Douglas M. Haynes: DEI allows us to mobilize our research capacity for discovery innovation. A creativity to have a wider impact. So I think in some sense we have this institutional knowledge of the value of it. I think what has not grown sufficient, and this is particularly important and ha and in jump starting conversations that have stalled, is to.

Really ground DEI in terms of a research program for organizational change. And so that can operate typically operates at the high level. Right now, many academic leaders feel particularly tender because of the hostility, but I think they really risk losing a lot of credibility by forgetting. The DEI legacy in history, and I wanna add something more that in some sense, the future of higher education is completely dependent on DEI.

Keith Edwards: Hello and welcome to Student Affairs NOW. I’m your host, Keith Edwards. Cultivating equitable and inclusive conversations in higher education Sounds timely, right? Is both a rationale. Four and a practical guide for transforming how dialogue happens on college campuses. The book argues that the health of higher education and society itself depends on our ability to engage across difference with empathy, humility, and courage.

Against the backdrop of political polarization, cancel culture and social justice fatigue. The authors call for a renewed pedagogy of love. Peace building and critical consciousness. I’m so grateful for these three authors and contributors and an editor for joining us here today for this conversation.

Student Affairs now is the premier podcast and online learning community for thousands of us who work in alongside and adjacent to the field of higher education and student affairs. We release new episodes every week on Wednesdays. Find details about this episode or browse our archives@ at tudentaffairsnow.com.

This episode is sponsored by Evolve. Evolve is a series of leadership coaching journeys designed to bring clarity, capacity, and confidence, empowering courageous leadership to reimagine the future of higher education. As I mentioned, my name’s Keith Edwards. My pronouns are he, him, his. I’m a speaker, author, and coach, and I help empower courageous, higher ed leadership for better tomorrow.

For us all through leadership, learning, and equity. You can find out more about me@keithedwards.com, and I’m recording from Minneapolis, Minnesota, my home in Minneapolis, Minnesota, at the intersections of the ancestral homelands of both the Dakota in the Ojibwe Peoples. Let’s get to our conversations and our guests today.

Jude, we’re gonna start with you.

Jude Bergkamp: Great. Hi my name is Jude Amp. I am the co-chair of the clinical psychology doctoral program at Antioch University up here in Seattle, in the Great Northwest. And let’s see. Let me say something about me. So I’m a biracial individual. I don’t know if folks are familiar with Loving versus Virginia around how interracial marriage worked, but according to the records, I was the first loving baby born in Kansas.

So my dad is a white Kansas farm boy, and my mom is from India immigrant. And so I straddled these two worlds, spending some time back in what I call home in India. While, growing up on the bur camp, around the bur camp farm. So I had pictures of me doing the rodeo and at the four H show, showing my biggest pumpkin or what have you.

But then on other times watching great Bollywood movies and trying to find my Indian. Roots as well. So I think I come to this work from that somewhat confused place in which psychology gave me some place to try to find out who I was. And so through that study, I really appreciated psychology and helping me figure that.

And I’ve come to a place where I have a little bit of a dissatisfaction with what clinical psychology and psychology has to offer us now. And so really, I’m here now to push our field of clinical psychology, but also academia in general a little more forward. ’cause I think we might be a touch stuck in the past.

Keith Edwards: Yeah. Beautiful. I love that mixture of confused background, but also rich and full of depth and what a gift it’s been to you as well. And now a gift to all of us. Doug, tell us a little bit more about you.

Douglas M. Haynes: Thank you so much Keith. And hello listeners. Doug Henes. I am a emeritus professor now of history at uc, Irvine both in history and African American studies.

I’m a former vice. Provost and for aggregate personnel and programs for the office of the president at University of California and an inaugural Vice Chancellor of EDI at UCII mentioned all those titles just to remind myself that I had a life before retirement a couple years ago. But, i’m really a product of San Francisco.

That’s what I was born and raised for most of my, my formative life. And I grew up at a time when San Francisco was desegregating. Its public schools, believe it or not. In a family of nine. I’m the youngest and in a historically black neighborhood, and I was drawn to history in park because.

