 Greetings and welcome to this edition of Campus Conversations. I'm Dan Mogulov from the University's Office of Communications and Public Affairs. As many of you know, we regularly use these events as a way to get acquainted with new academic and administrative leaders. And today I'm really pleased to welcome David Wilson, who began his tenure as Dean of the Goldman School of Public Policy on July 1st. Prior to joining the Goldman School, Wilson was the senior associate dean for the Social Sciences in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Delaware and a full professor in the Department of Political Science and International Relations with a joint appointment in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences. That's an interesting blend of academic disciplines. We'll be talking more about as we go along today. David's own widely published and cited research examines how individuals formulate their political preferences about race and justice and how social cognition shapes broader survey response behaviors. He's the co-author of the forthcoming book, Racial Resentment in the Political Mind. David is also a military veteran with 19 years of service in the US Army Reserves, including combat tours for Operations Desert Storm and Iraqi Freedom. As always, we welcome any and all questions you may have for our guests today. Just post them to our Facebook live streaming site as we go along and we'll do our best to answer them. David, welcome to campus conversations. Thank you, Dan. That was pretty impressive. Yeah, you should know. So tell me something I'm always interested. Why Berkeley? Why Goldman? What brought you here? What got you interested when either you got that recruiting call or saw posting wherever it was? The excellent way to start. Grew up on the East Coast. Been there most of my life. California is this mysterious place. We had visited on various trips to the national parks, but we had never really engaged the idea of the state and it's kind of history and it's this kind of California spirit that I read about in the strategic plan. And I was impressed by the legacy, the sense of pride that the university has in excellence, the public mission that is beyond just kind of being a public university, but actually trying to do good on behalf of the public and be accountable to the public as well. So I was impressed by how the public mission really emphasizes service and contribution to something bigger than yourself. And the University of Delaware is a private university and some other affiliations I've been with were private entities. And it kind of changed the way I thought about what I wanted to do in my academic career. So I looked at Berkeley very seriously and when I looked at the Goldman school, I saw an interdisciplinary faculty focus on excellence. It's reputation just like the Berkeley reputation preceded it. So I knew it was excellent. I knew it had high standards. I knew it had really smart faculty and really mature and outstanding students. And I wanted to be more connected with an area where we could have impact. And so the value of a professional public policy school was that we can really take our scholarly work, apply it to things in a real way and talk about the real-world implications and bring things closer to change, if you know what I'm saying. I got that. We're gonna get into a lot more about Goldman and policy and your areas of research, but you mentioned we, this is also a chance to get to know you. So do you come with family? What's your setup away from work? Yeah, here's my story. I got in a Subaru with my wife and my cat and drove five days across the United States, the great United States. I mentioned there was a cat involved. And we landed in Berkeley in early June. And we enjoyed the ride together and got really close. We're all still together. Everyone's still happy. But we landed here in July and, I mean, in June and we've been located in Berkeley and we're really happy with the move. Do you have any school-aged kids? What's your children? I have a, I'm sorry. My son is 23 years old. He's six foot five, way smarter than I am. And he works at a startup in San Francisco. And my wife is also way smarter than I am. And she works for the university. And we met in graduate school at Michigan State University and she's, again, the brains behind our operation. Wait, so are you telling us we hired the wrong Wilson? Perhaps. I should play the fifth, I guess. I don't know, you got too good, you got two good smart scholars who know the academic world and know how to understand excellence. Yeah, so I'm always curious. And I tend to ask this question a lot of, you know folks who are new. So you've been at Berkeley since July one, right? Yeah. So what surprised you? And what have you been initial, your initial impressions of the campus? We've got this big, huge reputation that has different shapes and forms depending on people's disciplines and geography and probably politics. So what's it been like? Yeah, it's, I don't wanna say the word shock but it's been a lot of surprises on a daily basis. And it's because when you're on the East Coast if you've ever made the migration you don't really pay attention much to California. And if you're California you don't pay much attention to the East Coast. So you don't think about the day-to-day things that happen in California. You may think about the big things like an earthquake or natural disaster but you don't think about the planning that you have to prepare for for the natural disaster or the politics of it or how there's a culture of, you know here's what we do or here's what we don't do. And that climate environment, the homelessness situation, the housing costs, the cost of everything, the urbanness of the Berkeley area is almost, it's kind of European almost. It's not urban like East Coast urban and having Oakland right here in San Francisco be close but be across the bay. It's just different. The weather is different. It rained last night. It rained yesterday afternoon and I was staring out the window. It's just so wonderful. And so that's the third time I think since I've been here that it's rained. So you're constantly experiencing new things on a regular basis and you're engaging with really smart people who are thinking about the world differently. And I mean from the person that's unsheltered that I meet at the coffee shop to the Nobel Prize winners who are on campus now you're really getting exposed to a new world. And for people who are familiar with Berkeley and have been here for a long time you kind of maybe take it for granted. But to us new folks it's like a whole eye-opening experience about what's possible and the history and everything. It's just so rich. And what's on your agenda for the school? I mean, you're coming in after a dean who served had a long and distinguished tenure. Schools in great shape. One of the believed and seen, perceived to be and is one of the finest schools of its type in the entire country. Have you come to just make sure you keep on keeping on or do you have sort of ambitious