This is such a hard question of what a socially just university is. I think my first shot at, it is that it's a process, not an endpoint which I think rightly very much in keeping with anti-racism work of accepting that this is an ongoing process of working toward being a socially just university. For me, I think it starts with honestly confronting the histories of our own institutions and that our institutions are built on structural inequities. Then we have to start there with a university like the University of Michigan to confront that history, to do the really hard work of then understanding how that history is baked into the structures and practices of our everyday lives at the university. Because until we understand that, we can't dismantle barriers to access ongoing inequities because they get naturalized in systems and of course that work is happening. Part of the work of becoming a socially just university is really listening to all of the people who are doing that work to identify and understand and dismantle the results of our own histories. That to me is a start. Tabby, I'd love to hear what your thinking is. Thank you. I'll just start by saying that I share your pleasure in having a conversation together because I also have been enriched and stimulated by working with you and the work that we will continue to do together in the college including grappling with this really tough question. I will say that the question of what is a socially just university. I know there we had some prior conversations about this. I'll say to me when I think about it I think about different things, sometimes different things on different days or different things on the same day. Because when I think about the complexity of the university's mission, where it reaches and the different areas exist the impact. Agreeing with you then it's baked into every single level and every single function of an institution from is the university just in supporting pathways of access to it, in different pathways of access. Is a university making its boundaries permeable in bidirectional ways so that members within the community of the campus can access local communities and vice versa local communities can access the university and its resources and goods? Is it just in the types of educational and professional and social environments experienced by its faculty, its staff, its students? Is it just in how it uses knowledge and resources that it produces to serve and to partner and collaborate with the public? Those questions or those areas implicate different areas of university functioning, which I can say many institutions unlike our society and maybe like us as individuals can be full of contradictions. We can study and teach about equity and social justice in powerful ways that prepare our students or press them to be thoughtful, knowledge producers or citizens. But at the same time, we can fall short in providing equitable access to local communities to that same knowledge and effort. I would say for me that one way to think about it is that instead, I agree with you that there is no endpoint so there's no getting to being a socially just university that it's actually being committed enough to address and resolve those kinds of contradictions or to work to resolve those contradictions to notice them and to work to resolve them even when it's hard and especially when it's hard. Yeah. I love when there are many things there that you said the inclusivity of the community. Thinking about this is about faculty and staff and graduate students and undergraduate students and then our stakeholders beyond the university in our local communities, our graduates. We have a lot of stakeholders to be thinking about in this. I have found Tabby may have as well that when we talk about looking at the ways this get baked into systems and trying to confront that and I have had people look at me like, what are you talking about. If we think about undergraduate admissions the ways in which at least for decades it was naturalized that if you had parents or grandparents that had gone to a university that would be an advantage for you to go to that university and that was very naturalized. As opposed to if a university is built on your family or your community's land that it should be an advantage for you to be able to go to that university and that has not been naturalized in our system that second one, but arguably should be naturalized in our system. To ask of ourselves, we have to be asking those questions about the things that we advantage over like, oh well, but of course that's the way the system works. Well, the system only works if we participate in it and there are a lot of inequities. We can see I think in that example right there the inequities baked into ongoing privilege. If your parents and grandparents going gives you an advantage, we've got privilege baked into the admission system. Barry as you said, this is exactly right. LSA is a very large college, so to give people a sense of scale we have over 18,000 undergraduates right now, over 2,500 graduate students, about 1,500 faculty, and 1,200 staff. It's also an amazing platform to have to be in LSA at the University of Michigan as we think about what does it mean to try to lead in key changes here. People watch the University of Michigan and they watch LSA to see what we're doing and we would like to use that platform to be bold in this space, and to show what does it mean to try to do structural change at scale. Because everything we do in LSA is at scale because we're such a large place. I think that there are a couple of frameworks that have helped me to think about this. One