Summer is typically a quiet time for higher education but this summer has been anything but quiet amid funding cuts, lawsuits, and questions about the value of American colleges and universities.
Our guests this week are part of Stand Together for Higher Ed, a new nonpartisan movement of university faculty and staff focused on building collective power to uphold the core values of higher education. Kathy Roberts Forde is a professor of journalism at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Mark Pachucki is associate professor of sociology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and co-author of the university's Mutual Defense Academic Compact (MDAC) resolution.
Ford, Pachucki, and their Stand Together for Higher Ed colleagues spent the summer talking to faculty and staff from universities across the country about what they can do to defend their institutions amid ongoing attacks and threats from the federal government. They don't have a quick, easy answer but they do have a plan for how people across campuses can come together to share how higher education impacts our everyday lives.
Is this approach enough? Chris Beem and Candis Watts Smith disagree on the value of Stand Together's approach and discuss their differences at the end of the episode.
Episode Transcript
Chris Beem
From the McCourtney Institute for Democracy at Penn State University. I'm Chris Beem.
Candis Watts Smith
I'm Candis Watts Smith.
Jenna Spinelle
I'm Jenna Spinelle. And welcome to Democracy Works. Welcome back everybody, Chris and Candis, good to see both of you again after our summer break, listeners, it's good to be back with you after our hiatus, and we're kicking things off today by talking about something very close to the best for all of us, what's going on in higher education and some of the things that have transpired with threats coming from the Trump administration while we were off this summer, and even starting before that and joining us to unpack some of that, as well as what we can do to try to push back against those threats, are Kathy Roberts Forde and Mark Pachucki. They are both faculty members at UMass Amherst and part of the team that's leading a new organization called stand together for higher ed, and they will talk all about that in the interview. But before we get there, Chris, why don't you, if you don't mind, just bring us up to speed a little bit on some of the threats and the attacks that have gone on over the past couple of months.
Chris Beem
The three of us have to be aware of our own biases here. But and you know, does cut quit cut pretty close to the bone, but it's still just a fact that the current administration has made initiatives and and taken demands associated with the actions of universities. This just simply unprecedented, right you have, you have big names like Columbia and Harvard that are big targets. And everybody, everybody has heard of those, those colleges and and they were given ultimatums, right? You do this, or we are going to cut your funding. And so the federal government has a lot of levers to pull. They have a lot of resources that they can take away and in by doing so, they can impact higher education dramatically. And you know, it's fair to ask whether or not the people who are going to be hurt by funding cuts associated with grants like the National Institutes for Health or the National National Science Foundation are going to impact any of the problems they identify, but it's still huge dollars that are, that are that the faculty had budgeted, that the universities have budgeted and depend on are expecting, right?
Candis Watts Smith
I think it's important for us to think about what the science does and what the purpose of it is. So there is this a lot of people, I mean, even people that I really respect, you know, writing op eds that are saying, you know, well, University have become due to dependent on government funding. But dependence, I think, has the connotation that there is a one way benefit and that scientists are doing science to the benefit of universities. And that's just not true. You know, folks are doing works on vaccines, on diseases, on this the quality of our democracy in comparison over time, so that we can learn lessons and hopefully not repeat them. That you know that that kind of work is a lot of it is high failure, high risk, and there are not industries and organ you know, for profit businesses that are going to pay scientists to fail over and over again, even though the you know, intellectual it is actually required to have a lot of failures in order to understand how the world works. But that is not profitable. And so this kind of idea that, like, well, that research can be pushed into the to industry. Industries aren't going to do that right. In fact, we know that a lot of industries, a lot of the best things that we see and have in healthcare and technology and media so on and so forth, start. Even labs at colleges and universities. So yes, colleges and universities were had budgets that said we were going to get a grant from this, you know, the NIH, the NEH, USA, ID, NSF, so on and so forth, this kind of alphabet soup, but to what end? And that end was to produce knowledge, to produce technology, to produce medicines, to have discoveries in all sorts of domains of our lives that everybody benefits from. So I just want to make sure that we put the conversation around the the attack on universities and higher education in the scope of democracy and you know, right, so that in terms of the Health of societies, and not just, you know, people who are navel gazing and we're gouging students with tuition, there is a larger benefit from the research to the education component to putting knowledge in service of society, and not just kind of using money to get, you know, to fill coffers. I think that if we look at history and we look at how conservatives have thought about higher education, starting like from like, integration of higher ed institutions as being something that's going to undo us, right? I mean, the Red Scare that also came into, well, what are university professors doing?
