that. And all of this information can be found at ADA.gov. You could just do a simple Google search. But Mhmm. The basic, aspect of this is that all university digital content, including, instructional content, audio, videos, documents, forms, and websites, everything must be accessible by 04/24/2026. So we have a little bit more than a year to do that. CSUN is pretty well positioned in that regard, but, I imagine many campuses are probably scrambling.
Paul Schantz [00:04:28]:
But individuals are responsible for ensuring that the digital content that they create or maintain, whether it’s like flyers or, any kinds of forms or documents that you put on your website, it it it’s gotta be accessible. And what makes it, this different is that it must meet w three c or World Wide Web Consortium, WCAG, that’s the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, the 2.1 a a guidelines. So there what makes it different is that there is an actual spec that you have to make sure that your content adheres to. So you can measure this. So that’s what what’s makes it unique.
Shiro [00:05:06]:
So Absolutely.
Paul Schantz [00:05:07]:
First time that there’s been, like, a a a technical specification for compliance that’s actually been provided by, the government.
Shiro [00:05:16]:
Absolutely. No. Thank you for laying that out. And if you were wondering, there is a separate deadline for those with, the size of your state or local government, which includes public institutions and universities. If it’s under 50,000 people, the deadline is April 27, which is a a little bit gives you a little bit more time for smaller orgs, but, I think CSUN fits in a much bigger org, which is why it’s that 2026 deadline, if I’m not mistaken. Gotcha. Cool. Well, thanks for outlining it, for us.
Shiro [00:05:49]:
In terms of your role where you’re, you know, overseeing a lot of different parts of the technology aspect and the website aspects of of the campus and campus resources, like, how are you looking at this, this new ruling and prioritizing or, like, prioritizing certain project or web pages or how are you going about just your overall strategy? Because it’s a big, big change.
Paul Schantz [00:06:15]:
Correct. Correct. Well, a lot of it is dependent on the platforms that we use. So our web content management system does most of the heavy lifting, for us. But still, the content management system only goes so far. It is still possible for people who are producing content and publishing it to post things that are not accessible. So there’s a fairly significant educational component, that’s associated with that. So we make sure that we’re not posting things that are that are not accessible, like images that contain lots and lots of text, which would just basically be blank if you don’t have the appropriate alternative text or something like this.
Paul Schantz [00:06:56]:
In in that regard, CSUN is particularly, in a good space because we have a department, that’s in our central IT division called the universal, it’s the UDC, the Universal Design Committee. And what they do is they help, do a lot of the education, on campus regarding, say, email access very specific, like email accessibility, web accessibility, making flyers that are accessible, that you’re going to attach to emails and this sort of thing. Also, our, because CSUN is part of a larger university system, Our chancellor’s office, which is sort of the central office, they are, going to be providing some what we’re calling ADA spot checks on a number of web pages for every campus within the system. And the idea here is that these spot checks are going to focus on highly trafficked web pages that are common to every campus. Things like their homepage, like a library homepage, associated students, a disability resources office, which as I mentioned before on our campus is actually two offices, and financial aid. And these kinds of web pages, every campus has, and they’re highly trafficked. And so, in advance of this, Chancellor’s Office spot check of these web pages, our universal design center is actually analyzing those, have analyzed those for us, and they’ve provided us with reports so that we can address what some of these concerns might be. One of the things that is a little bit more unique is that we also have a chatbot, which we call, CSUNNY, and that lives on several web pages, across our website, like, on financial aid.
Paul Schantz [00:08:50]:
And this is provided, by a company, called Mainstay. Used to be known as AdmitHub. There have been other podcasts, about this company and its chatbot in terms of reducing summer melt on other campuses. But we do use this on our financial aid website. Now because it’s a third party vendor provided app, it’s not something that me or anybody at CSUN can really control. So what we’ve been doing is we’ve been aggressively addressing the findings that the UDC, provided with us provided us with in those reports. So the great news is that, Mainstay has been extremely responsive. I reached out to them just a couple days ago, with the UDC analysis of those accessibility issues that we found, like the keyboard trap on certain things.
