When DEI Is Off the Table: How Higher Ed Leaders Can Still Drive Institutional Change:

Changing Higher Ed podcast 261 with host Dr. Drumm McNaughton and guest Susan Sturm

Transcript: Changing Higher Ed podcast 261 – with host Dr. Drumm McNaughton and guest Susan Sturm – DEI in Higher Ed: Creating a Path Forward

Introduction to Changing Higher Ed^®

Welcome to Changing Higher Ed^®, a podcast dedicated to helping higher education leaders improve their institutions. With your host, Dr. Drumm McNaughton, CEO of The Change Leader, a consultancy that helps higher ed leaders holistically transform their institutions. Learn more at changinghighered.com. And now, here’s your host, Drumm McNaughton.

[00:00:20] Introduction and Guest Introduction

Drumm McNaughton: Thank you, David. My guest today is Professor Susan Stern, the George M. Jaffin Professor of Law and Social Responsibility and the founding director of the Center for Institutional and Social Change at Columbia Law School. Susan’s work focuses on building the capacity of people and institutions to reduce discrimination, confront racism, and move toward full participation in educational, legal, and cultural institutions.

Susan recently released her new book, “What Might Be: Confronting Racism to Transform Our Institutions,” published by Princeton University Press. And she joins me today to talk about the book, DEI, and what’s going on in higher education, but most importantly, a path forward from where we currently are.

Susan, welcome to the program.

Susan Sturm: Thank you. It’s so good to be here.

Drumm McNaughton: I am really glad to have you on the show. You are such a trailblazer when it comes to higher education law and things like that; I’m really looking forward to our conversation.

[00:01:29] Susan Stern’s Background and Career

Drumm McNaughton: Before we get into it, and we talk about your book, give us a little of your background if you would please.

Susan Sturm: I’d love to; I have been working on issues of what I call full participation. How do create environments that enable people, regardless of their race, gender, background, position, to enter, thrive, succeed, and contribute to the thriving of others? I wouldn’t have called it that when I first started. I started thinking about this when I was in high school and I started working for Head Start, and then in college, my major was vision, action, and social change, and I feel like I’ve just been doing that ever since.

I graduated from law school and started working with foundations that were really interested in thinking about how to increase the impact of prison litigation. Then went into academia where I’ve been really working with students and higher education institutions and court systems that are really interested in culture change. Particularly in how law can be part of that larger process of bridging the gap between “the is, “the ought,” and “the what might be.” So it was very exciting, after having worked with community colleges, liberal arts institutions, law schools, and law journals, to be able to share some of what I’ve learned in that work in this book.

Drumm McNaughton: I’m looking forward to talking about the book, but you are at Columbia at the law school right now.

Susan Sturm: Yes, I am.

Drumm McNaughton: And Columbia, for many reasons, I won’t say whether they’re good or bad, but I have my own opinion on that, and it has been in the news too much.

Susan Sturm: I agree.

Drumm McNaughton: So a lot of politicalization, Hey, I even pronounced that right this time, politicalization, DEI, things like that. Before we really dig down into that.

[00:03:32] Overview of the Book: ‘What Might Be.’

Drumm McNaughton: Your book, “What Might Be: Confronting Racism to Transform Our Institutions,” tells the listeners a little bit about that, if you would.

Susan Sturm: Sure. The title of the book really comes from this definition, redefinition of Law to not just be the rules on the books, what courts say, what legislatures say, but to really think about how to bridge that tension between where we are now, “the is, “and where we want to get to “the ought,” and that is “the what might be.”

The book really takes a step to fill a gap that I have seen in a lot of the writing in this area. There’s a lot of writing about the problems. The problems of racial disparities, the problems of the lack of full participation in higher education institutions, and there isn’t very much on what we do about it that’s thought about in a rigorous way that’s informed by what people actually try to do.

