 Because sometimes I think there's an unrealistic expectation of, oh, we connect with the institution and then we'll see some outcomes within six months. And as I was kind of telling Marine and Michelle before that you all have known each other a long time, you have kind of engaged in this work in the past and then more recently with the grant, like you have kind of, you know, put the work into overdrive a bit. So again, thank you all for joining and sharing your insights on what these relationships look like and more importantly the work that you're trying to do to support students from HBCUs and providing them access to not only resources but access to graduate and professional education broadly speaking. Want to acknowledge and thank Marine. She does incredible work in helping to manage all of this stuff in terms of schedules and getting information out. I don't make her job easy, so I really appreciate for all that she does. Michelle is a graduate student and working with us here this year and she'll be helping to co-facilitate some of these workshops moving forward and today she's kind of serving in an observing capacity. But my approach to work is engaging graduate students to whatever extent they want to engage in this type of work. Folks might will be muted throughout the conversation just so that you all can engage and have this kind of conversation and dialogue across. I provided some of the prompts ahead of time but I have them in front of me and we'll ask him the questions to kick you all off. We also have closed caption available so you can check into that as well. And then lastly we use the IGR community guidelines for how we kind of engage in these online formats and it's just a reminder of just to be cordial in our engagement. Think about intent versus impact. This is more so for those who are participants in this work and sharing airtime and all of that fun stuff with that. And then just so for a quick overview for folks who are here and may not necessarily be familiar, the MSI initiative here at the University of Michigan began officially in 2017 with my position of Minority Service Institutions Coordinator but the work actually started before hand as well. Thinking about how we can better engage minority serving institutions as a way of creating opportunities for traditionally and historically marginalized student populations and another part of that is that we have state level affirmative action bands and this work still allows for us to engage with certain student populations in university state compliant manner. And so coming in 2017 we developed a grant initiative to provide seed funding to folks such as yourselves in order to support the outreach, the planning, the engagement and even large scale collaborative activities between minority serving institutions and graduate and professional programs here at Rackham. And part of the idea behind that is what we see with our peer and competitor institutions we see this engagement happening all the time. This cross polarization of a faculty member who graduated from the University of Minnesota so he sends his students there and then when they graduate they come back to Michigan and get jobs and we see that sort of happening and that's centered within faculty collaboration. So that's one part of it. We wanted to foster deeper faculty engagement and collaboration across institutions encouraging them to bring students into the fall as a means of strengthening these pathways for their students. And then also we think about this from another perspective like network improvement communities and this is a framework developed by Carnegie Foundation which centers around addressing common problems but using collective approaches and impact. So how do we take what political science is doing both at Jackson State and at Michigan and how do we take what molecular cellular developmental biology what they're doing here at Michigan and with their partner institutions and think what are the core issues that we're trying to address and how do we eliminate those so that we can again strengthen pathways and opportunities for students from marginalized backgrounds. So that's kind of why we're here and as a part of that grant we ask for those who have received grants to talk about their work and this is not to I guess fulfill or feed egos because you all don't need that. You all are talented faculty members but it's more so a result of me going through the discovery phase and trying to learn about relationships that exists like this outside of Michigan. There's just not a lot of information out there. So the purpose or gap we're trying to fill with these coffee chat series is to create a knowledge base for people to tap into and learn from as they develop their relationships moving forward in addition to sharing best practices within and across institutions and highlighting the exemplars from University of Michigan and across the country so that we can think about how we strengthen these relationships and better support these students as they transition from Jackson State into the University of Michigan for graduate and professional education. So with that we have Rob Mickey who is an associate professor here and director of graduate studies in the department of political science here at the University of Michigan. His research centers around politics and historical and comparative perspective and he is interested in looks at America's democratization and contemporary democratic stability, racial conflict and intersection of long term political and economic development. Brian DeAndre Ore is a professor of political science at Jackson State. He is well published and