 Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to LEAD, Leading Equity and Diversity. I am Debbie Willis, and I lead the DEI certificate program at the University of Michigan's Rackham Graduate School. We started this series because scholars wanted to hear from real people their experiences, leading equity, diversity, and social justice efforts. Thank all of you for joining us today. Given all this going on in the world, so much going on in the world, we appreciate your presence here. Before we get started, please note that you can enable closed captioning by clicking the CC button on your screen. You received the prompt that this session is being recorded, and though your audio and video have been muted, we encourage you to engage in the conversation through the question and answer portal. We'd love to bring your voices into the conversation. If you see a question that you would like answered, please like or upvote that question. We will ask the questions with the broadest interest first. Before submitting your question, we ask that you consider how it might impact others. We also ask that you remain patient with us, as almost 700 of you have registered for this, and we've received many questions at registration. We will not get to them all in one hour. However, we are committed to continue these conversations and have dedicated this lead webinar series to address racial equity for an entire year, and we invite you to join us each month. Today's conversation will address how administrators, faculty and staff can de-center whiteness at an institutional level and create a sense of belonging for all. The racial inequities exposed by COVID-19 paired with the national uprising against systemic racism has led colleges and universities nationwide to prioritize anti-racist teaching. While these efforts are appreciated and long overdue, higher education institutions will need to continue to examine how their policies and pedagogies have perpetuated racism and inequities and prohibited and inclusive learning environment for marginalized students. How can we demonstrate that actions to dismantle differential advantages are best for higher education institutions overall? We have two absolutely phenomenal guests well situated for this conversation. They are Dr. Stephanie Rowley and Dr. Elizabeth Cole. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your journey as a leader and advocate in the space of diversity, equity and inclusion and social justice? Stephanie, we'll start with you. Well, thank you, Debbie. I am so excited to be here. It's always wonderful to be at Michigan. So I was thinking about this a lot and I feel almost a twinge guilty about my journey in that it started when I was a freshman really at Michigan. I got involved in research at the Center for Human Development and my first mentor was Dr. Bonnie McRoy. And I think back on how fortunate I was to have a mentor who was really committed to anti-racist, social justice, inclusive teaching and in one of the early lessons that I learned watching Bonnie was that an individual can build an anti-racist agenda and push it forward in a way that really affects the entire field. And so what I learned early on with Bonnie, so one of the things she was doing when I first got there was looking at the way we study black children in developmental psychology. And she put together a bunch of articles on the topic but then she also used her position in various organizations to affect big change that has been lasting. And so fast forwarding through my experience at Michigan, I was working with people like James Jackson and graduate students like Dwight Fontenot and Jackie Matisse. And I continued to have these mentors who were making lasting changes. So when I look at the psychology department at the University of Michigan, I can see the fruits of those things that were happening 30 years ago when I was at Michigan as a student and then went on to the university. And I should say I was engaged in my own activism as a student in the Black Student Union in particular. And part of the work that I was doing was actually linking student groups with what was CAS, the Center for African American and African Studies at the time as a sort of student liaison. So I think early on I got the sense that as an academic, I could have a big influence on higher education but also policy and things more broadly. Moving forward, went to University of Virginia where Robert Sellers was one of my primary mentors. Some of you may know him. And again, the work that we did when he was an untenured assistant professor was really to build structures. He built a conference that has now celebrated 27 years. And so all along the way, I have had access to people changing the world every single day with a sharp anti-racist agenda and a set of scientific tools that they apply. And so as I moved into, I came back to Michigan as faculty and as I moved into various administrative roles, I was able to apply some of those same tools. And now I'm at Teachers College, Columbia. And again, I'm drawing back on these lessons that I learned even as a POP as a freshman to say that we can make systemic change and push back on structural racism in our everyday lives inside of the Academy and outside the Academy. Thank you, Stephanie. Liz. Well, thank you all for having us here today. Even though I'm still in Ann Arbor, it's always a welcome opportunity to come together in community during the time when we have to be physically apart. I had a lot of resonances with Stephanie's story. Like Stephanie, I was trained as a psychologist, but I started out in clinical psychology. And I was in grad school actually here at Michigan in a program that at the time was very psychoanalytic. So they understood problems in living that people were having in terms of problems at an individual level. And as I started working with clients, that seemed not only really unsatisfying to me, but also really unjust because I could see both from my own life experiences and in the life of the people that I was working with that so much of the challenges they