Educating a Whole New Generation

You're listening to the Truth Network and truthnetwork.com. Now, The Devil's Nightmare. Welcome back to another episode of It's Time to Man Up. Welcome back to another episode of The Man Up Show. I think today, I think this is officially the first time I've had Dr. Simon Tarr. Well, no, I know it's the first time I've had Dr. Simon Tarr on The Man Up Show, but it's the first time I've ever had the Dean of a university, Regent University, more specifically.

Simon, welcome to The Man Up Show. Thank you. It's great to be here. What an honor. Well, it's an honor to have you on.

I mean, I'm a little nervous here, Simon. I mean, PhD, MFA, which I don't even know what that means. You'll have to enlighten us. So you're up in Virginia. You're an educator, an artist, a researcher, Dean of the Honors College, as well as the School of Communications of Arts at Regent University. Did I get all that correct?

That's right. I have the best job in the world. I get to lead two wonderful schools at this university.

And that's pretty amazing. And of course, you know, the reputation precedes itself. I've heard nothing but good things about Regent University. And you've been, like, how long have you been with the university there? I've only been here for two years. I'm the new guy on campus. I've been in higher education for a long time, but I'm new at Regent, relatively.

New at Regent. And of course, you know, I mentioned, you know, educator, artist, researcher. You've done a lot of films and there's just so much, so many directions I could go with what you've done. What's been your favorite thing to do so far?

Let me just maybe just ask that first. Well, I have an amazing life. I feel like everything I do is art in some way or another. My favorite thing that I'm doing right now, and this might sound nerdy, but being able to work with all the great professors and the students and all the different degrees has unexpectedly for me become the most creative thing that I've ever done. I came up as an artist.

I have a lot of all these extra letters after my name, and MFA is one of them. It's a Master of Fine Arts, so I have a degree in art and I have a degree in research. But my career has mostly been as a film professor, as an art professor. And as part of that, I make a lot of weird art. I mean, it's not the normal kinds of stuff that you would see at a typical movie theater. The kind of art that I personally make is a lot more abstract or strange experimental work. But really, what I spend most of my time doing is working with professors to design great experiences for people who want to come and study at Regent, which is the first place I've ever worked that has put together all these great programs.

But with this bigger purpose of Christian leadership to change the world. Well, and I know looking through your bio, I mean, 25 years as a professor, and certainly there are some other universities I see on the resume here that really stand out. Penn State, Ithaca College, University of South Carolina. You know, one of my dear wrestling friends actually wrestled for Ithaca College. But now I'm going back way, way, way back. His name was Tim Woods. He became known as Mr. Wrestling 2 under the mask, under a hood.

Right. He was quite a standout back in the day in Ithaca College. But now you're not, so you're originally from where though? You mentioned your bride. Tell us about your family and where are you originally from? Well, I'm a northeastern kind of Pennsylvania boy. Those are born in Pittsburgh and I spent most of my time as a kid in Pennsylvania. I sort of adopted the south.

I spent the longest time of my life working at the University of South Carolina, which is a great, great university. And so my blood has thinned. I'm sort of a southerner now. I'm with you. I'm with you. Right.

Exactly. Well, yeah, I mean, you're from way north and now you're down south. But I'm married to a wonderful woman, Jennifer, who I met in graduate school, also in filmmaking. And we've been together for 26 years next month. We have a great kid, Casper. We left him at the University of South Carolina when I took the position at Regents, Columbia, South Carolina. That's his hometown. So he's stayed at USC.

He's having a great time down there. So congratulations on the longevity of your marriage, by the way. That's more and more, that's less common, unfortunately. So I congratulate you on that. So filmmaking, film production, film and video, what does that entail? Have you put some movies out there, some short documentaries?

What have you done there, Seth? Well, my work is, I have a website for my own personal stuff. It's tar.io, t-a-r-r.io, and it's almost all my work you can watch for free. It's mostly short experimental work. And it's the equivalent of, how would I describe it? If you think of most popular writing as being novels, like reading novels, there's lots of different kinds of writing. There's short stories, there's nonfiction.

And in that world, I would probably be a poet. And in the film world, there's the same kind of breadth of different types of work. Most of the time, we watch movies that tell great stories, and those are the equivalent of reading a novel, reading a book.

