 According to my clock, it's the top of the hour. So let's begin. Let me welcome everybody. Welcome to the Future Transform. I'm delighted to see you here today. My name is Brian Alexander. I'm the forum's creator, I'm your host, and I'm your cat herder for the next hour, and I'd like to welcome all of you to our hour of conversation. We have a couple of fantastic guests, and I'm really looking forward to meeting them and introducing them to you. I'm just absolutely delighted to welcome these two people. They have authored right now a new book that is in the publisher, and we should be able to buy it pretty soon. They'll tell us all about it, which gives us a bracing look at how we can reimagine higher education. These are both wonderful professors at the City University of New York, which is an extraordinary institution by itself. I have a lot of questions I want to ask them, and I want to hear more from what they're working on right now. So let me just start by bringing Christina up on stage. Hello, Christina. Hi, how are you? Great. Good to see you. How is everything? Good. Thank you so much for having me. I'm really honored to be here. Oh, it's our pleasure. And just so you know, there's a danger between me hosting and you being a guest. And the danger is that I will ask you about climate change in the humanities, and I will totally, totally go off in a completely different direction. So I've got to hold back from that. But I want to ask you, what are you going to be working on next year? What are the big projects and the big ideas that are occupying you? Thanks so much for asking this book with Becky. We are working on a book called Transform Every Classroom. It's a practical guide for transformative teaching and learning, where it's about getting students to participate, to be active agents in the classroom, and to give students agency, really. Oh, fantastic. And this is from Harvard University Press? Yes. Anticipated for next year. Very good. Very good. Well, it's a great project, and I appreciate the glimpse into it right now. And what are you going to be teaching? How are you going to be teaching? So I'm actually not teaching this year. I'm working as the executive director and postdoctoral fellow at the Transformative Learning in the Humanities Program. It's a three-year initiative at CUNY. We just are now concluding our first planning year. We just welcomed 51 faculty fellows from all across CUNY's 25 campuses. Wow. And this is supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. And it's again about participatory active learning, structuring equity into the classroom, which I know Kathy will also want to talk about today. And so, yeah, it's a very exciting program. We just did over 70 workshops. Faculty organized them themselves. We had faculty participate, and they worked with their students. Students participated. They gave their input on active learning methods. They gave their input on on grading, and it was really a transformative experience. Yeah. That's fantastic. So on the one hand, you've got equity. And on the other hand, you've got student democracy, student empowerment, student agency. That's terrific. What a great project. Any change in higher ed needs to come from those who are invested in it most in students and faculty. And as now in this all to act role, administering this program, I have the wonderful opportunity to learn from so many inspiring educators and their students as well. What a privilege. What a great position. What a great program. Well, Christina, I want to hear more about that, but I want to get your colleague on the stage next to you. And so let me bring on Kathy Davidson, who was one of our shining guests just a couple of years ago in the before times. Hello, Kathy. Hi, Brian. How are you doing? Hi, Christina. Haven't seen you in ages, Christina. Yesterday we put on a big five hour, four or five hour institute for all of our new faculty fellows. It was pretty amazing because everything we did was brainstorming, hackathons, creating manifestos together, all of the active learning things that we're preaching in our book. So practicing and preaching active learning. This is great. This is great. Absolutely. The book we're doing together and I'm so lucky to be working with Christina. The last thing in the world I wanted to be was one of those old foud academics that tells young people how to do what young people already know how to do. Christina has been teaching for a decade and relatively new PhD, but she's also dealt with the realities of teaching in this world and teaching as an adjunct at many different kinds of institutions. And that's really crucial because what we're trying to do is take all of the radical theory we've all read about in Friere and Nibel Hooks and Audre Lorde, but translated into really practical things that don't take more time, but are more effective ways of learning and more egalitarian ways of learning. And we've got all the research on that. A thousand studies of active learning. Yes, indeed. Well, that was just yesterday. That was yesterday, yes. We're moving on. Kathy, I'm assuming that there's a few people here who might not know you. And so I just wanted just to get to introduce you. Let me ask, what are you going to be working on for the next year? Well, we have this book and I'm also finishing, I hope, a science fiction novel. I just feel I know I've never, I've never written science fiction before. And until three years ago when I started this, I hadn't really read it except for Octavia Butler. And now it's all I do. And I think it's because we live in a world where science and fiction, neither one of them is capable of dressing the world, so we need to put them together. And it's, I'm having a blast. I'm just having a great time. Oh, that's fantastic. I'm also doing a new edition of The New Education. I should mention that because that would be a little remiss not to mention it. Now, is that a second edition? It is a whole new