 Hello, everyone. Welcome. This is, believe it or not, our sixth lecture in the spring series. Wow. Amazing. I hope everyone's been enjoying the spring that we've had the last couple of days. It's a lovely preview. Now I'd like to ask Michael Orlanski of our program committee to please introduce today's speaker. Michael. Michael, you're on mute. Thank you, Carol. Today, we're delighted to welcome Dr. Sherwood Smith. He's the director of the Center for Cultural Pluralism and senior executive director for diversity, equity, and inclusion at the University of Vermont. Dr. Smith was raised on the east coast of the United States. He spent several years out west, including study at Washington State University in Pullman, where he earned a bachelor of science degree in zoology. Sherwood Smith's love of travel and education took him even farther afield, including work in Antarctica, Peace Corps volunteer service with fisheries in Tanzania, and directing a school for international training program in Kenya. Over the years, working and interacting with students has become an important part of Dr. Smith's life. He has held student affairs administration positions at Washington State, Cornell, and Penn State universities. He came to UVM in 1995 as a doctoral fellow and later served as a faculty member in the College of Education and Social Services, holding leadership positions in the areas of diversity, equity, and inclusion. Sherwood's work encompasses professional development training for faculty and staff, conducting research projects, and teaching graduate and undergraduate courses at UVM. Among his recent publications, he co-edited a two-part series entitled Our Stories, the Experiences of Black Professionals on Predominantly White Campuses. When time permits, activities that Dr. Smith especially enjoys include cooking, bicycling, and fencing. He's also an accomplished amateur perpetologist. Please join me in welcoming Dr. Sherwood Smith. Thank you, Michael, for that really wonderful introduction. So I'm going to go ahead and share my screen. Or as Carol, do you have anything? Okay. All right. So thank you, everyone, for joining me. This is going to be a bit of a condensed version of a, probably could be a much longer presentation, and I'm really looking forward to getting some good questions from the audience. I always like to start with an acknowledgement that Vermont is located on land which traditionally served as a meeting place and an exchange location for Indigenous people for thousands of years. It's the home of the Western Abonacchi, and the Abonacchi is the traditional steward to the land on water in which we virtually gather today. And in that spirit, I want to acknowledge that we are guests in this land, and in offering this acknowledgement, I think we should just affirm Indigenous people's sovereignty, history, and experiences within our country on their land. Thank you. I know this is virtual, but my hope is that we'll practice the platinum rule instead of the golden rule. The golden rule is do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Platinum rule is do unto others as they would have you do unto them. I'm hoping people are able to ask, open it up. I will try my best to respond to the questions, but I will also ask people to respect, to not sort of identify people without their permission outside of this forum with their questions. I'm going to allow for quiet, so if there's quiet, and I don't say anything, it's because I'm waiting for others. If you've asked a question, please sort of step back and leave the opportunity for someone else to. I ask we start seeking clarification, suspend disbelief a bit, and speak from our own experience, our own truths with I statements rather than we and they and them. Carol, could you unmute and read this for me, please? Or Michael, I'm sorry, either one of you, but just if someone would read this. Only smart people can read this. I could not believe that I could actually understand what I was reading. It is the phenomenal power of the human mind according to research at Cambridge University. This is because the human mind does not read every letter by itself, but the word as a whole. Amazing, huh? Yeah, and I always thought spelling was important. Thank you so much, Carol. So I got asked to talk about pluralism and pluralism involves the understanding of multiple perspectives from different cultures, experiences and lenses. And I start out with this because one of the things I want to point out is that we are interpreting. I am interpreting everything in front of me through a particular lens of my own experience. And sometimes it's very helpful in the case of being able to read this jumbled set of letters. And in other times, it creates problems because we rely on inaccurate information to make decisions or limited information to make decisions when more information is out there. Quick agenda. And the concept of cultural pluralism comes from a Jewish scholar, Horace Colkin. And I'll talk a little bit more about that. Michael gave me a wonderful introduction. As I said, you can call me Sherwood. My pronouns are he, him, his. And I'm originally a flat lander from New Jersey, but I've been here over 20 years. So I'm calling Vermont home. I'm going to talk a little about