 Good afternoon, good afternoon. It is wonderful, wonderful to see you all on this excellent occasion. President Ono, Provost Macaulay, officers of the university, fellow deans, and dear friends. Good afternoon and welcome to the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy. I'm Celeste Watkins Hayes and I have the honor of being the Joan and Sanford Wildean here at the Ford School as well as the founding director of the Center for Racial Justice here. I'm delighted to see this community from across the university, from the College of Literature, Sciences and the Arts, the Rackham Graduate School, and so many others. We have representatives here from the departments of Afro-American and African Studies and Political Science and History as well as our friends at the Center for Social Solutions. We also have folks viewing online. We gather to salute our friend, colleague and mentor to many, Professor Earl Lewis. As we know, he is the first University of Michigan faculty member to receive the National Humanities Medal. In the ceremony at the White House, President Biden said, Earl Lewis chronicles African-American history and explores how diversity strengthens our nation. And it does strengthen our nation. As a university administrator who has shaped some of our preeminent institutions, pushing them to meet the challenges of our times. From water scarcity to the future of work to racial injustice, he makes American universities an even more important source of our national dynamism. Now to start things off, I'm honored to introduce our president, Santa Ono, the 15th president of the University of Michigan. He joined U of M after serving as the president of the University of British Columbia. Prior to Rich, he was the president of the University of Cincinnati. As an experienced visionary researcher, Santa has spent his career at research universities including Emory, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and the University of College, London. Santa is also an accomplished cellist and he holds degrees from the University of Chicago and McGill University. We thank him for his leadership. President Ono. Well thank you Dean Watkins Hayes for that introduction and for your outstanding leadership of the Ford School. It's always wonderful to be here, I had a chance to speak with some of the students here and they're just thrilled with your leadership and what they're learning here at the school. So thank you. Let's hear it for her. It's really wonderful to be with all of you today to pause, to celebrate someone who means so much to everyone in this room but to thousands of people around the world. I've seen him at different institutions and I know how much he's admired for his scholarship but also for his support and mentorship of many, many people. Here at the University of Michigan, Earl Lewis is known by in many different capacities as a professor, as a thesis supervisor, as a mentor, as a friend. As you know he is a leading social historian, an award-winning author and he's founder of a very important initiative here at the University of Michigan, the Center for Social Solutions and also as you know he's co-chairing a very, very important initiative here at the University of Michigan, Inclusive History Project and that's involving many, many members of our community here, faculty, staff and students and it's incredibly important work. Really taking an honest look at our history here at University of Michigan is a foundation to a better future and writing some wrongs that have occurred in post-secondary education but also at our institution. Being truthful about our history is a very first step in the path forward. As you know and you just heard from Celeste, he's the very first Wolverine to receive the National Humanities Medal and as you know these national medals, these national medals are the highest honors given by the US government and we've been fortunate to have a National Medal of Science and National Humanities Medal and we've also had national arts medals as well at the University of Michigan. For me this is a especially meaningful moment because of the role Earl you've played in my own life. I wouldn't be here today. I wouldn't have developed into a leader where it not for Earl giving me the chance at Emory University. I was a very green administrator when I was at University College London and Earl took the chance in giving me an opportunity to work with him as his deputy and then senior vice provost of undergraduate academic affairs and every single day I reached back to those experiences and to the lessons I learned from him in what I do as president of the University of Michigan. I'm very grateful for that opportunity Earl and thank you for that and congratulate you on this tremendous honor to be honored by the United States government and with that I understand that we're going to listen to a wonderful conversation between Dean Watkin Hayes and Dr. Lewis. Thank you very much congratulations again Earl. Thank you so much President Ohno for those wonderful remarks. Hello. Hi there. It's so great to be with you and so great to see you. I'm going to start with the obvious reason why we're all here but we're going to unpack all of the other reasons why we're here all of the different ways that you've had impact. I wonder if you can tell us about the call. So the call it actually started with an email before the call and there's some in this room know on a Monday evening late it was after nine o'clock I get an email from someone connected to the White House asking me if I'd be willing to take a call the next day from the chairwoman of the National Endowment for the Humanities. I said to Susan I hope this is not another assignment to be honest there had been a handful of requests for me to take on an assignment or two for President Biden and for a variety of reasons I hadn't been able to do so up until that point but I said sure I will be glad to talk to her this is the window and as you know Celeste knows because we as fate would have it Celeste was the next person I saw after that call because we were having lunch that day and and this is before they told me I wasn't supposed to tell anyone and so I get a call and I realize it instead of an assignment it's an honor and I was floored and taken aback and every now and then left speechless and so that was one of those moments tell me about the significance of this award why do you think it's important at the presidential level to recognize scholars to recognize people who have contributed to the humanities people who contributed to the sciences why why do these awards matter the awards symbolize in many ways that the work you do is not just about