 Again, let me welcome you, welcome to the Future Transform. I'm so glad to see you're all here today. This is the beginning of a new series within the forum and I'm just delighted to kick it off. I'm delighted to introduce the beginning of a series of conversations here on the Future Transform called the Paradigm Conversations. This is a partnership between the Paradigm Project and the Future Transform. What we'd like to do is help give the Paradigm Project a stage to have conversations about its work and I'd like to also be able to help do whatever I can with the Future Transform to help the Paradigm Project advance. What is the Paradigm Project? What are these conversations? Well, we'll start by bringing up some of the different people who are involved. And also if you'd like, if you look in the bottom left-hand corner of your screen, you'll see a link to our webpage which explains everything and how it works. Just one bit of information about this, we're gonna have one of these conversations every roughly four weeks going into spring and summer. And also, and they're all part of the normal series. So you'll all be able to join them just as you can. And full disclosure, I'm one of the advisors of the Paradigm Project. So I'm really fond of it and I do what I can to help. Now, in order to start doing this, I'd like to bring back one of our dear friends, the leader and founder of the Paradigm Project, David Scobie, the first of our three guests today. I mean, bring him up on stage. Hello, David. Hey, Brian and hello, everyone. Brian, thank you so much for the forum and especially for our partnership with you on these Paradigm conversations. It's definitely, definitely pleasure. I'm absolutely delighted to have you up here. David, tell us a bit, first of all, first of all, what you're gonna be working on for the next year or is the short answer to this paradigm, paradigm, paradigm? It is, I serve as director of a national higher ed innovation initiative called Bringing Theory to Practice. Some folks on the forum may know us. We've been around for 20 years and our work beginning a couple of years ago, but really which is now the center of our work is this multi-year project called the Paradigm Project whose aim is to foster paradigmatic change in especially undergraduate education on behalf of holistic, engaged, equitable education for all students. We think that higher ed is at a moment of crisis, of multiple crises, of an inflection point where we're confronting, this won't be news to anyone who's attending the forum. We're confronting challenges of resources, of enrollment, of students swirling, of faculty precarity, of a loss of public confidence in higher education. Old paradigms, old ways of doing our business have grown stale and ineffective, not only in the public's mind, but in real life. And we think that a renewal of college education to make it more holistic, more transformational, more accountable to the larger society is needed. All of that's the challenge. And the other side of the Paradigm Project is that the same moment of turmoil and intersecting crises has also been a time of great creativity in higher education. That's a piece of the story that is often undertold and underremarked, but in curriculum redesign and pedagogy racial and class equity and concern for student well-being, really important innovative work is happening. The trouble is that it's happening in siloed and fragmented and disconnected ways. So this project aims to create holistic solutions to help develop in collaboration with the innovators across higher ed to help develop new holes of new paradigms greater than the sum of these parts. And we do that both within, by supporting innovation within institutions and also by developing new communities of practice and innovation across higher ed by movement building as we call it. We think that overcoming silos on campuses and overcoming silos between campuses is a precondition to paradigmatic change and higher ed. I'm sure we can get into more detail about that, but that's a high level view of this commitment. It's meant to build on really important work that's happening, but to overcome the disconnection and sometimes piecemeal episodic quality of the innovation that's happening. That's a breathtaking vision. And a great ambition. And this is one I'm so happy to hear from. Friends, we're gonna keep David on the stage and so he'll be subject to your interrogation, but we have two other guests that I wanna bring on stage as well, two of the other shining stars in the paradigm firmament. And let me begin by bringing me add to the stage Professor Buffy Longmeyer-Avital from Elon University. And she has an awful lot to say and so much, so much to add. Let me see if we can add her up here on stage. Greetings, Professor Longmeyer-Avital. Hello, thank you for having me. Is that actually a fireplace behind you? It is. This might be the best Zoom background there is. Okay, well, it's pretty good. I hope it's not on down there. No, it's not. We are Northeasterners who grew up in a apartment, so we have no idea what to do with a fireplace. Well, I'd be happy to help you the next time I come by. Okay. Buffy, let me ask, you know, the typical way we ask people to introduce themselves in the forums to ask what you're working on for the next year. And I asked David this and he's the paradigm project leader, so this has to be everything he's doing, but I'm curious what you're working on. What are the big projects, the big ideas that are top of mind for you? So many things and trying to figure out which one takes the most priority, but for the past two years, I've been working as a faculty and administrative fellow at my institution at Elon University and really looking to change the ways in which we think about and we engage and we build systems around mentoring and mentorship in what we're calling meaningful relationships. The interesting thing about this process is that we struggled coming up with a definition that would capture everyone and it was because we realized that mentoring is just so