paperback edition with a new forward. The original had 10 tips for students to do well in college, 10 tips for faculty to change their classroom. This has 10 tips for changing your institution and a number of other features. And it'll be in paperback, which is cool. Oh, that's great. Let us know when it goes out so I can. We'll do. Fantastic. And friends, if you, in the announcement for this program, we shared a bunch of links. Kathy has a stack of great books to her name. And I really recommend all of them. And Christina has been building up an empire on the web, the whole range of great content, especially from Margaret Fuller as well as as mentioned before, teaching the humanities and climate change. So please keep an eye on all of this work. Now, the forum is all about questions from everybody, everybody in the audience. I just want to set that up by asking. We just lived through an extraordinary and very weird time. And it's not quite done, but we seem to be winding down the pandemic in the United States. And among other things, it showed us that higher education actually had a tremendous reservoir of innovation. And a year and a quarter ago, we were able to flip higher education online in just a few weeks, not just a few days in some cases. What does that tell you too about higher education's ability to reimagine the classroom and learning? I'll jump in and then, Christina, you can flesh this out. What I love is that two years ago, if you'd asked anybody if higher education could change, they would say that education hadn't changed since Socrates walked in the forum thousands of years ago, which is completely wrong. It's a false history. Higher education went through a tremendous change in the 19th century when the modern university was invented. But in two weeks, 18 million students were put online. And when I've given talks and pulled the audience, we changed grading methods. We changed semesters. We changed, oh my God, the Carnegie credit hour. And I keep saying, if we could change the Carnegie credit hour in emergency, we should be able to change the tyranny of meritocracy. All the whole ways of gaming the system that go into admissions, scholarships, the funding of K through 12 education. I don't know if you saw this week, someone did some wonderful research on math scores and put up a map of income distribution in the United States with little points of who makes the most of the least income. And then a second map of map scores are the same map. We're not teaching math. We're teaching economics, meaning how rich your parents are. But I think if we can make the kind of changes we did in two weeks last year, we can do anything. And we have to remember that we had that ability and remember our own resources as being able to respond to a crisis when lives depended on it and put that same energy in a major educational reboot and change. Just to add to that, because I've had the tremendous honor of working with Kathy closely, particularly at this stage of my career to work with someone who has so much experience and so much of the learning science knowledge, the social justice knowledge, the exposure, and we were talking yesterday. Little did I know, I learned yesterday that you had actually met some of the great educators, progressive educators at the community. You said you were meeting with June Jordan at one point and you argued, Lord, it's quite amazing to kind of have the experience of working with you and learning these things. And I think I taught last year online and in response to your question, I really think that the most successful work in the classroom happened in collaboration with students. It felt like we had been doing research for this book for many years and the world became more aware of the things that we had learned, that I had learned, Kathy knew all of this beforehand, but the things that I learned about students' lives, about the majority of students who work at time or part-time jobs, who are the primary breadwinners in their families, who have children, who have so many obligations in addition to being students, that we were all basically invited into their home lives in a very invasive way and I think those who were able to really engage their students in a two-way dialogue were really successful in modifying their classrooms, their virtual classrooms to meet students where they are and to create community online, to reach out to those students who didn't have bandwidth and tried to find ways to support them and it also showed how much support educators need and that more time and more resources are so important to give students the support they need to foster what Bell Hooks calls deep and meaningful learning, that community is so important to learning. So that's what I think that has shown us all and the science, the learning science, the research had all supported that, but now it feels like the whole world isn't on the secret. Indeed, it should be, it should be. The sounds of sirens for me is always brief that we're talking in New York City. Sorry about that. No problem, no problem. Native New Yorker, I know the sound well. It's an nostalgia. This is good. Yeah. Thank you. These are great ways of moving forward from the experience of the pandemic, not moving back to 2019, but discovering how we can change in a lot of ways. And of course, you're both at the CUNY system, which has one of the diverse, most diverse and one of the most economically suffering populations in higher education in the U.S. Now, I have a bunch of other questions, but I'm not sure they're here from everybody else but we have a whole stack of questions coming in. And we have one from a near neighbor of yours at Hofstra University, Professor Benjamin Rifkin, and he asks, please talk about what we can do now to prepare for the reconvenient campuses in the fall with regard to the very differentiated experience of trauma in the past two years. I'm going to put that up on the screen again. That's a really, really