pluralism, cultural pluralism, try to briefly share some applications, and then make sure I leave time for questions and answers. So that's what we're going to try to get through in our time together. So for all of you out there, and there looks like there's quite a few of you out there, I'm going to ask you to grab a writing implement and any handy piece of paper. And I'd like you to see if you can connect these dots. But I want you to use four lines without lifting your writing implement off the paper. So in other words, once you put the pen down, it needs to stay down as you draw those four lines. All right. So take, I'm going to give you a minute, a real minute. See how you do. 20 second warning. All right. Now, if we were in person, I'd go around and we could raise some hands and see who had solved the little puzzle. I'm just for the interest of time and our group going to just move ahead. And this is an example of, you know, they say, think outside the box. And some people in doing this, and I got sloppy at the bottom dots are moved over into my apologies. But even if they were in the exact spots, it wouldn't matter. What you have to do to connect these dots is go outside of the imaginary square that the six dots create. And our mind sort of automatically creates that box for some of us. And limits our ability to solve this puzzle. I will also tell you that somebody once found a different way of doing these four lines. So there's at least two ways out there. But this is the only way that I can remember. And I have trouble without this little cheat sheet doing it. And I've used this exercise a whole bunch of times. I want to acknowledge that I'm part of a larger group here at UVM. When Michael asked about the center for cultural pluralism and introduced me as part of the vice president's office, I want to just share with you that we at UVM have a prism center, mosaic center, center for cultural pluralism, which is where I am, an interface center and a women's gender and equity center, specifically reported to the vice president's office. And there are other centers on campus that support different aspects of culture and social justice as well. When we think about these concepts, there's a broader language at play. There's conversations going on about intercultural or cross-cultural communication. You can actually get a doctorate in intercultural communication. I'm going to be talking about this concept of cultural pluralism. There's work in social justice, UMass Amherst. You can get a doctorate in education focused on social justice. Currently in our country, there are a lot of conversations about isms, sexism, heterosexism, racism, ableism, classism. That's a whole separate body of work that really looks at institutionalized structures that marginalize certain groups, exclude, limit. And then multiculturalism grew out of education and has been expanded and included in other fields and areas as well and really talks about how practice in education should be designed so that everyone learns and has the same access to opportunities and knowledge as a result of education and has been expanded to talk about business and government and other places. So I'm just focusing on cultural pluralism, but these are all interconnected sort of pedals on a flower. Some of these areas are quite old. So the idea of the melting pot came from a play that was written in 1910. And it's really, in my view, a bit of a disparaging concept that all of our identities have to melt for us to be part of a whole. I rather the stews or the soups or the chilies where the combination of flavors and spices retain their uniqueness. And you can pull apart the pieces if you're a picky eater, but also the whole is richer for having all those things added in. But just to understand that some of these concepts are relatively old in the history of the United States. Oops. I want to also mention, I don't have a slide here, but W.D. Du Bois wrote in 1903 about the idea of double consciousness referring to the fact that specifically African Americans, but BIPOC, people of color, had to have multiple lenses as they looked at the world. Women identified have multiple lenses that any of us that hold an identity that on the margins have to understand those identities at the center as well, and are constantly having to shift our consciousness back and forth between those two existences. There are some levels of complexity here that I think are important to understand. Cultural differences have values and status attached to them. Cultures weight differently, different values. Looking at me, you might weight me differently if I had on a suit and a tie. You also might weight me differently if I was outside wearing Bernie Sanders mittens, but the more significant ones are age, class, gender, race, those sorts of things. Cultures don't exist in a vacuum. They operate within the context of time and the particular cultural structure. So what you might wear or do at the beach wouldn't be what you would wear or do at the office. What you might do with a bunch of friends out on an evening might be very different than you might do sitting with a bunch of people you've met for the first time. That our awareness of that context actually impacts how we respond and that we all have bias in