Steve Gavazzi:
And it borrowed exclusively from the marriage literature, which said that they’re, if they’re two things that make a marriage work or any intimate relationship work, it’s effort and comfort. And so what you’re looking at the, in the top right corner of the screen is what we all try to accomplish in our relationships, which is a harmonious relationship, which is marked by both high effort and high comfort. So you’re spending a lot of time. Both of you as partners are spending a lot of time, you’re investing a lot of time and you’re making each other happy. Everything else becomes suboptimal. So the traditional relationship, which, you know, back in the day may have been something that universities and municipalities could actually enjoy together, which was kind of ignoring each other. It’s very hard to do these days, mostly because of land issues, right. Which is something that we had talked about a little bit in terms of what’s going on at UC Berkeley right now also I guess, elsewhere in the California system and also student misbehavior issues. So really those are the wedge and edge issues, wedge, meaning it drives conflict, which is one of our other town-gown relationship types, right? You’re putting a lot of energy into the relationship, but you’re not really happy with each other. And then the worst of all situations was, is the devitalized relationship. And just like a marriage it’s characterized by low effort and low comfort. And here’s the one big difference Glenn between the town gown relationship and a marriage in a town gown relationship. You can’t get a divorce

Glenn DeGuzman:
Hello, and welcome to Student Affairs Now. I’m your host, Dr. Glenn DeGuzman. In today’s episode, we are exploring town gown relationships. It’s a unique phrase as that acknowledges the unique relationship between colleges and the local community. The recite in now, for me, I often think about the work of off-campus student services. When I hear about town gown relationships, but it is so much more. And today we have an incredible panel to explore this relationship between college and community. Student Affairs Now is the premier podcast and learning community for thousands of us who work in alongside or adjacent to the field of higher education and student affairs. We hope you’ll find these conversations, make a contribution to the field and a restorative to the profession. We release new episodes every Wednesday, find us at studentaffairsnow.com or on Twitter. But before we jump into the conversation, let’s thank our sponsors.

Glenn DeGuzman:
Today’s episode is sponsored by Anthology. Transform your student experience and advance co-curricular learning with Anthology Engage. With Engage you are able to easily manage student organizations, efficiently plan events, and truly understand student involvement to continuously improve your engagement efforts at your institution. Learn more by visiting Anthology.com/Engage

Glenn DeGuzman:
Today’s episode is sponsored by Everfi. How will your institution rise to reach today’s socially conscious generation? These students rate commitments to safety, well-being, and inclusion as important as academics and extracurriculars. It’s time to reimagine the work of student affairs as an investment, not an expense. For over 20 years, EVERFI has been the trusted partner for 1,500 colleges and universities. With 9 efficacy studies behind our courses, you will have confidence that you’re using the standard of care for student safety and well-being, with the results to prove it. Transform the future of your institution and the community you serve.  Learn more at everfi.com/StudentAffairsNow

Glenn DeGuzman:
As I mentioned, I’m your host, Glenn DeGuzman. I’m the associate Dean of Students and Director of Residential Life at the University of California – Berkeley. I use the he series as my pronouns, and I’m hosting this conversation today from my home in Livermore, California, which is the ancestral home of the alonae peoples. Now let’s meet our panelists. I’m going to go ahead and start and ask Su Webster to introduce and tell us about yourself, Su.

Suchitra Webster:
Hello, Glenn. Thank you so much for inviting me to be a part of the podcast. My name is Suchritra Webster and I do go by Su as well. I use she her pronouns and I am the community liaison at Michigan State University. And that position sits between the division of student affairs and services and the office of government relations at MSU, which is a large research, one big 10 institution for those who may not be acquainted. So I am here in the East Lansing community and I would like to just read a brief land acknowledgement. So we collectively acknowledge here that Michigan State University occupies the ancestral traditional and contemporary lands of the Anishinaabe, the Three Fires Confederacy of Ojibwe, Odawa and Potawatomi peoples, and the university resides specifically in land that was seated in the 1819 treaty of Saginaw. Thank you.

Glenn DeGuzman:
Thank you, Su. Let’s go to Ruben.

Ruben Lizardo:
Thanks. Glenn. Ruben Lizardo, I am the director of local government community relations at UC Berkeley. We’re situated in the chancellor’s office and all work very closely. As many of you as our colleagues do with all different campus entities. While we report to the chancellor, we see our mission of local government community relations partnership building as really in service to the mission, the public education mission of UC Berkeley. So that means students can call on us as well, or faculty and staff, et cetera. And I’m coming to you today from a place in Mexico called San Miguel. And, and there’s a number of indigenous populations here that have been the ones who civilized, civilized our community here. And just read a few of the names. So it’s a number of bandas. All of them may be associated with the and some people when there was at one point, it kind of conglomeration of all of them. Some of you may know that people use the word mis Chicos, and that is not really an indigenous group from any one place. It’s sort of almost like the Roman empire. She goes basically controlled all of what’s now, Mexico. So I only was able to acknowledge one or two because in some ideally ended like, well haka. There are many indigenous cultures that are here and still here, and I’m grateful to them.