I wanted to fill that gap. I also wanted to build on an experience that I’ve had, really from childhood as a middle child, but also as someone who has worked with higher education leaders and students and court systems, that people get stuck, they get stuck because they think they have to resolve a conflict between should I talk about race, should I not talk about race? Should I step in as a person who has not experienced racism themselves, or should I step back? Should we do something in this institution, which is itself part of the problem, or do we need to work from outside? And people get stuck in what I have called Groundhog Day. Just doing the same thing over and over again and ending up right back where you started from. And I wanted to help people recognize that if they stopped trying to resolve this and instead learn to hold those contradictions and figure out how to navigate them, they could get unstuck and actually use conflict, not as a way to end relationships, but as a way to energize change.

Drumm McNaughton: That sounds like a really good idea.

[00:05:50] Challenges in Higher Education and DEI

Drumm McNaughton: So why are we here? It’s almost as if people are just talking past each other. It’s at, in many respects.

Susan Sturm: Yes, we are, and it feels a lot more intense right now because some of the differences that have been taking place more behind closed doors are now right out in the public. With people who are in political office taking some of the positions that have really existed in many ways in the margins previously. And one, the reasons I we’re is because there is this dynamic, what I call “the paradox of racial salience”, which is that people occupy different universes and speak different languages often because we are a racially segregated society, even to this day. And so they take the same experience and they interpret it very differently. They hear the same word or the same language, and it means different things. And yet people impose their own meaning on someone who has actually come into the space with a very different set of meanings, and there’s an expectation that you’re going to pick one side of this way of understanding the world as opposed to the other. So I think that’s one of the reasons we’re here.

I think we’re also here because we have expected to be able to just come together without learning how we actually interact across these differences, without building the capacity to do that, and without building the relationships that allow us to see what I call linked fate. Linked fate, meaning that even these groups that look like they might, or think of themselves as being in opposition to each other, that they really have very shared long-term interests because they’re going to go down together if they don’t figure out how to come together to address these difficult problems.

Drumm McNaughton: That’s a really interesting perspective, and it resonates very much with me because the way I look at events on our planet is they’re all there for us to learn and grow. One person may be right; one person may be wrong; it may be just the opposite. But more than likely, we’re brought together for situations to learn from one another. Not to say, “I’m right, and you are wrong.” Does this make sense?

Susan Sturm: It does make sense, and I think it’s very difficult to do if you’re operating in a highly polarized environment where making a mistake means that you’re going to be publicly humiliated or shamed or kicked out, or lose your job, or your funding.

Drumm McNaughton: Really? Who would do that? No, sorry.

Susan Sturm: But I think really this is one of the challenges that I think higher education leaders are facing is that when you’re in a situation like that, in an environment like that, the tendency is to respond in kind. And I think there really is the necessity of engaging in those battles when you’re threatened with being shut down. But I think it’s also really necessary to invest in creating longer term collaborations that give people a chance to really work through these differences because they do have shared needs and understandings.

And I’m very happy, if it will be helpful, to share some examples of both what happens when you don’t do that and then what happens when institutions of higher education have had leaders at different levels of the organization that have made it possible to work these things through in a way that benefits very differently situated people and institutions.

Drumm McNaughton: Yeah, I definitely want to get into some of those, but what I’m dancing around here is the terms diversity, equity, and inclusion. And if I go to Wikipedia, which we all know is just a really good source of many things, they define it as “organizational frameworks that seek to promote the fair treatment and full participation of all people.” And I think that’s a critical piece, is fair treatment and full participation.

Susan Sturm: Yes.

Drumm McNaughton: I personally think that democracy, like higher education, requires open, thoughtful conversations and a willingness to debate. Yes, there is inequality in the country and it, that shouldn’t be up for debate because there truly is.

So what is it that’s driving this? What is making people so fearful about this whole thing? Because frankly, when I look at people are fearful, it’s usually fear of loss. So am I off on that?

Susan Sturm: I think you’re right on target. I think that fear is behind a lot of that, and I think there is a sense that if we actually include people who have been excluded previously, that will be at the expense of the people who have been taken into account. So I think that there’s actually research suggesting that when, at least, many white people hear diversity, equity, and inclusion, they think that’s not me, and therefore, there’s going to be a focus on something where I’m going to lose my position. I’m going to be treated as somebody whose needs are going to be deprioritized. I’m going to lose my opportunity to compete. If I haven’t gotten a job. If I haven’t gotten admitted to the college of my choice, or my child hasn’t, then it’s because I was disfavored and someone else was favored.