is, that you need to draw on the expertise that you have. It sounds obvious but actually doesn't always happen. When I think about LSA we have enormous expertise on our faculty about diversity, equity, inclusion, justice, anti-racism. We've also been doing work on preventing sexual harassment, we have some of the nation's leading experts on that. You take these issues, then where do we have the expertise? I need to let the experts lead and then my job as the dean is to enact recommendations, to use the platform that I have to help do the work, and to elevate the expertise to that level. I think about that. This past year we had two really important task forces. Tabby quoted one with Professor Matthew Countryman, a task force on anti-racism and racial equality. It was faculty and staff and graduate students and undergrads that did brilliant work to come to principles and recommendations for what it would mean to move forward in this space. It was a brave report, it was a brilliant report. Then the next step is to move forward on those recommendations because we have all also experienced being on task forces where we write a report and we submit it and everyone says that's really powerful and interesting and then from everything you can tell it goes in a drawer and the recommendations actually don't come to light. This is a really bold important report and the job of me and my team and I'm so delighted Tabby is on the team, is to move those next steps forward as a college which is what we're doing right now. It's going to take leadership centrally and then something that Tabby is working on and I hope it's going to take leadership in all of our departments and programs and centers and institutes. That everybody has to work on this and our job is to lead from centrally but then everybody else's job is to lead from where they are in this work. We're doing the same thing with the task force on preventing sexual harassment. They have just given us their report which once again is such an important and smart report and that we're coming up with the recommendations in the order in which we will be moving forward with those. I will take one thing from the task force report for the anti-racism taskforce that I've found helpful, turn it over to Tabby and then we can use a couple of examples of pilots we're doing in the college. But the report used for me really usefully outlines three different kinds of interventions. The first is relief, which is immediate actions. What do we do right now to be corrective to address inequities that we can do right now? The second is recovery, which the report describes as short-term remedies. The third is reconfiguration. These is those fundamental systemic long-term changes and that we have to be thinking in all three of those categories about how we're intervening and doing the work. Tabby, let me turn it over to you and see where your thinking is. Well, you didn't miss a line with the things you described and I assume as I think about this concept of a just university and maybe I can apply it to a just college as we've been working toward that I think about the challenges organizationally and structurally. If something is baked into everything then it is at every single level, but one of the organizational challenges which is both a challenge and a strength at Michigan and many institutions is decentralization. I mean, there's a lot of value to the autonomy, the intellectual and leadership autonomy that our units have which allows them to innovate and to really tailor the work that they do to align with their specific missions and foci. We don't want to homogenize college but at the same time what came up in our task force work is the importance of shared responsibility and shared accountability that it's not okay if there are particular units and spaces in our college that are pushing forward leading carrying the load of the work and then other units that are not doing it but maybe doing the opposite. Contributing to efforts or practices intentional and unintentional that contribute to inequalities or that exacerbate or maintain inequalities and that they're not the rewards and recognition systems don't reward those who've been carrying the load in inadequate ways and don't call out those who were not for their responsibility in being an equitable and inclusive environment. But this is not a simple thing. This is how do we have shared values and principles and shared leadership and distributed leadership and responsibility so that people view it as everyone's role to have an equitable, just environment that they have special knowledge and expertise. They don't have to be scholarly specials in particular areas that they can develop capacity and expertise and knowledge to move forward the work in their units in ways that address that view equity and access issues for our staff and faculty and students. How do we cultivate a culture of accountability and buy-in that our units view as beneficial to the broader goal of being a just environment? How do we build in structures that make visible and reward work and thoughtful effort in this space that nudge others forward when needed not in a punitive necessarily manner but the idea that we can't be a just college if we only have a portion of our units who are participating in those efforts. What does it look like and also to cultivate a space of a community of knowledge and learning, that if we think about it as all of our roles and people are thinking about the things that they can do from their positions? That's really a space that's a really promising rich space for knowledge exchange, for problem-solving. You're going back