goals for evolution and change? Where are you headed? That's a good question. First, Henry Brady is an outstanding scholar and was an outstanding dean for the school. And he's been nothing but kind of a stalwart in really helping us and helping the school to be successful and helping me to be successful as a new and incoming dean. Also, our staff is excellent and really play a role in helping me to understand the school and understand what our priorities are. And then our faculty and students have just been the most welcoming group of university citizens that I've ever encountered. And everyone I think is understanding that this is a period of transformation and an opportunity for change. And the things that I'm thinking about are not changes that are big things, but thinking more about focusing in on how everything we do can be transformational. We're our number one school of public policy analysis and we've been there for a while. We have an outstanding reputation that gives us a little bit of leeway to experiment and try some new things. And so we are enhancing and we are expanding and elevating our horizons more so than changing them, so to speak. So we'll be experimenting with how we do our scholarship, how we organize ourselves, how we create an infrastructure that allows us to be really outstanding. We'll be innovating with our degree programs, making sure that we are trying new things out in the classroom and outside of the classroom to enhance learning so that the experience is transformational, not just in terms of academics, but also in terms of culture. We'll be investing in student life, making sure that students when they leave here, they have a source of pride to go along with the degree that they've earned. And we're also of course, as many people know, we're thinking about our rocket ship, our building and our space where we can actually take all of these new technologies around learning and scholarship and student life investments and go somewhere that really does expand how we think about public policy and how we solve public problems. So we're laser focused on the future and being a school of public policy that realizes what the Goldman difference is that really articulates the values of innovation, diversity, our public mission, being transparent, being transformational and again, embracing that California spirit that nothing is too big of a problem for us to solve. I'm gonna circle back to you for a second, and ask if you can give us just maybe an example or two of some of the things you're thinking about a little more specifically. Before that, just wanna remind folks who may have joined us late, we're talking today with the new Dean of the Goldman School, David Wilson. As always, we welcome your questions. And if you do have questions for David as we go along, just post them to our Facebook live streaming site and we'll do our best to get to them. So let's go back and let me pick up where you were on the broad level, sounds really exciting. Can you give us a without letting too many cats out of the bag, some of the things you're thinking about that would count as new either in an evolutionary or a transitional sense? Yeah, yeah. So as a cat person, I'll let a few cats out of the bag. One thing we've been thinking about is we have nine or 10 research centers and of course we have a lot of ideas that come to the Goldman School. And one way that we can better work together and collaborate across research centers is to organize ourselves in terms of an institute, an institute for public policy research and analysis. One that has a leadership and support structure that allows faculty to be experts at their fields and at the research work, but has a support staff necessary to help do all of the kind of grunt work, so to speak, organizing of HR, helping with pre-award and post-award, dealing with facilities and equipment and spacing needs. Faculty who have to deal with all of the details within the proposal can sometimes detract and create a disincentive for going after more sponsored activities. So organizing ourselves in a way that allows excellence and outstanding research to be conducted in the school, but also transformed into practical solutions to the big problems requires a new kind of structure. A second thing we're thinking about is how to expand our footprint in different areas. Right now Goldman is primarily located in Berkeley. We should be thinking about how to have impact in Sacramento. We should be thinking about how to have impact in DC. We should be thinking about utilizing our international partners so that we can take, again, the Goldman difference in the Berkeley brand and work on behalf of the public sector and on behalf of public solutions in other locations. We have the expertise. We have the alumni. We have the tradition. We could do a little bit more out there to have a bigger impact. You know, it was interesting. You were talking before about Goldman how important its mission that includes public policy analysis is. And I'm looking back on the notes I took when you and I sort of had a preparatory chat before this event and you said you're not a public policy analyst. Help us through that. In other words, if you're not that, what are you and how does that work in terms of your fit as a dean of a school of public policy? Yeah, good question. So I am a person that the public policy is a vocation more so than a scholarly and scientific discipline. Policy analysis is a method for understanding the effectiveness and efficiency of policy. My work in public policy is looking at how the public experiences public policy. So when I do public policy analysis, I'm looking at, all right, if the policy is effective, why don't people like it? If the policy is not effective, why do people support it? If we're talking about a $3.5 trillion piece of legislation, why are we thinking more about the cost than the benefits? So as a policy scholar, my work centers on how the public understands public policy. And so that public voice speaks back to the policy process and helps to define what the problems actually are, what are acceptable or feasible solutions, what are the best mechanisms for implementing public policy and the like. So I'm more on the behavioral side or the policy feedback and in many ways implementation side. There are many traditions in the public policy world. There's public management, there's organization theory, there's public administration, there's public affairs and public policy and policy analysis. And so there are a lot of different methods and my work isn't traditionally in that scope of public policy, but I do look at the impacts of policy and I do try to understand its value. As a dean, where that comes in is it helps me to be a constant student of what our faculty are doing and what our students are interested in. As a senior associate dean in the College of Arts and Sciences, we had 26 departments. And when I would have to speak to each of those departments, it required them to explain to me what was important about their discipline, what was consequential