were facing had to do with racism, had to do with sexism, had to do with poverty and that I wasn't being given the tools to help them. So I became really dissatisfied with that program and didn't know what I was gonna do instead. And I started doing volunteer work in Detroit at a hospice for people with HIV. And this was in the 80s when that really was the public health crisis of our time. And I didn't even know if I was gonna finish school. And then I ran into Abby Stewart and she invited me to transfer over to personality psychology. And I, you know, at that time, I was not sure that an academic career was the way to make the change that I wanted to change but I didn't, that I wanted to make but I didn't want to quit. So I moved over there. And like Stephanie, I really had a phenomenal experience of mentorship working with Abby and working with her, I was able to do a dissertation about women who had been activists here on campus in the 60s and what were the reasons that motivated them to persist in that work. And even though there had been a number of studies that had thought about activism as this kind of generational commitment, no one had looked at it in terms of race before. And so I was able to diversify that sample and look at black women who had participated in the student movements like BAM-1, BAM-2 here on campus at midlife. From there, I was really fortunate to get recruited to Northeastern University by Leo Kamen who might not be a name you recognize but he was actually the psychologist that showed that Cyril Burke had fabricated his data that claimed to show that there were racial differences based on IQ. And so Leo had strong commitments as an activist, as a scholar and he wanted to recruit more diverse faculty at Northeastern who were doing work on politics. And I went there and that was my first job and I was joined in psychology and in black studies. I was able to work there to start a track for students who were interested in studying black psychology. I felt a lot of support from that department but when I got recruited here to Michigan in 2000 with a chance to be in women's studies and African-American studies, I was really excited both to participate in the kind of scholarly traditions here that Stephanie was talking about. But also I was excited about what it meant for my scholarship to be undisciplined, to be outside of psychology, to be able to kind of ask these bigger questions in a more fully interdisciplinary way. So once I came here, I really started doing work aiming to be transformative in a scholarly space. And most of the work that I'm known for has had to do with how you take the idea of intersectionality, which is really core way of thinking about race and gender and social class and other identities within women's studies and translate that for psychology and other social sciences. But I've also done a lot of work here and it's been really important to me to work for equity in my administrative roles. So I became a department chair in 2010 and associate dean in 2014. And I was interim dean of LS&A in 2018, 2019. And in all those roles, I prioritized DEI. So I've really become an advocate for how can you do this diversity work from within these roles that are not earmarked for diversity, how can you have an impact on all the kind of daily business that a department or that a college does, because I believe that it's through those institutional practices that you really create a climate and set a tone and impact people's daily lives. Since I've left the dean's office, I've become more involved at the program and intergroup relations. And that work has really started to shape my thinking about dialogue, both in our professional work and in our personal lives as a mechanism for creating change. And I hope to talk about that more later. It's so great to hear your trajectory and to hear you talk about the pioneers and the people that helped you along the way because I think that's so important to our topic of Decentering Whiteness. So let's just start from the very beginning. What exactly do we mean when we say Decenter Whiteness in academia? What are some examples of white supremacy culture or what we're talking about today? How about you, Sartlis? Okay. Well, I think when we talk about Decentering Whiteness, people might think that that means moving another group into the center. And I don't think that's what it means. I think Decentering means opening up what we do to people of different backgrounds, changing the way we do things, the way we evaluate scholars and scholarship. And to do that, I think we need to start to think about our academic organizations as being a culture. And we don't usually reflect in that way. But we are a culture. We have our own set of practices. And often those practices, I think are either kind of equated or conflated with what excellence means. We've been doing things in a certain set of ways for a long time in a take it for granted way. And it's rare that we sort of take a step back and think is the way we're doing this work really reflecting the kind of values and goals that we have for our work. I think these practices are often based on presumptions about who belongs here and what success can look like. And the groups that have long occupied the center, which are often white people, often male people have come to define what that means. So Decentering means having, being open to a broader view about what it means to be a scholar, what it means to do academic work, what learning looks like, what success looks like. And I have a number of examples. Maybe I'll just start with one that's pretty pervasive and maybe kind of unexplored, which is that many units across campus have sort of an honored place in their physical space where they display the photographs of the leaders. And some of us have begun to refer to those informally as the stereotype threat wall. Because if you're familiar with stereotype threat, that's the idea that when people from minoritized groups are primed with information about being outsiders, it can cause them to underperform relative to their