 Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to LEAD, Leading Equity and Diversity. I'm Dr. Debbie Willis, pronouns she, her, hers, 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 you all for joining us today. Given all this going on in the world, we appreciate your presence here. Before we get started, please note that you can enable the live closed captioning by clicking the CC button on your screen. You receive the prompt that the session is being recorded, and though your audio and video are 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 interests you, 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 hundreds of you have joined us today, and we received many questions from registration. We will not get to them all in one hour. However, we are committed to 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 anti-racism education in higher ed. We'll explore options and opportunities to facilitate learning that leads to a more inclusive environment. We have two phenomenal guests with us today to lead this conversation, Dr. Angela Dillard and Dr. Whitney Peoples. Let's start with brief introductions. Whitney, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your journey as a leader and advocate in the space of diversity, equity, inclusion, and social justice? Absolutely. First, thank you, Debbie, for inviting me to be a part of this. Thank you, Angela, for always being in conversation with me since I joined the UM campus to do this work in 2017. So I'm Whitney Peoples. I am a director in educational development and assessment services and a coordinator for diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives and critical race pedagogies at UM Center for Research on Learning and Teaching. And I've been at the center since 2017 and am originally from Texas, which I'll tell you a little bit about. So I like to say that because I'm still getting used to these Michigan winners, even though I've been here for a while now. But when it comes to, I think, talking about my journey into being a leader or an advocate in the space of diversity, equity, and inclusion, that for me really comes from my family and in particular my mother and her sisters who were a large part of raising me and my dad. And I like to go back and start there because I think my higher education experiences gave me language. It gave me particular kinds of frameworks, but the core of my investment in equity and inclusion really comes from the way I was raised and it comes from watching my mom and her sisters model a commitment to equity and really understanding that service is an important part of what we are called to do. It's a part of an ethical commitment that I saw them act out regularly, but also they were very clear with me that as a black woman growing up in Texas, I couldn't afford to turn a eye toward that and pretend that it didn't matter and I didn't see it. And I grew up with a really strong family legacy, so I come from a family of lawyers. My aunts will tell you that I regrettably, for them regrettably ran away from law school in my first year, I was really clear, I didn't want to do that. But I grew up hearing about like my great-great-uncle, W.J. Durham, who argued a sweat v. painter in the state of Texas with Herbert Marshall, which challenged the separate but equal doctrine and became really important for when Marshall and the NAACP defense one would go on to argue brown board, right? So these are the kinds of legacies that I grew up with. This is what I saw my mother and my aunts acting out and it's what my family really encouraged me to do. So when I decided I wanted to do things like get a PhD in women's and gender studies, they said, what are you gonna do with that? But they trusted me because they knew that it was a part of that long-term investment in equity and inclusion and injustice work. So for me, it really starts there. And then certainly, as we move through today, I'd be happy to talk about how it ended up in these particular avenues. But this is what I do now is a particular or a specific expression of what's really been a lifelong encouragement and really a lifelong modeling that I got at home. Angela. So Debbie, thank you so much for the invitation to be here. I've been following the lead series and congratulations on that. I think it's important and really wonderful to be here with Whitney. As she said, we've been writing together, we've been thinking together, we've been providing each other mutual support and solace over the past few years. And so this is a real pleasure. I think for me, my way into some of this conversation that we'll be having today really stems from the years that I spent as LSA as a College of Literature Science in the arts associate dean for undergraduate education from January 2015 to August 2019. And if you think about what was going on in those years, I mean, these were years where there was a real upswing, once again, on campus protests by students, well, graduate students and undergraduates, touched off by Ms. Yu and everything that happened in that cycle. And one of the things that happened in those years was each school would publish its list of demands. And one of the things that was always demanding was increased faculty hiring for a more diverse faculty and usually some kind of educational requirement that would deal with issues of diversity, inclusion, race and racism. So to be in the LSA dean's office in those years at the same time where the University of Michigan was going to unveil a huge commitment to DEI and AACSIS was really exciting and really got me thinking about, demanded thinking about what actual change looks like. How do you do it? How can you be a good advocate? How can you actually think about an administrative position from a bit more of an activist standpoint in which you're really going to work with others to try and produce real change to really move the needle? And I'm the first person to say that I was a little grumpy and cranky when the university announced that we're going to do this big DEI initiative. But I thought in those years to stand on the sidelines to just be critical and not be critically engaged was a real waste. One of my good friends and colleagues, Elizabeth Cole, said in those years, we have to step up. This is a time where we're in these roles, we're in these positions, and we have to run our leg of the race, help to move the needle, and then help to do a smooth handoff for the people who are going to come behind us to continue to work on these kinds of issues, especially around the curriculum. Thank you. Thank you both. So we'll start with you on this question, Angela, since you talked about being an administrator in LS&A. The