subtle question. I'm sure you can all see that. So, you know, looking ahead for the fall, how can we prepare for the differentiated experience of trauma? I think even just preparing for trauma, preparing, you know, I was talking to the colleague the other day and she was holding herself to the standard of teaching to pretend like as if it were pre-pandemic. And I was like, hold on. We have a lot of mourning to do. And some of us haven't seen loved ones last and it feels like the losses keep coming. And I think we need to embrace ourselves or, you know, embrace self-care and care in the classroom and continue to prioritize that. That we brought a degree of care into our classrooms and to recognize that, okay, things are getting better. But now is the time also to mourn, to grieve, to process, to look forward and to reimagine, you know, it's almost speculative fiction now what will come. So, yeah, that's what I would say. Kathy, I'm sure, has more. Yeah. No, I agree with that as well. And I think just asking that question is extremely meaningful. Remembering that the issue isn't just, oh, what technology we use, but like, who are we as humans and who are our students as humans? And what have they been through? What has our society been through? I mean, I just saw on Twitter today that more people are leaving their jobs because they don't like their jobs. And without notice, just leaving with no plans for the future than ever before. The flip side of that is women who suddenly during the pandemic became realized without paid childcare givers that they were responsible for families in a way that they thought their egalitarian marriages obviated and whose workforce level is down to the 1980s level are now trying to figure out how to reenter the market, the job market. So we're talking about, these are our kids, these are the parents of our students, and these are our students ourselves. So many 25% of students are over 27, those are our students. So on every level, there's been disruption and how we think about that in terms of how we structure our classes I think is the single most important thing we can do. And I think a lot of us are going to be teaching hybrid in the fall. I don't know that we know how to do that very well. I think I'm a darn good face-to-face teacher. I think I'm a darn good online teacher. I'm not sure if I'm good at an under-resourced university like CUNY where I'm going to have basically have a cell phone photographing me as I lecture the students. I haven't lectured it even to hundreds and hundreds of students I don't lecture. Suddenly I'm in a situation where the technology is making me teach in a way that could be bad for both my face-to-face and my online students. We have to figure a lot out on every level and I agree with Christina, we have to give ourselves some breaks. We're not going to do it perfectly. And admitting we... Did Kathy just freeze up? I think so, yeah. Okay. I'm going to give her a chance to reload the screen. Correct. And so Kathy, if you can hear this, just hit reload. In the chat you had at least one echo. Brittany Hofstadter said that she's seen very few darn good hybrid teachers, which is I think the case. And I just... I want to thank you both, Christina and Kathy, for very, very rich answers to that really solid question. You can go back into the Forum Archives the past year where we had a bunch of sessions, including two, on high-flex pedagogy with Brian Beatty. He met with the term, we've had several on academic work, self-care, balancing, work and life in the case of the pandemic. And above all, this kind of intentional pedagogy of listening hard to our students to see what they experienced and where they are right now, I think is crucial. And so, thank you again for a really, really good question. Kathy, are you back? Okay. I think you're back, but you seem to be having a problem with SoundQuilt, with the feed. You're stuttering a bit. Why don't you just try reloading this page and see how that changes things. Ben, thank you for the really good question. That was a really solid question. If you're new to the Future Transform, by the way, Ben's question is a great example of a text question. It works just that easily. And we have a few other folks that are up here right now. I want to make sure that we can see their questions too. So, from Kate Montgomery at SMU, as humanists and interdisciplinarians and amidst the constant debates the value relevance of liberal arts education, how do you see humanities education reimagined and more valued in society? That's such an excellent question. So, one thing that actually connects these two questions, I think, is talking about soft skills and focusing our teaching on what is most essential for students to learn. And what I think is so important is pointing out to students not just what we are learning or what is in the pre-sculpted curriculum, if it's a uniformed curriculum or what you have chosen or what you're asking them to choose if you're asking students to design a syllabus themselves. That we point out how and why we are learning is so important. And I often call this lifting up the curtains to show students the string of how and why it works, right? So, let's take a simple group activity, okay? When students are upset that one group member it's just not working, it's not going right. Well, I say, okay, this is one semester. If this is a job, if you wanted to change groups, you would need to either change departments or get a new job. And that's much harder. So, now is a perfect time to practice working through that difficulty and communicating and trying to find a way to make it work. And, you know, I don't just throw students in without mentoring them. So, thinking about group office hours where I can also talk about how to work through problems as a group, how to raise issues in a way that, again, like doesn't put unnecessary burden or labor on students. I'm still the one, you know, the supervisor. You know, I