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��Sandra Knispel:�� �� �� �� According to the CDC, suicide rates have been rising in nearly every US state. In 2016, nearly 45,000 Americans age 10 or older died by suicide. While the rise affects every age group under 75, the strongest increase is the rate for adolescent girls between the ages of 10 and 14. Thank you for joining us for The Quadcast. I’m your host, Sandra Knispel. And with me today to discuss suicide among children and teens, and of course, how to prevent it, are three Ģ����ý and Ģ����ý Medical Center experts.

First up, we’ve got Cassie Glenn, an assistant professor of psychology and psychiatry, whose research focuses on predicting suicidal and self-injurious behaviors. She’s also a faculty member in the Center for the Study and Prevention of Suicide at URMC.

We’ve also got Kathleen Baynes, an assistant professor of psychiatry and a psychiatrist at UR Medicine, Mental Health and Wellness, who works with children and adolescents who’ve been hospitalized for mental illness, and Michael Scharf,��the director of psychiatry graduate medical education and chief of the Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at the URochester Medical Center. Welcome to the three of you.

Michael Scharf: �� �� �� �� ��Thank you.

Cassie Glenn: �� �� �� �� �� �� ��Thank you.

Kathleen Baynes:�� �� �� ��Thank you.

Sandra Knispel:�� �� �� �� ��Just to be clear, Mike, when we talk about adolescents, what age span are we actually really talking about?

Michael Scharf:������������������ Well, that’s actually an important question, because depending on who’s quoting numbers, they might not be saying the same thing. Generally speaking, when doctor, when public health, and when the CDC talks about adolescents, we talk about ages 15 to 24. And this is based on not only observations about behaviors and development, but also neuroscience, and as the brain develops, and when we see brain changes really slow down and reach a more steady state or adult state.

Sandra Knispel:�� �� �� �� ��Now when we look at suicide rates, there is an increase that’s really drastic during adolescence. And looking at the most recent CDC data—the suicidal thinking of high school students—about 17 percent said that they thought of suicide. More than 13 percent of high school students said they even made a suicide plan, and 7.4 percent even attempted suicide in the past year. Those numbers are scary. Cassie, do you want to take that one?

Cassie Glenn:������������������������ Sure. So I think one thing that’s important to note, too, is this is not just a phenomenon that’s observed in the US. So there’s really interesting cross-national research from the World Health Organization that also demonstrates that suicidal thoughts and behaviors are relatively rare during childhood, but we see this increase dramatically during the transition to adolescence. There’s not just one thing that we can point to that’s driving this increase in risk during this period. There’s a whole host of changes that occur during the transition to adolescence, including biological and psychological and social changes, all of which, when we think about the risk factors for this particular group, may be contributing to this increased risk during the adolescent period.

Sandra Knispel:�� �� �� �� ��Now what, though, about the rate for girls between the ages of 10 and 14? That is sort of the largest increase, and do we have any idea what’s happening there? Kathleen?

Kathleen Baynes:�� �� �� ��So I guess one of the questions is what’s happening in that age group that makes them look more like adolescents? So it has to, I think, take a close look at what kind of behaviors are happening in that particular age group that might make these younger peers look like their older counterparts.

Michael Scharf:������������������ There are trends that are clearly impacting both the 10 to 14 year old age range as well as older adolescents, including increased use of cell phones and other screens, and it’s complicated to sort out what’s the real mechanisms going on here. So while that correlation is clear, is it related to just the act of looking at screens and increasing the time? A decrease in time spent with traditional human interactions and social interactions? An increase in isolation, if you will? Could there be other effects from the screen use, like impacting sleep? Also, the content. Sometimes there can quite disturbing or even horrific bullying or acts of cruelty that happen through the internet, through social media, or even witnessing things that could be quite traumatic, such as live streaming of a suicide or a suicide attempt.

Sandra Knispel:�� �� �� �� ��As a parent of high school students, when I look at these numbers—that 7 percent attempted suicide last year, but that really more than 13 percent made a suicide plan—what should I know? And maybe we should even back up. Who are the kids, or the teens who are at greatest risk for suicide? Because clearly, that’s not evenly spread.

Kathleen Baynes:�� �� �� ��That’s a frightening statistic. I think one of the things that we need to think about first is what are the protective factors against suicide? And one of those factors is of course relationship and connection. So when we think about connection to others, a relationship with your parents, a relationship with a significant teacher, a sort of saving grace figure, who are the kids that don’t have that kind of relationship? And so there, we want to think about what are the vulnerable youth in our groups? Are those kids that are struggling with identity issues that have been isolated by a perceived trauma, that are disconnected from their families due to other conflicts?

So identifying those kids who are most vulnerable among their peers and thinking about how we can strengthen those protective factors would be really important.

Sandra Knispel:�� �� �� �� ��I haven’t heard anything about drug and alcohol abuse yet. How does that play into risk factors for suicide?

Michael Scharf:������������������ Addiction is certainly a risk factor, and active drug use, whether or not it’s been of a duration, or a pattern where someone refers to it or thinks of it as addiction is a risk factor, both because of the impacts that recurrent drug use can have on your life, on your social interactions, on your connectedness with other folks, isolation, but also because of the disinhibition and impulsivity that can happen while you’re intoxicated. So someone who may have recurrent thoughts of despair or hopelessness or life’s not worth living while they’re under the influence of a mind altering substance might be more likely to active impulsively, to do something with those thoughts.

Sandra Knispel:�� �� �� �� ��And is it just the drug use by the adolescent, or is it also the drug use of, say, their parents that might have a direct impact on their risk for suicide? Do we know that?

Cassie Glenn:������������������������ Well, we know that family history is going to be—there are a whole host of risk factors. So we know, for instance, that having a parent who’s engaged in suicidal behavior, having a family member who’s died by suicide, that’s a significant risk factor. And for the genetic contribution conferred if a parent has a significant psychiatric illness. So that just sort of genetic contribution, but I think also what you’re bringing up there is the potential negative life events in terms of what children might witness among a parent who may be addicted to a substance, the kind of trauma that they might experience, is also an environmental stressor that could increase their risk for suicide.

Michael Scharf:������������������ Yes, adverse childhood experiences, referred to in public health literature and medical literature as ACEs, are actually known risk factors for multiple things that can happen later, including midlife physical morbidity and mortality, but also conditions like depression, and then ultimately the worst fatal outcome of depression, including suicide. Having a parent or an adult in your home who’s actively abusing substances is one of the identified adverse childhood experiences, and certainly can have a negative impact.

Sandra Knispel:�� �� �� �� ��There are lots of myths out there about suicide, and while there’s always the risk that by bringing them up we might perpetuate those myths, I think it might also be an occasion or a chance for us to maybe—or for you—to maybe put some of these straight. So Kathleen, do you want to tackle that one?

Kathleen Baynes:�� �� �� ��I think one of the greatest myths about suicide is that you can induce suicidal thoughts by asking about them. It’s one of the most important concepts that we teach any trainee learning about how to assess and treat suicidality, and something that we need to pass on more and more to families, teachers, and community members. The idea of asking about suicide means that we’re connecting with kids who are struggling with those kind of thoughts. To not ask about those thoughts means that we’re not realizing who may be struggling internally.

Sandra Knispel:�� �� �� �� ��So, to be very clear: a mother suspects, a father suspects that the child might be depressed, and worries that the son is considering suicide. Should therefore the parent say outright to his child, “Are you depressed? Are you feeling suicidal? Do you have suicidal thoughts?” Is that what you’re saying?

Kathleen Baynes:�� �� �� ��Absolutely. Any child that’s suffering, a parent is going to want to know what’s going on in your mind, what’s been happening with you? Have you ever had thoughts that make things seem so bad that life isn’t worth living? I think there are ways that we can make this more of a public conversation, so we identify and hopefully treat people who are struggling in that way.

Michael Scharf:������������������ You know, another important potentially negative myth that impacts people is that once someone is suicidal, they’re always suicidal, or a hopelessness for the people trying to help the hopeless and suicidal person. In fact, data and decades of experience show us that most suicide crises are time limited, and they are in fact not due to one single event or predisposing factor, but a combination of risks, and then current stressors. And if you can help people figure out how to get through that crisis and how to organize the next steps in their life around things that are important to them and meaningful to them, they’re not always suicidal. And so help and hope are both possible, and very real.

Kathleen Baynes:�� �� �� ��The idea that suicidality is a direct sort of trigger for imagining that someone is struggling with depression is a myth that we should also of dispel. [Instead it’s] the idea that it’s important that suicidality is considered as a signal that we should be more thoughtful about what is happening with this child, and open up the idea that any number of things could be happening: trauma, substance use, peer rejection, social media, bullying, any number of things. And we want to be curious about this, sort of the way that we’d be curious when a child had a fever.

Sandra Knispel:�� �� �� �� ��When you say “curious,” you’re saying—”ask?”

Kathleen Baynes:�� �� �� ��Ask.

Michael Scharf:������������������ Mm-hmm.

Cassie Glenn:�� �� �� �� �� �� �� I would say another common myth that sometimes people have, is that if someone is talking about being suicidal, that that’s an indication that they’re not likely to act, that if they observe that someone is planning or researching, that that’s just a cry for help, and that could be attention seeking, but they actually aren’t going to be likely to act on that. ��And when we think about warning signs and things to be looking for, we’re actually interested in looking, when people move from thinking to actively planning and potentially thinking about engaging on those kinds of thoughts, so we want to know if someone is thinking more specifically not just about suicide broadly, but about a specific method. Are they engaging in research? Are they giving away possessions? Are they doing things that might indicate they’re actually moving down the pathway to engage in suicidal behavior?

Michael Scharf:������������������ The core myth that a suicide crisis inevitably results in death, that someone who’s suicidal is destined to die as a result of suicide, that is absolutely a myth, and not true. And decades of research and experience demonstrate that.

Sandra Knispel:�� �� �� �� ��Cassie, you were talking already about some red flags. You just mentioned if someone says, “I’m suicidal,” and starts researching – you mentioned giving away possessions. Can you talk to us and make a start on red flags that we should all know about, that we should all look for?

Cassie Glenn:�� �� �� �� �� �� �� I think we’ve been talking about risk factors, right? So factors that may increase an individual’s likelihood of potentially becoming suicidal or engaging in suicidal behavior. When we talk about warning signs, we’re talking about some of the earliest indicators that somebody might be in a suicidal crisis. And there isn’t just one thing to look for, and that warning sign may look different across different individuals.

I would say broadly speaking, in addition to the things that I noted about actively preparing potentially for engaging in suicidal behavior, are significant changes in the individual’s mood and their affect and their behavior. And so significant differences in sleeping. Isolation. Are you noticing significant mood changes, depression, aggression, agitation? These are the kinds of significant changes to be aware of, relative to an individual’s baseline. Those are really the things that we’re interested in looking at.

Sandra Knispel:�� �� �� �� ��Any other signs we should be looking for, Kathleen?

Kathleen Baynes:�� �� �� ��One of the things that also can sometimes relate to suicidal thoughts is when someone’s engaging in behaviors that connect to that idea, like cutting or other self-harming gestures. So I think we’ve learned a lot more about some of the ways in which some of the sadness or anger or depression can sometimes turn inward, or towards the body. And so paying attention to those risk factors as examples of distress.

Michael Scharf:������������������ I think the most important point when we’re thinking about warning signs or red flags is actually not to memorize a specific list of behaviors or statements, but instead, to really think about how you know a person, and if there’s a change, you should be curious to figure out what’s the change about. And so there are certainly specific behaviors that are more indicative of depression, or hopelessness, or thoughts of suicide. But I would like listeners, rather than feel compelled to have to memorize a list of warning signs, to really internalize the message that if people you care about are behaving differently, or talking in a way that seems not like themselves, be curious. Ask. Try to figure out why. And there are resources that can also refresh your memory for some of the warning signs we talked about here. So again, rather than memorize them, remembering the resources might be useful. The , for example, has a lot of very useful information that you could look at quickly to refresh your memory about warning signs.

Sandra Knispel:�� �� �� �� ��What are the resources–since you’re talking resources–what are the places that you would want people to go to to say, listen, “Something is off about this person. Therefore, my next step is going to be X.” What should it be?

Michael Scharf:������������������ Well, you can certainly start with your network of providers or helping professionals. So most people have a primary care doctor that they have a relationship with. If it’s an immediate crisis, there are a number of crisis lines. We have a local crisis line. There’s also a national suicide hotline. And you can speak to someone who can help figure out what to do in the moment. And the person who’s struggling with the suicidal thoughts themselves can speak to the person on the hotline to help figure out how to problem solve what to do in the moment.

And certainly a suicide crisis is an emergency. You can also go to an emergency room. And what staff or services will be available at any specific emergency room will vary, but any emergency department will be prepared to have people come in in suicide crisis to help figure out next steps.

Sandra Knispel:�� �� �� �� ��Kathleen, you just raised a point about cutting, and I know, Cassie, that that’s part of your research. You obviously study non-suicidal self-injury. What is the link between people who cut themselves and possibly attempting suicide? Is there a direct link?

Cassie Glenn:�� �� �� �� �� �� �� So we do know from growing research, in particular among youth, that engaging in non-suicidal forms of self-injury, so as you noted, non-suicidal skin cutting as one example, that that seems to be quite a robust risk factor for predicting suicide attempts later on in adolescence, even more so than adolescents’ own history of suicide attempts.

So when we’re looking in research at predictors, typically, a behavior that one has engaged in is the most significant predictor of their likelihood of engaging in that behavior again. And so the fact that non-suicidal self-injury predicts suicide attempts above and beyond even a history of suicide attempts is pretty compelling.

Now is there a direct link? In most of what we study, we can’t necessarily say that there is a direct link. We do know that something significantly predicts something else, and we have some hypotheses about why that might be the case. So some of the leading theories about suicide suggest that what may distinguish individuals – so as you noted at the beginning, 17 percent of adolescents in any given year may think about suicide, and about 7 percent may attempt suicide, right? So that’s a smaller number. So there’s a lot of research focused on what might indicate someone is going to attempt suicide, compared to the larger group who will think about suicide. And non-suicidal skin cutting may be—or non-suicidal self-injury more broadly may be one of those risk factors. And the idea is that engaging in those kinds of behaviors over time might increase an individual’s tolerance for pain, it might reduce their fear of death, and that might be a potential mechanism that increases their likelihood of attempting suicide.

Sandra Knispel:�� �� �� �� ��Then let me ask the question of the uninitiated here. As a parent, as somebody looking in from the outside, you said “other self-injurious behavior.” I know about cutting. What else should parents look for, and maybe sort of pay really attention to, to see if their adolescent, their teen, is engaging in any of those self-injurious behaviors that are maybe not obvious?

Cassie Glenn:�� �� �� �� �� �� �� So there’s other forms of what we think of as direct non-suicidal self-injury, so cutting is one form, and there may be burning or other kinds of direct injury to the body. But there’s also a whole category of more indirect self-injurious behaviors. So we might think of—we’ve talked about substance use, disordered eating, it could be engaging in exercise to the degree that someone’s engaging in it to hurt themselves. And so these kinds of behaviors that are engaged in perhaps to excess or with the goal of hurting oneself in some way.

Sandra Knispel:�� �� �� �� ��Mike and Kathleen, since you’re both in the trenches, so to speak, you both see patients, what trends have you noticed here locally in Rochester? Are your patients also getting younger? Are you seeing more of that age group, 10 to 14 year old teenagers, girls? And also, when you compare those numbers of the kids that you’re seeing today versus 10 years ago, 20 years ago, are you seeing those same trends that we’re seeing nationally?

Michael Scharf:������������������ We certainly are. So in Monroe County, we have the only inpatient unit for children. And so most of the children/adolescents that present with suicidal crises come to our emergency room. And we’ve seen an almost 50 percent increase in the number of kids presenting every year, between 2015 and 2018, kids presenting to our psychiatric emergency department.

We’ve seen a tremendous increase in the number of teens and children who are seeking mental health care. In the last six weeks, we’ve actually received about 100 calls a week for our outpatient services, seeking mental health care. And I’ll let Kathleen speak to what the patients are like on the unit.

Sandra Knispel:������������������Well, before you get to that, my question is, are you getting totally overwhelmed? Do you have the resources to deal with that?

Kathleen Baynes:�� �� �� ��It does feel like we have our fingers on the pulse of a crisis. On top of having an increased volume of patients, the kind of patients that we’re seeing are more intense. So we’re seeing more comorbid psychiatric issues, so someone experiencing depression and another comorbid issue, like eating disorder or substance use. We’re seeing someone who’s in a crisis around bullying, or loss of a family contact, a death in the family, bereavement, and on top of that, struggling with social anxiety.

So we’re seeing not just more numbers, but also greater intensity of the kinds of presentations that are concerning for us.

Sandra Knispel:�� �� �� �� ��Is that new? Was that not the case say 15 years ago?

Kathleen Baynes:�� �� �� ��So I can’t tell if it’s quite new, but in some ways it’s reassuring, in the sense that people are certainly more open about that they’re struggling. And so I think that’s the silver lining around this crisis, which is that as more people are calling for our services, more people are calling for our services. It’s a sign that people are more open and more willing to seek help. And that we want to respond to with open arms.

Michael Scharf:������������������ Yeah, I think to the question of what the patients are like and is there changes over time in the last 15 years. A higher volume has certainly led to, like on our inpatient unit, a greater percentage of the patients being more severely impacted or more ill, if you will. The nature of the specific problems or combination of problems isn’t necessarily new or something we’ve never seen before. It’s really the quantity and the, again, percentage of our time spent with the more ill, more impaired patients, more at risk patients.

Sandra Knispel:�� �� �� �� ��Let’s talk about what you can do for these patients when they come in. What’s the best practice approach to help them? What kind of interventions do you find work really well?

Kathleen Baynes:�� �� �� ��First and foremost, we want to be thoughtful about building rapport, in part because having a close and connected relationship with an adolescent helps us be curious and know what’s going on internally. And having that rapport allows us to then be very thorough in terms of thinking diagnostically about who this kid is, what their symptoms are, and guiding our treatment from that point forward. So having a thorough diagnostic evaluation is very important, because it allows us to have a targeted sort of therapeutic response. So form that end, we look at things like biologic illness, different social things that are going on, educational struggles, and thinking about all the ways that we can help and support someone from a whole-person perspective.

Michael Scharf:������������������ And that diagnosis, that approach to figuring out and understanding what is going on, what’s driving the suicide crisis, is really critical for long term health and recovery. Simultaneous with doing that, we also need to address the immediate safety, and that can include environmental things we have to address. And what I mean by that is parents may need to look at things in the home that could be easy to access, potentially lethal. Firearms, for example, that are unsecured, or only partially or inadequately secured, would be the most common, significant thing people think of, as potential lethal means.

So the process of figuring out how to create the safest environment, and in the short term, that might mean being in the hospital, though of all the people that are coming, and I talked about numbers, and how we’ve had so many more youth presenting, the majority do not get admitted to the hospital. The majority go home with safety plans.

And a good safety plan is organized around keeping someone safe in the moment, while we simultaneously figure out what is going on and driving this crisis, to help people get through it and recover.

Sandra Knispel:�� �� �� �� ��So that must be really scary to parents to be sent home with a teenager who said “I’m suicidal,” right? Because then you essentially sit on top of them and make sure they don’t do anything?

Kathleen Baynes:�� �� �� ��Well, the idea of a safety plan is that we’ve been thoughtful about what brought someone into a crisis, and thinking through how to manage and negotiate that crisis. And so in some ways, not being in the hospital can be the most protective experience for people in the setting of their loved ones and close ones who better understand what’s going on with that person.

So one of the aspects of a safety plan is sort of taking someone out of that high intense emotional state and using their cognitive skills to sort of think through a strategy that can be more effective in a crisis, rather than a sort of deeply charged sort of emotional perspective. We mentioned non-suicidal self-injury, and we think sometimes about that as a way of coping with this distress, which is not the healthiest way or the safest way. And so one of the strategies around a safety plan is to provide alternatives to that coping strategy that are healthier, more protective, and actually build and capitalize on protective factors.

Sandra Knispel:�� �� �� �� ��Can you give examples? So to you this is perfectly clear, what a safety plan is. Tell me what it is. What’s in it?

Kathleen Baynes:�� �� �� ��So a safety plan is about sort of better knowing yourself. So first, some of the things that we’ll think about what are the body signals that tell you that you’re in distress, because knowing that you’re in distress is the first step in order to communicate to somebody else who can help you.

Once you’re able to communicate what you’re struggling with, you want to think through what are healthy alternative strategies. So one of the things that I think has come into our schools and into our communities more and more is the idea of mindfulness. So mindfulness is a coping strategy that helps settle your emotions, settle your mind, be present in the moment, that sort of circumvents the idea of impulsively acting on what may be a temporary crisis point.

So mindfulness strategies can include sort of more deeper connection to nature, taking walks, slowing things down, using specific mindfulness techniques to take that moment of crisis into a sort of more thoughtful, slowed-down perspective.

Michael Scharf:������������������ So a safety plan then would include the warning signs, or how do you know that things are getting to the crisis point, so that you can do something as early as possible, so a list of those signs, and then a list of things you will do to try to prevent reaching the crisis point. And a good safety plan as one of those things includes who you will tell. How will you communicate with someone about it? And then it needs to be someone who knows you might be calling, who can respond. You can’t say, “I’m going to call my biology teacher,” and no one knows if the biology teacher has any idea this person might call them. That wouldn’t be an appropriate contact in a safety plan.

But a parent, another family member, someone who’s part of creating the plan, as a person you contact. Often, also the crisis lines. We mentioned, again, there’s local crisis lines and national crisis lines, could be a contact on a safety plan.

Sandra Knispel:�� �� �� �� ��So the safety plan is really directly geared towards the patient, not so much the parent who may have brought in that adolescent? It’s really you’re talking directly to the patients, say, you need to recognize—we will teach you to recognize your own triggers, and we will teach you what to do instead?

Kathleen Baynes:�� �� �� ��That certainly gives the patient or the adolescent the most advocacy and control, right? So this would be a real developmental task of adolescents, to be sort of developing their own agency. And it taps into sort of what are unique traits in adolescents, right? Which is wanting to take more control, wanting to be more autonomous, all the while communicating more openly and directly with the people that they’re most directly connected to, and feel most—have the most trusting relationship with.

Michael Scharf:������������������ And so those people that they have trusting relationship with, while the language of the treatment plan or safety plan is directed toward the youth, those trusted adults, usually parents, would need to be—it’s critical that they’re aware of what the content is, because they’re usually part of the plan. And then they can also support and maybe even provide reminders, “oh, if you’re having this going on, it’s time to do your mindfulness exercise,” to help make it successful.

Kathleen Baynes:�� �� �� ��Ideally, these safety plans are actually a therapeutic intervention in and of themselves, because suddenly, there’s more direct, and open, and honest communication between parent and child.

Michael Scharf:������������������ And maybe even an added sense of control, right, that one’s feelings and the sense of hopelessness and inevitability of “I feel miserable right now, I’m never going to get better, life’s not worth living, and the way I feel right now is forever,” part of the process of safety planning can be demonstrating that, no, there are things you can do to make yourself feel better in the moment, and we’re going to try it right now. And again, give everyone an added sense of control and confidence that there is hope, that there are things they can do to feel better in the moment.

Sandra Knispel:�� �� �� �� ��I want to go back a little bit. So you said many patients get sent home with a safety plan. Some obviously require psychiatric hospitalization. And I know that you, Cassie, are doing research on that. You’re currently studying sleep disturbance in teens after psychiatric hospitalization. And I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about that research, what you’re seeing, what you’re finding.

Cassie Glenn:�� �� �� �� �� �� �� Sure. So it’s a little early to know about the findings yet, but I can certainly tell you about why we’re interestingin studying what it is that we’re interesting in. So a lot of what we have been talking about today are risk factors that we know of that predict risk for individuals over longer term periods. So we know that certain demographic factors, certain family factors, may predict that groups of adolescents are at risk.

From a research perspective, and there’s a lot of knowledge obviously clinically, but from a research perspective, we know far less about factors that predict risk over short term time periods, such as hours and days, which is really essential for having an empirically informed list of warning signs.

And so what we’re interested in is one of the highest risk periods, which is during the post-hospitalization period. So when individuals, both adolescents and adults, are discharged from the hospital, they’re at the most high risk for suicide attempts, rehospitalization, and suicide death. We don’t have a good sense of why that’s such a high risk period in the basically one to three months after they’re discharged from the hospital. We have a number of hypotheses about why that might be the case. They go from 24/7 care to then going back into their environment, where there may be a whole host of triggers and less monitoring.

One thing that we’re particularly interested in is how sleep disruptions during that particular period may increase risk over short time periods. And so what we are doing is we’re recruiting adolescents who have been hospitalized at the medical center for suicide risk, and we are following them intensely in the month after they’re discharged from the hospital. And so they’re downloading an app on their cell phones, and we’re asking them questions multiple times a day about how they slept, how they’re thinking, and feeling. Questions related to their thoughts about suicide, to more closely examine these kinds of fluctuations over short time periods.