Candis Watts Smith
You know, over we see, over the course of time, where institutions of higher education in the United States, and of course, in many other places, are places where people are supposed to think for themselves and are supposed to push back, are supposed to ask questions and are supposed to challenge our kind of dominant narratives of whatever. And just like as an example, maybe a parallel, I cannot find this source, but one of the kind of legal strategists around the anti abortion Movement said that we took the same strategy as Brown versus Board of Education, which was to make little tweaks at the state level and start talking about things, and Now you have to wait a month. Now you have to ask your parents. Now you and then people are like, Okay, well, that's just a little tweak. Okay, well, that's just a little tweak. Okay, well, that's just a little tweak, and now we can wipe it away. And so I think that we just have to be careful about how we talk about this moment. There's a there's this moment, and then there's this moment in the big scheme of things, and we do see patterns.
Jenna Spinelle
Yeah, so we've done several episodes on the history of higher education and some of the bigger issues that you are getting to Candis, so I'll make sure to link those in the show notes. For anybody who wants to dive deeper, take that, look further back and zoom out beyond the current context. But yes, both of you are correct that stand together is really addressing what is happening right now. So let's hear it from them. Let's go to the interview with Kathy and Mark.
Jenna Spinelle
Kathy Roberts, Forde and Mark Pachucki, welcome to democracy works. Thanks for joining us today.
Mark Pachucki
Happy to be here.
Jenna Spinelle
So the two of you are here today in your capacity as part of the organization stand together for higher ed, which we will talk all about here in just a moment. But Kathy, I want to start with you, and here we are at the end of summer, ready to start a new academic year. And I wonder if you could just start by bringing us a little up to speed on what's happened over these past couple of months. You know you talked back in June about some of the potential threats coming to reductions in Pell Grant eligibility, student loans, research funding, accreditation, among many, many other things. So what, what has transpired, and how are you feeling now here, as we record this in August, compared to, you know, where you were back in June.
Kathy Roberts Forde
So we were worried about these matters back in June, and in fact, we have seen all of these issues grow ever more urgent across the summer. And in fact, other types of new concerns emerge. And so yes, there was just an article out today. I think it was in the Chronicle about the. Disarray that we're here are being reported. Is being reported from colleges, from college staff about concerns about Pell grants and financial aid coming from the federal government. So we are not at all. Things seem very unsettled in that space. We know there are new accrediting agencies that are being created to to shift the accreditation landscape in ways that are of concern to many of us, and we fear are going to be ways for in which states are then able state governments and legislators and policy makers are going to be able to intrude into institutional institutional autonomy and faculty governance. We have also seen growing attacks on particular universities. We've had the forced resignation of the University of Virginia president. We have had intrusion into the affairs of George Mason, into faculty governance affairs there.
Kathy Roberts Forde
We have had at the state level in Texas, at that Texas State system, we have had the complete dissolution of Faculty Senate. We have also had what Gavin Newsom, Governor California, has called what amounts to a $1 billion extortion of the UC system by the federal government. And so, you know, as we, as we are all beginning to prepare for the academic year. There's a great deal that faculty and staff across this country, alum, students, everyone in the public, should be thinking about and caring about when it comes to not only research funding, but all kinds of other matters that should concern us all in the higher ed sector. I mean, at the end of the day, higher ed is a pillar of democracy, and these attacks are an attack not only on higher ed, but democracy itself.
Jenna Spinelle
And you know, amid all of these things, it seems like there's just a barrage coming at us from every direction. I know even what you just said, there is not the complete list of everything that's that's going on within higher ed. It can feel, you know, overwhelming. And you know, where do we start? How do we begin to push back against this? And I think that that is one of the great things about the stand together organization and Mark, I wonder if you could just talk a little bit about how, it came, to be.