So, I think it is that zero-sum scarcity mindset that has produced this. And also, I think a view of diversity, equity, and inclusion as either a check-the-box program that is going to force people to take blame or as something that is going to be at the exclusion or at the expense of the people who are currently benefiting.

And I think a lot of this can be the way in which diversity, equity, inclusion programs in some spaces have been implemented. So it’s not like diversity, equity, and inclusion programs have solved the problem, and there’ve been a lot of criticisms about diversity, equity, inclusion programs for those who care very much about greater participation of those who’ve been excluded.

But I think that we need to find ways to bring people together that will allow them to understand the ways in which the way we’re currently doing things has actually been problematic for people who cut across different racial identities and genders and social positions, and that by asking questions about how we can do better in what we’re doing and how we can learn from the experiences of people who have most visibly experienced the problems or the issues, we can actually make our higher education institutions function better for everyone and that we can grow the pie, at a time when we think only in terms of scarcity, we can increase the ways in which we experience higher education as transformative for people as genuine engines of a mobility, rather than ones that do that only in the rhetoric rather than in the reality. We need to really not get stuck on the specific word that we use and to get at our longer-term interests in what full participation means and how to ask questions that make it clear that there are ways in which everyone would benefit from this kind of rethinking process, this kind of coming together. If we can learn how to understand the tension between maybe our short-term self-interest and our longer-term linked fate.

Drumm McNaughton: That is much more difficult than just saying it. So, in our previous conversation, we talked about we need to find a way to talk about what we care about and do it intentionally and then connect to a broader concern. How do we do that?

[00:14:48] Examples of Institutional Change

Susan Sturm: Well, let me give some examples.

 Both at the level of a specific workshop or classroom and then at the level of a couple of institutions. Would that be helpful?

Drumm McNaughton: Yes.

Susan Sturm: At the level of a workshop or a classroom, part of what I think is really important is that we come together with an understanding that we actually want to be able to enable these groups to achieve their shared goals. And then we don’t just have these be one-shot things because you cannot build the kind of trust and the capacity to actually misunderstand so that you can understand if you only have one shot at it. And so this is part of the problem that I think we have experienced is that people come together once or twice.

I also think it’s really important to come together, not just to talk, but also to do things. So, to give an illustration of this, that actually took place in an unlikely place, in a court system, where people came together: judges and probation officers, court officers, interpreters, community members. This is a very diverse community of people who had never really talked with each other before. They came together because they recognized that their ability to pursue their mission, which was “justice with speed and dignity”, depended on them being able to overcome some of these misunderstandings these tensions, many of which were around race. So they came together and, number one, they took some time to just understand each other. Who are you? Who’s in the room? What has your experience of the court system been? Where have you come from? And that experience itself was eye-opening for everybody because they got to hear from people they didn’t usually hear from in an extended way.

And then they actually had to learn, “How do you have difficult conversations”? People had to realize, including judges, including the teachers of the judges, including the probation officers, that they didn’t know how to, and they were afraid to have these kinds of conversations. So we actually did some real capacity building around things like listening, around things like giving and receiving feedback, around things like literacy, cultural literacy, racial literacy. And then, very importantly, people were asked to bring what they were learning back to their workplaces, back to their classrooms, back to their environment and practice trying to do something that would make a difference and then come back into this space.

This took place over about a six-month period, and at the end of that six months, people had built small groups of people who’d actually learned that the way they were experiencing the court system, or when this takes place in a higher education institution, that that did not actually tell them the way everyone is experiencing it, and they also built groups of people who really wanted to work together. And they identified some people, who I call “organizational catalysts”. These are people who were really good at communicating with different people who didn’t necessarily speak the same way. And they gave those people resources to be able to build more experiments going forward and that really started to create engines of relationship building but also being able to have these kinds of difficult conversations.