ability. And there's big body of social psych research on this. So part of our culture is to honor our leaders, right? So I've sat in many rooms where there's a background behind me of 100 years of white male leadership that are implicitly sending the signal to me and everyone else in the room that this is what a leader looks like. This is who can be a leader that could have the effect of undermining my confidence or the confidence of anyone else who doesn't belong to those groups and also subtly send signals to everyone else. So what other kind of depictions do we wanna have on our walls? If we start to think of the way we honor our past as being a place where we're sending cultural messages, it opens up opportunities to think we could be doing this differently. Thanks. Steph, would you like to add anything? Yeah, so I've been thinking about this quite a bit in part because I have been participating. So after George Ford's murder, suddenly so many organizations to which I belong, we're doing training, anti-racist training. And so it's been spending a lot of time reading about some of these issues and some of the more subtle ways that white supremacy culture can pervade our setting. So I think one of the things that stands out to me is just the way that we operate. I think oftentimes work with diverse teams takes a lot of time and effort and humility. And so I think one of the ways that cultural racism comes into our organizations is when we're constantly in a hurry, we have these huge goals and we say, okay, we need to get this project done really quickly. So how do we get things done quickly? We call the people we know, the people we trust, the people who can get it done quickly in the way that we value, we don't take the time to invite new people to the table, to get new perspectives and input. I think another way is thinking about what the end product looks like. You know, I think in Epideme, we're very much swayed by a single set of standards, a single set of what is excellent and what is good. And it's really very hard to pull people away from that. So one of the questions that I saw was about, you know, the gold standard of a journal article. What about other sorts of work that may be just as important? Work in the community, white papers, collaborative papers that are written with community partners and others. You know, and oftentimes what happens is we say, well, this is the only standard we have. And if we don't use the standard we have, then we don't have standards. So for instance, there was a study done relatively recently on recipients of National Institute of Health Grants. Go figure turns out that white men are more likely than anybody else to get grants from NIH. And yet and still in certain departments, having an NIH grant in R01 is the gold standard for promotion and tenure. But if you said, let's use something else as a standard people would say, but what, you know, we don't have another standard. And so then what we say is, well, this is an imperfect standard, but we'll keep it. You know, we'll, even though we know that there are flaws in use of GREs as standards for admissions, we don't have another standard. And so we'll keep that, you know, knowing that it's imperfect. And so I think, you know, we really need to step away from or step back and ask ourselves, what is our goal? Like, what do we really think excellence is? Is it just having a certain number of publications in journals that value a certain kind of knowledge or could it be something different? And could we fashion something that is also reflective of excellence? You know, so the assumption is that without these kind of problematic indicators, that there are no other options. I also think that one of the things that I see a lot in institutions is a focus on superficial levels of DE and I. So if you do a search for DEI is the enemy of, you'll find many articles on DEI is the enemy of social justice, of racial justice. And I don't think that that's meant literally, but I do think that sometimes we do the feel good things. We do the, you know, the community conversation, the book club, I did a fabulous book club with Martha Jones on Wednesday, so I'm not saying that these things aren't important, but oftentimes we want to do these superficial things without really digging into the how we're doing the work, who's at the table for the work, how our practices include or exclude people and how we actually do have the power to set new standards that are excellent and rigorous, but that may be more, that may be more, more inclusive, you know, even just saying more inclusive sounds like we're lowering the standards somehow, but really thinking broadly about the standards that we use. Thank you, thank you so much. DEI is the enemy of, that's interesting. I'll have to Google that as well. This is kind of a follow-up question, which is how do you even begin to dismantle white supremacy culture after centuries of it being the norm? And when these elite institutions really don't seem to be interested in changing their culture, kind of speaking to some of the things you said, Stephanie, like, well, that's the gold standard. So what else do we use? So where do we begin? Steph, can you start? So I think, you know, thinking about the individual level, so thinking about what you can do as an individual, I think one of the most powerful things is asking the question. So I think so often we get, you know, sort of steamrolled, you're in the room, something's happening. People are saying, you know, why are we using the GRE if there's evidence that it doesn't predict performance and other outcomes? And oftentimes people are paralyzed and they don't have the information that they need in order to make a good argument. And so you sit there paralyzed and don't do anything. And I think that if we use a technique of just disrupting the conversation and asking a question, just by saying, wait, what do we know about the GRE? You know, I'm not an expert there. I think we should stop and ask. So again, you know, going back to that sense of urgency, where you feel like you need to