Take It or Leave It with Stacey Johnson, Liz Norell, and Viji Sathy

I’m back with another “Take It or Leave It” panel! I know it’s only been a couple of episodes since the last one, but there’s a lot happening in higher ed in the US right now and I find these panels helpful for making sense of it all. Once again I’ve invited three smart colleagues on the show to discuss recent op-eds that address the challenges that colleges and universities and their teaching missions are facing here in 2025. For each essay, we decide if we want to Take It (that is, agree with the central thesis of the essay) or Leave It (that is, disagree). It’s an artificial binary that generates lots of useful discussion about the state of higher ed.

The panelists for this edition of Take It or Leave It are Stacey Johnson, director of learning and engagement at the Coalition of Urban and Metropolitan Universities and co-editor of the book How We Take Action: Social Justice in the PK-16 Language Classrooms; Liz Norell, associate director of instructional support at the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning at the University of Mississippi and author of the book The Present Professor: Authenticity and Transformational Teaching; and Viji Sathy, professor of the practice of psychology and neuroscience at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and co-author of the book Inclusive Teaching: Strategies for Promoting Equity in the College Classroom.

Episode Resources

·       Stacey Johnson’s website

·       Liz Norell’s website

·       Viji Sathy’s website

·       Essay 1: “Higher Ed Is Adrift,” Kevin McClure, April 25, 2025

·       Essay 2: “I Teach Computer Science and That Is All,” Boaz Barak, May 2, 2025

·       Essay 3: “Ghosts Are Everywhere,” Patrick Scanlon, April 18, 2025

Transcript

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Derek Bruff 0:26

Welcome to Intentional Teaching, a podcast aimed at educators to help them develop foundational teaching skills and explore new ideas in teaching. I'm your host, Derek Bruff. I hope this podcast helps you be more intentional in how you teach and in how you develop as a teacher over time.

Derek Bruff 0:48

I'm back with another Take It or Leave It panel. I know it's only been a couple of episodes since the last one, but there's a lot happening in higher ed right now, and I find that these panels are helpful for making sense of it all. Once again, I've invited three smart colleagues on the show to discuss recent op-eds that address the challenges that colleges and universities and their teaching missions are facing here in 2025. For each essay, we decide if we want to take it, that is, agree with the central thesis of the essay, or leave it, that is, disagree. It's an artificial binary that generates lots of useful discussion about the state of higher ed.

Derek Bruff 1:25

The panelists for this edition of Take It or Leave It are Stacey Johnson, Director of Learning and Engagement at the Coalition of Urban and Metropolitan Universities, and co-editor of the book How We Take Action, Social Justice in the PK-16 Language Classrooms. Liz Norell, Associate Director of Instructional Support at the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning at the University of Mississippi, and author of the book The Present Professor, Authenticity and Transformational Teaching, and Viji Sathy, Professor of the Practice of Psychology and Neuroscience at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and co-author of the book Inclusive Teaching, Strategies for Promoting Equity in the College Classroom.

Derek Bruff 2:04

During the panel, you'll hear titles, authors, and brief summaries of the three op-eds that we discuss. That should be enough for you to follow along, but see the show notes for links to all three essays, should you want to read them in their entirety. The first essay we tackle is Kevin McClure's piece, Higher Education is Adrift. If you listened to our last panel, you'll know we discussed that essay in that panel. I found that discussion so rich that I brought the essay back for this new panel. And stay tuned on the podcast feed for an interview with Kevin McClure in a future episode.

Derek Bruff 2:37

Thank you, Liz, Viji, and... Stacy, for being on our Take It or Leave It panel today. I'm very excited to dig into these essays with the three of you and to use our artificial binary construction to explore their nuances and complexities. I'm hoping for some really good discussion today. So thanks for being a part of this.

Stacey Johnson 2:56

It's my pleasure. Thanks for having us.