personal and for many it is shaped by the relationship that it exists within and so we leaned into that and I've been leading a 35 person team and we are in the process of running pilots, developing frameworks, David is part of that team and I'm grateful for his input and support, but we are getting close to the end and I think we will have something really dynamic to report back that really thinks about the ways in which you become an ecosystem that truly supports and has mentoring and the goal of a mentoring ethos kind of throughout it, instead of it being implicit, it has to be explicit. For me, it has not been just simply an approach to making sure just simply in all students need to have this but also looking at mentoring as an equity driving vehicle for student success, making sure certain students are not falling through the cracks and also creating an opportunity for our institution to think about the ways in which we are asking faculty and staff to pour into our students and thus we need to be thinking about how we are pouring, how the institution is pouring into faculty and staff and how we are doing that for each other. So not an easy undertaking, but it's something that I'm really excited about because it has brought me into a lot of spaces to have conversations. And then the other piece of work that I do is the Black Lumen Project and that is really a restorative justice. It was born out of our history and memory work that looked at our history of anti-Black racism on campus. We are an institution that was founded after the period of illegalized enslavement ended. And I think a lot of institutions may sit back and say, well, if we're after a certain date, we don't have to worry about that. But it is important to look at the ways that systems were created during that period and how they have continued to push certain people to the sides, to the margins. And this work was proposed not to be just another programming space, but to really think intentionally about the ways that advancing Black student, Black faculty, Black staff, Black community success should not be based on or put onto the back of one individual or a collection of entities, but that it really needs to be a sustainable thread. And so I'm honored to lead that. And then perhaps I'll get back to my research, which I will tell you has to do with using the game of chess as a way to help young people learn how to navigate racial trauma. Wow, I am fascinated by that. Have you published anything on that that I confirmed? I have not, I'm just starting. This is coming, I've done a lot of research that reflects the experiences that I've had and that my students and friends have had. This one, this research project is in honor of my sons who are navigating the world and learning the strategies of what it means to be boys of color and boys who are Jewish as well. So lots of identities, biracial, Jewish, multilingual, and they both love chess. And so I thought, could I potentially take the chess game and create a pathway to help them talk about practices, navigate through the ways in which they can heal from racial trauma and also just to be able to better respond to instances of trauma as well. What's that movie about a teenage black chess player Oh, I'm blanking the name of it. Who is involved in a complicated, oh, Fresh. Oh, I don't think I know that one. I'll have to put it on the list. Oh, it's a great film. I was blown away by it. I'll put this in the chat. It's an incredible film. Okay, I'm gonna stop because I'm happy to teach about gaming, so I'm gonna stop here. Yes, David. I just wanted to know, I mean, Buffy's work on all these fronts is amazing, but I just wanna put a point under what she was talking about about her mentoring and relationship building work. That's a perfect example on the ground of what paradigmatic change looks like, that what and what our project aims to support, that what might seem like a single lane mentoring has changes in the faculty and staff role and overcoming silos between them, curricular change, a deep centering of equity that cuts across the different spaces of an institution. And that move from single lane or single silo change to integrative change, which Buffy is leading for us at Elon is a really good example of how the project gets lived. Excellent, excellent. Thank you, thank you both. But this is not enough. We need to add a third player to our panel. Let me just bring in our good friend and wonderful, just academic in all kinds of ways. Professor Timothy Eatman coming to us from Rutgers University. Good afternoon, sir. How are you? Brian, how are you? Oh, I'm fantastic. Now that you are all here, this is great. But you said it's not enough. I think it is enough. I wanna affirm you and the vision of this work. I think I learned so much about a professor along my Ivy Tells work that I didn't know about, just listening to her details, some of those things. So this has really been powerful already for me. And I've made a note that I need to go into that archive and look at what you've been doing here in more detail beyond even the Paradigm project. Very good, very good. These are wonderful people. In order to introduce this last person on our panel some more, Tim, what are you gonna be working on for the next year? What lies ahead for you in terms of the big projects and the big ideas? The big thing that I wanna do, Brian, is to have an increasingly offensive posture and approach to my prophetic imagining. Go on. So all of my projects hang under that. It really is about being clear about how I find my imagination shrinking because of the bureaucratic pressures, because of the challenges that are so prevalent with regards to our political landscape or social landscape. And Professor Scobey's invitation to join the Paradigm project I see as a part of my process of nourishing this notion of the pursuit of prophetic imagining. One of the kind of refrains of my talks of late in the last year or so have been beware the shrinking imagination. Because at the bottom of it, I think really, this is what we suffer