We have about one to two months left of data collection. This has been a pretty intensive study to conduct, and wouldn’t be possible without our collaboration here with the Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, because it really requires clinical partners and parents and families volunteering to participate in this kind of research. It wouldn’t be possible with the adolescents and their families participating.

Sandra Knispel:�� �� �� �� ��Well, when you have the research, we definitely want to hear. I’d like to start with you then, Cassie. What’s giving you hope that we will get a handle on this really pressing public health problem? Are we making inroads?

Cassie Glenn:������������������������ Yeah, and I think we’ve noted a few of these things already. We’ve talked about the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, which is the largest private funder and clinical resource for suicide research and outreach in the US. I think the fact that that foundation exists—they’re funding the study that I just mentioned. I think that gives me hope.

So for a long time, studying self-injury and studying suicide was circumscribed to studying certain kinds of disorders. We weren’t talking about suicide and self-injury as being these trans-diagnostic, severe behavioral indicators. So trans-diagnostic, not just being indicative of depression or borderline personality disorder, but existing across—among a whole host of adolescents who might struggle with psychiatric illness, and recognizing that they may exist among a large population of youth.

And so I think from a research perspective, the fact that there is research funding and support, I think, is really important to tackle some of these questions and issues.

Sandra Knispel:�� �� �� �� ��Kathleen Baynes, what’s giving you hope?

Kathleen Baynes:�� �� �� ��From a clinical perspective, I’m so hopeful even just in having this programming, because it tells us that stigma has gone down dramatically, such that we’re talking about this openly in communities, among public health experts, among patients, among students. I think one of the things that’s most hopeful for me is that more and more adolescents themselves are taking control of this issue. They want more wellness. They want mindfulness in their school. And so that for me, the sort of change in stigma around mental health, has been the most hopeful aspect of this crisis.

Sandra Knispel:�� �� �� �� ��Mm-hmm. What’s your silver lining, Michael Scharf?

Michael Scharf:������������������ Well, while we are facing a public health crisis for children’s mental health needs in the broadest sense, not just around suicide, we’re also seeing the public respond. The community here in Rochester, we’ve really seen a transformation, the help seeking behavior, the requests for care, which are overwhelming at times, when we talk about the number of requests that come in, the number of youth presenting to the ED. It also represents people being willing to get help, to talk to family members about it who bring them for help.

We’ve also seen a number of teens who are willing to tell their story publicly, with advocacy organizations, creating advocacy organizations. In the last couple of years, in some ways it’s been the most exciting part of my job, to work with those teenagers as they tell their story, and really have become organized to do some really neat things.

There’s the Stop the Stigma campaign in Rochester, where teens who lost a friend to a death by suicide organized an annual concern that’s all about raising awareness about suicide and mental health issues facing youth. And local philanthropy has also brought its attention to children’s mental health. We’re very fortunate that the Golisano Foundation and Tom Golisano made a $5 million donation, which the university is matching, to build a new child psychiatry building—a pediatric behavioral health and wellness center—which is in the process of being built right now. This will allow us to expand services and really help address this need.

As this project became public, the number of folks from the community coming out to show support, to be interested, to help either through financial contributions, to help with the building, or related programming for interventions, for things that we’re increasingly learning are helpful, powerful, but not paid for by health insurance or traditional health care, mindfulness skills that we’ve talked about. We anticipate in the new building having groups and classes that—where people can come to learn skills. Parent training.

There’s also really neat emerging data about exercise, about music, about reading, and the impact that each of these things can have on mental health and wellness. And being able to really understand that more, and make exercise regimens, understanding and increasing reading routines, utilizing music as part of our holistic approach to patient care, is really exciting and neat. And these are the things that give me hope.

I think, while we are facing a tremendous crisis, we’re also responding to the crisis as a community. And I feel fortunate to be part of it.

Sandra Knispel:�� �� �� �� ��Thank you so much. Thank you, Dr. Michael Scharf, for coming in, Dr. Kathleen Baynes, and Professor Cassie Glenn. Really enjoyed talking to you today. So let’s keep—let’s keep plugging away at this.

To our listeners, please remember, if you or someone you know is thinking about suicide or is experiencing emotional distress, please don’t hesitate to contact the Suicide Prevention Lifeline at SuicidePreventionLifeline.org, or you can call 1-800-273-TALK. Once again, thank you for listening to The Quadcast. That’s the official podcast for the URochester. I’m your host, Sandra Knispel.

[Music]

Gillian Gingher: Hi, my name is Gillian Gingher and I’m graduating with a bachelor’s in art history and business.

Benton Gordon: I’m Benton Gordon and I’m graduating with a bachelor’s degree in applied music in flute performance from the Eastman School of Music.

Beatriz Gil: I’m Beatriz Gil, I’m graduating with a bachelor degree in economics and political science, and with a minor in Chinese and international relations. And I’m from Barcelona, Spain.

Gabriel Guisado: I’m Gabriel Guisado. I’m graduating with a bachelor’s degree in biomedical engineering.

____

Knispel: After four years on campus it’s time to seek out new adventures..

Gingher: I’m planning on pursuing a master’s of architecture degree.

Knispel: Gillian Gingher is heading next to the Georgia Institute of Technology next for her master’s degree. As an undergrad she interned at several art museums in New York City and at the University’s Memorial Art Gallery in Rochester. She was also the events manager for the student-run Harnett Gallery on campus.

Gingher: [During] my time spent working in the art world I’ve learned a lot—that I like working with people and that I like working in social-justice capacities. So, it actually helped me figure out that I wanted to go into architecture, because I knew I loved art, science, design, and maybe I do like math [laughs]. Don’t tell my dad I said that though. I decided I wanted to go into architecture because I knew it was a way to help people. I basically want to go into an urban design route and design public housing and mixed-income housing.

Gordon: In August, I’ll be leaving for Taiwan to work as an English teaching assistant through the Fulbright program. I’m looking forward to not only immersing myself in Taiwanese culture, developing my Mandarin Chinese skills but also working with a local English teacher and learning how to become a better classroom teacher.

Gil: I’m going to San Francisco. So we’ll be going to California. I’ve never been there but I’m very excited. I’ve heard really good things about San Francisco and I’ll be working in consulting in the Department of Strategy and Operation as a business analyst for Deloitte.

Guisado: So, I’m going to be working with Accenture, which is a consulting firm. And I’ll be in Philadelphia, working on their technology side and I’m hoping to work with healthcare and biotechnology clients.

Knispel: So, where do you hope to land eventually—what’s your dream job? First up Beatriz Gil.

Gil: My dream job would be around politics. I think that before I really liked the idea of running for office. I’m not sure if that is anymore just because I think I really like more the international perspective and sometimes I think when you run for office it’s more focused on your country. So, something that I’m very interested in is applying consulting to politics. So, international consulting. I just can’t do it right now in the US because I wouldn’t go through the clearance for political consulting but that’s something that I would be very interested in.

Gordon: My professor at Eastman asked me that same question in my first lesson: “What’s your dream yob?” And back then at the beginning of my first year I said, “Well, my dream job is to play piccolo with the Seattle Symphony.” I’m from Seattle and my high school teacher currently occupies that seat, so I can’t realize that job until she’s retired. But nowadays the question is a bit more complicated. Many days my dream job would be playing in an orchestra, playing piccolo and soaring above the rest of the instruments.

Knispel: After his first year at Eastman, Benton Gordon took a gap year for financial reasons. He ended up substitute teaching at his former middle and high school, which gave him another idea…

Gordon: I taught every subject except computers at the middle school. I taught high school science and Chinese. And when I came back to Eastman I realized I really missed teaching. So nowadays, I’m kind of caught between the two. Going forward the role that music has in my life could look very different. It might be my full-time profession. I might go out and win an orchestra job and get that seat with the Seattle Symphonie. But it might also be something that I do on the side.

Guisado: I think my dream job at this point would be something having to do with entrepreneurship in biomedical engineering and maybe on the consulting side that I’m starting out of—so possibly having my own biotech/healthcare consulting firm in the future. Because one of my passions and why I picked my major is that I really care about people’s access to healthcare and trying to make that cheaper and I think that consultants can play a role in that—more so than just waiting on policy to do so.

Knispel: Gillian Gingher, the budding architect, also happened to be a meridian for the University, taking prospective students and their parents for tours of our River campus.

Gingher: I actually became a meridian my freshman spring, so a long time ago. I loved taking my tours to funny little places that are not on the scripted tour route. Just because I have so many little niches, like in the library and many places like that.

Knispel: So, if I came to campus as a potential freshman where would you take me? What’s your special spot that’s not on the tour?

Gingher: Oh, I mean I love taking people into the book stack. I don’t always take them like into the book stack but I love showing them the Otis elevator since it’s one of the oldest elevators in Rochester and it’s also a really old elevator in general, which is super cool. If you like architecture—the elevator is basically what happened to make the skyscraper and that basically created American architecture. So, it’s a big deal looking at an old elevator…for a nerd like me, at least.

Knispel: And talking of favorite spots… here’s Gabriel Guisado’s..

Guisado: It’s not really a spot. For me it’s very iconic. It’s the Eastman Quad. And I remember going for accepted students day and saying, “Wow, I just feel like I am at this prestigious university that’s going to help me grow and mature and it just feels like a culmination of a lot of things. So, I definitely want to come back there.”

Knispel: So, how much did they get involved in campus life? Beatriz Gil was first the president of class council for three years and then, in her last year, the president of student government. She got involved, she says, to give international students a voice.

Gil: I would say the contribution I’ve been able to make to international students…and I don’t think I can name one thing. I think it has been small changes. So, I’ve worked with orientation, I’ve worked with Fraternities [and] Sororities affairs, I’ve worked within Class Council, with Residential Life as an RA, and through Student Government. And I think with all of those things I’ve been able to make small changes that have had hopefully, I think, a large impact on international students on campus.

Guisado: I’ve primarily been involved with the National Society of Black Engineers, which is something I’ve been involved with in my four years here. So I started off trying to find a club that really fits what I’m looking for here. And so I think it fit me very well because it’s both an affinity group and a pre-professional group—so it aligns with me culturally and what I want to do post graduation. I started off as a general member, which then gave me the opportunity to attend the national convention.

Knispel: From that moment onward in Boston at the national convention Gabriel Guisado was hooked. He eventually became the president of the campus chapter of the National Society of Black Engineers.

Guisado: Being able to be at a national convention of that scale and being able to talk to so many companies, so many different professionals and students, and really understanding what it means to have an interview, show your cover letter, give your elevator pitch—those real professional skills—I feel like I would not have that without NSBE, which has helped prepare me to get a job.

Knispel: As the four are now getting ready to leave Rochester, we asked them for their personal highlights…

Gordon: A lot of them, as a music student, have to do with different performances, recitals, concerts that I have given…just the huge amount of camaraderie that comes with that—both playing in a group—and exiting the stage door to the cheers and applause of so many classmates and teachers.

Knispel: But one memory, says Benton Gordon, is much simpler and has nothing to do with music.

Gordon: Back in my first year the church that some of my friends and I attended was just a couple of miles from school. So the fall we would walk back from church to Eastman, about a two mile walk along East Avenue. On one particular day we were walking down and there were these huge piles of leaves that people had raked off their lawns. So we decided to jump in them. One of my favorite photos from that—four of my friends, you can see them lying in a leave pile, but I am not there. So one of my friends drew a circle around the place where I had been and wrote my name because I had successfully hidden myself in the leaves. That’ just one of my most cherished memories.

Knispel: To some, Rochester proved a chance to discover new talents….Beatriz Gil never thought she’d actually become so smitten with research..

Gil: I came here and I had the opportunity to do research for professor (Hein) Goemans the political science department. [I am] completely in love with him. He’s the best professor I’ve ever met—so motivated, so in love with what he does and his research. And he made me realize how research could be something very interesting and that I could also fall in love with. I did research for one year for him and then I have now finished my honors thesis for political science and I know 100 percent I wouldn’t have been able to do it without his motivation since the start.

Knispel: Meanwhile, for Gillian Gingher going to school here seemed in a way destined, long before she was even born…

Gingher: Well, my parents are alumni actually. They met in Slater, which is one of the upper classmen housing. It is no longer new and shiny like it was in the 80s when they met there. But I actually didn’t want to come to the university because they went here. I wanted my own spot.

Knispel: But once Gillian walked a bit around campus she changed her mind.

Gingher: This place—it basically grew my parents, at least in an undergraduate capacity. And it just had so many things to offer me personally, as well as the community, the open curriculum—and I just realized, “Yeah, this is the perfect place for me. Fine, mom and dad, I’ll go here.”

Knispel: And now, looking back four years later.. was it the right spot?

Gingher: Definitely, yes. Definitely, definitely. I mean, I made the best friends ever here and I’ve had the best time. I’m so sad to go. So sad. Even with a bright future—I don’t want to graduate. And I don’t think any of my friends really do yet. We’re kind of getting really nostalgic at this point.

Knispel: [nat sound alma mater] Well, we hope you’ll all be back for Meliora Weekends! But first it’s time to enjoy your graduation ceremony. [more Genesee song]…and, of course, you don’t have to be an expert to sing the Genesee…

I’m Sandra Knispel for the Quadcast, the official podcast of the URochester. [nat sound alma mater, applause]

Throughout its history, higher education has been the place where students expand their minds, further their understanding of the world around them, and prepare themselves for their lives and careers. While few dispute the higher goals of the college experience, many feel the tensions that exist when people from different backgrounds and diverse perspectives gather to learn and express their ideas.

For some, the tenets of the First Amendment—which protects several basic freedoms in the United States, including freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, the right to assemble, and the right to petition the government—are sacrosanct. Any abridgement of those ideals, they argue, is a threat to higher education’s ability to challenge minds and inspire students to see beyond their own world view.

Others consider free speech at its strongest when we make efforts to ensure the safety and inclusion of more marginalized and vulnerable voices. Looking to create more protective learning environments, proponents of this view often argue for safe spaces and trigger warnings, which serve as notices that sensitive or potentially difficult content will be covered or discussed in class. They contend that freedom of speech is enhanced when everyone is willing and able to participate.

Free speech on college campuses came into the spotlight recently when President Donald Trump signed an executive order that would make federal funding for universities contingent on assurances of free speech, and said he was taking “historic action to defend American students and American values that have been under siege.”

Has this tension reached a boiling point on college campuses and created the need for an executive order, or is this just an opportunity to shine light on what seems like a widening divide?

Joining me to discuss this balance between free speech and protective learning environments are:

Matthew Burns, dean of students in Arts, Sciences & Engineering ��at the URochester. Matt, thank you for joining us; and David Primo, associate professor of political science and business administration, and the Ani and Mark Gabrellian Professor at the URochester. Thank you for being here.

My first question for both of you, and Matt, I think I’d like to turn to you first, is why is this important? What’s at stake?

Matt Burns:������������������������������ Virtually everything is at stake with this. If we’re not careful, with regard to defining the boundaries of free speech, we’re going to stop higher education from being a place where inquiry is free. So, I think the bar has to be pretty high before we intervene. That said, I think we are aware that some voices have been silenced. What to do about that is unclear. I think that’s what we’re finding, where we’re finding ourselves right now. I don’t think that there’s a crisis now than there ever has been before. We’ve gone through this as we tried to figure out what those boundaries are. But I think for higher education in particular that the mark has to be pretty high before you start placing limitations on freedom of expression.

That said, there is a place for the community to respond to things that they find objectionable. And I think that also is a different kind of free speech. When that speech is being hindered somehow I think it takes careful scrutiny to look into why and how and how can we make amends for that with or without furthering defining the boundaries of free speech.

JVS:������������������������������������������������������ Dave, I’ll turn to you.

David Primo:���� �������������������� What’s at stake here is what it means for us to have a system of higher education in this country. What’s at stake is the future of free inquiry on college campuses. And that really comes down to – I don’t think it’s so much striking a balance between protective learning environments and free inquiry but rather saying that we have one specific mission and that is the pursuit of knowledge. And that pursuit of knowledge sometimes will make us uncomfortable. That pursuit of knowledge sometimes will make us feel vulnerable, emotionally, let’s say. But it is important to prioritize. I would argue the pursuit of knowledge even if at times that makes us feel uncomfortable.

Notice that I said uncomfortable though, not unsafe. So when there are threats of violence that’s when I think we have to draw the line and say ok, this is no longer the pursuit of knowledge. This is fomenting violence. We need to be very cautious in stifling inquiry on college campuses. And I think in the last 20 years we’ve gradually moved more and more towards this notion that speech itself can be violence. In other words, I as an individual am offended by your speech and it’s threatening to me even if the speech itself has no overt physical or other violent content. That’s concerning to me and I hope we can explore that in the context of the podcast.

JVS:������ ���������������������������������������������� But I think that notion of being offended versus feeling unsafe is a really important one. And while it seems like the differences might be obvious there’s nuance in there. So if a person is hearing a speech that seems to be speaking out against them or something they believe in, then they feel threatened perhaps. So how do we bridge that gap and say this is actually just one person’s opinion. It’s not necessarily an indictment of you or what you believe?

Burns:���������� ������������������������������������ Well, that is what we’re talking about here, right? So we know that there is a boundary out there for freedom of expression where you can’t incite violence. So you can’t go in – you can go in and say I hate Dean Burns. You can say that till you’re blue in the face. But what you can’t say is let’s get together and harm Dean Burns. So that’s a clear boundary.

But what’s unclear right now speaks less to the kind of threat of physical violence as opposed to the impact that some words have on others. And where do you draw that line? That is a slippery slope but words do do damage. And I guess there’s this question out there of course as to whether or not folks especially in marginalized groups have felt free to inquire or to challenge or have their voices been silenced? And I don’t think we’ve even come close to solving that problem or discovering what can you do.

Not everything has to be punishment either. So a lot of times when someone is offended or feels harmed by speech, their immediate response is we need to do something to punish that person who is speaking. And that can’t be the only tool we have in the toolkit. Even for an institution that has these values out there that we aspire to like integrity and leadership and openness. When someone violates those, those are aspirational words. Those aren’t codes of conduct that prohibit behavior. And so developing some sort of system of accountability is more difficult when you have aspirational words like that.

Primo:������������������������������������������������ One of the things I’m doing next year is mounting a new course called disagreement in a democratic society because ultimately what I think or I hope that this comes down to is that we have forgotten or perhaps we never quite knew how to disagree well as a society. And I think that that’s infiltrated college campuses in the last 10 to 15 years. It can’t be the case that somebody coming to campus and making a speech that you find offensive is cause for not inviting a speaker in the future or not inviting that speaker at all or having the extreme university administrator saying that speaker is no longer invited to campus.

It has to be the case that we allow ourselves to engage with those with whom we disagree rather than simply saying I find that speech offensive. It is harmful and threatening to me. And honestly I think part of the problem is sort of how universities have evolved to focusing on students feeling comfortable rather than students being in a rigorous learning environment. And those two aspirations can sometimes be in conflict, that you sometimes will be profoundly uncomfortable in a learning setting. Again notice I didn’t say feel that you are physically in danger. But sometimes you will perhaps mentally feel very uncomfortable or emotionally feel very uncomfortable in a learning situation. And those are precisely the times when you can learn the most.

And I sort of think we need to encourage engagement with individuals with whom we disagree. And we don’t do that in our society at all and I think universities have regrettably emphasized comfort over learning in the last 10 to 20 years for lots of reasons. But I think that’s something we need to focus on. We need to focus more on the learning part and less on the comfort part.

JVS:������������������������������������������������������ So, if a professor feels that she or he is not willing or able to communicate their beliefs or to share their perspectives for fear of retribution by a university, what does that do to this freedom of inquiry and what does that signal to the students on campus?

Primo :���������������������������������������������� Students learn a lot from us as faculty members I hope. They learn content but I think they also learn what it means to engage with the world of ideas. And earlier I said that students are sometimes going to feel uncomfortable in class potentially or in, on college campuses because they’re exposed to ideas that are different. That said, they should always – even as they might feel uncomfortable with the ideas with which they’re engaging feel comfortable in expressing their own perspectives.

The comfort I’m concerned about is the student is free to express their perspectives not that they are sort of insulated from alternative perspectives. And if they observe that faculty members are hesitant or are cautious or themselves don’t feel comfortable in expressing their perspectives, I think that sends a really strong message about what the appropriate way to engage in discussion is. The bulk of the time faculty members I believe can express their perspectives without fear of retribution.

My concern is that that is not a universal phenomenon, that there are definitely situations where faculty members either because of pressure from students, pressure from administrators or pressures from fellow faculty members don’t feel comfortable expressing their perspectives. But more importantly their research agendas can be sidelined for fear that they’re going to reach the “wrong” conclusions. Wrong being defined as what’s out of the academic mainstream. Those are pernicious effects that may not be obvious to students but I do believe it does filter through in terms of what goes on in the classroom.

Burns:�������� �������������������������������������� That’s a difficult thing to measure. I think there might be a difference between inside a classroom and research that’s done on outside although to what extent in a whole community learning, I would probably argue that yeah, I think discomfort is necessary for some learning. But there are those individuals in class who feel more than just discomfort. So for the most part there are folks learning who feel uncomfortable because an alternative point of view is offered.

That’s significantly different than someone who is in the classroom who has this traumatic experience and learning shuts down because of an example that is used or a phrase that it used. And I don’t think that there should be, again, punishment for that sort of thing. But why wouldn’t you challenge yourself perhaps as a faculty member or as a fellow student offering a different point of view that maybe the way I phrased that could be done differently so that it allows everyone to learn. I don’t know what the answer to that question is. I don’t believe it should be punished.

But I think to question those things is legitimate. So if you do use an example in class and you get feedback that for some reason offended me or shut down learning on my part, I would be open to that. And all things considered, maybe that’s the only way you have of teaching. But if there is a different alternative or if that’s just never been pointed out to you before, why wouldn’t you want to learn that?

JVS:���������� ������������������������������������������ I want to address some of the notions of trigger warnings because there are a lot of different theories out there and a lot of different people say a lot of different things. One of which is either – just put it out there at the beginning of the course. Say this course is going to cover some topics that are difficult so get ready folks. Others say you don’t necessarily have to have that blanket approach but really use the topic at hand to say some students might be affected by this because we’re going to be talking about this subject matter. So is that a way of policing language or is that a way of protecting students?

Primo:������ ���������������������������������������� So generally speaking I like the idea of universities not being involved or not being in the business of mandating how faculty handle sensitive issues in class. I think that’s really the purview of the faculty member. In my own classes I try to make sure that every student knows that they are a) going to be treated like an adult and b) are going to be treated with respect. And then we go from there.

My concern with the concept of trigger warnings is not the spirit in which they were created, but that they’re part of a broader trend that’s highlighted in a recent book that I highly recommend called The Coddling of the American Mind where we are – instead of encouraging our students to be adults, to have difficult conversations, we are creating these little protective bubbles for them, throughout their experiences in higher education from day one in orientation till they graduate. And I’m not sure that that’s serving them well in the long run.

We should not make college an unpleasant experience but we should emphasize that discomfort at times and I understand there are limits. Of course. But discomfort at times is central to learning. This doesn’t quite relate exactly to the idea of trigger warnings. But I remember as an undergraduate in a political theory course reading Marx and the professor noticed that I was really – we were sort in small group discussions and I was very animated and very almost upset by the ideas that I was encountering in Marx. And he emphasized that this is great that this is making you ��so essentially irritated. This is how you learn. This is how you grow. And I benefited a great deal from being exposed to those ideas.

JVS:������������������������������������������������������ Matt, I want to get your thoughts on some of those notions of trigger warnings but I also want to get your thoughts on more than just what’s happening in the classroom but what’s happening in wider campus environment and I hesitate to open the picture too wide. But a lot of that is happening online and in social media where a university that doesn’t have a lot of influence with how students are communicating or saying certain things about certain issues. So how do we as a university model a sort of free speech but also keep in mind that there are people out there who do come from marginalized populations or who are more vulnerable. What does that look like on the college campus?

Burns:������������������������������������������������ That’s a good question. I think the first thing with regard to the enormous amount of ways that our students can communicate with each other which is far greater than what I had when I was their age. There was no internet. I’m dating myself of course. But no email or anything like that. You were kind of forced to have interactions face to face. And I think that’s made a significant difference in how we, not just young people but everyone but certainly young people are much more proficient with stuff, how we communicate with each other.

If we’re constantly able to throw up an electronic barrier between me and another human, that significantly alters the way I’m willing to communicate with you if I don’t have to stare at a human being in front of me. I believe that that does have an impact. And so one of the things we can model perhaps is to take, is to make sure that we’re talking about appropriate venues. And that perhaps Facebook is not the place to be having this conversation with you. Maybe we should take it offline and have a face to face conversation.

With less and less of that happening, not because of their fault but because of what they have available to them, I think we can model that more and more and show our students and others by the way what it looks like to have a civil conversation about a difficult topic. It’s much easier to have a polarized, awful, mean conversation when you’re snapchatting or emailing or whenever that electronic barrier is out there.

So I think that’s the first thing that comes to mind whenever I think of how are we going to teach people to have civil discourse again. Take it offline whenever possible. I think that’s the first step because I’ve seen in my career that happen. People go and text each other. They’ll be in front of each other texting because they don’t want to say something that’s difficult to you. And I think there’s a part of us that any one of us that would give into that. I don’t think this is a young person’s problem. I don’t think they have any tendency that we don’t have. And in fact you see adults do that all the time too.