yourself it's actually accumulations important for the overall civic project and called the United States of America and when you end up with an award from the president of the United States it signals to you and to others that what you do behind closed doors or in meetings or elsewhere actually it is important and this is all the more important for the humanities in a certain way the arts because they have a performing side and a visual side it seemed to be more in the present and people get to see it the humanities when you're writing and you're telling stories and you're producing a poetry or analytical examinations of text sometimes seem hidden and you have seen politicians of all ilks Republicans and Democrats this is bipartisan who have questioned the value of humanities and very public ways of the last decade or two and so to be able to stand up and to be recognized and to be in the company of the people I was in the company of is a way to say that not only did the work that I undertook mattered but the work of all of us matter and that's actually important and it's someone who ran the Mellon Foundation five years where at one point Mellon was actually giving more money for working in humanities than either NEA or NEH combined at one point it's now may have been surpassed but during my presidency we were doling out about three hundred million dollars a year for the humanities and the arts far more than a national government so it's important symbolically as well as materially that in some ways we recognize this work so you and I share a love of stories and particularly origin stories I wonder if you can take us back to your origins to Norfolk Virginia and help us connect that little boy to this individual who receives the National Medal of Humanities on my block my brother is here and so I should my my Rudy and on our block and growing up in the second day to south in the 1950s and 1960s there was no clear path to a national map and so and even imagining that you would get invited to the White House was something that was beyond the dream that we have but and so I look at this but also reminded of my grandmother and so this is the origin story so in the last couple of years of my grandmother's life this is the early 1980s I was doing research in Norfolk on what became my dissertation in my first book and so I decided who better to interview than my grandmother who had lived and grown up in the north of Gary of her entire life and she was in her 80s at that point and so my grandmother told me something she had never told me before and it was about her own dreams and about a dream deferred but a dream never to be denied so she had was born turn of the century enrolled Norfolk County moved into the city of Norfolk and it always wanted to go to college and in fact she wanted to go not to college to college generically she wanted to go to st. Augustine College in Raleigh North Carolina she actually had a particular college in mind the HBCU in Raleigh North Carolina she saved twice and each time her father came and asked her to surrender the money to save an older brother from losing his house and so she would say to me that it was like nothing actually impacted her greater than that than death to sell because she realized what she was forfeiting for family so fast forward this is the 1920s fast forward to the 1940s and after World War two my grandparents had three kids my mom Virginia was the oldest of the three my grandmother had not been able to go to college and had worked as a domestic most of her work in life my grandfather was a laborer working for the US government at the Naval Air Station painting planes and so my mother it was decided was going to go to college at that point to Norfolk State which was the Norfolk Division of Virginia State College for Negroes for anyone who knows the Virginia educational landscape Virginia State was in Petersburg Norfolk was the upstart and so and my mother started at Norfolk State my grandmother decided that was not a good thing so the good God-fearing church-going woman that she was she played the numbers and she hit and she used that to actually send my mom to college and some ways that's the origin story because my grandmother believing that college was important made sure that all three of her kids went to college so by the time I came along that was the expectation in this working-class black family in Virginia that education was a ticket and the path and the ability to make a way out of no way exactly exactly so how did you decide that higher education would be the path for you it sounds like your your family had a love of education but was there pressure to do something else yeah I mean it was pressure was a good a job and so for those this is 1970s and so I graduated from Concordia College in 1978 and Bill Kraft the former president of Concordia is here with us and that was in Moorhead Minnesota and Harold Pope who was my classmate who lives in Detroit and a prominent lawyer the group of black kids all trying to figure out how we ended up in Moorhead Minnesota and 50 years later we're still trying to figure that out I don't know if they have a better explanation than I do I decided it was not a physical something from her previous life let me there and I made my way through it all and so when I finished undergrad I decided I was going to graduate school and I applied to the University of Minnesota was the only place I applied to go to graduate school in history and but I was going to get a master and make my masters and then make my way back to the East Coast and when I was there my first year my good friend Joe Trotter who is a faculty member at Carnegie Mellon he looked at me and he says Earl you're gonna be the next one of us I said the next one of us to do what he said you're gonna be the next one of us to finish it and get your PhD here Joe saw something in me that I didn't even see in myself at that point in time and he was prophetic he was right Joe as he would tell the story Joe finishes PhD at the University of Minnesota in the late 70s and 80s early faster than anyone he did it in five years me and these in the years where there was no support extraordinary I did it in six and so at that point about okay I think I can figure out this professor thing and and maybe actually be good at it but it was in part because I had mentors I had mentors who were classmates I had mentors who were faculty members Russ Menard who is my primary advisor was a colonial historian an economic colonial historian and Russ would look at me and he says Earl history stopped after 1800 he said the rest of this stuff is present tense and and he and I would laugh and I said no Russ the