And we saw this happening at the level of a whole university. I’m sure many of your listeners have heard about Freeman Robowski and University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Often people think about this university’s success as a story of just charismatic leadership, and it is. Freeman Robowski is a very charismatic leader, but part of what made this story happen is that he took this kind of, starting with a small space, of a program that was initially set up to try to understand why black boys and girls were not succeeding in science, technology, engineering, and math, and use that learning process to learn not about what was wrong with them, but what was wrong with the culture of science that was making it so that not just black boys and girls, but a lot of people were struggling with the stem fields, and people were dropping out in droves, and that became a way to figure out how do we need to teach differently? How do we need to build the support structures for this cohort?

That became the driver of another set of experiments; we could call them fractals, little mini versions of the institution that you want to build. And one thing connected to the other, connect to the next, where there was support, resources, and recognition for all of these different organizational catalysts who were building these experiments all around University of Maryland, Baltimore County, not only in the STEM fields, but in student government, and in theater, and in supporting people with criminal justice histories. Over time, this led to a much broader culture change within the whole institution, and they were able to stick with it, not for a year, not for two years, but for decades, and that led to this kind of long-term change.

Drumm McNaughton: Those are great examples. Thank you.

[00:20:32] Moments of Rupture and Learning

Drumm McNaughton: I want to double back just a little bit because in your book, you talk about when there’s an opportunity for meaningful change, and you talk about the “moment of rupture.” What do you mean by that?

Susan Sturm: Yes. I can give personal experiences of this “moment of rupture” and have them periodically, and they continue to happen because, as I’ve learned, coming from my own background as an upper-middle-class white woman, I see the world in a particular way and I try to learn from other’s perspectives, but there are things that I just don’t learn.

So one moment of rupture came when a student, an Asian American student, came to my office and closed the door. She was in a class called Lawyering for Change, and she said to me, “Professor Sturm, I need to have a difficult conversation with you.” And I was like, oh. She told me that I had set up an environment that really was being shaped by many of the black students in the class who were saying, “Look, we are really tired of being the ones who are told over and over again that we have to bear the burden of explaining to well-intentioned white people, what our history is and what we’re experiencing and the things that are happening over and over and over again. We want you to do the learning for yourself. Please stop asking us to do that work. We want you to come to the table having done some of that work yourself”. And this Asian American student said to me, “I understand that. I’ve seen that and witnessed this, but I have a very different experience. I wish someone would ask me to tell my story. People don’t even know I’m there. I’m ignored. My history is not even asked about or relevant. And when I speak, I sometimes feel like I’m speaking into the wind”.

So, this was a moment of rupture. I’m feeling like I want to step back from that experience in that classroom where you are trying to set up a classroom that models full participation, and in the process, you’re actually making it more difficult for me to participate. This is one example. This happens over and over again with many of the people that I work with who’ve tried to do something that would be in the spirit of increasing the participation of members of different groups. You can pick one direction or the other, and it prompts this reaction of deer in headlights. You’ve tried really hard, and in fact, you’ve prompted the opposite reaction to the one that you expect and that you think you deserve. And so for me, and for so many of the people that I’ve seen really build atmospheres and cultures of full participation, that is a really important moment.

Sometimes, it’s important to say, “Wow, this is really difficult. I want to just process this and be able to talk about this with you in a constructive way. Can we talk again tomorrow?” Or sometimes it’s really important you have the perspective and the muscle memory to say, “Ah, here we are. This is a really important moment”. And what was really important in that moment is to say there’s something that we can both learn from this. So let me try to understand where you’re coming from and what your needs are, and for you to try to understand what’s happening here and are you willing, what are your needs in this situation, what are your interests. Are you willing for us to be able to use this moment of rupture as actually an opportunity for us to learn? How can we expand the circle? How can we build this into a classroom that will reach more people and where people who feel that they are not being able to fully participate will be able to do what you just did, which took a lot of bravery to come to me and tell me about this so that we can actually respond. And that moment of potential rupture became a moment of real transformation.