It really provides a vehicle to understand myself in relationship to the world around me. And that sort of lens has really informed not only my role as a historian, but also as an academic leader, but also my contribution to this volume. Because I think in some sense in the current crisis, what is overlooked is not only the past, but also the possibilities that we hope the university to become after the past is of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

So there’s a lot to learn and a lot to do.

Keith Edwards: I love that. I feel like my whole life has been trying to understand myself in the context of the world around me. So that’s the evergreen journey. Thank you for being here and looking forward to what you’re offering. And Sherry, tell us a little bit more about you.

Sherri Taylor: Hello. It’s so fun to be here. My name is Sherry Taylor and let’s see, how can I situate myself? I’m calling in from Dallas, Texas, which are the ancestral lands of many indigenous peoples. The Cado, the Wichita, the Apache they moved around because it’s close to the Trinity River. It is also where I was born and raised.

I did live most of my adult life, 32 years in the San Francisco Bay Area. That’d great. And once again, live in Texas. I, how can I condense this? I have worn many hats. My background is in by training and experience in clinical psychology. I no longer practice that. I have moved into organizational consulting and leadership working all with all different sorts of disciplines because, and I think this is where I can link to this book project personally.

To fall in love with Learning is the foundation of any form of resilience. It is a life skill, and I love learning. And that is a gift and an inheritance from my parents who grew up at a time when education and learning was not available to them. My mother, had to drop out of school in the sixth grade to take care of family members, in rural parts of Texas.

My father was not able to, I think he completed high school, but they instilled in me the importance of learning because it. It was a path to freedom, personal freedom, community freedom, and ever expanding circles. And so I now bring that same thinking into my consultation, whether I’m in a classroom or with a team.

It’s really about how resource capable are. Is this group of diverse adults often able to learn together well? That’s what I see it all kind, right? ’cause that’s conversation, that’s problem solving, that’s critical thinking. That’s a lot of things. So yeah, and teachers have always been my heroes, so I’m very excited to be here.

Shout out to Dr. Anastasia Kim and Dr. Miguel Gallardo, who are a part of the editorial trifecta that kind of assembled all of this amazing work. And thank you to you, Keith, for inviting us to have this conversation today. How timely.

Keith Edwards: Yeah. Time. It is timely. I think it’ll always be timely. It was ti it would’ve been timely 20 years ago, probably.

Listen, sadly, be timely 20 years from now. But as you mentioned, cultivating equitable and inclusive conversations in higher education, you are part of the three person editorial team. And we have two of the authors here, Jude and Doug. Sure. Maybe you can kick us off here with how did this project come to be?

How did the book come to be? How did this emerge?

Sherri Taylor: So I. I, in my clinical training, I was a student of Dr. Kim’s and she actually was my dissertation chair. We have, our relationship has evolved and moved into friendship. Friendship, and, we are colleagues soul sisters, and we always are looking for ways to play together to be disruptive together.

And I actually have the, I found the email where she brought, me and Dr. Gallo together, and that was February 22nd, 2022. So at first it was the three of us and we were going to write a book to support educators, right? And bringing a very specifically a psychological lens to it, right?

Because of our understanding of group dynamics and these kinds of ways that power circulates in a room. We proceeded, we did an initial proposal with Rutledge thank you Rutledge, and we’re going along, mapping out. And then 2023 was a real how do they say, watershed moment for universities for diversity, equity, and inclusion.

That was the year that Supreme Court verdict all eliminated affirmative action in colleges. And we were, we had been meeting regularly and we, I distinctly remember having a conversation where we decided that it was important to make the conversation bigger. And to try to reach out to educators, higher education professionals, right?

Not just even in classroom instructors across a spectrum of disciplines to validate and. And show that these conversations happen in every single area of learning in higher education, and they have a place and importance. And we wanted to create some type of, almost like a very polyvocal chorus where we didn’t need to have the same even definitions right of the term, but we wanted.

People to be able to speak to how they were including, how they were inviting their students to think about these issues. Whether it was in a business class, in a science class, in a humanities class. But that as a whole, this is and always has been, and always will be a part of. That learning. And so then we revised our proposal. We reached out, we crossed our fingers, and it, it was met with a resounding yes. Yes. And then that’s how, you know we were able to engage and invite Doug and Jude into this project. Yeah. And then it’s, here we go.