history starts again in the 19th century into the 20th century but we would laugh about it but he showed me things about what it meant to be a professor and how and he and John Modell and Clark Chambers and Lasin a Kaba and Alan Isaacman and a whole range of others became touchstones for me about the possibility of living life as an academic so talk to us about how you craft your intellectual trajectory when you think about your articles and books and the ways in which you have really been successful in weaving together history and policy discussions and black studies and all of these different disciplines with this connective tissue around black experiences and black life and the promise of America can you talk about how did that come together how did that become your part of your life I'm actually trying to write an introductory chapter to a book of essays my own essays that's going to be published by the University of California Press and so I've been forced to go back and my brother's gonna laugh at this I give credit to the most unlikely person in the world our geometry teacher in high school Mrs. Overby this is 1971 and in just a peak Virginia Mrs. Overby was a conoclastic I would say that but she also was one who hew closely to an old vision of the world so in one day in my geometry class Mrs. Overby decided to regale us with the stories about the good old days on the plantation and you know sit with that for a second you know young black kid and this is your geometry teacher decided to give your history lesson and it took a few minutes into one of the older I was a sophomore one of the older students in the class found a litter and said Mrs. Overby can we get back to the lesson plan and she snapped and she returned to geometry and vectors and angles and a whole range of other things but I realized later on that that moment was a story about race and power in American life because what do you think she was trying to achieve in that moment to remind us of power in place I mean so there was no ambiguity I mean as we said in my my brother and I laughed about it later because Mrs. Overby my brother went on to get a graduate undergrad and graduate degrees in engineering electrical engineering but Mrs. Overby was trying to convince him there was only one way to solve a proof and and and she insisted that her way was the only way I mean so it was not only in her conversation about race that day it was also her pedagogical approach that there was only one way to do it and hers with the way but that day it was something else it was the case that while the school had desegregated and she was now forced to teach black and white and other students that was not her preference there was her job but it was not her preference on this day she wanted to actually insert her preference into a conversation that interrupted her job and that piece about history and power and the ways in which race inserts itself into mundane activities like teaching geometry sits with me all the time and it's funny I asked students from Berkeley to Michigan to Emory to around the country I go so how many of you've ever played the racial guessing game and they go that's the racial guessing game I go how many of you've actually walked into a room or walked across the street and you see someone ambiguous and before you know it you're trying to place them somewhere what's that about for all those people who tell you race doesn't matter how come you play the recent get racial guessing game what's the socialization in the process that leaves you to do that even when you know you shouldn't be doing it in some ways that brings me back as it was clear to Ms. Overby that you didn't have to play the game the game was there and we were part of it and I have set with that from that geometry class in 1971 72 to the day 50 some years later and it is something we still as we all know grapple with as a country and as a world and one of the things that we talk about within the Ford School are that policies have genealogies and that understanding that historical context is so critical for understanding where we are now so when you look around and see where we are right now at this present moment as a historian what goes through your mind it's an interesting question as a historian my first response is you know we have seen bits and pieces of this before and having to understand how and why and so as Celeste knows and some of you know we the Center for Social Solution in partnership with WQED just released a documentary on PBS nationwide called the cost of inheritance it is an examination of history race and reparations in the United States and so they are there's an example in there of John Boyd who's an African-American farmer in Mecklenburg County in Virginia and John tells the story in this documentary about not 1953 or 1963 or 1973 but 1983 trying to get a loan from a local federal representative for the farm administration and he was said in its latest 1983 this agent went only see black farmers two days a week for a limited set of hours and he tells his story in the film where he was sitting there he says one day where he had his time and the agent allowed a white farmer who was named Earl to come into the room during his time and handed the white farmer a check for 173 thousand dollars he had been fighting for several years to get a check for five thousand dollars that disparity between his right as a farmer and his desires as a farmer has a whole lot of antecedents 1983 1993 2003 is the Obama administration before actually the government begins to right the wrong of years of the nine black farmers the same access to capital as they awarded white farmers in that story is there in the history I mean for those who decry the claim that 40 acres in a mule makes no sense as some members of Congress have said recently all the people responsible for that are dead and I said that's absolutely right they are dead but we are the descendants of those who actually made those laws and policies 40 acres in a mule weren't possible but yet we still provide 160 acres at a time under the Homestead Act which is the latest the greatest wealth transfer in American history do you think that if people had a deeper understanding of history they would think about policies and policy prescriptions differently do you think that's part of the reason there's a concerted effort to not teach history and to not engage these yeah I wish she was as straightforward as people knew history they'd be better yeah I think part of the challenge is is that we're dealing with power in so many different ways and who gets to claim it who gets to hold on to it who gets to assert it and so history can be used and