to the point that I mentioned before about us not being finished. What we think that even, how do we cultivate a culture so that people understand that it's not finished not in a way that's demoralizing like, when will it over but in a way that's, we're always learning. Like it's okay if you're not an expert in this topic. Are you taking advantage of the supports and resources that we'll provide you to learn and build capacity because we're all on a journey? To me, that also is not just a truth that we're not finished but thinking about it that way is more likely to cultivate a culture of buy-in because people don't feel like they're right or wrong and that they're going to make a mistake and that it's over. That their responsibility is to be a learner. Their responsibility is to be reflective and then to use that knowledge just as they do in their teaching and their research to improve it and to make it more effective over time. Barry to make sure we're also responding specifically to your question of what are we doing in college I can call out a couple of really important and exciting initiatives in the college the first of which Tabby has been one of the key leaders on which is the LSA Collegiate Fellows Program. This was a really new way for us to think about hiring and we have hired. It was designed to hire 50 fellows in five years and we've hired 37 so far. This is emerging scholars who get a postdoc with a presumption of a tenure track appointment here at UFM who have a demonstrated commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion in their work. It was a really different way of doing hiring for us because we were hiring across the entire college. We've been a college where different departments say we're looking for this or we're looking for this and this was an open call to find the most exciting scholars who were doing incredible work and had this demonstrated commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion. The people who we have hired through this program are stunning in terms of everything they bring to our community and it's been a really important way to rethink how we hire out of these small silos and putting front-and-center people's work on diversity, equity, and inclusion. This will continue to inform our hiring and this year we're doing a pilot in the college where every search is asking for a diversity statement from all candidates. Tabby is working with all the units, to be thinking about this as part of the process where you value demonstrated commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion as part of the hiring process for all searches all across the college. That's one. Well, a few years ago we started what was called the Laptop Loaner Program. Actually, this program came out of a tweet that was part of the hashtag #BBUM, Being Black at the University of Michigan. This was a student who tweeted, "It's that moment when a professor says, pull out your laptop and you don't have one." This is before my time as dean, but the reaction of the team in place was, that's not okay. It's not okay for any undergraduate here not to have a laptop and have that access. So we created this Laptop Loaner Program where all students would need could get a laptop if they needed one and have it all four years and then pretty much have it after that. This was such an important and successful program that it's now become a university program. We also see that as part of our role as LSA is that we're a big college and is to pilot things and hope that some of them will get picked up at the university level. We're going to do that right now. We're hiring some coordinators to support faculty and staff who need accommodations for disabilities. We feel we don't provide enough support in that realm and so we're going to model a program for coordinators for that and hope that that again can become a university program. Tabby is there anything you want to add about the collegiate fellows which has just been such a highlight I think for us? Yes. I guess one of the things that, I mean, I'm excited about many aspects of that program, but one of the things that I hope has happened as a function of it is again going back to this idea of distributing leadership and expertise around diversity, equity and inclusion that these scholars are doing amazing work in many different areas. The idea that we need people who have expertise around different social identity groups around different kinds of inequalities around novel and innovative pedagogical approaches that they're using in their classrooms and in their labs. But there's not one way to make a contribution related to diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice. But if we are actually recruiting people for whom that is a core value and a core part of their professional identity and profile, then just the 50 alone if we do the job that we need to do to retain them that's transformative in terms of people who think that way about their roles as university members impacting the spaces that they connect to with their colleagues, with their students, with their alums, with local communities. That we think of this as not just benefiting the scholars themselves and is our job to provide them with that nurturing environment but that is a part of a broader cultural transformation. The other thing that I'm excited about with the program and the pilot of requiring diversity statements across searches again goes back to the distributed accountability. That we're not saying what people have to do one kind of work, but what we are saying is that it is reasonable to expect that any faculty member that we hire has some