from. Yeah. The sense of lack when there is no lack or it's lack because of how we think about it. So anyway, I'm really trying not to be cute here. I do wanna categorize it under that parameter, but my work as the inaugural dean of the Honors Living Learning Community at Rutgers University in Newark is one of those things that I think helps to put me in a continual position of prophetic imagining. What can we create in higher education that will press us towards the discontinuation of overlooking local talent in urban spaces, of nourishing the kinds of young people from traditionally underrepresented communities that have been disparaged? How do we look at the power of resilience in that regard? So that work, the Honors Living Learning Community, which I may be able to share a little bit more about later is under that. I'm also doing some pretty intensive work, Brian, on reparations. And so when Dr. Long-Rivertile was talking about some of that work that resonates, I was thinking, Buffy, we need that. We need another conversation because our institution has been part of a melon-funded project that's called Creating Just Futures. And that project is Sunsetting, but now I'm on the New Jersey Commission, New Jersey Council on Reparation sponsored by the New Jersey Institute for Social Justice. Nice. So those are a couple of things that have gotten my attention. You can imagine that pursuing the latter is really bold. In fact, if I'm gonna be honest, I didn't have the imagination myself that I could work on something like that two years ago, right? My imagination shrunken to the place where I was thinking, yeah, it's a deserved conversation, but let me work on something else. So that in itself is one expression of my own trigger towards prophetic imagination. But I'll stop there. Well, that's quite a point to stop on. I love this idea of prophetic imagination. We have, let me just, friends, let me just ask a couple of our guests, a couple of questions about their work and where they're thinking. And then I want to leave the floor open for all of you for your questions. We have a couple already in the pipeline and one more coming up, but I'd like to hear what you think about this project. If I can begin, Buffy, I'm curious, David outlined for us a vision of the future, prophetic vision in Tim's terms, of where we can take higher education in ways that are equitable, just to keep the sector going and really build on what we know works. But I'm curious, why haven't we done this? I mean, why haven't we just flipped the switch and realized, oh, here are all these great things we can do, why don't we do them right now? I mean, what stops us from realizing these visions? It's an interesting thing where change is celebrated, but also change is resisted at every step. And I think part of our role in this group, in the space that we've created, has been thinking about exactly that. What is it that is driving our resistance as an institution and as a system to change? I come to this work as a behavioral, kind of a critical health psychologist that was my initial training. And so I spent a lot of time working with and studying why people change. Even when they have all this information in front of them, that the behavior that they're engaging in is just not what it needs to be. And it's not going to have a desired outcome that they want. What is it that still prevents them from doing that? That still prevents them from taking that step to change. And sometimes you can only get there through a process called motivational interviewing where you're sitting down and you're actually helping a person kind of piece through, work through their life and work through their behaviors to kind of figure out why exactly are they not doing what they are saying they want to do. And sometimes from a behavioral health perspective, a lot of times it comes down to why. I think you can apply that to higher education as well. How are we biased in our thinking? How are we engaging in things like confirmation bias? So taking out directions and initiatives that appear new, but we know we're just going to confirm what we already know. We are driven by social norms. I think that when I started going to school or looking, started my journey in higher education, I think I remember a big book that I looked through to get kind of profiles of colleges, but I wasn't sure about rankings and all of those things. And I lived the world now where we're thinking about where are you ranked here and where are you ranked here and here is an aspirants. And we're always trying to kind of see what the other institution is doing when wants to. I think there's a fear, a general fear of making a pivot and recognizing that no one else is behind you. And what does that mean when we're so often defined as how we compare to others. So we both want innovation, but we also want to clearly be defined and to have that point of comparison to others. It's part of our habit and our routine. And I think we need to think about that. I think we need to think about the ways in which we promote leaders affirm creativity or not is in very similar ways and has been for a very long time. And so all of these factors, the emotional connections that we have, the nostalgia's idea, I think that there's a luring trap. Nostalgia is like a Venus fly trap, right? Like it lowers you in and I mean, think about the current state of a previous administration, what is rising kind of again, this notion of going back, this nostalgia, which yeah, consider a Venus fly trap. And we've talked a lot in our group in our conversations about the importance of acknowledging power and that often the individuals or the entities that are pushing for the change are not the individuals and the entities that are empowered to create that sustainable change or they're pushing up against that business as usual, which then absorbs whatever they're trying to do and remakes it into that which sustains the system as we know it. Change is an unknown and it can mean, I think it's perfect that I'm wearing a butterfly because butterfly