Thank you, sir. Well, thank you for having me. It was a couple of years ago that I was out here, and I really, really enjoyed it and really appreciated the invitation. So, Lewis, thank you very much for inviting me again. I was really fascinated by how you finished your talk. Was it 764? The 764? Because I was not aware of that. But I get asked the question frequently. You know, why, with everything that's going on on college campuses today — and it was just, we had a, you know, again, yesterday, right? Was it yesterday or the day before? At Columbia, with the protests and the rioting and taking over the buildings and breaking glass and all of that that's been going on for a couple of years now. Why is that not happening at Grand Canyon? Why is that not happening at your university? And so I, you know, I want to give the best answer I can. And I'll start by saying, we did go to Grand — came to Grand Canyon 16 years ago, and there were 900 students on campus, and there was $20 million worth of debt, and 33rd Avenue and Campbell was the worst place in the city of Phoenix from a crime standpoint. There were prostitutes and drug dealers and pimps on every other corner. And we had a plan, but for me to predict that it was going to turn out like this, I could have never done that. I walk on campus now and I think, who could have ever — you know, I thought we had learned some things that we could do something different with, but I had no idea God was going to do this. And so answering that question, what's going on and what God is doing, is really interesting to me. And there's a lot of New Testament stories I could probably tell, but there's one that stands out to me that is the best answer to that question. Just about a week before Jesus was going to die on Good Friday, he was in Jericho, which is about 14 miles from Jerusalem, and he was going to start the trek with all of the other Jewish people to Jerusalem to celebrate the Passover.
And it was a big deal. You know, every year people would gather, they would walk together. And it was a carnival kind of atmosphere. There was a lot of excitement and noise. And there were a lot of important people. And Jesus was very popular. They thought he was going to save them from Roman rule and, you know, all that. But he starts walking, and there's a blind guy sitting on the side of the road. We don't know the names of most people that Jesus interacted with and performed miracles on behalf of. But we know this guy's name. His name was Bartimaeus. And he had heard about Jesus, this Jesus of Nazareth, and he was calling out to Jesus of Nazareth. He wanted to talk to him. And the disciples thought it was embarrassing that this guy was making a big commotion because Jesus was a big deal and Jesus should be spending his time with the very important people in this crowd. But Jesus said, no, no, no, bring that guy to me. Now, at this point, Jesus could have talked to anybody he wanted to when there was a lot of important people in the room, but he wanted to talk to that guy, and he said, bring him to me. And they brought him to Jesus, and Jesus asked him what he wanted, and he said, it's very easy, I want to see. And Jesus healed him. He healed his blindness, and we know that Bartimaeus followed Jesus then into Jerusalem. It would be fascinating to know what happened. I think one of the first questions I'm going to ask when I get to heaven is, what happened to that guy? How does his life turn out? I just think it would be very interesting to know that.
But Jesus had a mind like a steel trap with regards to vulnerable populations. I mean, that's the thing where his mind went there over and over and over again in his three-year ministry. The vulnerable, the people that were suffering, the people that were hurting. I mean, that's the theme of the New Testament. It's the theme of Jesus' ministry.
And when I think about what God has done at Grand Canyon, it really comes back to that for me. When we went there 16 years ago, we had a plan. We didn't know if it would work. But after three years — we went 2008, 2011 — I thought, this is going to work. I didn't know it was going to work as good as it has turned out, but it's going to work. And so we had a big decision to make. We put $2.1 billion into a campus that's now ranked the 21st nicest campus in the country. Classrooms, laboratories, residence halls, 32 restaurants, six swimming pools, seven fitness areas. I walk through campus some days and I think, are we running a university here? Are we running a resort here? And I thought, because most commercial real estate people — and I'm not one — would tell you, you don't put $2 billion into 33rd Avenue and Camelback in Maryvale, right? You don't do that. You move it to Scottsdale or you move it to Paradise Valley or you move it to anywhere, but you don't put it at 33rd Avenue and Camelback. And then I started to think, you know, maybe that is what God's plan is. Maybe he wants this here.