our perceptions and that bias plays out depending on the status we're granted in that culture. Bias is a natural preferencing we have, but then our positions of power or authority may allow us to impose our biases or be unable to impose our biases. So these cultural components of difference, context and perception also impact our comfort. So when I first came here and started working at UVM, I met a number of Vietnamese and they were gracious enough to invite me to a reception for TED, the Vietnamese new year, also called the Chinese new year. At that time it was, I think it was the Radisson, which is now the Hilton. They were kind enough to invite me. I said, yes, of course I'll come. I was outside of my comfort zone. I wasn't in my fear zone, but I was dancing between fear and learning a bit. I walked into a room with people dressed wonderfully, the smells of freshly cooked food. I recognized almost nothing I was being offered as food. I had no knowledge of the language being spoken by 98% of the people in the room. I knew a very small number of people from UVM, so I knew very few of the people in the room. I was fairly uncomfortable. I wasn't frightened because I was a guest. People were doing their best to treat me with respect and honor as a guest, but it was definitely outside of my comfort zone. I learned a great deal about Vietnamese culture. I've made some friends who I still have today. I have food I really love, that I go down to Phô Hanh's off Riverside and Get or other places when I have the chance, but all because I stepped outside of my comfort zone. Part of what Calkin was writing about at the time he wrote was the need for America, the USA, to accept difference rather than try to force all of difference to fit into one particular pot or lens or model, if you will. So culture teaches us patterns of the way we live, it influences the group memberships we associate with, and all of us who have taught raised kids, even instructed a swimming class, have passed on or communicated certain components of culture, sometimes to a new generation. Culture, in my view, has multiple levels. There are different ways we can think about those components of culture. I like the model, and you can look up this article if you want, called the iceberg. This was really salient when the Titanic had just come out, but when we think of culture, we think of those things that are most obvious. How am I dressed? What do you hear for an accent? Perhaps the complexion of my skin, my height, weight, perceptions around my sex. The things that we can see, this is the zoologist to me, we're visual primates, influence us, but the things that really drive culture are well below the surface. Ideas of modesty, decision-making processes, attitudes towards deities, kinship, beliefs about friendship or sanity, notions of logic, even the physical space arrangements of how close or far I should be from someone. Those aren't immediately obvious, but language, art, music, dance, dress, food, sports are a little bit more apparent. If someone's playing cricket, we'll notice that really quickly and they're not playing football or baseball. Right? This time of year, the snow's pretty much gone, except in my picture, but if we look at the trees and imagine them having leaves, we notice the leaves a lot. They're really visible, especially in the fall when they're beautiful. But what really keeps the tree upright is the trunk. Those are the structures in a culture, laws, government types, the way documents are organized at the library or at the courthouse, the traditions just passed Town Meeting Day. Those are the things that support all of those things we see up at the top. And what supports the trunk are the roots, which are those beliefs, those things I said that are really deep underwater with the iceberg, are beliefs, the more covert, hidden values and ideals of a society, a culture, about sanity, wellness, sexuality. So when we're talking about cultural pluralism, we're talking about all these levels of difference and a pluralistic way. As Cochrane said, Cochrane was opposed to this idea that we just simplify things down and melt them together. He felt that denying the complications, the diversity was limiting and even for him an evil and would exacerbate evils. He wanted to advance the idea that multiple cultures and national pride could exist side by side together that I could maintain my identity as a German American, Italian American, those days an Irish American and be just as much an American as somebody who did not claim one of those ethnic identities or religious identities. And at those times, even multiple ethnic identities, one way and again, this is the zoologist in me a little bit, you can think of us as human beings of having a core who we are, but around that core are all these different components of our identity. Sometimes we're holding them really close, sometimes they're kind of removed and really nowadays we don't even think of electrons as little dots, they're sort of clouds surrounding the nucleus of an atom, so we don't even have specific points. But, you know, sometimes being a cisgendered male is really important. When I moved to Indiana to go to graduate school, I became a Yankee. No one had ever, excuse me, really focused on me