symbols, metamorphosis, you really do have to shed in many ways those elements of yourself to make room for what is new and it's in making room for that that you soar. But there is fear and I think we have to acknowledge that emotional fear and weave that into the process. There's probably even a grief that's coming from the fact that you can't just so easily rely on the things that you always rely on. And David mentioned all the areas that are contributing to why the time is now. And I would say that many of those things are also why we don't wanna change as well. The starvation often means pain. And loss, people are afraid of losing. Yeah. Brian, could I piggyback on? Please do. Please do. So, Buffy's eloquently describing how current relationships, the relationships of self-protectiveness, of competition, a fear of losing what we have, which some of the folks in chat have noted, even while we recognize this challenging moment, keep us from undertaking change. One of the assumptions of the Paradigm Project is that the way to overcome that is through collective, collaborative, iterative work. So it may sound to folks listening to us that we're saying, here's a big grandiose vision, adopt it. And that's not what we're saying. We're saying, let's have a shared sense of purpose in student learning and student thriving and education as the public good and the faculty and staff thriving. Not assume that we have a utopian package or some capital B blueprint, but build a movement within institutions and across institutions that change those relationships. So we're launching an institutional change makers network. We have projects in which institution, different emerging model institutions are working together. So our assumption isn't that we have the capital A answer. It's just the opposite. It's that collectively in higher ed, there is the shared creativity to create new holes, new equitable regimes, greater than the sum of their parts. If we can overcome these barriers to change that build new collaborations, new relationships that overcome what Buffy was talking about. Indeed, Buffy, thank you. This is, that's a terrific analysis of this. In response in the chat, Meredith Goldsmith says, you're reminding me of how dropping out of the rankings discussion seems to have fizzled. Too risky to be out in front without comparison. And PS, she loves your Venus Flytrap metaphor. I think she says she loves the metaphor. I think that's what she's referring to. Oh, this is, thank you, thank you. Well, let's turn this around. In terms of why we don't change or the difficulties we have in changing. Tim, can you describe a bit about the work you're doing at Rutgers as an example of positive change? Brian, in the last 10 years, Rutgers University Newark has seen an 80, that's eight zero, 80% increase of Newark residents who are at Rutgers University Newark. Hmm, that's no joke. Wow. And it's not only because of the work of the Honors Living Learning Community, it's really about an institutional mindset that has shifted, that is communicating in a different way, the regard for knowledge making that we talk about is publicly engaged. And the Honors Living Learning Community rises up out of the strategic plan of Chancellor, current Chancellor Nancy Cantor, who's sadly leaving us and going to Hunter College, CUNY. But the idea really was, how do we stop overlooking local talent? How do we as a public institution live up to our mission and how do we think about the epistemology of knowledge making in a more savvy and robust way such that we have cohorts of 80 students each year, Brian, 50 of which are just out of high school, 17, 18 year olds, but 30 that are transfer students. And so last May, we graduated a 65 year old who lived for two years in the Honors Living Learning Community with 17, right? It's one of the reasons I have this nervous twitch because I got 35 year olds and 17. We're together, right? But we think that it's a kind of a paradigmatic shift to think about bringing parents and veterans and students who age out of the foster care system and immigrants and folks who in the words of Newark's mayor, Raz Baraka, have overcome the school to prison pipeline. I love that, right? We're turning citizens. We've had more than five young people graduate from the Honors Living Learning Community that spent time, serious time, that they wouldn't have spent if they were the governor's nephew or niece. Right, off of stuff that is now legal, right? So, I mean, we don't need to go into that, but the HLLC is a space for shifting the way that we think about what some of these capacities are. I will just say, because I'm thinking of them, one of those students I just named and he wouldn't be embarrassed by me suggesting and even calling his name Tyreek Rolone who spent time in and graduated from our program is now the director of workforce development for the city of Newark. Right. Wow, what a great story. Exactly. So, I mean, these are the kinds of things that sort of make me giddy and, you know, make me sensitive to not only shrinking imagination but the gains, the harvesting of prophetic imagining of touching young lives, right, that just need a little help just like anybody does, right? And seeing them as worthy of the kind of investment that that will lead to. So, I work at the HLLC really is about trying to elevate the notion of what institutions can do. It means that we have to make some changes in the way that we do a lot of different things at our institution with respect to financial aid because we've got undocumented students with, you know, respect a whole bunch of issues. But we think that we in academia have the intellectual acumen and we're with all to do that. And so we're excited about, you know, the HLLC note is not a formal exemplar project. It is in the flow of the bringing theory to practice paradigm projects. And we're always in conversation about how, as David so eloquently said, you know, we can move beyond the silo mentality. You know, my charge was to lead the development of, you know, the creation of a national