And so we put off all the suitors and said, thank you very much for your interest, but we're doing it here. And we started to build, and the growth just didn't stop. It just kept coming. We had 900 students. Today on our campus, we have 25,000 students. Next year when we start in the fall, it'll be close to 27,000 students. We're building it out. We've got space and plan to build it out to 50,000 students. They're coming from all 50 states in the country. And we've grown our online campus that's grown to almost 100,000 students. We're over 99,000 students. They're literally from every state in the country and from literally all over the world. We're building 80 locations throughout the country. Smaller facilities that we call our hybrid campuses. Our ground campus is for 18-year-old students who come and want to live on campus for four or five years — actually it's three or four years — learn about life and prepare for life and graduate. Our online campus is mainly for working adults who want to go back to school while they're working full-time and raising families. And what they need to learn can be learned totally online. Our hybrid campuses are for students who want to go back to college and study mainly in the healthcare areas. They can't go back as an 18-year-old, but what they need to learn can't be learned totally online. And so that's why we're building those hybrid campuses. We've got 49 of those stood up. Eventually we'll have 80. Our goal is to have 600 students on each one of those 80 campuses. That's another 48,000 students. Lately, we've got really involved in the trades because construction is going to boom in Arizona in the next 10 years. And we need electricians and machinists, and so we're really starting to build that arm of what we do. And so, yes, we've become the largest private university in the country. We happen to be a Christian university. And so why aren't the students rioting? Why aren't they demonstrating? Why aren't they breaking windows?
Shortly after we started to build in 2011, 2012, I thought, you know, if you go back in American history to Lyndon Johnson in the mid-'60s and his idea of the Great Society and the war on poverty, and he was going to eliminate poverty, and out of that came the welfare system. And in the mid-'60s, 14% of Americans lived below the poverty line. Today, 14% of Americans live below the poverty line. Not one single — they haven't made any progress. Our inner cities continue to deteriorate. It's a phenomenal thing to me as I experience almost every day. I happen to live at 32nd Street and Camelback, and I thank God it's a very nice area that we live in. I get in my car and I start driving — not Camelback, 32nd Street and Lincoln — but I go down to Camelback and I start driving west, and then I eventually get to 33rd Avenue and Camelback, and the people there live a lot differently than the people live at 32nd Street and Lincoln. The people there live a lot differently than the people that live around this beautiful church. And I think almost every day, how does God feel about that? We got 32 restaurants on our campus. Kids can eat almost anything that they want any time of the day or night, and right outside of our walls there are children that are four years old that are hungry. How does God feel about that? Given his mind and where his mind would always go, how does he view that, and what are his expectations of us? And so we put together what we call a five-point plan and said, we're going to do something that the government can't do. They can send a soulless welfare check every couple of weeks or every month or whatever it is, but they can't really do anything seriously about poverty. We're going to do it as a Christ-centered organization. We're going to do it. And so that five-point plan, the first part of it is jobs. What a neighborhood like ours needs — which is, you know, when we got there, there were 42 different languages spoken within 10 square miles of Grand Canyon University. Today it's 72. I mean, I tell our students they like to go on international mission trips, and we support that, and they go, but God's brought the world to us. They've come from all over the world. They come from Africa, from Central America. They come from South America. God has brought them to us, and I really believe he's brought them to us. And the first thing that a neighborhood like ours needs is jobs, and we've created 16,000 jobs since we've been there, and we cut 16,000 checks every two weeks. We hire people in the neighborhood. It gives them a salary, it gives them benefits, we put them into an entry-level job, and then they can send their kids to college for free. And that can produce intergenerational change. And that's a reason to stay and live in our neighborhood. We've also spun 10 new businesses off of our core business as a university. You know, a golf course, a hotel, a restaurant, a marketing company, a promotions company. And we hire people in the neighborhood into those jobs, and it's the same thing. They get a salary, they get benefits, but they can send their kids to college for free. And so the first part of it was jobs. The second part of it was safety. 27th Avenue from Indian School to Northern — and I don't know why this happens — has been known as the track or the blade around the country for two decades. 