 And it's my pleasure to introduce our speaker tonight who, if ever there was someone who needs no introduction, it would be our speaker tonight. The reason you're here is because you know who's speaking tonight. And by rights, he should be introducing me, because I'm the person that you don't know. But a little context, this is one of our ongoing President's Distinguished Speaker Series lectures. This year, for the entire year, we've tried to connect various things that we've done, not just the lectures. Other events on campus as well. Under a theme that we came up with a year ago, which was originally intended to be the year of the refugee, but we've converted that to call it the quest for refuge. And what we've seen all year is example after example of why this is such a relevant theme. And it is something about which our speaker knows quite a bit. And he will have a few things to say about that today. I'll give you just a little bit more information on Nick Kristoff. He's been a columnist with The New York Times since 2001. So that's a long time to be on the editorial pages. Interesting gentleman, grew up on a farm just outside of Portland, Oregon, went to Harvard, then went to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, took his law degree back here. I looked him up and I can't, I don't have time to give you all the awards that he's won. Seven-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Twice winning the Pulitzer Prize. Everyone from Bill Clinton to Desmond Tutu has something to say about Nick Kristoff and it's all good stuff. He's been called the conscience of international journalism. And the gentleman who was the director of the Kennedy School of Government, the Shorenstein Center, which gave Nick a career excellence award, said he's the reporter who's done more than any other to change the world, which is a phenomenal thing to have said. And for the benefit of our younger audience members, what is really impressive is 1.5 million followers on Twitter, the most of anybody not named Kardashian in the world. So it's my pleasure to introduce to you Nick Kristoff. Thanks so much. It's great to be here. I've had a chance to spend some time with some students and faculty here and we've had great conversations solving many of the world's problems. Afterward, I look forward to taking your questions and we can solve those remaining ones that we haven't previously resolved. So please do put me on the spot in a little bit. And also, I mean, I really admire the fact that Roger Williams is not just examining these issues of refugees, but also in some ways trying to help make a difference with them. And if you don't know, the university has agreed to sponsor four Syrian refugees in the fall, which is just a really wonderful, beautiful step. And my wife, Cheryl, sends her regards. She just texted me that she's in Washington trying to get back to New York and her flight is late. So it's not united. So she should be OK. People are sometimes curious how it is that a New York Times columnist, and actually maybe a man to boot, should so often be writing about and engaged in these global human rights issues, whether it's refugees or women's rights around the world. And let me explain a little how it is that my career journey ended up taking me in this direction. And it begins when Cheryl and I were based in China. That's Cheryl and me in Tiananmen Square a few months ago. Well, that wasn't polite. Come on, Rhode Island people are supposed to be incredibly polite and hospitable. One way of gauging that picture is that our eldest son who's on my shoulders there, he's in graduate school right now. So it just underscores how quickly kids grow up in just a few months. But when we were in China, I started off writing the standard pieces about the government's doing this or government's doing that or exchange rates, this kind of thing. And then I began to see in very human terms in China and around Asia what happens to individual people and not just the dissident who is crushed by the system, but much more broadly what happens to very ordinary people. And in Asia, they were often disproportionately women and girls. And in particular, one not exactly an epiphany, but something that kind of woke me up a little bit was an occasion in we were writing about how there were so many girls who were having to drop out of school in China because they were girls, because their daughter was less important to educate. And so we were looking for a particular person to make the poster child of this phenomenon. How many of you have been to China? Anybody been to Hubei province in the middle of the country? Maybe? In 1990, we traveled to the Dabia Mountains in Hubei, very poor area, and particularly so back in 1990. This girl, Daimon Zhu, was the brightest kid in the school. And she'd had to drop out in the sixth grade for a want of $13 in annual school fees, $13. So she would hang out by the school gate, looking for Lauren. The teachers felt sorry for her. They would give her scraps of pencils, bits of paper to practice on. And well, we put her picture across three columns on the front page of the New York Times. And you can maybe imagine what happened. This is 1990, so we didn't get emails. But we got a ton of letters from readers, mostly retaining checks for $13 to help her. New York Times readers are incredibly generous, and at least in $13 increments. But we also got a check, or rather a wire transfer, for $10,000 to help her. And we took all this money down to the school. That's the principal beside her. And we worked out a deal whereby that money would be used to keep girls in school who otherwise would have to drop out. And those girls were thrilled. For the first time in this community, your educational outcome would be a function of your talent and not just your chromosomes. And so then we called up the donor of the $10,000 to give him a report. And he was in New York. He was kind of surprised that we would call him. And we said, you just don't understand how far $10,000 goes in rural China. It was a bit of a gasp. And he said, $10,000? He said, I only sent $100. Yeah, you know, as somebody who aspired to be an investigative journalist, I sensed a problem here. And well, indeed it turned out that he had attempted to wire $100. But his bank had had a little trouble with that tricky decimal point. So we figured the banker was probably later put in charge of subprime mortgages, you figure? So we didn't know what to do. I mean, we couldn't imagine going back, we figured at the end of the month or end of the quarter, the bank was gonna discover this error. And we couldn't just go back to these girls and say, oh, sorry, all a banking error in New York. So I'm a little bit embarrassed about what I did next. I've met some of the journalism students here. Please don't try this. I called up the chief spokesman for the bank whom I knew I dealt with him. And I explained what had happened. The bank had made this error. These girls were counting on it to get the first education they'd ever had. And then I let slip the follow-up article I was working on. And I said, now, on the record, are you gonna try to get that $9,900 back and force all these girls to drop out of school? And the bank's folks and didn't miss a beat. He said, on the record, we're delighted to make a donation of the difference. Well, that was 1990. And it's been fascinating to watch. So Dai Manju herself became the first person in her family to graduate from elementary school, from middle school, from high school. She became an accountant. And in Guangdong Province in the south, then started her own accounting firm and sent money back to the community that was used to start small businesses. There were so many other girls who otherwise would have been herding goats or working in the rice paddies who ended up getting a great education and great jobs in ways that didn't just empower them, but truly enrich the entire community. And so you go back to the area today and all of China, all