question is, as an administrator, how do we build accountability for implementing anti-racist pedagogy in academia and measure progress over time? Those are really good questions, really important questions. I think this is exactly the place to start, especially with accountability and especially with the idea of building. Because most of us, you're not starting from scratch, but you don't have everything that you want in place at the beginning, so building has to be part of this. One of the things that I did during my years in the dean's office was to oversee a huge review of the college's race and ethnicity degree requirement. So this is a three to four credit requirement that the LS&A has for all of its students. It had been years since a thorough review, had been not. And this was a can that the dean's office had been kicking down the road for a lot of years. And the can landed on my head, which was kind of, which from one point of view, it was a huge challenge. But from another point of view, was a major opportunity for us to think together about what we could do to improve this requirement that had been in existence for close to 30 years, to the point when we were doing the review. And I'll be talking a lot about that in my comments today. But I think some of the key things in terms of structure and building and accountability, I think you need three things. And a lot of this actually comes from the ways that people have been thinking about STEM education, especially in the first and second years. You need champions on the ground. You need faculty members who are doing the work want to do the work, want to tell you what they need to do the work better. You need high level support from the top. So administrative support that says, this is important to us. We're going to put some resources behind this. We're going to help you think about how to do this part of the curriculum well. We're going to sponsor a review to make sure that we get input from faculty, from staff, from students who have been in these classes. But I think that the big piece that people often overlook is the departmental piece. I think you need real sincere, long-term departmental buy-in to be able to do meaningful curricular reform, pedagogical work in any field, but particularly in fields that are around this race and ethnicity requirement and to the degree that we want to shift it in more explicitly in an anti-racist direction. So I think that there are a lot of things that are going to be part of that middle layer, where you've got to have the departments on board. And you have to have people thinking about intergenerational teaching teams. So faculty, graduate students, undergraduates, if your institution allows space for that. Some of these courses that are going to be handed off year to year. And so that you think of a team in a kind of longitudinal way as well, the people who are going to be teaching this over a three-year horizon. And then you really start drilling down on what these teams need. What kind of support do they need? What can we bring in? How do we think about classroom climate? How do we think about curricular design? How do we think about assessment work? And how do we build enough support around the people doing this work in the classroom to, again, start to move the needle in a meaningful way that's not just going to be a one-off, right? So it's not just the one charismatic faculty member who does all the work in her department. But then it never touches the rest of the curriculum because that person has been working in isolation. And I'll also be talking a lot about it. And Whitney has heard me say this just 100 times. Teaching does not have to be as lonely as we have made it. I mean, I think that this is a real mistake, especially those of us who are teaching in anti-racist ways, who are trying to experiment with that kind of pedagogy and what it demands. Those of us teaching about race and racism, ethnic intolerance inside of a curriculum at a major institution like the University of Michigan. Thank you. Thank you, Angela. Whitney, I know you have a different kind of angle in a non-academic unit. And I know you have expertise in curricular design. Did you want to add anything to that question? I think just two things. The first, I think, is what are the stakes for people if they don't do the things, right? That's a big part of accountability is helping people understand the stakes. So what happens if you don't implement this pedagogy? What happens if you are exposed to or trained in it and you choose not to use it or you use it for a little while and you walk away? And I don't just mean the stakes and how will you be in trouble with the dean or the department chair. I think it does matter how will this impact your own professional portfolio and professional movement, but also understanding the impact on students if you don't do that work, really having a clear sense of that. And that, for me, is the second thing I'd like to share is that in my experience, one of the things I've really enjoyed about doing this work and I've enjoyed about doing this work with Angela, who has such an understanding of the rich history of the R&E requirement is that I got to learn that history and I got to look at something that wasn't just an administrative decree but really came out of student activism, that came out of collaborative work between students, faculty, and staff to bring this about. And when you know the history of the R&E requirement, you understand really clearly that students were, at that time, asking for anti-racist intervention. They weren't just asking for a course on people of color or a diversity requirement. They wanted to fundamentally disrupt racist cultures and practices of their colleagues and of faculty members. They wanted to see change and they understood the classroom as a privileged side of intervention where that could happen. That's powerful. But sometimes when I talk to instructors, they don't know that history. And so students' calls for anti-racist action in the contemporary moment feel out of place for them. They feel out of line. But I think making sure that people understand that history and where students stood for that and stand for that today, that's a part of, for me, raising the stakes of this. And I think that's an important piece in terms of accountability is not losing the institutional histories of these things. Yeah, thank you so much for addressing that. And we know you all wrote an article in Chronicle of Higher Ed that kind of chronicled that history. And we'll make sure to share that with all the webinar participants if they haven't seen it yet. This is kind of a follow-up question. And that is, how might a