Shadowing Practice: The Future of Higher Education - Learn English Speaking with Video

Hello and good evening.

I'm Josh Brumberg, president of the CUNY Graduate Center, and it's my pleasure to welcome you to tonight's timely discussion of the future of higher education.

And yes, it does have a future.

We are honored to host this event at such a pivotal moment.

Higher education faces pressures few of us could have imagined even months ago when this event was first planned.

That's why it's so important to bring together experienced leaders and proven innovators to help envision a pathway forward.

The Graduate Center is a fitting venue for a conversation of this step.

Founded over 60 years ago, we are the only research-intensive public graduate school in New York City.

We are proud to be one of the 25 campuses of the City University of New York, the nation's largest urban public university.

We offer most of the doctoral degrees within the City University system, 31 in total in the alphabetical app in the academic alphabet

of biochemistry to urban education with 18 master's degrees from astrophysics to women and gender studies.

Our graduate students annually teach over a hundred and twenty thousand CUNY undergraduates bringing the latest from their seminars and laboratories

directly to the classrooms.

Through public programs such as the one you will experience tonight, we take pride in sharing the latest results, advances, and ideas of our faculty,

staff, and students with the public that supports us and that we are embedded within.

The Graduate Center is the proud home of the Futures Initiative, which we'll be celebrating tonight.

For just over a decade, the initiative has been a leader in advancing equity and innovation in research, teaching, and in public service in higher education.

Tonight we're not only hosting a thought-provoking conversation,

we're also celebrating the 10th anniversary of the Futures Initiative and the remarkable accomplishments and vision of its founder,

distinguished professor Kathy Davidson.

I'm proud to celebrate the enormous contributions that Kathy has made to our university and to higher education in our country.

Thank you Kathy for your vision, your passion, and for all the work that you

and your colleagues at the Future Initiative have done to advocate for greater equity and propel changes in higher education.

Kathy as you may know is preparing to retire from her CUNY roles

which has been many including as a special advisor to the Chancellor on transformation these past few years.

She has truly left her mark.

Congratulations also to incoming director of the Futures Initiative, Professor Shelley Eversley.

And somewhere in the crowd, Executive Director Adashima Oyo.

and special thanks to the diverse community of doctoral students postgraduate researchers faculty

and most of all the students who have been part of the futures initiatives mission of breaking down educational social

and economic barriers and promoting investment in higher education as a of public good.

That is what this year's anniversary events have all been about, conversations about the future of learning, of research, of the planet,

and tonight's culminating panel on the future of higher education.

Nobody ever accused the Futures Initiative of thinking small.

I will leave the introductions to Shelley, but I do want to welcome our distinguished visiting panelists,

Shelley Lowe, Maurice Wallace, welcome home one of my predecessors Bill Kelly

and thanks to my colleague Nancy Cantor for all participating tonight.

I'm looking forward to what I'm sure will be a critical

and provocative discussion of the way forward at a time

when all of us in higher education are facing so many challenges and newfound threats to our mission.

It's my honor to turn things over to Shelly.

Good evening, everyone.

It is really great to be here.

And thank you, President Brumberg, and thank you to the Futures Initiative team,

the fellows, the staff, Executive Director,

Dr. Adashima Oyo, for all of this behind-the-scenes work that put this together.

I'd like to say hello to everyone who's logged in logged

in we have over 500 rsbps who are watching this streaming this now

and we're going to get started it's really wonderful to be

here with you all right now you can see their titles here

these distinguished leaders and we will get right into it with president nancy canter with with the incredible Kathy,

I was going to say F Davidson, Kathy N Davidson.

William E.

Kelly, he lets me call him Bill now.

Shelly Lowe and Maurice Wallace.

Thank you so much for coming today.

To the members of the audience, please note that you should have received some cards, cards, note cards and maybe a pencil.

We will accept your questions so please write down your questions as they come to you

and somewhere as we proceed ushers will collect them.

And if you could, especially all of you with PhDs, you know who you are, please write neatly.

You can use all caps because I have to read your questions.

So thank you for that and we will just jump right in.

I have notes.

None of us needs to be reminded of course about the extreme pressures facing higher education today not only

because of the defunding of public education

that was really moving in full force since the 1980s

but also within the last few months the defunding of public institutions like the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Science of Foundation,

National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, plus libraries, museums, cultural and historical centers all across the United States.

While some of these institutions have powerfully and collectively responded to these pressures,

others have capitulated in a way that is shameful for anyone who's thinking about higher education for the public good.

We know this.

We all know this and one of the reasons why we're here in this room is

because we are well aware of the pressures facing us today.

And so what we thought we'd do with the Futures Initiative is thinking about the future.

Thinking about the ways that we can build and grow and create a future.

So let's use this time, this conversation today to model a way forward.