would never put students in the role of supervisor. That's not their responsibility. But to mentor students and how effective group work is done and how to work collaboratively across differences. I think that is a way to emphasize the soft skills the essential skills that employers are looking for. And, you know, for example, one interview question that's very common is tell us about a time that something wasn't working and how did you overcome it? You know, that is a common question and you need communication, collaboration, resiliency, independent research. You know, things like that, those skills are really important. I think if we just point those out or show students, here's what you could put on your resume or, you know, you wrote this paper. Why don't you submit this abstract to a conference or to an essay contest? Put that on your resume. You know, things like that, that we can talk through. Kathy's not on stage right now, but I know that she's worked with students on how to write a good cover letter. I've done something similar with my students and Steve Berg, wonderful educator, so much admiration for him. He teaches students how to write a professional email. So thank you for just explaining how and why is really important. That's very smart. A whole set of humanities skills. Let me see if we've got Kathy's bandwidth set up. There you are. I guess those sirens were for a reason. It seems like the whole internet went down in this part of the world. They were bandwidth. They took it, but then it went away. I wasn't prepared for Christina to go on. She could do a fine job without me, but I'm not going to be back. Talked about soft and essential skills. And in fact, just before you cut loose, Kathy, in the chat, Benjamin Rifkin had a couple of quick responses. One was he said, I would like us to move away from the term soft skills to core skills, because I think that's that. We want to elevate this. We want to make sure that your celebration of collaboration skills as being key, which thank you. I like calling them core or essential skills. Essential skills. When I used to teach business managers, they said those aren't soft skills. Those are essential skills. So we started naming them essential skills. Very good. So the humanities, how can we elevate the humanities and bring the humanities back, Kathy? I don't think there's any. First of all, I'm a little nervous about the term humanities or the term the sciences. I think knowledge is way too interconnected and that one of the problems of the modern university is that in the 1890s, we created these silos that made things distinct. That in real life aren't. And that's another thing we learned from the pandemic. The pandemic was every bit as much about economic disaster and economic inequality as it was about a disease. The fact that between January and now we have this incredible vaccine rate in the United States and such a very low transmission rate of a vaccine is not a healthcare issue. My relatives in Canada still haven't had their vaccines. It's a policy issue. It's a business issue. It's a philosophy issue. It's a governmental issue. It's a political issue. And it's a science issue. And those things are incredibly mixed except in our classrooms. So I think one of the things that we need to think about is how is this connected to this? How is this connected to this? And more classes that mix things up entirely so that physicists and English teachers are talking together to me feel like a value added that comes from college that really can't come from any place else in the world until you're in that world and living in that world and having to deal with it. We can be arming people for the world in a very powerful way if we give up the silos and the turf that so much define our faculty lives and our practical lives as faculty members. Thank you. That's a great answer. In your question, Kate emphasized interdisciplinarians. It's worth just echoing the world is interdisciplinarian. Thank you, Kate. And thank you both for really, really sweet answers. As a humanist myself, I really admire both the question and the answers. We have a different... And again, friends, you can see how easy this is to make questions and you can see how generously and extensively both our guests respond to them. So please, throw in more questions for us. We have one from Keele Donsh who asks, in my view, the single biggest threat to high rates of stingibility is the loss of its credential and its degrees. I would like Katherine Kristina's take on alternative credentialing. So... Mind if I jump in here? As some of you know, I'm the co-founder of what NSF calls the world's first and oldest academic social network. We call it HSTAC, but the initials are H-A-S-T-A-C, Humanities, Arts, Science, Technology, Alliance and Collaboratory. I recently was telling somebody about how we wanted to have this thing called a wiki in 2002. And so we talked to this guy in a garage and we worked on the first wiki and then the next year he launched Wikipedia. It was Jimmy Wales. I hadn't even really thought about how historic that is. Wow. True. So this was... One of the things we're doing now is we're trying to redesign this website. It's way too expensive. We have 18,000 members. It's too expensive for anyone to keep up anymore. So we've been talking to a developer about ways we might be able to archive the current website and think about re-scaling and what HSTAC might look like in the future. And as a good developer, she does design discourse and she asked us about user stories. And in a user story, you ask a formula question. As an authentic user, I should be able to do this action in order to have this benefit. Online credentialing is... I should be able to get this online credential in order to get this benefit, which is often an immediate job that uses these skills. Cynically, I'm worried that Google and Amazon are promoting that kind of credentialing because they want you to have that kind of