Glenn DeGuzman:
Thank you, Ruben. And let’s go to Steve.

Steve Gavazzi:
Okay, well, thanks Glenn, for having me here and I’m honored to be on this panel. I’m Steve Gavazzi. I’m a professor of human development and family science in the college of education and human ecology at The Ohio State University. And I use the, he series as my pronouns. I’ve been at Ohio state for the past 30 years, primarily known for my research on families with adolescents. However, I’ve also served as the Dean and director of the Ohio state Mansfield regional campus for six and a half years. So I’ve also developed a portfolio of scholarship on campus community relationships that is included three books. Now the first of which was the Optimal Town Gown Marriage, which was published in 2016 and then land grant universities for the future published in 2018. And now the soon to be released book what’s public about public higher ed, the latter two books, both coming from Johns Hopkins university press my latest work examines the relationships between land grant universities and native American trucks with important attention paid to the fact that tribal territories were seized and sold in service to the founding of these public institutions of higher learning.

Steve Gavazzi:
This fits well with the land acknowledgement statement, which I will offer, which goes as follows. The six campuses of The Ohio State University are located on the homelands of multiple tribal nations, including the Shawnee, the Potawatomi Delaware, Miamia Peoria Seneca, Ojibwe and Cherokee peoples. And the university itself was founded through the seizure and sale of additional territories from over 100 tribes and bands causing lasting harm to indigenous peoples and their descendants that we as a university have yet to repair.

Glenn DeGuzman:
Thank you, Steve, appreciate all of you introducing yourself and actually appreciate as well the land acknowledgements. And I think that’s becoming a big part of this podcast. And it’s really interesting to hear where different folks are coming from and the the acknowledging of the different nations impacted. Let’s get into our topics. Su. I want to start with you. And I think that when I think of the, of this topic, I think that college and community relations obviously are very unique and essential in historically for me, I think of off campus student services, housing, neighborhood relationships, government relations, and, and obviously liaison with city officials. Can you help me and our listeners better understand your work? And how do you describe your role to people not familiar with your work?

Suchitra Webster:
Absolutely. that is good comprehensive question at Michigan State and at so many other institutions, you have sort of a push pull between the needs and desires of the town and gown communities. As Steve Gavazzi will tell you, it’s like a marriage that people are stuck in forever in this case, the the town and gown portions of the equation. And so when I describe my work to people, I tell them it involves wherever Michigan State University inner circle intersect, excuse me, with the surrounding community. And that can my work, a lot of it is in direct relation to the impact of students in the community and the impacts the community has on those students. We do have other aspects of community relations, which have a much larger focus on economic development and some other aspects of growth within the larger community.

Suchitra Webster:
So I think each entity really has its own goals and objectives, but they’re really in all of these community communities, inexorably sort of intertwined together. So, so that’s important and then partnering and leveraging resources, all done through communication. And in most cases is really important because each entity has its own sort of path. And I think what it is is figuring out a way, if you think of a Venn diagram and I’m always, I’m not a mathematician, what is that middle part that intersects there it’s there, the magic happens because you’re trying do what’s best for your students or your institution maximize your resources, do all of that. And the community is doing that too. And it’s where you can work together to sort of raise you know, new, new forms of development together or new strategies and make things happen. I think that’s especially important. So so that’s how I would give you a general overview and that can be anything, as you said, from dealing with a public safety matter that has occurred to dealing with housing matters for students changes within a municipality and crises situations such as the pandemic, which we’ve all experienced in different ways that our respective institutions. So I hope that sort of gives you a sense of, of what we’re talking.

Glenn DeGuzman:
It does, it reminds me and tells me that individuals who go into this type of job function or work it’s you really have to be very curious and you’d have to always look for linkages. And, you know, when you use that Venn diagram, it’s like you have to see the connection to interconnection with all the different pieces

Suchitra Webster:
You absolutely do. And I think the people that sort of gravitate to this work, if you want to enjoy the work that you’re doing is you have to have I think an understanding and respect of history and context, I think that’s super important. As you said, you have to be innately sort of curious, and you want to know the why, and you do look for that connection of dots everywhere in unexpected places. I find that kind of stuff sort of exhilarating and it’s serendipitous, but I’m like, oh, well that would go with this. And then that person knows that one from grad school and they have a relationship with our, you know, K-12 superintendent and this all leads back to something that we’re trying to do with economic development in a nearby municipality. I’m just making that up. But those are the kinds of things that we get to do and experience in this work. And it’s for the betterment of the satisfaction of, you know, all of our constituencies and stakeholders. So, so that’s sort of the end game, but you need that curiosity and, and that the drive to connect the dots.