Derek Bruff 2:59

We'll start with the essay titled Higher Ed is Adrift. authored by Kevin McClure, who is an associate professor of higher ed at UNC Wilmington, Viji, one of your other UNC schools. McClure, I won't summarize the whole essay, but he names some of the things that are affecting higher ed that have specifically started since the current U.S. presidential administration began around the ending of grants, assaults on DEI work, lots of challenges with international students. And he named several of these challenges that Hired is facing right now. And then he says, one of the defining features of working through this moment is feeling rudderless or adrift, feeling like our institutions have suddenly lost their sense of identity or direction. And he goes on to kind of talk about academic leadership, university leadership, and the ways in which they are responding or not responding. But I want to kind of focus our take it or leave it on that quasi-thesis statement. Do you agree with McClure's argument that our institutions have lost their sense of identity? Do you take this feeling of adriftness? Liz, do you take this or leave this?

Liz Norell 4:27

Derek, I'm gonna take it. I very much agree with a lot of what Kevin has to say here. And I especially appreciate the way he talks about how institutions really love the status quo. And in the moment, there's so much uncertainty about what parts of the status quo will remain. And so I think a lot of university leaders, at least from what I can tell, they're not talking much, but from what I can tell, are trying to figure out how to maintain as much of the status quo as possible. And that often means they have to do work quietly, so they're not attracting the attention of the politicians who are trying to disrupt the status quo. But that means that the people who are actually doing the work, us, the faculty, are really uncertain about what things will look like in the fall. And so I have a lot of compassion for people who are in difficult positions, but I also feel like faculty just desperately need somebody to help us articulate, like, what is our vision as an institution? And I loved that Kevin used the word untenable later in the essay, because that feels like a limo juice here that, you know, untenable, we cannot live like this. We cannot sustain our mental health or our university health or college health. in this kind of uncertainty forever. And so I really appreciated the way he talked about those challenges. So I'm gonna take this one.

Derek Bruff 5:53

Okay, okay. Viji, how about you?

Viji Sathy 5:58

I had a hard time with this because I would say I took a lot of it, but then I was putting on my leadership hat because one of the things that I do on our campus is I run an academic leadership program for mid-career faculty. And we talk weekly about what it's like to be in a leadership space in higher ed. And I'd say mostly take it, but I feel like there's some premise here of like the lost sense of identity. I don't know that there was a single identity to be had to begin with. I think there was a lot of, I don't know that we had a lot of cohesion, but what we had was trust, right? And we don't have that anymore as a higher ed institution. I think we had a lot of people who, with maybe blind or not blind faith, felt like institutions were doing a good thing by them in their communities. And I think we don't have that anymore. And so I think we're having to build what the identity looks like now. Um And I agree with Liz that there are people doing work behind the scenes and they can't talk about it. And that's really challenging when you're on the other side of it. You want to know what's happening and you can't know because it could jeopardize the very work that's happening. So it's a difficult one. But I do agree with a lot of what was said there. I think it's just maybe even more complex than this.

Unknown 7:31

Yeah.

Derek Bruff 7:34

Stacey, do you take this argument or leave it?

Stacey Johnson 7:38

Yeah, I was maybe on the fence about whether I would take it or leave it, but I think I'm going to go with leave it only because I don't think he goes nearly far enough. So one of the quotes that you extracted from the essay was about if you're in a riptide, the best thing you can do is paddle perpendicular. Maybe I shouldn't have said that yet. Were you going to say that?

Derek Bruff 8:02

No, go for it. Let the panel go where the panel wants to go.

Stacey Johnson 8:07

He said that if you swim into the current in a riptide, you'll wear yourself out and go under. So you should swim perpendicular. And I really love that analogy. But in this case, it's not some inoffensive natural phenomenon that is happening to us. These are intentional, directed phenomena. embodied actions, right? This is not just, we're not just in a riptide. There's an army coming towards us right now. Like there are intentional things happening. And if we swing one way, the actions are going to swing with us. So I don't think just swimming perpendicular is going to be enough because I don't think that this is something that we can avoid just by swerving in another direction. It will follow us where we go. So to me, that felt a little bit innocent, thinking that there's some amount of carnage that can be avoided over the next couple of years with some self-care and trying out new techniques and things like that. What I did think was really good in this essay, though, was sort of a shout out to the idea of where is the industry and the moneymakers that surround higher ed that are not necessarily coming to higher ed's defense or rescue in this moment because higher ed constantly suffers from a scarcity mindset. We're always trying to protect the status quo because there's so little to go around. No one ever has enough to really get their work done. Everyone's always overworked. And so the idea that there are people who have abundance working close to higher ed and those people are not stepping in at this point to make sure that the important life-changing work of social and economic mobility and educated citizenry continues to move forward is infuriating. And we might be misdirecting our anger a little bit at people internally who are trying to protect the status quo instead of the people adjacent who are doing absolutely nothing to protect anything that's worth saving.