you've seen his work in American politics research, twin research in human genetics, policy quarterly, you've seen his commentary on Al Jazeera, MSNBC seeing in the news hour with PBS and the list goes on. He also served as a director of Jackson State's political science research laboratory and through that he established a pipeline for students of color entering PhD programs. So over the past decade or so, nearly 20 of his former research assistants have gone into PhD programs across the country so he is not new to this work. So hopefully we will be able to tap into his experiences as well. So thank you both for joining us here this afternoon. So with that, I provided you all a couple of prompts in advance and I have them here. So I'll start with the first one, which is centered around the nature of the relationship between the political science departments at Jackson State and University of Michigan and what type of activities are you all engaging in? Rob, you want to take the first half of that? I'm sure. So I guess I'll just start by saying there's given COVID there are the activities we plan to do and then there's the ones we're actually doing. So the goal of this collaboration is, well, there are lots of goals, right? So one is to encourage more undergrads at Jackson State to consider graduate study and political science. There are lots of ways when we'll talk about that, how we try to get them interested. But also to develop kind of research collaborations with faculty across the two departments. And then finally, given all of Michigan's resources and the fact that Jackson State's faculty, you know, have like, I don't know what DeAndre, triple the teaching load that we have here in Michigan, right? We have a lot more resources and including time. And so one thing that we've wanted to work on from the beginning is figure out ways that the Michigan can share some of its resources, whether it's financial, logistical, human, whatever, to help kind of spur professional development of these overworked faculty at Jackson State in ways that they're interested in doing. So that's kind of the overview. DeAndre, do you want to give them the COVID reality or anything? I'll give you an example, excuse me, in terms of the dirty resources. There was an occasion where I needed a data set and went out a part of the ICPSR and the Consortium of Social Political Research. And so I contacted Rob and because Michigan is a member and it is housed at Michigan, Rob was able to get those data for me. And so that sounds small, but it was an extremely important data set. We're trying to look at work that intersects psychology and political science. And so that was very helpful. In terms of collaborations, we haven't gotten an opportunity to collaborate as much, but I have been able to have them on speed now, excuse me. So we're working on a project now where we're looking at the unique ways in which people participate in politics. And so since Rob's work was on the South, we were interested in how a place like Georgia was able to elect a black senator and Mississippi has 32% voting age population higher than Georgia and we're not close. So given the fact that he had done case studies on Georgia in Mississippi, that gave us a perspective or enhanced our perspective rather in terms of what we were trying to do. And so we could justify choosing those cases. So that's an example of Ben Hutchings and all of this is we're actually applying for a National Science Foundation grant as I speak. And so Ben Hutchings expertise is in survey design and we're looking to create a survey that will speak to the unique political and psychological attitudes of African Americans. So this is just one case, or this is just one project rather, that it's not like we're producing a manuscript, but no, let me back up. That is the case. We're actually applying for a National Science Foundation grant and Ben will be a PI on it. So. Yeah, I think one of the reasons why Michigan and Jackson State were and are a good match is that intellectually there's a lot of common interests in the faculty. Michigan's department has long been strong in not just studying racial politics, but from a social psychological perspective and that's not work that I really do or even understand all that well, but it is exactly the work that DeAndre has done. And you know, I think I'd like to hear DeAndre talk more about this but Jackson State's small, right? It's how many undergrads y'all? Well, we only have about 65 majors per year or total or yeah, you know, political science. Yeah. Yeah, we graduate like 375 polysine majors a year. One of the remarkable things about what DeAndre has done over the years is send so many students to top graduate programs, including ours. One woman and then you know, Princess Williams, who's this September is going to start as a professor at Amherst College, which is, which I don't think she ever imagined doing like six or seven years ago, totally awesome. A lot of I think a lot of DeAndre's success in producing so many, sending so many people not just to begin, but to finish graduate school and to pursue these careers was the fact that DeAndre had gotten NSF funding to set up this lab, this kind of social site and race politics lab that allowed him to recruit undergrads and you paid him right to work as research assistants and to kind of shift from thinking like, if I graduate, I guess I'll go to law school to, hey, there's this weird thing that Professor Ori does. Maybe I should look into that right. And that that that thing is key just that being able to introduce students to new career paths through paid work, not unpaid work, but paid work as research