being a Yankee before until I was in Indiana. That wasn't a significant part of my identity. When I became a parent, and that could be one of these electrons, that was another piece of identity that was new and different for me. As I said, I became a flat lander, excuse me, which was interesting because I thought Indiana was far flatter than New Jersey, but it's okay. And I also thought Washington State was far more mountainous than Vermont, but at any rate, a flat lander was a new identity for me as well. So some of these are ones that we have for a long time, that we hold close and meaningful. Other ones, maybe ones that come and go in and out of our consciousness, our field of vision, if you will. I just put this up here to make things more complex. There are all of these layers. If I had a way to do it with this presentation, excuse me, I need a drink, I would give you a three-dimensional model that makes this stuff even more visible than it is right now. And these aren't stagnant, they're moving, they're changing depending on that context. Where you are, when you are, who you're with, even historical events will influence what points of our identity or what identities we're most sensitive to around us. Just another way of looking at these in which, sort of, which ones are privileged, which ones are marginalized or might be oppressed, which things we value more or value less, right? And even these intersect. There's a wonderful video, if you get a chance to watch it, called Swastika to Jim Crow, which talks about Jewish academics escaping Nazi Germany before the start of World War II, coming to the U.S. to escape discrimination as Jews in Germany, discovering that there was anti-Semitic attitudes in the higher ed and that they couldn't get jobs at many higher ed institutions in the U.S. The only place they could get jobs were at HBCUs. So you had Jews getting jobs as faculty members at historically black colleges, mostly in the South, because they weren't accepted in the North and the African Americans at the school were like, it's odd that you white folks are working here and the Southerners were very confused because they were anti-Jewish attitudes, but there were also anti-black attitudes, but now the Jews were working at the black schools and they had to sort of figure out which of their biases trumped the other. The other sad story I will tell you is about the Arizona orphan adoption, where Irish children were unadoptable in the Northeast, Central East, because they were Catholics, but were very adoptable in Arizona by Mexican American Catholics. When the priests and nuns took them by train from New York to Arizona, gave them to Mexican American families, the white folks in the community freaked. They got their guns and they took the children away from their adoptive families. They had to call in the state federal judge to get them to rule. He ruled in favor that they could not be adopted by the Mexican family and the priests and nuns had to load them back on the trains and take them back east. So nobody wanted them in the east because they were Catholics and not quite white and they were too white to be adopted by Mexican Americans in Arizona. It's a really sad but fascinating story if you have the time. So even this idea of marginalized and privileged intersects. This is a favorite quote from that article on the iceberg that understanding people we want to work with, serve, help is a critical component to being able to do that successfully. Now, again, there's got to be a few of you out there that enjoy a beer when the weather's warm and unfortunately Vermont is noted for micro breweries. So I'm not sure Coors is tops on anybody's list, but I'm asking you if you can think about where Coors home location is. And I'll give you a moment. And again, if this was possible, I'd have somebody sort of putting out answers. But I'm going to assume that some of you might know Coors home location is golden Colorado, right? So if Coors is in golden Colorado, and they made the mistake of translating, turn it loose to suffering from diarrhea in Spanish, what's the probability that a company based in Colorado has people for whom Spanish is their first language on their staff? What's the possibility that they're not in management? And that management didn't bother to actually check with them to back translate. This is more ironic to me, because if you look at the history of the US, almost all the Southwest was Mexico originally. It was annexed after the Spanish American war, the Treaty of Guadalupe, and Mexico ceded huge amounts of land to the US. So actually Colorado was originally, most of Colorado anyway, was originally Mexico, right? So one of the ways that Cochens ideas are alive today is that often diversity is not necessarily recognized as an asset versus something that's ignored or missed or passed over. Now you can have difference without having necessarily the types of diversity that are important. I just want to share with you that until recently, all of the judges appointed to the Supreme Court came from only two of the approximately 300 plus law schools in the country, regardless of who appointed them, and actually regardless of their ethnic background, right? And the first Trump appointee was also from Yale. It is only the