Derek Bruff 10:18

I'll chime in that I've been a little surprised at that too. There are particularly, I mean, there's lots of different threads here, but one of the challenges facing higher ed is the ending of a significant amount of federal grant funding. And a lot of that grant funding was powering research and innovation that was tightly integrated with industry and business, right? And so there's a whole stream of good work that had been happening, right? That's going to affect our industry partners. And so it is a little mysterious that they're not doing more to try to respond to that. I'm curious about, Stacey, you said swimming perpendicular is probably not sufficient. Liz, do you want to weigh in on that metaphor?

Liz Norell 11:08

Yeah, I do. Because one of the things that really struck me about that particular metaphor, which I thought was a nice one, but it doesn't feel appropriate in this context because I don't feel, I feel like if you're in a riptide, there's only one way to swim perpendicular. And I feel like right now we're all swimming in different perpendiculars. So like the metaphor doesn't really work there. We're all just kind of like scattering and bringing my political science hat into the picture. We've got collective action problems, we've got Incomplete information and a high degree of uncertainty and little to no kind of repeat players here. This is all very new. And so, you know, 200 days ago, we would have said the changes that we're seeing could never happen this quickly because institutions don't move quickly and all of that's out the window. So, you know, we are really not in a position where collective action is easy. And I appreciate that Kevin made the point that we need unions for this reason, but even the unions don't know what to do. They're collecting people together, but they don't know how to attack this multi-headed monster. And so, you know, the metaphor of swimming perpendicular suggests that there's a clear path forward and we just don't have that. Yeah.

Derek Bruff 12:28

Yeah, that's true. That's a very... You know what to do when you're in a riptide, right? You know which direction you need to be swimming. And we're in some crazy mess of whirlpools that are clashing against each other. It's not clear which direction to go. I'm curious. He says a lot about academic leaders, institutional leaders. And we've seen different institutions take some different moves here, right? Harvard is fighting back. And honestly, I was very impressed when they revamped their entire webpage to talk about the value of the research and innovation that they do. That was at least an interesting PR move. I don't know if it's having much effect, but I'm curious, what would you like to see from our university leaders in a time like this? Bearing in mind, as y'all have said, it's a very challenging position to be in right now. But given what you're hearing in your own work with your work with faculty and staff, what would you like to hear from or see from university leaders?

Stacey Johnson 13:34

I can say that in the organization that I work with, we are trying to give platforms to leaders within our network who want to talk about how important their institutions are to their communities, to their regions, to this social and economic mobility of their students. So that microphone piece to win public support, I think is where I find a lot of my work happening right now, but that's really a long game. Winning public support, changing people's mind, giving them better narratives than sort of false notions that have been sprinkled into public opinion over the last decade or so. It's not something that we can do in the next few months, but it's something that we think is really important and we're working on. For me personally, my impulse in these kinds of situations is to be messy. I think that protest is wonderful and protest is supposed to be disruptive, It's supposed to make people think, well, this status quo mega institution that's always been this way, as far as I can remember, won't always be this way. And right now, the only people who are feeling any disruption are people very internal. Even when I try to explain to folks outside higher ed, my best friend just lost 50% of her income because her Grant was canceled and now she can't advance in her career and doesn't know how she's gonna pay her bills. They're like, well, they can't just do that. Like she works there. So they're just gonna have to figure out a way, right? That's how institutions work. It's just hard to explain the level of disruption that institutions and individuals within those institutions are experiencing right now. I think the only way that this is going to have we're going to be able to put brakes on it is if people outside the institution experience a similar level of disruption. Really, we can pull the curtain back. And so, you know, I don't want to propose anything radical, but what are the things that we are doing that folks in our communities, in our regions, at a national level are counting on us for? And how dare we continue to hold up those things and make sure no one on the outside experiences any disruption when our students, staff, and faculty are on shifting ground all the time. So what are those external goods and services that we provide? And can we put less effort into them so that other people understand how hard things are right now?