critical look at our own anti-racist, pedagogical practices help us rethink the advantages and disadvantages of interdisciplinary education? The person says, I worry that too often the social sciences take the lead in these discussions and don't allow for other disciplines to be a part of the critical conversation in productive ways. You want to start there with me? Yeah, I think this is thank you for that question and thank you for whoever posted. This is a question that I've heard quite a bit. It's really where the stem fit in. It's really less where do the humanities fit in. I think there's a clear sense of where humanities and social sciences can engage with these questions. But I often hear sort of how do we do this in stem? We're talking about sales. We're talking about numbers. We're talking about angles. And so these things don't apply here. And I actually think that's where interdisciplinarity is one of our sharpest swords. So I am trained with a PhD in Women's and Gender and Sexuality Studies from Emory University, which has a really strong concentration in feminist techno science and science studies. That's a core part of my training. So when I think about stem spaces, I think it's less that social scientists are dominating the conversation and more that stem folks have to do some work to really cultivate an understanding of the disciplinary relevance, why this matters. And this is when interdisciplinarity comes in, having conversations with people outside of the field. So I'm thinking about folks like Evelyn Hammond, Ruha Benjamin, Alondra Nelson, some of whom are natural science trained, but also some of whom are social scientists and humanities, but they're doing critical work on natural science fields. So on biology, on chemistry, in engineering, who are bringing critical racial justice frameworks to bear on these natural science on stem disciplines. It would be great if folks in stem fields were also reading those folks and bringing them in as a kind of critical read on the field. I think that's a place where interdisciplinarity really serves us and where folks have done a lot of work to help stem fields think about the disciplinary relevance, both historically, but also in the contemporary moment. Thank you. So our next question, how can and should faculty and staff approach anti-racist pedagogy in light of the pressure to remain nonpartisan? While anti-racist isn't partisan, it's often views as such. So what are some of the strategies for working through this tension with students? Angela? I think like most things naming the tension is the best way of dealing with it. I mean, I think maybe starting with the conversation, you know, maybe not the first day, but you know, at the beginning of a class where you know this is gonna be a factor and come up and start to say, well, why do we think anti-racism is a partisan thing? I mean, let's talk about that, let's interrogate it. Let's try and surface all of the tension and the anxiety that might be in the room and talk it through and acknowledge that there might be things that do feel partisan and how we might then be able to manage that in a classroom setting, but then let's maybe, you know, move people in a direction where they start to see that this need not be a partisan conversation when we're talking about things like equity, fairness, inclusion, justice. I mean, I'm a person who actually works on both sides of the political spectrum. I specialize in ideology. I spend almost equal amounts of time writing about conservatism in the right as I do about social justice in the left. So I think that we just need to be a lot more frank that yes, some of this may feel partisan, but that's the place where you start. That's not a place where you stop. And I actually have learned a lot about this from Whitney and thinking about what an anti-racist pedagogy actually looks like. I mean, what are the things that make that different? And we found this inside of the review and I found it subsequently in thinking and writing with Whitney that the pedagogy is everything. You know, it's not maybe so much the subject matter, although, you know, I'm not gonna say that the subject matter isn't important, but you know, how are you teaching? Are you building in dialogue? Are you building in reflection? Are you naming things? Are you naming things appropriately? Are you having conversations about what's being surfaced and what's not being surfaced? You know, it really kind of turns out and in this article that we wrote together, we wanted to name that subsection, it's the pedagogy stupid. You know, it's not these other kinds of things. It's not, is it this field or that field? Is it this topic or that topic? Is it here and now, which means contemporary US or is it then and there, meaning historical or another part of the world? But you can have these requirements in these courses that cover a lot of different kinds of territory, intellectually and from a disciplinary perspective. But what we think, I think what we need to get together and drill down on is actually the pedagogy and what's going on inside of the classroom, whether it's a small seminar, a lecture or a lecture that then has discussion sections. Did you want to add Whitney? Yes, you should add to that because this is really key. Yeah, I mean, I would agree. It's how we teach, what we teach matters, but it's really how we teach. And I think what Angela started with there, right, is transparency. How are you transparent with your students? How can you name your commitments for them? And then how do you talk about it? How do you unpack it with them? I think part of what's in there for me, and this is the key part that I talk to instructors about is that anti-racist work, whether it's pedagogical work or community organizing is a risky work. It's risky work because it challenges the status quo, it challenges hierarchies. It raises all kinds of questions for people. And so the other thing is kind of, what's your goal in being transparent and talking with students about this? Is it so that students don't have any problems or questions with your pedagogical approaches? Is it so that you don't get any negative evaluations at the end of the semester? Then that, it's probably not gonna do that thing for you, right, because it's gonna make some students uncomfortable. And you still may get some people who are unhappy or who have questions or critiques of what you've done. And so I think part of it is also getting clears and instructor about what are the risks and then deciding that you're okay with those risks, that you'll take those on because you know that this is important work, you know that it's key to teaching and learning, you know that