And here I'm thinking of something Shelley Lo said to me earlier today to think about the endurances, to think about the future,

not just for us, but for the people who will be around when we're gone, for the people 30 years from now,

50 years from now, what will we do today that will help ensure opportunities for the public good,

for learning, thinking critically, for the arts, for science, for research?

What are we going to do today that will inspire

and help the future endure in a way that we are so deeply committed?

We have such an incredible brain chest with us today with these incredibly distinguished institutional leaders, people who have committed their careers,

their intellects, all of their powerful minds to public higher education and higher education in general.

And so let's use their minds and when you're thinking about this, let's take this opportunity to get into it so we can build

and create something that will make us all really, really proud.

So this is my first question for everyone.

And that is, we all know there has been a longstanding hostility towards arts and the humanities.

And now, the sciences from climate change to vaccines are the brunt of this critique.

Why?

How?

What are some of the ways

that all of the disciplines can work together to defend and fight for the importance of knowledge, research, and critical understanding?

I'm also here thinking about institutions like the National Endowment for the Humanities.

What are we gonna do?

NIH, NEA.

So here's the question.

What are some of the ways that all the disciplines can work together to defend and fight for the importance of knowledge, research, and critical understanding.

I'm thinking about this too

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because the Futures Initiative has had for the past 10 years a series of public lectures called the University Worth Fighting For.

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And so another way to think about this question is, what is the university that we are fighting for?

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I will start with you, President Cantor.

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Thank you so much.

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Thank you for having me here today.

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So I think the first thing we have to do is step back and say,

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who are we working with when we think about the sciences, the arts, and humanities?

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We need to be working with people on the ground in our communities to make it clear

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that in fact the arts and humanities are critical to human health,

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to well-being, to the success of their children, to the ability of people to thrive.

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That's all very good and general.

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But when you get on the ground, for example, I always point to the Humanities Action Lab.

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They take students and faculty and storytellers through the communities to talk about climates of inequality,

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to do science on the ground, to think about how flood resistance is going to be so critical in New York City.

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We have phenomenal car C mappings at Hunter.

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They need to be out with the people.

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We need to create a two-way street, what I like to call a community of experts with and without pedigree,

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who really co-produce those solutions.

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When you go out on the ground in community, nobody thinks higher ed is some thing you could get rid of.

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This whole notion that the public doesn't like higher ed, nobody's talking to the public.

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Kathy?

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I recently heard an interview with the head of Uber who said that he learned two things in college, how to be a good business person and how to tell stories.

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And I thought that was fascinating because I think one of the things

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that we have to do in higher education is really work on our storytelling

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and needless to say we've got an audience of here who is here because they're interested in higher ed.

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So we all have to tell that story.

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But I agree with you completely.

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When people talk about how there's people have lost faith in higher ed, they're rarely talking about their own children, right?

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They're working very, very hard to make sure their own kids are going to college.

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And we know, we have all the statistics, salary improves, health outcomes improved,

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marital status improves, colon cancer.

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I mean there are all of these things people have correlated with living a healthier lifestyle, being fortunate enough to have a job that you care about.

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Our students at CUNY don't have to be told about the importance of higher education.

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They're often the people, our students are often the people from their family who are the first person to go to college.

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And they're often supporting not only themselves while they're going to college, but helping their families be supported.

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They're the most optimistic and positive people I know when it comes to higher education.

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I think we need to send our students out into the world to talk about not only the importance of higher education, but how things are related.

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I can't think of any important issue that isn't some combination of technology, concerns, about technology, privacy, surveillance,

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concern about how you'd portray that, that storytelling, art, all of those things, and the science of it.

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Those are all connected in life.

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And in fact, it's school that sets those into subjects.

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It's life.

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It is how we live our lives.

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And we can tell that story, and we need to tell that story passionately, and over and over again.

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Thank you, Kathy.

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Thinking about this, the people, Nancy, the idea that we learn inside outside of the classroom,

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and Kathy, the idea that storytelling is as important as science.

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And I'm thinking about this in terms of the university we're fighting for, and I'm looking at you, Bill Kelly, I get to call him Bill.

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I'm thinking about, I know everyone calls him Bill, but I feel very special nonetheless.

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I'm thinking about you, Bill Kelly, having served as the president of the university and also director of a research library.

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What is it that we're fighting for?

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Yeah, that's a great question, Shelley, and I'll build on both Nancy and, excuse me, Kathy's responses.

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Perhaps a somewhat darker tone, but building on what they had to say this is a

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kind of rechercher le temps perdu evening for me 25 years ago i mean it's horrifying to think

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that on this stage i had a public conversation with jim duder stat one of

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predecessors a good friend of many of us on on the

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stage jim had recently retired after a a distinguished career at the University of Michigan

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and he was involved in the millennial project that Vartan Gregorian was writing

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and he was talking about yep you guessed it the future of public higher education

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and he and I talked for about an hour and a half

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that evening it was a remarkable conversation and I asked him some version of the question Shelley just asked us I mean, what is, what are we defending?

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What is the nature of the university?