Burns:������������������������������������������������ I definitely agree that face to face interactions are going to take the tension down, often will take the tension down a little bit. Although you can imagine that if the goal is to protest then a face to face interaction may actually heighten the situation. But I think in general if the goal is to have a conversation then yes, a face to face conversation is less likely to devolve. I mean you just need to look at Twitter or Facebook on any given day to see what happens when people who you might think are seemingly reasonable human beings choose to put their ideas into Tweets.

And this is true of faculty members who you would just be�� floored if you see the kinds of things that they put on Twitter and on Facebook for the world to see. They frankly should be embarrassed by their actions. And so part of the challenge is students may see, “Oh look. My faculty member says all these nasty things on Facebook and Twitter. Why shouldn’t I engage in the same way?” And that’s part of sort of this corrosive culture in which we’re all part of these days. And so I agree if the goal is to have a conversation face to face is still going to be, is going to be superior but if the goal is to score points or if the goal is to protest I’m not as convinced that face to face is going to address the root issue.

Burns:������������������������������������������������ Although there is the right to have that as well. But we have a long history of how to do that. Decades of protests on college campuses that we can look to for advice about that. But I think the other thing that I face fairly often is this notion that when someone does say something that is deeply offensive there’s nothing that can be done about it. Like I get to say that and nobody can say anything else. It’s just freedom of expression.

And while it’s true, we don’t use the conduct process to punish that speech. If we as a community really do define these values that we hold there should be some response. The community should be able to speak back at that. But I think what I’m hearing more and more is that that seems insufficient as a response. That is doesn’t carry the weight of expelling or suspending someone or removing them from campus.

And I simply don’t think that it’s appropriate for us to use the conduct process to punish that speech which is protected but deeply offensive. I don’t like it anymore than anyone else does. But we ought not to use a conduct process. Sort of like outside of the private university you don’t use the courts to punish that speech that is protected.

JVS:������������������������������������������������������ That’s a great point. The punitive side of responding to people exercising what they think is their freedom of expression that sometimes becomes problematic. And we have clear dividing lines between hate speech and what’s just offensive to people and I think that those are relatively clear.

But what is it and how do we encourage students and how do we encourage an appropriate faculty response when we see things that are demonstrably more than just offensive?

Burns:������������������������������������������������ I wouldn’t be so convinced that we’ve defined hate speech as well as you characterize it. Hate crimes and the legislation that allows us to look at actual violations that are exacerbated by speech that’s hateful is one thing to look at. But to my knowledge hate speech has been shot down again and again if you come up with those codes.

But perhaps more to your point, what should happen with that, I think it’s perfectly reasonable inside and outside of the classroom by the way to expect as an educational institution that you can’t just put something out there for the public to see or to read without having to defend it and sit in the hot seat. I think it is not punitive. It is perfectly reasonable that an educational institution that if someone says something that is offensive or hateful I get to perhaps as a member of the community or perhaps even as dean of students, expect that you sit down and you talk to me about it and you defend that point of view. And you have to answer the question as to why do you hold that point of view.

When I look at my wall and I see all of the principles up there and I point to integrity or I point to respect and it has nothing to do with that. Why are you here espousing that point of view when we look at those words every day and say that we believe in them? That’s a question that people I think need to answer.

Primo:������������������������������������������������ There are two aspects of this where I think it gets a little bit tricky. I agree 100 percent with Matt’s sentiment that you need to be willing to have your ideas challenged or expect that your ideas are going to be challenged on a college campus. So if you express position x and there are – 90 percent of the campus believes not x is the case, you have to be prepared to engage and you can’t then play the victim card and say oh people are saying mean things about me or I feel threatened again if there’s no actually overt threat of violence of course. This is just all verbal. That’s inconsistent.

But there are a couple of concerns here that I have and that is one, that we’re seeing increasingly that the goal is not just to engage with the individual with whom we vigorously disagree because of their offensive speech. It is to prevent that individual from speaking or seek again punitive – seek some sort of punishment for that speech. That gets us down a slippery slope where now the content of speech is the determination of whether or not it can be expressed on a college campus. And again, short of something that’s inciting violence, we need to be very careful about starting to draw those lines.

The second is – and this is in terms of how faculty members and administrators should respond. This gets delicate because administrators and faculty members hold positions of power. So let’s say a student says something offensive to many other students in terms of expressing their perspective. If a faculty member denounces that student publicly, is that the faculty member simply expressing his or her perspective or is there a fear that that faculty members assessment of that student may then in turn be affected? So does that faculty member in a position of power, right, create an unfortunate environment for that student?

The second piece – and this is the thing about administration. So let’s say a faculty member says something offensive or that’s perceived as offensive by the outside community or has research conclusions that are controversial. If the president of the university says, comes out as happened on this campus a few years ago and criticizes that faculty member, remember that the president or the dean is in a position of power, of authority over that faculty member. Does that send a message to the rest of the university community that if you hold views or express views that are unpopular and so on that you can be in some sort of danger?

Even if there’s never any actual retaliation, it does raise the question of exactly when should faculty members and administrators say something. I don’t know. I don’t have all of the answers. I think these are very difficult situations but I don’t think it’s obvious that administrators calling out faculty members or faculty members calling out students for what are perceived to be unpopular views is always a clear cut positive for a university.

Burns:������������������������������������������������ No. And it’s not clear that saying nothing doesn’t send a message either. So it is –

Primo:������������������������������������������������ Fair point.

JVS:�������� �������������������������������������������� Matt, as dean of students at the URochester, you’re obviously dean of all students and having to be mindful of course of a wide range of different perspectives. So when you are thinking in these terms, thinking of people’s freedom of expression, freedom of idea, freedom of inquiry and that sort of thing, you mentioned these principles, these university principles. Is that what you use as your guide for understanding this or do you have a broader plan or strategy?

Burns:������������������������������������������������ I can’t say that I have a broader strategy. Do I use those? Yes, actually right now we’re in transition from the college’s communal principles to the newly adopted university values. They’re basically the same thing. In fact, the university values are largely based upon the communal principles in the college. But yes. The answer to that question is right up on my wall. It took me seven years to decorate my office. But one of the things I did was right up on my wall are the six different communal principles, fairness and freedom and honesty and inclusion and respect and responsibility.

And whenever I meet with students about this or other difficult issues, I actually do. I don’t know if it sounds nerdy or what but I point at those and we engage each other in a discussion about what it has to do with those. Because I think the bottom line there is regardless of what actually happens if we’re keeping those principles in mind, now the university values, we’re closer to I think where we should be. So beyond the judicial system, beyond whatever is happening out there, I’m meeting with a student discussing this issue or with a group of students. I think those become very relevant because I don’t like looking at the letter of the law in terms of these things. But I like looking at those principles and challenging ourselves.

So yes, that’s my go to. But I think as dean of students and working for the last 30 something years in student life, it’s more than just those principles. I can’t be dean of students without the issue of freedom of expression coming up several times a year at least.

JVS:������������������������������������������������������ And Dave have you had your own contact with students around this notion of freedom of expression, freedom of speech?

Primo:������������������������������������������������ On the first day of class early in the semester I always tell students that they should always feel comfortable. So using that word comfort again but again the comfort is on the terms of the expression, not in terms of the perception of ideas. So you should be comfortable expressing your perspectives in class. And if you’re not, you should tell them, whatever the reason. And I actually started asking students in student surveys at the beginning of the semester. These are optional. Have you ever felt uncomfortable expressing your views or know that other students felt uncomfortable expressing their views in class?

And a surprising number of student acknowledged that yes, either they knew somebody who had or they had. And some of these students were conservative but some were liberal and said that I’m very liberal but on this issue x I hold a view that’s contrary to campus orthodoxy. I’ll never admit that that’s the case publicly or in class because I fear that I might lose friends over this. And that’s profoundly saddening to me that that’s how that student perceives the campus environment.

I will say that for a majority, a vast majority of the students this is not an issue. But we should be concerned if its an issue even for a small fraction of students. It’s become something that’s increasingly important to me over the past few years for both personal and professional reasons that students are in an environment where they are permitted to express their views without fear of retribution.

JVS:������������������������������������������������������ And, more and more, I think most people in the academy recognize that universities, colleges and universities are in and of the communities where they are located and even in the broader society. So with so much political polarization, with so much talk about a widening divide or with issues around freedom of expression and freedom of speech, what do we as a university have as our role to inform or at least engage with this conversation, this wider conversation around freedom of speech, better discourse, understanding of another person’s opinions. What can higher education offer a broader conversation on these things?

Burns:������������������������������������������������ Well, I think we have a number of resources right here. The first one that comes to mind is the Gandhi Institute which teaches a different way of using language to approach conflict. A nonviolent communication way of approaching this. And they give workshops on that all the time. They also sponsor among other offices on campus opportunities to engage in dialogue about race and other hot topic issues. And there is a good amount of – there are a good number of people on campus who are very proficient in facilitating those conversations. So we can probably act as better role models than they might find outside this community for one thing.

I think we do have some expertise on campus to teach different ways of communication that could be less prone to feel threatening. More listening than speaking would be a good rule of thumb to teach to just about everybody. So I think we do have a responsibility I think to educate both our students and each other, remind us that there are ways to talk to each other that don’t need to be so threatening, so uncomfortable, so divisive.

Primo:������������������������������������������������ I agree 1,000 percent with the sentiment that expression that is needlessly polemical or aggressive or impolite frankly is ultimately not likely to be effective communication. And if your goal is to try to convince somebody of your position or at least get them to understand your position, attacking them by calling them names or using other pejoratives, that’s not a winning strategy. One of the things certainly universities can do is educate students about the effective ways to disagree, if you will. And that’s hopefully something I’ll be discussing in my course next year.

How is it that you can engage with individuals with whom you disagree and shake hands at the end? How do we have those kinds of difficult conversations? One thread that I think is important to keep in mind as we think about this broader issue though is that universities ultimately are about knowledge production. And knowledge production is a messy, contentious process. But that to me is sort of our North Star. Our main goal, right, is knowledge production.

And disagreement is an important part of knowledge production. But it’s important to keep in mind that we need that disagreement that’s vital to producing knowledge. But the goal is not just disagreement for disagreement’s sake. The idea is hopefully that disagreement will lead us to new understandings, new understandings of the world and new understandings just focusing on ourselves, new understandings of ourselves and what our perspectives are.

But that can only come if you are in an environment of free inquiry where faculty members and students are able to explore controversial ideas. And I don’t think we’re in a crisis right now in higher education with regard to these issues but I do think that for a variety of reasons we moving away from that ideal of knowledge production and more toward this idea of viewpoint management if you will that I find that troubling.

JVS:������������������������������������������������������ Matt, as dean of students you see students when they come in as first years and they exit as fourth years primarily. Are you seeing them grow and develop as a result of this pursuit of knowledge?

Burns:������������������������������������������������ Yes, certainly. There are any number of ways though that our college students learn and grow through their four, five or more years here. So they come in as first years. They don’t have the knowledge base that they leave with. That’s Dave’s area, right? Hopefully they leave with more knowledge than they come in with. But they also come in with whatever life experiences they have prior to this. Some have been isolated. Some have been exposed to very diverse communities. And they learn from each other in that way too and I think that’s a lot of what they learn over the course of their time in college.

And they’re supposed to be learning that, right? We’re supposed to be sending them out more capable of communicating effectively with each other. Holding all the knowledge in oneself and one’s own brain does us very little good. Being able to express that knowledge even if that knowledge is controversial is the goal. So I do see them learning and growing. I do think that our graduating students most of them have a better handle on how to do that. They’ve lived with each other. They’ve come across issues that resulted in some conflict that they had to resolve one way or the other. So I do think that they’re learning and growing.

I don’t think to be frank they have the best role models in the world right now. And I don’t think that they are forced to be able to communicate with each other the way that we were in the past. So I think as educators we have to pay close attention to that and to try to do what we can to intervene and bring them back to methods of communication that are effective which involve both listening and speaking effectively.

Primo:������������������������������������������������ I agree with Matt that students are not exposed enough to the kinds of disagreements that lead to productive exchanges of ideas. And that’s one of the things I try to do with the politics of markets project with Ģ����ý is bring in panelists from across the political spectrum to debate difficult ideas. So a couple of weeks ago, I did a panel on globalization and I had ardent supporter of for lack of a better term open markets and increased immigration.

And I had among the three panelists was somebody who referred to himself as an economic nationalist. So very much in the Trumpian mode who believe that tariffs, the tariffs that the president is currently imposing are good for America, that America needs to protect its interests, just as other countries will protect their interests and so on. And they and the other panelists had a very spirted exchange. Never once did it get personal. Students asked some very challenging questions especially of the individual who referred to himself as an economic nationalist. But those questions were excellent probing questions and they got what I think were very interesting answers.

And so there’s a very respectful but firm disagreement there. And I think that was a wonderful sort of example of what college campuses at their very best can be about. And in fact one student or attendee after the event went up to the “economic nationalist” and said it was really good to – I’m not sure the exact word was good but I valued hearing your perspective because that’s not the kind of thing we get to hear a lot about on this campus. And that’s where I think universities are falling short is that we’re concerned about extreme views being expressed and so on. But in fact there’s actually not as much viewpoint diversity on college campuses as there ought to be.

JVS:������ ���������������������������������������������� I’d like to thank Matthew Burns, dean of students in Arts, Sciences & Engineering at the URochester, and David Primo, associate professor of political science and business administration, and the Ani and Mark Gabrellian Professor at the URochester. Thank you, again, for being here. For the Ģ����ý Quadcast, I’m Jim Ver Steeg. Thanks for listening.

[End of Audio]

But is a “full steam ahead” approach to the digital future a reality that most college campuses can afford? The Chronicle of Higher Education recently published a story about the challenges faced by the University of Texas at Austin when they attempted to redesign their curricula, revamp their teaching methods, and produce more live online classes. In the end, support and funding for the digital initiatives faltered. The investment in the synchronous massive online class, or SMOC, didn’t meet with expectations. And support for the bold move forward all but disappeared.

So, how can we understand digital technologies and the role they play in our lives and in our learning? Is technology helping us connect or are we more isolated than ever? Joining me today are three scholars who will share their thoughts on being educators and being human in the digital age.

Joan Rubin is the Dexter Perkins Professor of History and the Ani and Mark Gabrellian Director of the Ģ����ý Humanities Center. Joan is an American cultural and intellectual historian who studies the values, assumptions, and anxieties that have shaped American life. Joan, thank you for joining us.

Joan Rubin:������������������������������ Happy to be here.

Jim Ver Steeg:���������������������� Jayne Lammers is an Associate Professor at the Warner School of Education and Associate Director of the Center for Learning in the Digital Age. Jayne also directs the secondary English preparation program at the Warner School and her research explores adolescent literacy learning, especially in online environments. Full disclosure: I am a Ph.D. candidate at the Warner School and Jayne is on my dissertation committee. Jayne, thank you for being here.

Jayne Lammers:���������������� Happy to be here, Jim.

Jim Ver Steeg:���������������������� Emily Sherwood is the Director of the Digital Scholarship Lab at the URochester. The Digital Scholarship Lab specializes in creating digital tools and resources for learning. It provides resources for web-based scholarship and partners with faculty on their digital research projects. Before coming to Rochester, Emily was the Assistant Director of Digital Pedagogy and Scholarship at Bucknell University. Emily, thank you for joining us.

Emily Sherwood:�������������� Thank you for having me.

Jim Ver Steeg:���������������������� Joan, I’d like to start with you. I think we talk a little bit about technologies and what it means to higher education, but there’s a broader question there about what a digital world means for being human.

Joan Rubin:������������������������������ Right. And the Humanities Center, which I’m privileged to direct, has as part of its mission exploring what it has meant to be human in different times and places and what it means to be human right now. Our changing technology is an inextricable part of that situation that we find ourselves in. So, I’ve thought about this a lot, though I should say by way of disclaimer that I’m not a scholar. That is, in my work as a cultural historian I haven’t particularly investigated these questions. But we all think about them. They’re in the newspaper constantly or on the radio broadcasts and TV shows that we watch. So, in fact, ever since I knew that I was going to be talking with all of us today, I’ve been pondering these questions all the more and seeing potential answers in everything that I’m reading and listening to.

Let me give you a sense of how I would answer, begin to answer what you’ve asked. And it really proceeds from my perspective as a cultural historian. Here my training does come into play, and that is because I’m inclined always to see tensions, always to see contradictions and ambivalences and pros and cons. I once thought that if I wrote another paragraph beginning “On the one hand” and then moving to “On the other hand” that I would shoot myself. This is endemic in my own writing.

So, with respect to your question, I would say that technology has brought us great, great benefits. I think a lot about the losses that it has also entailed. I think about connection but also, as you’ve indicated, about potential disconnection. Those might be the sort of axes or the pluses – that sense of the pluses and minuses. That is what I would hope that our conversation today but also our conversation in the Humanities Center could illuminate.

Jim Ver Steeg:���������������������� Emily, I want to turn to you. I know that, as we mentioned in the opening, that a lot of students coming to campus these days, digital technologies are second nature for them. So, what does it mean for a student to have digital technologies in the classroom? How are we using that to improve their learning? How does it reflect maybe what’s happening in the wider world?

Emily Sherwood:�������������� So, you said in your opening – you mentioned the term “digital natives,” which is one that gets thrown around a lot, right? It is expected that our students will be able to engage with technology more readily than maybe earlier generations. And I’d like to push back on that a little bit because our students are consumers of technology. They take in media, they take in audio, they take in – they see images all over the place, and yet they’re not always taught to critique the technology that they’re receiving. And so, what I like to say when I’m trying to explain why it’s necessary to teach our students a range of literacies, including not just textual literacies but also digital literacies and data literacies, is that by the time students get to college they have been taught for, what, 12 years of formal education how to read and how to look at a paragraph or a sentence or words and analyze that and maybe ask a question, summarize an idea. And yet, they’re consuming media and they’re consuming images and they’re consuming maps and charts and data at such an alarming rate, but they haven’t been taught that for 12 years. Right?

And so, I think there really is an obligation for us to start to think about how we structure their learning around ways of thinking, a broader form of literacy. And so, I would push back on the digital natives point a bit. That being said, because we want them to be more critical the same way we want them to write papers, I think we do need to have them create using these other modes so that they become more capable of questioning them.

Jim Ver Steeg:���������������������� Jayne?

Jayne Lammers:���������������� I would echo Emily’s pushback on the term “digital natives” for another reason. I think that educators unfortunately make the assumption that because young people learn to swipe and consume media through technologies, they learn to use apps so early on, that they’ll know how to use whatever digital tool a teacher puts into a classroom. And that’s just not the case. So, I think the term “digital native” lets educators have some assumptions and lets them think about “Oh, I can just bring this technology into my classroom and they’ll know how to use it. I won’t need to think through all of the ways that I might need to prepare them to use it.” And I think that’s highly problematic.

So, one of the things that we’re doing at the Warner School is really thinking about what does it mean to prepare educators to incorporate these digitally rich practices? And in part it’s what Emily had to say, that we need to give our young people opportunities to produce digital content, to make thoughtful choices about which platform, which tool, which technology will best serve their purpose for whatever type of message they’re trying to get out, that we need more education around how to interpret a variety of digital content and how to make wise choices about where you’re spending your time and how you’re assessing the veracity and ten quality of the digital media that you might take in.

And so, some of what we’re doing in our classes over there is working not only with the future K-12 teachers around getting them to experience making content and using tools and seeing how challenging it is so that when they think about bringing it into their classrooms they know what they need to prepare them for, but then we also through our Center for Learning in a Digital Age have been thinking a lot about how do we prepare faculty members at the university level, how do we prepare K-12 teacher for what it looks like to teach with devices and what it looks like to make these kind of digitally rich classrooms actually work for learning?

Jim Ver Steeg:���������������������� One of the things that I want to make sure that we talk about is what learning looks like in both the physical space where it’s being enhanced or augmented with digital technologies and what it looks like in digital spaces and how students are using those spaces to question and to learn. Joan?

Joan Rubin:������������������������������ And I think we have to say, “What does it look like if we don’t use those devices?” And I am about to declare to our audience that I am the oldest member of this conversation and I’m in some ways teaching in a much more traditional manner than perhaps my colleagues are and perhaps I should be. But I – and I appreciate the fact that our students need to think critically about the technologies that they will be using as learners and as members of the work force. I think that’s absolutely in line with my own assumptions about what we do – what I do in the classroom. And actually, critical thinking is right up there at the top of the list for the values at the Center – of the Humanities Center.

But at the same time, I don’t know that it is the case that our students, even our wonderful Ģ����ý students, come here knowing how to read texts. That’s an assumption that we may make as we say, “Okay, now we’re going to teach them critical thinking with respect to digital devices.” But my efforts in the classroom are focused still – and I think it’s necessary – on reading, on writing, on explicating a text, on understanding what assumptions authors are making. This is not to say that the students don’t read the text in a digital format. It’s not to say that they shouldn’t learn to annotate it, to contextualize it using the tools that are available to them in the digital world, but those reading skills, I think, still need to be reinforced.

Jim Ver Steeg:���������������������� So, Emily, are there ways that we’re using technology to reinforce or to help students with those skills?

Emily Sherwood:�������������� Sure. So, one example I would point to is the Digital Scholarship Lab has for several years now been developing a time-based media annotation tool with Professor Joel Burges in English and Film and Media Studies. And it is – it allows students to do exactly that close reading that Joan was talking about but with time-based media. So, we have faculty at Eastman using it to analyze music. We have faculty in Linguistics using it to analyze the linguistic tropes around advertising. And we have faculty who are using it for Intro to Media Studies and Film and Media Studies to be able to give students the ability to close read film and audio the same way that they are taught to highlight a text and annotate it so that they understand it more fully.

So, there are places where technology actually will enable the sort of reflective thinking that we want them to be able to do closely with text and apply that to other forms of media as well.

Jim Ver Steeg:���������������������� I kind of want to go back to the online learning spaces because it strikes me that when we’re talking about technologies, and we’re talking mostly in physical spaces right now, we’re talking about students who are simultaneously living in both the physical world and utilizing these digital technologies. And so, Jayne, can you speak to what an experience is of students, of learners in digital spaces? How are they using – how are young people using digital spaces now? How are they gravitating to them and what are they getting out of them?

Jayne Lammers:���������������� Happy to talk about that. So, my research has been on how do adolescents leverage their own interests and pursue those interests in online spaces outside of the formal context of school? So, I’ve had the opportunity and pleasure of studying the writing practices of mostly young women, who because they’re either a fan of a particular content or they are trying to become writers of a certain sort that they find these online communities who will come together and give them feedback, who will help them improve their practice, and they get a great deal of both connection and learning out of these experiences.

And so, one example I have from one of my earliest research projects is a young woman named Eve. And she in high school would describe herself as somebody who did not like her English class. She felt, in her words, slow and unwise. She was diagnosed with dyslexia. She struggled through school. And yet, she found this online community of up to 12,000 people from around the world who were using the video game The Sims to create stories and to publish those stories. And what Eve was able to do as somebody who developed expertise in this space around photo editing and digital image editing, she got a reputation there that helped improve her kind of self-efficacy, her confidence, her motivation to learn. Writing and the details and the things that were not as easy for her became easier because she was able to get support from others in that space. She became somebody who opened her own website, started creating her own voiceover content, producing a YouTube channel, a Flickr, a Photo Stream.

And I’ve checked in with Eve now, years later after that study concluded, and she moved herself to L.A. She went to a film school. She’s parlayed this into a career. She’s now a mom who has a YouTube channel around being a mom. And she’s developed some expertise in this area and has this just whole different outlook on what was possible, all because she was a fan of this videogame and found people who supported her interest in learning.

And I think those things are possible. And when you ask young people like Eve whether or not they feel connected and whether or not they feel like they’re getting the support of relationships and humanity in these spaces, I think she would say she’s very much connected.

Joan Rubin:������������������������������ So, that’s a great example of the positive possibilities that the digital environment affords. And this is what I meant by saying at the outset that there are both pluses and minuses. I think we can’t lose sight of that accomplishment that you just described. But I am a big fan of the work of Sherry Turkle, who is actually a friend of mine from college. I don’t know whether our audience has encountered her studies, but she is based at MIT. She’s both a sociologist and a clinical psychologist. And I went back to some of Sherry’s books in preparation for our conversation, and she too always underscores the potential for growth, for individual development, for greater self-esteem that young people can find. But at the same time, the lack of connection that immersion, total immersion – and I think it sometimes maybe is a question of balance – but the lack of connection and even more the lack of that face-to-face contact that is the best way we have to develop empathy is missing for some of these people, for some of the students that she studied.

And I feel as a scholar who is dedicated to the humanities that it’s very important to consider what we’re losing as well as what we’re gaining. Our other value in the Humanities Center is empathy, and compassion is up there, and a sense of understanding what has made us human. What is – what are our differences? What are our commonalities? And I don’t know that you can – I don’t think that you can get that if your entire world – and that’s not the case, obviously, with your example – but if your entire world as a young person is built around being on your phone, being on Facebook – or, Facebook, I guess, is passé now, but whatever it is that you’re on – if that’s your day as an adolescent or as a college student, I think that our society is going to face some negative consequences.

