S3E5: President Mearns Answers His Kids’ Questions

Over the past three seasons, President Geoffrey S. Mearns has been the one asking his guests questions on “Our Call to Beneficence.” For this episode of the podcast, his two youngest children, his twins Geoffrey Jr. and Molly, turn the tables by interviewing him.

“Our goal in doing this was to hopefully give people a side of you that they might not know,” Geoffrey Jr. tells his father at the outset of their conversation. With that objective in mind, the President’s son and daughter ask him a host of questions about his upbringing, their family, and why he chose to become a lawyer before transitioning to a career in higher education.  

The trio end their time together by discussing what Beneficence means to President Mearns and why, based on personal experience, he believes that Ball State is such a distinctive and special place. 

If you enjoy this episode, please leave a review to support the show. 

Transcript

[PRESIDENT MEARNS]

Thank you for joining me for another conversation on my podcast. During this episode, there are two changes to my usual format. First, instead of one special guest, today I've invited two special guests to join me. And today, instead of asking questions of my guests, I will be answering questions from my guests. See, today, my two special guests are my son, Geoffrey, and his twin sister, Molly.

The twins are the youngest of my five children. Geoffrey and Molly both live in Brooklyn, New York, and they work in New York City. And we have recorded this conversation while they are here in Muncie with me and their mother for the Thanksgiving holiday. So, Molly and Geoffrey, welcome to my podcast.

[MOLLY MEARNS]

Thank you. Excited to be here.

[GEOFFREY MEARNS]

Thank you.

[PRESIDENT MEARNS]

So before you get started asking me questions, I've got a question for you. Have you ever listened to an episode of my podcast?

[GEOFFREY MEARNS]

Yes, we have. We did some ... we did some research to get ready for this.

[PRESIDENT MEARNS]

That's what concerns me. That you're prepared.

[GEOFFREY MEARNS]

Yeah. We also listened to the podcast you did with our mom.

[PRESIDENT MEARNS]

Okay, let's go.

[GEOFFREY MEARNS]

All right, so we're going to start. So our goal in ... in doing this was to hopefully give people a side of you that they might not know. So a lot of your background, a lot of stuff of your personal life, just to give them a sense of how we know you. So we're going to start from basically day zero, starting with where did you grow up?

[PRESIDENT MEARNS]

So I was born in Charlottesville, Virginia. My father, your grandfather, was a professor at the University of Virginia in the law school. And I was the fifth child. My father ... it was, I was born just a year after he graduated from law school. So he had four kids before and during law school. And so we lived in Charlottesville till I was through the second grade.

And then we moved to New York for a year, Chicago for a couple of years, Cincinnati. But we did have, one year when I was about three years old, three, four years old, my father got a Marshall Fellowship to study and teach in Sicily, in Italy. So for a year, my parents and four of my siblings and my younger sister was born there in Sicily. We lived for a year in Italy, So with a large family, we moved around quite a bit.

[GEOFFREY MEARNS]

Yeah, there's a great photo that we have always seen of all of you guys on the boat over heading over to Italy.

[PRESIDENT MEARNS]

Yeah. We took an ocean liner from New York City over to Italy. And as you saw your grandmother in that photo is quite pregnant because about three months after we arrived in Italy, she gave birth to your Aunt Kathleen.

[MOLLY MEARNS]

So that's a lot of places that you lived as a child. Is there one in particular that you would consider home?

[PRESIDENT MEARNS]

So I always think of Charlottesville as home, in part because of having been born there. But I think the other one that really became home is when my parents moved to Cleveland, to Shaker Heights, when I was going into 10th grade in high school. And they lived in in Shaker Heights for the duration of their lives. That's where you were born.

And so, that's where many of my siblings lived for many years. So that's kind of home. With my siblings and actually with your mother as well, we moved so much and had so many children that it seemed like at least once a year we would be sitting down at dinner and before dessert was served, my parents would say, “Well, there's something kids that we need to talk about.”

And it either was that my mother was pregnant again or we were moving again. And that seemed to last for about a ten year stretch, because, as you know, I'm the fifth of nine children.

[GEOFFREY MEARNS]

And that actually leads into our next question, which was what was it like growing up with eight siblings and seven of them being sisters?