it's key to your field and you know that students need to know if they wanna be a good sociologist, a good biologist, a good rhetorician, that they have to be able to do anti-racist work to take on anti-racist frameworks. And so you'll take one for the team so that you can expose them to that and help to normalize it in your discipline. Thanks, so we're talking a lot about pedagogy, which we will continue to do and it's really important, but some of the questions were like in general, higher education, anti-racism education. So one of the questions is, we would be grateful for any comments on mandatory anti-racist education trainings for faculty and staff, but the faculty in their departments are very resistant to any kind of training or professional development, but do you think making it mandatory would at least bring them in, even if it doesn't necessarily create buy-in, is that still a good thing? Whitney? Yeah, this is the question I feel. Yeah. So, you know, I am not opposed to mandatory requirements. I mean, I think they can do really great work. There are lots of things that we are required to do for our jobs on a regular basis. There are lots of mandatory training. So that's not a concern or an issue for me. I think it can certainly be a starting point. For me, my concern is what comes after. So if one mandatory training or one short series of mandatory trainings is all that's there, then all that can do really is to guarantee exposure. And if what you want to do is to be able to say, we have, you know, every instructor in our department or 400 instructors have all been exposed to anti-racist training, then you can do a mandatory training and it's one and done. But if what you really want is that people build stamina and capacity and that they cultivate a sustained commitment, then you need steps two through 20 after that mandatory training. So what will come next, I think. And that for me gets back to that accountability piece. Someone can go to a mandatory training. Does that mean then they are actually practicing? Are we looking for revised syllabi? Are we looking for revised mentoring plans? What comes after the mandatory? Mandatory would have to be step one. It couldn't be the thing that we fight for and then we stop there. There has to be more that comes out of it. But I don't think that a mandatory requirement is inherently bad. I just think it's a gateway and we often think of it as stopping points. So I'll ask the next question. Maybe, Angela, you can start here. How do we encourage colleagues to move from performative to substantive anti-racist actions? Yeah, that's a good question. It's a hard one. I think it kind of follows off on Whitney's answer about where do you start and where are you trying to get to? And what are we building in? I don't know. I'm on the fence about mandatory training. I mean, I understand that in my job, a lot of I do have responsibility to do mandatory training in all kinds of things. In fact, my peer certification stuff is up. And so over the weekend, I have to log in and I have to do mandatory training to make sure that I'm doing my research in an ethical fashion. We build in mandatory training and all kinds of things because we worry about ethics. We worry about professionalism. We worry about standards. I mean, so I think thinking of anti-racism, access, inclusion alongside of these other things that we are required to do as part of our professional obligations, it's not a bad thing. But I think like Whitney, I think that you wanna go somewhere else with it. And I think part of where you wanna go when you're talking about those of us working in the curriculum, in the classroom, especially with undergraduates, but also graduate students, is that you have to teach everybody. That's your job. I mean, I think we need to make it a little bit clearer. I think we need to talk more about what we're trying to do in education, especially in the first and second years of the curriculum. And so some people might know that Michigan has launched a foundational course initiative to look at our 30 largest courses that tend to be at the introductory level, especially in STEM, but not only in STEM. And the idea was to make those courses less obstacle courses and more gateways and bridges into what young people might wanna do in terms of the rest of their education and their professional careers. We should be lowering the barriers to education and we should be lowering barriers to success and thinking about our jobs, not as that the gatekeeper weeding out, right? But as something that we're trying to do that's positive and that's affirmative and that's always about lowering access for people to be able to learn. And I think to send young people into the world of a college degree or to send graduate students into the profession with PhDs where we haven't spent a lot of time preparing them to manage classrooms, workplaces, institutions, movements, families, communities, churches, without this kind of training is irresponsible. And I just think we should be a lot clearer about that and fold this into again our own professional responsibility as educators. Thank you. I'm gonna bring in one of the questions from the audience. It is, I've seen a lot of discussion of unity and healing in 2021, but I really feel that this skips critical parts of the process in creating meaningful change, accountability, reparations. How do we balance wanting to bring people into the conversation with the fact that many individuals and departments, deans, officers, et cetera, may not want to engage with the more uncomfortable parts of anti-racist work? You want to start? Debbie, will you read the second part of that question for me again, that lasts the how do we part, please? Oh, they removed the question. I think I got it. I think it was how do we engage with folks who may not want to talk about some of the more troubling aspects? Yeah. And not rushing to the moment of unity and healing without surfacing and dealing with some of the stuff in the past. Yeah. I mean, so I think this is really important. I would agree. I've seen a lot on racial unity and racial healing. And I do think that some of it can skip over that important piece. I think though, if we look at some of the folks that are doing some of that work and writing about it, many of them, like I'm thinking about Annalise Singh's workbook around racial healing, they are writing about confrontation as a part of the work of healing. So I think that would be one of the first things is that we need to not just sort of throw out terms, but we need to really go back and look at the frameworks that we're drawing on and look at what these activists and these scholars are asking us to