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What are the biggest challenges?

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What would you change after your long and distinguished career?

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And Jim immediately said, look,

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I would like to rebuild the relationship between the University of Michigan or all public universities and the funding constituencies.

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By that he meant taxpayers in the state of Michigan.

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He felt that that connection, which had been born in 1862 with the Morrell Act and the land grant had been severed to some extent.

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And that what Jim said was that everything we wanna do

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and all of the challenges we want to meet depend upon allies.

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Allies who understand the importance of what we do, of what our contributions to their lives, to their children's lives.

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And then he ticked off a lot of problems under the general subsuming category of demography is destiny.

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And he talked about aging populations, particularly in the upper Midwest.

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He talked about demands for tax relief,

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for security, for housing, for fear about social security disappearance, social safety nets.

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He said, how do we persuade them, because many of them are aging and their children are not in college at this point, how do we persuade them of how important

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University of Michigan is and why they should support it beyond the question of football teams.

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And what he said was, it's very simple, we need to make ourselves indispensable.

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And for me, that has been the kind of North Star in what I've done, worked, the work that I've been fortunate enough to do at CUNY,

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at the New York Public Library, at the Guggenheim Foundation, whatever, that for people to care, they have to see you as indispensable in their lives.

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And that is the challenge that we confront sometimes easier sometimes easier varied on discipline

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but it's a challenge for all of us thanks bill hi Shelley hi Shelley

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this has been a fun day it has you want me

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to answer the same question well I I I can actually refine this question especially as I'm looking at you

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and Maurice Wallace.

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Hi Maurice.

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Call me Maurice, yes.

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And I was thinking about something that Bill just said.

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And Bill just said allies.

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And there's this great book by Jody Dean called Comrade.

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I don't know if anyone's ever read it.

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I think she's a political scientist or a political theorist.

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And in her book, Comrade, she makes this distinction between allies and comrades.

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And she argues that, I hope I don't mangle this and I'm certainly simplifying this,

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but she argues that allies kind of stick with you when it's convenient and comfortable.

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And then comrades hang with you when it's hard and they fight with you when it's necessary.

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And they're willing to risk with you because you're their comrade, not just an ally, an easy friend.

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And I wonder when we're thinking about universities worth fighting for, institutions worth fighting for, and I know you're fighting for something.

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Not defending, but fighting for something if we're thinking about the future.

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How do you think about this distinction between allies and comrades?

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And most importantly, here's my question.

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Do you think, they told me by the way, everyone in this room, we had a pre-meeting and I said, is there anything I'm not supposed to ask?

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Am I supposed to be gentle?

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And they all said, no, ask us anything.

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So here I go.

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Do you think there's a crisis of confidence or a crisis of,

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better word, courage for institutional leaders today so that they're maybe showing themselves to be allies and not comrades?

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Or do you think that we have comrades and if we do, where do we find them and how do we fight with them?

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You want to go first?

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Shall we be allies or comrades?

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Okay, we'll be comrades.

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So as comrades, you know, one of the things I'd have to come back

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and say first is we talk to our allies differently than we talk to our comrades, right?

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We use different language very often, different words.

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We might joke differently with a comrade than we will with an ally.

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And that means we're not quite sharing all of the information with our allies the way

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that we will with a comrade to make them be on our side, right?

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And to really support the work that we're trying to do.

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And I think that it's going to come down very often to communication.

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So I have agreed with everything that's been said so far.

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We have a problem communicating to the public about what is happening.

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And is that about courage?

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Is that about saying I'm not standing up for what's happening?

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Or is it about just not having the ability and the knowledge to be able to do it?

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So I think we often have to think this is an all-hands-on-deck moment, especially in higher education.

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Do not think that this is not that moment.

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It is that moment.

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Everybody needs to be talking to each other.

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Everybody needs to be making comrades with each other because we have to move forward in this together.

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And when we move forward in this together, we have to have the public on our side.

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When someone says NEH has cut funding to over 1,000 grants, right, a number of them in higher education institutions, what does the public think?

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They have no idea what those grants are.

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They don't know what that money went for.

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They don't know how that impacts them.

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Why is that?

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That's our fault.

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We haven't told them, we haven't shown them what that work is

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and how important it is and how it affects them in their everyday lives.

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We are not treating them as either allies or comrades.

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And I think that that's one of the things that we always have to be thinking about.

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What does the public know about what we do and about the impacts of this?

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So do I think that it's a lack of courage?

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I think that I'll go back to endurance, Shelley.

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Sometimes endurance means thinking about the long road and how long it's going to take to get there.

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And you're going to have to go slow

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and you're going to have to go easy to make sure you can get there.

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And sometimes you really have to step it up.

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You have to jump over whatever hurdle that is and you have to be as loud about it as possible.

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But I think we all have to assess for ourselves within your institution, within your communities, within your state at what point are you at

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and where can you do the best thinking about endurance as the long run, right?

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Thanks.