about the research they were doing and how to best support them. And as a dean, you want to kind of have an open lens. You don't always wanna come with kind of a set mindset on how discipline should proceed. And that helps you innovate a little bit more. So my eyes are in ears are both wide open as being a dean of public policy. I do have a master's of public administration. So I know the discipline. I've experienced this in the classroom and a little bit in work. But what I really wanna do is find the best ways to ensure our faculty and our school are thinking about policy in a way that's moving as fast as the world is moving. In many ways, higher education tends to kind of follow or lag what's happening in the real world. And we have an opportunity right now to kind of catch up and prepare for the future. We only have an hour. Every answer of yours like makes me think of about 7,000 more questions. And as did this last one, both personal and professional. I'm curious about your background. In other words, was something about the way you came up or your family? Is there a connection there to what your academic interests and pursuits are all about? Yeah, I tell this story quite a bit. So I grew up in a split home. My mother followed divorce at an early age. My father was an immigrant from Panama, family located in Roxbury, Duchess, Boston, Massachusetts. And my mother's family was from Nashville, where we tend to draw out our ours and talk a little bit longer, use y'all quite a bit. And so no matter where we would spend our time, my sister and I, if I was in the Northeast, I talked funny because I still had that Southern draw. When I was in the South, I tended to talk a little fast sometimes and get all twitchy when I talk. That was my Northeast side. And people would pick on us a little bit. People would say we're different and we're odd. And really early in my life, I started thinking about how you treat people, how people treat one another, mal-treatment, good, bad, et cetera. And that colored my research and my interests throughout undergrad, graduate school, professional work, and then academia. And so my work centers on justice. It centers on how we think about people getting what they deserve or not. And that includes a handshake or a greeting or holding back certain benefits that connect with a policy or not allowing people to be members of certain communities. How we treat one another really determines how we think about what government does and the direction in which our country is going. So I've kind of got this lineage of justice and behavior. And my main tool of understanding the world is survey research. So I worked at the Gallup polling organization and helped the country and public agencies understand what the public is thinking about the direction of the country and the policies that are being implemented on a daily basis. So my background is broad. You've mentioned the military before and that has a little bit of how we treat one another thing as well. But those early years shaped my research and my interests. So I mean, I have to ask, I'm curious. It's not you, it's, I don't wanna say usual but it stands out that you spent 19 years in the military and at the same time have this incredible, I've had this incredible academic career. I mean, the list of your publications is page for those who haven't seen it page after page after page and incredible accomplishments landed here as a Dean. How do you sort of connect those two parts of your life? What led you to military service and how did it influence your subsequent choices? Yeah, it's a good question. I joined the military when I was fall of my senior year in high school. I was an athlete and I got an injury and I panicked. And there were these commercials on TV that said, if you join the army, they'll pay for your college. And that was the first time I kind of fell into something I should have been paying more attention to. I didn't read the fine print on a lot of that stuff at the time. But I joined and they said, hey, just go one weekend a month and everything will be fine and you'll do great things and you'll travel the world. That's not how it works, but that's what I did. And three years later, when I was sophomore, I think a sophomore in college, Desert Storm kicks off. And all of a sudden my world has transformed because I'm being mobilized to go to war. And I'm like, oh my, I'd only seen movies about this thing. Even though you go through basic training, you get trained, it's not real until you have to really do it. For most people in the military, it doesn't become real until you're activated. So that shaped one experience. And then later on, I just, I never got out of the military. I enjoyed the process of understanding how the military work, building the camaraderie around fellow soldiers and the training and the learning, all the traveling, all the things I got to do eventually. And then in 2001, 9-11 happens and I'm deployed again. And that really transformed my life. So Operation Iraqi Freedom, I spent 15 months away from my family and really had to reflect on, and of course, a lot of time in the combat zone, understanding with a different lens about how we treat one another and how we regulate that treatment in our own minds and through policy. And when I came back, I had a little bit about enough of Washington DC and wanted to get out. And I had been publishing and doing work at Gallup and got the great fortune to go into academia, landed at the University of Delaware. A few years later, got an opportunity to do administrative work. And so here I am. Wow, what an interesting story. What a great journey. You mentioned when you wanted to get out of DC and I was listening to you before and talk about really a set of inspiring goals and belief in the importance of the mission of the school. But then I'm trying to reconcile this, a lot of what the work that your students are doing and the careers that they're gonna go on to have are gonna find expression and legislation and government action. And at the moment, speaking of Washington, government seems entirely broken in terms of being able to put points on the board, being able to progress with legislation that's important to one party, a complete freeze. How do you keep students sort of with their chin up and feeling that actually it is possible to implement an effect change and reform and make the world a better place through public policy? Because it seems at times so futile when you look at the news coming out of the Capitol. Yeah, you know, this is, so I developed these kind of, I don't know if they're proverbs, but when I was in the military in some of the toughest times where it didn't seem like anything was changing in the world, I said, one, everything happens for a reason. You can't always control what that is. Two, it's all relative. It could always be worse. Three, if you somewhat said your expectations low, you'll likely always make a profit. And then four, always have a backup plan. If A doesn't work, make sure you got B ready to go. And how I talk to students about