There's all kinds of different things you can watch, and fewer people watch the short experimental work, just like not as many people read poetry. So that's personally the kind of work that I make. That's typically not what I teach students to do, because frankly, most people, when they decide they want to go into media making, they want to work in either documentary or nonfiction work, or they want to work in long-form storytelling. So the skills apply to when you're taking courses, like the courses that we have at Regent here. People study everything, but mostly they want to study longer-form storytelling or nonfiction documentary work, sort of in a golden age of documentary right now in the United States, so lots of people want to get into that as well.

So just a whole variety of different options, I guess just depending on their interest and what they envision themselves doing. Right, and a lot of times, it's a calling too. It's really strange, and maybe this might be how I started to understand what being called felt like. I intended, when I was studying to do and practicing to become a filmmaker, I really thought that I was going to be directing feature-length pictures with the stories and the 3x structure and all that, and that was what I loved the most. I still love that, and science fiction and Star Wars is what really made me want to do it. But no matter what I did, it seems that everything came out as short form poetry, despite my best efforts. And I was, and maybe I still am, pretty good at it, and that's what I sort of learned to say, well, this is what I'm supposed to do, I guess, I'll do that the best I can. And that's, learning to listen was sort of important to me, to learn what kind of work that I was intended to make. And really, for me, I sort of came to God much later, not until my mid to late 40s, and I think part of that was me starting to understand what it sounds like to be called, what is that feeling, what does it feel like to have something that is outside yourself.

There's something bigger than you, right? Yes, and that's something that is beyond you asking you to do something that doesn't seem to be in line necessarily with what you have been trying very hard and struggling to do, you know? Yeah, I know, I can totally relate. Actually, it was a couple of relatable things there. My dad, like yourself, came to Lord almost the same timeframe, 46 years of age, he was 46. So mid 40s, going on late 40s himself when he came to Christ, and he went on to then live another 46 years. Yeah, for the Lord, but like yourself, he had tried a number of other things that he thought would make him happy or things that would be satisfying or fulfilling, only to find out that that personal relationship with Jesus Christ is the only thing, as I found out at the age of 34, the only thing that can bring that genuine fulfillment. And then from there, part of my relatable story with yours is from there, I felt maybe you can relate for the very first time that genuinely that my life had purpose beyond entertaining people in a ring, a wrestling ring, that my life had purpose, and then as I pursued that relationship with him, he began to unfold the broader or bigger picture for what my calling was. Which if somebody had told me in my teens or 20s, Simon, that I was called to ministry, I would have looked at them like they've got a third eye in their head.

But once I understood what that meant, wow, everything just began to then kind of fall in line, and the Lord began to open different doors and given me the opportunity to make an impact on the world around me. And for a gift of $100 or more, Nikita will include a signed copy of his newly updated life story, A Tale of the Ring and Redemption. Go to www.colof.net and donate today. The Man Up show is honored to have Dr. Johnny Gaten as one of our longest running supportive sponsors. Dr. Gaten is regarded as one of the world's leading elite eye surgeons. He is motivated by his faith in doing all things heartily as unto the Lord. His desire to do his best has contributed to success in his eye care practice, performing over 70,000 eye surgeries.

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You can give monthly, annually, or one time. God bless you for making a difference around the world. You're listening to the Truth Network and truthnetwork.com. You know, you brought up something, you're giving me, see, you are an educator, because you're giving me an education right now, Simon, and all of our listeners, because I've never heard the term long-form storytelling and or short-form poetry, and that there was a difference between those two. Let me ask you this, in talking about that, some of your, I was looking at, again, some of your bios, some of the notes, you know, some of your films and performances have been, and correct me if I'm wrong, but what I read, screened on every continent, including Antarctica in film festivals? What's that all about, Simon?

It's true. So, when you make the kind of work that I make, the only real place to show it is in film festivals and these sort of itinerant forms of visiting your work in different places, because multiplex theaters aren't accessible to someone with my kind of work. Now, keep in mind, this is before there was streaming, this is most of my development as a maker came before.