assistants. And so one of the things that we're trying to build on and this was kind of work, kind of didn't last summer, last summer under with COVID, there are actually three Jackson State students accepted to Michigan's SROT, the summer research opportunity program, where students are paid decent money, right? It's like five thousand bucks for, I think it's decent money, five thousand bucks for eight weeks room and board. And they they're supposed to come here work on a research project with a faculty member, take courses about the GRE and meet with our grad students to talk about whether they want to go to grad school and everything. And so we got three from Jackson State, which was great, but wasn't so great because it was tough to, you know, it's tough to introduce them to the possibilities of grad school when we were doing this online. When one of them contracted COVID over the summer, right? I mean, it was yeah. So but one I'll I'll sorry, I had too much caffeine. I'll stop in a second. But one of the students who participated on virtually last year, Chelsea Waddell, working with Vince on one of his projects, is going to come back, hopefully in person, I don't know, maybe in person this year, maybe partly in person. I think they're still waiting on on that determination. OK, but yeah, sorry. Go ahead. Notice, I think another benefit or outcome from last summer, we had a faculty member to take an ICPSR course, and that's extremely important because, you know, hey, Deandre, tell them what that is. OK, so the ICPSR program in the Consortium of Political Social Research has arrived and it's housed in Michigan. And it's a summer stat count, if you will. So there are all these statistics courses that are, you know, based in a rooted in the social sciences, in terms of the way that they teach the courses, and we had one professor who took one of those courses. And that's extremely important because one of the reasons that we send our students to summer programs or encourage them to apply is that we just have a third of human resources. And so we don't have, even myself, you know, we just don't have the personnel to teach some of these method courses. And methods is extremely important in almost any graduate program. So for her to have been able to get this professional development, it actually helps the student indirectly because now she can teach those courses. Yeah, I think that's a great point, right? So as I kind of hear you, I'll talk. I hear like many modalities of of engagement within the relation within the relationship. So there's this building capacity across institutions for both faculty members at Michigan and also at Jackson State. So in the case of Jackson State, there's some professional development opportunities like come in, get some additional training to strengthen their skill sets. There's some opportunities to get access to things that perhaps Jackson State doesn't have access to at no fault of Jackson State. It's just these these disparities in, you know, sort of exist. So we see leverage, you know, you all leverage the relationships in that way. But then also for as I'm hearing for like Rob and the folks at Michigan, they're learning how to better engage around supporting students to both prepare them and support them while they're here on campus through through these research activities, right? So with those sort of activities and I'll take a question and frame it in this way intentionally. So what's your motivation like individually for wanting to pursue these relationships across institutions? So individually, you know, what's the motivation? And then also what's the motivation for your respective departments to to engage and collaborate in this way? So I'll start, I'll start individually. It's just I need help. So I'm screaming help, if I had to sign, I'd hold up help. So I mean, it's hard to teach three, four classes. And, you know, you have to create exams. You have to grade exams. You have to write these proposals. And so it's good to be able to reach out to colleagues to get feedback on your work. And that's extremely important, you know, for folks who are experts in their respective areas. So for me, you know, my selfish reason is to be able to, you know, get feedback, potentially collaborate. And then, you know, in this particular case, and we're working out the National Science Foundation proposal, you know, be funded to to create new knowledge. I mean, we're talking about doing a survey and, you know, going to places where like rural areas versus urban areas to see if there are these differences in the way that black people think. And and then we, you know, create questions that can be put on surveys. So doing a deeper dive than what currently exists. And, you know, the team at Michigan or the Department of Michigan, they're the right people to help do this. So, you know, those are the type, you know, things I was, you know, I was going to apply for the grant, but. It's a perfect fit because of this program. We already have established this relationship but, you know, beyond the personal relationship, I've been knowing these guys over 20 years. But, you know, this is develop a professional and institutional relationship. So individual motivation, I mean, I guess mine has just been to. Desegregate my work life, Desegregate, try to help desegregate political sciences and discipline. And then when I became Director of Graduate Studies, I mean, my focus wasn't, I wasn't really thinking about. Focusing totally on on diversifying graduate education. But when I was given this role, volunteer told to have this role by my chair, right? Then I see a call for proposals from you. I