politics and government is that serving the public is one of the hardest things that one could do. And if you're looking for a challenge, public service is it. No one will, well, I shouldn't say no one, I'll speak in absolutes, but you'll get very little appreciation. You won't make a ton of money, but you'll be able to impact people in a way that you can actually see. And so when we think about public policy, which is how government solves public problems, but government doesn't often do it alone. It does it with the nonprofit sector. It does it with the private sector. It does it with other international actors. It does it with, you know, volunteerism and all kinds of other things, but it has all kinds of mechanisms from, you know, tax and spend, to educating the public, to actually doing research. The reason why universities exist in part is because the government knows we need really smart people to help them understand what's going on in the world. The science, the social science, the humanities, the arts, all the traditions included. So it seems like government is not working, but government is working. It's our democracy. We, the people comprised of government, what we have to do is constantly remind ourselves that there is a process for change. And if we become experts in that process, we can actually realize change. If we move forward thinking that we can disrupt the process in many ways, it sometimes puts more barriers in the middle of change, but it is possible. We don't see as much of it because the story is more salacious if it's negative. You know, if a plane crashes, the story is 50 people die, not 50 people survive because this is where political psychology comes in. We have a negativity bias. It tends to capture our attention more than the status quo does. So we're constantly reminding students that change is possible, that our commitment is to community and the public service, and that we should be thinking about everything we do with the spirit of shared success, that we rise and fall together, and that our democracy is only as meaningful as our commitment to it. So that's how we keep our students and our faculty and hopefully the public engaged. So I want to talk to you about, we're going to circle around to it, just about what's happening in the country in terms of polarization and sort of the aid, the era of the conflicting narratives and all the rest. But on a first step down that path, talk to us a little bit about this blend of your academic interests, that you also had a joint appointment at your last school to the Department of Psychological Psychology and Brain Sciences. How are all of these things connected? What does brain science bring to public policy and politics and all of your interests? How are they all connected? First thing I'll say is higher education and departments come up with these names and sometimes they don't reflect what they really do. So I was in the Department of Political Science and International Relations. I didn't do any international relations and I was in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences. I didn't do any brain sciences. I did psychological sciences. So I was a political psychologist. I still am a political psychologist. And what political psychologists do is they study behavior. They use psychological theories and methods to understand how people process political information and make judgments about what that information means and then as a result of that processing behave, whether it's a vote, whether it's where a button or a sticker, whether it's share information, whether it's yell at someone who's walking down the street or whether it's painting something on a building over on the other side of campus. We are motivated by certain things and the job of the political psychologist is to understand those motivations, including supporting policies or practices, many of which exist here at the University of California Berkeley. Our spirit governance approach is all about this idea of democratic input and why that's valuable. It creates something in the minds of those who are acting in the sphere. And so hopefully it creates trust. It creates some level of commitment. It creates some sense of community but the people who are on the outside, it may be intolerant. It may be seen as something that is not welcoming or overly rigorous. And so the political psychologist helps people to understand how the mind is connecting to what's actually happening in society and politics to the political psychologist is not just government. It's literally if there are 12 people in a room, how do they decide what movie they're gonna go watch? Is it the strongest person that gets the pick? Do they vote on it? Is it a majority? Is it super majority? Is it secret ballot? Is it public ballot? Rock, paper, scissors? What is it? The political scientist looks at the rules and organizations. The psychological side looks at how people accept or don't accept what's been decided. And the political psychologist will always have a job. Fascinating. We've got a couple of questions coming in. I'm gonna get to them in just a second. Just remind anybody who may have joined us late that we are as always taking questions from the audience today. If you do have questions for David Wilson, the new Dean of the Golden School of Public Policy just post them to our Facebook live streaming site and we'll do our best to get to them. One more question before I go to those that just came in. I think we're all experiencing, no matter what our politics are, this difficulty of how to engage with people we disagree with in this era of polarization. How do we engage with people who have entirely different narratives, whether it's around climate change or around vaccine? And I'm wondering, given that you're there at that nexus of policy and opinion formation and perspectives, what do you do? What advice do you have in this day and age? Should we just not talk politics with people we disagree with? Or what's happening and how do we continue to work and sort of exist with those we disagree strongly with? Yeah, it's a good question. The thing that doesn't work is trying to change people's minds. Wow. So if you enter into a conversation hoping to change someone, you're already operating at a deficit. What I try and tell people that's useful is to readjust your expectations about what a win is in any kind of policy discussion or policy debate. A win is, in my view, helping someone else, helping their idea get better, right? And sometimes it's dissonance in action. It is very uncomfortable to let somebody else's idea become more prominent than yours. Being the bigger person in any kind of discussion should be our aspiration, even if it doesn't feel very good, right? And so if you wanna have conversations about politics, in other words, it's not agreeable politics, it's mostly the disagreeable stuff, go to the table prepared to let someone else's point have merit. Try and see that merit, try and see the value in how they're thinking about it, and just let that be the end of it. You don't have