make a decision right then and you don't have time to really think deeply about it, pushing back on the right asking questions, pushing back by verbalizing or what I call narrating the room. So you're sitting in the room and you're going, only the men are speaking. Like, why aren't the women speaking? And I have a colleague who just regularly raises her hand and says, excuse me, the men are speaking. What do the women think here? You know, I think so often we're, I'm afraid, so one of the other principles of, one of the other ways that white supremacy culture ends up in organizations is this belief that people should be comfortable. That we need to, you know, you can't say things that make people feel uncomfortable. Please, our goal, particularly as women and people of color, is to make sure that people are feeling okay. And so, you know, I think sometimes just disrupting that a little bit by naming what you see happening and by understanding that growth comes through discomfort. So other people, you know, you'll feel a moment of discomfort, maybe a long moment of discomfort, but ultimately if you want the situation to change, you have to surface and verbalize those questions. You know, you don't have to, it doesn't have to be a big show because oftentimes people aren't even aware that they are moving with this kind of sense of urgency. The other thing I wanted to say is I think you need an agenda. So in all of my sort of mentors, what I saw is that they all had a thing or a set of things that they wanted to push against so that they could become expert in that thing so that they could understand the data on that thing. You know, what is the nature of what's really happening? Let's say admissions. Let's say, you know, I want to change the tenure and promotion strategy or recruit more faculty of color or whatever your thing is. And then you can also measure your success. I think too often we think of DEI work as really reactive. You see a problem and you try to fix it as opposed to saying, I am coming in with a set of things that I will accomplish and that I have identified through a systematic review. And also it requires you to understand that you can't do it all, but you want to do something that's going to be lasting and meaningful. Thank you, thank you. So I'm going to bring in the first question from our participants that says, Dr. Rowley and Dr. Cole, thank you for addressing the crucial role research mentorship can play in anti-racist work. Can you talk more about how mentors might do this intentionally in fields of research that don't directly look at BIPOC experiences, particularly in STEM, as they support undergraduate and graduate students? You want to start Liz? Sure. You know, I feel like a theme that's kind of emerging here is that what we need to be doing is to move beyond thinking it's about either attitudes of individuals or that it's just a matter of recruiting more diverse people here and sort of bringing them into business as usual. But we're at a moment where to continue making change, we really need to take a hard look at our practices. And I think often, not always, but often practices that are more fair and transparent to everyone stand to especially benefit the groups who have been most excluded in the past. So I am a really strong proponent of all the work that Rackham is doing to make mentoring more regularized and explicit and to reveal what's sometimes called the hidden curriculum to students who might not fully understand when they start their graduate training how very different it is to be a graduate student than to be an undergraduate. You know, everyone who comes to programs like we have here, they were outstanding undergraduate students. They knew how to succeed in that system. That doesn't mean that it translates that they know how to be successful in a lab. So I think key to really mentoring all students but it can be especially powerful in working with students from groups with less privilege or who are racial minorities or gender minorities is establishing mentoring plans, being crystal clear about what both the mentor and the mentee expect to get out of this relationship to have explicit plans for how you're gonna deal with times when there is disagreement for how feedback is gonna be given, both the mechanism and the timing of it. You can't expect students to meet your expectations if you're not conveying to the students what those expectations are. But I think before we really got intentional about creating these mentorship plans all too often and I think I've been guilty of it myself, we mentored the way we were mentored. And in some cases that was outstanding but it could have also been outstanding because of fit that we had with our individual mentors. Because of that fit, there might have been ways that things could go unsaid and there still could have been success. And if you're gonna have an inclusive system, an inclusive academy, if you're gonna be able to mentor diverse people to reach their goals, you can't count on that. And it's not fair to, especially when we haven't been fully successful in diversifying our faculty. And that's especially true when we look across the divisions. So I think the number one thing we can be doing is getting much more intentional about the way we mentor. And I don't know if I'll get a chance to say this later but I think that that's, so I'll say it now, I think that's a framing that can have a lot of appeal to people who value fairness even if they're not yet on board with all this DEI stuff, even if they don't speak that language, that language of fairness is something that can be common ground. Thank you. I love how you talked about mentoring and how that's important. And I also love that we are now paying more attention to faculty and how faculty can be involved in this and training for faculty. And it's just optimistic that more faculty like Stephanie and you said earlier are interested in this conversation. So Stephanie, it's kind of a follow-up to this. What does it look like to listen to and center on the voice of black indigenous people of