never never would have thought of this on my own, right? But it was just seeing that call for proposals that got this started. But yeah, just individually, I mean, like, like Deandre alluded to, I got to know him. I'm embarrassed to say, yeah, two decades ago when I was doing field work in Jackson and doing research on on Southern racial politics and political history. And yeah, so I mean, I've always had a mo my motives have always been around, around democracy and racial politics. But it was rack and making these these opportunities available that led led me to want to tackle this. I would say institutionally, you know, our our department just finished its 10th year of of an emerging scholars program where we bring what we used, hopefully will again soon, physically bring 12 junior or seniors in undergrad plus their advisors. So they're not traveling to some scary place all alone. And they're usually students who are getting started on a senior honors thesis or something. And there's a conference where and it is kind of scary. They're sitting in a they're presenting in the front of a room and the whole audience is Michigan faculty and PhD students and they're kind of pitching their ideas as a 20 year old or whatever for their undergrad research. And when we first started that again, we got the idea from from Rackham. Deandre was one of the the first people we reached out to to say, wait, how do we do this? How do we do this in an effective way? Can you send? Can you bring yourself and your students up? So he was kind of Deandre was present from the start in our at least over the last 10 years and are working a lot harder on diversifying graduate education. I mean, I will say that Michigan has long been the leader in producing doctorates of color among all the top PhD programs in political science. But, you know, that's relative to not, you know, I think something like 29 percent of our PhDs since 1995 have been from underrepresented groups. Again, way better than other top departments, but still nothing to like pat yourself on the back for. But one of the reasons why we've been really good at recruiting students is because especially in the case with of African American and Hispanic students, we've always had faculty working on those areas. But it's easier for us to recruit faculty because we have these brilliant graduate students interested in working with them. So those things have really grown together. So that's the kind of departments, longer history. But yeah, for me, once this opportunity arose, it was kind of obvious whom to reach out to. Very good. Thank you for that. And I appreciate both of those perspectives. Right. And again, this is one of the goals for having some of these conversations or this work at large. So one of my biggest concerns is that and working to establish these relationships that it is it's one side. Right. So we've been very intentional around craft and everything that we do to ensure that what's done with at the program and department level is mutually beneficial and by direction. And I'm hearing that from both of you. Right. So again, Rob, you're able to learn from the work that that DeAndre has done over the years in helping to support and develop his students to get them into spaces. But then conversely, again, DeAndre at Jackson State is getting the support that he needs in a way that is both meaningful and relevant to him. So I think there's that is in line with what we're hoping to see. So with that, as this relationship continues to develop, and again, it becomes it's not necessarily formal, but becomes more formalized through mechanisms such as this grant through the grant that through NSF, what are some of the ultimate goals of a relationship like this? And then the benefit not just for your department, but what are the larger implications for such a relationship for the field at large and beyond? Yeah, so I think that, you know, the work that we're trying to do here now, which is the intersection of mental health and political participation, I think that it's sort of novel. We've been looking at research and psychology that looks at cumulative trauma and they look at, you know, something like 9 to 11, the Boston bombings and, you know, people who who are exposed, whether it be by the media and directly or directly, whether or not, you know, future trauma can be mitigated by those past, you know, experiences, but what they do not do in the literature and psychology is that they don't make the considerations for the unique trauma that blacks experience, such as police shootings or whatnot. And so we've been able to work with another university, Arkansas, to put those questions on the survey and then trying to bridge it or intersect it with political science. We started looking at, you know, political participation, you know, when individuals or are exposed to these various forms of trauma, whether it be, you know, COVID-19, whether it be police shootings, you know, does that impact one's participation in politics? And so preliminary results suggest that it does, that, you know, blacks who are exposed to media related to police shootings are more likely to participate in politics. Now, what we've been talking about, think I mentioned it before, with R.I.P. is, you know, how to, it currently Georgia, any discussion with respect to, you know, a successful model for black mobilization, political mobilization, it's Stacey Abrams. It's like, you know, just bring Stacey Abrams in and, you know, we can, you know, make a change. And so we know that's not true because I live in Mississippi. I know it's not true, at least from the city, but that's the point. What is the difference