[PRESIDENT MEARNS]

Yeah. So your Uncle Drew was the oldest and then I had three older sisters and four younger sisters. I always felt that I had the charmed position in the family because I was around when my brother really ruled the kids. But he went off to college ... he was a freshman in college when our younger sister Evan was born, so he really didn't really experience in the house the second half of the family, but I was around long enough to see the second half. So, you know, we were we were very fortunate, always felt that our parents loved us. We mostly got along. There was a very strict rule in our house: No hands. Don't put hands on one of your siblings. So we got pretty good at teasing each other.

But I have great fond memories of Christmas celebrations and always being around a house that was full of people, conversations, and a lot of love.

[MOLLY MEARNS]

You mentioned your parents. With all those kids in the house, what were your parents like growing up and kind of keeping a handle on everyone?

[PRESIDENT MEARNS]

So I never remember my parents having to be strict disciplinarians. They seemed to just innately, through their manner, keep us pretty well-behaved. Although I do remember, I think I was in either in the fourth or fifth grade, we had just come out of church and I happened to be sitting in the front seat of our Volkswagen van and your Aunt Allison, the sister who's just one older than me, I don't remember what she said, and I don't remember what I said to her, but I apparently said something I shouldn't have said. And all I remember was seeing my father's right hand. He was driving the car, so he was behind the wheel. We were still parked. And also remember seeing his right hand come out of my peripheral vision and smacked me across my smart mouth.

I think that was probably that's the only time I remember my father ever having to discipline us that way. Just because, all of us had such great respect and affection for my parents that I think we all were pretty, pretty well-behaved. I don't know how they did it, but they kept us in check pretty well.

[GEOFFREY MEARNS]

And then when you left for college, were you—how did it feel to leave home and move to New Haven?

[PRESIDENT MEARNS]

It seemed like the natural order of things. You know, as folks who have heard me speak, my father was the first in our family to go to college. His father was a nightclub singer. His mother was an executive assistant. You know, on my mother's side, she attended some college but didn't graduate because she got, they got married and she started having kids when she was very young.

Your mother's parents are your grandparents on the other side. Your grandmother attended some college. Your grandfather didn't. So my father was the first to go to college. And that one educational experience that he got just changed the whole trajectory of our family. So it was a given as we were growing up, not whether you would go to college, it was where. So I had the good fortune to get admitted to Yale. And I'm not sure how that happened because I do recall what my what my SAT scores and my high school GPA was. So I think they took a flier on me because I was a pretty good runner. And it was my sister Allison was actually two years ahead of me in Yale. And so we were on the same campus, although we didn't see each other. But this was at a time without cell phones. And you know, you wrote letters. You didn't have email, you didn't have cell phones. I remember very clearly about, I don't know, probably in November of my freshman year. And back then, you would make collect calls and you'd do it on a Sunday, because that was the cheapest time to make a collect call.

I remember very distinctly one day my mother answered the phone. We spoke for a short period of time and she asked me a question. She said, “Is everything okay?” And I said, “Yeah.” And she said, “Well, then why did you call?” And I said, “Well, I just wanted to check in.” And she said, “Well, if you're just checking in, write us a letter.”

So, you know, with nine kids, you know, we were off to college and she was taking care of four young ones still at home. So it felt like a time to be independent, even though I knew that my that my parents took too great care of us.

[MOLLY MEARNS]

And going into college, did you have an idea of what you wanted to do?

[PRESIDENT MEARNS]

Well, I was pretty sure I better graduate. But in terms of what I wanted to do after college, no. I was a pretty committed distance runner, you know, running cross-country in the fall, indoor track through the winter, outdoor track. So I have to admit here publicly, I was more focused on training and competing than studying, which got me in a little academic hot water in my freshman year. But I pulled out of that tailspin and was able to graduate. I thought I might ... I was pretty sure, as I was going through college, that I'd probably go to law school after I graduated, but not necessarily directly. So as I said, I probably spent a little more time focusing on athletics and probably could have spent a little more time focusing on academics.

[GEOFFREY MEARNS]

Like many students, I know many students at Ball State, Molly and I both worked during our undergrad as well. Did you work at all in any odd jobs when you're an undergraduate?