It was very easy to put your work on the internet. So, the way to do it was you would have your films in film festivals, and at one point, one of my films was put into a traveling festival that was packaged to send to a research station in Antarctica, because there's a lot of people down there, and you want to keep from going crazy, so they watched things down there, and so this film festival traveled to Antarctica, which allowed me to claim every continent, having seen my film. That's pretty amazing. And what about help me understand orchestras? How does that integrate into orchestras? Well, to me, the more interesting work that I've done later in my career is even stranger. As I kept making films, I started wanting to do more unusual works, so I tried to develop filmmaking that can be performed live, either live with a theater or live with live music, because for me as an artist, if you've ever played music or if you've ever acted in front of an audience, you know that there's a very different kind of energy that happens when you're making art that can only exist in that one space, in that moment, that can never be recreated, and I wanted to try to make the film equivalent to that experience, and so I developed a few pieces of live filmmaking material that were intended to be performed either with theater sometimes, but my favorite ever was this work that I performed with an orchestra, with a composer who composed just a brilliant piece of music, and it's this very exciting, energetic way of doing art with an audience live, like a musician does. So, wow, I'm just kind of trying to visualize, because I'm someone, I'm a dad who brought up my daughters and wanted them to experience all the forms of art, right?

Whether it was a ballet or an orchestra or a Broadway stage play, I mean, just a variety of, because I just want them to experience life and enjoy every aspect of life, and so what you have done and are doing certainly falls in line with that. Does that then tie into this patent that you have in virtual reality, technology, is that kind of tied together with that? No, that's just me being a nerd.

Okay. So a lot of the work I do is highly technical. I use a lot of computers and a lot of software to do the work that I do, and we're in a great time right now for technology.

It's really exciting. And so a professor friend of mine at the University of South Carolina, we were both really into virtual reality technology, and we came up with this weird idea for a piece of software, because virtual reality technology is exciting, but most of the software for it right now is kind of dumb. It's all just video games that are just an extension of video games you would normally look at on the screen. And we invented a software interface that imagined virtual reality in a way that you would use it with libraries. So if you were imagining a film library, for example, sometimes you can go to the library and check out books, but there are millions and millions of films, archival films, very old preserved work that you can go to libraries and examine too, but it's really hard to search for them, because you can't look for films the way you look for books. So we thought that virtual reality might be a good way to be able to search through libraries for archival films in the same way that normal people are able to look for books in the library. So we invented that. Pretty impressive, to say the least. Take a minute and tell us about the University Film and Video Foundation.

What is that? The University Film and Video Foundation is this wonderful organization that I was able to be involved in for a while, and its sole purpose is to give scholarships to young filmmakers, and so we had a foundation, so a big bunch of money basically, and every year that organization, they still exist at usvf.org. I'm not a trustee of it anymore, but they're a wonderful organization, and every year film schools from around the world submit their best films and the USDF gives them thousands of dollars. I mean, they give away thousands and thousands of dollars to young filmmakers. So that's really exciting. That was just truly an honor to be able to help organize this group of people to figure out ways to give money to young filmmakers. That's pretty cool. Young upstarts, up and coming, right? Yes. All right, so let me circle back just for a moment to Regent University and give you an opportunity to take a minute or two and just tell our listeners out there what is Regent University, who would want to come or attend, and can you do it online?

Take a minute. Tell us about Regent. Well, Regent University is this wonderful institution. It's located in Virginia Beach, and we have degree programs in almost anything you can imagine on campus and online. So I oversee the Honors College, which is an on-campus experience for undergraduate students majoring in anything. And so for folks who are interested in a very intense, great books education, a classical education that is supercharged by professional programs like pre-law or communications or anything you can imagine, I get to be involved in that. We have an amazing program there at the undergraduate level. And I'm also involved in the School of Communication and the Arts, which we have everything from film to journalism to theater to music at the undergraduate and graduate levels on campus and online. And the kicker to all of it is that the real joy of trying to transform culture for God's kingdom is infused in every single course and every program and everything we do in a really beautiful way.

It's really something to behold. It's a non-denominational university. And by that, I literally mean we have professors and students from every tradition of believers that you can imagine if you believe.