thoughtfulness and commitment to creating inclusive equitable spaces in the work that they do. That could look like the ways that they develop their syllabi and their courses. It could be the leadership roles they play in their discipline or in the campus, it could be in the ways they're engaged formally or informally in communities. But if we say that there's a value and that anyone that we asked to join our community should be both wanting to and have some foundations that help them contribute in this way and that's also signaling something about what we think about as equitable, inclusive and just college and in campus community. Let me pose a couple of questions to me grow out of what you two are talking about. One of them is that faculty are central to the process of what happens in a university. This will not matter whether we are large or small and some of the people who will be listening and watching this conversation will say, "Well, we can't possibly hire dozens of faculty. We only have a few opportunities to do that." But one thing that's shared between what you two are talking about and higher education, in general, is that faculty are very important to the process. Many things happen without faculty but without the faculty, nothing lasting is likely to happen. But we have to provide faculty with some sense of what are the roles and rewards, that will encourage them to do work with these values. One aspect of that and then I'll toss it back if you will. One thing that they generally have in common and most of our listeners and observers will have are courses. They teach courses and it's obvious that for the people that you are bringing in but on-going people, most of them are teaching courses. What you're saying there is not only are the faculty important in the process, but the courses might be a lever for actually moving change. In the spirit of conversation, I'm just posing a question about the future of faculty involvement but also the future of the courses that they teach. Are there any things that you're thinking about in regard to those two units? Tabby why don't you start with this one and then I can chime in? Yeah, definitely. I will say, I mean, going back to your comment about units that are differently sized or institutions that are differently sized saying, oh we can't hire 50 people in two. This comes up a lot when we present this program. My qualifier is always like, unless you to say that you're not hiring faculty anymore then you can integrate these principles into your approach, clearly at the college. Our college is very large and so across the multiple departments and divisions of disciplines that we have, that number of faculty is of appropriate scale but institutions or units that are smaller if can integrate the principles of diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice by engaging prospective candidates on how they could help address and advance those values through the work they do as a faculty member in intentional ways and to support that as a part of the hiring process and as a part of the evaluation process. It doesn't mean that institutions that have resources are the only ones that can or immense resources or that you need to have a 100 percent hiring program in order to do it. I think one of the interesting things about work in this area of diversity, equity, and inclusion and to me, those are inextricably tied to justice. I guess, one of the things that I find perplexing, interesting, sometimes frustrating but also that makes me think about strategy is encouraging our very talented faculty who were really good at learning and thinking and integrating new knowledge into the ways of doing their work, innovating, to think about diversity, equity and inclusion efforts in ways that they think about that learning reflection and innovation in their other scholarly work too. Most faculty if the state of the art in their fields change they wouldn't be like, well, I'm just going to do research and just the same way that I've done it for 20 years even though the methods and the theory in my field are changing, like, no, I'm just going to go to do that same thing again, I'm not going to incorporate that new theory, those new discoveries, that new framework, the new methodologies into my work. They know how to learn those things as well. I think having people think about, yes, this is the same thing that we're asking here is that you care about your teaching and you know how to learn and be reflective and we're really asking you to exercise those same muscles in thinking about shaping or rethinking or integrating new knowledge and evidence-based practices into your either course content or pedagogical approaches. Everyone doesn't have to turn into a scholar of a particular DEI topic in order to do that but we know how to learn about best practices and innovations in our field areas. I think there's a disconnect there that, oh, I'm not a specialist in that topic so I can't learn those things, is one barrier that I've encountered. One is that taking away some of the threat or identity threat that's attached to that, that's not an easy thing to do in some cases. No one else is saying that there's not a value to the way that you've engaged an instruction, but the field of knowledge is moving forward in this area of work, and the innovation of what we know to serve students and to serve students who are coming from different spaces we know more things about those areas and we want you to incorporate them into your practice as well. In ways that people easily do when it comes to their research in their scholarship even around areas that they knew nothing about