of Hubei Province is much wealthier today and much better educated. But this village is far and away better off than all the other little villages right around it because of this one-time banking error back in 1990. And watching that process underscore to Cheryl and me both the degree to which inequities often have a gender element, but also the degree to which these aren't just tragedies but also opportunities. And that so many social problems have this opportunity element to them and that if one can address whether it's gender inequity or refugees or mass incarceration or whatever it may be in a more enlightened way, then there is also a real opportunity not just for that individual, but also for the society as a whole. And it, but these broad inequities, but these broad inequities, they really are enormous. And in the case of gender, Cheryl and I came to believe that just as in the 19th century, the central moral challenge of the world was slavery and the 20th century was totalitarianism. In the century, it's the inequity that is the lot of so many women and girls around the world. I believe that I think a lot of people think that's meant as hyperbole and it's really not. And actually maybe to explain why, let me ask a question of all of you. Are there more males or females in the world today? Actually, let's put it to a vote here. Who thinks there are more males in the world today? I think there's one hand, well, there was briefly one hand. Maybe over there. Who thinks there are more females in the world today? Well, the brave hand over there and over there, they were right. There actually are more males in the world today. There are more females in the United States. There are more females in Europe. I think there are more females in this room. Given equal access to food, healthcare, protection of the law, women live longer. In an equitable society, there are more women. But the point is that much of the world is not equitable and the gender discrimination is lethal. And in recent years, it's been compounded by sex-selective abortion. Already there were, and so the mortality rates for females are substantially higher than they would be in a context of equal access to resources. And so that's why globally, there have been something like 100 million girls discriminated against to death. And that is why globally, there are now more males than females. And so that's the context where I think it's, it is the central moral challenge. And I do think that this also ties in with so many of the conflicts that we've seen around the world that indeed drive refugee flows. And I've got to say that one of my great frustrations as a reporter who since 9-11 has spent way too much time in Afghanistan and Iraq and Pakistan and Syria and Yemen is that since 9-11, we attempted to deal with issues of terrorism and conflict overwhelmingly just with the military toolbox. And you need the military toolbox. It can do things that no other toolbox can do. But I think we also systematically underused the education toolbox and the women's empowerment toolbox. And they're not very effective in the short run. Over time, they really do change societies. And you look at the difference between Bangladesh and Pakistan, for example. I mean, Bangladesh, when it separated from Pakistan in 1970, when it had nothing going for it. Today it has more girls in high school than boys. It's also not a source of global conflict. You look at Oman and Yemen, two countries next door. Oman has emphasized education, including education for girls. Yemen hasn't. Yemen is today a collapsed state in civil war. And it's not just about education. It's not just about gender, but it is a reminder that to create more stable societies globally, to deal with the root causes of some of the issues that we're talking about, that it is so important to rely not just on drones overhead, but also on education and on empowering women. And again, one of my huge frustrations has been this is something that terrorists understand intuitively. Why do you think the Afghan Taliban throws acid in girls' faces? Why does the Pakistani Taliban shoot Malala in the head? Why does Boko Haram kidnap 287 school girls in northeastern Nigeria? Because they understand that in the long run, the greatest threat to extremism is not necessarily a drone overhead, but is often a girl with a school book. And that's a lesson that we haven't absorbed as thoroughly and as well and don't act on to the degree that extremists understand that and act on it. Well, that, where did my clicker go? That, in turn, leads to the scenes we've been seeing of refugees and in particular, the flow of Syrian refugees through Greece has of course attracted enormous attention. This is a photo that one of my colleagues took and won a Pulitzer Prize for Photography for approaching the Greek island of Lesbos, Syrian refugees who had crossed in that boat from Turkey. And this has obviously also become just a wrenching political issue in this country. And I think that one factor that to some degree helped President Trump win election was his emphasis on immigration both across the Mexican border and also his emphasis on what he described as dangers of terrorism from refugees. And I think that hit a nerve with an awful lot of people and there's no doubt that there's a lot of pain, economic pain and social pain in white working class America that is often ended up targeting immigrants and refugees. You know, one of the things that I wonder about sometimes is how it was in 1964 and 1965, the US could pass extraordinary civil rights legislation while now these are such painful issues in the country. And I think frankly part of it is that in the early and mid 1960s there was a sense that the economic escalator was going up for everybody. And for the cohort born in America in the 1940s at any given point in their careers, 90% of people were earning more than their parents were. For those born in the 1970s, a majority of men at any point in their careers earning less than their dads were. And I think it's a lot easier to feel welcoming and magnanimous and hospitable and inclusive when you feel that you're on an escalator going up and when you feel that things have stalled and you may be the first generation in your family's memory that isn't gonna be better off than your parents. Then I think it's you're more inclined to point fingers instead of offering a helping hand. And on top of that, of course, we, there was an alarm about terrorism. And obviously there have been real incidents of terrorism. But I also think that we tend to exaggerate those risks. Those risks. And if you look at the seven countries that President Trump named in his initial ban, since 1975, I think it was from 1975 to 2015, people born in those seven countries committed zero acts of terrorism. And in the same period, to look at another source of insecurity, guns claimed 1.34 million lives in this country. If one, to put that figure in a context that's approximately as many people as died in all the wars in American history, depends a little bit how you, they're disputed calculations of how many people died in the Civil War. So it may be slightly more, slightly less. Now, if one looks beyond, I mean, often these discussions about those seven countries are somewhat sublimated a discussion about Islam and whether people should be afraid of Muslims. And so if one looks at Muslim Americans, both born in the US and immigrants from countries other than those who were subject to those restrictions on those seven countries, there have been 123 murders, terrorism-related murders since 9-11. In that time, there were 230,000 other murders. 