most recent woman appointed to the Supreme Court who is a graduate of Notre Dame Law School that adds any diversity in terms of academic background to the members of the court. So there's lots of diversity of people, but in terms of their training as lawyers, there's not a big spread here. And that's not to say people can't have different views and values. I'm just pointing out that you can have a lot of diversity and still maintain a particular cultural lens for everybody involved. What does this have to do with what I call the difference between intent and outcome? I think there was an intention to diversify the court and in some ways there's been a great deal of success. But I think if you look at from a particular marginalized lens in terms of the hierarchy and higher ed that's granted to Ivy League institutions versus non-Ivy League institutions, the outcomes of academic diversity in terms of the law schools was pretty limited. So from a dominant lens, there was really good intention. But unfortunately, from a marginalized lens, there was some limits to how well that outcome was achieved. And also that often people from a dominant position. So as a cisgendered male, I might have a particular lens on sexism or heterosexism that might be very different than someone who's constantly subject to discrimination because they're non-gender conforming or because they identify as female or a woman. These difficulties can show up in terms of work, access to time and space, preference for language. When I was in school, students were actually disciplined for not speaking only English, even though it might be their second or third language. And also access to roles and positions of power. It shows up also sometimes in the ways in which we categorize and value things, the ways we, what things we perceive as different or important. I want to suggest that the pluralistic view is like an insect where you have a multifaceted eye and you see multiple views all at the same time to make up that whole rather than just one single lens. It's also a pretty picture, I think. To be specific, most of the research now supports that you actually get better results this way, that the output from these organizations are actually improved when there's more multicultural teams. And there's some interesting work that's been done by a guy named Ziller in Israel showing the same thing for multicultural teams there as well. I think at a personal level, I talked about my own challenge, the challenge to allow myself to go into situations that challenge me, that push my comfort level a little. The challenge to make sure I'm asking who gets to define these processes and systems. Being sure I know that there are systems in place that make certain decisions for me or about me. How do I expand my experience? How do I take opportunities like this wonderful set of opportunities that are being provided by these webinars for you to sort of just expand the information you have access to? I think to the extent that I am able to name bias, bias behaviors, and affirm positive behaviors, the challenge bias, or support others. And how do I to the extent that I'm able actually support marginalized identities? Through my own voice and conviction, by validating their stories, not speaking for them, but validating their right or access to being able to speak. I want to share with you that there's a lot of information out there. I mentioned Hawkins book. The two books by Scott Page here, the diversity bonus and the difference. Scott Page is a complex theorist mathematician who, instead of looking at diversity from a social lens, looks at it purely from a mathematical formulaic lens to show through calculations, basically, there is a benefit. And as some people would say, the numbers don't lie. I don't know that the numbers are always true, but he uses math to show statistically and analytically how diversity benefits organizations. As I said, there's domestic diversity issues of the cast, which really looks at racism and the impact of racism in our society, cultural issues in terms of how we teach and instruct, intersections around those in the way we have culturally constructed gender and sexuality, and then just this wonderful short easy read called the blind spot that just looks at the way our brains are sort of geared to filter and modify information to make it easier and faster for us to make decisions, but that sometimes our brains cheat us like they may have cheated you with the dots into looking at information in an overly simplified way. You'll have this because it's being taped, obviously. There's some other books I recommend to you that you might want to look at, and I'm going to close here and open this up to questions with two quotes I really like. One by Martin Luther King, which I think is really what Calkin was hinting at, that if we fail to act that it really allows bias perceptions to continue without the question of is the bias even useful in some ways. And the other by Elie Weisel that points to the danger of neutrality. I think people sometimes think that being neutral is a spot on the line halfway between the two ends. I think if you're really neutral, you have to find a way to actually step off of the line because the middle isn't really neutral. It's allowing