Glenn DeGuzman:
Ruben, you wanted to add something to that.

Ruben Lizardo:
Yeah. You said the rift, if we could. And I wanted to just throw in here, just say how much I appreciate the context, the way Su laid it out. I feel like a kindred spirit. So thank you for picking the folks you bought here, but I guess I would just add the other little nuance that I found. And I came at this job from being my whole career. I’ve been working the whole public institutions accountable through equity based social justice policy work. So that’s the first time I worked for a public institution and now I’m accountable. Anyway, long story short, one of the other things I think pounding down issues that I think all of us could really benefit from is to understand that there are two jurisdictions too. So it’s like in Mexico on the border, there are towns that are right next to each other one on the American side, one on the Mexican side, two different laws sets of funding sources and all of that.

Ruben Lizardo:
And understanding that that’s in that has to be navigated to get up the win-wins that Su might’ve talked about is really critical if you’re going to last in this work.

Glenn DeGuzman:
Thank you Ruben. So let’s go to Steve, Steve, you have a unique background as a scholar and you’re also a marriage and family therapist and you referenced earlier in your book, the optimal town-gown marriage, taking campus community outreach and engagement to the next level. I was fascinated with your use of that metaphor of marriage to describe to, to describe the town gown relationship. And, and it’s, and I’m kind of curious to, if you could delve into that relationship between the college and the community better can you share more on this connection? Love to hear your why?

Steve Gavazzi:
Sure. Well, I’m also a picture is worth a thousand words. So I’m going to, I’m going to share one with you after I give you a really quick why I happened to have been on the phone about six months into taking my job as a senior administrator on one of Ohio State’s regional campuses is actually Mansfield, which is about halfway between Cleveland and Columbus. And so anyway was on the phone with one of the biggest donors from our particular geographic area. And he was reading me the riot act for something that my predecessors predecessors predecessor had done, and I’ll make a naked short, just, you know, he was wanting to blow some steam off. So as a therapist that was just sitting there with the phone slightly away from my ear, saying a lot of aha.

Steve Gavazzi:
Anyway I was on my way home and I kept having this deja VU experience. And I kept thinking, but wait, I’m too new at this job. I could not have had this happened to me before what? And I went, oh, I remember this is like that guy who was in marriage counseling with me, who was yelling at his wife for something that she did before they met. And I said, isn’t that interesting? Town-Gown relationships are a lot like marriages. And then I said, Hey, wait a second. Maybe there’s really something there. So as a, as a function of some work that I did with a number of people including Mike Fox, who’s a geographer at Mount Allison university and Jeff Martin, who at the time was a senior administrator at Clemson university. We came up with this two by two topology, which you’re looking at on your screen right now.

Steve Gavazzi:
And it borrowed exclusively from the marriage literature, which said that there are, if there are two things that make a marriage work or any intimate relationship work, it’s effort and comfort. And so what you’re looking at the, in the top right corner of the screen is what we all try to accomplish in our relationships, which is a harmonious relationship, which is marked by both high effort and high comfort. So you’re spending a lot of time. Both of you as partners are spending a lot of time, you’re investing a lot of time and you’re making each other happy. Everything else becomes suboptimal. So the traditional relationship, which, you know, back in the day may have been something that universities and municipalities could actually enjoy together, which was kind of ignoring each other. It’s very hard to do these days, mostly because of land issues, right.

Steve Gavazzi:
Which is something that we had talked about a little bit in terms of what’s going on at UC Berkeley right now also I guess, elsewhere in the California system and also student misbehavior issues. So really those are the wedge and edge issues, wedge, meaning it drives conflict, which is one of our other town-gown relationship types, right? You’re putting a lot of energy into the relationship, but you’re not really happy with each other. And then the worst of all situations was, is the devitalized relationship. And just like a marriage it’s characterized by low effort and low comfort. And here’s the one big difference Glenn between the town gown relationship and a marriage in a town gown relationship. You can’t get a divorce

Glenn DeGuzman:
That is phenomenal for those who are listening on our pod or an audio podcast and are not watching the visuals. We are going to be putting that slide in our website and studentaffairsnow.com. And you did a phenomenal job just describing those four, four areas. So thank you for sharing that. So, so obviously the, the art of maintaining those relationships or for the sake of the previous response, the marriage between folks it’s, it’s crucial for the town-gown relationship. Ruben, can you speak to the type of challenges that emerge in your work that create rocky relationships between city and campus?