model. And so we fail if HLLC is only at Rutgers North. No, no, no, that makes sense. That makes sense. So you're, it sounds like in part you're drawing on mentoring from Buffy's work, but at the same time you're grounding that in the media community, trying again to look for that spread of knowledge creation. Friends, let me stop talking. I'll just say quickly, just really quickly, the high impact practices, you know, for student success, evidentiary base informs all of the work that we're doing. And so we know that mentoring is an important part of that. As are all 10 of the others, but you know, it's important to note that we're creating new high impact practices, right? Because we're thinking about, and I think this is what the paradigm project is about, right? Recognizing how we have to be more capacious and more expansive, even as it regards the evidentiary base that we have on our institutional model. So this is, and the paradigm project can take this and show this to other people and inspire them based on this real world example. Yes, part of what we do is lift up exemplars and exactly like this. And I put a link to Tim's HLLC program, which is amazing in chat. It's a perfect example of the kind of integrative change we're talking about. Indeed, indeed. Well, thank you for sharing that, Tim. This is great stuff. Let me bring in some of the questions that have come in. This is one from our dear friend, George Station, California State Monterey. And he asks a very, typically, very, very powerful question. What gives you all hope for slowly growing participatory change movement as austerity driven shrinkages seem so omnipresent and overwhelming? This is a crucial question that we grapple with and I'll give a couple different answers. One is that we have, we're partnering with a lot of voices and although Tim Eatman at Rutgers Newark has never said it in quite this way, Rutgers Newark faces these, Rutgers University Newark faces these challenges in which people come to us and say, it's precisely because we're facing enrollment clips or budget cuts or equity gaps that we need to not go the way of zero-sum budget battles and shrinkage, material and imagination shrinkage. And so this moment of precarity is a moment in which we can choose to respond with hope and energy. And one of the things that, one of the kind of bywords of the project is it's not a choice between sticking with what we have as troubling as that may be and bad change that's coming. Change is coming. We're in the middle of an inflection point. Let's shape the kind of new academy we want or else the change will happen to us. And that work can be really joyous and give you energy. So that's not meant to sugarcoat George's question but those are some of the ways we think about. If I can just jump in, I would say, I also just want to say that I think we've been intentional about talking about and lifting up the fact that for some there's not ever been a time of real privilege and easy access and wonderful dynamic things have happened as a point of having the audacity to try and survive and not thrive in completely inhospitable settings. And so I think the beauty of this project is it also gives us an opportunity to recenter who we hold as exemplars and who are the, what are the programs, the approaches that we should be truly learning from instead of saying that you have to adapt to whatever this kind of traditional celebrated approaches. And so I think the hope for me resides in the fact that for many of us, this is not new, this is ongoing and there appears to be opportunities and momentum thinking about the Paradigm project to support the work that I was going to do anyways. I want to see more people who look like me in spaces and I'm not as committed to these systems because the systems have never been committed or loved to be back. So there's a leap of faith in doing this. A leap of faith and for some a leap of survival. I just have to come along and celebrate what Buffy has said and punctuated with, this is the legacy I walk in, right? My ancestors, right, no choice, right? And so where my finding hope one is, you know, the privilege of having the opportunity to contribute to what my ancestors put out there, right? In the context of that legacy, right? Number one, number two, when you get to be on a network with folks like David and Buffy and Mary Dana Hinton and Paul Shadowwall, I mean, you know, like the way that we do this thing, do you understand what I'm saying? Right, it has a tension, right, towards the intentionality around relationship. Does that make sense? I know like people like, oh, whatever, relationship. Yeah, fine. I'm saying that when we get in those spaces, Brian, and you know it, because you've been there, right? There is a, you think of Kate and Tessa and the way that we have shaped, you know, tied to the way that we've shaped Jillian, we've shaped these spaces, right? Intentionally, so that they can push us out of the sort of normative, entrenched dysfunctions of the way we even do business, right? And how we intersperse different approaches for breathing, frankly, the kind of breathing that is so necessary. I'm sorry, Buffy got me activated when she started talking about- We do this to each other. You do this for everyone. In the chat, George Station follows up by saying, Buffy's comment really hits home. We get periodic reminders of not being left back. And yeah, it's, we happen to be in a period where folks aren't pretending otherwise. That's just a really good point. Thank you, thank you, Tim. So, she knew the forum, friends. That's an example of a Q and A box question. Now we have an example of a video question from our friend, Meredith Goldsmith. So let me bring her up on stage. I think Brian is showing off, y'all. That's y'all. Hi, thanks for all of you. Hello, Meredith. Hi, thank you. This is tremendous discussion and I am happy to be a member of the choir on this one. I just wanted to ask quickly, I was just on a call about a book called Mending Education. That's about the fact that a lot of the pandemic-related