Douglas M. Haynes: It’s such a, I really loved how you framed the backstory, if you will, Sherry, about the volume.

It certainly is timely. And what’s, so I was connected with this project in part because of personal professional. One of the authors, Yvette Gola is a former colleague at the office of President where she’s. Vice President for Student Affairs and the Chief Diversity Officer. And of course Anastasia Kim is a the sister of a former colleague at op Martha Kim, a real brilliant, higher education attorney.

And what was so appealing to me of by this invitation was that it really takes the notion. That the university is wonderful as an engine for research, as a platform to transmit knowledge, but ultimately it’s a social organization with people. It’s people centric. That in order for it to maximize human potential, including our wonderful students, but also our coworkers and our colleagues, we have to have, we have to see it as a university within a university,

Where everyone is a learner regardless of their role and responsibilities.

And I think that’s particularly urgent now. Because in order to model conversations, you really have to create trusting relationships, right? And I think that there’s, when you look at the power structure of most institutions, it’s vertical for staff with their supervisors. It’s nominally horizontal woman.

Faculty, peers, but that’s complex. That’s very complex organization to have a trusting relationship, right? That enables to facilitates conversations, even, normal conversations, but particularly challenging conversations where there’s no necessary authority, right? At this stage in my career, I had largely retired from the office of the president.

But this particular orientation was very compelling because in some sense there is noian authority if there ever was one.

And knowledge. Percolates in so many different places. Some that masquerades that expertise, some that is authentic expertise.

But in order for us to live up to our aspirational values, right?

I’m convinced that we have to look within in order to build the community that we want. And it begins with the conversations.

Sherri Taylor: Yeah. Yes. Yes. Yes.

Keith Edwards: Appreciate that. And I think the volume, really, it is about conversations, inclusive conversations in higher education. And we’ve got two clinical psychologists, one former administrative leadership.

It’s faculty from different aspects and different backgrounds, different angles. So it’s really a very. I think Sherri used the word polyvocal, which is a new one for me. I love it. I love learning new words. If you made it up good for you. I did not. Yeah. But all of these different perspectives, and so it isn’t one angle on higher education.

It’s really a multiple perspective on higher education. Jude, how did you come to join this project and be a part of it as it emerged?

Jude Bergkamp: Yeah, that shoot, that’s a good question. I had some connections at the Wright Institute, and so I just finished my presidential term as the president of N-C-S-B-P.

It’s a training council organization that. That kind of represents over a hundred of our side e professional psychology programs in the country. And so I think through that I definitely met Gil Wright, who, oh, excuse me, my camera here. So I met with with Gil Gill at the Wright Institute and and Anastasia.

And so I think through some of my initiatives there with N-C-S-V-P, which was really about how can, programs, academic programs, integrate this idea of social justice into their curriculum and move beyond that one token class that everyone has to take in multiculturalism, if you will.

And I think, folks remember that class, maybe in their program, in that one book, and then somehow it’s then there was nothing. You took it once, and then there’s nothing at all. And so my push for for professional psychology was really to think about how we can operationalize concretize and measure, if you will social justice aspects into all the classes.

And so we really wanted to develop a congruent developmental trajectory to, through the curriculum to grow those social justice aspects. And so I was wanting to really engage all the society programs in that. So I think with that, my, my passion is around socially conferred privilege and those parts of our identity that do have privilege.

That sort of seemed to melt into the background in a lot of these classes and a lot of these conversations. And so I wanna actually flip that script and bring that socially conferred privilege back into the forefront. I think that was that was my connection with the book.

I’m really excited to, to be here with all. Yeah.

Keith Edwards: Thanks for those introductions and the framing of the project and how we got here. We’re gonna try and break this up into two kind of big, huge components. We’re gonna start with the organizational, institutional, and then move into the individual interpersonal I.