And just to say, I’ve had the opposite experience. This was many years ago when I was teaching at the University of Pennsylvania, where there was a small group of people who happened to all be white. They were conservative and they were the subject of a complaint by a whole group of students who were complaining about the fact that these students were making snide remarks under their breath. Anytime someone spoke they were rolling their eyes. They were sending texts back and forth to each other that were demeaning others people in the class. They were making it really difficult for other people to feel like they could speak openly in the class. And these students asked me if I would take action to discipline these students. And so the first thing that I did was I emailed these students and asked them if they would come speak with me. I said to them, ” I’ve gotten these, and I’ve noticed also that you seem both disengaged and also highly critical. Can you just tell me what’s going on for you? Can you explain to me or help me understand what is going on? Because something must have triggered this kind of response”. And they talked about the fact that they were feeling deeply unsafe and criticized in the class. They felt they couldn’t speak without feeling that their views were going to be undermined and demeaned and that no one had said, no one had ever reached out to them to give them an opportunity to express what was going on and to problem solve about what could be done about this. And so this became the focus of how we had to learn how to create a different kind of learning environment.

And these students really shifted gears after that. Became much more active participants, and it became one of the more transformative class experiences that I think any of the students had had and certainly that I have had. So, this was really important that these moments of rupture, where we experience criticism or failure or conflict as potentially breaking apart the class, breaking apart the institution, leading to sanction, can, under certain circumstances, become moments of learning.

Now, I don’t want to paper this over because there are times people can say or do things that really require something more dramatic to happen.

Drumm McNaughton: Yeah.

[00:27:17] Building Trust and Collaboration

Drumm McNaughton: Well, it’s interesting because it reminds me of setting up ground rules when facilitating a workshop. One of those ground rules that we always set up is respect. Be hard on the issues but soft on people. And we need to address issues without throwing darts at people. It sounds like in your creating an environment where people can learn from each other; you’re doing that very thing about respect.

Susan Sturm: And I would say that in a single workshop, those ground rules can be followed in a way that is more performative, a performance of respect, rather than actually coming to genuinely feel and think that you can learn from somebody who’s really different from you. So I think, and it’s very interesting with ground rules. I don’t know; I would guess, Drumm, that you’ve had this experience as well.

I think learning to make ground rules habits of practice rather than something that you say and then either perform or ignore is itself a culture change process. So, treating those ground rules, how do you actually hold people accountable without creating that rupture or kicking people out or celebrating people at other people’s expense? This is where you can only do that if you’ve come together in a way that says we cannot achieve our goals. Take the. Ithaca Police Department and Ithaca community that were not only at odds, but they were literally killing each other out of fear and out of different senses of violence.

At some point, some members of both communities, led in part by the then-mayor, said, “We have to figure out another way because this is not serving anyone,” and they could not agree on a lot. They agreed that they had to find a way they could continue to talk and listen and learn from each other even as they were in deep disagreement because otherwise, they were going to continue to experience literal violence at each other’s hands, and that required identifying some short term goals that they could come together around. Even as they were disagreeing over some of the larger things.

So this is something that higher ed leaders can really learn from. What are some short-term projects that we could identify these organizational catalysts around that will bring very different people together to work on something that they can agree on as a kind of predicate and to give them the capacity building to be able to do this with people who learn differently so that they can then come together around some of the harder issues with some track record.

We ask people to come into a very difficult conversation about something like race or, gender or, religion, or politics when they haven’t even learned how to decide what time should we meet in the morning in a way that will resolve that kind of conflict.

So, I think we need to build toward hard conversations by making it possible for the people who want and need to come together to learn how to work together. And I think we need to do a lot more to both celebrate and equip the people who know how to do this, these people I call organizational catalysts, with resources and recognition and opportunities to experiment as Freeman Robowski did, as Fisk Vanderbilt did in building this Pathways to PhD program, as Clark University did in building a relationship with the University Park Campus school and the local community. These are all examples of people who have done this in higher ed by starting small and thinking big over the long run.

Drumm McNaughton: Has DEI been looking at the wrong things?