Jim Ver Steeg:���������������������� But I think technology also enhances learning and can enhance those connections, and I think that’s part of the mission of the Digital Scholarship Lab.

Joan Rubin:������������������������������ Well, I’m not going to really be able to talk about it, but I would just say what are the connections? I think the word “connections” itself needs to be really unpacked. So, are we talking about knowing someone else? Are we talking about a relationship? What is a relationship? I think that’s a conversation that we can continue about; we need to hear about the learning environment too.

Emily Sherwood:�������������� So, in terms of connection, one of the strengths, I think – and this returns to a point Jayne made earlier – is about thinking through how the pedagogy is developed, and that a lot of times working with digital tools and methods, whether that’s in teaching or research, requires more extensive collaboration. Right? So, no one can be an expert in all of these things. And in fact, my team shows that nobody can be an expert in all of those. We have programmers and digitization experts and a digital scholarship librarian and a GIS specialist, so we all bring our own expertise to these conversations. So, for example, last summer we hosted a digital pedagogy workshop with the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning, and we had nine faculty come from six disciplines come for two days to develop a digital project for a course. And the focus of that was really to say developing a digital assignment doesn’t take less time; it actually takes more. And it doesn’t take less people; it takes more expertise. And so, we partnered the technology experts from my lab with outreach librarians who were subject matter experts in the fields of the faculty who were in attendance and we really worked together to make sure that there were learning objectives that were articulated.

And I would like to emphasize that for students, unless you also articulate what the digital literacy learning objectives are for a project, they will see it as extra work. They know how to – they don’t necessarily always know how to write a paper but they understand the work that goes into that for them for time management and things. And they understand how to study for a test. But thinking about making in these new approaches and these new methods, they’re often very uncomfortable with that. And again, that comes back to the digital native question.

So, one of the things the workshop was attempting to do was to bring together all of the expertise and support that a faculty would need in order to effectively develop this type of project for a class, and then we support them throughout the semester in doing so. And part of that is an acknowledgement that you have to scaffold out the process a little bit more even than when you’re teaching traditional research, or in the same way you would teach traditional research. So, I might have a student find an article first and then summarize that, and then I might have them critique it, or I might then have them do an annotated bibliography. And you give them steps along the way until they’re writing a research paper.

And the same is true of working on a digital project. So, if you’re teaching a digital essay, for example, you’re going to want a student to first write a short paper and then figure out how to turn that into a script. And then you teach them both the technology for the audio and give them tips on how to do that. And you teach them the video and give them tips. And at every stage there has to still be peer review and assessment on it so that it can keep developing.

And so, I guess what I’m saying is it takes more time and it takes more scaffolding. And we have to let our students have those opportunities to learn and play and fail and get better at the skills that we’re asking them to develop, just as we would with a traditional assignment. And so, one of the goals of my lab and our outreach librarians who we partner with is to make sure that the faculty and the students are supported in that process.

Jim Ver Steeg:���������������������� So, I want to shift gears a little bit. I mentioned at the opening some of the challenges that the University of Texas at Austin faced when they tried to do a full-force, digital-first approach to learning and curricula at their institution. And Jayne, I know that you had some thoughts about what was going on at Austin and how things are sort of shaping up here at Rochester, especially the Warner School. So, what do you take from a university like the University of Texas at Austin that really tried to make bold moves in the digital realm but sort of had to scale back almost right away?

Jayne Lammers:���������������� So, what I appreciated about the way that The Chronicle of Higher Ed categorized what happened at Austin was this notion that they way overpromised and they used all of these bold claims about what technology could do. And that, I think, is a common point of failure for many people who try to imagine what technology could do as a sort of panacea or a silver bullet for pedagogical problems, or for institutional problems. And yes, technology affords us the opportunity to collaborate, to reach broader students, to – and one of the problems they were trying to solve was “How do we free up classroom space? How do we connect with students from further away?” And we here at the university are also trying to solve some of those very same problems. How do we serve folks in the southern tier region, for example, for whom traveling up here, especially in the wintertime, is problematic? How might we be able to make use of various technologies to offer programs to them, to have lower residence programs where you don’t have to be onsite all the time, to strike the balance that Joan was talking about earlier?

And so, one of the things that I’ve really appreciated about the way that the Warner School and through our work in the Center for Learning in the Digital Age, the way that we’ve thought about what it means to do this thing we’re calling online learning is kind of a slow, methodical ramp-up. An examination of what content, what classes, what learning might actually be better facilitated through a variety of online tools, and what still needs that face-to-face touch? What needs that classroom practice, to Emily’s earlier point about the need for support in thinking through what does it mean to take learning, to take a project, to guide our students to some of these technologies, and to really be thoughtful about that?

And I think the Warner School has done that. We’ve been working through a new master’s program that we have and through a certificate that students can add as a part of their graduate school work to help them think about whatever their content area is, whatever their expertise is, what might it be to empower students to take advantage of digital tools and technologies for learning in formal environments. And what does it actually take to give them the experiences as learners itself to see “Oh my goodness, these things take a lot more time” – right? And Emily’s laughing because she knows. She knows. It’s an assignment I give to my students in the teacher preparation program as well, is go out and make – you think this ten-second clay animation, slow motion, stop motion animation thing takes only a little bit of time? And they realize, “Oh my goodness, that took hours to create and edit and upload, and I had to watch five YouTube videos on how to do it.”

And when we come back together in class – because we do have face-to-face time then to debrief their experience – we talk about not only how much time did it take you to be a maker in these spaces, but how much online learning did you have to do, and how many online resources did you tap into in order to help you complete this?

Emily Sherwood:�������������� I’ll jump in there for just a second. Part of our digital pedagogy workshop was requiring faculty to test run the assignment they were developing so that they did have a sense of where their students might have a glitch, or if the tool was even getting at the learning outcomes they wanted their students to get.

Jim Ver Steeg:���������������������� I think that’s a – and that’s a great example that again illustrates some of the power and potential of these technologies. But you’re still highlighting the necessary component of human connection, of getting to work with one another. So, Joan, I want to turn to you now. So, we’re talking a little bit about connections, and you asked a great question and asked us to unpack what we meant by “connections.” And I think what I’m hearing are collaborations, what I’m hearing are learning opportunities to learn from another, but it also raises a broader question for me about scholarship and about where you get ideas, and suddenly “Whose idea is it?” and is everything sharable?

So, I think those are the questions that I have. And I’m curious, Joan, as to how you’re thinking about what we’re talking about in terms of online collaboration and what that might mean for scholarship and learning.

Joan Rubin:������������������������������ Right. Well, collaboration is a buzzword. It’s a popular term today. Deans love to talk about collaboration. And faculty, of course, in my area, which is cultural history and literature, in particular are instantly suspicious. “Oh, they don’t appreciate the model of the lone scholar sitting in the attic and beating her head against a –” now a computer screen, yes, but still it’s that lonely process.

I think that, again, it’s important to have space to create opportunities for both kinds of activities. So, in the Humanities Center we have a work in progress seminar every other week where people are sharing ideas. And they’re not particularly taking advantage of digital technologies to do that, although that isn’t to say that they haven’t built their ideas on the resources available in the online environment. At the same time, we always want to have that space for the lone scholar.

In my own case as someone who uses archives, it has not been – because, I should say, I’m in a privileged position. I have the money to visit archives – manuscript collections, archival collections that are not digitized. There are young scholars just starting out who don’t have those resources and for whom the process of digitization is going to give them the material that’s absolutely essential for them to do their work. I’m in a different position and I have a different feeling about going to an archive, holding the letter than someone wrote 100 years ago, flipping through a manuscript – actually, people write about this, this sort of tactile part of the experience – and I myself prize that.

But this is not to say that – certainly, I have made use of some online resources myself. And I also think that as we go forward it’s going to be even more important to have the online capabilities available because we – where are we going to put all these documents if we even have – if we’ve even preserved them – and librarians talk about this – if we even have preserved them from our own time, where are we going to put them? So, the digital environment solves that practical problem.

You asked me something else, though. You asked me about what is one’s own work, basically, and how you share ideas, and whether – and I’m on a Listserv that answers – where people pose questions: “Who is the author of this? Where can I find a collection that helps me address this problem?” And I find that useful. I have been involved in an editing project in which the ability for multiple editors to look at submissions to the volume that we were constructing at the same time was absolutely essential. There’s an example where the technologies available to me made my life a lot easier. ���������� But I think as a scholar who focuses on culture and texts, and I have a project now that has to do with musical culture that sent me to Leonard Bernstein’s’ archive, for example – in that kind of work I’m relying on older methods.

Jim Ver Steeg:���������������������� And I think that there are certainly a number of values to relying on those methods. Those are tried-and-true methods that books have used for a long time. But it puts me in mind of what students are doing in the classroom now and how they’re gaining access to some of these things. To Joan’s point, access can sometimes be a pretty tricky thing. So, if you are – let’s say you are a history student and you would like to get access to – I noticed on the Digital Scholarship Lab there was a 3D modeling of the Temple of Jupiter. And so, that’s something that a student can access from a computer who might not be able to get there otherwise. And I’m just wondering what that kind of access does for students in the classroom when they can’t get to those archival places.

Emily Sherwood:�������������� I do think that’s – I mean, libraries, of course, are very interested in access and making more materials accessible to a broader public. That’s just something – that’s one of our values. And I do think that a lot of the digital scholarship projects – and digital scholarship or digital humanities has a tradition of wanting things to be open, wanting things to be accessible. That’s sort of one of the values of that community of scholarly practice. But there are challenges to that, and there are many challenges to that. So, for example, who is going to pay for the continued storage space? Where is the labor that’s going to make sure that those systems are secure and updated and patched so that they’re not falling apart? How do we make sure that the data is current and up to date and following research trends?

So, all of those things come with their own challenges and requires a large group of people to support those initiatives. And it’s why a lot of times funding agencies want to know not only what your data model is for now but what your commitment is to it moving forward. And the truth is we don’t know. There’s – we can say that we’ll support this for five years or ten years, but the idea that we will support all of the data being produced, it’s just at some point like – also like a library collection. There has to be curation. There has to be ways that we say, “We’re going to keep this” or “We’re not going to keep this” so that even, for example, the archives that Joan talks about using, there’s a librarian who has gone through and curated those archives – right? – or has made those contents available. So, that is an ongoing process that we – and continuation that we keep having. And it also is a place where the practices that we’ve developed for physical objects have to continue to have those conversations for digital objects and digital access.

You had – earlier, you had brought up the question of collaboration and “Whose scholarship is it?” And if I could return to that, if you don’t mind, –

Jim Ver Steeg:���������������������� Absolutely.

Emily Sherwood:�������������� – that also is a large conversation that goes on in digital scholarship communities. There is some great work being done out of Greenhouse Studios at UCONN where they’re trying to figure out how to account for the multiple types of labor in a project. For example, if my GIS specialist is helping someone process data and making it available, do they become a coauthor at some point because their knowledge base – they’re not the subject matter expert but they’re being able to – they’re making that scholarship possible through their expertise. And we don’t know. It’s complicated.

And I actually think the STEM fields have a better model for co-authoring across an entire lab, where humanities and humanistic social sciences, we’re still struggling with that because we do have more of a traditional model. And I’m a humanist by training as well – my Ph.D. is in English – where we do have a model of that single author. And so, that is a question that not only needs to be taken up by scholars but also has to be taken up by departments, by administrators, and by our professional organizations. And there are some that have put forth examples and sort of protocols for how we give people credit for that work. And I’m thinking about issues of obviously tenure and promotion, but credit more broadly.

Jim Ver Steeg:���������������������� Jayne?

Jayne Lammers:���������������� And I would say here we can learn from some of the youth that I studied in these online spaces who, though they are remixing content and though they are disrupting our notions of authorship and who owns things, they are fantastic at giving credit where credit is due. There’s an ethos in many of these online communities around reciprocity and paying back to projects and about making sure that you indicate where you got your content, who supported you as a proofreader. There’s the long list of credits that end up at the end of any given story or any given project that they might create.

And so, I think we have a lot to learn from the youth who are leveraging these spaces for their own kind of purposes around what does it mean to collaborate? How do we use kind of these different people with different expertise to create something that I have as a vision but know that I couldn’t do on my own? And then, how do I attribute where I got this support from?

Joan Rubin:������������������������������ I did want to make a couple of distinctions, if that’s okay, first of all between my teaching and my scholarship. There are wonderful resources for teaching, both produced by our own Digital Scholarship Lab, by our own faculty and students, and also just out there on the internet. And I welcome the opportunity to learn more about those resources and to incorporate them into my teaching.

As a scholar, I’m in a field that is quite traditional still: history. I would add those people in English who deal primarily with printed materials. There I need to use archival sources or I need to use published sources. They could be published online. But I don’t need the – and really can’t collaborate with other people in thinking through what a text is saying to me. I can get ideas. I can share ideas. That’s all great. But in the end it’s on me.

Jim Ver Steeg:���������������������� And I think that goes back to something that we were saying about what is the right platform for some of these technologies? What’s the right use for some of these technologies? And I want to be mindful of the time we have left and I kind of want to ask a broad – perhaps unfair – question, which is: From our conversation and from what we know in trends in higher education, what do we see coming next? What will be value coming next? What will – what can we expect as professionals in higher education? And I can – whoever would like to go first?

Joan Rubin:������������������������������ Well, I’ll just jump in again and say that there are multiple parts of the URochester, just as there are multiple answers to all of the questions that we’ve been discussing this morning. In Art Sciences and Engineering there are no online courses right now. There are certainly courses that take advantage of online resources, and I believe that they should, if I want to be prescriptive that way. But there is enormous concern on the part of the faculty about offering an entire course online. We don’t – we aren’t talking about graduate education. We aren’t talking about low residency. We aren’t having those conversations in the humanities and humanistic sectors of AS&E. And they’re – and we tried to go there a few years ago. We had a whole discussion about it. And as in the case of Texas – and I think this is part of the story there, there was simply an unwillingness on the part of the faculty to lose that face-to-face time in what are our small classes. We don’t have huge lecture courses, I’m sorry to say. We don’t have courses that are bigger than 20 students in the History department, by and large. We’ve got one that has 90 students and that’s an outlier.

I think it’s going to be a while, if it ever happens, that we move – I don’t think we will in our university – I’ll eat my words someday, but I don’t think we’ll move to actual online courses, at least not for a long time. And that, I think, is because the value of listening, the value of weighing someone else’s words in person, of getting to know an instructor as a person, in getting to know your fellow students in ways that I don’t think can be accomplished in an online course, those features of our teaching are too important right now to tamper with.

Jim Ver Steeg:���������������������� Emily?

Emily Sherwood:�������������� People ask me that all the time, like what is the next trend, particularly in terms of technology. And I do think there is – there are some we can point to. But I think the larger issue for me, or what I see, is that we’ll see more of a push towards programs and majors that are intentionally interdisciplinary. I think that a lot of the questions that our society is facing right now and that our students will be facing in the future need multiple perspectives in order to solve those problems, and I think that the students who will be able to engage in that will be ones who have studied a problem from multiple perspectives, and they’ll be able to bring creative problem solving. So, in that respect I don’t see the digital and the human at odds, but I see them as necessary in order for us to move forward as a society.

Jim Ver Steeg:���������������������� Jayne?

Jayne Lammers:���������������� I’ll agree with you that that’s an unfair question in some ways because part of the blessing and the curse of technology is that it is always changing. Right? To ask people to get our students learning a particular tool of any kind because it might be a tool of the future is just unrealistic. But to Emily’s point, I think not only do we need multiple perspectives from a disciplinary approach, I think we need multiple perspectives from a global and cultural approach. So, one of the things that I’m going to be working on later this year is going to Indonesia and studying the digital literacy practices of Indonesian youth to see what are they doing, how are they authentically engaging in these tools, and what is important to them? We have a variety of research that has the Western perspective documented but we don’t have a lot from other perspectives. And as these countries become more connected and as borders become easier to cross and as the technology sets up these connections that really network us across the globe, I think it’s important for us to pay attention outside of us. How are others using these tools? And what can we learn from them? And so, that’s what I’m looking forward to doing.

Jim Ver Steeg:���������������������� Well, this has been a fantastic conversation, and I want to again thank Joan Rubin, who is the Dexter Perkins Professor in History and the Ani and Mark Gabrellian Director of the Ģ����ý Humanities Center; Jayne Lammers, who is an Associate Professor at the Warner School and Associate Director for the Center for Learning in the Digital Age; and Emily Sherwood, who is the Director of the Digital Scholarship Lab at the URochester. Thank you all for being here. I truly appreciate it.

Jayne Lammers:���������������� Thanks, Jim.

Joan Rubin:������������������������������ It was a pleasure.

Jim Ver Steeg:���������������������� For the Ģ����ý Quadcast, I’m Jim Ver Steeg. Thanks for listening.

[End of Audio]

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If you look at social media, or just simply read, watch, or listen to the news, it’s easy to get the sense that America is more polarized than ever.

Is it just politics, or is there a broader issue to consider? In one recent and recognizable example, when students from Covington, Kentucky—many of whom were wearing Make America Great Again hats—were recorded in what looked to many like a standoff confrontation with a Native American elder, the video went viral. When new video of the moments leading up to the incident emerged, many argued the additional footage offered context that complicated the original story, and both social and mainstream media were rebuked for what seemed to be a rush to judgement.

In a recent episode of the , , vice provost of academic affairs and the Susan B. Anthony Professor of Art��History and Visual and Cultural Studies; , the Ani and Mark Gabrellian Professor and associate professor of political science and business administration; and , associate professor at the Warner School of Education sat down with University Communications to discuss how we bridge America’s social and political divide. An edited version of that conversation follows.

• Read the full transcript of this episode

Jim Ver Steeg: How did we get to this moment of heated rhetoric in our social and political landscape? Is this something new or have we seen it before? Can we move beyond it and reach a compromise?

David Primo: We have seen this before. A famous Civil War historian recently said in an interview that if we really understood what was happening in previous eras, we wouldn’t be so concerned with what’s going on right now.

But I want to push back a little bit on this idea that polarization is necessarily problematic. It’s when polarization becomes destabilizing that it’s problematic. I also think we need to be careful about thinking that compromise is always better than not compromising. You can have a compromise that leads to pretty bad public policies. So, compromise can itself sometimes be overrated.

When we think about political polarization, it really comes down to why we care about it. Is it the policy outcomes we’re getting or not getting? Is it because we fear that the country isn’t functioning? Or are we concerned about how we go about being citizens? I think we’re fundamentally divided as a country because we have different political preferences, and that’s okay. The key is when it becomes destabilizing or we’re unable to have conversations.

There are studies showing that people would be hesitant to marry somebody of the opposite political party. And that’s the sense in which we’ve become more polarized, and we’ve become more sorted. We don’t actually interact with people who are different. That plays out in universities as well.

JVS: What are the challenges to civil and civic discourse? How do they play out on campus and what can the University do to help students become skilled in having these conversations?

Joan Saab: I’d like to think that’s exactly the reason we have higher education or liberal arts education. It’s a forum—at least in humanities and social sciences classes—to create spaces for the exchange of ideas and lively debate. At the Ģ����ý we do this in the . This year’s theme is “expertise,” which I think is crucial at this particular moment. There is this idea that everybody has an opinion and every opinion is valid, but that’s not always true. Sometimes people are right and other people are wrong. But how to come together in an engaged and informed and respectful conversation where experts can say, “No, that’s not exactly what happened,” or, “Perhaps that’s one way of looking at it, but why don’t we try to look at it from this other avenue”? We do that at universities.

Warner School of Education here has a number of public outreach programs in the community through K-12 schools. The Eastman School of Music does this as well with their community music school. And the (MAG), which is a part of the university, does a lot around public debate and public discourse.

I’m often at MAG where there is now a media arts program with video art installations. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve stood outside of the media arts gallery and heard somebody say, “What the heck is that?” And the next moment is the crucial moment because they have to engage with the art and they have to understand why is this in a museum. What is it allowing people to do or engage with? It’s the listening component and the processing that is so important. You might still not like the art, but it’s not always about liking. It’s about understanding and tolerating, and then taking those lessons and applying them to other things. Universities provide a forum for people to think about what’s at stake.

JVS: How we inspire civil civic discourse, particularly in young people, is especially important for us in higher education. How do we think about what we saw with the students from Covington, Kentucky?

Kevin Meuwissen: My interpretation of the students in the video wasn’t that they have really strong political beliefs, but that they’re probably relying on some strong “political shortcuts” that make it unnecessary to think hard about their positions on political issues. What I mean by “political shortcuts” are the social and cognitive tools and processes that stand in for deeper understanding of problems. For example, political party is a shortcut, as are the political elites we choose to trust and affiliated cultural groups. I think one of the things that we can do to help young people engage better in politics is to help them understand how “political shortcuts” work.

I also think we can better understand the development of young people’s social and political affiliations by actually engaging with them in circumstances in which that development happens, and not just looking at the interactions that they’re having around issues on the ground. If we can link their on-the-ground political discourse with a 10,000-foot view of how people do politics with each other and why, we can help students become more cognitive about the process.

JVS: How can higher education help with that? How can colleges and universities impart this notion of greater civil civic discourse to people who might not have the benefit of higher education?

JS: I think that the university as an entity, and the Ģ����ý in particular, need to engage with members of the community outside of the classroom. We need to be public intellectuals. And we need to not just limit what we’re doing to our professional lives, but model it in our daily behavior as well. I’m not saying when you’re at the checkout line at Wegmans to give a lecture in response to the headlines in The National Enquirer. But when we have an opportunity, like speaking to a group of high school students, we need to bring knowledge and to model civil discourse. That’s the benefit of being in a liberal arts education. You engage other people’s ideas all the time in a respectful way.

KM: One thing that is really important is political trust, which requires engaging regularly and consistently with people. How do you build the trust necessary to engage in politics? I’m also curious about productive politics versus destructive politics and how you tell one versus the other. How you find the needle in the haystack—productive political opportunities—among all of the potentially destructive things? I think those are open questions for me.

DP: One challenge is that Americans are not particularly interested in this sort of dialogue and discourse. It’s not that they’re being destructive; it’s just that they don’t care to talk about it—or they’re so busy trying to make ends meet, focus on family, that politics is just not a priority. Getting this to the top of the priority list is going to be a challenge. That’s where I think society’s elites come in, because the elites are the ones who are the big problem. They are the ones who have become extraordinarily polarized. That’s a good place to start because hopefully it can set the tone for the rest of society. I also think that viewpoint diversity is one piece that’s been missing, especially in universities. But just interacting with people who are different than you is a good place to start.

In a message to the university community President Richard Feldman mentioned that we had had our own recent experiences with intolerance and disrespect, including a swastika written on a sign at one of our schools. In his message President Feldman wrote, “The recent acts of bigotry and violence in Pittsburgh and Louisville, the national threat created by pipe bombs sent in the mail and many other recent incidents have been deeply disturbing and unsettling. As a university that celebrates academic freedom and civil discourse, these acts and a national conversation that too often displays hate and divisiveness are distressing and frightening. The recent acts of bigotry and violence in Pittsburgh and Louisville, the national threat created by pipe bombs sent in the mail and many other recent incidents have been deeply disturbing and unsettling.”

So, I’d like to begin there in our conversation that I think will shed some light on bigotry and hate from an academic perspective. Joining me in the studio today, I’m honored to have Nora Rubel, who is the Jane and Allen Batkin Professor of Jewish Studies and Chair of the Department of Religion and Classics. Nora’s scholarship frequently centers around religion, food, and intersecting identities among faith, culture, and race. She is author of the book Doubting the Devout: The Ultra-orthodox in the Jewish American Imagination, and is currently working on her second book, Recipes for the Melting Pot: The Lives of the Settlement Cookbook. Nora, thank you for joining us.

Nora Rubel:������������������������������ Thank you for having me.

Jim Ver Steeg:���������������������� We’re also joined by Laura Elenbaas. She is an Assistant Professor of Psychology. Her research exam is developing conceptions of fairness, perceptions of social groups, and peer relations, including children’s perceptions of inequality, their development of stereotypes, and how they learn to reason through complex moral issues such as justice and discrimination. Laura, thank you for joining us.

Laura Elenbaas:���������������� Thanks for inviting me.

Jim Ver Steeg:���������������������� And we’re also joined by Thomas Fleischman. He is an Assistant Professor of History. His research fields include modern European history, German history, environmental history, and state socialism. He is currently finishing the manuscript for his book, Three Little Pigs: East Germany’s Green Revolution 1945-2000. Tom, thanks for joining us.

Thomas Fleischman:�� Happy to be here.

Jim Ver Steeg:���������������������� So, not an easy subject but I’m so grateful to the three of you for joining us. And Nora, I want to start with you, particularly as we think of acts of bigotry and hate, particularly around anti-Semitism. How is it that you’re understanding what we’re seeing in the world today? What is your perspective on some of these things?

Nora Rubel:������������������������������ There has been a response to the FBI report that shows that hate crimes have spiked against Jews in the last two years. However, anti-Jewish discrimination is the highest reported anti-religious discrimination, but Jews historically in America have had better relations with law enforcement and are more likely to report. However, anti-Semitic crimes tend to be more graffiti, vandalism, et cetera, much like the fliers that were found on campus recently that were faxed to several departments that had anti-Semitic writings.