Mark Pachucki
Sure, I can give a little bit of background, I will say I really appreciated Kathy's answer and starting off with attacks on Pell Grant. I'm I'm a student from when I was in college, I was a Pell Grant recipient, and I'm only here today because that was opportunity was opened to me. So I the variety of attacks that we've seen over the last six months have devastated a lot of university systems and thrown a lot of Stu really, really worried students into into disarray, and we, as faculty and as leaders that are at our institutions, said, We need to do something to come together, and so at our institution, at UMass, we are here as private citizens, and that's the grounds on which we're speaking to you today. But our institution took note of what Rutgers University was doing in terms of passing their faculty senate passed mutual academic defense compact, and several of us here said, you know, that's fantastic.
Mark Pachucki
We do need to stand together with one another across institutional lines, but it can't stop there. It can't just be one university. It can't just be a cluster of the big 10. I admire what they did, and I think we have a lot of praise for what they did, but we said we need to do more than that. Every single institution in this country should find a way to be coming together in some some fashion. And there's a lot of different ways that universities and colleges can collaborate with one another, but stand together for higher education was just, you know, an expression in an outgrowth of that that those efforts in the spring.
Jenna Spinelle
Yeah, so you mentioned the phrase mutual academic defense compact, which was a new term to me when I first heard about your organization. I'm sure it will be new to some of our listeners as well. Can you just tell us what that is?
Mark Pachucki
Sure. I'll be very brief with this, and maybe Kathy can jump in as well. But the idea is that every single institution has its own set of resources, unique talents and expertise, that that body of human capital, you know, academic workers specialize in. And the idea is that if at our institution, we have something unique, we can share with others. We are willing to do so, and we see this every day in our research lives and in our teaching lives. We have students coming into our classrooms from all over the country. We have a lot of us collaborating with other scientists at other universities. So the idea of collaborating is. This is nothing new, but this takes on a new a new imperative, I think, for lack of a better term, when the future of higher education is being threatened, I don't know, Kathy, I don't know if you add on to that,
Kathy Roberts Forde
That's excellent. I think the only thing I'll add is that this idea for a mutual academic defense compact originated. It occurs in their faculty senate, and then it spread to faculty senates all over the country, their great amenity beyond the big 10 that have passed the these mutual academic defense compact resolutions. And the idea is, they took from this NATO, from from NATO, you know, an attack on one is an attack on all and the idea is, let's pull resources, talents, collective action capacities of our immensely rich with resources, but also under resourced at the same time. Institutions across this this country, I mean, we have, there are 1000s and 1000s of higher ed two year and four year. And are one, you know, in research intensive institutions across this country of all different kinds, and they reach into every single city, town, Hamlet, village of this country, and every single state in this country, and all of these, these, this, this higher ed sector that we have it everyone is suffering in this moment. And so the question is, and in different ways. And so the question is, how can we bring faculty and staff these institutions together to build the capacity for collective action, to share and ideas for how we defend higher ed together. I will say that the mutual academic defense compacts that stand together for higher ed.
Kathy Roberts Forde
We support them, but we are focused right now on building stand together teams and as many campuses as we can the reason is thematic resolutions. They're not they cannot be passed in a lot of red and purple institutions. In a lot of red and purple states, they are simply not political terrain on which they can move. So many of these states have passed legislation and already constrained faculty governance and intruded on institutional autonomy in such profound ways that faculty and staff in these institutions cannot pass Maddox. It's just simply not possible. And in fact, even those that have are finding it very difficult to to to get a high level administrative buy in at the institutional level. And so we think it's incredibly important for stand together teams to be built so that there can be this new this just even small groups that kind of operate very quietly or really loudly, to begin to build faculty and staff power together.
Jenna Spinelle
So I realize that some of these teams may still be in the early stages of development, but in an ideal world, you know who's on the team? What? What? I know every school might be different in terms of what the team does or or what it works on, but what are some of the kinds of things that that you envision one of these teams undertaking?