changes to teaching at New York and that they were all about relationships with students and yet they haven't been adopted. The basket already hasn't been adopted over the long term. So I think this is a question that I have for you and it's, how do you get people to acknowledge that something is actually working and it's actually something simple? Yeah. That's a good point. Who wants to tackle that one? Good question. I'll take a quick swing at it. Some of it is common sense. We put out a bi-weekly newsletter called Bringing It that each week features something that's working at this level of holistic change. We talk about it at AC, new conferences. But I've mentioned a couple times this idea of movement building and I actually think we need to be much more robust in building networks where we are feeding each other, learning from each other, doing collective action beyond the level of the kind of great institute lab where we have projects we meet for a while and then we go back to our separate worlds. We need to build networks where like two years from now, Meredith, you and I are still gonna be in relationship with one another and you're gonna bring to your campus what we're doing and I'm gonna learn from you that we're building a network that aims to be larger and longer. So I think that's one of the answers to it and I'll just say our colleague in front, Peter Felton and Leo Lambert, their book, Relationship Rich Education, which I think is actually getting huge uptake across higher ed has a lot of those really important and good stories that influences our work in the project. I just wanna echo that piece of about the building of relationships and the relationships that offer affirmation because again, you may be in a situation where you are doing great work but for a variety of different factors, the institution is not able to sustain it or to resource it in a way that it should be resourced and I think that there is something incredibly powerful at least for my own experience, certainly as a result of the pandemic and then having to navigate this virtual Zoom world where I've been able to be in touch with other people who have similar thoughts and similar experiences and are telling me and affirming me that you are and you are not one who has, you haven't lost it. You are on the right path, keep going, some of these people are on this screen right now and thinking about where I am in my career and someone commented a few days ago, they called me a creative and they wondered how I had gotten to where it was as a creative because sometimes the system really works towards stomping out the creatives and I'm kind of watching that and fighting against it for my own children now in terms of how they're navigating space and it's my research project that I'm gonna take up but the ways in which we are embracing technology along with these conversations and the movement building pieces of the Paradigm Project is I think allowing that network to really flourish or not just a connection but truly the other benefits of those relationships which is the fact that you can in some ways see yourself and see that you are really doing what you need to be doing and that's what again goes back to that piece around hope hope as well and so there's a piece of this that is word of mouth as well in terms of getting out the information but it's the mirror, right? The reflective self coming back at you saying you're okay, you're where you need to be and you're doing what you need to be doing. Brian, I'm trying to resist this telling this short story but blame it on Buffy because she brought up her kids and you know, it's like, ah! I mean, I have my youngest daughter is in graduate school I'm not gonna name the school but she recently had a situation where she was at the institution and Brian, she went to the bathroom and someone was coming out and the person that was coming out saw her and screamed right and so Jamila and I are now in a conversation after that just pop it do I make this place scary? Right, I mean, it's hard enough to be a molecular engineering PhD student, right? It's hard enough to be a woman in STEM, right? In 2023 and 24, right? And to not be loved back to not be affirmed for the content that woman is probably going to space my wife and I have determined that she's an astronaut scholar didn't you follow what I'm saying? But it's the small mindedness it's the consistent attacks on the way we can sit in our humanity together that I think are some too often understated with respect to how we do this work and I just really was inspired to share that brief story. Thank you, thank you for sharing that. Meredith, thank you so much for the great question. Thanks to Rafiq and Tim for the great answers. Friends, if you're new to the forum that's an example of a video question so you can tell you don't have to be shy you can join us just by clicking the raised hand button and you don't even have to have a beard to be on stage although apparently it helps a little bit. That was really cool though, that video. I hope somebody else will do it, it was really cool. All right, we know people here so we call you out too. Before you do that, before you do that we have a question that came in from somebody who couldn't make it today because of the prior commitment but they asked a question and I don't remember if we've talked about this in the paradigm project so far. This is from Rebecca Rotondo who is an architect and she says I would love to hear about how we can address justice and equitable policy universally across all facets of the college experience which includes the built environment. In my experience, the realms of design and support of the built environment and the area of overlapping socio-emotional experience is rarely overlapped but I think it's crucial that conversations that address systemic change must include every facet of the student experience including the built environment. And I'm curious what you think about that. Literally, it makes sense. Real quick, we have an $80 million building project that opened three