[PRESIDENT MEARNS]

Well, so I worked in college, but also even by the time I was in 10th grade in high school, I was always working full time over the summer and usually had a part time job during the school year. And then when I was at Yale, I was working in the summers and also working on campus and my first job as a freshman on campus was working in the athletics department, in the laundry department of Athletics.

So before cross-country practice would start, I had to fold laundry for the football team and then I would go to cross-country practice. And that continued in the spring for other sports. And then my last three years—sophomore, junior and senior year—I worked for the Yale Taxi Service. And so my time slot was every Sunday evening from 5 p.m. to about 2 a.m. on Monday morning. And you there were usually three or four of us on the job during any one of those shifts. And so we were either driving a minivan or actually working as a dispatcher. So that was my 8 hours a week when I was a ... for my last three years in college.

[MOLLY MEARNS]

You already mentioned you had a maybe slight idea that you wanted to go to law school, but you didn't go to law school right after undergrad. What did you do in the time between?

[PRESIDENT MEARNS]

Well, so it was the spring. It was getting into the—it was about spring break of my senior year. And I had this realization that, you know, my parents with that many kids, my parents had a couple of rules. One was, you graduated in four years. College was not expected to be a five or six year adventure. You were supposed to graduate on time and I was going to graduate on time. 

And then their second rule was that you could come home and live at home for one summer, but that by Labor Day after you graduated, you needed to be out of the house. It didn't matter whether you had a job or not. You were out of the house. 

So, it was like March spring break of my senior year and I realized I didn't have a job and was pretty sure that my parents meant what they said. So a buddy of mine who was a year behind me was a really good soccer player. His mother was, worked in the placement office, specifically helping Yale students get jobs teaching at private schools. So I went over and met with his mother and he she helped me identify a couple of private schools that would hire people directly out of college to teach.

And so I applied to a couple of places and got a job in Morristown, New Jersey, at a private prep school called the Delbarton School in Morristown, New Jersey. So, drove down to Morristown and got that job. And so, I wanted to do that kind of job for about three or four years and then think about whether to go to law school.

And so that was what I did for three years between college and law school, and that's where I met your mother. I think there's a television show like that, right? 
[MOLLY AND GEOFFREY MEARNS LAUGH]

[GEOFFREY MEARNS]

And at law school, what was your goal? What were you thinking of doing with a law degree?

[PRESIDENT MEARNS]

Well, so between college and law school, I was really focused on training and competing. And my goal from a very young age was to represent the United States in the Olympics, in the marathon. And so during that time in teaching at Delbarton, I qualified for the 1984 Olympic trials in the marathon, was injured before the race, so didn't compete in that race.

So while I was in law school, I was thinking of, could I take another shot at it in 1988? But also thinking about what did I what I wanted to do with my law degree. I really didn't have a good sense of what I wanted to do when I graduated from law school. But I remember very clearly a question that a professor asked in a criminal procedure class.

And he asked the students in the in the class: “How many of you, when you graduate, want to work in the criminal justice system?” And a lot of us raised their hands, raised our hands. And then he said, “Well, how many of you want to be defense lawyers?” And the majority of the people raise their hands to be defense lawyers.

And he asked the students why and they gave many answers. And his response was, and it resonated with me at the time: “Doing criminal defense work is a very important and valuable position in our criminal justice system. But what he said is, if you actually want to influence the system as opposed to simply influence particular cases, you have more capacity to ensure the justice part of the justice system by serving as a prosecutor, because you've got to decide which kinds of cases to investigate, how to invest your critical resources in terms of your prosecutorial priorities, and you have more control of the disposition of those cases by how you charge them and how you negotiate, please. So that really resonated with me. And so that was the first time I began thinking that if I had the opportunity after I graduated from law school that I might want to be a federal prosecutor.

[GEOFFREY MEARNS]

And when you, you know, I know you took some time in in private practice before you became a prosecutor. When you actually became a prosecutor, what was that like? How was handling sort of the financial challenges of that and what advice do you have to young people now looking to work in public service despite those barriers?

[PRESIDENT MEARNS]

Yeah, So I had the good fortune after I graduated from law school, I clerked for a federal appellate court judge, a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. We were, that judge was living and working out of Louisville, Kentucky, and then worked for a year in the New York office of Jones Day.