Ruben Lizardo:
All, I would say only thing the context was said by Su and Steve. So that’s important to think about. And I would say that really, I think a lot of times we sit in the middle between say students, faculty, staff, cause you know, if you’ve talked to someone on campus, they come out to, and they’re mad that the city do this or didn’t do that, et cetera.

Ruben Lizardo:
And then we have neighbors who are upset about why don’t you do this? Why don’t you just find the students? Why don’t you expel them? Because they did XYZ and pause maybe this trouble. And they kind of forget about the constitutional rights that everybody has, even in Berkeley to stand up for other people, but they forget, you know, one of our neighbors, they didn’t want our students. And Glenn knows as well to walk on all the streets when they were leaving the golden bear orientation. He wanted them to walk on one street that would limit their noise. And I’m like, well, there is a document called the constitution of the United States. And a lot of our students have a right to walk on any street. You know, I’ve been working with this guy for a long time and normally I wouldn’t be that sarcastic, but it didn’t affect our relationship.

Ruben Lizardo:
But the bigger, what I’m saying is that when people don’t acknowledge each other and their right to have health and success or whatever it is, that’s one of the big ones that when people have been beefing for such a long time, it’s really hard to get them to find that win-win. But I have found that at least in terms of my job, it’s as important, the education work that I do towards the chancellor, the vice chancellors, the managers, and the people who serve our students right in the neighborhoods for and to emphasize that the UC and UC Berkeley equals university of California. So we’re all public servants. And we have an accountability just like the city staff, having accountability to serve the residents and even our students. So let’s start by that and then let’s figure out, okay, what is the piece? If there’s something that can be done that acknowledges the rights of our students acknowledge those rights of a unit, et cetera.

Ruben Lizardo:
So I found that that basically helping people to understand why the other party is upset, helps to kind of be escalate and get us to the point. The other one is just really if you have really good public servants at the campus and in the city, like for example, at UC Berkeley, right now, we’re two years into a lawsuit that the city has filed against the campus on population, but the chancellor and the mayor agreed, even though we don’t agree on this and we’re going to go through court, et cetera, we’re going to encourage all of our leaders to kind of continue to cooperate on issues of, of joint accountability. So while we are in a lawsuit, it doesn’t mean that we don’t work together around COVID. It doesn’t mean that we don’t work together on game day operations for football, both leaders are challenging everybody to find a way to continue to cooperate, even while we have a legal challenge.

Ruben Lizardo:
So I think those are the isSus that are there. I would say the last thing I would, I would throw on on the table here is that the more that my colleagues can align their interests, then this was what Su said. I found the more that people do things together, but let’s likely they are to need me because they’ll just call each other up and sort their problems just like we do with our neighbors. But if people are kind of, you know, I found that actually in the university, there are people who are more introverted and more and more or less comfortable, they are, can make that uncomfortable call and talk to someone. The more they need someone like me or BPD or UCPD to come intervene because they just don’t know how to talk to someone next door to them. And, and this goes for our students as much as our neighbors. So aligning people’s interests to do things together, I think is actually a really good way to improve town gown relations, even when you’re in a conflictual legal challenge.

Suchitra Webster:
Ruben, I really appreciate what you’ve said, because I’m also thinking about what we’ve all been through with this pandemic and for us you know, it’s been a good reasonable relationship, but if anything, crystallized the need for us to be in solid communication and have shared goals, it had to do with the pandemic and this past fall needing people to you know, not congregate and follow certain rules and protocols and you know, having an expectation of students that was much more explicit for our institution than we’ve ever really been with students before and for the community to feel as though they had somebody that they could go to and talk to, because unfortunately these weren’t just you know, small peripheral issues for, for many people. It became a matter of life and death. And, you know, having the student group down the street, but was going to have their college experience, their collegiate. I put that in quotes, collegiate experience, which for them that, you know, 250 people and having that party, regardless of who was living around them, it’s a nuisance thing, in an average year this year, it took on some elements that we really had to address collectively. And we were successful, I think, in making those, those inroads. So I appreciate what you’re saying.

Glenn DeGuzman:
Thanks Ruben. Thanks Su. So with all these challenges that you named some ongoing years in the making, and then we also have some newer emerging challenges popping up Steve, you use in another metaphor in your in your optimal town gown, marriage book the town gown, 10 commandments. Can you tell us a little bit more about that and take us through these these 10 commandments or strategies or practices?