Viji Sathy 16:14

Well, and Stacey, I think it's even... Trying to relay, I've been doing a little bit of that work of communicating the impact on higher ed to friends and family who are not in the sphere, but that rug has been pulled out from under us and that notion, it really doesn't sit with people comfortably because a lot of people have been in situations where their work has been disrupted or shifted drastically, right? So it almost to them, they're, the response can be, well, you're smart. You'll find something else. You have lots of options. And it's not just about being potentially jobless, right? It's about the nature of the work we do and how it's shifting so greatly that it's unclear. Are we going to keep science strong in the United States? It's unclear. There are so many things that the things we, I'll say for myself, took for granted, right? as leaders in this country around, we may not be able to maintain our leadership. And that's the piece that I think it's really hard to communicate to people because everybody sees this as an individual's issue and not as something that's systemic and could change the trajectory of how, say, science is done or who will be producing innovation in the future.

Liz Norell 17:38

That's a great point. I think the thing that I want to hear from leaders is just, we hear you. We see your uncertainty. We are open to talking to you if you have concerns. These are the people on the leadership team who will listen. I just want to see some recognition and some understanding. when possible, leaders of institutions saying, like, you know, we are going to defend academic freedom principles as forcefully as possible. You know, just something like that would, I think, make a lot of faculty members feel calmer, reassured, and seen.

Derek Bruff 18:23

Yeah. And I think that's ultimately why I landed on Take It for this essay, because I do feel like... Even though there are reasons for lots of action behind the scenes that may be productive or may not be, the reality is faculty and staff are, as Kevin says, are not normal. Like, this is not normal times, and we need to see our leaders actually step up and be leaders and communicate that, at least that understanding of how hard this is for everyone. And some are, right? I'm not saying that none of them are, but I... When you've got several thousand people who work for you, essentially, I think you have some obligation to take care of those people, right? And so I think that's what McClure is calling out right here. Yeah. I want to come back to the perpendicular paddling. So we talked a little bit about what university leaders could do. What can we do as individuals within this system to stay afloat right now. What are you doing? What are you seeing colleagues do that seems to be helping or maybe offering a little bit of hope?

Liz Norell 19:41

Community, community, community. We have to be talking to each other, supporting one another. I think community is our first line of burnout prevention and uncertainty and despair kind of overwhelm. And And I'm also trying to figure out those collective actions.

Viji Sathy 20:05

I think for myself, I've been just asking people how they're doing and really like waiting for the real response to come through and just trying to recognize that there's so many hardships people are facing and they just don't have a space to talk about it or at least feel like they're going to bring people down if they bring it up in certain places. And so, I want to let the people I'm with at least know you don't have to have your guard up for me. And we can commiserate together about some things that you've lost and that we've all lost. And I want to try really hard to help people find any kind of joy, anything that doesn't feel like despair. And I think that's super hard right now. I don't want to be like the toxic positive person but at the same time we can't we can't be in despair every day every moment and um and so what where are the places where we can experience joy i think liz is right community is a place when when i know like sure there might be things that um you know, I don't agree with in terms of policies and what, what might get said at the end of the day, I know my colleagues and I respect them. And I, you know, so there's certain pieces of it where, where I think, and we might not agree on all the things, but we can, we can at least band together around some things and, and support one another. And I feel like that's the place I'm, I'm in right now. And I don't know. Yeah. I think it's a hard, it's a hard, line to walk. Cause you, you really don't want to come off as an, even in Kevin's piece, like we don't need another wellness workshop, right? That's not it. It's not like a bandaid on this gashing wound. It's really just like, what do individuals need and how can they be supported and, and trying to encourage people to do what they can. And that might be, that might be a smaller set of things than what they were able to do before.