do as we take up those frameworks. So a framework around racial healing, you absolutely cannot heal if you can't root out the infection, right? And so I think a lot of those really ask us to first do the work of confrontation. So maybe some of it is defining terms to say, well, if you want to do racial healing work, if you want to do racial unity work, here are the steps to that, right? We don't just stand up and say, we're now doing healing work for healed, but we have to say like, what is the process for that? And the process for that is first confronting what the issue or the problem is, addressing it, working on it. And healing may be the thing that you do five or six years down the line or longer. But I think that that might be part of it is getting really clear about terms. I think that's a shaky thing when we start using terms like diversity, equity, inclusion, social justice, anti-racism, that these things just start to sort of take a life of their own and we divorce them from people that have been writing about them that have been practicing them, who are telling us, this is what this thing means, this is how you do this. We just start using terms and using frameworks totally disconnected, totally out of context. And so that might be one thing that I would say is that as you go about doing that work in a space, getting real clear about terms, real clear about what we mean, and then real clear about process. Yeah, thank you. So I want to say thank you to all of the audience who are like, here's the other part of the question. I have a phenomenal Rackham team that's like moving and I appreciate that, but you answered it. It was basically who may not want to engage with the uncomfortable parts of anti-racist work. So thank you so much. Did you want to add Angela or no? I think so. I mean, I think, you know, I'm a historian by both training and inclination, you know? And I think history is a river, right? I mean, it's not, I mean, I think part of it is that we need a better language for what we're trying to do and what we think we're doing, which is not, you know, a kind of simple language about progress, you know? So it's not that you just kind of lamps the historical boil, all the pus spills out and then somehow you end up in a completely healthy state, right? That some of the pus stays with you, right? I mean, that you trust. And I think that part of it is, how do we get comfortable in that? I mean, how do we deal with that, right? I mean, so along with, you know, a kind of metaphor of a river in which the past is never the past, you know, some of it is those kinds of metaphors that come from climate and what you really sort of think about climate problems like you think about weather. I mean, you know, you don't solve weather, right? I mean, you don't solve storms. Storms are always going to come. Those some days are going to be brighter than other days. So I think that this is just part of what it means to be alive right now, to be aware, to be in these kinds of educational settings to be trying to do better, right? That this has, I think we have to see this as a constant and ongoing process, not as something that we just fix in a five-year plan and then we expect something better at the other end, right? Because doing that five-year plan, lancing the boil, surfacing all of these tensions might mean that we're in for a decade that's gonna be very difficult for us. And I think that that has to be okay. So for me, it's not kind of healing and unity. I mean, I think what we need to do is to get to better places of solidarity where we're at least talking about this stuff, we're supporting each other through those moments that really are rocky. And I'll say it again, we have teaching does not have to be as lonely as we've made it. And I think we can teach from a place of solidarity that has teaching teams that are intergenerational that are spread across departments in which we're supporting each other and doing work that in a lot of ways feels very difficult. Inside the classroom and then sometimes inside departments and then sometimes inside of whole colleges and universities. Great. Wow, Angela, you said a lot there. Go ahead, Whitney. Well, I was gonna say, I know you wanna move forward, but I just wanna, I wanna pick up on something Angela said because Angela, I think you really got to the crux of this piece around solidarity. And such an important part of that is accountability and stamina. So for me, that rush to unity and that rush to we're healing is often a rush to like want to feel good and want to feel accomplished around something. And so I think about like when I draw on Angela Davis' work or I draw on Ibram Kendi's work and I say to people, what if you let go of anti-racist as a stable identity that you can inhabit? And rather you see it as a set of actions that you are either performing or not performing. So what if there's no there that you're trying to get to, but that this is a constant state that you're working in and you're working to achieve and that sometimes you're doing it and sometimes you're not and when you're not, that's when you have to figure out how to be accountable. That's when you really have to like understand the strength of your solidarity when you can say, you know what, I got that wrong, I didn't do that. I can deal with the risk, I can deal with the feedback from students, I can deal with being called out or called in. I think that's such an important piece is in building solidarity, building stamina, stamina to be accountable, stamina to take a risk, to take a chance, to get it right and also sometimes to get it really wrong. And I feel like the push to unity and healing is in my experience often the desire to jump over that and to not have to sit in that uncomfortable space. Yeah, thank you, that's super powerful. And I also, Angela, like you said, I like your comparison of it to the weather, right? We don't fix the weather, but the weather always is changing. So I like that with climate and our climate and our culture and we just have to, it has to be an ongoing basis. Like you said, Whitney, something we're in it for the long haul. I'll bring in another question from the audience that says, how can students effectively follow up after they've already raised issues of bias in the department? Sometimes it's difficult to see what might be happening from the student position. That's right, this is a really difficult one and I wanna be really careful about approaching this. So I think part of what makes this really difficult is that there are a lot of cross currents simultaneously. So something happens in a classroom and there's a student complaint. I think there are a lot of things that might