one side or the other an advantage. If I'm really neutral, I have to somehow remove myself from the equation. And personally, I haven't quite figured out how to do that often. I want to stop here. And I think unfortunately, for me to see the questions, I may have to close my PowerPoint. Let me see here if I can get, yeah, that's what I was afraid of. I'm going to have to stop sharing screen, I believe. Forgive me here. I am going to just go one place for you. When we get to the end, I'm going to end a few minutes early, there'll be a commentary, but I really would in the chat appreciate when we're done if people would sort of give me a word or two about what they thought of the presentation and the Q&A and stuff. I really appreciate in getting feedback from the audience. All right, let me stop sharing and let me get to questions. And it looks like there's been a few in here already. How programs at the Center for Cultural Polism have been impacted by the pandemic positively or negatively? The positive side is that by going virtual, I think we've allowed some people access who might not be physically able to go home and come back to a program or had commitments right up to that time and would have had to get to the program late. So I think we've expanded access in some cases. I think the format of virtual, even in this case, has had some limitations in the amount of interaction and it also presupposes people have decent Wi-Fi, have a good laptop or a cell phone. So I think it's a both and. If a high school student of color were applying to both an HBCU and a college with a predominantly white enrollment and asked for guidance, what might you offer? Now see, this is why I love this because I get questions I've never gotten before. I would say the three things in my experience that help students is one, they like where they are. B, they like what they're studying and B, they feel like they are developing a connection to the institution. So I think if students are unhappy where they are physically, geographically, but they really like their friends and they like what they're studying, they'll probably do okay. But if two out of three are bad, they're going to flunk out or transfer. So I think there are opportunities no matter where you go. And I think the challenge with race is it's an oversimplification. So if this white person is first generation Serbian with a disability, that's going to be different if they are fifth generation Polish and LGBT, that's going to be different. What if they're from a white person from a family that has adopted multiracial children? What if they're from a white family that's grown up in a predominantly African American neighborhood? Again, context is so important here. I don't think there's any problem with a student who identifies themselves as Caucasian, Anglo or white attending an HBCU and they do all the time. And I don't think there's a problem with them attending a predominantly historically white institution either. I think those are going to be different experiences depending on where the school is, the size and the community. Other questions folks, come on. Or maybe I'm not seeing them. There are questions in the Q&A. So if you go to the bottom of it and click on the Q&A button. Thank you so much. Can you comment on the kind vendor video about whiteness? Kind vendor, kind vendor. I have to look this one up. I think I know what you're talking about. And that's, if you're talking about Aaron's YouTube post who's a faculty member in counseling. I think my entire presentation has some comment on it. I don't know the person. So it's difficult for me to comment on an individual's personal views with no real understanding of beyond a short video I've seen. It's not someone I know. What platform would allow us to stream the video Swastika to Jim Crow? I don't know if I have an answer to that. The UEM Library has the video. It might well be, you know, this is where, you know, there are so many platforms out there. I would just Google Swastika to Jim Crow or maybe do Swastika to Jim Crow in YouTube and see if it shows up. You might be able to get it from the Fletcher Free Library as well. I don't know if it's a live streamed film. It's, to date it, it was originally in VHS and has now been moved onto DVD. So I don't know who would have it out there. But if you contact the Bailey Howe Library, I'm sure they could tell you who the producer is and you might be able to get like a 24-hour site license to stream it. Somebody said phenomenal. Well, thank you. I'll take that as really high praise. Would it not be more productive to emphasize our commonalities rather than our differences? I guess I'd like to think we have the ability to do both at the same time. You know, some people would say to me, well, I don't see you as black and my question would be, well, what would it mean if you did? Because if you're consciously saying you're trying not to identify my race or pick any ethnicity you want, there's a history attached to that cultural background or that particular experience that failing to acknowledge I think can be really demeaning for people. So I don't think that no, and I would actually honestly say that's like saying I can't, I don't notice sex. So I have a real trouble finding a restroom, right? If