Derek Bruff 22:06

Yeah. I, I want to hear from Stacy too, but I, I, My first boss at Vanderbilt University was Alison Pingree. And one of the things she taught me, this is coming in sideways, but we had a time where our program coordinator was out on maternity leave and she was going to be gone for six months. And Alison said, we don't have eight people working here for the next six months. We have seven. We will have to do less work. Like you can't compensate for someone being gone, right? You redistribute, you manage some things, but like the overall workload can't stay where it is. We have to acknowledge the reality that there's more going on right now. And so I think there's a version of that now to say, yes, we have to kind of paddle faster in some ways, but we also have to acknowledge our own limitations. Stacey, any advice for those of us trying to paddle?

Stacey Johnson 22:58

There's a certain personality type or brain chemistry type who thrives in these sorts of more chaotic moments and more uncertainty. Maybe you have a colleague who is always looking to the horizon and gets really bored with routine and is terrible at returning emails. But when there's a crisis, they're at every meeting, they're getting stuff done, they're showing up. So one of the things that I would say is try to borrow some of that energy from them. Whoever your colleague or your person is in your life that really needs is going to derive energy from these moments and find ways to contribute. They are in your life because that's their role right now. You don't have to do that role. You have a different role. So spend time with that person. Contribute to what they're working on. Be supportive of them. I just feel like every person doesn't have to step up in every way all the time. And it's okay to know you, know where you thrive. Some of us are amazing at creating strong, healthy networks. Some of us are great at leadership development. Some of us are great at building enthusiasm for specific projects that are against the wall. So if there is a person in your work life who's good at this, now's the time for them to shine. Let them have that.

Viji Sathy 24:31

Yeah. Actually, something that our provost said, something along those lines at a faculty governance meeting is like, do what you do best. That's what you should focus on, doing what you do best. And I take that to mean both in action and in your roles, right? If teaching is where you shine, just put your efforts in your teaching, right? I think this is where we get to say, wherever you draw your source of strength, lean into that right now.

Derek Bruff 25:00

That's good advice. I find myself constantly scanning the horizon, and I am not someone who looks for the next crisis, right? Like I am not the worst case scenario thinker. And so scanning the horizon is very, very hard for me to do right now. And so to think about, okay, let me, let me, let me scope in just a little bit and focus on what I can do right now and, and find the person who is good at the crisis and, and let them, let them kind of carry us a little bit right now. I like that. Well, I want to shift gears to the classroom. The second essay that we've read in advance of today's conversation is titled, I Teach Computer Science and That Is All. It is written by Boaz Barak, professor of computer science at Harvard. And he points to particularly some of the... current conflict around higher education and how it has handled the conflict in Gaza. He connects it kind of to broader issues, but he makes this argument that, and I'll quote this one line here, we academics should look at how we contributed to this erosion of trust in higher education by allowing the blurring of lines between scholarship and activism. And I'll say, I know enough about op-ed writing that I don't know if the author of this piece wrote the title. The title is very provocative. I teach computer science, and that is all. But he's making this argument that we need to somehow separate our scholarship and our activism, and that because we haven't done that, that's why the public has lost trust in higher ed. And so I would like to know, Vigi, do you take that or leave it?

Viji Sathy 26:50

I have to go first.

Derek Bruff 26:52

You don't have to.

Viji Sathy 26:56

I'm going to leave it. I'm going to leave it. I, you know, yeah, the title really did rattle me from there. It sounded like something out of a, I don't know, McSweeney's or something like that. But just, you know, there's so much of this that, I mean, to me, it comes down to how do you show up in a space and and leave parts of you behind. And I don't think that's possible. And I think, you know, especially as a woman of color, like I can't, I can't go into the classroom and show up as somebody different than I am. And students are going to make assumptions about me. They're going to be wrong about some things about me, right? Like there's, there's a lot of privilege and just saying like, all I do is this one little thing. No, that's not true because even in your content curation, you make choices and, about what you share with your students and what you don't share with your students, right? You can think you're being as objective as possible, but there's someone else who could come along and say, I'm teaching an intro computer science course, and I have this content in my course, right? So, the lens that we bring is the lens we bring, and as much as we think we can leave some things behind, we don't, just by virtue of being human. So, I think I'm going to leave this one because I think it's impossible to not show yourself as a human in a classroom.

Derek Bruff 28:23

Stacey, do you take it or leave it?

