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Leading Through Pendulum Swings in Higher Education with Marjorie Hass | GSVtv Podcast
00:16:49
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Foreign.
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David Harris with ASU gsv.
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And I'm Marjorie Haas with the Council of Independent Colleges.
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Great. And so it's such a pleasure to have you with us today. And we're going to have the conversation we're not going to have about. And that's about diversity, equity and inclusion. But we just came out of the session on the pendulum swings, and we've had some hard swings. And I'd love to ask you, maybe this is kind of off the wall a little bit. Your background is in philosophy. You studied philosophy. How do you apply that to the moment we're in, in the difficulties of talking about diversity, equity and inclusion?
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What a great question. And, you know, people say, what can you do with a philosophy major? You can help understand the current moment. So that is a good question. I think two things come to mind when you ask me that. One is that my work actually in philosophy was in an area of philosophy called philosophy of language and philosophy of logic. And I focused on trying to understand negation difference in formal systems like a formal logical language, a computer language, et cetera. How do we mark negation? How do we mark difference? And my work was. I was interested in how we can describe difference and symbolize difference in ways that aren't just. Just about sort of having or lacking. And I became interested in that for very sort of abstract, theoretical reasons. But it almost immediately became clear when I would talk about my work that it really did apply to a lot of the issues at that time that feminist philosophers were dealing with. Most philosophers had described women as just like men, only lacking something. Sometimes it was the phallus or the penis, sometimes it was reason or moral will, whatever that was. And I was, you know, my work applied to that. And so I began to have conversations around that, those issues and do some writing and work on them. So that's been helpful to me to think about difference in all of its guises and et cetera. And then the other thing I think I would say is that philosophy is the best training you can have in how to disagree about principles and not about priority personalities, about how to change your mind when faced with new evidence about what counts as evidence, hopefully about how to separate out your own prejudices and history from more abstract senses of truth. Even recognizing that's always provisional. And I think also training in how talking to people who don't already agree with you helps you become a better thinker yourself, which is critical at this time.
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It is critical because views are so divergent.
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Yes.
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And we talk about differences and you Work with? I think it's 600.
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Yes. At the council.
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Independent colleges. Yes, Colleges and universities. What differences do you see if you were going to contrast the ones that are attacking this moment effectively under a very rigid federal regime about diversity? The those are being successful versus those who are not being successful.
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It's also a good question. I think the institutions that are faring well. And again, these are institutions, cic, these are independent private colleges, so they're not governed by state appointed or elected legislators. So they have a little bit more autonomy. But I would say that the institutions that are faring the best are the institutions who had begun this work deeply from the center of their missions. Institutions that sort of said, well, we recognize there may be some students who don't feel at the center of the experience, so let's maybe over here craft a center for those students, or let's maybe hire somebody who can work specifically or specially with those students. That's been a harder go in this current climate than institutions that said, maybe we need to rethink sort of how we do things generally, because our mission says we want to serve these kinds of students or these students in this way. And so many institutions have found that they've had to make almost no substantive changes at all. They were not doing anything that violated civil rights laws. They are not doing anything that disadvantages another student. They simply were providing a quality and a caliber of education that was available to every student.
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So, you know, one of the, one of the, you know, on the hard pendulum swings is this notion of accommodation that, oh, you're a special group. I'm gonna. I need to accommodate you in a certain way. You need to speak to me with certain, you know, in a certain language. I'd love to. What's your perspective on that, and how does this moment impact the accommodation scheme?
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I often, in my own leadership work and before I came to the council, I was the president of two different colleges and I was a provost before that. So I often found that I could use the ways that I brought difference into a community as a way to sort of help shape and model how we might do some of this. So you and I had talked earlier. I'm Jewish. I was thought the first woman and the first Jewish president in all of those contexts. And both my presidencies were at institutions with a Presbyterian connection. Each of them lived that out in different ways. But when I would show up, suddenly, that would shift certain things. Right. The college was used to having a Christmas service that the president had a speaking role in or The. The president was, you know, just things that made sense, and all of a sudden now sort of didn't make sense.
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Right.
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At one college, they had. The chaplain's office had offered a model seder. Well, then I showed up offering, and we were hosting a Seder. And so how do you address that? And what I found most helpful was to bring those differences in as sort of gentle models for how we might talk about things a little bit differently. So I could say, I can't participate in the Christmas service. It's a Christian tradition. I'm not Christian, but I would love to sit in the front row and learn and cheer on and enjoy this event. And then I will be delighted to invite others to come to our events and enjoy and participate. With the Passover Seder, the chaplain and I co taught a course with students to develop a community Seder that both met the needs of Jewish tradition, but also was inviting and respectful of the college and the people at the college who might be participating. So I think there are ways that we can, as leaders, model from our own experience with exclusion and difference, ways to create cultures of inclusion that are not hierarchical, are not demeaning, and are not help shape a community culture rather than make separation.
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So what do we do? So that's very reasonable, but what do we do when we face change? That I would say, some people might argue, crosses red lines. Yes, We. We don't allow words like climate change in. Right? Yes, we. We cut funding for programs for people who they could not get into college. They don't have the means to afford it because we think that's exclusionary for some people, those are real red lines. And this is a big problem in higher education today. How do you manage that?