230,000. There's a professor at the University of North Carolina who is tracking the likelihood of being killed by a Muslim terrorist versus the likelihood of being killed because one is Muslim in the US. And the odds are invariably greater that one is killed because one is Muslim than that one is killed by a Muslim terrorist. Last year it was one in six million versus one in one million. And so at the end of the day, yes, there are terrorism risks and one can exclude the possibility that somebody who is brought in is gonna commit some violent extremist act or that their child will. But as we think about risks to Americans and every given year, ladders kill more Americans than terrorists. Terrorists do, bathtubs do, husbands kill so many more people. And I just think we need to be able to understand that of course there are risks but weigh them against various other ways to improving security around the country. Universal background checks before acquiring a weapon would improve security. Domestic violence is an issue I've written a lot about. I mean one thing that would make a huge difference in the country is making sure that when there is a domestic violence protection order against somebody that person cannot then, that person is usually under tremendous strain, emotional strain, and preventing that person from being able to go out and get a weapon would be a practical step that would make a huge difference in this country. You know if we look through the prism of history then I think we likewise see that when we're scared we tend to make bad decisions and we often become scared by immigrants who we perceive as threatening and different who we can otherwise. In the 19th century as you know, there were anti-Catholic riots, Catholics in some cities were burned alive because they were perceived as a threat. Chinese immigrants were subject to the Chinese Exclusion Acts. During World War II there was Japanese-Americans Japanese-Americans were interned in camps on the West Coast. And relevant to this photo, Jews trying to flee Nazi Germany and Nazi occupied countries were also barred because we perceived them as risks and as threats. And these days that seems crazy. I mean how could somebody have perceived and Frank's family as a threat? But in fact we did. And the New York Times for example, and I think I have the date here, we ran a front page piece. I think it was in 1938. We warned about so-called Jewish refugees and we suggested that they could be communists coming to this country to join the ranks of those who hate our institutions and want to overthrow them. The Chamber of Commerce in New York warned that the United States continues to be the world's asylum and poor house would soon wreck its present economic life. And the State Department warned that Jews fleeing Nazi Germany could in fact be Nazi spies coming to spy on us. The Washington Post published a editorial thanking the State Department for blocking Jewish refugees into the country. And so in America there was sympathy for the Anne Franks of Europe. But a refusal to admit them. And so after Kristallnacht, the attacks on Jews, there was a opinion poll in the U.S. and see 94% of Americans disapproved of the Nazi treatment of Jews. But 72% objected to admitting them in significant numbers. And I think that something similar happens whenever we feel frightened and fearful and that we otherwise people who come from a different context. And someday I think we will regret the way we have acted vis-a-vis Syrian refugees and others. And Canada is an interesting approach that has differed from that of the U.S. and so many other countries. And it's interesting that Canada historically was as xenophobic as any other country. There was a white Canada immigration policy through the 1950s. And yet before Pierre-Elia Trudeau and then continuing under Pierre-Elia Trudeau, the father of the present Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, they began to see that for economic reasons and other reasons that Canada could be a stronger country if it brought in talented people from all over the world. And that became part of Canada's identity. And so the U.S. under President Obama, they admitted about 13,000 Syrian refugees. Little tiny Canada admitted more than 30,000. And while this was a huge political issue in the U.S. and probably helped the backlash, probably helped elect President Trump, in Canada, Prime Minister Trudeau showed up at the airport handing out winter jackets to Syrian arrivals. And Canadians took pride in the fact that they were stepping up. Groups of Canadian citizens sponsored refugees. And to me, I think it's partly a function of political leadership stepping up and what political leadership, if it addresses a difficult issue, that it really can convince people that this is something that one should do as a matter of right and that this can strengthen a country. And to me, it's a great example of political leadership stepping forward and doing something at a time when many political leaders around the world were doing the opposite, fleeing in the wrong direction. The, it's not just, you know, we've often focused in this country on Syrians, but there are so many folks who have been fleeing from all over. I spent, you may know, I spent a lot of time reporting on Darfur. And to me, the images of Darfur kind of seared in my memory. And I think one of the mistakes that we in journalism made is that we didn't often humanize the people who are refugees. And so let me talk about a few of the Darfuri refugees who I encountered, who I just so deeply admire. This is a woman who was, she couldn't walk. And so when the Janjaweed militia attacked her village in Darfur, everybody was running away, but she couldn't flee and her husband refused to go without her. He stayed behind. And so when the Janjaweed militia saw him, there, when they got to that hut, they started a fire in the hut and they threw him on the fire. She jumped on top of the fire to try to put it out with her body. And she, he had stayed behind to save her. She now saved him. The Janjaweed were embarrassed and they said, oh, they'll die anyway. And they left. And boy, I mean, that courage and strength just left this incredible impression on me. This man in another Darfuri village, the Janjaweed, caught him. They held him down and the gouged had his eyes with a bayonet. And the point of that is precisely to create refugees. It's a terrorized populations. And that is something that regimes do. Why does President Assad and Syria drop sarin gas on a village? It's not that it is some magic military tool. It's because it terrorizes people and it drives them away. And for those people in that village, what chorus do they possibly have when people are having their eyes gouged out or being burned alive in fires? There's also sometimes a tendency to think of refugees as helpless or just victims. And one of the things I've learned from interviewing so many Syrians and Darfuris and Eritreans and Iranians and Pakistanis and Haitians and Salvadorans, Guatemalans, Honduras and so many others is that these people are not helpless, flotsam. They are incredibly courageous agents. And this woman, Suwad Ahmed, was one who I think about all the time. She was driven out of her hut. She was in a refugee camp and the Janjuid militia was circling the hut, the camp periodically. But people needed firewood to cook. And the women would go out to collect the firewood. And I remember asking somebody, well, why don't the men go out? And the villagers explained to me that when the men go, they're killed. When the women go, they're only raped. So Suwad went out one day to get firewood with her 15-year-old sister Halima. They were gathering the firewood and they saw in a distance the Janjuid approaching on horseback. Suwad told her sister Halima, run back to camp. And then she made a diversion of herself running very obviously in the opposite direction to save her sister. And it worked. The Janjuid saw her, they ran after Suwad. They caught her, they brutally beat her. Eight of them gang raped her. When the Janjuid left, the villagers went after her. They found her, they took her back to camp. And she was telling me this story, but in a culture where rape is extraordinarily stigmatizing. And I wanted to be able to repeat this story, to use it in the New York Times, but I wanted