years ago and was designed very carefully with this notion of having a social corridor in the building. There are four lounges on each floor. We have smaller rooms so we can push students out of their rooms into conversation spaces and the designer that we worked with, our BH group was really, really keen on working with us to achieve exactly that. So come visit us at Rutgers University in Newark so you can get a good example of, you know, what kind of design with social purpose in mind looks like. So I'm pushing people into- Sorry, Brian, go ahead, no you first. No, it's just, so one key feature that is pushing students into space with each other. Yeah, and universal design is obviously a really important part of that. I was gonna say that's a perfect example of a larger issue we've talked a lot about in the project which is that some kind of important change, some kind of important innovation happens in a particular kind of issue area. And if left to itself, it'll be good but it'll be incremental. You build a good building for you, you know, you add counselors to the mental health center. The important thing is when you ask, what are the larger implications of this particular incremental change? What does building the building have to say about inclusive relationships or the way faculty and staff think about their connections to one another? And it's that boundary crossing imagination where the place you start leads you into new conversations with others, including conversations with architects and facilities, folks who are typically excluded in a siloed university. I think there's also a conversation around how the design of the just the built environment also engages the community around the university as well. So just thinking about my work in the Black Lumen project, one of the things that we realized in doing this kind of historical analysis of the Black experience, the Black experiences was that even though the infrastructure on the campus was a lot of times not there or not where it should be, the students, the faculty and staff relied heavily on the kind of collection of spaces, particularly churches in the community that would offer those relationships, offer those points of anchor and refuge and build up. And so then you think about, well, what's the accessibility of the community to the campus? How are we, what are the invisible barriers and boundaries that we create? And how do we need to think about that as well when thinking about paradigm shifts? Because again, I go back to the fact that certain students, when they leave the bubble, it's what I call the microaggressive whiplash. When you are underneath it and how do we make sense of that? How do we think about that in terms of the faculty and staff and the ways in which they are engaging the space? And also considering the fact that I think there is a big push for institutions to now move beyond just the specific campus to more thinking about more the satellite and other offices and locations, space and design is becoming much more important as we think about the ways in which we're moving into the future. Beautifully said. You all have fans in the chat. People are double-plossing what you said and they've added more. In our friend, John Hollenbeck points us to Jane Adams who had a model for community education a century back. And our dear friend, Roxanne Riskin who multi-tasks like Mad takes the best screen grabs at anybody on earth. She keeps emphasizing that we focus on well-being and compassion as we do this. We have time for one question and this is a really fascinating question from an awesome, awesome person. This is from Steve Ehrman. And Steve asks a question about, this has to do with the adoption of new innovations. And this is the deep one. And so I think we each have time to take a whack at this before we run out of time. Steve says that, oh, maybe hit the right button. Regarding the change of mindset Rutgers, new perspectives only spread widely if there are some advantages people reap if they act according to the new assumptions. Do you agree? And if so, what advantages do people have? Here, I'll bring it back up so you can see this. Yeah, I think we, even though it's directly directed to me, we can each take a whack at it. My whack will say, I think that what we're seeing here really is more about, about a score of energy and work on the ground from faculty and staff, who had built a kind of an ecosystem around affirming the urban campus and a leader who recognized that. Nancy didn't have a magic wand. In fact, if you look at the things that she was able to achieve, much of it had already been proposed years before, right? And so, there's a way in which it may be about deferred reaping, I don't know if that's the right way to put it, but also I think so much around change has to do with the spade work and the folks that are often not in view, I'll stop time, maybe I can hear from some of the colleagues. Oh, that's great. Thank you, Tim. Thank you. David, Buffy. David, I'm gonna let you jump in first. I'm still here. This is a great question, Steve. Thank you. One answer is at the level of, it's part of the craft of change to construct rewards and incentives to make it so that people don't have to swim upstream to do positive change. But I would say more deeply, the moment that we're in, we hear this all the time and not just from people who are gung-ho for big innovation is a moment where people feel like the values that brought them into being educators are not, they don't get to live them every day. And in fact, they feel demoralized and exhausted. And in that situation, I think the problem isn't, what advantages will I have with change? It's that I know the situation isn't good, but how do I know it won't get worse if we undertake change? And so it's that collective commitment to working together grounded in our values that I think will remind people that their sense of identity will be nurtured alongside the tactics of making sure people get rewarded and that they're a good incentive. Beautiful, well said. So I don't know if