And Doug, as you mentioned a couple times, you’ve had I’ve counted three major LAR leadership roles at very large complex organizations. This is probably more than that. And the chapter that you’ve wr written is really about making a broad case, not just for those institutions, but for higher education as an industry, for society. So how do you see we can engage in these critical conversations around inclusion in higher ed? At the organizational and institutional level?

Douglas M. Haynes: I think the current crisis is not new. I think one thing that I think we can agree on is that higher education has been in the cross areas for many decades.

And indeed the I referenced earlier, the 1964 Civil Rights Act. I think its significance is quite profound in that it really created an opportunity for colleges and universities to be laboratories for social change. Remember it before then it was legal for institutions of higher learning United States to exclude and deny participation.

And also to impose artificial quotas. And so in some sense since then we’ve been evolving and I think that more and more of our folks of my generation and earlier those who are coming, are experiencing a university that’s far more diverse. Compositionally, right? And I mentioned that because, before this, the latest assault on the independence of universities, many institutions embrace this concept of diversity, equity, inclusion, right?

And remember, it was the first time that we see across the sector this commitment. And organizationally, the rationale was very straightforward. DEI is a way to grow our access to the talent pool of this country and the world. DEI is a mechanism for us to better serve the communities that we share space with.

DEI allows us to mobilize our research capacity for discovery innovation. A creativity to have a wider impact. So I think in some sense we have this institutional knowledge of the value of it. I think what has not grown sufficient, and this is particularly important and ha and in jump starting conversations that have stalled, is to.

Really ground DEI in terms of a research program for organizational change. And so that can operate typically operates at the high level. Right now, many academic leaders feel particularly tender because of the hostility, but I think they really risk losing a lot of credibility by forgetting. The DEI legacy in history, and I wanna add something more that in some sense, the future of higher education is completely dependent on DEI.

If we’re talking about enrollment. If we’re talking about committee communities, universities serve in a variety of ways if we’re talking about our research capacity. And so if the argument of the moral argument doesn’t appeal, there is a practical argument. But that’s not enough.

And as we outline with my co-author my colleague, Dr. Marguerite Benet Erth we talk about the need for a coherent research program because as much as institutions commit to this broad idea of DEI, in many ways, there are four basic questions that we must. Continually confront now, but also tomorrow.

That is who are our students, right? This matters for institutions, particularly as we enter an enrollment cliff.

Sherri Taylor: Yeah.

Douglas M. Haynes: Are they thriving? Fundamentally important because we make a pledge and promise to those whom we admit. And furthermore. When we ask the question, who are our students?

Are they thriving? It opens us up to learning more about the multidimensional nature of our students and our community that we call our campuses. The third is how do we know our students are thriving? That question really calls into question. This fiction of meritocracy, right? DEI, is not opposed to meritocracy.

On the contrary, it’s fully committed to excellence, but it wants to leverage the institution to equip people to maximize their potential. And then the fourth question is, how can we improve? Each of these questions. Benefit all students, all communities, and indeed our society. And so it should appeal to the leadership.

If they care about the viability of their institutions, it should motivate our faculty who are in some sense the sort of central figures in the intellectual development of students. It should matter to our staff who play such an important role in so many ways to keep this institution running and to be there for students.

And often they’re far more diverse compositionally than the faculty. And then of course, to the students. This all brings me back right now. This volume addresses a cr, a fundamental issue for the future of our education. How do we build trusting organizations that enable people to bring their whole selves so that they can maximize their potential?

Yeah. And I think that we must make arguments to all sectors, and by that I mean we need to make arguments to our staff.

We need to make arguments to our students. We need to make arguments to administrative leaders, but fundamentally, we have to be a learning organization that’s grounded in community learning, that every member of the campus community can benefit from building, trusting.

Keith Edwards: Relationships. That’s great. So let’s get Jude and Sherry in here. But Doug is saying it, it only matters in higher education if we care about enrollment, retention, learning, research, innovation, and contributions to society. So beyond that sorry. But Jude, what would you add here about the the organizational institutional level?