27th Avenue from Indian School to Northern, prostitutes on every corner, drug dealers, pimps, guns, violence. And 90% of people that live near 27th Avenue are really good, family-oriented people. But they've got to live in the middle of all that. Why don't people at 24th Street and Camelback have to live in the middle of all that? Because there's money there and there's not money over here. And so I went to the city of Phoenix and I said, listen, we've got to do something about this. We have our own police force and security force. I said, we're willing to put a lot of money into it, but you've got to partner with us. We've got to do something. This has got to stop. And it's amazing that we got a new precinct commander, and we've made unbelievable progress. Crime is down 30%. We've got now 82 organizations as part of the university that have their business or organization on 27th Avenue. Churches, schools, and businesses, and we meet three times a year. We put money in. We buy video equipment. We're connecting the video equipment to the city of Phoenix video equipment. We put our police headquarters right on 27th Avenue. We're going to have everybody in the neighborhood. We can help. But if you're bringing drugs or prostitution, you've got to go. You have got to go. And we're going to make it happen. We're getting closer and closer. I would guarantee you if you drive up and down 27th Avenue right now between Indian School and Northern, you will not see it. It comes back a little bit at night. And we're just going to keep going and we're going to keep going. There was a hotel at Bethany Home and 27th Avenue, old hotel, 30 or so rooms, yellow ugly thing, but it was 24/7 sex trafficking. There was an international sex trafficking organization that owned that hotel. Prostitution and drug dealing. They went in there a couple of months ago and arrested those guys, boarded that thing up. We're going to burn it down — it's gone. We're making huge progress. The third thing is homes. We have the largest Habitat for Humanity program in the world going right now in our neighborhood. We've rebuilt 500 homes. Our goal is to get to 800. And once we get to that, we will set another goal. The fourth thing is students. A lot of kids in our neighborhood have parents who haven't graduated from eighth grade. We have a tutoring center that's open between 3:00 and 8:00. Our students run the tutoring center. We assign every student that comes in that wants help. We just tell them, bring your homework. Bring your homework because by God, you're going to get an A in algebra because what we know is if kids get A's in algebra, they'll graduate from high school and there's a chance that they'll go to college. So that program's led to a scholarship program. We've raised over $16 million and awarded now over a thousand full-ride scholarships to the kids that come right out of our neighborhood. 95% of them are kids of color, 100% live below the poverty line, but we're getting kids from all 50 states, but we're not going to leave the kids in our neighborhood behind. The fifth thing is absolutely amazing. I'd love you to come out and see it sometime, but it's called CityServe. Dave Donaldson, who now works in the West Wing of the White House — he has an office there, is going to be in charge of faith-based initiatives for the president — started CityServe a number of years ago because Walmart and Target and Costco and all the retailers sell goods into the marketplace, a percent gets returned. They can't resell it into the marketplace. They've got to get rid of it before they can put out new lines. And so those things were being put on trucks and taken to landfills. He said, I think I can build a series of 50 hubs, one in every state, and we can get that stuff put on trucks and taken to those hubs. The hubs will create pods, and those pods are inner-city churches who appoint a hero who gets to know the needs of the families in the area and puts in orders, and we get the stuff to the families. This is an amazing thing. They told us to build a 10,000-square-foot warehouse. It's now 100,000 square feet. We get two truckloads of goods every single week, about $60,000 worth of truckloads on every single one of those trucks. And we've got three full-time people that run this thing. The rest is volunteer help. But we've gotten over $17 million worth of goods to over 70,000 families in under three years. North to the Indian Reservation and west to Yuma and south to Tucson. But mainly West Phoenix and Maryvale is where we really focus. But we've got 190 pods now. The thing is just growing exponentially. There's a very good chance they want to move the headquarters to Phoenix and put it on our university. We just got 25,000 volunteers — 25,000 students plus faculty and staff. It's just — an amazing guy called me and said, listen, we'd like to join what you're doing. We've got a nonprofit. I said, what's it called? He said, Sleeping Heavenly Peace. I said, well, what do you guys do? He said, well, you're a university president. You can't figure out what Sleeping Heavenly Peace means. We build beds. So they come at 6:00 in the morning and they set up an assembly line, and we had 150 of our student volunteers, honor college kids. They came and they got taught one of the stations, and we produced 80 bunk beds in a three-and-a-half-hour time period. He would like to move his organization