There’s a couple of reasons for this. Jews look a lot like everybody else. Most Jews in America are White. So, if you wanted to actually commit and anti-Jewish crime, it’s much easier to go to a place where Jews congregate. So, acts of drawing swastikas on walls or sending out anti-Semitic fliers is a lot easier than kind of figuring out who’s a Jew in a crowd.

Jim Ver Steeg:���������������������� One thing I wanted to talk to you about, Nora, is I know that you teach and study a lot about White supremacy and the Christian identity movement, and I think that that played into the events in Pittsburgh.

Nora Rubel:������������������������������ Yeah, well, one of the things that came out after the shooting in Pittsburgh was sort of the underlying roots of this sort of anti-Semitism that we see. And I think probably Tom will talk a little bit more about European anti-Semitism, but within the United States, starting in the 1980s, really, we saw a kind of blossoming of the Christian identity movement. It goes back – it’s – much further back, but this is sort of an idea of Jews as being the children of Satan and responsible for kind of all of the ills that befall White people.

Anti-Semitism tends to be different than a lot of other types of bigotry in that anti-Black, anti-Hispanic, anti-Muslim sentiment tends to have sort of pejorative ideas about people as being less than, lazy, stupid, inferior. Anti-Semitism in this kind of conspiracy theory tends to look at Jews as crafty and smart and pulling the strings behind the scenes. So, for example, the Pittsburgh shooter was particularly upset about this congregation’s involvement with HIAS – the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society – and he was very hyped up about this idea of this caravan of brown people coming across the border. But this has a history that goes back quite a bit, this idea that Jews are responsible for bringing in brown people to supplant the White race.

Jim Ver Steeg:���������������������� That’s an interesting point and something I want to touch on a bit. Though we’re primarily focusing on acts of violence against Jewish people and Jewish institutions, I want to get your thoughts on how some of these things are intersecting, how it’s not just necessarily anti-Semitism but there – so many other things are attached to these acts, if it’s misogyny, if it’s racism. So, can you talk a little bit about how those things intersect in these events?

Nora Rubel:������������������������������ Yeah, a lot of scholars on these issues say that anti-Semitism tends to be the canary in the coal mine, because if you’re seeing a spike in anti-Semitism or public anti-Semitism, that usually goes along with other forms of racism, misogyny, religious discrimination. There’s been a lot of anti-Muslim aggravated assault. We can see that many of these shooting events tended to have to do with anger about women and that seems to be very much mixed up in this.

Jim Ver Steeg:���������������������� Tom, I want to turn to you. I think getting a little bit of a historical perspective would be helpful, but I – to Nora’s point, I think it would be interesting to hear a bit of a comparison, or at least your thoughts around a European or German experience of some of these things as compared to how we’re seeing them manifest themselves in the States these days.

Thomas Fleischman:�� Right. Well, I always start my class on Nazi Germany with this cliché that history repeats itself, and I sort of admonish my students not to view Nazi Germany in that way but actually to use sort of Mark Twain’s famous expression that “History doesn’t repeat itself but it certainly rhymes.” And in this way we can think about the ways in which history can instruct or inform what’s going on in the present.

And from my perspective what I think is absolutely real and what is totally going on is the revival of fascism as a viable political ideology in and around the world today. Now, it’s sort of tricky to talk about what fascism is because it’s an ideology that’s hard to pin down, largely because its outward appearance, its symbols are different based on the country in which it’s happening. But what do all forms of fascism have in common? Well, Robert Paxton wrote this very famous book about what fascism is and he defined it more or less in this way: It’s an ideology that depends on the primacy of a particular group. The primacy of that group is also at the same time subverted by that group’s victimization. The group then also has a natural faith or desire to follow a leader. And fourth, there’s a glorification of violence embedded in that ideology. And I think if you were to go through that checklist, you would find all those factors present here in the US right now.

Now, it looks different in every country because it depends on the national myths that those countries have told themselves. So, in Mussolini’s Italy it was about recovering the glories of ancient Rome, connecting 1920s fascism to Caesar. Hitler wanted to – the Third Reich was supposed to be the third thousand-year Reich after the first – the Holy Roman Empire, then the Kaiser Reich, or the German Empire, that was founded in 1871, and then Nazi Germany, which was supposed to be the third incarnation of that.

In the United States what you’re going to see more are appeals to American exceptionalism, Manifest Destiny, and then of course the primacy of White people, which is embedded in our histories of slavery, but more recently segregation in the US South.

Jim Ver Steeg:���������������������� Do you think about the effects of what happens when the biggest voices in the room sort of embody and embrace this type of doctrine? What does that do to a culture? Or how does that inspire or how does that – what does that – what is the effect of that?

Thomas Fleischman:�� I mean, I think we’re seeing it right now, is that it gives permission for people to act in violent and discriminatory ways. It allows people to do things that they wouldn’t have done before, primarily because the most powerful person in the country is telling them it’s okay.

Jim Ver Steeg:���������������������� We had a conversation earlier about technology. And it seems – the internet used to be thought of as this – it was going to be a terrific tool for the democratization of all things. It was going to be the great liberator. It was going to provide information and make us a better society. But we clearly have seen how the internet has been used to do quite the opposite. And I think before we get to Laura I would just like to get both Nora and Tom’s thoughts on how we consider some of the information that’s out there and some of the ways in which technology is being used to promote some of these more hateful events and maybe some of the more hateful rhetoric.

Thomas Fleischman:�� Well, in Nazi Germany it’s famously tied to propaganda campaigns masterminded by Goebbels. But I think more recently what’s been going on is the use of technology to allow these relatively isolated groups to communicate more often with each other. There was a book published earlier by Kathleen Belew at the University of Chicago called Bring the War Home, and it’s about the rise of White supremacy in the United States since Vietnam. And one of the more striking things that she talks about in the book is how beginning in the 1980s these movements began to use computers and computer networks to communicate and trade information about assassination lists, how to build bombs, how to cause mayhem, and all the other assorted forms of racist propaganda.

What appears to be happening now is that social media is amplifying and extending the reach of those networks in ways that we hadn’t really considered before, that White supremacy has organized online for a long time but the rise of Twitter and Facebook, particularly their inability or perhaps unwillingness to regulate such behavior and actions and communications have allowed them to spread in ways they never could have dreamed.

Nora Rubel:������������������������������ I agree with Tom. I think that technology has always been used as an outreach method. You had propaganda on the radio going back to the dawn of radio, and some of that was a way of reaching people in isolation and having them feel like they were part of a conversation. You then had White supremacists also using ham radio technology, reaching out to each other that way. In the past, though, to really find out about these White power organizations people had to send away for pamphlets, attend meetings. They don’t have to do that anymore. They can Google a conspiracy theory – you know, “Jews…” – and then you can just see what pops up.

So, I do think that in some ways this connects people in a pretty dark way. We also saw with the Gamergate scandal that was really kind of the beginning of our understanding that people could be doxed, where their personal information could be released to the public. So, you could show up at somebody’s home that would normally be a private citizen. And I think that that’s one of the dangers of the internet as well.

Jim Ver Steeg:���������������������� And Laura, I – with this information that’s out there, especially when it’s consumed by young people, I’m assuming it has to have some sort of formative effect. But I want to get your thoughts on how do stereotypes happen? How does bigotry happen? How does prejudice get instilled in young people? Can you share some thoughts on what some of those processes are?

Laura Elenbaas:���������������� Yeah. So, I can definitely speak to the development of stereotypes and prejudice more broadly. And the fact is that from an early age kids and teenagers, they’re sifting through a lot of potential messages about how they should feel, what they should think about people who are a different background from themselves. So, in developmental psychology there is a long line of research on children’s racial attitudes, racial or ethnic attitudes, but also some important work on perceptions of people of different religious backgrounds, different nationalities, different socioeconomic statuses from oneself.

And so, kids are bombarded from a very early age from lots of different messages coming from adults – like, parents and teachers are crucial setters of norms for how we behave within our family, within our classroom. But also from the media, of course, and there’s been this ramping up of really intense rhetoric around immigration, around religion in the US lately. But also from other kids. Kids’ peers are a strong source of information for them about how we treat different groups within our school peers who are a different ethnicity or different nationality from us. So, they’re going to adapt the attitudes, the perspectives that make sense for them in their lives. There’s a lot of contextual or environmental variability in the extent to which kids then buy into biased beliefs or issues of prejudice.

But one thing I want to highlight from – coming from the developmental perspective here is that kids often lack positive opportunities to interact with, to come into contact with, to talk with and even become friends with peers who are a different background from themselves. So, again, most of this comes out of work on race or ethnicity, but it applies in the case of religion too, in the case of socioeconomic status and nationality. Positive social interactions between peers of different backgrounds are crucial for reducing and limiting the development of stereotypes and biases in childhood and adolescence. In fact, friendships – stable, quality friendships between peers of different backgrounds is the number one way of reducing stereotypes and biases because it could – it puts a face on the other group, a name on the other group, a personality on the other group. An individual who can disprove those potential stereotypes that you’ve heard from other sources.

And unfortunately, though, despite how good it is and how friendship alone is a source of support, a source of well-being for children, unfortunately, the way that many communities are structured, the way that neighborhoods are structured, the ways that schools are structured, a lot of times kids don’t get those chances early on. That is one way to – that is one source of bias and that is one way of addressing bias. Kids who have friendships with peers of a different background are much less anxious about interacting with other kids of that background. They’re much more empathetic across group lines. And you can see a direct link in terms of the inclusivity or respect shown in their behavior.

Jim Ver Steeg:���������������������� Nora?

Nora Rubel:������������������������������ So, you mentioned that children who have these friends, they can be more empathetic. It seems to me that empathy seems to be the kind of key to understanding that people are different but they’re worthy of respect. Can you talk a little bit about developing empathy in children?

Laura Elenbaas:���������������� Yeah. Yeah, so the empathy emerges very early in development, actually: the capacity to put yourself in somebody else’s shoes, try to understand what somebody else is going through, and if necessary respond accordingly. So, even very young children, even toddlers will respond to another person’s distress by trying to address it. So, someone is sad and a little toddler can come over and pat them on the back: “It’s okay.” Someone is hungry: “Okay, maybe you can have a little piece of my graham cracker.” “You’re trying to get something that’s out of reach and I can help you? All right, I can take care of that. I can look out for your welfare in these ways.”

But also, recognition of differences and similarities between oneself and others is also really emerging. So, what quality friendships across group lines does is extend that expression of empathy under a broader umbrella. So, kids have eyes; kids have ears. They’re going to notice who has a different skin color from them, who speaks a different language from them, who practices a different religion from them. But whether or not that makes a difference in terms of whether they’re going to express empathy, whether they’re going to hang out with that kid or be friends with that kid, be in the club after school with that kid, invite them to their birthday party, has a lot to do with the conditions of their social environment. So, conditions of where adults are condoning hostility towards stigmatized groups or towards out group, so to speak, where there is an environment of threat of competition are not going to promote empathy, are not going to promote friendships across group lines.

Jim Ver Steeg:���������������������� So, I want to turn our attention to difficult conversations that the three of you might be having, either with students in your classrooms, maybe your own children, just young people in general, or anyone who really comes to you for insight, academic insight on how we can understand hate and bigotry. Obviously, in higher education we espouse the great charge of education and making society better, and an informed society is always of course a more empowered and healthier society. And at the URochester we have our own vision and values statements, which include the umbrella of Meliora, which is striving to be ever better, but we also celebrate equity, leadership, integrity, openness, respect, and accountability. Those are all really wonderful things but sometimes they fly in the face of some of the events and some of the actions that we’re talking about today.

So, I’m curious to hear from each of you as how you talk about these things, both in the context of education but also how you can share the fact that these are all good things, but we still can’t – we can’t lose sight of the fact that there are bad actors out there. So, whoever would like to go first.

Nora Rubel:������������������������������ Well, we saw a spike in hate crime directly after the 2016 election and a rise in biased incidents here at the university. So, I brought that up in my classes, which unfortunately at the time – unfortunately or fortunately I was teaching a class called “Sex and Power” and I was also teaching a class called “Religion and the Race for the White House.” So, both classes were really relevant to what was going on at the time, and many of my students were just shocked by what was coming out. But I will say that my students of color were not surprised at all and definitely shared that with their colleagues, that these are things that happen all the time and they’re just not always reported and people don’t care about it as much and now we’re seeing maybe a little more public expression of things that people had been keeping in private.

So, as Tom had said earlier, suddenly there’s permission. Right? And you just had the feeling that suddenly there were all these people that were thinking these things and saying these things in private and they were delighted with the opportunity to say it out loud because you have public elected officials saying that it’s okay. I think the most recent midterm election where you had Andrew Gillum running against DeSantis in Florida, I said it’s not that necessarily DeSantis is a racist, but the racists think he’s a racist. And that allows for people to feel free to say these things that they might have already been thinking.

Thomas Fleischman:�� So, it might help if I talk about my course, “Hitler’s Germany.” One of the things I try to do in the class is sort of reframe how students think about what the phenomenon of Hitler and the rise of Nazism actually means. And it requires that I do two things. One is that I push back against this notion of the Holocaust and Nazi Germany as an exceptional event in history – it’s exceptional in its violence, it’s exceptional in its racism, it’s exceptional in its genocide – and to put it right back into the 20th century. And the reason I do that is twofold. The first is that when students see it as exceptional they also tend to be thinking explicitly – or maybe implicitly – about Auschwitz as representation for what Nazism was. But there doesn’t have to be an Auschwitz for there to be a fascist movement. There doesn’t have to be genocide and concentration camps for there to be all the other things that Hitler brought into the world. And so, I try to help them see how fascism emerged over the course of a 20-year period between 1918, the end of the First World War, and 1939, the beginning of the Second World War.

And then, the second thing I do in the class to push back against this sort of sui generis notion of Nazi Germany is to connect it to trends in world history. And in particular, under fascism and for Hitler himself the United States was a very powerful influence on his thinking: on his racial ideology, on his economic ideology, and on his notion of imperialism. On the eve of the invasion of Eastern Europe in 1941 he made a speech in which he said that the Volga River would be Germany’s Mississippi, and implying in that notion that just as the United States had wiped out all the native peoples that existed between the coast and the Mississippi, Germany would do the same to the people that existed between Germany and the Volga.

And so, the point here is to say – is to really get students to think about, one, the ways in which Nazi Germany didn’t just happen in an exceptional way, but, two, to get them to really understand that it could happen anywhere. There’s nothing special about being German and anti-Semitism. There’s nothing special about religious or ethnic hatred and a particular national history.

Nora Rubel:������������������������������ We see this conversation now about limiting immigration from certain countries and this is something that has happened time and again in the United States. There’s never been a consensus on “What does it mean to be an American?” And in the late 19th century we saw in response to great numbers of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, which were seen as the undesirable parts of Europe, a radical limiting of immigrants, essentially cutting immigrants off in 1924, specifically for the purpose of maintaining a primarily White, Nordic stock in America. So, this is a conversation we continue to have in the United States.

Thomas Fleischman:�� And I would just say that the 1924 Immigration Act doesn’t also happen in isolation. This is known as the era of the second Ku Klux Klan, when it reaches its apogee, the greatest national membership it’s ever had. This is at the height of mob violence and lynching against Blacks in the United States. This is also a moment in Eastern Europe when we have – after two decades of pogroms and violence against Jews. And it’s also going on in the context of sort of massive global disruptions caused by capitalism and trade and unfortunately war.

Jim Ver Steeg:���������������������� If you’re talking to young people about this, this type of hatred or this type of bigotry, how do you talk to them in ways that are beneficial to their development and maybe contrary to these messages? But also, if you’re working and speaking with students on campus, how are we talking about this in the – from a developmental perspective?

Laura Elenbaas:���������������� I actually do talk about the development of prejudice and the development of discrimination in my undergrad courses. I teach “Social and Emotional Development” – it’s our intro developmental course in Psychology – and also a small seminar in peer relationships. And in both of those I talk about the development of biases. So, I keep it data-based. I talk about “What does discrimination look like in the child’s world?” And it looks like repeatedly bullying someone for biased-related reasons. It looks like excluding them from friendships or just from social groups. It’s often name-calling, taunting, other forms of harassment. So, I talk about what it looks like when a child shows bias and what it does to be on the receiving end of that. Being on the receiving end of that sort of harassment in childhood is associated with depression, with anxiety, with academic disengagement.

But I also – and I think that many students appreciate the fact that from a developmental perspective you have a chance to intervene early on. And really, this is what the developmental data shows. If you want to have a chance of changing attitudes for the better, of promoting inclusion, of promoting respect, you need to start in childhood when those attitudes are still malleable and still forming.

So, I hope one thing that my students come away with over the course of this discussion – I think that they do – is that they are going to make choices in life about where they live, about where they send their kids, about who their kids hang out with, and about the things that they directly say to children, whether it’s as a parent or a teacher or a doctor or a social worker or a clinician. We all have interactions with kids and adolescents. We need to think about our words and we need to think about an example that we’re setting.

Jim Ver Steeg:���������������������� Well, I’d like to thank Nora Rubel, Laura Elenbaas, and Tom Fleischman for joining us on this episode of the Quadcast. I got a lot out of it and I really appreciate your insight on understanding and hate and what’s happening in our world. Thank you for coming.

Thomas Fleischman:�� Thank you.

Laura Elenbaas:���������������� Thanks.

Nora Rubel:������������������������������ Thank you.

Jim Ver Steeg:���������������������� For the Ģ����ý’s Quadcast, this is Jim Ver Steeg. Thanks for listening.

[End of Audio]

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If you pay attention to the news, it’s easy to get the sense that acts of violence—particularly violence inspired by bigotry and hate—are on the rise. Unfortunately, the numbers seem to back that up. Last week the FBI released a report that showed anti-Semitic crime incidents targeting Jewish people and Jewish institutions in the US between 2016 and 2017. College and university campuses are not immune.

In a message to the University community following acts of bigotry and violence in Philadelphia and Louisville, President Richard Feldman noted our own recent experiences with intolerance and disrespect on campus, including a swastika written on a sign at the Eastman School of Music. “As a university that celebrates academic freedom and civil discourse, these acts and a national conversation that too often displays hate and divisiveness are distressing and frightening.”

University Communications recently sat down with , the Jane and Allen Batkin Professor of Jewish Studies and chair of the Department of Religion and Classics, , assistant professor of history, and , assistant professor of psychology, for an academic conversation about hate and intolerance. Together, they discuss reactions to recent incidents of hate, important lessons from history, and the psychology of stereotypes and intolerance. The following Q&A has been edited for format.

• Read the full transcript of this episode.

Roots of anti-Semitism

Jim Ver Steeg: Professor Rubel, as we think of acts of bigotry and hate around anti-Semitism, how is it that you’re understanding what we’re seeing in the world today?

Nora Rubel: Anti-Jewish discrimination is the highest reported anti-religious discrimination, though Jews historically�� in America have had better relations with law enforcement and are more likely to report.

One of the things that came out after the shooting in Pittsburgh was the underlying roots of anti-Semitism. Within the United States, starting in the 1980s, we saw a blossoming of the Christian identity movement. This idea of Jews being the children of Satan and responsible for all of the ills that befall White people.

A lot of scholars on these issues say that anti-Semitism tends to be the canary in the coal mine, because if you’re seeing a spike in anti-Semitism or public anti-Semitism, that usually goes along with other forms of racism, misogyny, and religious discrimination. There’s been a lot of anti-Muslim aggravated assault. We can see that many of these shooting events tend to have to do with anger about women and that seems to be very much mixed up in this.

Jim Ver Steeg: Professor Fleischman, how do events from European or German history compare to what we’re currently seeing in the United States?

Thomas Fleischman: I start my class on Nazi Germany with the cliché that history repeats itself, and I admonish my students not to view Nazi Germany in that way, but to use Mark Twain’s famous expression, “History doesn’t repeat itself but it certainly rhymes.” It’s in this way that we can think about the ways history can instruct and inform the present.

From my perspective, what is going on is the revival of fascism as a viable political ideology in and around the world today. It’s sort of tricky to talk about what fascism is because it’s an ideology that’s hard to pin down, largely because of its outward appearance. Its symbols are different based on the country in which it’s happening, but there are some things that all forms of fascism have in common. Robert Paxton [professor emeritus of social sciences and modern Europe at Columbia University] wrote about what fascism is and defined it more or less in this way: It’s an ideology that depends on the primacy of a particular group. The primacy of that group is also at the same time subverted by that group’s victimization. The group then also has a natural faith or desire to follow a leader. And fourth, there’s a glorification of violence embedded in that ideology. And I think if you were to go through that checklist, you would find all those factors present here in the US right now.

In the United States what you’re going to see more are appeals to American exceptionalism, Manifest Destiny, and then of course the primacy of White people, which is embedded in our histories of slavery, but more recently segregation in the US South.

Jim Ver Steeg: How is technology being used to promote some of these more hateful events and maybe some of the more hateful rhetoric?

Thomas Fleischman: Well, in Nazi Germany it’s famously tied to propaganda campaigns masterminded by Goebbels. I think more recently what’s been going on is the use of technology to allow relatively isolated groups to communicate more often with each other. Social media is amplifying and extending the reach of those networks in ways that we hadn’t really considered before. White supremacy has organized online for a long time, but the rise of Twitter and Facebook—particularly their inability or perhaps unwillingness to regulate such behavior and actions and communications—has allowed them to spread in ways they never could have dreamed.

Nora Rubel: I agree with Tom. Technology has always been used as an outreach method. You had propaganda on the radio and some of that was a way of reaching people in isolation and having them feel like they were part of a conversation. You then had White supremacists also using ham radio technology, reaching out to each other that way. In the past, though, to really find out about these White power organizations people had to send away for pamphlets, attend meetings. I think that [technology] in some ways connects people in a pretty dark way.

Kids and prejudice

Jim Ver Steeg: Professor Elenbaas, how does prejudice get instilled in young people?

Laura Elenbaas: From an early age kids and teenagers are sifting through a lot of messages about how they should feel and what they should think about people who are different from themselves. In developmental psychology there is a long line of research on children’s racial or ethnic attitudes, but also some important work on perceptions of people of different religious backgrounds, different nationalities, and different socioeconomic statuses from oneself.

Parents and teachers are crucial setters of norms for how we behave within our family, within our classroom. But there is also the media. There’s been this ramping up of really intense rhetoric around immigration, around religion in the U.S. lately.

But one thing I want to highlight—coming from the developmental perspective—is that kids often lack positive opportunities to interact with and even become friends with peers who are from a different background than themselves. Most of this comes out of work on race or ethnicity, but it applies in the case of religion, socioeconomic status, and nationality, too. Positive social interactions between peers of different backgrounds are crucial for reducing and limiting the development of stereotypes and biases in childhood and adolescence.

Nora Rubel: Laura, you mentioned that children who have these friends can be more empathetic. Empathy seems to be the key to understanding that people are different but worthy of respect. Can you talk about developing empathy in children?

Laura Elenbaas: Empathy emerges very early in development. Even toddlers will respond to another person’s distress by trying to address it. So, if someone is sad, a toddler can come over and pat them on the back and say, “It’s okay.” If someone is hungry, they can offer their friends a little piece of graham cracker. But also, recognition of differences and similarities between oneself and others is emerging. What quality friendships across group lines does is extend that expression of empathy under a broader umbrella. But whether or not that makes a difference in terms of whether they’re going to express empathy—whether they’re going to hang out with that kid, be friends with that kid, be in the club after school with that kid, or invite them to their birthday party—has a lot to do with the conditions of their social environment. Conditions where adults are condoning hostility towards stigmatized groups, or where there is an environment of threat of competition, are not going to promote empathy, are not going to promote friendships across group lines.

How to talk about hate in the classroom

Jim Ver Steeg: How do you talk about these things with students in your classroom, or with anyone else who asks your perspective on recent events of hate and intolerance that are making the news.

Nora Rubel: We saw a spike in hate crime directly after the 2016 election and a rise in bias-related incidents here at the university. So, I brought that up in my classes, one called “Sex and Power” and another called “Religion and the Race for the White House.” Both were really relevant to what was going on at the time, and many of my students were shocked by what was coming out. But I will say that my students of color were not surprised at all and shared with their colleagues that these things happen all the time. They’re just not always reported.

Thomas Fleischman: In my “Hitler’s Germany” course, one of the things I try to do is reframe how students think about what the phenomenon of Hitler and the rise of Nazism actually means. That requires that I do two things. One is that I push back against this notion of the Holocaust and Nazi Germany as an exceptional event in history—it’s exceptional in its violence, it’s exceptional in its racism, it’s exceptional in its genocide—and to put it right back into the [context of the] 20th century. The reason I do that is twofold. The first is that when students see it as exceptional, they also tend to be thinking explicitly—or maybe implicitly—about Auschwitz as representation for what was Nazism. But there doesn’t have to be an Auschwitz for there to be a fascist movement. There doesn’t have to be genocide and concentration camps for there to be all the other things that Hitler brought into the world.