Jude Bergkamp: I this idea, Doug, where you said this idea of the whole self bring your whole self in. And I might add that I think the faculty who are, as you said, like the central maven. Of intellectual growth and facilitation. Maybe not just for the students, but for, again, our whole selves and for our fellow faculty and up the line to the institution in general. So it can be like what a, a trickle up effect in, in some ways. And so I really think there is this call. For faculty to then find a way to bring them their whole selves in, not just their status as a faculty and not just maybe their expertise in that certain academic niche.

But, but when you think about for students I know for me, during those years is so formative. And I think Sherry even mentioned some of her heroes or mentors were her teachers. And so how we embody the classroom, how we facilitate these kinds of conversations I think is just so much more than just the status as I’m gonna teach this topic.

Keith Edwards: And so much of how institutions work is just, as Doug pointed, they’re just people and how things get done is really just conversations and all of them are across difference. Even my conversation with my mom is across difference. Sherry, what would you add here about the macro level before we shift as we’ve begun pointing to toward the individual interpersonal level?

Sherri Taylor: I. I’m gonna do a macro micro dive ’cause I’m really something about this I notion of whole self, but in particular the word thriving. I’m just really thinking about what does it mean for a system like a living, right? A non-linear dynamic system, right? With more non-linear dynamic systems that are nested inside of it, right?

That’s a university truly right, all the way down to the individual person. What does it mean to to strive to understand what the conditions are that allow this system to thrive, to do the work of this maximize creating those conditions where human potential can flourish. And I think here’s what’s coming to me.

I am gonna, I’m gonna challenge something that I think that there’s a real opportunity here to recognize and contemplate what exactly it is to what is a university, because I think, teachers understand this. I’m sure everyone here has a real felt sense of this. Teachers are mental health professionals from time to time they are, they support.

They’re like, we really gotta grapple more complexly with what exactly happens on a university campus. And what exactly. Is the role, right? And how those roles shift and become more fluid. I think the pandemic really taught us about the expansiveness of what I remember I was helping students find housing.

Helping students get medical care, adapting my syllabi because a student got COVID and developed neurological issues in the aftermath. W was that me being a teacher. You know what I mean? And I also had colleagues who, you know, and I bow deeply, all of us in that very outlier moment, had to really figure out where we were going to try and draw a line.

Jude Bergkamp: Yeah.

Sherri Taylor: So that we could take care of ourselves. But I think it illuminated something about the bowl that is education.

And. So when we think about thriving, it’s okay, there’s learning that’s going on, but then there’s also other types of learning that are going on. There’s living, right?

The learning of kinship and community Yeah. Is also going on in and beyond the classroom, in and between departments, in and between student resource center. So I guess all of that is to say, I think I’m wanting. Yes. Plus one to everything. And like I just am having a real felt sense of the complexity of the dilemma.

Jude Bergkamp: And,

Sherri Taylor: And some recognition of what the labor of being an administrator is. The labor of being a teacher is the labor of what it means to be a student.

Yeah. And then how do we. Value that. Because that, in my experience, is when people really are able to thrive is because they feel that they and what they’re being asked to do.

Is valued.

Keith Edwards: Yeah. It reminded me now of some of Kevin McClure’s worked in the Caring University is that these roles have expanded, right? We’re asking faculty to be experts in their discipline, experts on teaching and learning, which they weren’t trained to do. Experts on student mental health, experts on campus resources, experts on all of these things.

And that’s a lot, right? And, disability references and referrals and all of these things, and. And then we complain that faculty are turning to AI for help with the administrative tasks. That’s because they’re trying to manage a workload that has, that is being compensated as though they teach so many classes a semester when in reality they’re doing so much more than that.

And then staff too, right? All of these things are expanding. That’s a great, Sherry, I love how you tied the macro to the interpersonal and maybe helps us move into this conversation about the individual interpersonal level. This is about conversations. Jude, you mentioned a clinical psychologist.

How do you see this? Playing out at the individual and interpersonal level, and by this these critical conversations around difference and being able to engage with them effectively.

Jude Bergkamp: Yeah. I just, I wanna go back a little bit because to, to the whole conversation, isn’t this hearkening back to the glory days of liberal arts education, right? The glory days of we’re not teaching a robot how to do a job. We’re not just programming someone to do a function like in this co in the capitalistic wheel, machine, if you will. Sure. And instead, we’re really working on developing, the person.