her informed consent. And it's very hard to figure out if you have the informed consent of somebody who doesn't understand what the New York Times is, who doesn't understand the internet. And so I was kind of pushing this consent issue, trying to make sure she understood. And she kept saying she did. And so finally I asked, you know, why are you willing to let me use your story? Why are you willing to let me take your photo? And she said, this is the only way I have to fight back against those people who did this. It's the only way I have to fight back. And I want to fight. And so I thought, okay, that is consent. And I so respected her courage and strength in a context where everything else was being taken away from her. And you know, I just want to also emphasize that the conversation about refugees and immigrants is so often limited to just a few countries. This is a global issue and Central Americans haven't gotten much attention. But there is a huge, huge issue with Central Americans coming into this country and coming into Mexico. These days the net flow across the, between Mexico and America is actually in the direction of Mexico. The more Mexicans leaving the United States for Mexico the other way around. But there are many people who are fleeing Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, because the gangs control so many of those places. I talked to one Honduran girl who, I think she was 14, she'd been made to be the girlfriend of a gang leader there. And she told me that one of her girlfriends had resisted being the girlfriend of the gang leader. And she had been gang raped and then shot in the stomach and left naked in the streets. And then this gang leader was threatening this girl, her name was Elena, her family. And so they fled. And of course any of us would do that. And if any of us loved her kids, of course we would wanna bring her kids away from that kind of environment. And yet when they come to this country, so often they end up in detention facilities or worse are sent back to be killed or to be raped. And you know, I wanna make clear there are no magic solutions here. And I'm not saying we should just open up our doors to everybody. There is a real risk that one can argue that when Germany and other countries completely opened the gates to Syrians and other refugees, one can make the case that that may have encouraged more people to flee their countries and to undertake dangerous crossings of the Mediterranean or the Aegean in ways that led some to lose their lives. It's complicated and it's hard. But the solutions ultimately involve above all trying to address the poverty and injustice and violence in the home countries, the push factors. If one's trying to address the problem of Syrian refugees, then the most important thing one can do is bring peace to Syria. Syrians would much rather be in Syria than they would in the US. And I don't think the international community tried very hard on that front. A second thing one can do is to try to improve conditions in the neighboring countries where most Syrian refugees go, in Turkey, in Lebanon, in Jordan. The UN had to drop education programming for Syrian kids in those countries. Again, most kids, a half of Syrian kids in Lebanon can't go to school. And if you love your, if you're a Syrian, you love your child and your child can't go to school, you want your child to have a better future. You're willing to take some risks to go to Greece and then on to Europe or to America to try to make that happen. And so we can simultaneously acknowledge that it's complicated, that we can't admit everybody, that we have to do a lot more in other countries and yet think that also, that we have a leadership role to play and that when we refuse to take any refugees, it's a lot harder to convince other countries to do their part to solve this complicated puzzle. The, at root, I think the problem with refugees and with immigrants, with so many other sort of social justice problems that we face, has to do with other rising people who we think are different. They're different because of race. They're different because of religion, because of their ethnicity, because of their immigration status. And so we feel threatened sometimes. We can't empathize enough. And that creates this empathy gap. What do I mean by an empathy gap? One way of looking at it is that in the US, it also very much applies to issues of affluence and poverty. In the US, the poorest 20% of Americans actually give more to charity as a percentage of income than the most affluent 20% do. Doesn't make any sense. Affluent Americans aren't any less good or decent or compassionate than poor Americans. So why is it? It seems to be because if you are affluent in America today, then you are to a considerable degree insulated from needs, from people who are at disadvantage. In contrast, if you're poor in America today, then every day you encounter people needier than yourself. Confronted by that need, when it has a human face on it, then you reach into your pocket and help. And it also becomes more complicated when, because when one is insulated from that need, it's also easier to come up with narratives that try to explain this other rising or one's own lack of empathy. And so in a context of poverty, it becomes about how poverty is all about personal responsibility. In a context of immigration or refugees, it becomes about how insecurity is all about Muslim terrorists. Or even in context of domestic crime, it becomes about how either the economy and loss of jobs or crime is all about unauthorized immigrants crossing the border. And taking really complex issues and turning them over through these stereotypes, through that filter in ways that create this empathy gap. Everything is complicated with race as well. There's a lot of evidence that the problems of racial inequity are less about conscious, racist, deliberately trying to discriminate and much more commonly about well-meaning people who intellectually believe in racial equality and yet behave because of unconscious bias in ways that perpetuate discrimination. And there have been study after study in which people look at resumes and it's exactly the same resume, but the one that has a name that sounds like a white guy, people think, oh, that's a pretty good resume. Yeah, he's a pretty good fit in this organization. And the same exact same resume, exact same qualifications with a name that sounds black, people think, I'm not really qualified. Maybe apply again in a few years. Same thing with gender. The same resume coming with a John at the top, men and women alike think, oh, this person is highly qualified. Same resume with Jane at the top, men and women alike think, yeah, not so good a pick. One of the, and I do think this unconscious bias plays deeply into so many of these issues, including immigration. And there was one of the studies that I found most interesting actually involved the NBA. And some economists looked at foul calls by NBA refs. And you think these are televised games, the refs are incredibly well trained. There's any place where there's bias is gonna be eliminated to be those games. It turned out in fact that NBA refs are more likely to call personal fouls on players of a different race than they are. And often enough to change the outcome of the game. And you think if this happens with, you know, NBA refs with such training, then what hope is there for a policeman who's making a stop on the road for a principal who's trying to figure out which of, you know, whether the black kid or the white kid started a fight and who to expel or somebody at a job context, who to hire. But there's a little more to the story. After that study came out about the NBA, the NBA was furious. They argued that this study was, you know, completely preposterous. They commissioned their own counter study which showed that there was no problem at all. And then a few years later, the original economists who'd done the study, they came back and they did a follow