training, their training, for those kinds of skills, beginning level, undergraduate, underpaid, under-resourced skills that we know have an incredibly low glass ceiling. The glass ceiling for programmers is about five years. If you don't also have all those essential skills, all those connector skills, all those bigger ways of thinking, all those cultural ways of thinking, you're not going to get above that glass ceiling. You're going to be credentialed for superannuation, credentialed for quick obsolescence in the most cynical terms possible. I'm very suspicious and as you know, I've been doing badging and alternative credentialing in my classrooms, in competitions with my life as a member of the Mozilla Board for 20 years. I believe in it. I do not believe in that as a substitute for education, especially for people who do not come from middle-class backgrounds. People who talk about the privileged poor, first-generation college students who go into college talk about the hidden curriculum. All the things that middle-class people learn at the dinner table that people whose fathers have never worn a tie except at a funeral or a wedding don't have as a matter of currency because they're things that are about the passport to, I didn't do well on my SATs, we'll get you a tutor, right? No, my students live on $7,000 a year, there's no tutor. Tutor costs $7,000 a year. What are the hidden curriculums of college that you learn by being in college with diverse people that will allow you to move beyond the glass ceiling of your first five or six years in a job? I have a friend who is a therapist who said almost all of her clients are 40-year-old people who've gotten to the glass ceiling and don't know what to do next. Who thought they're often, she herself is Asian-American looking towards a specific job to getting a job right out of college and now have gotten to the glass ceiling that's often gendered, racial and class-bound as well as field-bound and they don't know what the next step is. Those are things that should be part of our user story in college that you're not just learning content, you're learning skills that will allow you to be leaders. Future leaders have changed in the world and future leaders in your workplace. And that's typically reserved for the very elite of those roles. And we got lots of research on that, lots of research on that. That's a fantastic answer and I know Keele a bit and I suspect he'll jump in I think and what he would say is so are you saying that universities like Q&A and the 4,000 plus out there in the U.S. and the 20,000 in the world should they then maintain their position as not just teaching classes but also issuing credentials? Yes, CUNY has nursing degrees, physician's assistance, optometrist audiology, there are many, many kinds of certification you get and you're doing a four-year college education as well. And many of our students are coming back and retraining in fields and getting certification and retraining and then many of them also will also be getting degrees at the same time. And I think that's a model that's an important model for the future so that you're getting both and. Credentialed in an atmosphere where there constantly are events going on, constantly performances, talks experiments, exhibits you're getting a different kind of education you're getting many of the advantages of an education that don't come with a simple credentialing service and skills literal skills building credentialing service. And again, I've spent my whole last 20 years on alternative credentials, I'm not against them I just know their limits and I'm very cynical about them when the provider and the end user are the same person. When Google is giving you the education, Google is hiring you and they're not necessarily hiring you at market value. That's the kind of company town idea. Yep, yes, exactly. Well, thank you. Keele, thank you for great question. Great question, thank you. Thank you for rich, rich answer. We have a video question I want to bring up a great friend of the program and put us all in a special mode so we look extra cool for this because this is George Station coming to us from Cal State Monterey Bay long term friend of the program Hi George. Hello, George. Are you on vacation? I am in fact on vacation and tuning in just for this. Thank you. That's so kind, George. Great to see you. Okay, great. So basically you two have said so much already I don't know where to go with it but I do want to actually look forward to Kathy and Christina, not only the new book but Kathy, the next edition of New Education Thank you. Because that's the last time I think I saw you. You see Santa Cruz with Jody Green. That's what I was remembering too, yes. Yeah, but I wanted just to ask more about equity issues because let me quote and I'm going to read it so I don't mess it up. Australian educator Kate Bolz said, the pandemic has also taught us that all sorts of fixed fittings turned out to be movable. Scheduling, assessment modes grades, logistics of scale were now somewhat free not to put them back as they were. So I'm thinking about not post-pandemic but what we're going into immediately and everything you've said today about meritocracy, hidden curriculum us as faculty being ready to go back can we really do hybrid well all of those things and I'm concerned that this next year is going to be about as rough as last year and I'm wondering how we can get through this keeping issues of equity in mind and maybe if you could even be specific if you want to get back to your book are there issues as far as racial and ethnic equity in addition to a little more broad first generation students and other challenges that you were talking about with hidden curriculum so maybe if we can start with that so much is so huge but that's probably enough to if I could get a response from both of you. Easy question George. Thank you. That was the low ball version. Do you want to start Christina or do you want