to change them. You don't have to win. You don't have to walk away with a victory. It's hard to do, but that's what the research suggests you should do. The other piece that's important is that we start thinking about how to design a curriculum. I think we really wanna do some of that at Goldman around active learning, active listening, perspective taking, empathy, communication, persuasion, and among other things, just learning how to breathe. These may seem like very soft skills that have no relevance to any vocational area, but they will help you when you start having conversations about what's important to you when somebody else may not see it. And that's whether it's going to see the movie that you don't wanna see, or whether it's a policy that may actually make your life more difficult. Being able to have those skills that allow you to be an active listener and a change maker in the truest sense, I hope Rich Lyons is somewhere out there. I think that is the way we can really understand what's powerful about Berkeley is that here you get exposed to life. I mean, it confronts you head on, that you can't walk down any street, anywhere around Berkeley and not see life happening. So instead of taking a position on it, embrace it, continue to learn about it and share it, but don't expect to change people because you're up against a molehill. They'll be thinking the same thing you're thinking and you're not gonna change either. So why set that as your expectation? Fascinating. Let me go to a couple of questions that have come in. The first question is somebody has posed is how big is the impact of public policy? And I guess is what they're getting at here is, is this just sort of an academic endeavor, the whole public policy thing, or are there really, are there real world consequences that you can draw a line from what's happening at graduate schools and public policy to what's going on in the real world? Yeah, our return to what public policy is. It is how the public sector seeks to solve public problems. So these are not private problems. These are not, you know, hey, you stepped on my shoe. I mean, they may arbitrate the problem on the back end, but in terms of policy, we're thinking about how do we take a problem that we can exclude everybody from? So if it's small, for example, and deal with it in a way that doesn't, it's not, it's never gonna be perfect, but it doesn't necessarily harm one group just to help another group. That's a hard thing to do. And so public policy is always about finding that middle ground, selecting those alternatives or those choices that have costs and benefits. Nothing is cost-free, nothing is benefit-free or benefit-perfect. And so the public policy schools give you those skills to balance things out to really understand what should be the criteria. What do we expect the policy to do? How do we define the problem itself? What are we trying to accomplish and how do we know it's there on the back end? When is it time to do something different or change course? How do we know that the right citizens or non-citizens are benefiting from the policy in the way that we planned? That's what the policy analyst does. Policy is not designed to be a perfect solution. It's designed to help solve a problem, not perfectly, but solve a problem and give people options, give the public options. And again, we don't seek to try and solve private issues, but the bigger public issues. And for example, who's a citizen? Big public issue. Who should be able to buy housing in certain areas? And if they can't, how do you open that door so that people aren't living in their cars or in campus? If we have a water crisis, how do we communicate the people that we need to kind of tamper down our water usage and make it easy for everyone to have access to good water, low-cost good water or free water in some cases? So public policy schools aren't just going through an academic exercise. They're actually looking at public problems and helping people to understand the market's not solving them. Government's gonna have to step in. Solution is not gonna be perfect, but it's gonna be an evolutionary process of trying to get closer to what really does work. So I'm curious, nearly every public policy issue you raised just now and in previous answers, nearly every single issue was politicized. So how do you keep politics out of the classroom? Or do you? Are professors expected to be blatantly political with in terms of their opinions about what the role of government should be? Are they market-oriented? Everything now is tainted with some sort of political color, one or the other. How do you deal with that in the school and in the curriculum and in your hiring of faculty? That's a good question. Wow, you cannot have policy without politics. Politics in a very basic definition is any decision about who gets what and how. And if someone's getting something, someone else is gonna be judging whether or not they're deserving of what they've got. So this is, again, the political psychologist's piece. And they'll make a judgment about what should happen if they're undeserving, just as they make a judgment about what should happen if they are deserving. And then they have reactions to that. So politics, you can't disentangle politics from thinking about policy. You can do your best to think about policy analysis as apolitical. So just as the scientist seeks to have a scientific methodology for understanding a bigger research question or a bigger issue, and shies away typically from the normative debates, is it good or bad, as opposed to is it doing what it's supposed to do or not? How do we measure the outcomes and measure the inputs and see if they're aligned the right way? So the policy analyst is primarily, in theory, supposed to be focused on the costs and benefits of the policy, the outcomes, the ways in which people experience it, whether or the problem is to define the right way, whether the story is being told in a way that gets the public to support the policy and therefore support the democratic process. And that requires a lot of skill to try and not bring your politics in there. And we do our best to try and say they should be disentangled when you're analyzing the policy. But when you're thinking about it, the politics, you can't help but let them come in. Great answer. I got a lot of food for thought there. I'm gonna turn to another question that came in from the audience, who asks, how do you distinguish being aware of public opinion about a particular policy from pandering to public fads? And I guess this gets to that whole relationship between opinion and politics. Do you follow it? Do you lead it? And how do you distinguish between the two? Years ago, when we decided that people were important in governing, we had to come up with a methodology or a way of getting the people's voice. Direct democracy is messy. So if we've got 300 and we may have 400 million people in the United States, how do we determine, how do we listen to all four million voices? Some of them are underage and may not have a good way. So what