Mark Pachucki
Sure, I think from the faculty we've been talking to, the faculty and staff we've been talking to all summer at different institutions around the country, we've been hearing from them their concerns about what's been going on on their campuses, why they're so worried, and why they signed up as members. What we said to them is that there's a variety of things that one can do, depending upon the situation on your campus, one would be to organize faculty and staff who share stand together values of promoting academic freedom free from political or financial interference, and to encourage public discussion on their own campuses. Teams could host events related to higher education and academic freedom, such as a teach in we have one that's gonna be coming up this fall, that we're going to be rolling out with the collaboration of the AAUP at universities and colleges around the country.
Mark Pachucki
So even getting together to share experiences like that can help faculty and staff feel like they're not alone. We can be encouraging people to write op eds or policy statements or to write their their legislators and community partners, faculty and staff. Could be gathering stories about about impact, but also about all of the good that higher education does for our you know, for our country. We know that higher education helps fuel our economy, and we know that when the National Science infrastructure is damaged in the way that it is, Discovery stalls, and our nation's reputation and its ability to affect change in the world diminishes in some ways, so that damage to our. Economy is something that we're really trying to head off. You know, we could be promoting and modeling the importance of reaching across whatever aisles separate us.
Mark Pachucki
I'm a sociologist. I study how people come together and what breaks them apart, and in how we study relationships, we know that reaching out to someone who is not like you in some capacity is often a difficult thing to do, but there's so much reward in building a diverse social network and a thickly intertwined network of people that can collectively enact some some end goal. But I think at the end, it's about it's about students. It's about the next generation of learners and really listening to them and their thoughts and their concerns about higher education. So I think regardless of what state one is in, whether one's at a two year school or at a four year school, private or public, there's a huge variety that local teams can be doing.
Jenna Spinelle
Yeah, and, you know, Mark, you said something now that I want to pick up on, on two parts of which was that the the ability and the power that faculty and staff have to speak out versus the administration of a college or university. And let's, let's start with the faculty and staff piece of that, because a tenured faculty member, as I understand it, is different in this scenario, or in this this capacity, than a faculty member who does not have tenure, than someone who is a staff member and not faculty at all. So I wonder if you could just walk through those distinctions and the extent to which it impacts one's ability to speak out on behalf of the institution.
Kathy Roberts Forde
I'll step in here simply because I've thought about this a great deal. I'm sure Mark has too. But when Jen Lundquist and I co founded and launched stand together for higher ed in early June, we did so out of our experience with having led a letter campaign that launched in late March when Columbia was under its first its first encounter with the with the federal administration, and at that time, we were asking in that letter, and we had a number of people from across the country and colleagues here at UMass Amherst collaborating together to write this letter, and we were writing directly to leaders of the 60 institutions that had been a named in the OCR letter from the Department of Education as targets for investigation and perhaps punitive punitive action for anti semitism. Now we in that letter that we wound up getting more than 5000 signatures from faculty, mostly tenured faculty at institutions all over the country, a few from outside the country too, that we learned some things when we put that letter together.
Kathy Roberts Forde
We were so fearful about anyone signing that letter who was not tenured. That our call was particularly we didn't exclude non 10 it was only to faculty. We did not exclude non tenured faculty, but we made a point to say, please consider your risk very closely when you are considering signing this letter. Since then, we maintain these concerns, but we also we heard from so many staff who wanted to be part of whatever came next after that letter. And so when we were talking through creating stand together for higher ed with each other and our colleagues like Mark, you know, we we said you've got to open this to staff. Staff on college campuses around this country. Are they? They serve and build the mission of the institution.
Kathy Roberts Forde
And so many are so important to our students lives and their success and their livelihood and to our own happiness and our own work, that we wanted to open things up, but we are very very we ask everyone who signs up for stand together for higher ed to think about their risk. We instruct members who are creating stand together teams on their campuses to think very carefully about who could be the lead and out there as the public face and voice of the stand together team on their campus and make sure that that person is either has some degree of protection based on their position or, you know, fully, fully understands the risk.
Jenna Spinelle
So we have the, you know, faculty and staff. But then there's the administration. So how are you all and the folks you're working with thinking about that like, how is is there pressure to be applied to administrators and administrations that might have this feeling, and if so, what might some of those pressure points be?