me to jump in? I can kind of stitch a few of the questions together and then Kathy will take it away. I just want to come back to again the value of the humanities and the importance of learning how to tell a story and how to tell a compelling story right and I think that that is a skill that every student needs and like Kathy was saying middle class family trained in telling a compelling story trained in telling showing the value of work and not necessarily in the ways that all students are trained in the unspoken things that you have to come to college knowing that you have to learn how to use the code and a lot of students don't even know about the support available or think you have to be in really big trouble to go get that support you know and it's so crucial that we as faculty as administrators and staff tell these stories to try to make this change and I think that that is an asset of the humanities and the importance that the humanities plays in that role of shifting the needle to meet the needs of more students and I think the more that story let's stop telling the story of the privileged upper upper class white kid who goes to the IVs he's in the 0.4% of undergraduates in the U.S. let's not make that the story of every college student and think about the stories of students who are working in part-time who didn't come in knowing you know having the insider knowledge that I think a lot of us who have decided to devote our lives to academia have and so that's I think the importance of telling stories that's the realm of the humanities the realm of every discipline every student you know you can't get the grant if you don't know how to tell a compelling story yeah I mean one of the stories that we know and this has been well backed by research is students who are first generation think if they go to a counselor or an advisor or a tutor that means they've failed whereas rich kids feel like that means that people are working for them and supporting them so it's a very it's a disparate idea of what is a resource versus what is my privilege hey I've earned this right I don't know any kidney student who feels that they're sort of entitled to the things that elite students feel that they're entitled that they're entitled to have been taught that they're entitled for that's what you're paying your tuition for I want to talk about faculty to George I think this is a really crucial thing in a new version of the new education I talk about 10 things we need to do to change our institutions the first one is change the faculty reward system because in a system of shared governance change can't just work from top down can't just work from bottom up but no faculty member who's smart is going to give up their chance for promotion and reward if it means they're going to be penalized for it and right now we have a system where a monograph or a citations in an article are really all that count an institutional service which is institutional change institutional leadership barely counts at all until you're an official administrator so you're actually asking people to sacrifice their careers to change their institutions who does that the second rule I have is get rid of the diversity tax if 45% of our students are students of color and 25% of our faculty are and if your college handbook has a person of color in every darn photo and you have a person of color in every committee and you don't have faculty representation you're ruining people's lives and careers you are setting up a structure of inequality supposedly to become more equitable that's a terrible model for the teacher it's a terrible model for students it's a terrible model for society it's called exploitation plus so that's one of my other things as we come back all of those things increase exponentially so for example the burdens are falling more on faculty of color the hardship is falling harder on students of color there are inequity issues on every level and I think those have to be addressed institutionally and I hope our administrators are listening I don't know if you're listening by the way my voice just broke up terribly it was okay we're listening and I'm going to be pointing a few people on my campus to this recording so based on what she just said we've had a lot of statements last year continuing this year all over university and college websites everywhere last summer it was about the unrest and George Floyd's killing this summer it was about the chauvin conviction and so on but they're all of a type as far as campus statements those promises of what we are going to do that are kind of echoed in what you're talking about I'm wondering if you have any evidence that universities are actually going to do what they have been saying they should be doing in all those wonderful statements most of which are still on the web for us to read from last year and continuing into this year as far as let's get real specific we haven't so far black latino students and so on and if you've addressed this in your book if you have anything to say about that I hear it in what you've said so far but please embellish a little for us and thank you so much Brian for welcoming me up to ask this today well thank you and my best to your wife well that's a separate negotiation we'll talk about that later so I would say two things at once there's been lots of hiring and lots of hiring not just in academe but in museum directors, museum curators library people in places of prominence my fear and this is not just my fear but my fear talking to lots of older scholars of color and museum directors of color who are worried that young people are being put in positions of responsibility without resources and support for those responsibilities and are going to be taking the fall especially as at the same time we have those statements on websites we have Florida, the governor of Florida signing a law saying that every student and every faculty member has to say what their political beliefs