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Thank you, comrade. That was marvelous.

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I don't know that I can say it any better.

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I might add, however, that in my own imagination,

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one of the distinctions between the ally and the comrade is that the comrade signs up to be accountable.

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And accountability, I think, is a thing that we just don't always expect from an ally.

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An ally might well be an affective relationship, but when the going gets tough,

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right, You don't want to have to look for your help.

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The comrade is already there.

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The comrade is called to this labor in the same way that we're all called to this labor.

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And I guess I also want to say that it may be

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that we have not been comrade enough to the communities we have so we seem to have trouble engaging.

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And it's not just the university itself, but the university has, I think,

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a responsibility to understand that the community is not them out there,

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but the institution is also a part of the community and the community is also a part of the institution.

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I mean, the staff, the faculty, the leadership that makes the university go,

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we don't live our lives entirely in a kind of academic vacuum,

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nor do any of the people who labor diligently at a university.

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So I want to try to imagine what it looks like

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for a university to talk about us and not mean only those who have,

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who occupy space on a campus.

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I want to know what it looks like for an institution to refer to us and have in mind

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not only academic leaders, academic workers, academic laborers, and support staff,

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but to think about a broader audience,

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the audience that a public lecture should invite.

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And I hope that this institution continues to offer the annual public lecture

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and be very serious about what it means to invite audiences to a public lecture

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and make it easy enough for that public to attend those lectures,

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to advertise public lectures in such a way that the public is interested in in and engages,

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maybe not even just interested in,

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but uses platforms where that public finds itself,

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where the public sphere is talking.

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Yeah, and I guess the last thing I'll say, because I know we're supposed to be short here, and it's sometimes hard for me.

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I want to suggest that that Bill, if I may, is...

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He's my friend, you can call him Bill.

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Okay, okay.

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Thanks Bill.

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I think he's absolutely right to say that the university has to demonstrate that it is indispensable,

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but I want to suggest that academic workers have to also demonstrate demonstrate how we can be irresistible.

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There's a certain passion, a certain power,

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a certain energy, a certain force that Kathy Davidson modeled for me many,

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many moons ago now.

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I was her student at one point.

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And tonight, just in her comments, she reminded me by the content of them, by her manner, by her thoughtfulness,

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of how excited and enthusiastic her modeling of an academic life,

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the life of the mind, how inspiring it was for me.

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And I just wanna offer that her model is something I'm always trying to pay forward

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to my students and to the community that exceeds the campus wherever I have an opportunity to engage them.

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So thank you, Kathy.

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Thanks, Kathy.

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To just say one personal comment really quick.

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I look out and I see former students, former colleagues, current colleagues, current students, family who've come from all different parts of the United States to be here.

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It's extremely moving and I'm gonna now stop that, because I got a show to put on.

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Maurice, I wanted to pick up on your point about how we're part of the community.

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And I wanna refer to a class that Bill and I co-taught in 2015 called the Future of Higher Education, where we chose 15 students.

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They had to be in 15 disciplines from computer science to art.

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They were all graduate students, and the other requirement is they had to that semester be teaching an undergraduate class at one of the CUNY undergraduate campuses.

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And we would, the first day of class we walked and we said, hi, I'm Kathy Davidson, I'm Bill Kelly, we're gonna leave now, you're gonna make a class for us.

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We're coming back in 45 minutes and you 15 people from 15 fields who have never met each other before, all graduate students are gonna design a class.

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They were like, what?

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We went away.

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We came back after 45 minutes and the students were like, go away, go away.

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We're not through yet.

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And they had designed a class.

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But one of the things we did is each week somebody would have some new educational experiment

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that we would all read the theory about.

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And that week, they would go try it out on their undergraduates and get feedback from their undergraduates.

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We also put on an insane project at the end where every one of the undergraduates brought family

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from all of the schools to the Graduate Center, and we had a showcase of work done by the undergraduates.

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And a project I'll never forget, and this goes to your point, was one of our students was teaching at Brooklyn College,

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and there was a Kehinde Wiley exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum of Art

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and she said that she would give an A to any students

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that could find five students of her unique students at Brooklyn

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College find five students five people who had never been to a museum

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and bring them to the museum Brooklyn Museum of Art let

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everybody come in free these students put up placards all over Brooklyn in Korean,

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in Japanese, in Mandarin, in Spanish, in Russian, and said we, these students, are going to be your docents.

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And these students were docents for these community members who came by the hundreds.

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And of course the most wonderful students who were there were the grannies who felt

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so proud that their grandchildren were taking them on tours of the Brooklyn Museum of Art.

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It was amazing and that was one of the most remarkable experiences.

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It surely was and it goes to the point that I continue to make in these difficult times.

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The work needs to become visible.

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I mean we all understand the value of the work but the work needs to be visible.

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Cathy's example is a good one.

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There are a hundred others that I'm sure each of you can think about

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but it's not sufficient just to do the work.