onto our campus. Maybe we'll do that at some point. But the building of the beds is one thing, but when you deliver them, it's unbelievable. We delivered one at a time when a fourth grader was coming home, and we got the bed installed before the fourth grader. This kid's been sleeping on the floor his whole life. He walked into his bedroom and there was a brand-new bunk bed and brand-new bedding, and it was his bed. He didn't have to sleep with his brothers and sisters on the floor. It was his bed. Now, I just have to believe that at some point that fourth grader is going to say, who are these Christ followers? Who are these people? And why would they care about me? And maybe I need to learn more about that. You know, when you talked about execution and doing — that is my answer. Because in addition to that five-point plan, we've got hundreds, literally, of ministries on our campus where our students go out into our neighborhood almost every evening. They know where the Syrian refugee population is. It's an old apartment complex. They go there Tuesday and Thursday evenings and they help the kids with their homework and teach them English as a second language. Hundreds of those things are going on every day. And so what I tell people is, I'm not against protest because there are times when attention needs to be drawn to an injustice, but we don't need our attention drawn to it. We live in the middle of it. We drive through it. We see it every day. It's not a matter of drawing people's attention to it. It's a matter of doing something about it. And so that kind of became the brand of the university. Did I sit down one day and figure that out? I didn't. That was a God-ordained thing. It seemed like the more we blessed the neighborhood, the more God blessed us, and this thing just didn't stop. That's my only explanation for it. But our students don't have time to draw attention to things. What we need to do is we need to work on all those things because those are God's people. They were created in his image. They've come from all over the world. And God wants them to know about his son Jesus. And I think we can introduce him to Jesus best by helping them live better in this current life. It's interesting how it becomes contagious because all of a sudden everybody's bringing us these opportunities. A couple of years ago, before he left office, Governor Ducey called me and said, the last thing I want to do is I want to do something serious about kids who age out of foster care. They don't have any place to go. Can you put something together? And we worked pretty hard on it, and we got back to them and said, listen, if they're eligible, can meet the admissions requirements, they can come to our campus. They can live on our campus for four years. They can get three meals a day. We'll pay for all of that, pay for their tuition, pay for their fees. There's a $3,500 difference between what it's going to cost us to do it. And he said, that is easy. He said, I can't believe that you got that close. So we've got this foster care program now where these kids — if they age out of foster care and they're eligible and they want to be on our campus, they can come and everything's paid for for four years. They don't have a place to go. They don't have a place to go at Christmas. They don't have a place to go at Easter. They don't have a place to go in the summer. They've got to stay on campus. But now they have a place to go. They get three meals a day. Their tuition's covered. And we're getting a job for at least 20 hours a week, and they get to keep that money. So we have them start in a bank account. So when they graduate, they're going to be in a different place than maybe they spent their first 18 years. Our tutoring program was going so strong that the principal at Alhambra called me and said, you know, it's great that you're helping kids academically, but we've got a lot of kids that are suffering with depression, anxiety, suicidal thoughts. Their families really can't afford counseling. Can you do something? Because we have the fastest-growing counseling program in the country. It happens to be a Christian counseling program. And so we started this thing called ST Changing Lives Outreach, and under the supervision of one of our faculty members, our students go provide that counseling to kids in our neighborhood. It's amazing. It's absolutely amazing what's going on. And most of those kids never met a college student before. But now a college student is showing up and helping them with their — they've never had that kind of attention before. Many of you might know Don Cardon, big developer in Arizona. He came to me a few years ago and said, I've got a daughter. You know, she's got some intellectual challenges. She really can't go to college the way your kids go to college, but I'd like her to have an experience that is like that. Could you create something like that? And so we created this program, and we bring these kids in in the fall, usually 24 to 30 kids each fall. They go through a two-year program. They have their own classroom, and they come on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Each one's assigned a buddy, and the buddy shows up, meets them at the — you know, we take them to chapel, we take them to basketball games. It's a phenomenal program, and at the end of the two years these kids