between Georgia and the difference between the city? And so Rob has written about this, this difference. And so even though, you know, his work is not in behavior, it has this historical context that we definitely need. And that was because of the relationship that we had, you know, I wouldn't have known of his work, probably, had I not known him. And that allowed me to, you know, bounce questions off of him to help inform, you know, the work that we're doing now. And the same thing with Vince. Vince, you know, was working with the National Election Study. The National Election Study is the largest study for presidential elections. And it's housed at the any consortium for political social research. But Vince actually was on that board and a co-PI. So it's ideal to have him on this grant because, you know, he can give us the advice we need in terms of trying to try to develop original concepts. One, I just said, one of the things that's been frustrating about covid is I think we all know, you know, a lot of the benefits from conferences or workshops or whatever in person aren't necessarily the things that happen during the official panels. But it's the the stray conversations of the coffee breaks and so on. I learned a lot of stuff I didn't know and commonalities that our department has with Jackson State just because DeAndre and a colleague came up for the the the kickoff event that you had. What was that, October 19, 2019? Things like a lot of time ago at this point. Yeah, is that one? Yeah, I think that's one. And so, you know, one of the things we were going to do last summer, Vince has served Vince DeAndre has all this research that he's done, but hasn't published yet. And it's just again, not by coincidence, but Michigan's real strength. It's not me, but we have like six or seven faculty who are focused on exactly what DeAndre does, which is this intersection of social psychology and racial politics. And we were thinking of having him up here for a couple of weeks. I think we even had that in the budget, right? To workshop his unpublished papers to get feedback. But for me, the real benefit of that selfishly wasn't just that DeAndre would then get feedback and there would maybe help him publish some of that. But it would just be having him here and realizing that, oh, Jackson State, other faculty, Jackson State and DeAndre have like seven other research collaborations or just even seeds of an idea that are exactly along the lines of thinking of things that we would like to do, but haven't figured out how to do yet. So I think just finally getting the damn vaccine and meeting in person I'm thinking long term. There's a lot that we can build to kind of build these kind of intellectual collaborations, not just with faculty, but between undergraduates and graduates at the two schools. One of the things that we're going to do in the I think winter semester 2022 is teach a class, a three way class on racial politics over Zoom with Jackson State for undergrad for Jackson State, Michigan and the University of Puerto Rico. Again, as a way and it's is it a benefit if there are two other new voice faculty voices for Jackson State students? Maybe not sure if mine's one of them, it's a benefit, but certainly it's a big benefit for students and faculty at Puerto Rico and in Michigan to hear from their undergrads for having undergrads working together on research projects together and so on. So, you know, ideally we're thinking beyond just the grant stuff that Deandre is talking about and not just research collaborations, but even even undergraduate teaching. So that's something we're excited about building. And again, sorry, one more thing that maybe the only benefit of COVID is that we've learned that, hey, we can actually teach across space like this and it doesn't really cost anything. And again, we wouldn't have thought of that without Zoom. Absolutely, which is a great piece, right? So how do we I mean, the students at these institutions are future collaborators, right? So how do we begin to develop that culture of collaboration at that stage? All right, because in graduate education, sometimes it can be feelings of like hyper competition and so on and so forth, right? But begin to prepare them for that at an earlier stage with access to colleagues and faculty members across institutions. I think that makes sense. I have a couple of minutes left here. So I always like to, you know, in these types of things with practical, you know, takeaways, right? So from both of your perspectives, so Rob, from your perspective in Michigan, Deandre, your perspective with Jackson State, what are one or two takeaways from your respective experiences that you would share to others who are thinking about developing out similar relationships? So what are some things that they should think about? What should they be planning for? What did, you know, should they consider that perhaps you didn't consider? Who should they bring to the table that, you know, you hadn't thought about? What are some challenges they may experience? But one or two takeaways each. Jay, you go first. So, you know, when you do fundraising, they said first you have to friend raise. And so I think that you have to develop, you know, rapport with colleagues from, you know, across the country. But if you plan to establish a collaboration with the university, you definitely need to, you know, develop a relationship. So I think relationships are probably the most important because it is the nucleus. We can have this program on paper, but not implement, you know, what we put together. But because of the relationship that we have, it does help to ensure that, you know, we