up. And they found that actually this time that bias had indeed, that racial bias had indeed disappeared. And it seemed to be that once those refs were aware of the problem and their feet held to the fire and they thought about it, that actually it was possible to overcome our minds in the way we otherwise people in that way. And so I'm hoping that we can have more conversations about these issues of immigration, of refugees, of race, of gender, religion, immigration status, all those things that divide us to create this empathy gap. And I think if we think about them and if we can put more human faces on them, then I think it is possible to tip away at that empathy gap. And one of the stories that really moved me, we ended up telling it, A Path Appears sort of involves that empathy gap. It has to do with a African American kid growing up in rural Arkansas in 1957. Really smart kid named Ollie Neal. Really smart kid, but just a troublemaker. He was fired from his job at a store for shoplifting. He was made as the saintly librarian at his segregated black school cry. And then one day he's in high school, he's skipping English classes in Mrs. Grady's little school library. And he's randomly looking at the books. And one book catches his eye. Actually, Ollie later explains to me that the reason this book catches his eye, it's a young adult novel by an African American author named Frank Uribe. And it catches his eye because he says there's this woman wearing this risqué top. And I'm thinking, this is 1957. What does a risqué top mean in 1957? But it caught his eye. He looked at it. He thinks, okay, this might be a fun book to read. And then he looks over the checkout counter. And there's a girl in his class. Well, he can't be seen checking out a book. He's a tough kid. Tough kids don't read books. So he puts the book in his jacket and steals it. He takes it home and he reads it. And it's kind of the first novel he's read. And he really enjoys it. He returns it to the library about a week or so later, puts it back on the shelf. And he sees another novel by Frank Uribe. So he steals that one. And again, it's just a terrific read. He's kind of flabbergasted by how fun reading can be. He eventually returns it. He notices there's a third Frank Uribe novel. He hadn't seen before. He steals that one. This happens four times. It turns him into a reader. And so he ends up graduating to more fiction, to more literary fiction to current events. And as one of 14 kids going to this segregated black school in the middle of nowhere in Arkansas, he manages to go to college. From there, he goes on to law school. Becomes one of Arkansas's first African-American lawyers, a leader in the civil rights movement, a prosecutor, a judge. That's actually Judge Ali Neal. Isn't that cool? And then at one of his school's reunions, he goes back and he's sitting opposite Mrs. Grady. And he says, Mrs. Grady, I just want to thank you because you're a little library. Completely turned my life around. But I got a confession. I stole some of your books. And Mrs. Grady says, well, Ali, I have a confession too. I saw you steal that first book. And she explains that she had seen him steal it and she was so angry. You know, what is this jerk of a kid doing stealing books that he can just check out? And she was about ready to go march over and yell at him. When in this flash of empathy, she suddenly understood that he was embarrassed to be seen checking out the book. So she let him steal it. And then even though he was an obnoxious jerk who had made her cry, that weekend she drove 70 miles to Memphis to the used bookstores there to find another book by Frank Irby. The first bookstore she went to didn't have one. The second bookstore she went to didn't have one. Mrs. Grady can't remember if it was the third or the fourth that did. She bought it with her own dime, put that book on the shelf in that space. And when Ali Neal stole that second Frank Irby novel, she was thrilled. Then she drove 70 miles back to Memphis and did it all over again. And you know, there were so many reasons why Mrs. Grady had every right to be embittered as a black woman by the discrimination she was suffering both because of her race and because of her gender and to be annoyed at Ali Neal, a kid who showed no gratitude, who humiliated her and made her cry. There was no reason to take a risk on him. And yet she somehow summoned this empathy for this kid who didn't really deserve it. And look, anybody who has dealt with these issues knows that helping people is harder than it looks. You take a risk on somebody and often you just get your heart broken. Doesn't always work. But every now and then as Mrs. Grady did, you take a risk on somebody even if they don't deserve it and it has this extraordinary impact not only on them but ripples through other people as well. If we can summon the goodwill to bridge that empathy gap for people whom we would otherwise be prone to other rising. And if we do that then there are all kinds of ways we can try to help and make a difference. Somebody was asking me earlier about what students can do to try to make a difference, make a better world. And I think that in fact there's so many ways now that weren't available to earlier generations of students. So many opportunities to counsel, whoops, to counsel disadvantage kids at a public school to tutor them, to help them think about college, to tutor in a prison or to go online and do things even halfway around the world without leaving. And in our family, we have three kids. So Cheryl and I have tried to incorporate some of these ideas in our own kind of family life, knowing that telling kids to be empathetic isn't gonna get you very far, that it's all about modeling behavior. And so we tried to, you know, with mixed success to incorporate things. And I knew that I was kind of getting somewhere when my kids gave me the best Father's Day present ever. And this is my Father's Day present. Are you impressed? This is a giant Gambian pouched rat. These are huge, these are some of the biggest rats around. They're three feet long, nose to tail. We have released six of them here, so you can see them firsthand. They, what is special about these rats is that they have very poor eyesight, but they compensate with a wonderful sense of smell. And so they are trained by aid groups to sniff out land mines in minefields. And so I never took possession of my rat, but it was trained in my name to be a mine detector. And so my rat went to Angola, so I followed. I wanted to see how my rat was doing. And it's sort of amazing to see them out there. And I, you know, not to boast, but a human mine detector with a metal detector can clear about 15 square meters of a minefield in a day. My rat can clear more than 200 square meters of a minefield a day. And my rat works for bananas. And there's so many other ways locally abroad that in which people can make a difference and find also a purpose and meaning for themselves. And I do, I want to just leave you with a thought that I think one of the obstacles, one of the ways we psych ourselves out is we think that the problems today are so vast that anything we do is just gonna be a drop in the bucket. Now, and in a sense, there's something to that. They're, it's quite easy to sponsor one child, one girl somewhere to get an education. You know, one girl like Daimonshu to get an education quite cheaply. But there are 60 million kids worldwide who should be in school and art. That's not a problem that we're gonna solve in this country, in this decade. It's a huge, hard problem. And so to that extent, anything we do is gonna feel like a drop in the bucket. Likewise, something similar with refugees. It's fantastic that this university is gonna take four Syrian refugees and educate them. That is awesome. But there are about 60 million displaced people worldwide displaced by conflict and the highest number since World War II. There are 20 million people facing starvation in just four countries. South