color? How can understanding these counter narratives help us dismantle white supremacy in academia? And why is this important to know the counter narratives? So as we had a faculty meeting recently where we had our decolonizing study group. So we have a group at Teachers College who is thinking about the sort of effects of colonization and the marginalization of all kinds of people. And the students came to our meeting and they shared some of their stories and faculty were absolutely forward. So again, I think one of the big things in terms of cultural racism is silence. That we imagine what other people are experiencing, what other people are thinking. We also equate a lack of performance with a lack of ability. And so I think that oftentimes these counter narratives can bring in a voice of understanding how there's something about the system that is broken. And I think because there's so much silence about difference because you feel vulnerable, right? So you feel you're gonna bring your whole self to the floor and share your story. And you're not sure if you're going to be accepted, but it's critical for the learning of the other. So one of the things I loved to do back with Rack of Myself was with more, mentoring others, Results and Excellence Committee is we would do these role plays, which the faculty hated initially at least. But once they got into it, it was like, oh, yeah. So we set up these dialogues where the two faculty members would play a student and an advisor in a different situation. And oftentimes part of the story would be inserting a counter narrative and giving the faculty member the opportunity to think about and practice responding to that story. And it was really enlightening for a lot of people because they added this sort of skill. So I think that for faculty mentors, I think for whether you're a junior faculty member, whether you're a student or administrators, I think sharing your story is really critical to being able to make change. At the same time, we also can't end up in a situation where we are relying on folks of color to supply the fodder for all of our work. I think it's also dangerous for people to feel like or for folks in power to feel like it's enough just to hear those stories or that it is the responsibility of folks of color to supply that information. Yeah, thanks so much. And thanks for sharing what you're doing at Teachers College, which is decolonizing. What is it? So it's the decolonizing study group, but the idea is that the group is decolonizing Teachers College. And many of these issues. So really looking across the college at the places where we can, in some cases, center the voices of marginalized students or faculty or make space for other kinds of experiences and expectations. Great, thank you. I mean, it's great to see that colleges and universities are doing a lot of things about anti-racism, et cetera, in this time and space. And so Liz, to that point, one of the things at Michigan, the SACUA has established a new faculty senate committee on anti-racism. How do you think such a committee can best address the concerns of faculty of color, writ large and black faculty in particular? Well, first of all, let me say, I think it's so great that they're doing this and it's such a funny moment because I feel like there's so many things that either new things that we're facing like COVID or old things that we're facing, like police violence that are especially acute right now. And so it feels like a time of crisis, but I'm also inspired by these spaces where people are using that to create opportunities for change. So I'm really glad to see SACUA taking that up. From what I've read about this, it seems like there's been some discussion and maybe even some disagreement about what that charge of this committee should be, about whether it's about dealing with individual racism or is it about trying to understand structural racism that might exist in the university and how to counter that. And so I think that it's gonna be critically important for this committee to have some clarity if they're gonna be able to have results, both in terms for them to meet the expectations that people have and for them to focus their work. I think, we talk a lot about structural racism and I'm starting to think that in this context, it might be even more useful to think about institutional racism and exclusionary practices, because it's just more pointed. I feel like sometimes structural racism feels overwhelming to think about how do we have an impact? But we have a lot of control about our practices at the university. The next thing I would think, or I would hope this committee would think about is what exactly is their sphere of influence? The SACUA often plays an advisory role. If that's how they see the influence that this committee can have, how can they leverage that? How can they partner with other places on campus that are doing this work, like the Office of DEI, like the National Center for Institutional Diversity to create coalitions, to have a bigger impact, to coordinate their efforts. I think one thing that happens sometimes here is we have a lot of groups working separately and a lack of coordination makes us less powerful than we could be. So thinking about what's within our power to do, how can we leverage that power? And then my next piece of advice would be to really engage those communities, to bring people together through town halls or focus groups to find out what are the needs and desires of this community? Where is the most urgent need felt? And from there to identify the actions they could take. So I think my two pieces of advice are to get specific, work with the community. And then, like Stephanie says, to really have an agenda. It's, I think a lot of times, sometimes these efforts aren't as successful as they could be because they try to be too big. So what pieces can you do now? Maybe what parts can you leave as recommendations for people who will do this work next year? Thank you. I'll bring in another question from the audience. Has anyone seen meaningful financial support and