misused as we've seen and demagogues oftentimes actually know just enough history to get people to follow them and it's not that they are ignorant of history is how they use and misuse and abuse history for their own whims and we look you know yeah I sit here we can watch an event on national television on January the 6th and then people will tell you later it didn't happen or it didn't happen the way that you saw it with your own eyes and you're encouraged to believe in some ways that counter-narrative is indeed the correct narrative and raises profoundly important questions about force school and others it was not history it's a certain kind of literacy that we need to make sure that we're about how did we make legible to pass how do we make sure that people are literate enough to understand and question what they see and go and look and try to understand what are indeed the original sources I mean so I'm less saying when that history written history is this saving device more so than a certain kind of literacy is critical at this moment with so much is coming at us in so many different forms that you can't tell fake from deep fake how do we think about that as educators it's something that at the University I know we're very concerned about colleagues across the country are concerned about it as well how do we translate that how do we reshape our curriculum how do we reshape how we're instructing students to have that deeper level of legibility and understanding and literacy yeah I think there are three ways that I would say that we can address it one is to actually be quite up front about our own limitations I mean there are certain things we can know and certain things that we may not know and so that piece I think is critical me you stand in front of a classroom you oftentimes want to be the authority you're taught and you've been taught to be the authority but how do you surrender that off authority as an instructor and deal with the vulnerability of not always having all of the answers on the most complete set of answers so that's one piece of the pedagogical part to it the second part I think has to do then with how we actually accumulate the sources that we're going to use to explain whatever it is about the past or the present that we're trying to connect and how do we really pull those sources and then the third part is actually how we invite our students to be the active learners because what I've learned over almost 40 years is that if I'm standing in front of a classroom lecturing my students get so much if they have to actually turn and be the instructors and actually go and understand how that material was made what the argument is what the sources are etc. and then teach it to the others in the class then they actually learn more and I've been able to test this over years and I realize that redesign of the classroom where the students are not the passive recipients but the active creators of the knowledge that's been produced in the classroom also means that it usually sticks with them longer than if they don't you know on the other side of the table just received. Do you think higher ed is struggling from a PR problem where we're not good at telling our own story in terms of what we do or do you think we're in the midst of a power struggle? A little bit of both I mean I was laughing with someone last week I go you know if higher ed was as good at corrupting young minds as being alleged by some maybe that good there'd be no news story. I mean because we were succeeded and I saw I laughed at a certain level at in the perfect way the innocence of the claim and that somehow that there are these unformed individuals who walk into a classroom and we sort of mold them into these little proselytics who go out and proselytize in a certain kind of way. It doesn't happen at least it's not been my experience at the very least and so that's one part the second part of it is yeah we do have a PR problem because as some of us who know you can't get all the big 10 schools to agree on the same thing and you certainly can't get all the AAU schools which are the major research universities to agree on the same thing and then you multiply that to the 4,000 colleges and post-secondary institutions in the United States and imagine that we speak with one voice and we don't. We've never spoken with one voice. I don't know that we should. I mean so with some part of the heterogeneity of the institution of higher education in the United States is power and perhaps it's weakness that we aren't all the same thing. We never have been never will be but that means then for those who want to pick out a story and pick out a theme we're easy prey because we all aren't the same and we don't speak with the same and we don't have the same intentions but. So how do we navigate that? How do we respond to it? How do we think about an effective voice set of voices as opposed to one voice as it relates to the importance of higher education? I mean I think part of it is you try to figure out who's in your neighborhood right? I mean so as a higher ed institution when I was chairperson of the Concordia board I would say to Bill oftentimes what neighborhood do you want to be in and who's in your neighborhood and how do you influence the folks in your neighborhood and how do you engage in conversations with folks in your neighborhood? We all live in communities and trying to get people to understand something about their community. My good friend George Sanchez told a story that I often repeat all the time in many different settings and George if I get it wrong you can correct me later but George was telling us we were in a meeting and George was offering an example in Southern California and I think as I remember correctly there was a vote coming up in this community about paying more taxes and all for public schools and one person stood up saying you know this really isn't about me. My kids have all grown up and why should I pay more for somebody else's kids? And as I remember the story another person stood up and says to that person talking they asked you three questions and the person said sure when you're done do you plan on retiring and the person said yeah. Says well when you retire do you plan to sell your home and he says yeah well when you sell your home who you think is going to buy other than those other people's children so an investment in those other people's children is an investment in your retirement plan. For some people that's the motivator. Yeah and all of a sudden for that person as I understand it a little light bulb went off in his head that he was no longer disconnected but he was actually part of community he was in a