Sudan, Somalia, Nigeria and Yemen. And they will lead to more displacement. These are huge problems. So in some sense, what we do is gonna be a drop in the bucket. But I wanna leave you with a thought that drops in the bucket do have value. I've become a believer in them. And I've become a believer in them in part because of somebody I know who left an impression on me, Vladislav Khristofovich. Vladislav Khristofovich was a East European refugee. Fled Romania was in a concentration camp in Yugoslavia. Almost executed, made his way to France. After World War II, could not get a work permit. So was doing jobs illegally and felt that neither he nor his yet unborn children would ever be fully accepted in a French society. And so he began to dream of coming to the US. And he explored various ways of doing that. He pursued a fake marriage with an American citizen, an American woman as a way of getting a visa. And that seemed to be going along just great and then it collapsed. But then he was cleaning hotel rooms illegally without a work permit. And one of the rooms he was cleaning belonged to a young American woman from Portland, Oregon, working for the Marshall Plan. Well, she liked him. She convinced her parents back in Portland who had never met him, of course, and their church in Portland to sponsor his way to the US. This was completely taking a risk on him. I mean, he was from Eastern Europe at a time when Eastern Europe was the great enemy. He could have been a spy. He could have been a saboteur. And in the best of situations, there were approximately as many refugees then as there are now. This wasn't gonna solve the global refugee problem. Wasn't gonna make a dent in the global refugee problem. They had to pay his transport to the US. They had to provide him a job for a year. They had to pledge support for him for a year. It wasn't gonna solve any problem. But they did it. They decided to put that drop in that bucket. And so Vladislav Kostrovich sailed to the US, took a train to Oregon. He decided after coming to the US that the name Vladislav Kostrovich was completely unworkable in the US. Partly it had three Zs in his last name. And so he shortened it to Kristoff. It's my dad. So take it from me, truly. Drops in the bucket. That is how we can fill buckets together, okay? I'd love to take questions. Thanks very much. Hi, my name's Kayla Ebbner. So Donald Trump has made his opinions on refugees very clear. I know on one of your articles you've written about the effectiveness of protests and how sometimes they can be not so effective. So how can we press the president to actually act and make the right decision? It's true that I think that some of the protests against President Trump hasn't been particularly effective in a couple of different ways. And one is that I think that one of the characteristics has been that a lot of the protests have been symbolic rather than, and kind of feel-good protests rather than things that are carefully prepared and really aiming for some specific, clear ask that is plausible. And I think another problem with the with the opposition to President Trump is that it is often involved a lot of belittling of Trump voters. And I think it's gonna be really important in 2018, if Democrats wanna make progress on some of these issues, that they win back the millions of people who had voted for President Obama, for example, and previously, but who in 2016 voted for President Trump. And it's gonna be really hard to win those people back if one is simultaneously denouncing them as dumb bigots. And so I think that there's been, you know, those are challenges that one faces. And in the case of immigration, I think that a lot of Americans are somewhat ambivalent. And I think they're genuinely fearful of terrorism and suspicious of refugees. And I think that it was interesting to see that in fact, the response to the initial immigration ban was more resistance than I might have expected. And I think that was because a lot of people stepped up and said that, you know, this is not, this is not how we should behave. And we can do better and we can't take everybody, but we can pursue a legal path that we shouldn't mistreat people in airports, create this confusion, divide families. I think that likewise in the case of deportations that some of the most effective stories have been those that humanize the problem in the context of a family. And so you have an American, I mean, many, many of the families being deported, the parents may be unauthorized immigrants, the children are US citizens. And I think that gives pause to some people. What these kids are American citizens, do we, you're saying you should deport them too or make them orphans or what exactly are you saying? And it's easy for people to be suspicious of a vast group. I think it's harder to demonize a particular person with a name and a face. And so I think we in the media can also do a much better job of humanizing these groups and putting individual faces and stories on them. And I don't think that we in the media did as good a job as we should have in 2016. And I hope that we will do a better job trying to humanize these issues and moving people from categories to make them real and three dimensional in ways that would make it harder to stereotype, harder to demonize and harder to behave in ways that I think historically we will come to regret. Thank you. So you spoke about the media taking more accountability in the future with humanizing and preventing the other from being painted onto potential refugees and immigrants coming into the country. What I've noticed a lot on this campus in particular is a blaming of the news media for that stigmatizing persona on refugees. So I was wondering, have you noticed that within your work that it is something that happens or is it more something that people try to place blame and then kind of refuse to see the humanizing aspect of the news media later on? You know, I think that our malpractice was more a malpractice of omission rather than of commission. It becomes hard when you figure out how to cover a presidential candidate who is making blanket statements that you feel are unfair and vindictive about large groups. If he's a presidential candidate, one needs to cover that. I think one can then provide more context and balance and fact checking and that's where I think we tended to slip up in the context of immigration to refugees and also in so many other contexts. And I think that was partly because television was desperate for a business model and President Trump was great for ratings. At a time when everybody was desperate for audiences, he was really, he delivered audiences and in contrast, fact checking and follow ups and reporting is more expensive and doesn't deliver eyeballs. And I think the other problem is that we just are not good at going out and following, we've chased the most recent shiny thing and we don't provide consistent, we don't go out and cover some of these ongoing stories. Those Central American refugees I talked about, they have been forgotten. South Sudan right now is poised on the edge of a genocide. This is a country that we helped create and it is on the abyss of a genocide and there's essentially no coverage. And these are hard stories and they're expensive stories and they're dangerous stories. There are a lot of reasons not to cover them but if we and the media claim special privileges then I think it's only fair to hold our feet to the fire as well. And so by all means, those of you who are students, I hope you will do that. Thank you. I have a question. What do you think we should do to combat this sort of era of social media slactivism and how can we come up with actual solutions that'll move some of these agendas forward? Well, I mean actually I would, I think push back, it's a really interesting question about slactivism on social media but I would push back at the idea that slactivism accomplishes nothing and is useless. I do think that inconsistently here and there at