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Sure. You know, the notion that the we want to ban speech we don't like. Yeah, that's human nature. We need to have rules protecting free speech precisely because free speech makes us uncomfortable. So that's something we all have to guard against, and we all have to think about ways that we can support speech we don't like. Banning scientific areas of exploration does not make them go away. Reality comes back. It is what it is. So I do think that this is a moment when we have to be especially protective of free expression, of academic freedom on campus. There have been times in my career where I have had to protect that against perhaps what might be considered criticisms from the left. And there have been times in my career where I've had to protect that from criticisms from the right and I think effective leaders, leaders who care about leading to help create democratic citizens. Have to model. That doesn't mean we can't say it's painful. It doesn't mean we can't encourage more speech and critical speech. And it doesn't mean we have to celebrate positions we don't agree with. But it does mean we have to allow them and make space for them.
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Do you think we're at risk of losing the center, if you will? And we just get this polarization of, you know, right thinking, left thinking.
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Here's what I think. I mean, yes, we're there, right? But I would come at this, and this comes somewhat from my training as a philosopher and also from another academic interest I have in psychoanalytic theory. I do agree with the theorist Melanie Klein, who suggests that sort of at a fundamental base level, human beings are wired early on to think in a very binary way. You know, that the earliest experiences are, this is good and comfortable, this is bad and uncomfortable. And infants tend to tend to, you know, identify the. There's the good experience and the bad experience, and they're totally separate, right? The good mother, the bad mother, or the, you know, and it's part of human development to learn to recognize it's the same mother and again, mother figure, let's say, right? It can be the primary caretaker, can be either a man or a woman, et cetera. But it's an achievement, a psychological achievement, and it's an achievement that requires ongoing guarding. We never lose our. Our tendency when under stress to revert to binary thinking. And Melanie Klein argued and demonstrated that binary thinking eventually or almost automatically becomes paranoid thinking in our human minds and brains. When we're thinking in binaries, it's hierarchical. There's a good and the bad. There's an in and an out, there's an us and a them. And that thinking is very destructive for individuals. It's very hard and uncomfortable to live your life that way. It does not make for happiness, right? And it is also something that human development helps us get beyond, but also that we help each other, right? When you're under stress and you and I are friends, and I hear you start thinking. Thinking in that us and them way, right? Part of what I do as your friend is say, well, I know you're angry, and maybe they didn't say that explicitly to hurt you, or maybe they, too, have had a difficult experience. And we try to support each other in thinking in a way that's more tolerant of complexity and ambiguity. And what I think has happened to our culture is we've lost the cultural structures that help support that kind of ambiguity. When our leaders are themselves modeling that primitive binary thinking, it pulls us all down with them. And that's a tragedy. Part of the responsibility of being a leader is to hold a space. I wouldn't necessarily call it the middle, but I would call it a space for complexity and ambiguity and a recognition that it is very rare, that something is just wholly perfect or wholly awful. Most things fall somewhere on that continuum. And our job is to steer through those troubled waters, to try to engage with as much of the good as we can.
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Maybe that's an antidote to the weaponization of, you know, paranoid black and white thinking.
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Yes, yes. And you know, again, that's a complicated answer, right? That isn't just we'll now go and do. And yet we intuitively know this. You know, psychoanalytic thinking, while it can be very abstract and philosophical thing, the best thinking always does come down to something. You know this in yourself, right. You know that in those moments when you are angry at somebody, often, you know, I mean, I'm a mother, right. You are furious at this child, or you're furious at your beloved spouse or your beloved friend or your beloved mother. And there's a moment where you feel the sort of anger that feels like, this is intolerable. It's incompatible with my recognizing any good in the person in this exact moment. And it's a horrible place to live. It feels bad. And I think when we look culturally, the people who look to us like they're living most in that binary thinking also look very unhappy. It's one of the reasons why many of our wealthiest, most powerful people right now do not strike us as models of how any of us would want to live our lives. They look deeply unhappy.
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And that is one of the major goals of education, to get people to get out of those black and white zones into those, let's call them, thinking zones.
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Thinking zones, yes. And you know, that thinking zone is a. Is a difficult place to be. We do it better when we have interlocutors. We do it better when we have a sense of safety and security that we won't be mocked or ridiculed for our own initial forays, right? We do it best when we have examples of people changing their minds or coming to a new synthetic understanding through thinking through difference. And that's something that we provide for each other and our families. Ideally, it's something we provide in our communities, and it's certainly something that we continue to lift up and model in higher education.
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So we started with the philosopher question. Let's close with advice that you would give to the class of 2030. What do they need to be thinking about? What do they need to know?
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That's great. I would say find that balance between safety and challenge. You need to have a zone of belonging, a place where you feel seen and beloved. And you need to have places where you are experimenting with standing in the face of difference, standing in the face of disagreement, standing in the face of challenge. It's hard because sometimes that's the same space. Right. I said, I'm Jewish. There are very few Jewish spaces I can be in now where we can all just hold hands and say, we all agree on everything. Right. And that's, I think, true for many subcultures, et cetera. So you have to, even within those differences, find that balance between support and safety and love and the courage to be in that space of challenge and difference. It will make you a better thinker. It will make you a better human. And we need you to be able to lead and create. We have a lot of forces destroying things right now. We're gonna need builders, because I don't think that our current leaders are builders. They're destroyers.
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But I think your message is very hopeful. Yes. And that you're giving people the comfort to say, go into those spaces, challenge yourself, question things. And that's what we need to do. And that's actually. I think that's a tradition of the
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US it should be. Right. That's who we are. And again, we're here at Ed Tech AI Conference. Right.
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And we're running long.
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Right?
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Right.
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But the algorithms will are set up to keep you in the dialogue of the same.
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Right.
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Get outside of the algorithms.
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Right.
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Get outside of the tech. Speak to your neighbors. Speak to the people across the street. Speak to take a class that will challenge you.
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Right.
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That's.
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Thank you so much.
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My pleasure.
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So much fun.