follow on on that. I think we can help faculty get a lot better at preventing it from happening because there are things that you can do. If something does, if a hot moment does happen in the classroom, how do you address it to make sure that this does not become an ongoing problem for you? Ignoring it and hoping it goes away is just a bad strategy, right? It's just, that's not gonna work, right? And then it's gonna elevate because it wasn't addressed close to the moment when it was going on or it wasn't prevented in the first place. And I think that we create more problems for ourselves because we don't do a better job right in the moment when something is going on. And so then it gets enormously complicated about what this looks like. And I have to say that without going into too much detail about this, typically once things have gotten really bad, I think that we've gotta get better at training people to play mediating roles, to be able to go in, to be able to talk with people, to be able to figure out what's going on because sometimes what's being named as a problem is only the tip of the iceberg and there's a lot more problem underneath that. And I think, one of the things I really wanna, to make sure I talked about today is the value of real expertise. Just because you're interested in this stuff doesn't really mean you know exactly how to do it. And so just because you might have an interest in mediating disputes doesn't really mean that you've had the training and the expertise to be able to play a constructive role. So I think we need to get better at bringing in real expertise when things have gone completely off the rails and to admit that we don't know everything. We have a lot to learn and that we should have experts on deck whose knowledge we can draw on. In fact, one of the things that we really pressed for as part of the LSA diversity equity and inclusion plan was a person like Whitney. She's the person who actually got the job. There's somebody that really understood what the race and ethnicity requirement needed. What faculty needed expertise in. How do we build supports around people that come from a place of deep knowledge so that we're not just throwing people into the pool and hoping that somehow they're gonna swim in waters where they are clearly uncomfortable and over their head. Thank you. So just to follow up on that question, we had someone ask how can we best follow up with students about actions taken? And I think this is really important communication question that I hear students come to me often to say nothing's happening. When I know there is people working behind the scenes happening about how do we communicate that better with students? Yes, sorry, I forgot that part of it. Let me take one more stab in this. We have to close that loop with students. So I mean, here's the thing about people in administrative positions. They often underestimate what can be said and what can be communicated. I mean, so I think people get so afraid of being able, you're so worried about violating privacy or these are personnel decisions or I can't talk about that, that you communicate nothing that you need to be able to close a loop when there has been a complaint. I think you have to be careful. You have to be really mindful but there are absolutely things that you can communicate and things that you can say on behalf of a teaching team or a department where we can talk about what we've learned from a situation and promise to do better. So I think people wanna be listened to, number one. They wanna know that what they've said has been taken seriously and I think they want some kind of reassurance that things are gonna be better in the future. Not completely solved and great but better that you've heard this, you've learned from it and that you've committed to making improvements. Thank you. So another question from the participants, what does transformative accountability look like for staff and faculty that don't see a problem with the exclusivity of their class or institutions as opposed to a more punitive accountability? In other words, how can we not cancel human beings but still protect the vulnerable people, those same human beings harm with their racism? Whitney, you wanna start? Yeah, I mean, first of all, I really appreciate the nod to cancel culture and wanting to disrupt that but I wanna talk a little bit about cancel culture and an important piece which is, as we disrupt that is boundaries and thinking about sort of healthy boundaries and good boundaries. So if we look at some of the folks who are doing work on calling in on transformative accountability, so folks like Adrienne Marie Brown, like Loretta Ross, they're really not just saying no matter what, you just keep giving chance after chance after chance after chance, right? They are saying at some point, you have got to see that this person is invested in trying to do something that this person is trying to change that this person is willing to take up resources. So I wanna start there because cancel culture is toxic and it doesn't really get up a lot of places but the flip side is not, transformative accountability is not, you just keep giving unlimited chances to people who are clearly not trying. At some point, you do have to, I think, really hold folks accountable in a different kind of way but I think one of the ways that transformative accountability might look is really giving people an opportunity to build skill and practice. So I often say to instructors that I'm working with, don't be frustrated if your students don't know some particular thing about race or don't be mad if your students are thinking race is totally interpersonal versus understanding that it's also systemic and institutional. Ask yourself, where would they have learned it? Where would they have learned that thing? Where would they have gotten that skill? And this is also very true, I think, for not just students but like humans, people, period, right? Where would we have learned this? This is the skill, it's a muscle that we have to build, that we have to really exercise and get used to and build capacity around. So one thing is giving people multiple opportunities to engage in this work. As Angela says, and I appreciate it so much since I've started, let's make teaching less lonely. How do we create learning communities for people? Communities of practice for people where they can get an opportunity to try something out, get feedback, see what works, be accountable to their colleagues who they're learning with but also accountable to their students, accountable to their administration, to their department. I think that's one of the ways really building opportunities for people to