times it really does do some good and it would often do more good if people did something beyond tweeting or Facebooking but even that, and not everybody agrees with me. There are plenty of people who would disagree but if you look at Coney 2012, do you remember the Coney 2012 movement to go after Joseph Coney in the Lord's Resistance Army? So there was a lot of mockery of Coney 2012, these teenagers just pressing a button or something. In fact, I've gotta say that four US senators in the weeks after that reached out to me to ask me about Joseph Coney and what could be done. Nobody had ever asked me about Coney before that. The US dispatched troops to Central African Republic to try to locate Coney to get his troops to defect. We think that now he's in hiding in an area controlled by Sudan that we can't reach but attacks by, lethal attacks by the Lord's Resistance Army by Coney's forces have declined more than 90%. And I think that that is partly because a bunch of teenagers around the country posted on Facebook. I do think that so often with global issues that our problem is not that we lack a technical means to address something but a lack of political will and a lack of attention and when we in the media drop the ball selectivists can bring more attention to really crucial issues. Thank you. Hi. You talked earlier about some of the problems that Germany and other countries have been having with accepting refugees. You mentioned that letting in too many, sorry, refugees was one of the problems and the consequences of it. What I'm wondering is what are some of the other problems that these countries are having with immigration, sorry, with refugee immigration and what can they do to make it a more efficient process, especially Germany, because it's been one of the most involved and what can Germany and these other countries do to become role models for this cause? So, you know, Germany I have in Angela Merkel I have somewhat ambivalent feelings about and on the one hand I think Angela Merkel showed enormous courage in opening the doors after this young boy, this infant boy, Alan Curdie, was washed up on the beach and that moved everybody. And, but it all unfolded in an incredibly chaotic way that ended up creating a huge backlash in Europe that empowered far-right nationalists and that also encouraged people to make dangerous journeys. I, you know, there was a Nigerian girl who made her way to Libya and she was, Libya has some of the most ruthless thugs and warlords. She was kept in a pit in Libya and brought out every day to be raped by people who would pay for that for six months. I think she was, if I remember right, she was 16 and endured this. And finally she was able to get on one of these rickety boats in the Mediterranean. And as it was falling apart, that fortunately the Italian Coast Guard rescued it and rescued her and so she's now in Italy. But I do think that there was a, you know, that people were encouraged to make trips in ways that were really unfortunate. In terms of, you know, models of countries, I'd go back to Canada as a place that I think has really kind of handled it pretty wisely and paid a close attention to the public mood. And they've also, the way they've handled it, I think, has been really useful. So what happens in Canada is that groups of people form to sponsor a refugee family. And that group, it, I mean, it's a major commitment. They end up raising often $30,000, it's a little bit more, for the first year, they are in charge of that family. There's tremendous emphasis on assimilating those families. So tremendous emphasis on, you know, giving them English language lessons, getting them driver's licenses, getting their kids in school, helping them figure out where they can shop, building them a little social network so that they don't become isolated or, you know, feeling alienated. And Canada has been really remarkably successful in assimilating these people as a result of these efforts. And it has also, I think, made Canadians feel ownership of the process in ways that I find really, really admirable. And it has also led to Canada kind of feeling a great pride in this multi-ethnic country that has emerged, so that, I mean, famously Canada has more Sikhs in its cabinet than India does. And so I think that Canada is an interesting example of how an industrialized country can take in large groups of refugees in ways that don't create a backlash, in ways that create ownership and kind of build identity. So we learned from Canada. Thank you very much. I'll be sure to cite you in my thesis. Okay. Good luck with the thesis. Thank you so much. We spoke briefly before. I'd like to raise two things. First one, it seems to me that part of what you're trying to do is to suggest that there's a chance that we all as a society can interrupt history, disrupt history at some level. So I'd like you, if you could reflect on this notion of a writer that is, at some level, a protest writer. And there's still that as a pro-action testist comes from testis as a witness, witness that denounces wrongs. So in a certain way to me, that is something that appears to be at the core of your position, I would say. I would just surmise. I'd like if you could reflect on this notion. And the second one is this idea of other. The other that in a certain way, if you follow French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, father of contemporary ethics, suggested that society is the miracle of moving out of oneself. So in a certain way, what he's trying to suggest to all of us is that the other is even more important than oneself in as much as we create society with others, those others who most likely we don't know, but are, as your father or as my mother, immigrants coming from somewhere else. So if you could reflect on those two things, and I'd like simply to say that we are going to have tomorrow a long day of discussions on these issues in campus. Bravo, bravo. So on the first issue, I know I think of that a lot. What is the role of journalism and what can I do? And I tend to think that in the news business, fundamentally we can be in the heating business or we can be in the lighting business. And I think there are more and more journalists have gone into the heating business and created lots of heat, but not so much light. I think that where we have the greatest impact is shining a spotlight on an issue that is neglected and making people pay attention to it. And I think that so much of what I do is try to make people spill their coffee in the morning over the paper. And I do think that I've seen over and over that once people become aware of an issue, a moral issue, then they do respond. And maybe not as much as I would like or as well, but it's so much easier to behave badly toward a place than a people that we're not thinking of, that we don't think of especially in human terms. And so that's how I see my role. And on the second point, I guess what I would just say to those students who are thinking about that in these discussions is maybe I've alighted a little bit over just how hard some of these issues are. These are really hard policy issues and even on a personal level, they are difficult. And when I was in Canada, I talked to an awful lot of groups, some of whom sponsored families, put in a lot of money and found it incredibly frustrating that then these families are behaving in ways that just seem self-destructive or hugely biased or the man is not letting the woman work or have her own bank account or whatever it may be, it's really frustrating. And helping people is harder than it looks. But I also think that at the end of the day, our efforts to help other people have this somewhat mixed record, they have this almost perfect record of helping ourselves. And particularly for students, I think that we talked about human trafficking earlier. Huge problem in that if students tackle that issue, for example, are they gonna make a dent in human trafficking in Rhode Island? Well, I hope they will and I think