And that was a really challenging job, in terms of how many hours you had to spend doing the work. But frankly, for me, it wasn't particularly rewarding because you were the low person in the hierarchy and didn't feel like I was making much of a difference. And so while it was more financially rewarding, it was not particularly gratifying from a professional standpoint.

So I had the good fortune of getting an opportunity to become an assistant United States attorney in the Eastern District of New York, which is Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, and all of Long Island. And there were two things that enabled me going to your question, Geoffrey, about financially. So first of all, law school was a little cheaper back then when I was in law school. And I was able to, with the jobs that I had in between the first and second year and in between the second and third year, to save up enough money to pay for the next year's education. So I only really needed to borrow money for that first year of law school because again, the third rule that my parents had is they would help you pay for college. But any graduate program, you were on your own. So I had the good fortune of being able to graduate with what at the time was a relatively small amount of debt.

And then the other good fortune was during that time period, I married your mother. And as you know, your mother is a very frugal person. And so, because she was doing well in her profession, it enabled me to take a big pay cut and leave Jones Day in New York and go to the U.S. Attorney's Office. So a little bit of it was the economy at the time, and the other was your mother's very generous financial support.

She made an investment in me. She’s still determining whether she got a good return on that investment.

[MOLLY AND GEOFFREY MEARNS LAUGH]

[MOLLY MEARNS]

How did that kind of shift once you started having kids?

[PRESIDENT MEARNS]

So the job was very demanding and but I loved it. And so as your mother will tell you, I worked six, usually six and a half days a week, 12, 13, 14 hours a day. But I loved it because it was so challenging, and I felt like I was growing as a prosecutor, as a lawyer, and as a leader every day.

So what seemed like a burden when I was in private practice because it wasn't particularly rewarding, really felt like a great opportunity. And then we were blessed when Bridget was born, but to illustrate sometimes the demands, but also my poor judgment, if your mother were here, she would tell you the story that on the day we brought Bridget home from the hospital, we brought her home in the morning, and we got back to our brownstone apartment in Brooklyn, I helped them get settled, and I left and went back to the office.

She remembers it quite clearly and reminds me of it from time to time. But that was the level of commitment that was expected. And then two and a half years later, about two and a half years later, when Christina was born, you know, those challenges at home, those responsibilities at home, added to the responsibilities that I had at work.

And your mother was working at that time. So, we figured it out. We juggled our calendars, we juggled our expectations. I remember coming home in the middle of trials, maybe to get home in time to help bathe Bridget or Christine, and to help them get ready for bed and I would bring a briefcase full of stuff to do home to prepare for the next day of trial.

Jennifer would go to bed, your mother would go to bed, and the babies would go to bed, and then I'd sit at the dining room table and do 2 hours more of work to get ready for a cross-examination or a closing argument.

But it sounds like a lot of work and a lot of responsibility. But it was a wonderful time in our lives because the two of us were blessed at home and we were both challenged and rewarded at work.

[GEOFFREY MEARNS]

At the U.S. Attorney's Office, you worked primarily on organized crime cases. What attracted you to work on those cases? Was it because they were high profile? You know, that was the late eighties, early nineties....there was a lot of big organized crime cases going on in New York, or was it something else?

[PRESIDENT MEARNS]

Well, so that part of it was, I often joked if you were prosecuting mobsters in Brooklyn, New York, in the late eighties and early nineties, it was a target rich environment. There were five organized crime families in New York, and we were working hard to bring down the leadership of every one of those families. But I got that opportunity because of a guy whom, you know, a guy named John Gleason, who was the head of the organized crime section, and I'll spare you the long story about the reorganization that went on throughout the Justice Department that enabled many of us as young, relatively inexperienced prosecutors to get an opportunity to participate in investigations of organized crime in New York and try some really big cases. And so, you know, I was only maybe three, three and a half years out of law school. And I was trying cases that were on the front page of The New York Times and the other newspapers. And so we never felt like, the pressure of that public exposure, because we were just kind of focused on doing the work and maybe we were too inexperienced to realize the pressure that we were facing. But John was an extraordinary trial lawyer. He was actually the lead prosecutor that convicted John Gotti. He was the one who assigned me to prosecute the juror who took the bribe in the first federal Gotti case. And so he gave me responsibility on those cases and in other things at a time when, not exactly sure why he entrusted me with that responsibility, but it just gave me an opportunity to grow as a lawyer. And also at that same time was increasingly getting more responsibility as a as a leader, a supervisor of other prosecutors in the office. It was a lot of fun.