And in a way the university campus is an artificial thing, right? Artificial little bubble. Now, it pops and it, melts out or what have you. But where else do you have to, in a way sit with really folks that are very different from you?

And connect over something. And even if it’s a function, let’s say even if it’s engineering or computer programming, which I have no, no idea about, if even in that there’s still the necessity to work and collaborate and find, common ground and just make things work.

In clinical psych, it’s a little different because clinical psych, the person is the instrument of the healing. And so whether we see and let me go back also there’s this other thread that I’m going with, which is this, there is truly an attack on education. Yeah. And higher education.

And I do wonder, Keith, earlier you mentioned three things. It was like. Something about like unity and love and something like that. But then you threw in critical consciousness. And critical consciousness with those two, doesn’t it get a little crunchy? And I wonder if the if the birthplace of a lot of critical consciousness comes from the rich intellectual stew of the university and academia to a point where. To a point where that gathering of diversity and difference, I almost would say is sacred. And could it be that this current attack is because the university was a major source of critical consciousness? A major source of calling in or out of our socially conferred privilege and how.

A a country like ours with its colonial roots still seem to recapitulate the same colonial strategies over and over again. Of the ins and outs. The who’s nots and could this attack on education B, because we were such a, bubbling stew of critical consciousness. And now instead we wanna flip to.

You go to college to get a job. What are you majoring in? What are you gonna do? Who are you gonna be? That’s the thing. Yeah. And so clinical psychology then is like in this weird middle place, how can I educate competent? Entry level health service psychologists when we’re not cultivating who that person is as the instrument of change and healing.

Yeah. And so we then, I still think in our competency model, we still require, in a way, some kind of personal growth. Personal awareness and understanding of who we are so that we can work with different clients. The interesting part about how, diversity kinds of issues have been taught in clinical psychology.

It’s gone through these eras but the ma I was educated in the early nineties and so that era was what I called the multicultural era. In which our textbooks were broken up into chapters. Those different people and those different people, and those different people, right?

But I never saw the chapter on white people. Isn’t that oddly missing in there? And so what is the assumption? It was a majority assumption in which in order to be a competent clinician, I have to learn about, how these people do X, Y, and z. Personal space and eye contact and what do you talk about in silence?

All that sort of stuff. But the diversity of our clients is continuing, especially in globalization and these such things to be more and more different. How can we put people in a box? So the shift is what’s the constant in, let’s say, clinical psychology? I would say it’s the clinician.

And so why don’t we flip that awareness of others to the awareness of ourselves. Yeah. And how can we be aware of ourselves unless we are in really. Communication and inner co, just inner, like relationships with different folks in order to mirror back to us who we actually are.

Keith Edwards: Yeah, you’re reminding me that, critical consciousness, how has a negative angle to it. What if we talked about a pedagogy of love, peace building and critical consciousness. What if instead we said love, peace building and deep self knowing, right? Or something like that. I, for those of you listening and not watching, when Jude talked about almost.

The universities as almost sacred spaces. Sherry almost jumped out of the screen at me with enthusiasm. Sherry, real quick, what do you want to say about

Sherri Taylor: that? You’re so curious. You’re so curious. No, it’s just I am, I have part and part of my life and I bring it into my teaching and my con consulting is I am a contemplative.

I do believe that one of the most sacred things humans do together is learn. Because of, because it is so deeply and fundamentally relational and it is disturbing. Sorry, plot twist everybody. Yeah. Learning happens in a, in, so again, I don’t encourage in my classrooms a kind of belief that safety is what there is to be offered, right?

There are conditions under which you will be able to decide for yourself your, the risks that you’re willing to take in order to learn, right? But so what you saw was, yeah, anytime those things are spontaneously linked, it feels like such a validation that there’s something. There. It’s not neutral.

What happens on a on, on a university campus? What happens in higher education? The potential. It is a catalytic, it is a force amplifier. But it is also non-directional.

It that it’s gonna it’s agnostic in that way, which is why there, it is always going to be a site of ideological war.