Susan Sturm: Sometimes I would say yes. It’s hard. DEI has been now the label that’s put on many things that would not embrace the label of DEI. I think that some of the smaller tactics or small-scale experiments, such as implicit bias, that are important things for people to understand but have come to stand in for the much larger, more institutional, and structural work that needs to be done to change institutions. Also, we’ve thought, I call again, thinking about this as a set of paradoxes that we have to focus only on race, or we have to not focus on race at all. And the fact is, we need to do both of these things.

And I think when we think about DEI, we see both sides of that paradox rising. We see people who want to hold onto the necessity of talking about race and, gender, and sexuality to say, “we need to talk about that 24/7 and only that”. And we see people who want to shut down that work saying, “we can never talk about race. We can never talk about gender. We can never talk about issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion”.

I think what we really need to learn to do is to do both of these inconsistent things at the same time. We need to figure out how to meet people where they are so that if we’re not going to get everyone in the room if we lead with race, we need to lead with something like what Fisk Vanderbilt did, which is to say, “how are we going to get people who have not been participating in the sciences to participate in the sciences”? That’s a goal that everyone can come together around, and they brought together Fisk, a predominantly black, historically black college and university, with Vanderbilt. They called each other resource-rich and resourceful.

Then they came together around increasing participation in the STEM fields, but they also learned when they had to talk about race because if they didn’t, they weren’t going to be able to support people who were not experiencing a predominantly white institution as adequately welcoming.

So, by both talking about race and talking about what will make this an environment where people from all different backgrounds can succeed in the STEM fields, they were able to do both, not always at exactly the same moment, not always in the first instance in the same way. And that’s what we have to learn to do.

So I think we need more nuanced and complex projects that allow us not to get stuck on the language but to really be leading with the values and the goals and then to adapt the way we speak about it and what we prioritize to meet what we need to bring everyone into the room that needs to be part of the conversation in order to enable our goals to be met.

Drumm McNaughton: I think what I’m hearing you say is we need to take the long view versus being reactive. American culture looks for quick fixes. There is no quick fix for this. Understanding what the strategic view is where is it we’re going.

When we do Shared Governance projects, when something is broken, like one institution, the trust was just irrevocably broken. We get them working on projects to get them to be able to start to trust one another. You can’t just put it all behind and say, “We’ve already litigated this. We’re not going to litigate it again”. Guess what, folks? Unless you come to the table willing to discuss. To, as we said in the conversation earlier, come in with humility. Be willing to apologize. You know, we didn’t know, et cetera. You’re not going to get where you need to go.

Susan Sturm: Exactly, and I think trust can be built. My colleague, Chuck Sable, talks about this idea of studied trust. That you learn to trust step by step by step. It’s one of those contradictions. To build trust, you have to be willing to be vulnerable. To be vulnerable, you have to trust. So what do you do when you’re faced, over and over again, you’re faced with these contradictions, and so I think you need to find some small way to leap over that paradoxical divide to say, “I’m going to take a manageable risk here” and the manageable risk, of let’s say, being in this collaboration with something that we could walk away from if we need to and let’s try this experiment around working on a workshop together that will bring our constituencies together or some kind of course, or we’re doing a teach-in now at Columbia about how do we hold on to the rule of law and what does democracy mean? Well, we bring together people who are willing to do one workshop or another and who learn through that process, can we work together? This is what we saw in this court system that I worked on, that there was a small project that was something like, can we work with the community on designing a workshop that would allow us to ask some questions about why we’re struggling to build trust in our community?

People were willing to come into that space. Did they trust each other? No. But they had enough trust to say, “No one’s going to use this against me if it fails.” And we will build in accountability as we go so that the accountability is not where you make mistakes, but we’ve all agreed that we’re not going to use this against each other, and then we would be able to move forward. And then that created the platform for the next. And it builds a whole new set of organizational catalysts who were willing to do this in yet another space.

Drumm McNaughton: One builds on the next, builds on the Exactly. You can’t sweep it under the rug, as the saying goes; you’ve got to deal with it.