[GEOFFREY MEARNS]

Is there any case or specific skill that you think that you gained from those opportunities that you use still today?

[PRESIDENT MEARNS]

Well, one of the things that John often reminded us as we were going through some of these long cases is, you know, if you're trying a case like that, the shortest one was maybe a couple of weeks. Often they were three, four or five, six weeks. And there were good days in the courtroom. And there were some challenging days in the courtroom.

And John's constant admonition was, never let the highs get you too high and never let the lows get you too low. That you take the long game and focus on your plan and your preparation and your execution. So I remember that. And I remember also, there were a couple of times when cases were pretty personal to John.

And so I felt an obligation to him, who had given me that responsibility, to demonstrate to him that his trust in me was well placed. And so I learned watching him about how to lead others, how to give people, you know, who are working for you, an opportunity to demonstrate their capacity to do more and to do better.

[MOLLY MEARNS]

So we know you didn't stay in Brooklyn forever.

[PRESIDENT MEARNS]

That's right.

[MOLLY MEARNS]

We know our sister Claire was born in North Carolina. What brought you to Raleigh?

[PRESIDENT MEARNS]

So after Christina was born, we were living in a floor-through brownstone in Brooklyn in Cobble Hill and it was the two of us, plus two little kids. And we had about 800 square feet. And so we were faced with the choice, given my continuing commitment to the Justice Department and your mother's work, that if we were going to be able to have a bigger place to live, we were either going to have to move an hour outside of New York City and commute, which would have meant even a longer day, or we were going to have to, you know, find another place to live and work and raise our kids. So right about that same time, the United States Attorney's Office in the Eastern District of North Carolina was looking for a first assistant. So every United States attorney is nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate and the first assistant or chief assistant is the top non presidentially appointed prosecutor in the office.

And so the Attorney General's office in Washington was looking to help the United States Attorney in Raleigh recruit from within the Justice Department, a first assistant to help manage the challenges in that office. And so we had never lived in Raleigh, but it sounded like a great place and a good professional opportunity for me. So I guess it was May of ‘95, we left Brooklyn and moved to Raleigh for a couple of years where I was the first assistant, and that's where Claire was born, in December of 95. So the timing was good.

[GEOFFREY MEARNS]

And probably the most high profile case that you end up working on when you worked for the Department of Justice was the Oklahoma City bombing trial. How did you end up working on that trial? And maybe just give us a sense of what that was like.

[PRESIDENT MEARNS]

Yeah, so I'll tell you the story. And while the story is going to sound like it's about me, the real story here is about your mother. So fast forward to April of 1997. Your mother and I had decided to leave Raleigh and move to Cleveland, where my parents were, your grandparents, several of my siblings, your aunts and uncles were living there. And we had just decided that I was going to leave the Justice Department, she was going to continue working, and we were going to move to Cleveland to be closer to family. 

So I had accepted a job again, back at Jones Day, this time in their office in Cleveland and late on a Sunday night, got a call from a woman named Beth Wilkinson. Beth was a classmate of mine. She was actually the president of my law school class at the University of Virginia and had worked for me in the organized crime section in Brooklyn, New York.

Beth was one of the principal trial lawyers who was trying the McVeigh case at that time. And what she shared was that the lead prosecutor and a couple of the other principal trial lawyers had decided that when the McVeigh case was over, that they were not going to continue to try to participate in the trial of the second defendant, Terry Nichols, and that there were three of them who were leaving, and that the attorney general wanted to appoint an experienced prosecutor to come in and serve on the as one of the principal trial lawyers in the Nichols case.

And Beth called to say they had interviewed a couple of prosecutors. The trial team was not particularly excited about any of those potential candidates. And did I want to be considered? Well, as I said at that time, you know, we had signed a contract to buy a house in Cleveland. We still hadn't sold our house in North Carolina. We had three kids. I had a job. And so I told Beth, you know, I really appreciated her, you know, calling me and thinking of me that way, but that it just wasn't going to be possible. And so I hung up the phone. And as I said, this was late on a Sunday evening, and your mother said, “So who was that?”