learn and practice their newfound skills so that they can build stamina around it and stay involved with this work long-term. That would be one way that transformative accountability might start to look. I also think, and this is, again, I always say that it's not just these champions on the faculty or administrators that say this is what we're gonna do but that's the part mental level which is where so many faculty, graduate students, undergraduates live. I think of a department says this is what we're doing. Here are the resources that I'm gonna give you to do it. Here are my expectations and here's how I'm gonna reward this kind of behavior in our department, this kind of commitment in the classroom and in our curriculum. Then I think that starts to move people a better direction. I think you need a lot of carrots. It can't be all sticks. I just don't... I mean, over the years, I've had a lot of undergraduates in my office frustrated, angry, hurt. I mean, you can see the hurt. It's just heart-wrenching, kind of what some of our students are experiencing with us in our classrooms. And at some point, there's always a, can't you just fire him or her for them? You know, and the answer is, well, no, or the question is, can't you make this person better, more inclusive, more welcoming of a diverse environment? I don't know how you force someone to be inclusive. I mean, I think that that's a losing proposition for us and that we need to have better tools, better narratives, better resources to move people in the direction that we wanna see them go. But I don't think it can be forced and I don't think it can be punitive. It can't be, you teach better, you be more inclusive or I'm gonna fire you, especially in those cases where that's gonna be an empty threat and you know it. So again, I mean, I think, you know, we need, and Whitney talks about this a lot, we need a bigger, better toolbox for being able to help produce healthier environments in which we're teaching and in which our students are learning. And environments where we're continuing to learn. When I started teaching, I was really not good at teaching writing. I knew that, you know, I needed help. I needed to know how to do it. I needed support to be able to do a better job. I needed the expectation, you know, to be able to seek out ways of continuing my own education. So I think we need to build that in too that just because somebody is what they are at one moment, that doesn't mean that they're stuck there and that's all they're gonna be. And I think, you know, we do build this credit to ourselves as institutions dedicated to ongoing learning and education when we think somebody is just stuck, you know, just cause you're an asshole at one meeting on, you know, February 3rd, doesn't mean you're stuck that way, right? I mean, we can help to move you to a better position for everybody and for you. Yeah, I appreciate both of your comments on this, especially because we often see things in a dichotomy, either we cancel them or we just ignore it and allow it to keep happening. Like people don't see the in the middle. So I appreciate you, Whitney, bringing Loretta Ross in cause calling in is not allowing it to keep going and happening and happening and happening. But at the same time, it's not necessarily canceling. I'll bring in another question from the participants and it is the DEI events in my department have been more harmful to me and my friends who are minorities in the department, especially women of color who are specifically approached to participate in these events. What do you recommend to us on wanting to support DEI within the departments when the form it currently takes is the exact opposite of inclusive? You wanna start, Whitney? I will if I can find my mute button. So this is a tricky one, right? Because I think you wanna support, you wanna help things get better. And also, and I think particularly for BIPOC folk, you don't wanna end up taking on additional labor to do this sort of invisible labor of fixing it or feeling like you have to be the one to fix it. I think there are a couple of routes people can take and these will look different if you're an undergraduate student, a graduate student, if you're a lecturer, an untenured faculty member or someone who's tenured or senior in your unit. One I think would be depending on the topic, pointing people to resources that are available on campus if they're not already using those. So if you want to do pedagogy trainings in your unit, like absolutely contact CRLT either to ask to come in and do a training for you or to talk through the plan that you have, right? So I think this gets back to Angela's point around where the experts just because you think you are interested in something, just because you're developing a passion for something doesn't mean you have the expertise to lead it. So that would be, I think a major thing is pointing people towards some resources and saying, I'd really recommend that you take a look at these or that you talk to someone in this unit. And then that might, if they take that up, that might give you a chance to think, perhaps this is useful or, and maybe I can attend this one or also maybe not. The other would be suggesting evaluations, anonymous evaluations, if the events are not evaluated. And I know for some folks, depending on the makeup of your unit, your evaluation may stick out whether it's anonymous or not and people may well know that it is you. And that is something to think through. But I think asking units to evaluate their efforts is important. And so suggesting if that's not already a part of it, that that be a part. And perhaps that those evaluations, what comes out of those, that a kind of anonymized sort of grouping together of the answers be shared back with the unit so that there's a clear sense of how folks are feeling, whether things are working. So I think those can be two ways that you can start to intervene on offerings that aren't really helpful and that are actually harmful. Yeah, I'll just add, sometimes you just can't go in alone. And then I think sometimes you just, like on the airplane, you have to put on your own mask first. You know, I mean, I think sometimes maybe just realizing that this is not, this is too much right now, or that you're just not, that you just can't be there for it in this moment. I think, you know, giving yourself a bit of permission to just pull back. Again, it doesn't mean you're pulling back forever. It might be that you just need to retreat a little bit and try something else. Bring in more resources, bring in more help, bring in a chair, bring in an associate dean, right? I mean, have somebody else sitting in that room with you. You