otherwise ways for acknowledging the ways people do anti-racism work in addition to their official job descriptions and others who are able to get ahead and then continue to frame the guidelines for what is valued. You wanna start, Stephanie? Sure, I've been thinking about that with our own Race, Culture and Diversity Committee at Teachers College. So my initial thought was people do service as faculty, as students, and that's part of what we're supposed to do. And so I'm a strong believer that we should all be engaging in this work and that everyone cannot be paid for it. At the same time, I think Michigan had some really wonderful exceptions of committees that someone felt was so central to the mission of the institution that they felt like people should be both well-trained for the work and compensated. And so a couple of those would be more. So mentoring others was also in excellence. So there was some compensation for being on that committee. The STRIDE committee is another one. So there are a variety of committees across campus that do service for the university. I can imagine how you could also deploy a student committee in the same way where students would agree to be on the committee. Again, part of that would be excellent training, a strong agenda, but also some compensation. I think where it gets a little tricky is where individuals are coming forward and offering to do a workshop here or there. And how do you really tease apart what is beyond the expectation of the service that you would give as part of your being part of a family? Where part of a family you do chores. So how do you make that distinction? Thank you. So I have a question that says, what advice can you give to those who recognize whiteness as ideology and systems, but have trouble connecting it to their individual actions? And this was actually followed up by another question that said, what do you do if you're a boss or your department chair is actually racist? Tough. Can you repeat the first part of the question? I got stuck on the boss. Absolutely. What advice can you give to those who recognize whiteness as ideology and systems, but they have trouble connecting it to their own individual actions? And this is one of the reasons that I worry a lot about the performative work that happens. That is, like I was saying, the book clubs and the community conversations and things like that, where people who understand whiteness as an ideology can be made to feel really wonderful at their wellness, but still not be reflective. And so I think it's a struggle because how do you force people to become self-reflective? And what are the spaces that promote it? So I think so much of the training that we do doesn't necessarily hit the mark in that way, but I think there are ways as leaders and even as followers that we can encourage it. So Debbie, I shared with you a blog post that is one of my favorites. And the blog post is about white supremacy culture in organizations. And the thing I love about it is at the end of the blog post that we can share with everyone, but at the end of the post, it says, where do you see yourself in this? And so I think that part of the work that we all need to do is understand that we're all engaging in behaviors that can be marginalizing, that are putting us in positions where we are not supporting and advancing the work as we would like to. And really the only antidote is self-reflective practice and awareness of what it looks like, that engaging in white racist culture or cultural racism is not cultural racial epithets and things like that, but often it's exclusion. It's how we define standards. It is who's at the table. It is transparency and who gets the information about the goodies and who deserves to feel comfort. And so I think it's really critical that we start to share at that level to think about how this seeps into our culture and structure the structured policies that we have as opposed to thinking about it in the abstract. Can I add on to that? I think, I agree with everything that Stephanie says. And as I think about how you would actually do that, I think self-reflection can sometimes be kind of limited and that if we really want to work in solidarity or as allies, we also need to have trusted communities around us who are able to give us feedback in supportive, loving ways. Feedback that's motivated by, I know your intentions and I know you can do more with them rather than a kind of... Well, there was a recent amazing article about Loretta Ross in the New York Times where she talked about calling in instead of calling out, right? So those moments when you could tell someone, you're not seeing this, let's talk about that. So getting back to what we can do sort of institutionally, I think building capacity within our organizations for people to have those kind of difficult conversations through programs like IGR, in the psych department, our diversity committee last year developed a document they call the Difficult Dialogues Toolkit and this year we're gonna be working on trainings to implement that in our department. So building capacity for people to have those kind of supportive yet challenging conversations to hold us all to the values that we are embracing. Thank you, I appreciate that. I'll ask another question from our participants. This is the second time this week that they've heard the term hidden curriculum. And so they asked, Professor Cole, if you could explain what this means in an educational context, what are examples of the hidden curriculum and how do we shine light here? Great question, I feel like that's a question I should have done more homework for, but I believe Stephanie might know this since you're the Dean of Teachers College that it was coined by, wasn't Henry Giroux, I think? And the hidden curriculum is all the things that we learn implicitly and it can have to do with things like how we conduct our business here, but maybe even more insidiously, it has to do with things like what kind of knowledge counts, how do we evaluate different arguments who has credibility as a knower? And here I