Steve Gavazzi:
Well, thanks for giving me that I should say from the outset, these are not commandments that are written in stone, but rather fresh clay and need to be, I think, adapted to all of the different things, including the COVID pandemic and also the racial injustice that we’ve seen especially emerging over the last year. But with that in mind we wrote these 10 commandments that were actually based in large part on what college presidents and city managers and mayors were telling us in terms of what actually makes a good harmonious relationship. And so the first three are in terms of commandments are really about first of all, not underestimating the importance of the campus community relationship that’s commandment, number one, commandment, number two reads thou shall honor your town gown partners. And the third commandment is thou shall not miscalculate the time that’s involved in developing and maintaining those harmonious relationships.

Steve Gavazzi:
And really, I think those three together tell you that the leaders of the campus and the leaders of the community must be in constant contact with one another, and they both have to really make it, make the relationship work. It cannot be a one-sided relationship. And so working through the rest of the commandments commandments four, five, and six, really have a lot to do with some of what Su said earlier, which is you have to know your past. So you, you have to appreciate the history of the relationship that you’re working with. You have to also continuously assess the present state and you need to do that in as wide with as wide a possible lens. And then also remembering who’s the most important link between the campus and the community and that’s the students. So thou shall remember that students are the most important connecting point between your campus and your community.

Steve Gavazzi:
And then the last several commandments have to do with other particular people, which includes faculty members. And part of that is remembering that faculty members represent both the face of the campus and they typically, but not always are residents of the nearby communities. The eighth commandment, you have to seek win-win outcomes wherever, and whenever possible, the ninth commandment is you shall give respect in order to receive respect from your town gown partners. And then the 10th one is really a commandment for posterity’s sake, which is thou shall leave the town gown relationship in better shape than you started it, just like the Boy Scouts.

Glenn DeGuzman:
Thank you. So commandment five intrigues me and it speaks to gathering data in a systematic way. You know, do you use a metaphor? My own, I kinda was thinking about like marriage counseling, right? This past year, lots of issues emerged 2020, and even into 2021. And I think about what’s happening nationally racial and religious tensions. I think about violence. I think about the pandemic outbreak and now recovery. And it’s had major impacts on local economies and how our campuses respond to impact the students. What has emerged in your parts and, and how has that impacted campus neighbor, student relations?

Suchitra Webster:
So certainly the pandemic and the example I gave just a few minutes ago is certainly relevant and salient, but there are certainly other emerging things and themes that we’re seeing. And one of them I’ll give you some specific examples. We’re going to have a lot of people returning to campus with some sense of normalcy this fall. So you think about an entering freshmen class for us, which could potentially be 8,500 to 9,000 students, but then you have a class of sophomores that are, you know, had every kind of unusual experience imaginable. So we had some that did move on to campus under specific circumstances. Some may be only for several weeks or a semester. We had other students who had grade 13, essentially in their childhood bedrooms. And we had others who said, you know, I want that college experience and I don’t care what the president of the institution has said by asking us to please keep density down and stay away.

Suchitra Webster:
We’re going to come to town anyway, we’re going to rent an apartment. We’re going to rent apartments. We will get houses with our, with our friends and have an experience, but not one that the university has really been able to influence in the way we normally do. So they haven’t lived on campus. There haven’t, there hasn’t been exposure to dorms or, you know, any of that stuff. They don’t even know basic wayfinding, right? Like around the campus itself. So, so there’s some very basic challenges. I think that we’re going to be facing as an institution, but you also asked about larger isSus. MSU for instance, is a predominantly Caucasian white institution. And when you think about the discourse around DEI policing and all of those things you have national movements, which are long overdue and necessary, but there’s a bit of a a pressure point in juxtaposition because a lot of the behavioral issues that we have in the surrounding community involve privileged majority Caucasian students.

Suchitra Webster:
And so you have this push and pull, you have this tension between, we’ve got to change the way we do policing. We want to look at a budgets and policing models, defunding certain aspects of that policing, but yet we’ve got the challenge post COVID and some of the I guess, historical issues that we’ve had and have not resolved. And we still have to contend with those. So, so I see some problems around some of that. I also think that there is a definitely a proliferation of weapons, which we’re seeing you know Michigan doesn’t allow the current rules, don’t allow you to bring weapons onto a public campus property. And so we do know that there are always those in legislatures that are looking to, you know, make changes around that and other many, many other topics you need only go to your you know, favorite news source and see what’s going on in state legislatures nationwide.