And I’m not a fan of that type of language. But I think it really. Again, it illuminates and brings attention to, oh we gotta keep an eye on that particular part of, the human, developmental the trajectory. And also, let’s remember not everybody who learns goes through.

College education. ’cause all of this the, what’s happening on the university campus is having a trickle down into lower levels of education. Yeah. So I’m also thinking whatever happens there then is easier to implement right. In the kind of, on in the milestones on the way too. So at the high school level.

At the middle school level. At the elementary level. And we were already seeing that happen.

Keith Edwards: Yeah. And any of us who can remember being a college student can remember how messy we were. Ah, surrounded by other people who were messy dealing with the things that we were dealing with, the inner questions, the inner mess.

Not having the skills and I’m not just talking about 18 to 22 year olds. Okay. Nope. Some of us are double that and still messy

Jude Bergkamp: by our messiness.

Keith Edwards: I wanna move us to two real quick questions. We’re limited on time, so we’re gonna do this next one in a bit of a wrap on time.

Jude Bergkamp: No,

Keith Edwards: yeah.

Rapid fire. Sherry mentioned this email initially came, I think February 22. A lot has shifted. You all wrote chapters and made contributions and have, I know, continued thinking about this. So how has your approach shifted both in your thinking or in your practice in that time?

Sherry, let’s lead with you then, Doug, then Jude.

Sherri Taylor: And I will be quick. So I think my thinking has shifted in both I again, encourage a focus on access, right? Because we all, and access broadly. So access can include how your syllabi are built, what the assignments are, all those things.

I also, decenter grades as the ultimate assessment of learning, and that created. Incredible amounts of transformation for my students, for the trust, for the relationship, for their decision and self-determination in owning their own work. And that struggle, right? They actually found a sweetness, I think, in the struggle, which again, learning becomes the goal and the outcome.

So that’s, I’ll just land it there ’cause I can talk about this kind of stuff forever. Yeah. Yeah.

Keith Edwards: I love it. Doug, you mentioned you are now emeritus, which is, I believe Latin for. I can now tell the truth. So what has changed in how you think about this?

Douglas M. Haynes: I think what’s changed is that more than ever there’s four sort of habits of mind that I think are so important.

The first is time. It’s a measure of a commitment. The second is attention. What are you focusing on? And why? The third is humility, being open to new perspectives and knowledge answers, but also questions. Yeah. And then the final one is vulnerability. Particularly in relation, your relationship, my relationship to other people.

I think that those four sort of habits of mind, I think help ready the mind. For trusting conversations, because you have to have trusts in order to have a trusting conversation. And I think it’s possible, and you don’t have to spend 33 years in a career to appreciate these things.

No, but I think if we can commit to those four. Habits of mind. It’s a good starting place.

Jude Bergkamp: Yeah.

Keith Edwards: That was a real helpful structure. Jude, what has shifted for you since you wrote this chapter and started this project?

Jude Bergkamp: Urgency.

Urgency. This honestly feels to me a little bit like yeah, it feels like life or death.

And it feels real dangerous. And there, there is this piece about do we pull back and water down and whitewash what we need to be talking about or do we, step up and make that happen? And those great four habits of mind. What I noticed for myself, Doug, is that the, these students are coming into my class much more, quote unquote liberated than I am.

I still have Catholic Kansas Bruin in me, the early seventies, and so it’s in me. It’s not in them. They’re more liberated than I am. They’re, they feel this urgency more, I feel in a certain way. They have this drive towards critical consciousness. And so is it as much me helping my students learn those four qualities of mind, or is impetus now for me to really embody those four qualities of mind and work a little more collaboratively in how our curriculum is gonna go?

That’s right. This is this I feel like this is a, in some ways life or death and unprecedented. And this is a time for us to really shift. In the way that we do things.

Keith Edwards: Yeah. It reminds me of a thing from my research on identity around we move from knowing a thing to doing a thing to being a thing.

And the being is what I heard you speaking about, how do I embody this in that way? And I think we’ve all known. Teachers who said the right thing but didn’t do it, and teachers who embodied it and showed up day in and day out. We are running outta time. Speaking of one of Doug’s habits of mine the podcast is called Student Affairs.