before. I would just say there is a socialization around how we might approach this as an intellectually, grounded, reflective endeavor that I think could be attractive to faculty or to some. Most faculty are not the resistors like, I don't care about students from different backgrounds. But there is a resistance to a perceived barrier in learning or the learning curve there. I don't know. What are your views around this idea of resistance? Then also the other thing that I'll just pop in and say is that, moving toward an orientation where the students come here and learn how to navigate how we are here. Students have to learn to fit in, to the way we do things and should become ready to learn toward oh, we should be a part of understanding effective teaching is understanding that students are starting in different places and that we may need to then understand those different places in order to bring everyone to a level of proficiency and mastery that we think we can achieve. I remember we were having a debate with a colleague, not in our college right now, who said, "I gave the perfect lecture but the students didn't understand it." I was like, if you didn't give the perfect lecture then, but technically it had components of a perfect lecture but the fact that the students didn't understand it suggested that there needed to be rethinking around communication or examples or translation that you cannot think about yourself as a master teacher or an effective teacher if we're not thinking about differences in where students are and how they might relate to how they take in understand and make use of the knowledge. My personal journey. I come from a family with educators on both sides. I think a lot about the power of education and have in my own career. When I came to the University of Michigan as a graduate student, my PhD advisor was Richard Bailey and he introduced me to his scholar named Geneva Smitherman who is one of the experts on African-American language. She got her PhD from Michigan, she spent most of her career at Wayne State and Michigan State. Amazing scholar, she and Richard Bailey showed me how linguistics matters for real people in real-time and how you can use it to do social justice work. All the ways in which there's discrimination against people based on their language and how important this is for schooling. It's why I stayed in the academy was I could see how as a linguist I could do work that mattered for real people in real-time and could maybe change our education systems to be more equitable for all students and make sure that no students were being silenced. I feel like that has then informed each step I go I think, "Okay, how can I use this platform, a teacher in a classroom." When I ran the writing program as an associate dean of students, to create a more just university and each platform gives me different chances to try to do that. But that's the short version of my story. Thank you so much. Tabby how about you? A lot into that. [inaudible] I'll say that I always say that when I started out my research career, in secondary school when I could have noticed that the representation of students like me decreased as I went up from elementary to secondary and being one of few in the advanced classes, I didn't think that the students that were previously with me were less smart. But there was something that was happening around, they disengage some of the students so that we did some of the students out. I began to wonder about both the structural and practice but also the messages direct and indirect that certain students were getting about who they were and where they belonged. That really shaped the research that I do on racial identity as connected to student identity, that has undergirded, the work I've done in secondary and higher education spaces. This curiosity about the ways that organizational structures and systems that have particular stated goals. Those stated goals maybe misaligned with the practices and policies in ways that don't lead those goals even well-intended goals. I think that orientation has been part of my work as a faculty member and as an administrator looking at the alignment or lack of alignment between the goals and the practice. I knew that would happen. Hopefully, Sean will do his magic there. No. Yeah, of course. But [inaudible] trying to understand the alignment between intentions and policy have undergirding my work as an administrator and the desire to always leave a space. When I leave a space, I want it to be better than what I was introduced, and to be a part of that, to view myself as a community member in all spaces from the time I was a junior faculty to my current time now as an administrator. I'll also say that sometimes people have asked whether I prefer DEI-focused roles or non-DEI-focused leadership roles and I say well, they're all DEI roles to me. I've been in both types, one that had an official title related to those concepts and others that didn't such as program chair and other spaces in our research enterprise. I make every role a DEI role because as we talked as we began issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion and justice are interwoven into all of our systems and part of my role is to understand and to advance the organizational functioning of the space that I'm in. A part of how I see that happening is by addressing diversity, equity, and inclusion. It's interwoven into every role that I have and is a part of my personal professional identity which I think makes me a changemaker in terms of my personal identity and the way that I've constructed my different faculty community and administrative roles.