that's something that's important to you. They've even done studies where some stores would refuse to sell baby clothes to people if they didn't know the sex of the child, if they wouldn't tell them the sex of the child. So I think that we can't help but consciously or unconsciously notice difference. Difference isn't a problem unless it's weighted in a particular way. I'm going to do something really quick to point to this one if I can. Let's see. So here's a concrete example. Somebody I know personally was adopting, this was 19, maybe in 1999, 2000. And this is information requested of the birth father. So they want to know his name, they want to know telephone, yada, yada, yada, all these things, right, widowed, separated, divorced. But under physical descriptions, they want to know height, weight, age, hair color, eye color. And then they list that complexion is important. Fair, normal, olive, tan, dark, and my favorite other. Green, blue, purple. So by placing normal between fair and olive, you've now ranked these. First of all, I'm not sure the complexion is important, but you could have, you know, a color spectrum in which they're not ranked, or you could have a color spectrum which says clearly you're only normal if you're between fair and olive. So my question about difference isn't, is difference there? It absolutely is. Is noticing it a problem? I don't think so unless there's a bias attached to the difference you're noticing. So that's my piece on difference. Up, so let me go back here to, somebody found the YouTube for Swastika to Jim Crow. I serve on the board of a nonprofit, we're in the process of developing a diversity, equity, and inclusion. Mission statement for our diverse employees, our customers and our board currently do not have a racially or culturally diverse membership on the board. Could you suggest organizations serving or supporting minorities in our Burlington community to recruit a more diverse working board as we are increasing the size? Okay. There are lots of organizations in Vermont. If you're speaking broadly about diversity, are you one, two, association Africans living in Vermont? There's a Somali Bantu organization. There's actually still an old German beer hall in the old North End, right? There's the Bosnian community. There's a Somali women's tea group, right? There's a small but active Filipino organization. But my challenge to you is if you haven't worked on the climate in the board, inviting people into a climate that's not going to be accepting of a pluralistic culture is asking them to melt, to conform if they want to stay on the board. And even if they stay, if they're not valued, they may not feel like it's a worthwhile opportunity to continue. So my first question isn't, can you get people? What have you done with the board to make sure that you have a climate and an environment that is willing, able, and ready to engage with the diversity you're now trying to recruit? And what are you doing to build capacity? Because I doubt your board is completely homogeneous, even if you have nothing but white cisgendered, able-bodied, male-identified folks over the age of 40, between 40 and 45. Because they come from different family backgrounds, potentially from different parts of the country, have different sexual orientations, may have different issues of visible or invisibility ability issues. So I'm just suggesting that both you expand the definition and more importantly, you begin with where is the board with its own comfort? And if the board is all white-identified, what would it be helpful to understand about white identity? And there's a huge body of literature now out there, both historical, cultural, political, a whole range of stuff people could read to understand there's a wonderful book called White by Law by a guy named Lopez that looks at the legal history of the codification of whiteness in the U.S. and how the legal system structured who became white. Wonderful example that in Rollins versus Alabama, I believe the case was 1919. At that point in time, there were anti-miscegenation laws, which meant that black African Americans could not marry whites. A black man was accused in the town of marrying a white woman was found guilty. He appealed to the Alabama Supreme Court. This is Rollins. The court decided in his favor to throw out the case. You can look up this case, Rollins versus Alabama, 1919. And the court verdict literally reads, there is no clear evidence the woman being Sicilian is white. They didn't say she was black. They just said, we're not sure she's white. So depending on your background, you're only recently white. And if you look at the names we use to describe poor people who are white, that condition is still not completely stable to use my words. So I think even understanding whiteness and what whiteness is or what it means to identify as white is beneficial before you bring in a diverse group of people to give points of conversation. Do UVM geographic locations or institutional cultures waive for or against fostering a positive learning environment for students who are of color or identify as LBGT? Have you seen progress regarding diversity in recent years? So you all ask good questions. So I have to think about answering them. And this is like