have something to take away from it. Also, students are a lot more beneficial. They can be more beneficial than we tend to believe sometimes. So, you know, Vince has a research lab where he has his meetings weekly. Well, I'll try to collect the data, code the data, write up the report. And the students are sitting there waiting for something to do. And so I've learned, you know, just from observing events that we both have a common undergrad assistant in Chelsea that, you know, just give these students the opportunity and let them go with it. And it's actually been a relief for me in taking some of that load off of my plate by just having the code data, for example. So, you know, I'd say it's students center, you know, please say yes, but, you know, in reality, they are an asset and we should, you know, look at them as such. Very good. Thank you for that, Rob. Yeah, and that's the way that they can find out what it is that we do on the research side, whether they want to pursue a career in that. That's right. I mean, I guess I'd say one lesson is be patient. Don't expect that, you know, you start a relationship and then the next year they're gonna be five undergrad from that school joining the, your graduate program. You know, we had three students who were involved from Jackson State last summer. And, you know, one's may be interested in thinking more about political science. One student was like, okay, now I see what you mean. I guess I'll go to law school anyhow, which I totally respect, right? So we're just, you gotta be patient because you're introducing students to the possibility of maybe a career path they haven't considered before, but you're not gonna have immediate huge numbers, right? The other thing I learned is that you can't build these relationships to last if they just involve one person at each institution, especially one person at the under-resource place, right? Where there's so much burden on them to do everything. And that's a challenge that, I mean, we'll have, I think continue to have just because Jackson State, how many faculty do you all have? Seven now. And we have 55, right? So if, you know, if I have to do something else or I don't know something like we can find somebody to help out, right? But yeah, it's everybody's busy. Everybody was busy before we started these relationships. So you're kind of asking people to find time that they don't have, right? But yeah, that goes double for the burden that DeAndre has. So it's hard to do, but try to, my advice would be try to think from the beginning about a team of people who can support each other so that not everything's landing on one person's shoulders. Very good. That is sound advice. And I'll just summarize that for folks that are here, at least as I heard it or am interpreting, right? I think DeAndre, the idea of relationship and rapport building is key. And again, that's one of the cornerstones upon which the funding from Rackham is built to just kind of spend some time getting to know one another. And if you know each other, spend some time fleshing that relationship out even further, encourage other folks to join in and just kind of build that rapport across institutions. So I think that is fantastic. Rob, the idea of being patient, we talk about this all the time, right? And sometimes we look towards the ideal outcome, which means ideal outcome being students in graduate programs. But the reality is that there are bottlenecks that exist and these programs don't exist or these relationships don't exist in a vacuum. But they exist in programs and departments that have structures and politics and things of that nature in which these sorts of initiatives have to function within and getting others on board to do this work or think the way that you do can be challenging. So we have to think about what success looks like in many different ways. How many students are we given some of research opportunities to how are we collaborating on grants papers? How are we supporting the students throughout their journey? So I think the patient is key. The team-based approach is something that I highly advocate for, both for capacity building, but also for scalability and sustainability. For this work to sustain, the more folks that you kind of bring in and have ownership over this work, the more leverage you have in moving forward. And then, DeAndre, I want to leave on the last point on what you made in terms of the using students. And I don't mean that in a negative sense, but students benefit from opportunity, right? And so as the graduate programs, one of the things that folks tend to look at is prior research experience, right? And so as a faculty member, the work that you have going on, that's an easy way for folks to think about how do we provide a student with more research experience? So how can we, in many ways, formalize some of those informal engagements? And I know that you all are doing that in some way. So, again, I appreciate you all. One, for being the first to do this, I really appreciated it kind of. Rob, I told him that a week or two ago, and he said, what? You put me on first. But I do appreciate it. I really value engaging with Rob as he helps open my mind in thinking about these. And then DeAndre, as well, just kind of meeting and knowing you over the past two years or so, and just engaging with you. I leave so much more better than before. So I thank you both for sharing your insights on how your relationship is developing and potentially implications for the future. With that, we have a couple of people on the call. I'll open the floor for them to see if there are some questions that they may have. And we'll go from there.