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It's essential to also make it visible to your point about comrades.

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Can I take that one step further?

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I believe we have to create what I call third spaces.

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Spaces that are not owned by us or owned by the community.

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Spaces where we create together.

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In Newark we created what we called Express Newark,

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50,000 square feet in downtown Newark of a university community arts collaboratory for storytelling, for the newest Americans.

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That kind of thing is revolutionary for getting out the word of what we really are.

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So it's not just a sort of one and done, we have a grant, we're going in.

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It's a constant co-creation in the community.

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Which we have not done a terrific job in doing.

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But universities can be anchor institutions.

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are in and of our community if we take that seriously.

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And we have to take it seriously.

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This morning I got an email from the president of Princeton University, not a place noted for its history of social activism,

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but I'm Bill by the way.

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The subject line was stand up for Princeton and in decades I had never heard any such thing from that university.

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And instead this was a list of representatives, of senators, of consul people.

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This is why endowments shouldn't be taxed.

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This is why tax exemption status should be preserved.

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You know, bullet points very beautifully done and the argument was

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that every week this newsletter would appear in my mailbox and you know, a very different institution than what we're talking about.

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But the point I think is valid.

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Constantly, not just randomly at a lecture, but constantly reminding what the value is in building this allyship that Nancy was just talking about.

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You know, on that note, two things.

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One, big shout out to the Graduate Center's public programs.

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They do this all the time.

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We do this all the time and thank you all for coming

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and for staying on their mailing lists and for reaching out

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and making time in your day to be part of this conversation.

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I'll also remind you

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that you can write your questions down on a note card as neatly as possible

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and ushers will collect them and so you can get in on this conversation.

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Yeah so getting back to it you know I've got this list

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and I kind of feel like the graduate students in this room

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and the faculty people in this room

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or the people who are aspiring to be be faculty people in this room have a burning question about academic freedom.

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So I'm just gonna ask it now before we get we get caught up

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because there's all kinds of directions I could go

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and thinking about what we're what you were saying before I love the idea of connecting with the communities

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and and it could have pivoted this to say black and Latinx studies for instance ethnic studies,

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women's studies, gender studies, that have a real kind of commitment to community engagement,

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community engaged teaching and learning as part of the praxis of those.

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And so we'll come back.

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I'm going to circle back to that question.

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But for now, because we still have time-ish, I wanted to ask the big question about academic freedom,

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which has always defined higher education.

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It is so essential to critical thinking and to the creation of new knowledges.

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How are you thinking about academic freedom right now?

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And what is your advice for us as we see it under threat?

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Go ahead, President Cantor.

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Well, we can go down the line.

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You all don't have to answer, but- Under threat, that was the point.

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Yes.

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So yeah, do you have any advice for us?

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How do we protect it?

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How will we help it endure for the future?

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How are you thinking about it?

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What's your advice to the person, say, like me, who's on the schedule next semester to teach critical race theory?

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I teach climate justice.

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I teach all the words that are now bad words.

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And I write all the things that, you know, as soon as my book comes out, could get banned.

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So I want to begin and end perhaps by saying what I think it's not.

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What I can't stand honestly is this whole notion of institutional neutrality.

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And I think that is completely contradictory to academic freedom.

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What is academic freedom?

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It's our ability to have the whole diasporic world at our table.

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It's our ability to take a critical lens to those issues.

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We can't pretend, certainly at CUNY,

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we can't pretend that those global issues that are resting with our homes,

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with our students, with our communities, with our faculty and staff are things that we can be neutral about.

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Now having said that, what I also don't like is when we jump immediately to this intellectual

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diversity or balance so that we can't talk about,

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we can't take a critical lens to settler colonialism

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or apartheid or genocide because we're not bringing the balance to the table.

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I'm just getting out there, I'll probably be fired for this, but so be it.

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Thank you, comrade.

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Yeah, right.

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Comrades.

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I don't know.

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But I really, I mean,

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I'll stop, but I really do feel passionately about the fact that we get drawn into this cycle of saying,

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if we have this perspective we're analyzing, we have to have the opposite perspective for analyzing.

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That's not the way you do interrogation of ideas.

421

You don't do that by saying, well, that could be true, but this could be true.

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You interrogate an idea.

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And that's what the core of academic freedom has always been about, a critical lens.

424

It's what Bilboa...I'm sorry Nancy.

425

No please, I'll be quiet.

426

Just quickly, the distinction that Nancy is

427

so correctly drawing was described again I seem to be the village Grigio recalling ancient history, but it was...

428

Better you than me.

429

Your turn next.

430

But he described that distinction as a difference between institutional neutrality and institutional restraint.

431

That the institution had an obligation to create a platform for discourse and judgment,

432

but it couldn't simply abandon its responsibility to do the kind of interrogation you're talking about.

433

I mean, we do have a responsibility to create safe spaces for that interrogation.

434

That's your job.

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And that's really hard, and we have to face it, that that's really hard.