they might, but it's hard. But I do think that it can be part of their education to encounter very, very different worlds than those that they have. And so I'd sure encourage them knowing that it's difficult with the knowledge that it is one way to knit together that kind of society as you described it. So you talked a little bit about guns and that's an issue that my wife is passionate about and we've been reading the things that you write and all that is very persuasive. And I'm passionate about energy issues and I've been chatting back and forth with some friends of mine that have the same background and same education and they have different views on energy and I've been unable to, talking about it doesn't seem to change minds. And I'm wondering how often you find people changing their minds, maybe people that are over 30 or under 30 and is it possible to talk to your friends and change their minds, even someone you, like you is particularly persuasive. So do people change their minds or do we just have to sort of grow them differently? Fascinating question. And it's one that I've wondered about because I wonder how I use my column. And initially when I got my column in 2001 I thought, oh boy, I'm gonna be writing about these subjects and enlightening people and changing minds all across America twice a week and it doesn't work that way. When I write about issues that people have thought about, if I write about Middle East, if I write about guns, if I write about President Trump, then it's very rare that I will change somebody's mind. One exception is I tend liberal so where I take a conservative position then people are more, fellow liberals are more willing to listen to me and keep an open mind about what I'm gonna say. But, and I disproportionately, where I do take a more conservative position, I'm more likely to write about it precisely because I think that that's to some degree where I have more of an impact and I wanna challenge my readers, which often they take as incredibly annoying. But one does what one can. And so I'd also think that there are some kinds of issues where one really can have an impact and one is those issues that people haven't thought about, don't know about. So I've written a lot about a condition called obstetric fistula, a childbirth injury or sex trafficking. I think these were considered disgusting or just hard to talk about and once you break the ice and break a taboo, then we get better policies. Consistently, we have the worst policies toward things that are hard to talk about. Anything to do with sex, mental health, domestic violence, things that are awkward or taboo to talk about, we have bad policies toward breaking that ice, I think leads people to change their mind. And the other, the final area is areas where one can put a human face on things and one thinks about the change in attitudes towards LGBT issues. Just stunningly quickly. And that was because all of a sudden, everybody realized that they had a cousin or friend who was gay and that that person wasn't some kind of evil monster, but just a good person who was born slightly differently in ways that didn't make them better or worse. And so I think that once there was that epiphany that just changed attitudes on LGBT issues so quickly. So I think that there is some hope on those issues. I think it's a lot harder on issues that people have wrestled with for a long time. We have room for one more brief question, but before we have that question, a reminder to everybody in the audience, there will be a book signing over here. And now our final question. Thank you so much, Mr. Christoph. Good meeting you earlier and talking about journalism issues. I'm from Gambia. I'm a former refugee and the larger version of the Gambian rat, if you can see. Exactly. So I wanted to ask, I run a refugee foundation that I founded myself. We support refugees that are recently coming to this country. I always grapple with this question as a former refugee and as somebody supporting people newly coming. What should refugees do in this country? Both within here, but also outside, to change the narrative, to change the lack of information about refugee issues. Like for example, currently everybody thinks refugees are Syrians. Like you clearly articulated. What can we do as former refugees or as refugees to contribute to that information flow, to share but also change the narrative and give a better impression and better voice and better outlook about refugees in this world and in this country specifically. Well Omar, I think you've been exemplary in providing sort of an answer. And your own efforts to start an organization to deal with refugees, your efforts in this community, I think are important in reminding people that refugees aren't a drain on a society, but ultimately enrich it. And I think that where problems arise are where refugee or immigrant communities become isolated and not intertwined in the larger context of that society but in their own little ghettos, whether geographic or cultural or whatever else and don't intermix. And then I think it becomes easier for there to be alienation and for outsiders to perceive them as threats to their culture, to the American way of life or to their physical security. And so I think anything we can do to build bridges between immigrant and refugee communities and maybe that's interfaith communities, inter, every kind of intermixing, I think is really important. And I would indeed take your own example Omar as a fine example of that. I also just wanna leave you all with one thought that there have been a bunch of questions here about the media and I've been thinking about this. And one of the things I worry about frankly is that a lot of these issues for progress really require a certain amount of media attention and especially television to humanize them to get into people's living rooms. And I think we have not done a good job on that in the last 15 years but I'm afraid that we may do an even worse job of that in the next 15. And that's because the business model of journalism is really in terrible trouble. And if you're the executive producer of a TV show, you know you can send a camera crew out to South Sudan or to do a piece about Central American refugees and your ratings will go down compared to a rival network that puts a Democrat and a Republican in a studio together and hasn't yelled at each other. That's just the blunt reality of the economics of it right now. The Bill and Melinda Gates, their foundation, essentially bribed ABC News a few years ago to cover global health and nutrition. I say bribe, it was a grant. But it was controversial within the development community because why should the Gates Foundation be spending scarce resources that could be used to vaccinate kids instead to pay television executives to do their job? In fact, ABC News did some really fine coverage on maternal mortality, on micronutrients and I was fine journalism, got more attention to these issues. And so after a year the Gates Foundation went back to ABC News and said we'd like to renew our grant and ABC News said no, we don't wanna take your money because we see that when we do these stories our ratings drop, that's when people click the channel. I found that incredibly troubling as a journalist who went into this business partly because I believe that we can be in the lighting business not the heating business. But I would just say that each of you in some way you have your own spotlight. Maybe it's your book club or your Facebook page or your Twitter handle or your dinner table conversation. Whatever it is, you have your own spotlights and I hope that in the coming years if we in the news media drop the ball on some of these really important issues then you will all pick it up and shine your spotlights on these issues because if we don't collectively keep these issues eliminated they will get neglected and we will look back and regret the mistakes that we have made. Thank you all so much for having me here.