we do is we come up with these rules. I say, well, if you're a certain age, we'll listen to you more. Some will listen to you less. We then have to come up with a way to make sure that voice is representative of everyone and do it in a way that's scientific. So public opinion, in a scholarly sense, has a scientific method behind it, a method that's not just about polling, but a method of random sampling and statistical estimation based on data collection and other things. So public opinion is supposed to be information about what the public's will is, and it's always a snapshot in history. It's never predicted of the future, even though many people like to use polls to try and predict who's gonna win an election or how the public will respond to something in the future, that's not what polls and public opinion surveys were designed for. So you use public opinion information to inform how you think about things. You shouldn't always use it as a reason to decide. It should be a part of the equation for decision-making, but it shouldn't be wholly, the only criteria for decision-making. And that's because as we know, once people know they're being studied, they change their behavior. Once you have opinion in an ad comes out, it changes people's perspectives and they may come up with different opinions the next day. Again, the political psychologist's currency is that we understand that random error happens and that people will change their behavior in systematic ways under different informational conditions. And we have tools that help us take that into consideration. So as we're thinking about the public and how it responds to leaders and policies and factions and commercials and controversies, we're always trying to take partition those things out that are meaningful and those things that are just kind of air and random noise. So I'd like to toss you some softballs, but I'm afraid that's not an option because we have some really good questions coming in. Pretty tough ones. There are no good softball questions. No, this is a good hardball question. Here we go from a member of the audience. Incrementalism where we have an inherited status quo and are only able to make changes on the margins has been a dominant school of thought in public policy for the last few decades. How do you think public policy will evolve either past this idea of incrementalism or within this idea of incrementalism? I guess my main question is the person writes, what's the cutting edge of how we think about public policy right now? Yeah, certainly there was a policy faculty member or scholar somewhere that either looked that up or just is in the school. Somebody threw you a fastball under the chin there. Look, I look at the tax code that the Trump administration passed. That didn't seem like incrementalism to me. I sometimes look at War Powers Act and the actions that come about, that doesn't seem like incrementalism to me. I think about some elements of voter ID laws and how we think about citizenship and how we look at our border doesn't look like incrementalism to me. So how we think about policy is kind of, it kind of, it goes to Evan flows, I think, or it should go through Evan flows. How we analyze policy has a set of tools that we use to understand whether it's good or bad. How the public adopts and accepts the value of a policy is something we have very limited control of now. And that's because there's so much free information out there for every good lecture you get from a faculty member at the university, they'll on the internet get a bunch of contradictory stories and it's up to them to decide what's most important. So I think a good framework for public policy is sticking with the idea of really understanding what the problem is and making sure it's well-defined, thinking about the range of solutions and knowing that no one of them is gonna be 100% effective or liked and thinking about what's feasible to the policy scholar out there. It could be something that's incremental or it could be something that's a radical change and you have an opportunity to adjust and then you have to defend it on the back end and therefore talk about what the story of the policy is, its value, how it will change our democracy of the United States for the better and just stick on that messaging. You can't get rid of the politics, but policy is about solutions and not wholesale solutions, but just parts. And you have to encourage others, private sector, nonprofit sector, others to kind of get involved and it's tough now, certainly. Even at a university, for example, our policies are quite incremental, radical change is not supported. So we should be thinking about 100 policy ideas we have, one or two can be a little bit radical and we should move forward with that. So it's about picking which one or two those are and being okay with that and then slowly migrating the incremental curve a little bit more to the big change curve and seeing how it sits for a while and then maybe going back to incrementalism. Yeah, I wonder how that, I mean, everything you say makes a huge amount of sense, but I wonder how that lands with your classic or maybe your stereotypical or even cliched Berkeley graduate student who wants to change the world tomorrow. Yeah, yeah. I think it's okay to have diversity. I think it's okay to have diverse perspectives and I would be quite open to someone, I've been out in the world, as a graduate student, I wanted to change the world too. It's not as easy as we think and I think you have to pick and choose your impacts and very early on in my professional career and then in academic career, I couldn't make everyone do those things that may be impactful, but I could influence one person and I could help them understand things in a different way and that was enough for me. So sometimes we want change to be something everybody else sees instead of what we accomplish. And so it's important to set realistic expectations around what can be done, but that doesn't mean you have to reduce your energy or your passion for seeing change. It's when you go into a situation, understand what's feasible. We teach that in the public policy schools, what's doable, what's possible and then kind of find the mean, use your variance, your diversity and find what the mean is and then go after it. And slowly you'll build a partnership that builds another one and builds another one with that system. Here's another one, this is almost like a softball. This person asks, how do you plan to strengthen the pipeline at the undergraduate level for undergraduates interested in public policy since this person states or their belief that the pipeline is very weak across the nation. So one, do you buy into the sort of a inherent assumption here, the pipeline is weak and if you do, what plans or thoughts do you have about strengthening it? It's an interesting thing. I don't know that I agree that there's a weak pipeline into public policy and I'm not sure if it was degree programs or the field of public policy in general. They were talking undergraduate here. Undergraduate