Paul Schantz [00:09:42]:
Like, meaning, like, if you’re using a tab or arrow keys, you can get into some of the controls and then you can’t get out, which if you are a person with low vision or if you’re blind, you know, you don’t your screen reader gets confused. You can’t get out of it. There’s no way to get out of that. So I’m pleased to say that Mainstay, they responded immediately, to my, to my email, and they’ve shared our findings with their engineering team, and they say they’re gonna be responding to that. And kind of the cool thing about that is that, if Mainstay makes those changes, that benefits not just us at CSUN and our students at CSUN, but any customer who’s using the application, anybody who’s on that platform. So that’s gonna help tens of potentially hundreds of thousands of students across the country. So that’s something I’m I’m pretty excited about.
Shiro [00:10:35]:
That’s amazing. So kind of like the theme I’m hearing is, like, making sure that, the assets that you own, right, like the development of the pages like financial aid, your home page, having having those spot checks in place with the larger committee or if you don’t have, have that. Right? If you have something just internally within your org, doing those spot checks, starting off with those higher traffic pages. And for the portions you don’t control, like, web applications that are developed by third parties, like, is it mainstay, like, then making sure that they are a vendor that you like to work with in terms of are they prioritizing accessibility, are they responses, do they care, right, just do they care at all as a company, are really important. Is that right?
Paul Schantz [00:11:18]:
Yeah. That’s that’s exactly correct. And and and one thing I would be remiss if I if I did not call out the fact that the Cal State system, we do this as a team, and we have had, an accessible technology initiative, what we call ATI, for well over ten years. Every campus has multiple representatives that are responsible for, the three legs of ATI, and and that is procurement, which I have some involvement with with respect to software purchases on on my campus. There’s instructional materials. So that’s anything that gets posted. So it could be like the learning management system or any kinds of, material that get posted there. And then websites, which, of course, is the topic that I’ve been discussing and the thing that I have the most personal familiarity with.
Paul Schantz [00:12:07]:
So we’ve got we’ve got some great people across the entire system who who helped do this.
Shiro [00:12:12]:
That’s amazing. And, like, I know we’ve we’ve talked about it in our precalls before, but never actually addressed it on recording. Like, what what did it take to set these committees up? Right? You said that you, user what was it? The UDC?
Paul Schantz [00:12:28]:
Yeah. The, universal design center.
Shiro [00:12:31]:
Right. Like, setting these committees up that really care about accessibility, I don’t think every school has this already in place. Right? And so, like, what are kinda, like, the starting points that helped that you know of help form these organizations and groups amongst just your campus and also campus partners?
Paul Schantz [00:12:48]:
Well, on our campus, there’s been a, historic, association with, accessible technology. We have so every campus has some form of a disability resources office, and they are the ones that’s kind of where the rubber meets the road, where if a student who has a disability needs some, additional help in their classroom, like maybe they need to have a, a textbook, you know, converted into braille, for example, that’s something, a disability resources office does. So those kinds of, functions on a campus have been around for many, many decades. At CSUN, we also have, a department called the Center on Disabilities, and they are responsible for putting on an assistive technology conference. It is in Anaheim, really close to Disneyland, this year. And, this is the fortieth year for this accessible technology conference. It’s, had it has an international presence. And in fact, many people from around the world who attend this conference, they think of it as CSUN.
Paul Schantz [00:14:04]:
So many people in the accessible technology field, they may not even be aware that, oh, well, CSUN is actually it’s a California State University campus. Mhmm. But they’ve associated the conference with with CSUN, which is kind of fun. But there’s, we we get really great attendance. It’s anywhere between, like, 3,000 to 6,000 people. Obviously, the pandemic affected our numbers. So we’re seeing our numbers come back up. We’re anticipating over 3,000 attendees from around the world
Shiro [00:14:36]:
this year. Yeah. That’s fantastic. I think I read somewhere it is one of, if not the the biggest, assistive technology conferences in the world as a whole, just, like, not just with, higher ed, but as a whole. So
Paul Schantz [00:14:50]:
Yeah. That’s correct. There there are other conferences. There’s a a big one in Europe, but it’s not at the same scale as this one.
Shiro [00:14:58]:
Yeah. So definitely check it out if you’re curious about, you know, what assistive technologies there are, if you’re interested in accessibility as a whole. If you can’t make it this year, it’s or you probably won’t since the time this will be posted will probably be in April. Definitely check it out for next year. It’s it’s it’s fantastic. Kinda going back a little bit more towards, what we’re talking about with vendor evaluations, you have your state school system and you have certain criteria for, evaluating vendors. How do you kind of, like and you probably work with your procurement team on this, but how do you how do you go about thinking about adopting a new tool and understanding and making sure that that vendor cares about accessibility and that digital accessibility will be a priority?