neighborhood and place in that neighborhood mattered that's the same thing for her and part of it is talking about our connection to so many different people so many different stakeholders so many different constituencies beyond just the students in our classroom right and all of the impact we have yeah. We live in a big wide world I was had the great fortune of being invited to give the this 75th this distinguished lecture for the Fulbright program or something like that I forget which number it was the 75th look I distinguish for the Fulbright program between the UK and the US and so I was in Edinburgh right after Thanksgiving and I realized that a conversation there I'm just giving a talk entitled the grace of reparations and arguing that if we look across the world the whole question of race and reparations is not an American story alone the UK and Europe and the rest of the world has its own versions of that story and how do we pursue a graceful way of beginning to think through what are our obligations to one another and I think part of the challenge and the opportunity for us as we sort of pondered the question so let's just think okay this world is more connected now than it ever has been I can send a message and in 15 seconds is someplace sitting in a phone someplace in the rest of the world and you sort of realize what that means I mean there are moments when I yearn for the analogue day when I would get a letter and I would sit and let us sit there for a few days and then I would respond and then a week or so later it would get to where it's gonna be and and communication was slow and easier not easy but easier and now you realize that almost everyone in this room if you get a text or an email is expected to answer within 35 seconds to 45 seconds and you think of what that does to the brain loop if you always on you always thinking about how you're gonna answer and how quickly you need to answer we don't get a chance to pause and think when I was provost at Emory and Santa maybe remember this we present provost as provost and president I and rest of the cabinet we had a rule on big complicated issues we were gonna suspend time we were gonna say that we weren't gonna answer in the next 24 or 48 hours we would tell people we would get them an answer in within 48 hours but we wouldn't rush to try to get an answer in that first 24 to 48 hours because in some ways we had to figure out how to slow time me and in this connected world as we think through these problems how do we begin to address problems that are more than one or two or three millennia old yeah I had been given this commencement address and poor Susan has heard it more than once my wife where I remind people that geneticists have now to confirm what we long knew that all humans share 99.9 percent of the same DNA which in effect means that all of human history has been written about one tenth of one percent of difference and you think of the fact that over the course of millennia we've forgotten our shared origin story going back to your first question we have a shared origin story we've moved away from that shared origin story event by event decade by decade century by century war by war millennia by millennia what does it mean to sit on that notion that we all share the same 99.9 percent of the same DNA that in effect all of human history is about that one tenth of one percent of difference is that part that actually forces us to reconnect with one another but also to ask different questions about how we tell that that shared origin story. So much of the Center for Social Solutions really brings that concept to life of the commonality that we share and it's so interesting to me how you selected these four key areas of focus and you're doing this at a point in your career where you've looked at and thought about so many different topics so many different ideas you've had an administrative career where that's taken you from you of them to Emory work at the Mellon Foundation seeing hundreds of proposals for ideas how did you settle on the four driving ideas for the Center for Social Solutions and you're right they were my ideas I always tell everyone else no one else should be held responsible for the four ideas that I came up with so the first one I'd already started and so before I joined the Mellon Foundation I organized a convening at the Mellon Foundation so I was the president designate and we brought in a group of people Nasa Cantor was in the room and we brought in the university presidents general councils etc etc and we were trying to think through post-gruder and grots after Hopwood and others begin to think through what the terrain and landscape looked like and what people knew and so out of that came OCI the our compelling interest series because we realized after that convening of 25 30 very smart and able and well-situated people that they knew less about the law let alone the science and the scholarship behind the Gruden grots cases than we had hoped and so we thought we needed to come up with a new effort so we ended up calling an our compelling interest the value of diversity for prosperous democracy so that was already there and I had already started it before I decided to leave Mellon so thrust one diversity and democracy okay but then I'm a historian and an American social historian and it was circa 2016 or so and I'm sitting there going 2019 is right around the corner and and I'm a native Virginia and so we're approaching the 400th anniversary of the importation of the first African peoples into colonial James James Town in Virginia slavery is almost like that specter it's always offstage but never completely gone in American life and in my view we had not fully addressed or dealt with it and so I I could see that we were getting close to 2019 and we were going to need to do something about it and I remember when I raised this issue in this prospect with some folks at the foundation including my board chair and others they were a little leery of taking on this topic and their body language encouraged me all the more and that I had found the right topic and entitled because I deeply believe that the story of slavery is not an old story is an ever-present story and according to more recent data there are more people in some form of unbounded labor in the world today than at the end of the 19th century of forced labor and so we began to look at more recent contemporary statistics you realize that the story of human trafficking is just one example of the continuation of the story so for us and then slavery and his aftermath became a theme because I wanted to center it in certainly what we think of as the second slavery that period of the