of the pipeline into our undergraduate mine. It's like, I guess the pipeline, it seems to be at the undergraduate level. In other words that where for undergraduates interested in public policy, person asking questions suggests that that pipeline starting at the undergraduate level is weak and difficult. Yeah, I don't have enough information to confirm or deny that to be true, but I know that there are several pockets in health policy, the law school and high school of business, of course in the social sciences and I'm sure the natural sciences as well, there are areas of public policy. They're not, I guess maybe broad wholesale majors but they're areas where you can engage public policy because again, public policy is what governments do to solve public problems, right? So any public problem that you're trying to solve at some point will require policy. And so the inroad to the field of public policy may be a bit narrow. We're a professional school and so we don't have undergraduate majors, we have an undergraduate minor so it's available. But if you wanna go into a graduate study or go into the work, it's really about having a set of tools to help you to see problems in a certain way and then working with teams whether it's in a public sector, private sector, nonprofit sector to come up with solutions that are feasible, that are effective, that are efficient, that you can rationalize and justify to the public and the like and I think there are a lot of majors that can help the pipeline into public policy work but in terms of the undergrad program I can't speak to. Got it. David, one area, it seems like a major area in your professional life, your academic life that we haven't talked about yet is race. The book that you have coming out is called Racial Resentment in the Political Mind. Tell us a little bit about what that book is about and what drove you to write it. Yeah, wow. So the book is about thinking about race and how race matters in a way beyond simple racism and prejudice. In that if you look at public attitudes about any particular issue and you use an indicator of racism to try and predict those attitudes, racism and prejudice may explain some of the variants but it doesn't explain all of it and it doesn't explain the majority of it and in most cases it doesn't even explain a third of it. So there are other things that are going on that may bring people to the same position as someone that is racist or prejudiced that we may not be thinking about. And so the book is about exploring just world beliefs. Just world beliefs are beliefs that people get what they deserve and deserve what they get. Yeah, I'm sorry to interrupt. Are you saying just world as a- Just world, belief in a just world. The world is just. So the shortcut of justice is something is just. So belief in a just world is the belief that again, the world doesn't necessarily need the same that need to change the things that we experienced. They work for us. Yeah, there may be bad actors and bad people out there but our world is fine. And it doesn't mean that we all agree on that world. It just means my system is fine. So you think about religion, for example. I believe in what I believe. And if someone tells me that someone is experiencing religion in a negative way I don't seek to change the system the world as I know it that person may need to change. And so the way people process information about change is one of resistance. And some of that stems to our notion that our current ways of doing things are just. They're the right way of doing things. And if someone is impinging on that right way of doing things, I should react with some level of defensiveness because it's unjust that I have to change to accommodate it. So in the area of race relations that means if we're thinking about policies that help bring about racial equality they may involve me having to kind of not get as much benefit out of something as someone else, a racial minority, for example. I don't know that that's fair. I'm gonna, I'm not gonna be opposed to it but I'm not gonna be supportive of it either. And so it's very, it's very human for people to resist change and therefore if you have inequality and you're seeking to bring about equality people can't just stay high in the world and people stay low and then there'll be equality. Some way they have to come down and another group has to come up. That's the only way to get equality. And so the book is about how that occurs in people's minds, what's acceptable, what they can tolerate, how they think about issues through justice and not just through racism and prejudice. And it gives us a way to look at the political mind is how we are distributing values and benefits and rewards in society. And that's the political mind. And then how we resent when those things are doled out the people who don't deserve them and then how race colors that resentment. So it makes me wonder and wanna ask you from an analytical, not necessarily a political point of view, what your take is on a lot of commentators who've talked about the extent to which racial fears were really behind sort of the, a key factor in President Trump's election, the fear of loss of place and of status and of a changing world and moving towards more diversity. Is that something that rings true for you from your perspective and from your studies? What's your take on all that? Yeah, it sounds like you've read at least half the book so far. That's absolutely right. I mean, it's not something that's so far-fetched, right? That if we looked at any other subject, except for beyond race, it would just make perfect sense to us that if we had to all of a sudden change how we do things at the University of California, Berkeley, people would see that as kind of a threat to our traditions, our statuses, our state of excellence. If we start experimenting with things and we take away, it was pretty tough. Take away the SAT or take away the GRE or stop grading or start allowing people to take courses that allow them that are flipped and don't use the Socratic method. All of those changes create resistance and people start wondering, well, what happens if we do it? What happens if we change? And so if you take it back to race, it's the same exact thing. It's not just that people hate or dislike racial minorities. It's that there is a belief that our culture, our traditions will change if we have to give up our current way of life, our current way of merit, our current way of thinking about what's right and what should be privileged or prioritized. So it's not such a far-fetched idea. It's just not as rarely thought of as a way to think about racial attitudes is that people think that having to accommodate minorities today is unfair because I've done nothing to harm them. It doesn't, if they're unequal, they should work harder or maybe they should do the things I do, but I'm not willing to change the system to make the world a better place. That is a collective action problem. That is a political science and political behavior problem. It's how we filter information about the