436

But that doesn't mean we run away from it by being neutral.

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No, or on something like academic freedom, which is absolutely an existential issue for universities.

438

It's not simply enough to say we're providing a platform.

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We are providing an opportunity to speak to the core values of the institution.

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Exactly.

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Maurice?

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I have been thinking about this and in the context

443

of the pursuit of knowledge in black studies that I'm so much a part of these days.

444

And I was reminded, or reminded myself, that one of the most curious representations

445

or invocations of academic freedom is in Martin Luther King Jr.'s Letter from a Birmingham Jail.

446

He uses that phrase, academic freedom, And it seems almost to come from nowhere,

447

except he references academic freedom in the context of civil disobedience.

448

And he understands Socrates to have exercised civil disobedience to help realize the idea of academic freedom.

449

And so I wanna imagine that what academic freedom might look like,

450

feel like, seem like under the present circumstances is a practice of civil disobedience

451

which also means that it costs or could cost.

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And I think if there is advice to be given it is the sobering advice that comrades know,

453

allies may not know, and that is academic freedom, the insistence upon academic freedom,

454

the practice of academic freedom may cost us something.

455

And the question is will we still stand?

456

Which is both advice and a challenge to us all I think.

457

And it's about endurance right and I'm gonna go to thank you comrade.

458

I want to ask when did we have academic freedom at its highest

459

and most open and supported era right when did we see

460

that when did we feel that when did you feel like in universities that that was supported and you could do it.

461

Right, so then I go back to something one of my colleagues says constantly, elections have consequences.

462

Right, if we really want academic freedom, if we wanna support academic freedom and the ability to really critique something and to have these open conversations,

463

what are we doing to ensure that we are making democracy front and center,

464

that we know that we are supporting voting, that we know that we are informing the public about how this plays a role,

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how everything intertwines together.

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I mean, Kathy and I were on the National Council for the Humanities together.

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You know, I started under Obama, she was on already, and then she left me under Trump.

468

But we could see the shift in how you could do and fund research in universities between who's elected.

469

So we have to really ask ourselves, when does it look good and how do we ensure

470

that we kind of try to get to that point to make it look good again or make it accessible again, support it again.

471

And to just drive home the point that we've been making, and then I'm going to turn it and talk about something optimistic

472

but the negative part is when you have people denying the science of vaccines,

473

the science of epidemiology, books being banned, slavery not allowed in textbooks in many states.

474

One of our colleagues from one of the Midwestern states, I'm a Chicagoan, no slur intended here,

475

has a list of words that she can be fired for if she uses, and those words include things like social justice.

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Woman, but not, feminist or female or woman, but not man.

477

Black in certain situations.

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I mean, that's not, those are not neutral issues.

479

I mean, if that's not academic freedom to say there are things

480

that are true and real and important and worth fighting for, then why bother having universities?

481

Why bother having education?

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My positive thing, and I don't know, is Leah Barlow here?

483

She was saying that she might be.

484

I don't think, I don't see her.

485

This is a woman who teaches at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College, one of the historically black colleges and universities.

486

She taught Introduction to African American Studies in the fall to 35 students

487

and thought she'd do something cool and put her syllabus up on TikTok.

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35 students, it was a great class.

489

She did the same thing on January 20th, 2025.

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Martin Luther King Day, Inauguration Day.

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She put her syllabus on, she gave a mini lecture, she left, she came back, and a million people had joined up for her class.

492

Suddenly, 18 other professors at historically black colleges said, I want to be part of this, too.

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My class is open for free.

494

They've banned black studies at universities.

495

They're saying slavery doesn't exist in my state.

496

It does exist.

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We're going to make this free to anybody who wants to.

498

Right now, not right now, that's the negative story.

499

4.5 million people signed up to these 18, there are advisors, there are counselors, they call themselves Hillman Talk University.

500

If anyone is old enough to remember a different world from the 80s, the Cosby kids all went to Hillman University.

501

So it's a totally made-up university that people are going to.

502

However, TikTok is proprietary in surveillance, and now they're shadow banning the professors who teach it.

503

So the numbers have gone way, way down because it's hard to even get to those.

504

But the idea that I'm trying to make is there are many ways to be resilient.

505

There are many ways to be comrades.

506

And there's many ways to say, no, no, no. We fight for truth and we fight for things that are real.

507

And we need to know those things.

508

And even if you try to take away our courses and our programs, we're going to find other ways of delivering those things.

509

And that, again, is about the public.

510

You know, to be part of Hillman Talk University, you just have to be on TikTok.

511

You don't have to have a university degree.

512

You don't have to pay tuition.

513

It's there and there are many I love it

514

that there are more and more things happening like

515

that all over the country I've heard the Columbia law Dean

516

who was fired is teaching her class on civil rights and law

517

as a free class out in parks around New York now and You know so there are ways to resist.