transatlantic slave route but that transatlantic slave route had a sub-Saharan slave route an Indian route as well and so most Americans we talk about one and not the other and those two together talk about much of the world and so we went there but then I was struck I was when I was at Emory we were in a meeting at the Carter Center well actually where George Georgia Tech with representatives from the Carter Center from Georgia Tech and Emory and there was Georgia Tech I believe it was a colleague was telling this story and then Jeff Copeland who had been at one point in this life the director of the CDC would tell another story but the story was something like this where there was a West African village without drinkable water close by and the women would have the ferry water from somewhat contaminated river stream into the central village and so see the little World Bank I think it was the World Bank and not into an international monetary fund but one of them funded a project and they brought in the engineers and the engineers did what engineers do they examined the problem and it came up with a solution they built a well right in the center of the village all done at least they thought and then to their surprise the women can't walk into the river to get the water and they couldn't figure out why the women were still walking to the river and so eventually they brought in an anthropologist and a gender expert to talk to the women and the women said yeah like we like the clean water but that wasn't the only reason that we actually went to the river and there are other social ways where we actually got away from the children and the man and the household duties and the community by going to the river putting the well right there saw one problem and created another one because then you're right there right there exactly right and in that for me became a metaphor on me and in a lot of ways that we oftentimes try to diagnose a problem believing that we have actually spoken to all the right people without speaking to the actually most central folks in the overall narrative and so as we're thinking about that so I asked question I go so what does it mean then if to be able to move water mean what would it mean to be able to move water from flood prone areas to drought stricken areas and in between Fargo North Dakota and Moorhead Minnesota and the River Valley used to flow north and flood every year so from slavery and its aftermath theme to to water and security yeah water and secure yeah water and security became the way because all of a sudden engineers will say the same thing it's not an engineering problem to move water from one place to another it's every other kind of problem we have pipes that can and hoses that can move vast amounts of water from one place to another and the question becomes then what is it what does it mean to be every other kind of problem and in a world right now where climate is quote-unquote an essential threat I think it's a threat I don't think you ever even modify it you reference I grew up in Norfolk Virginia has been stinking since I've been born and continues to be on the water and that's a problem because that's where it's the naval east coast naval fleet is housed and so they're trying to figure it out but what it was it mean then as we think about water and so I thought this is the wildcard question for me as a social historian I'm but I have wonderful colleagues in the Center for Social Solutions for whom the study of water and then colleagues in engineering and others one but we're learning along the way that's we try to move this along and then fourth real quickly is the dignity of labor in an automated world and this stems in part I started as a labor historian among other things and so I've always been interested in workers and the dignity of labor and is alleged that between robotics and AI and all what it means to labor is going to change and it's changing so how will we ascribe dignity to work and I think of this in in a Western context but I think in the modern context almost any place you go in the world at least in a Western setting within five minutes and encountering someone the conversation user turns to so what do you do what do you do and imagine a world in which is impossible to answer what do you do and so we started with that question of trying to sort of situate thinking about what do you do and it's the dignity of labor in an automated world I want to ask you about the inclusive histories project because that too is a place of exploring our common humanity dealing with some difficult truths encouraging us to think deeper and I wonder if you can first of all for people who aren't familiar with it talk about the inclusive histories project and then talk about the significance of what it's meant to be involved in this project here at the University of Michigan so the inclusive history project has three starts and in a way I tell the story now others here may tell the story differently and so it started in part over Fielding Yoast and Paciwa the president's advisor community on university history who recommending that Yoast's name come off the ice arena and there's a reason behind that and I was on that committee so I'd say this is someone who was on that committee because of Yoast's involvement in the incident that led to the bench in the world's ward in the 1930s when he and Jerry four were on the football team etc that decision our recommendation was heard and the question was is that enough me and should we not and in fact do more and do a broader and deeper examination of the university in this history and so that went from Mark to Mary Sue to Santa and and that sort of order and that cadence and so we spent the first year in what I refer to as year zero which upsets some my colleagues and I'll take the blame because I was the one who wanted to call it year zero because I didn't want to give anyone the impression that we were doing anything more than framing and designing how we should go about studying the institution's history and that's not to say that people weren't already doing work we've said it multiple times and I'll say it again we knew that people were already doing work and we were building on that work but we didn't want to implant it we were starting to do work until we actually understood what we were trying to achieve and so we spent a year designing and framing and now this year we actually have begun the work of trying to understand the university's own history two centuries worth of history there but doing it a little differently than most others and so many other colleges and universities started with a story about slavery and slavery was a defining