Paul Schantz [00:15:44]:
It’s, it it it is a process that’s been baked into procurement. And Mhmm. Typically, what will happen is well, the ideal, the ideal situation is that the person who wants to bring or the department that wants to bring a particular piece of software on board, they will work with the vendor. They will look, for certain kinds of documentation has been done in advance.
Shiro [00:16:13]:
Mhmm.
Paul Schantz [00:16:13]:
There’s a couple of them. One of them is a called a VPAT, which is a voluntary product accessibility template. And if a vendor has one of those completed, it shows that they are at least aware that there is a thing, called accessibility, within technology products. Does not always necessarily mean that their product, meets all of the WCAG, 2.1 AA guidelines, that I mentioned earlier, but it’s usually a good sign. We also look at, what’s called a HECVAT, and this is a product. It it’s a document that, EDUCAUSE, had a leading role in developing. It’s the higher education I can’t remember exactly what it stands for. It’s the, evaluation something or other.
Paul Schantz [00:17:07]:
But it’s basically it’s a long form that that, a, a vendor would fill out. And the intent of filling out this form is that all higher education institutions ideally will use this HECVAT, form. And if you if it’s if you’ve completed it as a vendor for one campus, it’s good enough for all the other campuses. So that’s the idea behind, the HECVAT. But what will end up happening is, our procurement office will look for those kinds of documents, and they will also run the, as part of the the purchasing process, run it through our universal design center. So it’s not just on paper. Like, we actually do test the products. So we have, technical people in the UDC that will review that product and make sure that, oh, it actually does do the things that the vendor claims that it does.
Paul Schantz [00:18:05]:
And like I mentioned before, for example, with this chatbot that we use, you know, we can take those findings, share them with the vendor with the hope that they will actually remediate any issues that we find. Some vendors, you know, they’re just so big, they’re not gonna care. And it’s like, well, whatever. It’s like higher education is only a small portion, of our business. Although, we hope that they will do that because if it makes the product better for, you know, anybody, it’s it’s good. Right? So that’s that’s our feeling on it.
Shiro [00:18:38]:
That’s great. And I I I didn’t remember this off the top of my head, so I did Google it while I was listening. It’s higher education community vendor assessment tool is what heck that stands for for for for those of you curious. Okay. Well, like, I’m hearing some great things right now. So my primary audience for this podcast is a lot of marketing folks. Right? Whether that’s in more comms or marketing enrollment. But these all people do care about digital accessibility as a whole, but they just may not be in the nitty gritty as you are or but you understand.
Shiro [00:19:10]:
Right? And so, like, let’s say I’m a marketing person who’s trying to bring on a new tool, right, to help with, admissions and enrollment. Is it is it easier for me to have these, these forms, right, like the HECVAT and the VPAT and maybe, like, an accessibility statement ready and understand that before I bring things to IT or procurement? Like, is that like, in an ideal world, is that better?
Paul Schantz [00:19:39]:
It’s best if you have given it some thought in advance. Yeah. Because ideally, with any kind of marketing and communications tool, the goal is to communicate more effectively. And and I’ll use an example. We our our UDC gave a training course on accessible email just a couple days ago. And, there are many examples that they share in, in the PowerPoint presentation that they do. But it just so happened that while I was on the call, I received an email that fit that description perfectly. It was, it was a solicitation, for contributions, from a, an org I’m not gonna say who the organization was.
Paul Schantz [00:20:26]:
It’s not important. But it they they were using Mailchimp, and none of the all of all of the literally all of the information, including the call to action, was in images. And not only was it just like one it’s not like a banner. It just went on and on and on. I mean, we’re talking paragraphs of information. And the thing was it was really compelling content too. It had a very personal story, about, you know, an individual and why you should contribute to this cause. And literally, there was it was a black hole, you know, until I said, show the images with this.
Paul Schantz [00:21:14]:
And I I’m not kidding. It was like, seriously, like, six or seven paragraphs of text, and it was all in an image. So at the very least, if you wanna convert more people, you would at least wanna have, like, one or two sentences as alternative text, along with maybe a button with actual text that’s readable by any email client. So it was just a great example. It just happened to arrive while I was in a training course about making accessible emails.
Shiro [00:21:43]:
No. That hurts too even if the content was good, but you didn’t have any alt text. That’s that’s tough because you know someone spent all that time developing that content. Right?