Kathy Roberts Forde
I think Mark points to this. And your question to Jenna, it's like the prisoner's dilemma for leaders of higher ed institutions at the moment that is no one. It's really hard to act collectively and for the collective good when you know the some of these attacks work on a divide and conquer kind of strategy, which is very effective. And so, you know, institutions are afraid of being the next target, and for very, very good reason, because we have seen what, what the punitive actions do, and how powerful state and state action at the federal and state level has been and so what I would say is that, you know, certainly, I think that a lot of faculty and staff don't see what their administrations are doing. It's really hard they like the messaging has been constrained as well in terms of institutional administrations kind of pumping out to the world everything that they're doing to serve their their missions and their faculty and their students and their staff.
Kathy Roberts Forde
But they, you know, certainly at UMass Amherst and in the UMass system, we know that they are doing an incredible amount, if working incredibly hard, in concert with the Office of General Counsel, the president of the EMS system, the governor, the attorney general. So you see, right now in the state of California, you see the entire UC system and the state government collectively working together. And so there's just so much that is happening, yeah,
Jenna Spinelle
I'm glad you mentioned outreach to legislators, that's actually where I was, where I wanted to go next. And so I know that some of that has been happening at least here at Penn State. You know, our government relations team has been meeting with both our state legislature and our federal representatives in Washington. So what? What are the the levers that can be pulled there, or those points of commonality, maybe, or how can this work be presented in a way that that might be appealing and effective to legislators given the incentives and the structures that they have to operate within?
Kathy Roberts Forde
What we understand from discussions we've had on our national leadership team is and and others, is that that kind of what you just described, is happening at institutions and all over this country, with state legislatures and with their federal delegations and so that work is well underway because, you know, in every state, There are institutions that are trying to keep their the federal research dollars flowing, that are trying to protect Pell Grants, that are trying to protect financial aid and trying to, you know, maintain, you know, this, this piece of the higher ed, you know, student access and research funding.
Kathy Roberts Forde
There are other areas where we think, first of all that needs to be encouraged. That's to be encouraged up and don't let up on on those efforts to persuade and to message but and to affect policy change. But also our legislators at state and federal levels also need to really understand how higher ed works, why institutional autonomy matters, why tenure protections matter, why faculty governance matters, that these are not just these actually are pillars of democracy and pillars of encouraging inquiry and free thought and discovery, and it keeps that space of discovery, debate, critical thinking, wide open and free from all kinds of political possible political repression that we've seen over and over and over again in this country's history, and that that's that Matt those things matter and trying to they're hard to describe. They're hard to make people understand how they work and why they matter. That we need to be doing that too.
Jenna Spinelle
So you know, a good number of of our listeners are part of higher ed in some way, either faculty, staff or something along those lines. But for those who are not, I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the majority, or the vast majority of our listeners, are, at a minimum, alumni of an institution, or perhaps more than one institution. So what about for folks who don't directly work in higher ed but still want to be supportive of this work. What are some things that they can do?
Kathy Roberts Forde
So there are a number of institutions where alumni have started their own groups to support their institution. I'm thinking in particular of crimson courage at Harvard, which is an extraordinary organization that has done all kinds. Kinds of manner of an amicus brief. They've had a protest at a at a federal court decision that affected that where a case involving Harvard was being heard. They have mobilized alum to to write letters to the president of Harvard and the corporation at Harvard, to try to shape Harvard's response in a way that is protective of all these things that we're talking about now that makes higher ed what it is. So I think that alumni, at the moment higher stand together for higher ed is faculty and staff focus, we have to start there. That doesn't mean we will build out eventually. But for now, what alumni can do is they have an extraordinary power themselves. There are millions and millions of alum in this country, from second, two and four and you know, graduate school institutions who have the power to do something as alum and citizens and people who care deeply about main, you know, keeping higher ed going for their own children, community members and for democracy itself.
Jenna Spinelle
So as we sort of start to wind things down, here we are again, at the beginning of of a new school year. For someone who listens to this and says, Yes, I love everything you all are saying, I want to get the ball rolling for this at my particular institution. What? What are the steps they should take.