world and then how we feel about things like change and new policies and equality. I'm wondering if one of the motivations for writing the book was a sense on your part that the salience and urgency of racial issues has never been higher in this country. What really was my motivating factor started way back in graduate school, actually, was that political science had a particular way and social sciences had a particular way of thinking about and measuring racial prejudice. And when I looked at the measure or the indicator, I didn't see much racial prejudice in it and I didn't see much racism in it. And that got me thinking about what is it? What's behind this? In other words, what is the fear that people have that leads to racism? In other words, if you let somebody who's really different have the same status as you, what's the problem? What's behind that? Well, one thing, there's got to be some injustice to it. There's got to be something that creates resistance in anger about it because racists get pretty upset about things like racial equality or racial integration at least. And then there's got to be a moral component to it. And so resentment is an ideal emotion or an ideal sentiment because it's a reaction to some kind of undeserved outcome. And so when I talk about just world beliefs, that is kind of the motivating force, but the reaction that people have to someone getting something they don't deserve, whether it's being able to live in my neighborhood, being able to eat at the same table, being able to ride in the same place as me on a bus, being able to be in the same classroom, being able to just quite frankly, look someone in the eye and be proud. If that happens, the whole slippery slope falls apart, we'll all be in trouble. And so that fear is a moral fear that's grounded in my research. It says it's grounded in justice. It can be grounded in racism and prejudice, but that's not all it's grounded in. A lot of it is grounded in justice. So my motivation started with what's beyond racism and prejudice. We don't need one single additional article on racism and prejudice to know that it exists, to know that it has impacts, to know that people hold it when they think they don't hold it. What's next? How do we think next about race in America? Wow. And does that leave you your studies and your research and everything? Does it leave you optimistic, neutral, pessimistic about the possibility that through public policy and through the sort of awareness you're talking about that we can actually address the structural racism in our country and in our government and our society? It doesn't leave me optimistic, but it doesn't leave me pessimistic as well. It will take a tremendous shock to the system for us, or it'll take a lot of time for us to realize the promise of our democracy. It won't happen through just public policy because again, ameliorative policy, helping policy exist, and then all it takes is one administration to roll it back. And all it takes is one administration to send a signal that all these other things the prior administration did to kind of help us just made us worse. And here are some specific examples of it, even though the overwhelming majority of examples showed the complete opposite. So talking about positives and benefits is good, but negative information always weighs more heavily on individual minds because they have to prepare for negative. They don't have to prepare much for positive and preparing for negative puts you in a fight-or-flight mode and therefore makes you less resistant to new information and change. All right, I'm gonna give you a softball. What color is the sky? Give me that one. That's not that soft. This came in from the audience. It's a good question, but also put the ball in the teeth for you. What do you think makes the Goldman School of Public Policy one of the top schools in the country? Just reading this. As someone who was currently choosing graduate schools to apply to, why should I choose Goldman? And if you can't do well on this question, David. I won't grade myself, but I'll say what I think is the Goldman difference is the commitment of our faculty to making sure that students, in the best way they can, that students have a transformational experience that challenges their thinking on what are right solutions for public problems. Students take those experiences and they build a community of their own. I mean, they really do work together and commit to one another around this idea of altruistic input. This notion that we're gonna be public servants in some way, even if we're not working in a private sector, we're interested in these big problems. We're interested in being a part of teams that try and solve them. And in many ways, they wanna be entrepreneurial. They wanna come up with their own solutions once they're done with graduate school at the Goldman School. And we wanna really be the place where they get trained to be entrepreneurial, to be active listeners, to think in terms of designs and systems and to encounter problems and have confidence that they're gonna address them in a way that leads to change and impact. And so we started Goldman with community. That's what grounds everything we do at Goldman. That community leads us to think about the kinds of scholarly work around public impact and resolving issues like inequality and unfairness in society. That builds on our academic enterprise where we're teaching students about those scholarly learnings. Then we give students an opportunity to put those things into action. Once they put them into action, they gain confidence. They grow, they get better. Then they see the actual impacts and outcomes of their work. And then they're proud of that experience. And then they wanna give back and they then become a part of our extended Goldman community. And they wanna help others learn and have an impact. And so Goldman has a very specific model for training students to be outstanding policy analysts and policy researchers. And we've now just brought on a new master's degree program on master's of development practice that thinks about these things even outside the boundaries of the US, that there are these global challenges in a world that need thinking that is not just US domestic thinking. And that's not to say that that's all we do, but we now have a broader framework for thinking about how to articulate that into a degree program and then blending our hosts of degrees to give students that transformational experience we think is important. So I hope that's enough of a pitch to get the student to think about the Goldman School. If not, we have a lot of fun activities that have food. Oh, my, well, David I really, this has been a fascinating conversation. I wanna thank you for your time and welcome you to the campus community. We hope we can have you back here on campus conversations at some point. Thanks, Dan, it's been great. Go Bears. Yeah, go Bears. And thanks to all of you for joining us and look forward to seeing you next time for the next episode of Campus Conversation. Stay safe and be well.