moment in their creation the University of Michigan doesn't have the slavery narrative as a defining moment and so we are going back to 1817 and the land grant with native peoples in the state of Michigan what became the state of Michigan and what that responsibility is and has been but we're also trying to do something else which I think is actually key we framed this as a project is also to be reparative in nature it's not just about telling the story about our past but it's just to actually tell the story about what needs to be repaired in the present and that is hard work as we make our way through and I've said to Santa more than one occasion this is at a minimum of five year project it could very well be a decades long project and I will it was on the other end of a decade I will watch I will have gone up payroll by that time as I remind people I found I'm on a five I was on a ten-year lease I'm now in a five-year lease and so and the clock is ticking down and in that direction and so that means then we're trying to get a certain number of things done and the next period and so we have several major efforts on the way our website will be released in the next few couple of weeks and so that will be the first public attempt to really share with the broader community what we're doing and but we will have reports and for those of interest that you can actually read the framing and design committee report from last year but our hope is to do three things at a broad level one is to be repaired and so we'll be able to see that and so that means that if we're telling the same stories about the university and 20 30 or 20 35 that we told in 2020 we will have failed we really fundamentally believe that it should have forced us to take a harder look and so if the young people who are given a college tours give the same college tours in five or ten years from now we deemed that a failure and we've said that and as an example but we also believe that this should be where people get to take it and do their own kinds of projects and so we're trying to support faculty staff and students who want to initiate projects as well as there is sort of guide big projects that the institution itself will be about and then the last thing I would say and this is at a sort of high level is that we also expect that in the end the iconography of the campus will change in some formal sense me and the markers the signage all of that should have changed a little bit whose pictures on the wall which pictures are on the wall how long they stay on the wall perhaps even what names are on the wall will change as well and those are our expectations it's nice to be on the front end of all of this rather than the back end because you can still remain quite hopeful I want to finish where we started which is when you talked about the medal and receiving the national humanities medal and for those who are right here you talked about a significance in terms of people and it's so interesting to me all of the different institutions that you've been a part of and you've named in reference many of them here you come back to the University of Michigan and I remember when I was thinking about moving and I had lunch with you and Al Young and I said tell me about the University of Michigan so I'm gonna close by asking you what is this place called the University of Michigan and what has it meant to you and your career so the University of Michigan is both a physical location and in the imaginary location may add some level yeah I when I was away so for those who don't know I was here for 15 years the first time 89 to 2004 and then I went away for 14 years 2004 to 2018 and then I came back in 2018 and so as an imaginary place imagine yourself walking along somewhere on the other west side in Manhattan and you have on a Michigan cap exactly and go blue you don't even need to know the person you just walk by and the only exchange is go blue and you keep walking and and and and it's that part of an imaginary community that you're part of now half the people I'm not even sure were Michigan alums but they had the cap and they were still part of this imaginary community and it's that piece that even when I was away I could still sort of touch that imaginary community but it was also a place where I dare say I am my colleagues and the graduate students and others that we work with changed our respective fields for a generation and so I mean I'm looking at George and George will remember this and we will walk George Sanchez who's now at USC but George and I were walking across campus one day I said George I got a crazy idea and he says what is it I said we should start a new book series and he says really I said yeah let's let's let's do it and we'll pull in some others with that crazy idea became the American Crossroads book series and 50 books or something close 70 books now I published at least half of them are a word winning books and at least two of the authors have gone on the women authors one of whom was Tyler Miles who was our colleague here but she published her first book in our series and the other one was Natalia Molina who's at USC now but who's a graduate student in the history department are here and so we created in this space opportunities for a new generation and that for me is actually the greatest part when I came here I was a whole lot younger and I remember sitting at lunch in my first being recruited and all of my colleagues treated me to lunch that day were telling stories about service in World War two and he will know who some of them were and I'm sitting there going okay I think I figured out a way to be part of this department I certainly was not around in World War two let alone fighting in World War two and and all but it was that space where we came in and we we I was given the license to recruit with others Robin Kelly and Elsa Barkley Brown and we built the strongest program in African-American history in the country at that period in time George came and and and we built it out even more and there was a group of us who were here who were determined that we were gonna actually shape and reshape aspects of American history that part I actually think about and then of course what I didn't know and and when I first moved here in 89 from Berkeley that I will become an administrator I mean in fact the joke is and Jim Grossman will know this I left Berkeley because they in part they want to meet me an administrator I mean when I got an offer from Michigan Berkeley's responses that we can make you in this we will give you tenure we can make you an assistant dean and give you more money and I go oh no I'm done and then within a year of arriving here I