Stacey Johnson 28:25

At first glance, I was like, I'm going to leave this one, obviously. But the more I dug into it, actually, it's actually pretty hard. It was a hard one. Eventually, I'm going to say I'm going to leave it. So from a faculty development perspective, it is okay with me for faculty to make the choice that this person is making about their classroom. I 100% agree with Viji that he can't leave behind his identity or leave his ideology out of the classroom. It's a sort of self-delusion to convince yourself that that's what you're doing when you go into the classroom and focus on what you've decided is important, but it's okay with me if he does that. It's okay with me if all he talks about is computer science. And I think he can be a really good instructor and do amazing work and even like change people's lives with that approach. What I don't think that he can do is tell me to leave myself out of the classroom because, you know, in the content that I teach, I teach about people and the languages they speak. And historically my field teaches about European people and the varieties that are deemed appropriate to Europeans. And so my entire career is focused thinking about, is that the way that we want to continue to teach moving forward? Or maybe there's 20 other something Spanish-speaking countries in the world that should be elevated and celebrated, where those people should be talked about in classrooms, where students should be able to see themselves in their own histories, in the content we teach, and not think, this is something that only happens in Europe. This is something that's happening in our own community right here. Let's talk about that too. And that is very much rooted in my identity and my ideology, my way of seeing the world. I can't teach my content without thinking about those questions. And that's just me. I know every college faculty member is facing those same choices. So leave it because how even?

Derek Bruff 30:37

All right, Liz, are you going to make it three for three?

Liz Norell 30:43

I feel like you intentionally put me last on this one. Yes, this is a hard for me. And I have several points that I would like to articulate here. First of all, I just want to note that this essay begins with a paragraph talking about his activism and then suggests that we should, that the problem, the thesis is is that we have blurred the lines between scholarship and activism. Well, in this piece, he talks about his scholarship and his activism. And so there's a problem in the first two paragraphs. But knowledge is political. Teaching is political. That doesn't mean that we're engaging in political debates, like we're not legislating, but the decision to teach is inherently a political decision. And I know that people who teach math and computer science, I'm married to one of them, wanna believe that what they do is not political. It is, it just is. I don't like this artificial, speaking of artificial dualities here, I don't think that there's a difference. I don't think it's as simple as we have facts and we have politics. You know, he talks in the essay about how we need fact and science based policymaking for things like public health and climate change and artificial intelligence and economics. Those are all political issues. And the facts are politicized. So how are you going to teach the facts and not be political about it? And I just want to say that if he truly believed this, I don't know this guy, I'm sure he's very kind. But if you truly believe this, he would never have written this piece. Because the piece itself is blurring the lines of scholarship. and activism. So yeah, I don't like anything about the piece. Again, I'm sure you're a very nice person, Boaz, but I don't appreciate anything about this.

Stacey Johnson 32:49

Can I add something, actually?

Derek Bruff 32:51

Please do.

Stacey Johnson 32:53

In reading this article, I was reminded of a conversation I've had in my personal life with a lot of people about whether you can separate the art and the artist. Um, so I've heard really convincing takes on both side of that, whether we have to stop watching this person's movies because this person is terrible or whether we can, you know, appreciate a Picasso despite knowing who Picasso was, that sort of thing. Um, and I think at the end of the day, in my mind, art is the artist. The teaching is the teacher. Like, I actually can't separate the art and the artist. I have to have really hard conversations with myself about who am I giving my money to? What am I placing value on based on people's whole selves? And so I think just my own, the way I see the world, not only affects the way I teach, it affects the way I read this article and how I interpret his argument and whether I can even be on the same page as him from the beginning and make sense of his arguments in the same way that he does to a meta level that it just makes his argument kind of absurd. Like we can't even have a conversation about this because our ideologies are so different. How can we have a conversation about the classroom without talking about ideology?

Viji Sathy 34:20

Yeah, and he has this line, we should not normalize bringing one's ideology to the classroom. And I'd say, we should normalize bringing everyone's ideology to the classroom, because this is how we got in this mess in the first place. We can't talk to each other about our differences. And wouldn't it be great if we modeled what it looked like to have a very good conversation around difference and still respect each other at the end of the day? And I think this is the point of education.