Suchitra Webster:
And that certainly has an impact. And then I would say you know, we’re talking about things like civil discourse, safe discourse, we’re talking about, you know on our college campuses and like so many others community building and then creating communities of practice and all of that. And I think one of the intriguing challenges for us is how do we expand that discourse into the surrounding community? So there’s a desire there too. And sometimes they look to the institution like they should know what they’re, what they’re doing, they can help us. So I see that as not easy, but another opportunity for us to engage with the, the non-academic community or the non university committee or community, excuse me. And you know, have, have new dialogue there as well.

Glenn DeGuzman:
Thank you for sharing that, you know, a lot of the things that you mentioned I can resonate with in my home institution, so I can see how things just it happens in different locations, different places, obviously it’s different. And there’s nuance there’s context, but I can definitely resonant, relate. Ruben you have been at this work for a long time, and you have served as a liaison between our campus at UC Berkeley, with the city of Berkeley, Albany, Richmond, and a lot of other cities in the east bay commandment three speaks to this harmonious relationship and that takes time. What advice would you give those who are inheriting a sort of like a rocky relationship, right? The rough times maybe because of historical situations or more current economic downturn or, or the pandemic.

Ruben Lizardo:
Well, first one, don’t take it personally because, and also acknowledge that everybody, whether it’s the campus leader student or the neighbor, their reality is their reality and sort of work with them on it.

Ruben Lizardo:
And then looking for ways that the university institution, its own public mission has an accountability safe to neighbor, to some of that. So finding the way and blend, I think you’ll find this familiar. One of the things that I want to lay out, a few concrete things that go to a couple of the other commandments, which is leave things better than they are. Some of the things that we’ve been able to harness as tools were put in place by predecessors from me. And so for example, there’s a thing called the student neighbor advisory council that a chancellor established many years ago, when the town gown issue on the south side were really bad. They brought together all the neighbors, the city, the campus leaders, people like Glenn, and they put them in a room together and they said, okay, this is the issue.

Ruben Lizardo:
What are the ways to solve it? And those people came up with different projects and programs and that so-called student neighbor relations advisory committee, by the chance of the chancellor empower the people. It still meets every year, but what actually then came out of it, the solutions, the programs, the partnerships, those are the ones me and my colleague get behind to try to make sustainable. When we have these meetings, it’s not a conflict anymore. It’s kind of a report out, oh, we did this. We did that happy neighbor meeting, et cetera, for a couple of other things that came under my watch. Not that I drove them, but I want to say, and this is to credit Mike, when my before the current chancellor chancellor, Carol Chris who’d been at Smith College before she came as chancellor, the previous chancellors would meet with the mayor at the football game that they were invited to, or maybe once a year or when there was a problem.

Ruben Lizardo:
Chancellor Chris said, I want to meet with the mayor every month for breakfast. So that gave me work to do. We thought it was too ambitious because, you know, your chance is going to be with the mayor. All the prep work that’s involved to get it done. There’s a lot of work initially with every month. Now, it’s every couple months, even during the pandemic we had, some of you may know that we had all those problems with the free speech stuff, where people came and there were all these riots, et cetera. The chancellor said, I want to have a meeting with all of my vice chancellors, PV, and I want you to organize the mayor and have them have a meeting, the entire leadership of the city. And the campus came together and chancellor’s conference room talked about the isSus. What are we going to do?

Ruben Lizardo:
And gave everybody marching orders. The same thing happened around COVID. So taking advantage of the willingness of your top leader to be in the partnership is really something that you could make more regular, more sustainable, and not make it every now and then. And then the other thing I’ll just say that it’s actually been helpful. And this is something that student leaders developed. One of the external affairs, ASU see vice presidents, new. I forgot what his first name was, but you remember him. He got a city council member, and he asked us the council member to establish a committee, a collaborative committee of the city council in Berkeley. It’s a special committee. Sometimes cities have a standing committee with between themselves and the school board, where they compare notes on issues of joint concern in Berkeley. Here’s the actual committee that was established by the city council.

Ruben Lizardo:
They includes two representatives of the ASUC the undergrad student government, the graduate assembly, two staffers, and then the four council members who represent the districts adjacent to the campus. That committee is kind of important. It doesn’t make decisions for any of the partners, but it’s the place where on a regular basis, people bring the issues to talk about. And then if solutions emerge, it’s on the players to make them happen. The current mayor wanted to be a part of the committee. He doesn’t represent a district, so they made him an alternate. So he’s at these meetings. I guess what I’m saying is any tool that you can have and make a systematic, becomes the actual vehicle for managing these issues. The last thing I’ll say, which I’m hoping that we’re going to sustain at the last time that the city the university around their long range development plan.