know, but because I think you can't just keep throwing yourself at the same wall. I mean, that's, it's not gonna be good for you and it's not gonna produce the kind of change that you wanna see. So another question is, how to respond to the sentiment that it takes time or this idea of learn helplessness that faculty and administrators sometimes have? How can they realize that they can take risk to make changes faster? So that one for me, I think that's an important question. It brings up for me a really important tension, right? Which is the move and the need to make change and make them quickly, make changes and make them quickly, but also the importance of thoughtful action. So, you know, I can tell you as someone who does anti-racist work who's been doing anti-racist work for a long time, but at the University of Michigan since I joined in 2017, the uptick and request for anti-racist training after the summer that we have is like phenomenal, right? I mean, like I am everywhere. I mean, I am trying to multiply myself at almost all times, which is its own sort of conversation to have. And so, but I see sometimes in conversations that there's this quick desire, particularly to respond to students and say, look, we're doing something, we're doing something, but we don't have the next step plan in place. And so the one session will ultimately fail you. The one training will fail you. It is not going to transform the unit in the way that students and faculty are asking or staff are asking for it to be trained or transformed. And so I think, yes, you need action. You need to communicate. You need a transparent process to let people know what you're planning, where you're headed, what you're doing. But you do need time and you do need thoughtful engagement. You don't just need to throw a bunch of stuff at it right now. Think that you've sort of settled it. And then only in six months or a year, the same questions bubble up, perhaps from a new crop of students. And I think that's the tension that we move between is this desire to quickly respond and show someone that we've done something, but we really haven't created the infrastructure. We really haven't created the process. And so perhaps the middle ground is coming up with a clear plan, being in conversation, if it's in a department with your students or if it's in a course with students, if it's in a department with students and staff and faculty, if it's in a school or college with the departments as a whole, but being clear about here's the plan, here's the timeline, here's what we wanna do. Here's the opportunity for you to give us feedback. Here's when we're gonna assess our efforts so that people can see action, but they can also see a nod towards longevity and a nod towards process and time. I think so I think you need, there's a tension that you need, you need both there. Yeah. Absolutely, that was such a good answer. I'm so glad this is being recorded, because starting out with some small winds upfront, build some momentum, use some radical candor, use some real generosity with people, with yourselves, with the culture, but keep shoving out a culture. I mean, I really do think that there, you can plot this out. Yeah. About kind of what we know tends to work best. And I think a lot of what Whitney just says has that embedded in it, absolutely. So as always, we have so many more questions and we are at time. I do wanna try to get in one question about the balance of males and females in this work. And that is, can you speak to the difference in female which is typically higher in male faculty engagement and anti-racism work and DNI in general? And how do you have any tips or strategies on how we can help rebalance that quickly? I love that last part Debbie, quickly, fast. I mean, honestly, I would really wanna think some more about an answer to that. I think one of the first things that comes up for me is the bodies and the modes of embodiment that we move in. So for folks who are experiencing marginalization and are experiencing minoritization, there may be a different kind of impulse, a different kind of investment in doing that work. And so some of this may well be helping folks to think about what are their stakes in this work? How are they not just doing a favor to other people but that they are actively bettering themselves, bettering their own work environment if they do that? That might be a part of the way to do that. But there are things in there that I'd wanna think more about and perhaps trouble in the question too. Yeah. So I'll just say that really quickly that I've enjoyed working in communities of women in some of this work that's feminist in its core. I really enjoyed that. So from my perspective, how do we help women sit at the front of the room at the head of the table, call the shots, make decisions, lead? And then how do we help women in this work get recognized for what they're doing? Not, so I think that some of the imbalance might be, is it in some cases men get more recognition than women do for doing the same kinds of work? So how do we get more women recognized? And then how do we get more women who are doing this work rewarded for what they're doing? So for me, it might not be an imbalance in terms of bodies, but it might be an imbalance in terms of leadership, recognition and reward. I appreciate that. Thank you so much, Angela. So I just wanna say thank you both for joining us today. We appreciate you being here. We appreciate your expertise. And I learned a lot today. I'm sure most of our participants appreciate you based on the chat. So that's very good. I wanna thank all of you who joined us today and spending this hour with us. And we invite you to continue to have these conversations with us. Next month, we will have, the topic is Chief Diversity Officers as Anti-Racist Advocates. And we will have Dr. Robert Sellers and Dr. Katrina Wade Golden joining us. And that will be a great conversation. That is March 12th at 12 o'clock. So we hope that you will join us there. I'd also like to thank Rackham Leadership, Mike Solomon who allows this work and it very much believes in this work going forward. And all of my Rackham colleagues who are here to support this work and in the background doing lots of things. I really appreciate that. Lastly, our past webinars can be found on the lead playlist on the Rackham YouTube channel. So you all can go back and review them and we'll send them to everyone who registered today. The work comes after the webinar. So I'd like to invite all of you to really think through something you can take away from today and use immediately. With that, thank you so much for joining us. And I wish you all a phenomenal week. Bye everyone.