518

What was the word you use Shelley endure endure their ways to endure

519

And there are ways to still defend what the universities is is fighting for

520

I just kind of quickly underscore from what I hear Kathy saying is

521

that even under the constraints we are justified to lament and resist,

522

we also now have an opportunity, I think.

523

And I think what's essential for taking fullest advantage of the opportunity that we have, a kind of, you know,

524

not an opportunity we have looked for or desired, but an opportunity nonetheless, I think what might be necessary for us to do,

525

for us to take fullest advantage of it is just imagination.

526

That's what I hear Cathy talking about, a kind of institutional or institutionalized imagination

527

and understanding that perhaps

528

that might be one of our greatest forces for good in

529

this moment is the imagination to think beyond the constraints that are imposed upon us.

530

It's consistent with the history, as you know, of American public higher education in which crises were never wasted,

531

whether it was the Morrell Act during the Civil War, whether it was the challenge to Stanford University in 1900,

532

be it firing the economists who challenged Stanford's railroad policies,

533

all of these things generating other kinds of universities that Kathy has written about.

534

It has to do with the Second World War and Vannevar Bush and the NSF.

535

It has to do with the resounding response to McCarthyism.

536

These are darker times.

537

McCarthy was just a senator, not a president.

538

But in these times of crisis, as Maurice just said, resilience, endurance, and imagination come to the fore.

539

And if there is a silver lining, it is that this is an opportunity not to waste.

540

Yeah, and I do want to say quickly, Shelley, this is exactly what I said when they invited me to this panel.

541

And I was like, I'm so excited about this moment because we have the opportunity to change it.

542

And it's needed to be changed for a very long time.

543

And it's time that we speak up and we say, guess what?

544

We can do this now and let's do it, right?

545

Let's get together and let's figure this out and do it, change it.

546

Have big ideas, this is so great.

547

I'm really excited too.

548

I'm excited because one of the things that the Futures Initiative has got me about as innovation and equity,

549

advancing innovation and equity in higher ed.

550

And when we think about it in black studies, in women's studies, in gender studies, in humanities, in interdisciplinary studies,

551

we're always, and everyone in the room who's ever taught a class, right?

552

We're always thinking about the multiple ways that people learn.

553

We're always thinking about empowering and inspiring students.

554

And one of those ways of doing that is being adaptable.

555

So like Hillman talk, for instance, or the ways in which so many people are really thinking about the way

556

that they teach that centers their students and they use multiple modes, right?

557

It's not just about the textbook.

558

It's about the poem.

559

It's about the video.

560

It's about the song, the speech, the performance.

561

Then all of those things come together to connect with the community, as you were describing it first, Nancy.

562

And then when I'm thinking about black studies, connecting the communities.

563

And I say this because of course that's where I come from.

564

We have, I have the questions here, some questions from the audience.

565

And I think we have a little bit of time, so I'm gonna slip this one question in.

566

What happens when funding is tied to politics?

567

Do you think there's a way out?

568

Didn't mean to abruptly change it.

569

How about if I put this in context?

570

Of course, we're talking about this, we're talking about building, right?

571

And certainly a university like the City University of New York

572

always has to be agile because it's always dealing with a limited budget.

573

And there's a certain creativity and imagination.

574

You know, when I think about my ancestors who were slaves, enslaved, my ancestors.

575

You can see it all over my face.

576

This is the face of a person whose ancestors were enslaved.

577

And my ancestors had to imagine freedom before they could achieve it.

578

And one thing I love about the face that I carry, that I inherited from my ancestors,

579

is also to remember that we have to imagine that the impossible is possible.

580

And the only way we can achieve the impossible is with the imagination.

581

We have to think creatively, adaptively, and in a way that we see something that does not yet exist, if that makes sense to you.

582

We have to see freedom in our minds before we can imagine it in our reality, before we can create it in our reality.

583

And I think, like Shelley said, this is a moment when we make things, when we imagine and build something,

584

maybe from a ruin, maybe from an outdated system, maybe from the challenges that are in our contemporary moment.

585

We have to think big,

586

creatively with imagination and try to do something with it so that we can endure for the future.

587

Yes, go, go, go.

588

This is great.

589

And then I'm going to ask this question.

590

We also have to think collaboratively.

591

Yes.

592

Higher education has been a ridiculous competitive ecosystem.

593

Yes.

594

And that's a big problem now.

595

If funding is going to be tied to politics, we have to be tied to each other,

596

and we have to be doing things together.

597

We cannot be an isolated institution competing for that money that is tied to politics.

598

We have to have alliances, and that's what we're doing now.

599

I love it.

600

Collaboration.

601

I co-chair a national alliance of 590 presidents of universities on immigration and higher education.

602

None of us by ourselves can turn around what's happening to immigrant origin students, to international students, and to refugees.

603

We can't do it by ourselves.

604

We have to do it together.

605

And we can't be simply looking for funding from individual federal agencies that are turning us,

606

turning against it.

607

I love it.

608

Collaboration.