Ruben Lizardo:
One of the cool things that the chancellor and the mayor then agreed to, besides the payments we pay the city about 2 million, $2.2 million a year. They also created the thing called the chancellor’s community partnership fund. It’s gotten up to $300,000. Now they’re basically catalytic grants that are given to campus and community entities that want to improve a Berkeley community. That’s fomented couple hundred partnerships. So that kind of thing, anything that could be systematically put into the DNA of the town gown relationship is going to make everything better. When you have a problem, that’s all, that’s it.

Suchitra Webster:
Ruben, I really liked what you said about systems and processes, which are you, you create. And then they just, it becomes routine it’s part of what’s normal. And that leads me to what you were saying, Steve, about the, one of the commandments, like somewhere in the middle there, it was about students and making sure that students are in the middle of all of this. And so to Ruben’s point, I would add any in the city of east Lansing, where MSU is located, we have a university student commission, and it’s just like any border commission in a city, but it’s comprised entirely of students. And there’s our associated students of MSU, AMSU, which is our undergrad student group council of graduate students, et cetera. And then there are other groups that have seats, but they are all MSU students and they connect with the mayor and others and give their feedback and their insight on ordinances and other issues that we deal with, I work as liaison to that group as well. But that’s a great example, Ruben, as you say, of having something already as part of the process that you can just begin on and formulating new ideas that way,

Glenn DeGuzman:
Thank you. You know, this podcast is called Student Affairs Now and in, and I would like for each one of you to answer this question and it’s really, if you could summarize what you’re thinking about, what are you’re pondering as we’re, as we entered 20, 21, what are you questioning or, or what has he been troubling you now? And if I can have Steve, if you can kick us off with this final question.

Steve Gavazzi:
Sure. Well, I think that we’ve covered to some extent the the disturbance in the force that’s been caused by the pandemic related to COVID. I don’t think that we’ve talked quite as much about the pandemic related to the racial injustice, which worries me. And I think third, the pandemic that we seem to have in terms of the split between the right and the left is the third thing that, that really concerns me at this point in time. For the, for part of the book that is coming out this fall, what’s public about public higher ed. We had done a couple of surveys. The first survey that we did, which is predominantly the focus of this book is looking at the largest most populous states. So that includes California, Texas, New York, and Florida.

Steve Gavazzi:
And we also added Ohio and West Virginia because that’s where Gordon Dee and I have our respective institutions, but we did another mini survey that actually was nationwide. And it was very specifically focused on isSus surrounding COVID and racial injustice. And we, we asked all of the respondents to tell us about their political affiliations first in terms of whether they considered themselves to be Republicans, Democrats, or independents or something else, but then also where on the scale of, from very liberal to middle of the road to very conservative, did they find they find themselves? So we asked them then some very specific questions about how well public universities were reacting to COVID19, as well as how well they were reacting to racial injustice isSus. And what we found was that there were just as many Democrats and Republicans that thought that the universities were doing a great job.

Steve Gavazzi:
And just as many Republicans and Democrats and independents who, who thought that universities were doing a lousy job on both of those issues. So there was really no a big split. There was some slight differences there, but the most important part that I got out of the survey was the vast middle. And it was approximately 35 to 40% of all Republicans, Democrats and independents were not sure whether universities were a net positive or a net negative with regards to COVID and racial injustice. And so to me, that message really has to be seen in the light of, we have a lot of work to do in creating narratives around what we are doing to contribute to the public good with regards to both of those major issues. And the good news is if we get that narrative, right, we have just as much of a possibility of impacting Democrats independents and Republicans alike. So those are the kinds of things that I I’m thinking about right now.

Glenn DeGuzman:
Steve, can you, what’s the, what’s the name of the book again?

Steve Gavazzi:
What’s Public About Public Higher Ed.

Glenn DeGuzman:
You can preorder the book, we’ll have that information on our website. Let’s go to you Ruben.

Ruben Lizardo:
I’d say, you know, I tend to get in the weeds. I’m very much very committed to the public good. But I also come at it saying, okay, having been around here for awhile, and haven’t been a person who’s trying to make public institutions accountable, like kind of learn, you know, you can get a city council, you can get a legislature, you can get somebody to pass a law that says you shall do this. But if that law doesn’t have money behind it, and actually the actual implementing kind of language, it was just something that made you feel good and made that person feel good that they served you. And so I really always try to help whoever I’m working with at the end of the day. So what are we trying to achieve?