are and their tuition is going, their scholarships are going to be judged by whether they are having true knowledge or if they are insisting that people are making up called critical race theory they don't mean Kimberly Crenshaw in 1970s legal theory they mean some other thing that's being used like communism was used by McCarthyism and for the exact same end so we have two things happening at once in society and on websites and in the reality of people coming into those both being hired in positions I hope with support I hope everybody who is being hired into those positions has a great mentor who is helping them get all the resources they need to succeed and thrive and change the world more cynically I'm afraid that too many people are being hired in positions of visible I'm saying this very carefully visible prominence without the kind of infrastructural support that is normally given to people in leadership roles and that is what we all have to fight for and we have to be focused and be dedicated to and be looking at very carefully because otherwise there is going to be a lot of scapegoating of exactly the people who should be the next generation of our great leaders in Akadene. I hope that didn't sound too depressing and cynical but my commitment this year is in that direction as much as in any direction right now. Thank you Kathy and again George thank you for the time. I'm conscious of time and we have some questions stacked up and I want to make sure that we get a chance to address all of them friends if you do to the forum that's an example of a video question so you have a chance if you'd like to click the raise hand button and join us but in the meantime we have more questions of educational change and one of them comes from Jason Frank at Santa Fe a very pointed question how can a higher end effectively address issues like equity, social justice and how to fight a rupture? Go for it Christina. A lot of capital B big capital F feelings about this so kind of piggybacking on what Kathy was saying you know we saw a lot of cluster hires of people of color and I think that one thing that is really hard that I think we need to fight is the requirement of a certain number of citations and that being what tenure depends on and the unspoken requirements of mentoring all of these people and I think coming from the adjunctified workforce mentorship is so much of what we do and it goes so far beyond whether you are tenure track or not I think mentoring is such an important part of education that it's not valued in our tenure and promotion structures and I think what Kathy was saying earlier about the importance of it's not service coming back to the language issue right not soft skills but essential skills or core skills it's not service it's leadership but this is an interesting opportunity for us as leaders to know what we are doing and what we are doing is reflecting change across the university every time you volunteer to be on a committee and even as an adjunct I have participated on committees completely uncompensated every time we spend extra hours on future training and professional development rebuild them on accounting for leadership as much as we do research, if not more so, as much as we do, we should count teaching. Those are all connected. They're all related to one another. And it goes back again to the siloing problem, right? That teaching and research are often coincide. And I'm in English. I've taught many composition courses, and I actually had a faculty member observe me teaching a course of 35 students over enrolled. And she said, you can't keep doing that. You'll get burned out. And I said, so what do you teach? And she teaches honors senior poetry with maybe 13 or fewer students. And I was like, so that's a demonstrable difference. And also for me to make a living as a PhD student at the time, living in New York City, I was not only working, teaching on multiple campuses, moonlighting at a different school, working on a presentation supposedly, working as a fellow, and also working as student staff in the admissions office. And fortunately at CUNY, CUNY, we couldn't keep the lights on without student labor. No university could. No university could. And I think that's amazing in that I've now graduated with this tremendous skill set. But again, I think we need to think about service as leader puts and how to structure our reward system in those ways to value good teaching as much as we do research and value good leadership as much as we do research. Thank you. Thank you for sharing your own story. And my admiration from you just escalated. I didn't know that there were actually three or four of you, Christina. I thought there were two. I think there's a hundred. I think so. Well, the problem is that students suffer, right? That then they're coming to me asking for recommendation letters when they apply for jobs or fellowships or study abroad or graduate school. And I'm like, I'm at the bottom of the totem pole. My recommendation does not mean much, but I'm the only person who knows your name. And so how can I mentor you better to seek out and find mentors who can write that letter for you? Thank you for sharing that. And Jason, thank you for the very pointed and very apt question. I think that's a contradiction that we're not really facing very hard because our texts are very clearly. We have more questions that have come in. One from Michael at Redusco, University of Detroit Mercy. And Michael asks, higher education is getting dismissed, devalued or targeted for reform. Do you suggestions for institutions to communicate the value of an education, of a liberal arts education? Kathy? Unfortunately, the exact things that we're communicating as a value of higher education is the things that people want us to stop doing. So I think actually, rather than communicating the value of higher education, we need to be, one, standing our ground about why it's important, but two, I think we have to go on the