The second thing I do in the class to push back against this sui generis notion of Nazi Germany is to connect it to trends in world history. And in particular, under fascism and for Hitler himself, the United States was a very powerful influence on his thinking: on his racial ideology, on his economic ideology, and on his notion of imperialism. On the eve of the invasion of Eastern Europe in 1941, he made a speech in which he said that the Volga River would be Germany’s Mississippi, implying the notion that just as the United States had wiped out all the native peoples that existed between the coast and the Mississippi, Germany would do the same to the people that existed between Germany and the Volga.

The point is to really get students to think about, one, the ways in which Nazi Germany didn’t just happen in an exceptional way, and, two, to get them to really understand that it could happen anywhere. There’s nothing special about being German and anti-Semitism. There’s nothing special about religious or ethnic hatred and a particular national history.

Jim Ver Steeg: Laura, how are we talking about this with students from a developmental perspective?

Laura Elenbaas: I actually do talk about the development of prejudice and the development of discrimination in my undergrad courses. I teach “Social and Emotional Development” and I talk about the development of biases. I keep it data-based and I talk about what discrimination looks like in the child’s world. It looks like repeatedly bullying someone for biased-related reasons. It looks like excluding them from friendships or just from social groups. It’s often name-calling, taunting, other forms of harassment. So, I talk about what it looks like when a child shows bias and what it does to be on the receiving end of that. Being on the receiving end of that sort of harassment in childhood is associated with depression, with anxiety, with academic disengagement.

I think that many students appreciate the fact that from a developmental perspective you have a chance to intervene early. If you want to have a chance of changing attitudes for the better, of promoting inclusion, of promoting respect, you need to start in childhood when those attitudes are still malleable and still forming.

Our insights will come from Clifford Smith, the Louise and Henry Epstein Professor of Business at the Simon Business School, and David Primo, the Ani and Mark Gabrellian Professor and associate professor of political science and business administration. It’s a pleasure having both of you here.

The premise:�� Economics touches virtually every, if not every, aspect of society. Is that a fair statement? I’ll start with Professor Smith.

Clifford Smith:�������������������� Economics has been applied to a whole array of circumstances, things that were obvious like how do you price a book to things that are somewhat less obvious like the economics of crime or the economics of family life. Ultimately, what economics is good at is looking at circumstances where a large number of people – buyers, sellers – come together, interact in a market or a market-like setting, and the outcome of that interaction is setting a price. Sometimes there are things like prices like dollars and sense. Sometimes they’re prices like how much time you spend devoted to a particularly activity. That’s really what economics has focused on over the last 200 years. And it turns out to be a fairly powerful social science in trying to help us understand how those dimensions of aspects of our interactions occur.

Peter Iglinski:���������������������� So considering how economics is a determining factor in basic human needs – talk about things like food, shelter, healthcare, education – how well-versed are people in general?

Clifford Smith:�������������������� A great many more people have never seen the inside of an economics classroom or picked up an economics book than have. So in terms of some formal training in economics, that’s not broad-based. In terms of having experience, making choices, virtually all of us do it all day every day. And so this is one of those things where what economists are ultimately trying to do is to understand how people make choices. It’s that kind of social science. We’d like to be able to explain what we observe people doing out there in the economy. But most of them are doing it with heuristics and by that old rule of thumb “if it feels good, do it.”

David Primo:�������������������������� So the beauty of a well-functioning market, as I see it, is that you don’t need to understand economics to benefit from its principles in the same way that if I jump up, I don’t need to understand physics to know that I’m gonna be pulled back down to the ground. So Friedrich Hayek, a Nobel prize-winning economist wrote this famous paper “The Use of Knowledge in Society” where he discussed that sort of the beauty of markets is what they do is they aggregate, I would argue, potentially trillions of different decisions and it comes back to – go back to what Cliff is talking about earlier – comes back to pricing, right, to figuring out prices, to figure out how we should make tradeoffs because when we go to the grocery store, we don’t need to understand the laws of supply and demand to know that we’re gonna have to make choices on which products to buy, in part based on price. And those prices are aggregations of, again, trillions of different decisions made in the marketplace.

That said, the beauty of learning economics is that it can help you understand your own decision-making a little bit better. And that’s one reason why I think it’s still beneficial to learn economics even if you don’t need to understand it to fully benefit from its principles.

Peter Iglinski:���������������������� So which brings up the point of human nature. Is economics basically the study of human nature at least in some context?

Clifford Smith:�������������������� Let me go back to what I said before. I mean economics at its heart is looking at how a large number of people interact in a market or a market-like setting to determine a price or a price-like magnitude. Now economists have taken that set of insights and tried to push it back a level. They’ve tried to say well, what must people be doing if this is the way supply decisions get made in markets, demand decisions get made in markets, prices get determined in markets.

The thing that makes that useful is that, okay, here’s some econ-speak. Prices are determined at the margin. It’s gonna get determined by people where if the price is a little higher, people are going to demand less. If prices are a little lower, people are gonna demand more.

Now, my wife was a medical librarian. She had bookshelves full of abnormal psychology books. I mean there are some loony people out there, I mean just absolutely cuckoo. And to argue that that doesn’t happen is a fool’s errand. But the point is loony people tend not to be at the margin. And so what that means is that the folks that have the biggest impact on determining prices are the ones that are making more careful decisions about how much to supply in a market, how much to demand in a market. And it’s very difficult to tell a story where those people are loony.

Peter Iglinski:���������������������� Aren’t there psychological factors involved? I mean you can – if the price of something is too low, some people may interpret it as being, “Oh, that’s too cheap. I don’t want it” or some retailers have raised prices to make them seem – their products seem more lucrative and more desirable. Doesn’t that play into this occasionally?

David Primo:�������������������������� You can always find dozens of examples where the model of a perfectly rational human being doesn’t work so house-buying is a great example, right. You see deal after deal that fall apart because emotions get in the way and people act, frankly, in irrational ways. That said, right, in an economy where you have millions of transactions, those are not necessarily what are driving prices ultimately. And even if, yes, people aren’t perfect. They’re gonna make mistakes or their emotions come into play in ways that again deviate from what economics might predict. I think the value of economics is A) it helps as a price-setting mechanism. It helps to aggregate out the information. But also it’s going to cancel out a lot of that noise.

So I think it’s important to study the ways in which people deviate from perfectly rational behavior. But I think sometimes we focus so much on the aberrations that we don’t notice the fact that so many transactions occur in a perfectly normal way.

Clifford Smith:�������������������� Well, put a slightly different way, I would never argue that we don’t need a psychology department at the university because we have an economics department. There is all kinds of behavior that economists aren’t going to spend a lot of time focusing on because it’s not something that our tools are particularly well-suited to come to grips with. So I could have someone walk into the department store at the mall and there’s a white shirt, a blue shirt, a yellow shirt that are all there for sale for $35.00 a piece. There’s not an economist on this planet that could tell you which individual’s gonna buy the white shirt or the blue shirt or the yellow shirt.

On the other hand, if the blue shirt is for $25.00 and the others for $35, more people are gonna buy blue shirts than they are white or yellow. So there are things that we can focus on that we can talk about, that we can have some useful insights on, but we don’t have a crystal ball. And when you get into the details of trying to understand what a specific individual is going to do with respect to a specific decision, that’s arguably one of those places where talking to somebody from the psychology department may give you a lot more useful information than talking to an economist.

Peter Iglinski:���������������������� Would you like, as economists, like to see the average person have more control, be a little more empowered when it comes to the economy?

Clifford Smith:�������������������� You know, one of the things that economists regularly get admonished against is making a bunch of value judgments. At first approximation, I would believe that people have the right amount of economics training. If they would benefit from more, they’ve got opportunities to buy books or attend classes or sign up for podcasts that would give them more insight there. And how far you go down that road is gonna be answered in different ways by different people. I’ve got a PhD. I’ve got some really good friends that never took an economics class in their life and don’t ever intend to. We still get along fine.

David Primo:�������������������������� So there are two parts to your question, as I see it. One is should people know more about economics so they feel more in control of their own personal financial situation? And there I think we need to separate economics from personal finance. And I think everybody should know the basics of personal finance. To be honest, if somebody said to me, “I have time to take one class, Personal Finance 101 or Econ 101.” I’m telling them to take Personal Finance 101 every time and here’s why.

I actually think it’s a great danger to free societies when we believe that we can control an economy because that is precisely what politicians try to claim that they’re doing and I go back to Hayek. It’s actually very difficult to think that if an economy – what a market does is aggregate billions and trillions of pieces of information – that we can have government officials sort of pulling the levers and controlling how that economy is going to function. Yes, at the margins Trump imposing tariffs is going to have an effect or a tax increase is gonna have an effect or a tax cut’s gonna have an effect. But the idea that presidents and governments are controlling the economy is actually one of the great dangers, I would argue, for free societies.

And I’ll give you a quick example. Governor Cuomo – and this is not a partisan claim at all because you can find Republicans who do the same thing – said that “under his administration we created 1,000,000 new jobs in six years” he said in a State of the State Address this year. New York State did not create 1,000,000 jobs. The governor did not create jobs. But like all politicians we take – they take credit when jobs are created. We can put aside good or bad numbers. The fact is that he was not the one who created those jobs in the same way that when President Obama took credit for certain activities of the economy, it wasn’t him. When Donald Trump is taking credit for certain aspects of the economy, it’s not him. And I think that’s the mistake we make is the idea that we can somehow control the economy. The economy is an aggregation of billions and trillions of decisions.

Clifford Smith:�������������������� You know, there may be a different spin on exactly that same point. There are economies where a small number of people control huge fractions of the economic decisions that get made. I’m thinking about places like North Korea and Cuba. [Laughs] And if you look at those economies, one of the things that you see is standards of living are among the bottom of the list across nations. And, again, this goes back to something that Hayek said and that is that a lot of individual decision-making, decentralized decision-making, leads to much better decisions than having a few smart people in a room making a lot of really important decisions.

Peter Iglinski:���������������������� A person can go through their entire educational career – grammar school, high school, college – without taking any economics courses. Is that where the problem starts?

Clifford Smith:�������������������� No, I would argue that it’s not. You know, if you go back to the simplest statement of what economics would tell you about how to make decisions, I can state it in sort of one simple sentence. You’re thinking about doing something. What are the additional costs that I incur if I do it? What are the additional benefits that I receive if I do it? And economics would tell you if the additional benefits are greater than the additional costs, do it. And if the additional costs are greater than the additional benefits, don’t. Now, you don’t need a PhD in economics to get to that point. Again, there are some subtleties that will crop up in more carefully identifying incremental costs at incremental benefits. But when my kids were much younger, I can remember being at the mall with one of them and they said, “Oh, Daddy, I need this doll, shirt, whatever.” And I would say okay, it costs $10.00. You can go buy it or we can continue to look around and see if you find something that you’d like better that you could spend that $10.00 on. And invariably they decided they didn’t need the doll, that they’d like to keep shopping. And that was the first introduction to the notion of opportunity costs that a five-year-old of mine received.

David Primo:�������������������������� Earlier I pointed out that you don’t need to understand how the economy functions to be affected by prices, to be affected by supply and demand. But I think there are two ways in which understanding the fundamentals of economics can be useful. The first is that it helps you be a better decision-maker potentially. So if you’re aware of the ways in which we sometimes deviate from rational economic maximizing behavior, it might help make – it might help improve your decision-making moving forward.

Quick example:�� There’s a famous fallacy called the “sum cost fallacy” that once we’ve invested�� a lot of time in something, we’re hesitant to let go of it or we’re hesitant to let go of a project. Oh, I’ve already devoted so much time. I need to see it through. But going back to Cliff’s point about being forward-looking, if the marginal benefits of moving forward don’t exceed the marginal costs of moving forward, you should end the project. What’s done is done. What’s in the past is in the past. And if you’re aware of those kinds of behaviors, it might help you sort of better understand your own decision-making.

The second way in which I think it might be useful or would be useful for somebody to have a better understanding of economics is it actually makes you a better citizen in that you’re more aware of when politicians are promising that they can somehow undo the law of supply and demand or fix issues that are in some sense unfixable given the realities of the marketplace. And so, as Milton Friedman famously said, right, there’s no free lunch. When a politician says “Oh, we can do this at this cost or at no cost and it’s all benefit,” well, you have to ask the question if it were that easy, why wasn’t it done before?

So it helps you be a better citizen if you understand the ways in which politicians try to write down regulations they think are gonna improve the economy when there’s evidence to believe or reason to believe that it’s not gonna help at all.

Peter Iglinski:���������������������� Queen Elizabeth once asked her top financial people “Why did you miss the financial collapse?” What would you say to her? I’ll start with Professor Primo this time.

David Primo:�������������������������� My first reaction would be as somebody who studies earthquakes, a seismologist I suppose, says – doesn’t predict when the next earthquake occurs. Do we then say the entire field of seismology is worthless? Of course we don’t because we may know where the fault lines are in the economy. We may know where the challenges are in the economy. But if people are acting in rational ways, if everybody knew that a crash was coming tomorrow, the crash would’ve already happened because, again, markets aggregate information. And so we’re in a world in which it’s very difficult to predict what’s going to happen in the economy precisely because it’s an amalgamation of all these different individual decisions. And in some sense if we know what’s going to happen, then individuals who are forward-looking will have already factored them into the decision-making today and you sort of get this never-ending cycle. And so predicting is very difficult but I would argue it’s not the goal of much of what we do in social science. That is what economists who work for banks get paid to do. That’s what a lot of economists who are in the private sector get paid to do. But in reality our goal is to understand the economy and prediction is a very different thing I think.

Clifford Smith:�������������������� I completely agree with what David just said. If we focus on the stock market for just a minute and let’s suppose that the New York Stock Exchange works amazingly well, that whatever information is out there that might be relevant is impounded in the stock price right now. Well, what that means is that stock price changes have to be driven by new information. And if new information almost by definition is information that you couldn’t have inferred from what was available already, then new information almost by definition has to be independent of the current state of our understanding. Well, that means that stock price changes are not going to follow some trend. They’re not going to follow some pattern that’s easily readily determined. Stock price changes to a first approximation are going to be independent. And that characterizes an incredibly well-functioning market but imposes big constraints on what’s reasonable to ask economists to opine about.

Peter Iglinski:���������������������� When people see the daily news reports about stock prices, I think some people are confused thinking that that’s money going to or from the company and it’s not. It’s just between the owners of the company, the shareholders. So what does the fluctuation in the stock market tell or should tell the average person?

Clifford Smith:�������������������� In some dimensions it’s like the scoreboard at the football game. If prices are going up, it’s a reflection of the fact that a bunch of well-heeled, very diligent people at places like Merrill-Lynch and Goldman-Sachs are more optimistic about the state of the economy today than they were yesterday. And if it goes down, the opposite’s true so in a lot of ways it’s like a scoreboard. It gives you a reflection of one group of people’s assessment of the state of the economy, not looking in the rearview mirror but looking out past the hood ornament. And this is not like a poll because these people are putting their money where their mouth is. [Laughs]

Peter Iglinski:���������������������� To what extent should economists study ways to make life better versus how economy acts the way it does? There’s British economist David Ricardo, 18^th century, said that economists study how the produce of the earth is distributed. Should economists also study the best ways to distribute the produce?

David Primo:�������������������������� There is an entire field or subfield of economics called “welfare economics” that’s devoted to understanding the implications of alternative economic arrangements, how do you think about different allocations of resources. And perhaps I’m revealing my political economy training or my political science training here, but I would argue that the real problem is not the failure – the challenge we face is not the failure of economists to figure out how to meet basic human needs but rather how political hurdles prevent us from meeting basic human needs. I think this is really a job for the political scientists, not the economists in that markets are really good, actually. Functioning markets are really good at wealth creation and at creating situations where everybody’s sort of situation is improved.

But when you introduce war, when you introduce violence, when you introduce imperialism, you run into challenges where the economy can’t work to help everybody. So I say to my students that you can look at these really elegant economic models that are going to give you these beautiful equilibria where we solve this problem that’s facing the world, let’s say, pollution. We can write down these beautiful models that show what the optimal tax rate is to get to some optimal level of pollution. Now the challenge is we have to go from these abstract models to a world in which politicians are going to make these decisions. And there you’re in a whole different world of decision-making, one that has numerous well-known pathologies and that’s where you run into challenges.

Peter Iglinski:���������������������� What are the limitations of economics, Professor Smith?

Clifford Smith:�������������������� They’re many and varied. You know, we don’t have crystal balls. We’re much better at looking in the rearview mirror and telling people where we’ve been than we are gazing out past the hood ornament and telling them where we’re going in large part because of the things that we talked about a minute ago. When you start talking about a specific individual faced with the very difficult individual decision, economists aren’t particularly good at coming up with answers to exactly what you might expect. For example, if a CEO finds out that his firm is now the target of some tender offer, a takeover attempt, and you’d like to understand how this CEO is gonna react, I’d probably be more comfortable picking up a telephone and calling somebody in the psychology department than picking up the telephone and calling somebody in economics or finance. Large numbers of people in markets or market-like settings determining a price or a price-like dimension is what we’re good at. Things that get very personal, very individualized we’re not particularly good at doing.

David Primo:�������������������������� One of the challenges that I think economics has faced for decades now and that consumes much of the research that I’ve done and that many of the colleagues in political science have done in the last 30, 40 years is the notion of collective choice, so economics is very much focused on individual choices. Where am I gonna go to dinner tonight? What product am I going to buy? But what happens when you’re in a group of friends and you’re deciding where to go to eat? Many people who are listening have probably been in that situation where you cycle or nobody can reach an agreement and everybody ends up with a restaurant that nobody’s particularly happy about.

The reason is that collective choice suffers from some fundamental limitations and economics has helped us understand what those limitations are and political economy and gain theory have helped us understand what those limitations are. But I think it’s important for us to be aware that collective choice – in other words where a group of people is making a single decision – is going to be very difficult.

So, again, let’s go back to the restaurant example, five people, right, might struggle to figure out where to go to eat. Now imagine it’s not five people deciding where to eat but it’s 10,000,000 people deciding what car emission regulation rules should be or what tax rates should be and so on, and you see where you are gonna run into challenges. And a lot of people don’t think about this as economics but it really is economics. It’s political economics. It’s political economy. And I think that’s a fundamental … I don’t know if I’d say it’s a limitation of economics, but it’s an area that economic reasoning has identified as a challenge for society.

Peter Iglinski:���������������������� You make me think of Walter Oi who was an economics professor at the URochester, that he explained that apple pie really isn’t the favorite pie in America, but it’s the pie that people collectively will at least agree on, that there are pies they like better if they were buying an individual slice for themselves. But when you buy it as a group, that’s the one they can all come to terms on.

David Primo:�������������������������� Yeah, I think that’s sort of like a consensus choice, if you will. And if you think about that as a consensus choice, that’s great. The challenge becomes when there is no consensus choice. So with apple we might be lucky that as a society that we can sort of coalesce around apple pie. But what happens when you have choices that are given to you that are really not very palatable? In your own individual life, one of the choices is not to purchase something at all, so if I go to the store and I don’t like any of the products, I don’t have to buy them. We don’t have that choice when we make collective choices and that’s one of the challenges we face.

Peter Iglinski:���������������������� People occasionally wonder why economists who all have PhDs and a lot of experience disagree and I know this is a complicated question. [Laughs] Scratching the surface but, Professor Smith, why don’t you all agree? You study the same books presumably.

Clifford Smith:�������������������� In a lot of ways most of the disagreements in my experience have been over magnitudes that we don’t have a good handle on. Most of us would say here’s a choice that we’re thinking about. What level of unemployment compensation would be appropriate? And there’s some economists that think that this benefit of additional unemployment compensation is big and the costs are relatively small and, therefore, they’d be foursquare behind raising unemployment benefits. And there are other economists that could look at exactly the same question and decide that given the information in their experience, the benefits are small and the costs are big and they’d be foursquare against it.

Now if information were readily available, I think a lot of that disagreement would wind up disappearing, that most economists’ approach to problems is the same but if you think something’s big and positive and I think it’s big and negative, we’re not gonna see eye to eye until we can get some information, some evidence that both of us would agree speaks to that question. And if that were to occur, I think it would be a whole lot quicker to receive some consensus.

David Primo:�������������������������� I would flip that question on its head and argue – and ask why is it that economists agree so much? I actually think one of the big challenges facing social sciences and academia generally is that there isn’t enough disagreement, that there’s too much intellectual homogeneity, if you will, where there’s a set of theories that are sort of the accepted theories that everybody kind of buys into. And you can have little fights among the theories but there isn’t – there often aren’t these big broad-based challenges to ideas in the social sciences and science progresses through disagreement.

We all need to have a common language within a field and we need to have some certain premises that we all subscribe to or else nothing can – science can’t get off the ground. But once you have that, I actually think you need more disagreement, more viewpoint diversity or else you get fields that don’t grow and don’t progress. So I think there is a healthy amount of disagreement in economics because knowledge production is difficult. But I also think we could actually benefit from more disagreement among economists and among political scientists and among social scientists generally.

Peter Iglinski:���������������������� When economists miss an event, miss a collapse – to back to the collapse idea – are economists generally, and yourselves, then better prepared for the next event? Are you able to learn enough to help you in the future or would that event be seen as just a singular aberration?

Clifford Smith:�������������������� I think we all try and learn from experience, and when something comes out of left field, something we didn’t anticipate crops up, it’s one of those moments where you slap yourself on the forehead and say why didn’t I think about that sooner? And the next time something similar starts evolving, you’re a lot more likely to pay attention to this thing that came up and bit you in the behind three, years, five years, twelve years earlier than you would’ve been if you’d never had that experience at all. Yeah, economists learn.

One of the things that I had the opportunity to do that I really enjoyed tremendously in my professional career, Henry Manny who actually used to be on the faculty here at U of R, started this Law and Economics Center and started offering courses to federal judges. He concluded that they had lots of training in history and political science and all array of challenging academic disciplines. But one that they didn’t have a lot of was economics and business, and he got funding for some foundations to offer courses in economics, finance, accounting, statistics. And some of the people he brought together to provide these programs were just the Who’s Who in Economics. I remember one time after dinner one night there was a panel discussion and Paul Samuelson, the first Nobel Laureate from the US and a professor at MIT, was talking and another person on the panel was Milton Friedman, another Nobel Laureate, this one from Chicago. And my impression was that the judges were struck with how common the analysis was between the two. Both of them agreed that this aspect of this problem represents a benefit and this aspect of this problem represents a cost.

And yet one could say yes and the other no because they thought this benefit was big and this cost was small. But the other one thought that the cost was big and the benefits were small. So when it comes down to the bottom line, they apparently are butting heads and disagreeing with each other. But if you go back to the underlying analysis, they really agreed on a step-by-step basis about what was important in the analysis. And they both agreed at the end of that discussion that, “Well, if we had more information, if we had something that was more focused and gave us a better handle on how big this benefit is, how big this cost is, we’d agree.” And I take a lot of comfort in that because politically you have a hard time finding well-known economists that are further apart on the social spectrum than Paul Samuelson and Milton Friedman. [Laughs]

Peter Iglinski:���������������������� What’s the biggest economic misconception among the general public?

David Primo:�������������������������� That’s a hard question.

Peter Iglinski:���������������������� [Laughs] Sorry.

David Primo:�������������������������� I would argue that the biggest misconception is that we can legislate our way around economic principles. That, for instance, if we impose a minimum wage of – let’s make up a number here – of $30.00 an hour, that somehow we could do that and it wouldn’t have, you know, it would work perfectly and nobody would lose their jobs and everything would be great. Or that we can continue to take one debt as an economy at the federal level and we can worry about it in 30 years and it won’t be a problem in 30 years. Or this idea that somehow we’re not subject to the laws of supply and demand. We are whether we like it or not.

Peter Iglinski:���������������������� Professor Smith?

Clifford Smith:�������������������� I think David’s going down exactly the right road. Engineering professors can’t repeal the laws of physics anymore than business professors or political science professors can repeal the laws of economics. People are gonna in general do what’s in their best interest. And you can pass a law that says that the minimum wage is $30.00 an hour. I don’t have to hire you. And in fact if I don’t expect that you’re gonna add at least $30.00 of value to my business for every hour you work, I’m not gonna hire you. [Laughs]

Peter Iglinski:���������������������� Earlier you had talked about how the public can become better informed. There are books, podcasts to listen to. There are TV shows to listen to. But in this morass out there – and there are one or two charlatans out there – how can the people pick their sources for getting a good quality economic foundation?

Clifford Smith:�������������������� The advice that I give my students as they’re about to graduate is it’s important to keep up. And if they’re gonna subscribe to a daily, I generally put the Financial Times at the top of the list. I think you get more perspective reading something that’s edited out of London than something that’s edited out of New York or Washington. When you are looking at a weekly, I more frequently recommend The Economist than I do Business Week or Fortune. Again, it’s edited out of London rather than New York. And I think that there’s a lot more global coverage of issues. They’re a lot better at setting things that are US-specific issues in a context that makes sense and is understandable. But, ultimately, there’s gonna be no substitute for doing some homework.

Peter Iglinski:���������������������� Professor Primo, what’s your guidance?