Ruben Lizardo:
Whatever way you want to describe it, whatever ideology you’re using, what is it that we want? And what’s the right thing for us as a public institution. So I think the dilemma that I find sometimes, and I worry about is that people and it’s natural. When I was a student, I was that person that the chancellor hated to see coming. And it’s karmic to me comic comedy that I work in the chancellor’s office now, but our students are so committed and so passionate. They don’t want solutions that are going to take 10 years. They want them tomorrow. And so, and then they take each other on and really strong rates. So I think I’m hoping that in the next year or so, we can try and transition from the country, from where we were politically motivated by the guy who ran the white house, and that we can start to really sort of build partnership with people around what we want.

Ruben Lizardo:
I’ll give you an example of one of the things that worries me, bats are not necessarily counting anymore. For example, we’re going to do a project at historic people’s park and the chancellor, the mayor behind it chronically supported it. And basically what’s going to happen is we’re still going to have a part we’re going to build student housing and the university for the first time that I’ve heard of anywhere is partnering with a nonprofit housing developer. Who’s going to build 75 to 125 units of affordable housing and permanent supportive housing will serve the formerly homeless. Our students want the university to do more about homelessness, but they don’t see that as a solution. They agree with others who think, well, the thing to do is allow people to camp and people’s park indefinitely, and that equals the solution of homelessness. So I don’t think the students are wrong for wanting to stand up, stand up for the homeless or unhoused, but we don’t meet in the middle around actually.

Ruben Lizardo:
Okay. So then what is the solution? And I think the culture that was created, and I think it’s fine, winding and changing around the country has gotten people to where they just don’t. Aren’t willing to hear from each other about what could be a solution that we can all get behind. So that worries me, but I have complete faith. And I even, when the students are challenging me, it’s, you know, we want them to come out of UC Berkeley, ready to stand up for social justice. So it could be tough, but we have to just keep pushing forward and finding those solutions. So even though I worry about it, mostly because I want students to succeed and build it, they’ve made a difference and also finish graduate, get their degrees. That’s the reason, but not because I think there’s anything wrong with what they’re doing. I just think less ideology and more actual specifically, what do you want to see for everybody would I think, make the world better.

Glenn DeGuzman:
Thank you so much Ruben as you’re speaking, I kept thinking about work. So thank you for that too. Su, why don’t you close us out?

Suchitra Webster:
Thank you. I would just say that listening to what Steve and Ruben have said to democracy and you know, discourse and having it don’t belong to one particular end of the ideological spectrum. And I think as institutions of higher education, we’ve got to make it safe and responsible and, and the duty of individuals to speak factually and have really strong discourse around the exchange of ideas. And that’s something that’s just critical to who we are as, as a country for that matter. And with all of the tensions and pressures around issues of DEI, climate change, I mean, you name it. There, there’s no shortage of issues. Everyone needs to be engaged in this process. And these you know, Phantoms of I’m conservative, I’m liberal, I’m, you know, we we’re getting away from the public good because that, that doesn’t belong to just one entity. So I just, I want to say that. And I think that is at the crux and at the heart of the work that we’re all going to have to do as you know, beholden to student affairs and what we do in higher education and community work.

Glenn DeGuzman:
Thank you. And with that, we are out of time. I want to thank Su Webster, Ruben Lizardo, and Steve Gavazzi for being my guest today, want to also thank production assistant, Nat Ambrosey, who does all the behind the scenes dirty work to get these episodes prepared and aired to our audience and listeners. Thanks for joining us. You can receive reminders about this and other episodes by subscribing to the Student Affairs Now, newsletter or browse our archives at studentaffairsnow.com. One of the awesome features about our website is that our episodes are transcribed and our great place to, to just do research and cite and build literature. Thanks to our sponsors today, Anthology and EverFi. Please subscribe to the podcast, invite others to subscribe, share us on social or leave a five-star review. It really helps a conversation like this, reach more folks and build a community so we can continue to make this free for all of you. Again, I’m Glenn Guzman hope you learned something new and go out and make it a good day. Take care, everyone.

Websites: 

College Town Assessment

International Town & Gown Association 

Books: 

Gavazzi, Stephen M. The Optimal Town-Gown Marriage: Taking Campus Community Outreach and Engagement to the Next Level. Stephen M. Gavazzi, 2016. 

Gavazzi, S. M., and Gee, E. G. (2021). What’s Public about Public Higher Ed? Halting Higher Education’s Decline in the Court of Public Opinion. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Gavazzi, S. M., and Staley, D. C. (2020). Fulfilling the 21^st century land-grant mission: Essays in honor of The Ohio State University’s sesquicentennial celebration. Columbus, OH: The Ohio State University Press. 

Gavazzi, S. M., and Gee, E. G. (2018). Land-grant universities for the future: Higher education for the public good. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Other