And you don't even have to. You can just be curious and want a great education and come to Regent. We have people who aren't believers and they come because the fact is that this is our civilization. It is built on this amazing foundation of Christendom. And we are just bringing that and infusing them into every degree program we have.

It's really wonderful. Yeah, it sounds. I mean, anyone paying attention, colleges, college campuses, universities have really come under fire in the last several years. And it sounds like, Regent, there's a handful out there that if I had kids of college age, there's only a handful that I might even consider at this point, Simon, sending my child to. Regent would certainly be one of those. And like I said, I've heard nothing.

I don't know. I've been to Virginia Beach many times. I don't know that I've ever actually toured the campus. I may have to make a point of that later in the year. Next time you're around. Yeah, yeah, later in the year. I think towards the end of the year, I'll be doing a men's conference. I think maybe even in, I think maybe Chesapeake, right next door to you guys. Oh, sure.

Yeah, no, that's where I live. Okay, so you may have to give me the little nickel tour of Regent University there. What's the website for Regent? If people wanted to, parents are out there, they want to find out more about Regent University. So to find out more, it's simply regent, R-E-G-E-N-T dot E-D-U. And it's called Regent because we're all considered to be regents on Earth.

As his kingdom advances, we know who the king is, and we're simply regents in his stead. So go to regent dot E-D-U, and I'd love to answer any questions. If anybody's got any questions about degree programs or anything, I'm very findable. It's very easy to look for me on the website, and I'd be happy to answer questions. Very accessible you are. And one more time, your own personal website, Simon? Oh, my own personal website is tar, T-A-R-R dot I-O. And most of my work that is recorded, you can take a peek there and see if you like it, see if it's something that you'd like to watch for a few minutes. If you don't like it, it's not very long.

You can test the waters or test drive it, right, and see what your thoughts are. So if you're a mom out there, you're a dad out there, you're a parent out there, you're a grandparent out there, I want to encourage you to consider, if your child is looking for a college education university to attend, I feel confident to say they will get a solid Christian-based education there at Regent University. And who knows, maybe they'll end up under the tutelage of Simon Tarr while they're there as well, the Dean of the Honors College as well as School of Communications and the Arts. And Simon, fascinating story, and I appreciate you being a part of the show today. Oh, it's absolutely my pleasure. It's so great to talk to you. Well, and last thoughts for all of our listeners out there, give us any last thoughts you'd like to share with those in Listening Land?

Well, I would say that, you know, higher education is in a weird place in the United States, and if you feel that it may not be for you or if you feel like all that you see in the news just has put you off of pursuing that part of your development, then maybe think again, maybe there are institutions that aren't doing you wrong and that there might be other ways to think about developing your mind and becoming stronger in many ways, not just your mind but also your soul. Your spiritual journey, spirit, soul and body, right? And that spiritual journey. Dr. Simon Tarr, I appreciate what you're doing and impacting lives really of all ages. I know we talked about moms and dads sending sons and daughters, but I'm guessing people of all ages, whether they attend on campus or attend online, that you have a wide range of students.

We have students that are non-traditional, which I don't like the term non-traditional, but it's when you think of, you know, 18 to 22-year-olds, we have those, but we have students of every age coming to get every kind of degree that you can imagine. So there is nothing standing in your way. That's awesome. Dr. Simon Tarr, educator, artist and researcher, thank you for being part of the man up today. Oh, thank you. Thank you so much for having me. And to all you out there in Listening Land, each and every week you're so faithful to tune in and dial in and send in your comments to me, to go over to coloff.net and just send me a response or a comment how the show is impacting, how these stories are impacting you. I just challenge you today, go out today and just live a God-filled and have a God-blessed day.

Until next time. This podcast is made possible by the grace of God and your faithful prayers, support and generous gifts. May God bless you for your continual contributions.

Go to coloff.net and donate today. If you are enjoying the Man Up show, would you help us spread the word? Tell your family, tell your friends, tell your neighbors to download, subscribe and leave a comment. Hi, Nikita Koloff. Be sure to check out the Man Up show, now available on television, broadcast and podcast. Go to MorningStarTV.com or the Truth Radio Network. Check out your local listings or better yet, download the Truth Network app today. Nikita Koloff here.

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