are ready to step into a job. Now probably half of them work for us. If you ever come to campus and go into our bookstore, beware of one of those kids because he will upsell you. I guarantee you, you will buy more than you thought you were going to buy when you went in there. But it's amazing to watch them change. You know, you talk about people that don't want — these kids can't wait to have a job. They can't wait to work. They can't wait to be productive and part of society, and it's life-changing to watch what's happened with them. And I can go through five or six other programs. Childhelp is one of the biggest organizations in the world. Maybe some of you know about Childhelp, but they take in kids that have been through the very, very worst in terms of abuse. And they've created — two ladies, it's a phenomenal story. They're 90 years old now, but they want that, and so they asked if they could move their entire organization onto our campus. We can't do that immediately, but we're working on it. We moved their call center to campus, and our counselors are now helping them, taking the calls, and so we're building a connection between the two organizations. It is an intentionally Christian organization, and eventually we'll move more of it. But what's my point? My point is that for all the things that I would like to be known for, and our 10 colleges and our 350 academic programs — what's happening academically is just unbelievable to me. But it's happening. We have 22 advisory boards. We have 800 companies on those advisory boards because they want access to our graduates. We've got the strongest student body in the state of Arizona now by virtue of incoming GPA. Our honors college has exploded. Over 3,000 students now. And I'm proud of all of that. I'm proud of our athletic program, and our women's softball team is now ranked 24th in the country, and our men's basketball team has made four of the last five national tournaments. And the foundation was laid by Josh, who's sitting in the back there. He's probably the best player that ever played at Grand Canyon University. Still holds a three-point record. Did you hold a three-point shot? And so he came when we weren't even eligible for the tournament, and laid the foundation for us, and now the thing has taken off. And two years ago, we beat St. Mary's in round one, and we lost to Alabama in round two. We were up by six with four minutes to go. Got screwed by the officials. Every time our staff asked me how we're going to get to the Final Four, I said, listen, we haven't raised tuition in 16 years, but things are working very well for us financially. As long as you guys keep doing your job, next time we get to the round of 32, I'm going to figure out who those officials are and get to them. Now, take that out of the notes. All right, that would not have been a good thing to do. That wouldn't fit with the — but with all those things that we've been blessed by and we're extremely proud of, it's the fact that people look at us and say they're trying to make people's lives better. They're very concerned about vulnerable populations. They're very concerned about the least of these. But they're doing a lot of stuff to make their lives better. And to be known for that, for a Christian university to be known for that, I think is the thing that we're most proud of and we're most grateful for. And so I'm excited about the next 10 years in Arizona because of what's going to happen in our economy. There has never been a time, I don't think, in our country's history that we can do more about eliminating poverty than we can in Arizona in the next 10 years. The supply and demand in the labor force has flipped, and I am meeting with parents and school superintendents literally on an almost everyday basis because we need them to understand that for those families that have been cutting grass — and there's nothing wrong with that — for generations, the opportunity for those young people today is more than it's ever been if we can get them into some kind of postsecondary education, into some kind of middle-class job that can become an upper-middle-class job. We are going to do something permanently to eradicate poverty. We're going to create a middle-class community in Maryvale. It's going to come back. It's going to be a middle-class community. It's going to be a safe community. People are going to want to live there. And the spearhead of that was a Christian university who wanted to do what Jesus taught us to do, what he showed us to do. And hopefully that will be — it's interesting. The government threw everything they could at us for six years. Absolutely everything they could at us, and we just kept going. We just kept going. And it wasn't us. It was something God wanted to happen. When I read a book called How to Go from the Outhouse to the Penthouse in 24 Hours — November 6th happened, and on November 7th I got a call and said, would you come to Mar-a-Lago and would you help us think about the future of education in this country and help us think about the future of the Department of Education? And so all of a sudden we're in a position where we can provide leadership, and we can do it from a Christian worldview perspective, and so we need to do everything we can in the next four years. So hey, thank you for having me. I'd be happy to answer any questions. Yes, sir.