also wanna send a shout out to our colleague here, Isis Settles, who's been doing amazing work on what she calls epistemic exclusion that has to do with the ways scholars of color are treated as knowledge producers in the academy, particularly when they're generating knowledge about the communities from which they belong, but not always. So you can think of that as part of the hidden curriculum as well, who gets to speak on behalf of their own experience and get seen as knowledgeable versus someone who's just telling a story, right? When our personal story is seen as informative and when are they seen as indulgent or to be discredited by other people, who in the, like Stephanie mentioned earlier, the example of all the men are speaking, what do the women think? In many settings, there's norms for who gets to speak first and those are racialized and gendered as well. So the idea is that to be successful in the academy, in academic context, there's a whole set of practices and values that never has to be sort of laid out explicitly. And yet, if you don't master it and endorse it and conduct yourselves in those ways, you're not gonna be seen as successful. Thank you. Would you like to ask Stephanie now? Yeah, so it reminds me a little bit of years ago, Rackham did some training for first-gen students because it goes even beyond just the norms of the academic norms, but also to interpersonal norms. Like when is it okay to ask a question? Is it okay to text your advisor? If you're failing, what do you do about it? You know, when you go out for dinner, which fork do you use? Do you drink wine at the interview? There's so many different things that are cultural that we don't necessarily think about that can be the undoing of students if you're not aware of them. And so I think that, and so often, faculty aren't even aware that this is an unwritten curriculum. And so it's just the way that it is and there's an assumption that everyone has been exposed to the same kinds of information. And it's very isolating for a lot of people. Thank you. So one more question from the participants. The comment that you had, Steph, about DEI is the enemy in the context of superficial work, DEI work, resonated with them. Is it almost, she says, it is almost like we do things to pat ourselves on the back that we're committed to DEI without really digging into what makes people feel excluded. Can you comment on what can be done to go beyond the standard DEI practice to alleviate this? Yeah, I think one of the questions is what is our goal? So I often think we don't ask what the goal is with DEI. DEI is the goal, right? Because we have to do the DEI. And that means that we need to have diverse people here and they should feel okay about being here. And we should have some cultural celebrations and things. But oftentimes when you dig in and look at the data, you recognize, A, that we don't have the diversity that we want or we have diversity and people are not included or the equitable practices aren't going forward. And so I do think that feeling good is good and it can set the stage for so many things. But I think that the lasting work really has to come through structural change. It has to come through adding the mentoring committee, adding transparency around how you get promoted, pushing back and thinking about the standards of how we define excellence. And I think that it can be tough because I think you can check the box if you do whatever. But I think at the end of the day, if the goal is to make lasting change and if equity and inclusion are the goals not just diversity, then I think really digging into these structural issues has to happen alongside the nice conversations. Because sometimes those conversations can really bring people to the table. But that can't be the end in and of itself. So another question is, I think many early career academics are waiting for tenure to do this work. I'd like to hear tips for white scholars to initiate dialogue with other white scholars about decentering whiteness. You wanna start, Liz? Sure. You know, we had a number of questions like this from the participants sort of like, how do you do it from where you are? And I felt like for all of them, I would recommend two strategies. And one of them I've already talked a little bit about but I'll say a few more things and the other one's new. And the first is just dialogue. And I can't say this enough. I think we use email too much, especially for difficult conversations. And some of it is the time urgency that Stephanie was talking about. And I think some of it is also discomfort with having those conversations face to face. And I have a personal rule that whenever a communication starts to have a motion attached to it, it can't be electronic anymore. It can't be a text or an email. It has to be at least a telephone call. So the first thing I think we can do is dialogue. In order to get people to shift our perspectives, we need those moments where you're listening to understand and that's the way you get to finding common ground. Now, when I was writing up my notes for this, I thought that could really sound like placating or appeasement or we have to ask for these things nicely. And that's not what I mean. What I mean is it's about connecting, about setting up a space where counter narratives can be expressed and heard about identifying those places where you do agree and working on strategies from there. And so that I think can set up those moments like I talked about earlier about what if we think about mentoring in terms of fairness? Many people can agree to the idea of fairness even if they are still struggling to understand structural racism. So one thing I think is getting better at dialogue, getting more comfortable with having those uncomfortable conversations. And I'll tell you one tip that has really worked for me is when I think about it as being bigger than me, like I Liz might not wanna bring this up but I faculty member or I associate dean, it's my job to do this. And I don't mean that as an impressive burden. I mean it sort of freed me to walk into