And I told her who it was. And she asked, “Why was she calling?” And I explained the call and she said, “Well, what did you say?” And I said, “Well, I told Beth that it just wasn't practical. We just we couldn’t, you know, couldn't do it.” And she said, “Call her back and tell Beth that you are interested in the job.”

And she said, “This is who you are. If the Attorney General of the United States thinks that you are the best person to represent the United States in what is arguably the most important criminal prosecutions in the history of our country, then we'll figure the rest of it out. This is who you are. This is who we are.”

And so I was quite surprised. And so I called Beth back and I told her what Jennifer said. She said, “Great, here's the deal. It's Sunday night. You need to be out here Tuesday morning to interview with the trial team and interview with the associate deputy attorney general.” 

So on Tuesday morning, 36 hours later, jumped on a plane from Raleigh to Denver, Colorado, interviewed with the trial team. The liaison between the trial team and the attorney general was somebody whose name you've heard and probably everyone who's listening knows it was Merrick Garland, who's now the attorney general of the United States.

And Merrick was the one who recommended to Attorney General Reno that I be appointed as a special attorney to participate in the Nichols case. So about ten days after I interviewed, I got a call from the attorney general's office saying that I had been selected and that within a week I had to start commuting from Raleigh to Denver to start preparing for what was going to be the conclusion of the McVeigh case and the beginning of the Nichols case.

So that's how it came about. And as I said, that story is about your mother, because beginning at that point, within a relatively short period of time, as we were moving from Raleigh to Cleveland, your mother with three children, with me spending two, three weeks at a time in a hotel, living in a hotel in Denver, Colorado, and I was out there for almost 12 months. It was about nine or ten months.

In the interim, as you know, your mother got pregnant and that's why you're with us here today. And I got home just in time to be with her and with you when you were born. So it was a great professional responsibility. But it came about because of your mother's sacrifices and her understanding of what it means to be a patriot.

[MOLLY MEARNS]

So after kind of that trial, then when you were in Cleveland, you shifted back to private practice for a little while and then you switched back into public service, first at Cleveland State University. How did that happen?

[PRESIDENT MEARNS]

So I spent seven years in private practice on the other side of the caption, right? On the other side of the “v”, representing people who are either under investigation or possibly having been charged with a crime and also doing some commercial litigation and got an email one day from a member of the search committee who was looking for the next dean of the law school at Cleveland State, saying that that that the committee had received my name as a possible candidate to be the dean of the law school.

I thought they were confusing me for my father because he had actually been a law professor and a law dean. And I had not. But the reason I took the opportunity is one is, I believe, well-prepared and ethical lawyers play a very important role in our democratic society. I think public education is a public good. And so I was fortunate to receive the opportunity to be the dean of the law school, thought I was going to do that for maybe four or five, six years, and then go back either into the practice of law or maybe go back to the Justice Department or do something else in public service.

But that didn’t quite play out that way.

[GEOFFREY MEARNS]

And when did you know you wanted to be a university president, do you think?

[PRESIDENT MEARNS]

Well, so what happened was I'd been the dean for about four years. New president comes in at Cleveland State, asked me to serve as a provost, and I actually spent some time thinking about whether I wanted to do that. And the reason I did was, as I said, I was planning to go back to practice law and maybe be in public service in that respect.

And I knew that if I went down the path of becoming a provost, that it was most likely then going to be staying down the path of higher education. So it was when I became a provost that I realized that that’s a very important job. But what I missed about being dean of the law school was the external opportunities that a dean has in contrast to a provost.

So that was when I realized that maybe I could become the president of a university. And that's what came about for me, about two and a half years, three years after I became the interim provost at Cleveland State.

[GEOFFREY MEARNS]

And do you have any advice, particularly for young people about how to view their own progression professionally and when they might be ready to be in a leadership position?

[PRESIDENT MEARNS]

So I guess what I would say is, first of all, focus on your current job. If you do your current job really well, demonstrate work ethic, demonstrate competencies, demonstrate the capacity to support other people on your team, leadership opportunities will naturally flow to you. So focus on what you're doing. And the second piece of advice that I would say is “Say yes.”