Susan Sturm: And I just want to say, I think it’s also really important to build some joy. I call this joyful struggle and, really, I would say, the most rewarding work that I have ever done. The things that make me feel like when I look back on my life, I will feel a sense of fulfillment, there are things that have come outta these kinds of struggles when at the moment I thought, “I gotta get outta here. You know, this is really too hard”. But then somehow I, and the people working with, and I’ve seen this over and over again, whether it’s the liberal arts diversity officers group, or whether it is these other experiments, that these become the most fun, the most joyful, didn’t seem like that was ever possible, and I myself was transformed along with the others with me, by being willing to open myself up in these ways, to be vulnerable in these ways, and then I can learn so much. Including from my students.

Drumm McNaughton: Yeah. Which goes back to the initial premise and the initial part of our conversation. We’re here to learn.

Susan Sturm: If we could all adopt that mindset that we’re here to learn, and if we learn, we will be able to take the next step. We’re never going to get there because that is the nature of the world we’ve always lived in. It’s always imperfect, but we can move toward it. And if we could adopt that mindset and really invest in each other in those ways and create an environment that really rewards and values people who do that, I think we could get out of the state we’re in.

And I just want to say we cannot not do that just because we’re under attack. But we have to be building these democratic practices even when we’re under siege, ’cause otherwise, we’re going to forget how to do it, and we’re not going to have the constituencies that will make it possible.

Drumm McNaughton: Amen. Susan, thank you so much.

[00:40:32] Final Thoughts and Takeaways

Drumm McNaughton: Three takeaways for presidents and boards. What can they do at their institutions to get past this?

Susan Sturm: Help people know when they’re in a paradox as opposed to an irreconcilable conflict that leads to rupture. So building the capacity, the vocabulary around these paradoxes, and I’m happy to help, anyone who would like to, I’m happy to help, and treating then mistakes as inevitable part of those paradoxes.

A second really important thing to know is that to resolve these paradoxes, you can’t do but to hold them; you need organizational catalysts. Invest in building and, identifying and supporting organizational catalysts who can build across these divides and give them the resources to experiment at the local level and to connect each other across these different experiments so that they will then be able to have impact. Not only at the institutional level but at the cross-institutional level because institutions have to learn with and from each other.

And then build the architecture for understanding linked fate. Find the ways in which the sciences connect to the social sciences. The people who care about race the people who care about gender connect to each other and how we’re all in this together. If we don’t hold onto democratic governance in higher education, we will all go down. If we don’t hold onto how we’re going to deal over the long run with gross inequality, we will all go down.

That is something we have to learn how to do, and so that is a really important practice that needs investment from the very highest levels of organizations of higher education so that the work can be done at the local level where it has to happen.

Drumm McNaughton: Thank you. Those are great takeaways.

[00:42:27] Conclusion and Farewell

Drumm McNaughton: What’s next for you? When’s the next book coming out?

Susan Sturm: Well, I will say, part of what’s next for me is to help build these networks within and across higher education institutions that want to do this work. Including by gathering and writing oral histories of people who are building multiracial learning communities. And so, I would just welcome anyone who is interest in that to please reach out because I think a lot of that is already happening, and I would love to be able to build on and support that work.

And my next big project is how do we build the architecture of justice? What does that actually look like, and how do higher education institutions fit into that picture? I think they’re critical sites for collaborating with justice institutions to build something that I think is so critical for the continued future of our democracy.

Drumm McNaughton: Very good. Well, Susan, thank you so much for being a guest on the show. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed our conversation; I look forward to the next time our paths cross.

Susan Sturm: Thank you. You’re such a wonderful host and such a wonderful and curious interlocutor, and I really appreciate the conversation.

Drumm McNaughton: Thank you. I’m going to quote you on that if that’s okay. Take care. Again, thank

Susan Sturm: Thank you.

Drumm McNaughton: Thanks for listening today, and a special thank you to my special guest, Professor Susan Stern from Columbia University’s Law School. Susan, thanks for being on the show. I look forward to the next time we get a chance to cross paths and have a great conversation like we did today.

To my listeners, thanks again for listening; see you next week.