I can add anything more than what the science added, and I got a soundtrack to go with it. Nothing pressure is on. But I think a few things just come quickly to mind, which is I was in a webinar yesterday for women of color leaders. And one of the things that I was reminded of was someone said that the very things that you did to get you where you are may not be the things you need to continue doing. As a call to really reflect on the behaviors and the ways in which we approach situations and how as we continue to grapple with greater things, taking that approach of I have to be the best, I have to be the shining star, everything that's amazing and perfectly lined up may be working to disadvantage my advantage. And so it did cause a moment of reflection. And then I think I'm just gonna bring it back to and hopefully this fits because you said mindsets. And so it's making me think of, my background in graduate school, I worked with Josh Aronson who was contemporary with Carol Dweck and who was at Columbia at the time. So mindsets are a thing very, the discussion of mindsets is very near and dear to my heart. And in many ways it's informing that research that I talked about. And so if I could just take a little bit of time to just unpack this and hopefully a little bit of time. It is very clear that as a result of going through the pandemic that the children of my, the generation of my sons is struggling. And we all can agree on that. And those are the students that are going to be coming in the next decade or so entire education. And so we need to be preparing for them. And one of the things that I did not expect was the fact that there is a loss of filter or sensor when it comes to competence and perspectives and beliefs that are shared freely. But there's still a pressure to not respond back and not let it get to you. And so you tend to internalize it. And when we go back to that threat about wellbeing, that's part of that. What are the ramifications of that? And so even though I know that they are struggling with the ways in which they are approaching this, there is a hesitancy to call it what it is, because calling it what it is means that they have to let certain people in their life go. And as young kids, they may not be ready to do that. And so instead, this is why I said, let's use the game of chess. And what I'm trying to do is create kind of a moment of cognitive dissonance, right? I'm asking them to use to apply chess to the ways in which they think about, just ways in which they think about navigating racial trauma. And they have to learn that enough so that they could be able to teach it to somebody else in order for them to believe, in order for them to be successful in teaching it to others. I think there's an element that they have to kind of internalize themselves. And so I'm hopeful that this will start to shift their mindsets, whether they know or not. And so maybe perhaps a radical kind of vision of this is it's not about advantage, but it's about creating a cognitive dissonance that is so powerful that only way through it is to go with the shift that calls, that is being called for. That's quite a description of how we can move forward, Buffy. That's a very, very deep way of rethinking what we're doing. I think that comment alone makes me glad that we've had the three of you here. I'm sorry, but the clock has run out and probably fallen over a bit. It's been an absolute delight to host the three of you as a first conversation in this paradigm conversation series. We just hit it out of the park. Let me just quickly ask, what's the best way to keep up with all three of you and with the paradigm project? I think I'm probably the best point person because I'm director of bring theory to practice and one of the organizers of the project. My email I'll put in chat right now is scoby at bttop.org. There are some pretty concrete ways folks can get involved including joining the change makers network and also signing up to be on our listserv which communicates every couple of weeks. My colleague Todd Rosendahl put it in chat earlier. And we are, this is the first of a monthly series as you said, Brian. And it's really meant to open up a set of conversations on different themes about what paradigmatic change means. So I hope others will continue to be part of it. This has been wonderful. Excellent, thank you. Thank you. Buffy, Tim, how do we keep up with you all? Assuming we can. Well, I mean, you can definitely find me on LinkedIn because I'm usually posting there different things that I'm engaged in. So I think you have our LinkedIn but I'm pretty sure there's only one Buffy Longmar Abhital in the world. So I'm not that bad. I would bet good money on that. Yes, yes. And Tim shared his email. Thank you. Thank you all three of you. I'm really looking forward to hearing more from you. And I'm gonna follow up with each of you with questions and irritating comments. Thanks for your leadership. Thank you. Yes. Thank you all. Thank you, Brian. That's for this point. Thank you so much, love. Appreciate you. Back to you. But don't go away yet, friends. Just formally wrap things up by thanking all of you for the really, really good questions. I mean, this is, first of all, that's just a delight and for the discussion we've had throughout. If you'd like to keep talking about this right now, just hit the socials as they say, use the hashtag F-T-T-E. You can see all kinds of ways of connecting with me there including on my blog, bryanallexander.org. If you'd like to look into our previous sessions including the first one, we introduced the Paradigm Project as well as on topics including racial justice just go to our archive at tinyurl.com slash FTF archive. If you'd like to look at our sessions coming up, including our next paradigm conversation, just go to the forum website, forum.futureofeducation.us. And above all, thank you for being with us for this terrific hour. It's always a delight to talk and think with all of you. I hope everybody is safe and well and we'll see you next time online. Take care. Bye-bye.