Kathy Roberts Forde
If there's a small group of faculty and staff on a campus that are already in conversation with each other. Call yourself a stand together for higher ed team. There is also a place on our website where you can sign up as a team. We have a toolkit on the website that people can use to think through what how they can create a team quickly. A team can be three to four to 15 to 20 to 25 to many people. It can be situated as a standalone. It can be housed within an AAUP chapter, if your campus happens to have one, or in some kind of governance body. It could be part of a union group. I mean, it can be, it can be held anywhere that makes sense in a local context, because every institution had a highly specific local context. You can be out this the team. Can be really public and be, you know, active and doing all kinds of things. Can be a very quiet group of people who are looking for shelter with one another and just beginning to think together. Mark, what else would you say?
Mark Pachucki
I'm still hung up on the last question that Jenna asked us. I think I'm gonna try to connect it to what you're what you're talking about, Kathy, because when I talk to people about stand together for higher ed that are not in academia, and they say, What can we do? You know, I always say, you know, you could be, you can be supporting the folks in your life who are pursuing, pursuing science. If there is a young person in your life who gets the spark of in their science class in fourth grade to do a science project. You can help them out with that as a parent, or if you have a niece or a nephew, and you know there's, there is a moment that we're in right now where all of us who are scientists have trained for years and years and years to do the work that we are doing. There's kind of an implicit bargain in the jobs that we do that, you know, you're in school for this long and this, you've chosen this as your career. You deserve to be able to have the freedom to ask the kinds of questions that you want to, to follow the data where it leads.
Mark Pachucki
And kids who are inspired in grade school or college become scientists deserve that same chance. And so I just think about, if you're not academia yourself, chances are you know a young person who is getting interested, and there's a lot you can do to encourage that spark in them. And we certainly want higher education to be around for the next generation and for generations to come. We think, you know, we are in in the next essential crisis right now. And if faculty do not come together, if we cannot figure out how to stand together and to realize this idea that we're stronger together, I think our future is in doubt. And so for whatever, whatever career path you are in, whatever vocation you have chosen, you can think about applying that to your own life and having your own freedom and your own dignity curtailed. And I think that, you know, it's a very, it's a very human kind of connection. And I think, I think it matters to us all.
Jenna Spinelle
We will link to the website in the. Show notes so folks can go and check it up and sign up and learn more. And Kathy and Mark. Thank you so much for joining us today.
Kathy Roberts Forde
Thank you. Jenna,
Chris Beem
All right, well, that was that was really interesting and provocative. I mean, I just was frustrated with what I took to be when they were talking about what people should do, what this organization is trying striving to do, and what they're recommending that people in higher education do. I heard a lot of vague words that, you know, we're in disarray. We need to communicate, come together, clear the way, claim the narrative and and I'm I'm just thinking, how would you know if you accomplish that? There's nothing about those words that give you a sense of of concreteness, of specificity of objectives, even, and and I find that very frustrating. And given the kind of where we are with regards to, you know, the crisis in which we find ourselves, I don't know that. You know, clearing the way, claiming the narrative, is what we should be focusing on as our goals.
Candis Watts Smith
I hear you, I mean, you're just kind of like, what I hear you saying is, you are bringing a knife to a gunfight with the exactly with these, with these fancy words about engagement and communication. But what I hear them saying is that we have to defend institutions that you know we have. The reason why students across the world flock to the United States is because, for many reasons, but in part, what makes our university so good and higher education so good is because we have academic freedom and we've had institutional autonomy, right? And so somebody has to defend those things. History shows other countries, shows that you can have a university of blank that does not actually do the work of walking toward truth, but instead is a arm of the government right, which is not a way to walk toward truth.
Candis Watts Smith
What I hear them say is, we have to take responsibility, and we have to show up. People have to show up, and they have to witness what other people are saying so that they don't feel gaslit. What I hear them saying is that we have to remember professional ethics, that the way that we got here was to build, over time, a way of being so that we can do the hard work that is necessary for finding out what causes diabetes or autism or obesity or racism or anti semitism or sexism or whatever that we have to believe in truth and we are in a situation Where like people are. I mean, go back to 2016 Kellyanne Conway shows up talking about alternative facts. That is not a way to be. And so like we are in the situation where people are living totally different lives in their media landscapes, and somebody has to be there to say you can believe what you want to believe, but Facts are facts, and we can work toward the truth. So yeah, like communicate and come together. But what I also hear is defend solidarity and stand up for the things that made us the place and be of the Lord come right all over the world.