609

It's a model that all these people here are thinking about and one that I think is,

610

like you said, transformative, empowering, and that is going to be part of the endurances that we will need,

611

a tool for us to be able to work together and not compete, but work together.

612

That's great.

613

Thank you, Nancy.

614

You know, I think part of that collaboration, one of the things

615

that we kind of read to prepare for tonight was a message from the chancellor right

616

that was sent to everybody and and thinking about the difficulties

617

that we're facing right now particularly as higher education institutions

618

and you know he seems to take a step back

619

and he says well let's look at what our founding language

620

says right why were we created as an institution what is our mission what is our vision what is it

621

that we are trying to do

622

if you take the mission of institutions higher education institutions

623

and you really break it down a lot of them are

624

exactly the same right they're all trying to do the same thing

625

and we can come together and be collaborative

626

because we are trying to do the same things we are trying to have the same impact with the public and

627

when politics gets tied into funding get tied into accreditation into

628

what you are supposed to be doing you go back to your founding words

629

and you say no this is what we were created for

630

and this is what we are going to do

631

because this was created before you and politics came into play

632

or this came into play and we have to keep moving that forward

633

because how many institutions have changed their mission statements right you know we might update them a little bit

634

but right we stick to

635

that founding I call it our creation stories right we stick to

636

that knowledge and we move forward with

637

that Thank You Shelley some of my favorite thinkers

638

and institutional leaders and writers and dreamers always remind us that we have to believe that we can achieve the impossible.

639

And we've seen it.

640

And we're about to make history, to borrow Shelley Lowe's point.

641

We're about to use our imaginations, to borrow from your point, Maurice Wallace.

642

We're about to collaborate, to borrow from Nancy Cantor.

643

We are about to be responsive to all the ways we learn, including making collaborations.

644

Thank you, Bill.

645

Thinking about libraries and thinking about the ways that we can transform without even spending money.

646

And Kathy, thank you so much for inspiring.

647

I've worked with you you a lot in many different capacities and she always says to me your job is to inspire.

648

And so on that note I will say thank you Kathy, thank you Maurice, thank you Maurice Wallace,

649

thank you Shelley Lowe, thank you William Bill Kelly, thank you Nancy Cantor, Kathy F.

650

Davis.

651

I adore you.

652

And thank you all for coming today.

653

I hope you get home safely and that you think of yourselves as agents, historical agents, find your comrades, and let's get to work.

654

Thank you.

655

I realize I forgot to say thank you the Futures Initiative.

656

We're celebrating 10 years.

657

And there's a team that works very hard to organize this.

658

Thank you all.

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The Context: A Critical Conversation on Higher Education

The video captures a lively discussion about the future of higher education, set against the backdrop of a 10th-anniversary celebration for the Futures Initiative. Leaders and innovators gather to address pressing challenges, from equity gaps to new threats to academic missions. This real-world dialogue reflects the dynamic, collaborative nature of professional communication, making it an ideal resource for english speaking practice.

Useful Chunks & Collocations to Master

Native speakers often rely on fixed phrases to convey complex ideas efficiently. Here are 5 key chunks from the conversation:

"pivotal moment" – Describes a critical point of change (e.g., "We’re at a pivotal moment for education reform").
"pathway forward" – Refers to a clear plan for progress (e.g., "Leaders must collaborate to find a pathway forward").
"break down barriers" – Means to eliminate obstacles (e.g., "The initiative aims to break down social and economic barriers").
"left her mark" – Highlights lasting impact (e.g., "Her work on equity has left her mark on the field").
"thought-provoking discussion" – Describes a conversation that stimulates new ideas (e.g., "The panel led a thought-provoking discussion on innovation").

Your Shadowing Challenge: Mimic the Tone and Rhythm

The shadowing technique is a powerful way to improve fluency and pronunciation. Here’s how to practice with this video: 1. Play a 10-second clip of the opening remarks (e.g., President Brumberg’s welcome). 2. Pause and repeat the clip, mimicking the speaker’s intonation, pace, and stress (notice how "pivotal moment" is emphasized). 3. Use a shadowing app to record yourself and compare it to the original. Focus on matching the natural rhythm of phrases like "fitting venue" or "remarkable accomplishments." 4. Repeat with a 20-second clip of Shelley Eversley’s introduction, paying attention to how she connects ideas (e.g., "thank you to the Futures Initiative team, the fellows, the staff"). This exercise trains your brain to think in English and helps you adopt native-like shadowspeak patterns. Keep practicing daily to build confidence in real conversations!

Grammar in this video

The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:

Structure	In the video
Present perfect continuous have/has been + -ing — an action that started earlier and is still going on	have been thinking · we've been making
Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now	has been · has made · have done
Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it	are honored · are embedded · be reminded
Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing	students who have · people who will · people who have

What is the Shadowing Technique?

Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.

Shadowing technique: read the full step-by-step guide →

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Grammar in this video

What is the Shadowing Technique?