was the interim director of the Center for Afro-American African Studies they do that oh my gosh you come in with a plan and they do they do it but I discovered something along the way I discovered something about administrative life that I didn't know when I was leaving Berkeley and you probably have discovered this as well I discovered that one I was actually good at it more so than I even dare admit to myself in the first couple of years but two it was for me psychologically it was the right blend because as an administrator I can make a decision in the morning that had consequences by the evening so much of academic life was about deferred gratification and that is least in history I write an article it go through the review process etc etc and by the time it came out of 12 to 18 months later I go I don't even remember this man and let alone I've been reading some time to go those my pros I mean I need to be a remember and it was this part where something about being able to say and this was what Michigan also meant it took a chance on a young person to leave and then eventually when I became Dean of Brackham and all it gave me more than one opportunity to lead and that is something that I did value do value and will value forever Earl Lewis we celebrate you we appreciate you we love you we can't wait to see what's next because we know that there is much more work ahead of you we're so excited thank you so much for this conversation thank you it is my very distinct honor to introduce my friend and colleague Dean and cousin what a remarkable conversation and it what a difficult position to be in to follow that conversation but we're thrilled to celebrate you and this medal I was anchors and I'm the Dean of the College of Literature Science and the Arts and I was in the Dean's office when we got word that Earl Lewis might be interested in returning to the University of Michigan and institutions are not known for moving quickly or for consensus and I have never seen so much consensus or speed in the LSA Dean's office that I saw at that moment and we're thrilled to get to co-host the celebration of you with Celeste and with Ford because as you all know Earl is jointly appointed between our two schools and this conversation me what a remarkable scholar you are who both shows the power of the humanities in your own work and have been doing that for decades but we also see you harnessing the power of the humanities and it's what you're doing at the Center for Social Solutions and was doing you were doing at Mellon and of the social sciences by bringing colleagues together to address the most pressing problems you are also as we've seen today a brilliant advocate for the humanities you are also one of the most generous university citizens I have ever met as you're getting a sense of I mean Earl is running the Center for Social Solutions he is also teaching so he is here today his students are watching or are here because he should be teaching class right now but we are very glad that he is here and also every time I turn around and there's an important committee who is on it Earl Lewis because you say yes and it's such a gift to all of us and as I was sitting here and you were talking about this metal and why it matters in terms of the importance of the humanities for the civic project that we are in and of course in LSA we house a lot of the humanities units and I was thinking about all the ways in which we try to talk about the power of the humanities and I've learned so much from you about how to talk about it in terms of first of all it's a place where we go to find meaning as well as solace and I thought about that a lot during the pandemic when here we were alone often and we turned to art and music and history and literature and philosophy I remember meeting someone who said I started reading the Stoics again during the pandemic and history and plays and film as a way to make meaning and find meaning as you were just talking about the humanities tells history and retells history so that we in that retelling can try to confront our own biases and confront what it means these misconceptions and consider what we learn as we go forward from that it imagines alternate worlds and I love what you said there in terms of what does it mean to move water right not what engineering is involved but what does it mean to move water the humanities interrogate how humans respond to each other how our communities and as you were talking about these complex connections and how we respond to change so that we can be prepared and be persuasive and I was thinking about your remarkable ritual rhetorical toolbox and that one of the things we're also trying to do is expand people's rhetorical toolboxes and make them as you were talking about more discerning listeners and readers because of course history can also be used to manipulate if the humanities ask us to consider key ethical questions we push on notions of truth and fact as we strive to pursue both and then one of the ways that I have come to talk about this and I was thinking about as we were sitting here is that we and it goes it's a quote from a fellow dean of mine actually in the Big Ten who said empathy is not just a value it's a skill and it's a skill that we have to hone and it's why we study history and read literature and study art and languages is that we are honing empathy and this is a world that needs more empathy and you are someone who brings such deep empathy to the work that you do so I have said to you before and I want to say it here it is one of the privileges of my career to get to work alongside you here at the University of Michigan as we've seen today you are forever pushing us to embrace new perspectives in our work you bring those perspectives into dialogue and to be unafraid of true structural change because true structural change is really scary and you showed us here as you were telling these wonderful stories that you demonstrated again and again what it means to be unafraid what it means to be unafraid to take on the hard questions to be unafraid of change both in research and in administration and you've shown us you've shown us both so I know personally that you are wise in your counsel and you are generous with your time and energies you are optimistic and pragmatic and that is an amazing combination so thank you for all that you do we are thrilled that you were honored with this medal you are both an inspiration and a model for so many of us so if you can all join me once again in celebrating Earl with a round of applause and now we hope you will join us there's a reception right outside so we hope you all will stay and join us to celebrate with Earl