David Primo:�������������������������� I think NPR’s Marketplace Program does a really nice job of distilling some complex economic ideas into stories that are digestible and that convey those ideas in very clear ways and with some balance. So you’ll hear multiple perspective, which I think is useful because I think it’s also important for Americans to know that there is disagreement out there about what monetary policy should look like, what tax policy should look like. There isn’t universal agreement on these issues. The Economist as a magazine I think, as a publication, that’s – that is going to offer, again, a nice world sort of a broader perspective, a worldview, if you will, of the economy.

But I go back to personal finance. If you go onto Amazon, you can find millions of probably, literally millions of personal finance books. Some are gonna be good. Some are gonna be bad. But understanding your own, as the saying goes, your own personal economy is perhaps more important than understanding the macro economy because you have much more control over your personal economic situation than you do over the macro economic situation. And if you can find a book on investing, let’s say, that helps you develop a financial plan, that potentially could be more important to your life than understanding why interest rates went up last week, you know, why the Fed decided to raise interest rates.

Given – this sort of goes back to economic principles. Given limited time and scarce resource of time, understanding how the economy affects you on a day-to-day basis may be the most important thing you can do.

Peter Iglinski:���������������������� Any closing thoughts?

Clifford Smith:�������������������� We covered a lot of ground. I hope people found some of this thought-provoking and helpful.

David Primo:�������������������������� The one thing I would want to leave listeners with is that economics does not exist in a vacuum and understanding the links between economics and political science, between economics and psychology is where often we make the greatest strides in our understandings in social science. So this is sort of a plug, I think, for multidisciplinary work or work that cuts across disciplines because that’s the way in which we can learn and in which we can grow. It’s important to have a base of knowledge with any discipline, but I think it’s really useful when you have this cross-fertilization of ideas.

Peter Iglinski:���������������������� My thanks to Clifford Smith, the Louise and Henry Epstein Professor of Business at the Simon Business School, and David Primo, the Ani and Mark Gabrellian Professor and associate professor of political science and business administration. Thanks also to Joe Hagan, our audio engineer. For the Ģ����ý Quadcast, I’m Peter Iglinski.

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Beth Olivares:���������������������� Hello.

Jim Ver Steeg:���������������������� I’d also like to welcome Kristin Doughty, who is assistant professor of anthropology and restorative practices, restorative justice scholar.

Kristin Doughty:�������������� Hi, thank you.

Jim Ver Steeg:���������������������� Thank you for coming. And we also have two consultants and restorative practices coaches, Duke Fisher and Toni McMurphy. Duke and Toni, thank you for joining us.

Toni McMurphy:�������������� It’s great to be here.

Duke Fisher:���������������������������� Thanks for having us.

Jim Ver Steeg:���������������������� So I’d like to start with you, Toni, and Duke, to tell us a little about restorative practices. What are they, and what do people need to know about them?

Toni McMurphy:�������������� Well, restorative practices, really, it’s a term that encompasses and represents a philosophy, but also a set of tools, perspectives, and disciplines. So for example, in the training that we’ve been doing recently, we really invite people to become fully present, which doesn’t happen often with busy lives and long to-do lists. We invite people really to lead with their humanity, and authentic dialogue. So while we all have roles and responsibilities and we don’t want to lose sight of those roles and responsibilities, what’s also true – there’s a way that we can enter a conversation, human being to human being, to seek to understand, to listen, deeply.

You’ll notice that even by design, the pace and the rhythm is a little bit slower. In authentic dialogue, we joke and say that we incorporate the NPR pause [laughs]. So, there’s information, and then there’s space that allows that information to settle in. The other thing that I think is representative in restorative practice is in the work that we’ve been doing is the importance of circles. And I’ll invite Duke to share about what that means, and what that looks like on campus.

Duke Fisher:���������������������������� I think restorative practice can also be called circle work. You’ll hear a shorthand for it. And I think it reflects that if we try to work through these issues in community, we have better results. And so it’s where – think of conversations I try to have at my kitchen table. We fall into our regular patterns. And often those aren’t helpful. And so it’s about assembling the right people to be in the room to speak to each other, to make something significant happen.

Jim Ver Steeg:���������������������� And how big are those circles, typically? Do they vary in size? Is it usually a small group?

Duke Fisher:���������������������������� Well, we use the term a lot, like lightly, because the circle might be two people, and I think there would be people who would tell me that that’s a line, not a circle. So, you have two people, where we might do restorative coaching, where you talk and use some of the principles that Toni was mentioning to support each other on a one on one conversation. That might happen with a student who may be struggling with how they’re fitting in on campus, or if they feel like they’ve impacted their living environment negatively, or their classroom negatively.

So, it can be one on one. And it can also be a rather large process. I would say that classic four to eight is fairly standard for let’s work through something together. When you start saying who should be here, who should witness this conversation, like who should hear what you want to say, who do you want to have hear what you want to say – I think those start to cluster pretty quickly. And then Toni and I have been part of processes where you may have circles that involve several hundred people, and it’s concentric circles.

And so it may be something happening on the inside, and then a tier just beyond that inside circle, and then another tier. And there’s strategies that are set up to make sure that the tiers are listening, and communicating with each other.

Jim Ver Steeg:���������������������� Beth, I’m hoping you can give us a little context and talk about why we’re using restorative practices at the university, and maybe be a little bit more in depth as to what we’re hoping to accomplish with it.

Beth Olivares:���������������������� Sure, so bringing Duke and Toni here, after having consulted with a group of faculty, including Professor Doughty, who you’ll hear from in a moment, and the deans in arts, sciences, and engineering, as well as graduate students and others in the department of brain and cognitive sciences, where we’ve had some concerns over the last year or so, it became clear to me that what the community was asking for was a process, a way to deal with harm that had been created, and had impacted the community that was non-punitive, non-investigative, non-legal, and allowed people to say what they had experienced, and work together to figure out ways to understand each other’s experience, but also move forward, and to create a community in which everybody can actually thrive.

So, the beginning of this journey with restorative practices happened in February with our decision to bring Duke and Toni in through the Skidmore Project on Restorative Justice. And they quickly started working with members of the community in brain and cognitive sciences. And I should say that initially there were – was predominately in the arena of identifying harm, and mapping harm, and assembling group of people who would self-assemble to talk about things that had happened in their department, or in their world. And have spent many, many, many hours with many members of our community that include some but not all of the complainants in the lawsuit.

Have included possibly all or almost all of the faculty in BCS, many of the graduate students in BCS, as well as senior administrators, including folks in the president’s office, the president of the university, all of the deans in AS&E, the faculty senate executive committee, and members of affiliated departments as well.

Jim Ver Steeg:���������������������� So, it sounds like there’s been some pretty considerable buy-in for this process.

Beth Olivares:���������������������� Correct. So, there’s two aspects to the process. The first one that I’ve been describing has really been the harm identification, and dealing with interpersonal conflict, and all of those things. And that really took up quite a lot of Duke and Toni’s time for the first month. That work is ongoing. The BCS department has adopted these practices in a very holistic way. Greg DeAngelis, who is the chair of the department, has said that these processes have helped enormously in dealing with the difficult waters that they have to navigate.

The second part of this is – Toni alluded to earlier – is that we’ve been doing training. Because in addition to actually doing this kind of work, the idea is that we should train our community in the practices so that we don’t have to use them as remediating harm, but actually harm prevention. So we have 12, we’ve done 12 four-hour training sessions over the summer. We’ve had over 150 people participate in those. And overwhelmingly positive results, positive reactions. And many – so from people who literally this is their second week on their job, to people who have been here for four or five decades.

And many of whom, almost all of whom, have expressed that this is something that’s absolutely needed in the community, and they want more of it. So yes, there has been a – I would say widespread buy-in. It’s been a quiet process. Because we don’t – it’s again, non-coercive. There’s an invitation out to the community. Whoever shows up is the people who participate. We don’t make anybody do it. It’s not required.

Jim Ver Steeg:���������������������� And it’s all inclusive. I think you pretty much ask everybody, right?

Beth Olivares:���������������������� That is correct.

Jim Ver Steeg:���������������������� And I want to say, before I forget, if you want to learn more about some of the restorative practices happening at the URochester, you can go to the website, which is Rochester.edu (slash) college (slash) diversity (dash) restorative-practices. And Professor Doughty, before I talk to you, I just want to turn back to our consultants, Toni and Duke. And we hear both restorative practices and restorative justice. And I’m wondering if you can help us understand what might be the difference between those two ideas.

Toni McMurphy:�������������� Well, restorative justice is one slice in the restorative practices pie. So, it’s a specific way of applying restorative practices when there has been harm. But really one of the things that I am always in awe about in these situations is how the other becomes humanized.

Jim Ver Steeg:���������������������� Kristin, I’d like to turn to you now to offer some perspective. I know some of your scholarship is around restorative justice, restorative practices, and I know that you do a lot of thinking around lasting change and structural change. So can you tell us a little bit about your work and how you have come to understand restorative justice, and restorative practices?

Kristin Doughty:�������������� Yeah, thank you. I’m delighted to be part of the conversation. I’ll begin by saying that the research that I do that relates to this is really twofold. One piece of work that I’ve been doing that I began when I started graduate school, so it’s been going on for about 15 years, is my work in Rwanda, where as a political and legal anthropologist, I was looking at post genocide reconciliation, where the Rwandan government put in place a new process that was really explicitly a combination of restorative and retributive practices to deal with genocide suspects.

And so that’s the base of much of my work, sort of into these areas. And then I more recently have become involved in looking at issues around mass incarceration in the US, and I’m involved with a group here at the URochester of faculty in Warner School, in education at the medical center, and in art, sciences, and engineering. And we’re calling ourselves the Rochester Decarceration Research Initiative. But where we’re looking to think about how issues of mass incarceration, which are related to carceral and punitive practices, shape life in the region.

So, my perspective on these comes I think from both of these domains. In terms of thinking about systemic and structural change, to your question, I think maybe the best way I can say it is in thinking about – I’ll name like three shifts that I think are really important that restorative justice and, in my mind, both restorative justice and restorative practices would impact. One is that restorative justice, I’ll put that in quotes, as I think about it as an anthropologist, looking at the literature, at the diversity of practices across many regions in Africa and many regions outside the US, are really about I’ll go to Duke’s comment there.

I just jotted it down. It should reach all of your community. It’s about refusing exile. It’s about refusing the idea that you can take someone who has done something bad, or committed a crime, in the language you would use, and just send them somewhere, be it prison, be it elsewhere, and to define your community as just the ones you want to have remain. Restorative approaches assume that there is no exile, that everyone has to be there from the beginning to the end, whether that’s at the level of family, at the level of a community.

So, taking that practice on board actually involves redefining community. Community no longer means just a harmonious, handholding, Kumbaya. But community means the people with whom you engage, warts and all. And I think that mind shift that goes along with really embracing the idea of restorative practices is a really structural and systemic one. The other piece is to reframe how we think about punishment and accountability. There’s a sense that I think that in a lot of popular perception that restorative means no punishment.

But I think really that’s only if we think of punishment as being exile, or cleaving off, or particular forms of punishment that are really just artifacts of the US legal system and how we all therefore think about punishment, or how we think about how we raise our children into these practices. But if we think about accountability being a much deeper process that links to the kinds of things that Duke and Toni have been saying about accountability to other people, about acknowledging harms, about all these other pieces, there can be deep accountability even absent the kinds of punishment that we might have historically thought about.

So those two mind frame shifts I think are really foundational to how we then implement structural change. Whether at the level of universities, policies, and practices, or at the level of more broadly our whole justice system. And I think it goes also to this issue of listening that Duke and Toni have been talking about. I think that really beginning processes that are deeply about listening is also a structural and systemic type of change.

Jim Ver Steeg:���������������������� Two things that you said really stand out for me. One is the idea of sort of reimagining or redefining community. A lot of folks tend to believe automatically that community is a good thing. But sometimes membership in that community can be exclusive. And that’s not always a good thing. The other thing, and Beth, maybe you can speak to this, it’s this rejecting the notion of exile, and how that plays into what some of our efforts here.

Beth Olivares:���������������������� So, Kristin’s quote about when exile is not possible, how do we be a community, how are we a community? Those conversations have happened on multiple campuses, and multiple layers across the country. And here as well. And it became really clear to me that we needed to figure out a way to pull together as a community and figure out, what does that mean, what does accountability mean, what does that mean for a front-line staff member who has to handle the paperwork to get students advisors? What does it mean for the policies and procedures that we have here at the university? What does it mean for the way that we interact with each other? So, and I also think that this series of practices, this exercise, this work that we’ve been doing, is really very much in line with the kinds of things that President Feldman has been talking about, with the culture of respect ��and the new meliora values.

Those sessions were specifically designed as Duke and Toni have said to provide their participants with a set of tools that they can use to create their own circles, to maybe behave differently in their departments, or in other ways. But they’ve also really been small group discussions, about the ways in which the people who are in the room are tethered to the university. Like what, why are you here, what binds you to the institution, what’s precious about being in the institution?

And then hearing each other say those things out loud has a really powerful effect. And then the next question is, well, what are the challenges you see at this institution? And so we get pretty deep into those conversations as well. And I’ll say that across all of the conversations, all the trainings, the concerns that people have are very much echoed in if you’ve read the report of the commission on women and gender in academe, if you’ve read the report of the commission on race and diversity.

The kinds of things about the ways in which we’re perceived, this institution, folks here, perceive that we don’t hold each other accountable, that we’re not willing to have hard conversations, that sometimes we take the easy way out and we ignore things that oughtn’t be ignored, that we treat each other with less than the deep listening that this practice asks us to do, and by doing that we dehumanize each other. And so, pulling us into circle, and having these conversations, we all see that many of us share the same preciousnesses around being here at the university, but also some of the same concerns.

So that’s then the next question is how does that make you feel? Sometimes it’s heaviness. Sometimes it’s sadness. But often it’s hope. Because we’re all in this together. The idea is we can pull together and make this a better place.

Jim Ver Steeg:���������������������� And one of the things we talked about before we started the show was to make sure that we acknowledge that sometimes we’ll be speaking in very general terms. Sometimes rather deliberately. Because it’s important to the process. It’s important to the participants that we maintain privacy and confidentiality with the things that are discussed. That of course doesn’t mean that I won’t try to get you to talk about some things [laughter].

So, I guess what I want to know is because so much of this is about accountability, and you’ve had some central players involved in these conversations – I’m looking at Toni and Duke, the consultants – has anything stood out to you both that was either surprising or illuminating or enlightening about the process here? Is there something, a memory you have of any of these workshops or trainings that really stands out?

Toni McMurphy:�������������� There are many. I would say that some wonderful moments which illustrate the ways in which people are finding value in these practices such that they are organically emerging. So, we have spent a significant amount of time in BCS. And recently organically there were calls and requests to come and support them in convening their own circles. And they just know and they’ll say well I think at this point, with this topic, we need a talking piece now, where every voice is heard, that the person with the talking piece has the floor.

And of course, anyone can pass. Even last night, we were having a conversation planning a circle for this afternoon. And we asked what thoughts do you have about potential rounds, which are the prompts when we go around the circle, and people respond to a question. And so, there were several ideas. And then this person said, well, for this one, I think we should do a diminishing round, which means that the piece keeps going until not just once around, but as many times around as needed, for people to share what’s on their mind and in their hearts. And so, we were almost giddy.

We were there on FaceTime going yes. This is what it’s all about. And just hearing people say things like what we create here in four hours with complete strangers, why don’t we have this in more spaces, in more department meetings, in more faculty meetings, in more classrooms? Why don’t we have this in more homes in which we live, in our personal lives? And it’s exciting to see the a-ha that people have in terms of what is truly possible when we come together in these ways.

Duke Fisher:���������������������������� I want to tell you about everybody. I’d love to blow the whistle on everyone I’ve met. Because it’s those kinds of conversations. It’s a guilty pleasure that I have that Greg would have said – he’s the one that used the terminology. And I said oh really, you’re going to use our terminology? You want me to start winging science terminology around? It’s lovely to see that at some levels the conversations that they’ve having begin to justify the use of the methods. And to have a group of scientists say let’s put this formal structure into our conversation? These are people who speak to each other every day, and have meetings every day.

And the fact that they’d be willing to even consider using a different method I think is astounding. That the storylines that have my attention are – we’ll assemble to talk about a formal tension on campus. And there are systemic issues that have to be addressed. So, you have people trying to use their personal voices and talk about their own experience, and then say how does that impact things like the Me Too movement? How are we going to manifest that here on this campus? I mean these are high level discussions.

And we spend enough time with people that sooner or later, it gets to the core of people’s experience, and in one particular meeting, we have a staff member who was talking about one of the conflicts that they were facing, and they began to share that these people share lives with each other, they raise children together, they attend each other’s weddings and funerals. And [crying] they just talked about how the conflict between them had impacted relationships with children, and it was sort of an aside, where they said do you think we’d be able to convene a circle to have our families discuss this? And the answer is of course.

Jim Ver Steeg:���������������������� So at a deeply personal level for some folks then.

Duke Fisher:���������������������������� Sure. Sure. And that they value the conversation enough to say I trust this with my children, or I trust this with my family, is particularly affirming.

Jim Ver Steeg:���������������������� It’s wonderful. And I would be remiss to say – to not say that we have communal principles that we tend to focus on, one every year, and this year is responsibility. And Kristin, I’m sort of looking at you. You mentioned accountability in restorative practices, in restorative justice, and can you talk a little bit about the role specifically of accountability and responsibility in restorative practices?

Kristin Doughty:�������������� Yeah, I mean I’ll go back to a little of what I said before, which is to begin with, we have a sense that accountability – when we’re thinking about punishment, being accountable for one’s deeds, gets defined as suffering pain for them in a way that makes you an example for others, that sort of becomes a notion I think that many have written about in the ways that we think about punishment within sort of cultures of punishment in the US legal system. I mean it takes a lot of different forms.

But when we think of punishment as accountability, that’s really not the same thing. And if we can delink those in some ways, and then rethink accountability as ways of remediating harm, as ways of doing – giving back in different ways. I mean as an example, again, the Rwanda case is very complicated, and I don’t want to draw false parallels. But in the wake of the genocide with these Gacaca Courts, the Rwandan government made a new set of laws, and the part of the rationale was that people who confessed to crimes of genocide could get their actual sentence, their prison sentence, reduced by half, and could do community service.

We obviously have community service built into our models in the US. I’m not saying this was an uncontested decision, or policy for the Rwandan government, but the idea that people – that’s a form of accountability is what I’m trying to say. Doing – helping rebuild houses and rebuild roads and doing forms of community service is a form of accountability. And so we can think about ways. And again there’s lot of ways to analyze it. But we can think about ways of giving back, of both at the level of relationships, at the level of material practices, there’s lots of different ways that accountability I think can be defined.

And I think one of the things I said to Beth early on about this is I feel our institution should be accountable to people who are – who continue to be here, and who are at varied levels of power within the institution. And there’s a lot of people at the university who have very different vulnerabilities, and voices, and I think a practice like this, that is designed to include that wide range of people from – some of the people that I talked to at the very beginning of this, who are sort of asking for these processes, were undergraduates and graduate students. And I think the university is accountable to them as well.

And so at least for me that’s part of that accountability to acknowledging people differently placed in relation to power, and how we think about the move being constructive, not just punitive, is really important.

Jim Ver Steeg:���������������������� That strikes me as particularly salient in higher education, where there are so many different levels of power, and authority. And so Beth, I turn to you. How are we thinking about how this fits into a higher education model? I’m assuming there are people that from all different levels in some of these circles and some of these groups. So how does that present itself here, at Rochester?

Beth Olivares:���������������������� So, in the trainings that we’ve had, it is an open invitation. And the groups have been very – it’s whoever registers, comes. And we specifically do not deal in titles or anything like that. Everybody gets a nametag with their first name on it. And the first initial of their last name. we do introductions by not your title, but the essence of what you do. So, we have a lot of people who are problem solvers, and a lot of people who are story tellers, and a lot of people who are breakers down of barriers and things like that.

So in a few of the responses, the evaluation responses that I’ve gotten from folks, who might not be seen as powerful people in the hierarchy, who are incredibly honored, they say, to have been invited, or allowed to participate, and I follow up with them and say no, absolutely, this is for everyone, this is a leveler of hierarchy.

Jim Ver Steeg:���������������������� And I know we often don’t speak about an end goal or an end result of restorative practices, but I turn to Toni and Duke, and so I’ll ask you, how would you frame what’s happening now, and how do you think things might go? What’s coming next?

Toni McMurphy:�������������� So, as I alluded to earlier, I think one of the most exciting things is that as people are exposed to – and they actually experience up close and personal what restorative practices look like, feel like, they start to identify ways that they can incorporate this into their meetings, their classrooms, to discuss concerns, to make a decision, to approach strategic planning in a department. How can we come together? That’s one of our circles later today. In a way that we’re really mindful, that we’re transparent, that we get things on the table so we can examine them from different perspectives.

And then people have talked about again taking these practices home into their personal lives. And there’s a point at which in the training people – we have said how many of you engage in difficult conversations? And every hand goes up always. And so what are tools that help us navigate those more effectively, with more transparency, with more grace? And we have people write – what is it that you need or want from others to have these difficult conversations, and what is a strength you bring?

And so we wind up with these incredible paper plates spread all over our centerpiece with people talking about things like I want respectful candor, I want patience, I want empathy, I want to be heard, I want to really be heard. And then we start imagining what could it look like if we actually embrace this and go forward? And we acknowledge at the end of the training each of us can impact the environments in which we work and live in these ways by showing up differently. It paves the way for other people to respond in kind.

Duke Fisher:���������������������������� The practitioner in me wants to tell you that there’s a path. Because you asked about end goals. So how do we get there? It’s about assembling the right people in the circle. So that you can collectively understand what we’re working on. Who do we need in the circle so that we know – we have the nuanced understanding of what this is. We create safety so that they can actually speak their truth. Then once we have that, we develop through the lens of harm – how has this been difficult for you? One of the most important questions that Toni and I ask is – what’s hardest about this?

And that encourages people to do that self-exploration. How is it hard for me in this moment – is a very important lens. And that leads us directly into what needs might you have? And it’s very personal. There may be – think about the last time you demanded something. I want her fired. They need to be removed from the church. Whatever demand you’ve just made. And the question Toni and I will often ask is what need would that meet? Why would that be important that you get that? What do you get if you get that?

And once we have those needs-based words, then we can give them an opportunity to say – how do we meet those needs? You turn to the circle. It’s not just on one person. And they look at each other and say what would we do? Because there’s a mantra that it’s a hot mess in a lot of these circumstances. And I think that what the circle says above all else is, we can do this well. We can do this well. And it gives them an opportunity to lean on each other, folks that have impacted each other, and say we have the expertise in the circle here to make sure that we not only deal with the situation, but we address the conditions that created this situation.

So that we’re not just finding one solution, but we’re talking about how do we change things so it doesn’t happen again, or so that people are safer, or more comfortable, or more ready to act like a community as they go forward. So, it may seem like it’s very broad and it’s very emotional, and the answer is yes, it is. And the trainings are about uncovering the mechanics of how does it happen, the mechanics of compassion, the mechanics of responding to each other. There are methods – philosophies and methods that are specific to the work that we do that can support communities. They can learn it, and they can provide it for each other.

Kristin Doughty:�������������� I was just interested in building on that point. Because this language of community and coming together keeps coming up, and I wanted to speak to that a little more. I often joke I’m sort of allergic to the language of community only because – and that goes to this point of redefining how we even think about it. And I think that’s a really important piece of this process, because as we – I think what’s implicit in what we’re all saying here is that the coming together doesn’t mean silencing dissent, and coming together doesn’t mean coming together and pretending that everything is perfect and we all get along all the time.

So, the language I think that Beth’s been saying, and that I heard from both Duke and Toni, of we come together and we rebuild community – I just want to reiterate that that is a community that is in theory doing the hard work of actually having these conversations, not about sort of a false coercive part to it. And there’s been a lot of scholarship, and a lot of critique, around notions of coercive harmony within restorative practices. So, I think that’s an important thing to point to. There are examples – there are places where restorative practices, restorative justice can in fact be deeply disenfranchising for people with less power.

If they are sort of forced to consent to mediated solutions that they don’t actually want. So, there are certain examples of that. And I understand why people bring that concern to thinking about these kinds of practices. But I think it’s really important to not use that to, at least in my own view, to disallow the effort to begin with these forms of models, and also to the point that people are making, this idea of the deep listening. I keep coming back to that.

But I think for my own experience as an anthropologist doing sort of ethnography of my own campus, that issue of information needing to flow from the bottom upwards is something that this process can actually – and these sorts of practices can help to structurally fix, to implement at the level of policies, and at the level of culture change, and the level of meetings within departments and programs, etcetera, if information is really – if people feel comfortable talking, and that information gets taken seriously, and moves upward, that is itself in my mind a form of real change. And the kind of thing that could prevent problems from happening more in the future.

Duke Fisher:���������������������������� So I’m glad you raised this. And one of my favorite talking pieces was the gift from another practitioner that’s an ampersand. The and sign. And as it’s passed around the circle, it reminds that we’re not looking to meet one need, but meet the needs of the individuals in the circle, and everyone is encouraged to put voice to what needs they might have, what harms they’re experiencing, what needs they might have. And it’s a process of this need and that need, rather than this need or that need. And you can see how that plays out between structures and individuals, between power sources and those that are laboring under the power source.