three questions in one. All right. So every school's geographic location and institutional culture, as I said, weigh in because different sizes and places. I mean, I worked at Cornell. I've worked at Penn State. I went to school at Washington State. I went to school at Ball State in Muncie, Indiana. They all have different cultures. So do those impact learning, yes, somewhat homogeneously. If you like being at a really rural location, depending on who you are, you might like it there. If you miss the city and you feel isolated in a rural location because you came from an urban area, that may happen. If you're going to a historically white institution that doesn't, as UVM does, has created organizations to support LGBT students of color, students across faith and belief traditions, women, then you may have trouble building a community that's important to you for support or places to go when things are challenging. So I think UVM has done well in that aspect. Do we still have a lot of work to do? Yes. I would point out that when I started here, students of color represented just over 4% of the student body. They're now up to over 12, and it's like this year will be the most ethnically diverse class we've had. When I came here, there was no LGBTQA center. Four years ago, there was no interface center. So have we made progress? Yes. Is there still a lot of work to do? Yes. Both those things are true at the same time. It's not simple. It's not easy. My metaphor for everyone is I really hated when they stopped using Windows 8 because I really loved Windows 8, but I haven't gone back to using a manual typewriter. Change is a constant. Diversity is a fact. Acceptance is the choice we have, whether we're going to be inclusive. I don't know what the question is for AALV, and I don't know those acronyms. Yes, there is a Filipino community here. Thank you for the person who listed that. Oops, over here. Do you feel the university has been more open or diverse or has it been successful? It's just talking about that. Has your department been impacted by the recent cuts at UVM? And if so, what have the limitations been? In terms of the Center for Cultural Pluralism, right now, not overly because so much of our program has switched to online and virtually. We just put together a video series. You can't be webinar series called You Can't Be Anti-Racist if you don't understand race. And because we're not having to rent space, we don't pay for food, we've managed to do all right this year. What the budgets will be like next year, we'll have to see. So there may be cuts or limitations that impact us, but the Vice President has done a really good job of being really supportive, Dr. Wander Henning Grant. And I think we're in an okay place, whether it will stay that way or not remains to be seen as often the case. And there's certainly, you know, I don't know anybody that would tell you they couldn't do more if they had more money. But that's sort of the nature of the beast. Oh, I'm working on reading Cast. I have not, I'm reading the half that's not been told Cast is next on my list. After recently reading Wilson's Cast and her book on migration north of African Americans, I now see thinking I believe of that proposed a reverse migration to the southern states for political evenings, reference and blue states. Thus the Senate. I'm not a political scientist, and I'm not sure I understand this question one have to give an informed answer. Clearly, there was migration of African American blacks from the south to the north at one point. Before that, actually, when the slave trade started, there were huge slipmints, shipments of slaves really rare. It's were built bring slaves from the North Carolina and Maryland down to the south to work the plantations. Is there been a new migration to the south from the north? Potentially. I think it's a simplification of I would need to know more about migrations by who immigration from Mexico, Mexico, other Latin X populations moving to the US, other folks from Southeast Asia and Asia, Afro Caribbean versus African immigrants to the US. I don't have enough information to give a good answer to that question. I apologize. Thank you for the praise. I'm glad the diagrams are useful. I got about two minutes left if there's another question or thought anybody wants to put up. I'm happy to do my best. I told you I'm going to be real honest if I don't know the answer. I'm going to tell you. All right. This has been too. Did you find another question? One more. We have time for one more if there is. No, I'm just going to put up this one request for folks in the chat because I see there's there's about 50 people in the chat. So let me just share screen one last time. Assuming this won't mean do this, darn it, Janet. Just to ask everyone if you would throw a word, if you haven't about the experience, I really like getting feedback, thoughts, suggestions, so I can make presentations better. So thank you. And it's all yours, Carol. Let me just stop sharing and mute myself. Oh, this has been wonderful. Thank you so much. You've given us a lot to think about, which we love. Very, very edifying. Hope you'll come back soon. Thank you, Sherwood. You're welcome. My pleasure. Everyone be well. Have a good weekend. You as well. Bye-bye.