Now we always like to end with what are you thinking troubling or pondering now, and if folks want to connect with you, where can they do that? Jude, what are you troubling now?

Jude Bergkamp: Oh goodness. Holy smokes. I am troubling now in this area of decolonization decolonization and really watching the constant recapitulation of colonial strategies.

Over and over again. And so that, that’s my struggle I guess in my, and what I’m thinking about a lot. And I’m open to any kind of connection we have. I have a research lab, a very motivated liberated. Grad students who are ready to do some work. And I always love it when we can find a way to have applied research that really addresses a community need in the present moment rather than, go off in the ivory tower. So you can find my contact information at the Antioch University Seattle website. I’m also on LinkedIn, Jude Amp, and so I’d love to collaborate on that kind of stuff.

Douglas M. Haynes: Beautiful. Doug, what are you thinking?

I’m developing a larger research program around black, thriving as a vehicle of institutional transformation. And it’s really about centering blackness. As we Ima reimagine the mission of a college or a university. And so I’ll be working and I hope with colleagues across the country but my address for those that are interested I am a faculty member still at uc, Irvine d Haynes at UCI eu.

I have published a bit on issues around racial justice in higher education, and so that’s one way to get to know me, but I just wanna urge folks to think about your priorities.

And do what you said, Keith. Do learn and be.

Keith Edwards: Doesn’t sound very retired. Doug, maybe we’ll have to work on that.

A whole research project on black driving is sounds pretty active. Sounds pretty engaged, but that’s the best part of retirement. You get to do the things that you want to do, the things that you’re passionate about, so that’s great. Good for you. Exactly. And Sherry, what is with you now?

Sherri Taylor: Let’s see. I, I.

I would like to reframe. I am being troubled by a question and I am delighting in that. And the question came to me yesterday from a, I was reading a chapter from the Yan psychologist James Hillman, and there’s a, he has a chapter called The Education of the Feeling Function, and he, it’s about school and learning, and he poses the question, where can the heart go to school?

And so I think. I am wanting every educator, every administrator to wonder about that question with me. In these, in, in this moment, at whatever point you find yourself listening or watching in this podcast like. Where can the heart go to school? Because that is also showing up right? In, in our classrooms to our universities.

And so what is the act or the practice of radical hospitality to be offered so that we can support, the unfolding, the greatest and highest expression of human potential? ’cause we don’t know what that is yet. And it’s not ai, I said it. I do not believe AI is greatest expression of human potential.

So you can find me at soul studio lab.org. I’ll put it in the show notes.

Keith Edwards: We would love to include that in the show. Yes.

Sherri Taylor: Oh wait, I have one. I just need to say a great, a deep bow of appreciation and thanks to every single contributor or person who had hoped to contribute, because there were individuals who had to make different decisions based on how hot things we’re getting, but clear.

We did this for everyone. Beautiful.

Keith Edwards: And so

Sherri Taylor: thank you. Thank you all.

Keith Edwards: And thanks to the three of you for being with us today. This has been terrific. I got all page full of notes here in front of me and thanks for your contributions to the book and your leadership in this space. So thanks to all three of you.

I also want to thank our sponsor of today’s episode, evolve. Higher education is facing unprecedented challenges as we’ve discussed, and needs courageous leadership now more than ever, and poor leadership has never been more costly. At Evolve Institute, we’re empowering a new generation of leaders with the capacity to turn these challenges into possibilities and lead with and through them.

At Evolve, we help leaders develop the capacity to lead with clarity, confidence, and courage. We offer leadership coaching journeys for leadership teams and individuals and individual leaders focused on executive leaders and emerging executives, emerging leaders, and those leading for equity. As always, a huge shout out to our producer, Natalie Ambrosey, who makes us all look and sound good behind the scenes, and we love your support for these conversations.

You can help us reach even more folks by subscribing to the newsletter on podcasts and on YouTube. You can also leave us a five star review. It really helps great conversations like this, reach even more. Folks, I’m Keith Edwards. Thanks again to our fabulous guest today and to everyone who is watching and listening, make it a great week.

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