that and do that work. So one thing is dialogue. The other thing is to really work the systems, I think a lot of times we're dealing with someone, we're in a class where the syllabus is not very diverse or we're dealing with a colleague who we don't think gets it. We have systems here, we have faculty governance, we have executive committees, we have undergraduate committees. That's where the policies that end up excluding or including people get drafted and enacted. And so a lot of times I think asking what's the relevant body to take this up with? And maybe is there a way to go to that body as a group? So I'm offering that for people who are students or for people who are untenured, who feel at risk, that it doesn't have to even go to them as a complaint, it can go to them as a question, the way Stephanie was talking about it. Hey, we were noticing there's not a lot of diversity on our intro syllabus or our pro-sum syllabus. Like why, what can we do about that? Make it a problem to be solved. And not in every setting, but in a lot of settings, I think we're at a moment now where that can get heard, especially by these bodies, even where there might be individual gatekeepers that aren't so responsive. So we have only five minutes left, like every time it goes really fast. But I'd like to end it with a question on how do you go about making people feel more included? So we're not just recruiting a more diverse environment, but how do people of color, and this particular question said black students, faculty, staff, how do you make the spaces feel more included for them? And then any last words of wisdom that you would like to leave with the participants today? So I think, I keep coming back to like, what is the purpose, right? So what is the purpose of a black student or faculty member being in the academy? They have work they wanna do. So I feel like you make people feel included by giving them work to do that is meaningful and where they will bring something unique and special to the table. I think, I think conversation is great. So I think, hearing stories and things like that is really critical. But I think, as I was coming to a new institution, I reached out to people and said, I understand you're doing an amazing thing over here. Tell me more about that. And then how can we put you to work continuing that? I think when I have big decisions to make, people know who get asked to weigh in. And so when I think about who's on my advisory committee, who am I going to for advice regularly, I am always thinking about inclusion in that. And that doesn't mean including people who just look like me. It means including that person who I think is gonna tell me something that's really gonna set me off and annoy me, but I need to hear that too. And so I think giving that sort of a feel of inclusion is really, that everyone has something that they can share, I think is critical. Put on the board. Liz? You know, much of what I wanted to say about this question, Stephanie has already touched on. And I had an interaction recently with a scholar who was junior to me, who shared a paper she'd written with me and I wrote back to her and I said, oh, this line is brilliant. You should do more with this. You should move it earlier in the paper. And she wrote back and said that no one had ever said anything she wrote was brilliant before. And I know she's brilliant because she's been very successful. But I thought about the ways that words like brilliant and genius, you know, there's research showing that those get applied to men and to white people more often than they do. And so I've been trying to do this in my personal life anyway, but it made me realize I need to do it more in my professional life. We need to express our appreciation for each other. And I don't just mean that in a feel good way. I mean, doing those, those are moments of reaching out and connecting with people and saying, I see you and I see what you're capable of. But I want to say one more thing and it's not a super positive thing. You know, I Googled this before our session and I found a paper by Sylvia Hurtado that said that black and brown students' sense of belonging on campus is correlated with acts, negatively correlated with acts of bias and hatred on their campuses as well. So I want to remind everyone, part of inclusion is all of us as a community pushing back against exclusion. And so we can reach in and we can bring people in but we also want to think about working against the forces that make people not feel included. Yes, I think that's such a wonderful way to end. I think all of us that's on the webinar, if we can today make a commitment to reach out to a student of color, a faculty of color, a black student, a Latinx student, and say, you are ex, like you are brilliant, you are smart, you are et cetera. It is something that is so helpful, those words. And you know, like you also said, hearing stories, they're so helpful and just encouraging each other. So we encourage you, Stephanie, Elizabeth, and I encourage you all to reach out to someone today to tell them how brilliant they are in whatever way authentically, of course. So we, I very, very much appreciate you all joining me today. I want to thank our featured guests, Stephanie Rowley and Elizabeth Cole for joining us. I want to thank all of you for joining us. And when you could have spent your hour doing anything. I'd like to thank my leadership at Rackham Graduate School, Michael Solomon, who's always here to join us and who supports this work that we're doing at Rackham Graduate School. I love hearing about what other schools are doing. So Stephanie, thank you for sharing that with us. I invite you all to join me next month when I'll be talking about educating for anti-racism, envisioning a curriculum requirement. So there's a lot of talk about now having requirements for anti-racism in schools and colleges. So we're going to discuss that next month with Dr. Angela Dillard and Dr. Whitney Peoples. And so you don't want to miss that. Thank you so much for joining us today, everyone. Have an incredible weekend.