offensive. I think the conversation about critical race theory has become entirely dominated by people who are saying we're doing some terrible things, wording, denying history. The governor of Texas that spoke out against critical race theory. Also, it was only in 2018 that the Texas legislature voted to put slavery in as a cause of the civil war, the required high school textbooks in the state of Texas. So the two causes or the main cause of the civil war were state's rights and something else, but it had nothing to do with slavery. And there was a resolution passed that slavery be put into the textbooks. That was 2018, 2018. And now the same legislature is saying they have to outlaw critical race theory. We haven't even gotten history. Forget it, we don't have real, honest, accurate history. I don't even wanna talk about critical race theory. I mean, because nobody even, it's a made up term. It's like communism with McCarthyism and it's being used. So we have to say passionately that we stand for accurate, reliable, powerful ways of understanding what all of our fields are, including science. I mean, look at the world's misinformation about science. And again, overbalance given to anti-vaxxers and people who are refuting the power of science versus people who are standing up for science. It's a, I think we have to say just what our message is and what we're doing, undefensively, literally, undefensively. I think we have to be as offensive as we can be right now to get our message out there. Powerfully, powerfully. I'm happy to help be offensive. Let me hear from you. Thank you. I'm counting on you, Brian. Well, first of all, Michael, thank you for that question. And all best to you in Detroit. You guys have gone through a horrible time this past year. And Kathy, in support of what you're saying, Mike Ricicci in chat says, adjunctification is a side effect of anti-intellectualism. That's the reason why politicians cut public support for higher ed. And then we had a great response. Christina, to your point from Nikki Joanne, who says, what example are we setting for students if we harm ourselves in the process of existing in the academy? Absolutely. Yeah, I think in the new education, I say that students are learning from adjunct exploited labor, how to be adjunct exploited workers themselves. Because what we see in higher education is hardly limited to higher education. It's true of lawyers, accountants. I mean, the outsourcing, the gig economy is happening everywhere, including in higher education. Higher education, only two states have returned to pre-2008, 2008 funding levels. Yeah, we still hold on. So we're talking about a process that hasn't happened willfully. It's happened decisively and as a political issue that contributes to the, not only adjunctification, which is exploiting new faculty, but also 10% of actual, of full-time faculty also, which is also exploitation of every level of workers at the university, including students. It's a robbery, we're robbing the future. Future students, future teachers, everybody's future. I don't want to end on such a grim note, but I do want to end with that passion and that concern. And we are at the end of the hour somehow. I thought we just started and you guys are fantastic. Let me thank both of you, Christian and Kathy, for just terrific, terrific answers. This has been like a masterclass in thinking about higher education, reform and reimagination. What are the best ways to keep up with each of you? Kathy, you're pretty active on Twitter. I follow me on Twitter and you're gonna hear me shooting off my mouth about things every single day. Very good. That's a great way to keep up with me. Okay, okay. And Christina, what's the best way to keep up with you? Yeah, I'm also on Twitter, you can find me there and I also blog about teaching on Haystack. We have a pedagation group where we blog frequently about teaching. Very good. I know we'll have a lot to say about hybrid teaching in the coming semester. Excellent, excellent. And we should both look at the Harvard University Press catalog for when they announce your new book. Thank you. And Brian, thank you for all you do. I mean, I think one of the ways that we keep our spirits up are programs like yours and you do such a great job week after week after week. Thank you. Oh, thank you for saying that, that's off the ground. That leaves out a hidden third term that I want to reveal now, which is I want to thank the entire crew of everybody and what used to be called the audience. Thank you for these terrific questions in the chat box, we've been lighting it up. Thank you, thank you all. But don't go yet, don't go yet because I need to point out where we're headed for the next few weeks. Just to remind you that the next few sessions we're gonna be looking back at racial equity, at mentoring, trauma-informed teaching, personalized learning and augmented in virtual reality were also, if you'd like, to go back and keep talking about all these issues, just use the hashtag FTTE on Twitter and we already had some back and forth just now or the past hour. If you'd like to go back into the past and look at our archives, including Kathy's previous appearance, our sessions on everything that's come up so far from agitation to in changing teaching to questions of work-life balance, just go to tinyworld.com slash FTF archive and you can see a lot more. In the chat, Danette Long asked, what's the title of their new book? Danette, the title was provisional yet, they haven't fully agreed upon it yet so it's gonna be there and I'll share it out when it comes out. In the meantime, let me thank everybody, again, for a very impassioned, thoughtful and very, very rich conversation. This is the best way I think for us to think about where higher education is going next and the best way for us to start redesigning it. In the meantime, everybody, we'll see you online next time. Take care, be safe and we'll talk to you next Thursday. Bye bye.