Paul Schantz [00:21:54]:
Mhmm. Oh, yeah.
Shiro [00:21:55]:
Wow. That’s a great example. Speaking of just, like, working with vendors, how has it been working with concept three d so far?
Paul Schantz [00:22:03]:
You guys have been awesome. So things have been great.
Shiro [00:22:06]:
That’s great.
Paul Schantz [00:22:07]:
Well, I mean, I do see the the material that you put out on LinkedIn and, you know, you’re definitely accessibility forward. So that’s that’s good. And it’s kind of fun, you know, like the the desk that says accessible maps are important. Convince me convince me otherwise.
Shiro [00:22:25]:
Right. No. I mean, it’s definitely one of our, Concept three d’s most important company values is is making sure that we develop with accessibility in mind. It’s not an afterthought, and it’s not a separate but equal system either. So Mhmm. Definitely important. So I love all those examples you gave. I I I’m gonna share this web page that I came across yesterday or today, actually.
Shiro [00:22:50]:
It’s all images on the landing page. I’ll I’ll share it to you. You’ll you’ll laugh. But, anyways, let let’s switch gears a little bit here. You’re just in the starting phases of this about, developing an AI task force. AI has obviously been a hot topic for, what, two years now. I think HireRight is just finally starting to adopt it. Right? And then there’s a lot of things you can do from, obviously, the student perspective, but also from the staff and faculty perspective.
Shiro [00:23:20]:
We’ll talk more about the staff side here. Let’s talk about a little bit about you what your your vision and your school’s vision is in adopting AI and where you maybe plan to use it?
Paul Schantz [00:23:31]:
Well, this AI task force, it is a campus level, it it’s a campus level project. And and I am just a very, very small part of it. It’s it’s being organized, by, folks in our central IT division and academic affairs. And like I say, it was just created. We had our very first meeting last week. We’ve got representation from every area on campus, and it’s going to run for about eighteen months. It’s gonna be really, comprehensive. Some of our initial deliverables are going to be informed by, like, current use cases or, like, closely anticipated needs.
Paul Schantz [00:24:11]:
We’re gonna be determining some near term actions that we should take to create agile structures. This is gonna sound very jargony, and I apologize for that. But what we wanna do is we wanna facilitate faculty, student, and staff exploration and adoption of of AI capabilities. And and we have three working groups. One of them is around research. The second one is around teaching and learning, and the third one is around administration and operations. Mhmm. So the one that I’m personally on is the administration and operations side of things.
Paul Schantz [00:24:45]:
But like with accessibility, education and training is really going to be a big part of the equation. Some of the early conversations that I’ve had with, my colleagues in student conduct have been around the kind of framework that faculty might use with students in their classroom. And one of the early ideas we had was having sort of like a simple, traffic light metaphor. So rather than burden faculty with all the details about artificial intelligence, you say, okay. Well, if you have traffic light, red means you don’t use AI at all in in the work. Yellow means it’s okay under certain circumstances, and green, you know, have at it. And there’s different variations of of this kind of a framework. Our academic technology team, they’ve conducted a a number of training sessions around artificial intelligence, including how faculty can incorporate a statement on AI in their syllabus.
Paul Schantz [00:25:42]:
And this is actually since last time we spoke. There’s been some development in that area. So there’s a Canvas, that’s our learning management system module that, faculty members can incorporate directly into their syllabus. So they can choose the elements of an AI policy that they wanna have in in their own classroom. So that’s been very helpful.
Shiro [00:26:06]:
That’s amazing. Are there certain goals, like, within your your personal team that you’re trying to adopt AI for, or, like, plan just maybe some ideas even?
Paul Schantz [00:26:18]:
Yeah. I I think we’re it’s still very early stages. It’s going to be looking at using AI for parsing, data, particularly, engagement data, which is something that is personally interesting to me, by virtue not only of the fact that I oversee the assessment office. So we’re gathering a lot of data about student interaction across the entire division, but also in my own, doctoral research, which I I won’t get into because you’ll have me for an hour talking. But the idea is that we’re gathering a lot of data from a lot of different, sources, and it will be very helpful to use AI tools to help parse that data in ways that make it understandable for us.
Shiro [00:27:05]:
That’s amazing. Yeah. I just I had the light bulb moment just now. You have all the the student card data. Right? Or, I forgot the right word for one card data that you have. Millions of data points probably. Right? Every every year, millions of data points. How can you parse that data? AI can come in and help you understand that information.