I can't remember a single time when my supervisor came to me either in the U.S. Attorney's office or in private practice, or when the president asked me to move from being the law dean, which I loved, to being provost, where I ever said “No.” Every opportunity that I had to take on an additional case, to take on additional responsibility, take on an additional supervisory responsibility, I said yes. So just say yes.

[MOLLY MEARNS]

Yeah, we can end on a couple maybe more personal, maybe more fun questions.

[PRESIDENT MEARNS]

Okay.

[MOLLY MEARNS]

What are some of your hobbies? What do you do in your free time and what do you do when your kids come to visit?

[PRESIDENT MEARNS]

Yeah. So I love you know, you know, I love watching sports. I love being outside, you know, running, playing tennis. You remember growing up, we play running bases with Frisbees or go, you know, on little, you know, runs with you when you guys were little. So I love being outside. As you know, we love going to Maine and hiking and walking and things.

And as you also know, we love following up that physical activity with either pancakes or ice cream.

[GEOFFREY MEARNS]

Or both. 

[PRESIDENT MEARNS]

Yeah. So, you know, those are the kinds of things that I like to do. I'd to have a little bit more free time to read more. I don't read as much as I would like because I'm usually spending time being active. I spend enough time behind a computer reading emails and stuff.

[GEOFFREY MEARNS]

So you brought up a little bit about ice cream. We have a little bit of a famous story of you that I think also maybe relates to some time as your time as a prosecutor. You have a distinct love for chocolate chip ice cream. 

[PRESIDENT MEARNS]

Correct. 

[GEOFFREY MEARNS]

And we used to, we had our favorite place in Cleveland, and maybe you can give people a small flavor of what happened when they decided to get rid of their chocolate chip ice cream.

[PRESIDENT MEARNS]

So you're talking about Mitchell's? 

[GEOFFREY MEARNS]

Yes. 

[PRESIDENT MEARNS]

Yeah. So there's a special gourmet local ice cream place. And so I was interviewed by the Cleveland Plain Dealer. They were doing kind of profiles of, you know, prominent people in the community. And they asked a wide variety of questions and they asked what I did on the weekends with my family. And I said, I took all of you to Mitchell's for ice cream. And they asked me what my favorite flavor was. And I said, chocolate chip. In fact, as you know, they're in my estimation, there's no need to eat any other flavor of ice cream than chocolate chip. So it  it was about a month after this large profile in the Cleveland Plain Dealer gets published, when I'm going in with Molly, right? Going into Mitchell's on a weekend to get ice cream, and they tell me they've discontinued chocolate chip.

So I wrote the owner of Mitchell's a letter saying, How could you do that? I showed him the article and he sent me a gift certificate for like $25 of Mitchell's ice cream. And I wanted to write back and say, Why are you giving me a gift certificate? All I'm asking for is to bring back the chocolate chip. And I think it was about six months later when they finally brought back the chocolate chip.

[MOLLY MEARNS]

After we moved away from Cleveland. 

[GEOFFREY MEARNS]

My favorite part of the story was they gave you the gift card and said, try a different flavor. I'm like, we’ve been trying that for years.

[PRESIDENT MEARNS]

Yeah, no good deed goes unpunished. Maybe that's another lesson.

[MOLLY MEARNS]

So I guess we can probably wrap up. We know you always end with one question to your guests. What does beneficence mean to you?

[PRESIDENT MEARNS]

Well, so I ask that question, and as you know, when we were walking over, we walked right by Beneficence. So the reason that I feel so fortunate to be the president of Ball State University is because in my estimation and in my experience, Ball State is a distinctive and a special place. And distinctive and special because of our commitment to the enduring values that are represented by Beneficence.

Those are the values that distinguish the character of the people and the culture that we have here on our campus. So Beneficence is about serving others. Education is about serving our students and serving our communities. So Beneficence is a very important reminder of the character of our people, the culture of our distinctive institution, and our overriding responsibility to use the precious gift of life that we have to share that gift in service to other people who need us.

So that's what Beneficence means to me. And it means, when I say that, I had the good fortune to be president, I also have the great good fortune to have such a wonderful family. So appreciate spending today with you two.

[GEOFFREY MEARNS]

It's great. Thank you.