And so the idea is that we try to raise it up in a way where every voice is heard. And that’s why that structure is so important. That’s why that piece travels around the circle. Everyone answers the same question. And we all speak to each other rather than someone speaking at the circle.

Jim Ver Steeg:���������������������� Beth, I want to turn to you and ask you to put your official dean for diversity hat on. But it strikes me that as we’re talking about this, we’re talking about elements of inclusion, and equity. And I’m wondering how you consider restorative practices in your role for dean for diversity in arts, sciences, and engineering.

Beth Olivares:���������������������� Sure, thank you for that question. I believe that this set of practices can help us with all of the kinds of inclusion work we have to do. So responding to bias related incidents, responding to any kind of harm, preparing students to be able to actually speak their truth, whatever that truth is, and have other people know how to listen to those things, to those experiences, is not something that we have often been able to model. And I think – so I think back on student protests, and town hall meetings, where students and others scream and yell and they have real truth, real pain, and real experiences to share.

And it’s never been clearer to me that those things actually get heard in the way they need to be heard. So, moving from that model of waiting until things boil over, and the conversations are only being had among a few people behind closed doors, into a space in which we all have the capacity to listen and to speak the truth, however painful, and work from there. Seems to me to be the right way to go.

Jim Ver Steeg:���������������������� So, what’s next for our efforts in restorative practices here on campus?

Beth Olivares:���������������������� So, we’re in the process of preparing a proposal for a series of additional trainings to happen during the year, as well as a continuation of the work that that’s holistically emerging from, from the faculty and the graduate students. So more to come on that. Lots more will happen. But we don’t want to let the cat out of the bag too soon.

Jim Ver Steeg:���������������������� You know I have to try.

Beth Olivares:���������������������� I know [laughter]. I appreciate it.

Jim Ver Steeg:���������������������� And I want to remind folks that if they are interested in learning more about the restorative practices efforts at the URochester, they can go to Rochester.edu (slash) college (slash) diversity (dash) restorative-practices. So, Dean Beth Olivares, thank you so much for joining us.

Beth Olivares:���������������������� Thank you so much.

Jim Ver Steeg:���������������������� Professor Doughty, thank you for joining us.

Kristin Doughty:�������������� Thank you so much.

Jim Ver Steeg:���������������������� Duke Fisher and Toni McMurphy, they are coaches and experts in restorative practices. Thank you so much for being here.

Toni McMurphy:�������������� It’s been great.

Jim Ver Steeg:���������������������� For the Ģ����ý QuadCast, I’m Jim Ver Steeg. Our sound engineer is Joe Hagen. Thanks for listening.

[End of Audio]

He earned his PhD in English from the University of Maryland, a Master’s degree in Comparative Literature from the University of Illinois, and a Bachelor’s degree in German and Political Science from the University of Alabama. Dean Hall, thank you for joining us today.

Donald Hall:�������������������������� Thank you very much. I’m thrilled to be here.

Jim Ver Steeg:���������������������� And welcome to Rochester.

Donald Hall:�������������������������� I’m happy to be in Rochester.

Jim Ver Steeg:���������������������� That’s great.

Donald Hall:�������������������������� I’ve been here a little over a week and the weather has gone from blazing hot to acceptable.

Jim Ver Steeg:���������������������� To moderately hot.

Donald Hall:�������������������������� To moderately hot. That’s correct.

Jim Ver Steeg:���������������������� So, I want to start out by looking at some of your responsibilities and some of what your duties will be here at the URochester. And I know that you’ll have academic, administrative, and financial responsibility for a unit that is home to more than 350 faculty members, over 5000 undergraduates, and over 1300 graduate students. And so, that involves budgeting, development, advancement. That’s a big job. So, what attracted you to this opportunity?

Donald Hall:�������������������������� Well, in many ways it’s a bigger version of what I did at Lehigh. What is different here at Rochester, of course, in the way this college is set up is it does have engineering in it, which is very different. I’ve been collaborating with my fellow faculty members and administrators in engineering for many years at Lehigh, so it’s not new terrain for me. But, it will be fun to work with them more closely.

It’s also a different sort of setup in the sense that the dean of faculty here at Rochester has athletics under her or his responsibility, student life, financial, aid admissions – all of those things are new. So, when I was looking at possibilities after having been at Lehigh for seven years, this was big and interesting, and the university, of course, has a stellar reputation. So, it seemed like a great fit for me and what I wanted to do. And then I met people here and they’ve been fabulous.

Jim Ver Steeg:���������������������� Oh, that’s terrific. And I know that it’s a little bit early to talk about a grand vision for the future, but I know that you probably come to this role with some priorities. Can you share maybe what some of your priorities might be starting out?

Donald Hall:�������������������������� Well, I have been very transparent in the process of interviewing for the job and then talking with people as I was thinking about the position. And throughout my career – I’ve been in higher education since my first job, which was in 1991 – I really have developed a set of both skills, but also passionate commitment to several things. One is internationalization.

I’m a former Peace Corps volunteer. So, I know how – and also someone who was the first generation of my family to go to college, I know how world expanding, mid expanding that experience of going abroad for the first time or for an extended period of time can be. So, I have spent a lot of time working in universities on deepening international engagement. So, that is one key issue.

My own background, as you noted in terms of my educational background, but also my scholarly background is very interdisciplinary in nature. And so, both internationalization, but also interdisciplinary education has been key to what I have worked on in my career, but also that I feel is very important today in higher education, generally.

And the other thing – myself coming out of a background – I was born in the south in rural Alabama, and in an environment that was very fraught with racial tensions. And also as someone, myself, growing up as a gay kid in a very intolerant environment. That is the whole sort of movement toward embracing the real value of diversity in community. Not just tolerating diversity, but really loving diversity and respecting diversity, and really valuing it as a core principle of a vibrant community is something that I’ve brought to the work I’ve done in higher education.

So, as I look forward to the work I’ll be doing here in AS&E, I know that those touchstones of interdisciplinarity, internationalization, and diversity are gonna be ones that I go back to often.

Jim Ver Steeg:���������������������� And that’s a very important topic here at the URochester – is that interdisciplinary study. And I know that a lot of universities tout the specialness, the importance of interdisciplinary work. But, with a big medical center and so many other departments that support and work together, it’s an issue here and it’s a big – it’s a big opportunity for students to study interdisciplinary studies. So, how do you encourage students to do that? How do you encourage faculty to work together? What does that look like?

Donald Hall:�������������������������� Well, you know, I certainly think that the structure here really supports interdisciplinary work. I mean, the fact that we have an integrated College of Arts, Sciences, and Engineering itself is fairly unique. At so many universities now these are fragmented, and they are really silos between those entities that make it very difficult for students to move across those boundaries and borders very easily or adeptly. Here, I think that is much lower, that barrier to exploration beyond the boundaries of whatever major you happen to choose or concentration you happen to choose to really explore eclectically.

But, beyond that, you know, I really – when I think about the broad challenges that we are faced with as a globe – whether these are environmental challenges, challenges around economic injustice, around just the spread of disease – something like Ebola, let’s say, in Central and Southern Africa. When you look at these sorts of issues that we have to grapple with, they have cultural, they have social, they have engineering, they have scientific, they have a whole host of components that if you approach them from only one of those you really are not seeing the big picture and you really are not dealing with the complexity of a problem. So, when I talk to researchers, when I talk to teams of faculty, when I talk to students it really is: How do we begin to approach the grand challenges that we are facing as citizens of the globe, and how do we begin to problem-solve those in a way that really does respect the complexity of the issues in front of us?

And I think that ability to move among those domains of the social sciences, the STEM fields, the humanities, the arts – that is critical to facing, you know, these grand, really global challenges that are life-and-death ones for us. Again, if you think about threats to the environment or health threats, these are life-and-death challenges that don’t only have scientific solutions, they don’t only have medical solutions, they also – you have to look at culture, you have to look at language, you have to look at socioeconomics – all of these play in. So, that’s how I carry this message of, you know, the importance of interdisciplinary education, research, and thinking to people.

Jim Ver Steeg:���������������������� And that’s – I want to say that’s a uniquely humanitarian-humanities type approach, but I think what you’re saying is that you’re looking at it as a person who studies humanities, but also appreciates the hard sciences and what they can bring to solutions.

Donald Hall:�������������������������� Absolutely. Absolutely No, the humanities will not save us. Philosophy will not save us. Philosophy has something to say about an issue like injustice or an issue around, you know, cultural disagreements or cultural conflict, or around a threat such as a disease threat. We can understand those philosophically, but if you don’t understand the science behind it, you know, then you’re obviously not going to find a really comprehensive solution to an issue.

Jim Ver Steeg:���������������������� Right. And I want to go back to a little bit about the importance of a global perspective and an international perspective in higher education. And if you cast yourself back to your first job in higher education and your early memories of that, how has our understanding of the importance or understanding of the need for a global perspective changed in that amount of time?

Donald Hall:�������������������������� Well, I don’t want to reduce everything to vocational appropriateness, however I do think in the past 26 or 7 years, since I first started in higher education, the job market for our graduates has changed significantly. When you as an exiting BABS student go out into the world, you are unlikely to remain employed only in a small geographical area with no contact to anyone else. It may have been still true in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s, but in the 2000s and going forward, students and graduates’ careers are gonna take them across the globe. And so, when I’m talking with my faculty members, with staff members, and with students about what they – what students need in order to be best equipped to go out into the job marketplace – that global perspective; that comfort at working with people from different cultures, at being able to talk outside your comfort zone is absolutely critical to employability.

And so, you know, whether you’re going to be an engineer, or you’re going to be working in the finance industry, or whether you’re going to work in PR, or whether you’re going to be a teacher after you leave, you’re still going to have to deal with cultural difference and global difference. And so, I think the best thing we can do is train students, help equip them to be productive citizens of the world, not just citizens of their local community or state or region.

Jim Ver Steeg:���������������������� How does a liberal arts education factor into that preparation?

Donald Hall:�������������������������� Well, again, I think a liberal arts education – broadly defined, a liberal arts and sciences education – allows one to see the complexity of the world in front of you. It allows one to think about cultural difference, disciplinary difference. It allows one an understanding of languages, which I think is critical for students to have at least some awareness – not necessarily fluency, because fluency is a very difficult thing to achieve in a second or third language. But, at least a comfort with individuals who approach the world from a different linguistic standpoint as well as cultural epistemology.

I think that a liberal arts and sciences education, again, best equips one to think about complexity and difference. And I think that is critical right now, both in terms of individuals as citizens of the nation, but also citizens of the globe.

Jim Ver Steeg:���������������������� When we think about critical differences, cultural differences, and we, in terms of diversity, consider the importance of representation in a lot of different levels of higher education, I’m wondering how you approach diversity to the faculty. And I know that that’s been sort of a charge, is making sure that we have adequate diversity on our faculty. So, what are your thoughts about the diversity here now and where do you see your efforts in the future?

Donald Hall:�������������������������� Well, I think that – you now, Rochester is making excellent progress. I believe, you know, the College of Arts, Sciences and Engineering completed 18 or 20 searches this past year and over half of them were women, which is very good. It’s a record for the college. But, when I talk with faculty about the importance of diversity, you get at it from a – you can approach it from several angles. One is students, as we have an increasingly diverse and international student population.

Students have a base level right to see their own lives, their own backgrounds, their own cultures mirrored in the faculty. They really should have a university community that is as diverse as, you know, what they see around them among the student population. So, that is one practical aspect in terms of the sort of pedagogical effectiveness, I believe, of a university.

But, beyond that, diverse groups, people who really come out of very different backgrounds, perspectives, belief systems really do function more productively in the long run. They generate better ideas. We don’t learn through encounters with sameness. We learn through encounters with difference. And so, groups that are inherently diverse are more dynamic, they’re more likely to challenge each other.

Preconceptions are challenged, because people come at the topic at hand from many different perspectives and groundings. And they are more generative over the long run in terms of leading to new knowledge, new discoveries, new innovation. So, I think that there is both a pedagogical aspect to this, but there’s also an aspect to this that really is generative of new research and better thinking.

Jim Ver Steeg:���������������������� And you mentioned that you grew up as a gay kid in the south.

Donald Hall:�������������������������� Yes.

Jim Ver Steeg:���������������������� And how did that shape your understanding or your appreciation – your own appreciation for diversity and inclusion?

Donald Hall:�������������������������� It really demonstrated to me, one, that students need role models. They need to see people like them in positions of authority, responsibility; who are respected and productive members of the higher education community or society as a whole. It really demonstrated to me what can go wrong. For instance, again, growing up in Alabama in the 1960s and 70s when there was so much polarization – and there still is in many ways in the south; along racial lines, along political lines, along class lines. And the violence that that lack of even ability to communicate across difference can generate.

And so, I really think that as I’m, again, thinking about how we best equip students to be successful in life, both vocationally, but also as citizens of the country and of the globe. It’s really that ability to speak across difference, to speak to people unlike yourself with respect, listening as much as you do sort of assert your own beliefs, and to come to an ability to appreciate and, as I said, value diversity as fundamental to a healthy society.

And so, I think that really – coming, again, out of an environment in which both from the standpoint of sexual orientation, but also very much race in the south, where that ability to see the other – the other person, the other group – as having intrinsic humanity, of having an intrinsic worth – where that broke down and is in many parts of this country still very broken. I think the best that we can do at a university is model the type of community we want our students to go out and create off campus.

Jim Ver Steeg:���������������������� And so, your scholarship is around building those academic communities. So, what is your scholarship around that? What do you typically study? What do you look at in terms of academic communities?

Donald Hall:�������������������������� Well, I’ve written a couple of books on faculty development around higher education. One was called The Academic Self, and the other was called The Academic Community. And it really did go back to those core principles of being able to speak across differences, to understand the perspectives of others – even if you don’t agree with others. And this can work faculty to faculty, it can work across lines of faculty to administrator, or staff to staff. You know, faculty staff relations, et cetera play into this.

It really is, I think, critical for a higher education community to model the type of civic behavior that it wishes to instill in students. And, again, we should be – at a place like the URochester, we should be a model for what we want American society to live up to. And I think that is – in the work that I’ve done around especially community building on campus, it really does go back to that valuing of diverse perspectives, finding ways to coexist with those – with whom you disagree, sometimes very deeply, but nevertheless respectfully. And come together around the common good, which in the case of a place like this really is around advancing research and advancing the education of students.

Jim Ver Steeg:���������������������� And I know that you’re credited with increasing the size of the faculty at Lehigh, but also increasing the diversity of the faculty at Lehigh. So, how did you do that? What were your tactics? How did that come about?

Donald Hall:�������������������������� Some of it really does have to do with group efforts and working with other faculty who are very likeminded, and who, you know, really are committed to this project, who become the trainers of others, the trainers of their peers in terms of – because, I don’t – it’s very rare that in higher education you would find someone who is overtly opposed to the value of a diverse faculty, of being, you know, very proactive in searching for individuals from underrepresented groups. But, that doesn’t mean necessarily that they have the skills necessary to go out and make sure that faculty search pools are diverse as they should be or that the outreach efforts are as successful as they should be. So, what you want are individuals who are well-placed in units and departments to be trainers of others.

And then it’s a matter of critical mass, because it is very, very difficult – myself, knowing as the first out gay person in several units that I’ve joined over the years – it is difficult to be the first. That’s why at times in the past I’ve been a big proponent of cluster hiring, so that you bring in cohorts of individuals – at least groups of two, three, or more – so that people have a community where they really can share strategies, they can – where they’re not as likely to feel tokenized, because I think that is really destructive. If someone comes in and feels like she or he really is the first and perhaps only person who will represent that group and becomes the stand-in for all members of that group, the spokesperson for a race, a sexual orientation, a particular subset of our culture – I think that’s a recipe for disaster.

So, I really do see critical mass as important and oftentimes that can be achieved through cluster hiring. So, at my previous institution and over the years at even institutions before that, we really tried to bring in people – very thoughtfully, strategically, but in groups where we understand that they will need support systems. Because, it’s one thing to attract someone and it’s another thing to retain them. And retention becomes a real issue if someone is tokenized.

Jim Ver Steeg:���������������������� Did you get a sense that the cluster hiring resulted in a better sense of community for the new-hires?

Donald Hall:�������������������������� Oh, absolutely. No, over the years that I was at Lehigh, from 2011 to this past year, we really built a nationally recognized Africana studies program. And it was through a cluster hiring process, so that you really were bringing in individuals, not in groups of one at a time, but – or not at one at a time, but in groups of two, three, more, so that they did have that sense of community. A couple of years ago we started something very similar with our Latin American and Latino studies program, and that is ongoing and is still resulting in hires every year, and in groups sometimes of two or three.

So, I think that – I’ve seen it work. I really have seen it work. But, it’s critical, I think, for not only changing the initial numbers in terms of the way that a given year looks, demographically, but also in terms of retention and making sure that these sorts of successes are not lost after a couple of years.

Jim Ver Steeg:���������������������� Right. I’ll give you the famous two-part question.

Donald Hall:�������������������������� Sure.

Jim Ver Steeg:���������������������� So, coming to Rochester, what do you see as perhaps one of the greatest opportunities here, and maybe what do you see as maybe one of the greatest challenges here?

Donald Hall:�������������������������� Well, I think the opportunity, of course, is that – and this was clear to me from the very beginning. You know, I’ve said to you that I’ve been very transparent about who I am, what I stand for, my values, my priorities, and my track record. That has been actively sought after and has been – it’s why I was hired here. So, the will is there, the intentions are there. There are many people at the URochester and in Arts, Sciences, and Engineering who are completely onboard with these priorities that I’ve articulated to you.

The challenge is always one that, you know – there has been, of course, news in the past year about the Ģ����ý that’s not always been positive. So, there’s the immediate sort of getting past the history, the recent history in terms of the media coverage of the university. But, beyond that, it’s the same as every university experiences. We’re in Rochester, New York. We’re not in Manhattan. We’re not in Los Angeles.

We have to attract people to a particular place and that is – if you’re not in one of the largest metropolitan areas in the country, it can be very difficult, because people are looking to come here and join not only a university community, but a broader community outside the university. And I find it’s lovely here. It’s absolutely wonderful. But, you know, when you talk to people about Rochester it’s – you know, it’s like you’re talking about Greenland. It’s like it’s all snow and ice, and polar bears are wondering around. I mean, it really is – you know, it’s like you’re going off to the Yukon.

It’s like, “Do you have your prospector’s helmet, and your ice pick with you?” You know? So, there’s that perception. And we talked – I talked about that with the committee as I was interviewing here. And this was as much coming from them as it was from me. That you really do have to actively recruit people here. And I think that’s fine.

I mean, I was at West Virginia University for seven years. So, you know, we did some wonderful things at West Virginia, but you have to convince people to want to come to a place like West Virginia. Some places that people don’t automatically, you know, sort of think of when they think of, “This is where I want to go and join a vibrant and diverse community.” Which we have here and I think – you know, I think we can meet that challenge.

Jim Ver Steeg:���������������������� And as a student myself of queer theory, I do want to talk a little bit about your scholarship in that area. And I know that you talked to – wrote about this in a book, but I was asking – I’m gonna ask you about queer studies and about queer agency, and what that means to you, and what you share as far as improving a sense of agency for queer students, and if that translates to other marginalized populations?

Donald Hall:�������������������������� You know, I really think it does, because, you know, that whole concept of queer, you know, in the way that it was sort of – became very popular and popularized especially in the 1990s, but, you know, certainly has persisted for, you know, 20-soemthing years – really is about – to go back to something I said before – about valuing difference. The reason that term ‘queer’ became re-appropriated by Queer Nation and other activist groups was because it really was – had been used as a slur, as you know, for decades. Calling someone different and, you know, stigmatizing them for being different. Whereas the reclamation of that term really was to say, “Yes. We are different. We are proud of being different. And difference is important.”

So, in that way, I think that that idea of queerness, of valuing difference, of valuing people who think outside the normal routine ways of thinking is very generative and it really does, I think, say a lot about what society itself – as I indicated before – should value. In terms of valuing the differences of perspective, the differences of backgrounds, the differences of – you know, of ways of living one’s life that I think finally allows growth and change. And so, queer agency I think really is about carrying that message that – you know, to repeat something that I said a few minutes ago – that we only learn through encounters with those unlike ourselves.

And by learning to respect – to hear their perspectives, to respect their perspectives, and to use those outside perspectives to question what we think and the way that we’ve been approaching things I think really does lead to social progress, scientific progress, research progress, et cetera.

Jim Ver Steeg:���������������������� Is Lehigh University a decentralized university?

Donald Hall:�������������������������� No.

Jim Ver Steeg:���������������������� Okay.

Donald Hall:�������������������������� This is that one extreme of a kind of decentralization. Lehigh was somewhere in the middle. And then I’ve been in very centralized environments before. But, no, it was – we were a very hybrid university in the sense that we had certain aspects that were highly decentralized and then others that were very centralized.

Jim Ver Steeg:���������������������� So, what do you think about coming to a more decentralized place?

Donald Hall:�������������������������� I think that it is both very empowering when you’re, you know, in a position – in a college position. Where, again, there’s a lot of responsibility, but also a lot of opportunity that occurs within units, a college unit. What I think that it – what I think the university still will need to think about – and certainly we’ll have a new president, you know, who will be joining us in a year or so – is: How does that decentralized model – which is very engrained here and is not likely to change – how does it also dovetail with the desire to build a university brand? That, I think, is the real challenge. It’s easy enough within a unit to build a brand.

But, if we have, you know, the College of Arts, Sciences and Engineering; we have the Simon School; we have the Warner; we have Eastman; we have the medical center; and then we have a president sitting over all of this. How does she or he think about what holds it all together? And what advances the institution as a whole? I think that’s the challenge.

In the unit perspective, like I said, it’s very liberating in a sense that you really – you know, deans of the units, the sort of executive dean of the unit really is almost like a university president or a college president. Which is – again, attracted me to the job. But, I think from really the university president at the URochester, that president is gonna have to think about how to move the institution as a collective and as a cohesive unit forward. And I think that’s the challenge and opportunity.

Jim Ver Steeg:���������������������� Sure. And you hear a lot of talk about challenges to the value of higher education. If it’s challenges from technology or if it’s challenges from the cost of higher education. So, how do you communicate, in essence, the value of higher education?

Donald Hall:�������������������������� You have to look at what students get when they – the lives they lead afterwards. You know, there are very cheap educations at institutions in which students have no employability after they graduate. Then you look at the very high-quality institutions like Rochester, like Lehigh was, where students almost uniformly succeed after graduating, they enter successful careers, they have lives that, you know, are models in many ways. And the investment up front is well worth it in terms of the return on that investment.

You know, there was a piece in a national publication a few weeks ago, really, that talked about the winners and the losers. And Rochester is very much on the side of the winners in the sense that we have a track record to build on. We have proof in terms of the employability of our graduates, the success of our graduates, to say that, “Yes. The sticker price going in is very high. But, for that investment you really have a path forward that is remarkable.” And I don’t think that many, you know, less expensive institutions can say that.

So, while, yes, we’re very conscious of and we should all be very conscious of cost containment. But, we’re not funded by the State of New York, we’re not funded by the federal government. We are internally self-funding. And much of that is through tuition dollars, and the rest is through endowment and gifts, et cetera. But, for that price, students really do get an extraordinary education here.

Jim Ver Steeg:���������������������� And I see a sort of continuum from the academic community, particularly for students, developing into that alumni network. That continued connection.

Donald Hall:�������������������������� That’s right. That’s absolutely right. What you want is for students to have the type of experience here that will make them want to stay connected to this university for their lives, their entire lives. Because, those alumni going out are gonna be the ones that are the potential employers of the new graduates. They’re gonna be the supporters of this university, that will ensure the financial health of the university.

They’ll be the ones on the outside who are promoting this university, not just nationally but internationally. And so, the type of experience that they have here for their four years – or if they’re a graduate student; two, or six, or whatever – really should connect them to this university, you know, throughout their lives.

Jim Ver Steeg:���������������������� So, we’ve talked a bit about some broader perspectives, some goals and some visions for down the road. Is there anything that you want to accomplish or anything you’re looking forward to in the near future? Is it unpacking your boxes or –?

Donald Hall:�������������������������� Well, part of it is unpacking my boxes. Part of it simply is learning all about people’s aspirations here. You know? I mean, summer is a wonderful time to start, because, you know, it’s relatively – not slow, but relatively slower during the summer. But, once we get to August and the students are coming back and the faculty are coming back, you know, I look forward to starting to visit departments, programs, units; talking with the communities within those units, talking to staff, talking to students, and hearing about their real aspirations for this university and for the college.

So, I – you know, I’m in learning mode right now, and unpacking mode. But, you know, the movers will be here probably sometime around August 1. So, before the work floods in around the middle of August, I hope to have a lot of boxes unpacked.

Jim Ver Steeg:���������������������� Dean Hall, thank you so much for joining us today.

Donald Hall:�������������������������� I’m thrilled to be here. No, thank you very much. And, you know, I look forward to working with everyone here.

Jim Ver Steeg:���������������������� Thanks to our sound engineer, Joe Hagen. For the Ģ����ý’s QuadCast, this is Jim Ver Steeg.

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