Shiro [00:27:27]:
So that’s that’s that that would be incredible if you get it to work.
Paul Schantz [00:27:32]:
Yeah. I mean, there’s I mean, from a, from a qualitative analysis standpoint, it’s gonna be pretty transformational. Google has their notebook, LM tool, which is I think it’s still in beta, but if you have a Mhmm. A Google account, you can access that. And as part of I I was just finishing up my literature review a few months ago, and I figured, hey. I’d I’d literally just finished the last, article, and I’m like, I’m gonna try this and see, you know, how this works. I went through the old fashioned way, you know, with the article where it just went through the abstract, and I highlighted the things that seemed to be the most relevant to my research. I’m like, okay.
Paul Schantz [00:28:16]:
Well, I’m gonna upload this PDF into notebook l m. And it parsed it really, really well. It was, I would say, at least 85%, compatible with the the work that I had done on this. And on top of that, it generates a series of questions that you can ask it. So after it’s parsed the the document, it says it even gives you suggestions about questions you could ask about the document. On top of that, it provides a, a podcast, which takes two completely AI generated, characters, and they have a conversation about, about the about the document. So it’s pretty interesting.
Shiro [00:29:08]:
Oh, that’s cool. I didn’t know about that, the the AI characters and conversations. I gotta check that out. Real quick. So the goal of, you using all the student engagement data and trying to cipher the data, what is the ultimate goal of of doing this? And I already know the answer, but I wanna hear from you.
Paul Schantz [00:29:28]:
Of course. Of course. I mean, well, ultimately, we want students we we want to increase retention and graduation rates. That’s the ultimate goal. But there are also benefits to the organization as well behind the scenes. So if you’re a learning organization, you care about continuous improvement. And it it could be that a program that you have been doing for twenty or thirty years just no longer has quite the same impact that it used to. So when you’re analyzing and assessing that programming information, maybe what you decide to do is like, okay.
Paul Schantz [00:30:05]:
Well, maybe this program isn’t, you know, it’s not as good as it used to be. What maybe we should do is shift some of those funds somewhere else. Maybe start experimenting with different kinds of programming that might be more effective. And, additionally, looking at ways that we can connect students with other kinds of, relevant engagement opportunities. So it’s connecting different kinds of things. So we have hundreds of different kinds of engagement opportunities for students, and there may be all kinds of findings that we can get from from looking at that that data.
Shiro [00:30:44]:
Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, I’m just thinking, like, even, like, in your in your student portal, right, based on the students’ classes, major, it like, maybe the portal can recommend, like, certain events that are coming up around campus because it’s it’s already a lot to Shrychive through the hundreds of events. What if you could have one or two cater towards you, you know, and using AI for that?
Paul Schantz [00:31:09]:
Well, exactly. I mean, there’s there’s any number of, clubs and organizations, that are associated with a particular major.
Shiro [00:31:17]:
Mhmm.
Paul Schantz [00:31:18]:
And students that do connect get connected with organizations that are related to their classwork, they tend to do better. Not everybody, but, I mean, by and large, they do perform better. So every opportunity that we can to have students find that sense of belonging is like, oh, I’m in, like, say, I’m in anthropo cultural anthropology, for example. It’s like, okay. Well, there’s an anthropology club. Well, you would probably be, well, you know, it it would be good for you to be a part of that. I mean, I say that because that was my undergraduate, major forever ago. And I was a member of a club, that was associated with, cultural anthropology, and it it helped me.
Paul Schantz [00:32:03]:
I mean, it it definitely created, connections that that helped me, get through the the whole thing and get to the finish line.
Shiro [00:32:12]:
That’s great. Well, I mean, there’s I feel like there’s just so much we can do with AI and even just specifically with how we can better understand and break out data. So I’m really excited for what, your specific goals are, but also what CSUN and the Cal State system are gonna come up with with this AI task force. So I’m really excited, and thanks for covering the the new ADA ruling. That’s been great to have a podcast episode on that. So thank you so much for joining. I’m wondering where our listeners can connect with you.
Paul Schantz [00:32:44]:
Well, if they want and they’re just old fashioned, they can connect with me via my email. It’s very simple. It’s just paul@csun.edu. So and if you Google me, you’ll find me.
Shiro [00:32:56]:
Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Paul. Thanks for our second round together. Appreciate you.
Paul Schantz [00:33:01]:
Thank you, Shiro.