Chris Beem
And that's why, that's why, that's why foreign students come here. You know, even students from authoritarian countries come here because they they know the value of critical thinking and independent thinking and being self critical, right? And that's the kind of thing that you are taught in an American university. Far more. You're far more likely to be taught that there than anywhere else. I grant that I just I feel like the arguments need to be a little bit more. Well, no need to be significantly more hard edged than they are.
Candis Watts Smith
I'd be curious to know, Chris, what you think would be good strategies in this moment that like, what is the what is the gun in the like, you know, fire, fire meets fire. Like, What? What? What does that? What do you think that looks like?
Chris Beem
I think about that a lot. All right, here's what I would do. I think the the the response of the Georgetown Law School Dean was, was very powerful and appropriate, and he just, he just said, I'm not, not one bit of this. They said, Unless you, I mean, I'm, this was in March, so it was a while ago, but they said, unless you can prove that you are no longer having di dei policies, we will no longer hire your graduates Georgetown Law School, graduates in in the in any executive agency, and he just said, No, we're not going to do that. We're just not going to change our behavior because of you.
Chris Beem
And I think that is a that is a stiff response, and you can argue all over the place, that Georgetown Law is, you know, is a unique beast, and that, you know, if you're an LSU or, you know, University of Tennessee in Knoxville, that you have different problems. I get that, and I'm perfectly willing to to acknowledge that, you know, not every strategy is going to work everywhere. But if, if it were me, I would say, first of all, you know, the the strategy of administrations to say we're going to keep our heads down and hope that he doesn't come after us is not a good strategy. And and, you know, there is, there is a much better. I mean, maybe it won't even work, but at least you have the satisfaction of doing the right thing, which is to say, No, we're not doing this. This is wrong, and you have no right to be stepping in where, where you have no expertise. We're going to do what we want, and we're going to continue to provide a level of sophisticated education that is going to make a difference in the world. And if you don't like it, pound sand. I would like that. I would like to see more universities taking that kind of response.
Candis Watts Smith
Yeah, I'm gonna put my administrator hat on, which I'm just gonna borrow because I'm not in administration anymore.
Chris Beem
You're a lot more experienced with than than I do so and so.
Candis Watts Smith
I think that what somebody in administration would say is my job is to ensure that this institution that has been alive 450 or 200 years, continues to be alive now, of course, like the callback, the feedback there is, yeah, under what circumstances, right? Like, what is it that you're doing inside of there? So just to say that, I think that some people would say that the things that we're doing is so that we can continue to do the work as best as we can in the situation that we can. I think you're right, Chris, that you know back to back to the example that you get about like trying different things. I think that we see that doing nothing, keeping one's head down, is not a good strategy, that fully acquiescing is also not a good strategy, that implementing policies to undermine your own institution before anyone asks you to do that is also not a good thing to do. I think, though, that what's happening with with with the stand together group is, let's try to figure out what does work. Maybe, you know, what can we do? What is possible? How can we orient ourselves toward answering a problem within very constrained boundaries?
Chris Beem
I mean, it's always such a pleasure arguing with with Candis, I like it more when we disagree, because she because I always end up learning more as a result. So you know, I think what this conversation speaks to is just how complicated, difficult, how much is at stake in this conversation? And, you know, I mean, it is not by any means clear what's the right strategy. And it's it. It requires conversations like this. And I will say that stand together is, you know, is part of that conversation and deserves credit that. So, you know, I more to come right. This isn't going away, indeed, and, and, and it is worth our time to reflect on it. And anyway, so, so, yeah, good. We're up to a good start this year. Um. For the McCourtney Institute for Democracy. I'm Chris Beem.
Candis Watts Smith
And I'm Candis Watts Smith, thank you for listening.