Liz Norell 34:53

Exactly right, Viji. And so I taught political science for years. I've taught thousands of students an intro to American government course. I don't talk about my own political beliefs, but I believe that everything about teaching that class is political. And my particular frame in teaching it was exactly what you just said, Viji. We would have conversations, not debates, but conversations. I would ask students to figure out why other people hold a belief that they don't share. What are the values that are implicated in that? Because to be able to listen to opposing points, I think is a core skill of an educated citizenry. And by censoring people, what you're allowed to say, which is what this piece is essentially asking us to do, then we don't ever get the benefit of knowing someone who disagrees with us. They're just the others that we can more easily dehumanize. That's not serving our goals.

Viji Sathy 35:55

And maybe what he's getting at is that kernel that you mentioned that you don't bring your political thoughts or what did you say, your political ideology? Yeah, I don't talk about my own political preferences. Right. And maybe that's the difference. And I think there is a chance because there is a power dynamic in a classroom. There is a chance that you showing your hand could make a student feel uncomfortable about theirs, right? So I think that's the piece that is probably the nuance here is how do we do that, especially in courses where these conversations happen? are part of the course content, right? I think that's... I can get on board with that, but I think that's an individual's decision about how they lay out a course and how much trust they build with their students and being able to go there with their students versus this... Like we could all be vanilla about things and not talk about things that are controversial. That's a falsehood. And I teach stats. Sure, there's quote facts around stats, but there's also how the normal curve was derived and the racist ideology behind that, right? So, there's certain things where it's like, it doesn't matter what the quote facts are. We can't We can't separate that from the history of the work or the people who do it or the people who don't do it. There's so many parts of what we have in our purview that are inherently political.

Liz Norell 37:33

And I'll just say one more thing, Derek, if I may. I have a lot of thoughts about this piece. Obviously, I think that, as you said earlier, Vigi, for some people, their kind of ideology or their place in the political world, that's what I want to say, their place in the political world is written on their body. by the way that they present themselves or the way that they appear, whether that be skin tone or gender expression or whatever. And so to say like, leave this out is to just completely ignore the fact that for some people that's not possible. But also he talks about how he sees his students out at protests. So they know what he thinks, even if he's not talking about it and to ignore it then suggests that it doesn't matter very much to him or to not acknowledge it. I don't know. It just seems like a really unfortunate perspective.

Derek Bruff 38:32

Well, and I was going to add, independent of the content of our courses, we teach human beings and we are human beings in a class together. I taught stats in the fall of 2016 and And there was an election and I had to teach class the next day. And I had a student, I remember very clearly on the fourth roll, like she was crying in class. Like it was a hard day. Regardless of what the content was that day, we had to be humans with each other, right? And so I'm a very hard leave it on this. And for two reasons. that haven't been identified yet. I agree with most of what y'all have said as well. But he talks about in the piece, teaching cryptography and getting into issues of privacy and surveillance. That's straight out of the first year writing seminar I taught for years at Vanderbilt. Like he's noting current political debates as on topic for his course. And even more fundamentally, he talks about the value of teaching students to persevere when solving hard problems. the value of collaboration in the field of computer science, there are disciplinary and professional values that he has named in this piece that he wants his students to at least understand, if not adopt. And that's another way that we bring ourselves into our classrooms, right? We are part of the moral development of our students one way or another. And so I think it I think it's better to acknowledge that and bring that into the conversation with the students. The other thing that I'll object to here is I think there's an assumption in that statement that I read. We academics should look at how we contributed to this erosion of trust by allowing the blurring of lines between scholarship and activism. I don't think that's why the trust got broken. I think... molehills have been turned into mountains by bad actors who exaggerate and tell false stories. And that's why public trust in higher ed has been eroded. I don't think it's the individual actions of faculty members teaching in classes. I'm gonna move us on now. And I have no segue whatsoever to talk about generative artificial intelligence.

Stacey Johnson 40:47

The molehill mountain thing reminds me of AI.

Derek Bruff 40:50

Yes, there's a lot of molehills that are being cast as mountains right now. This last piece is titled Ghosts Are Everywhere. It's written by Patrick Scanlon, a professor emeritus of communication at Rochester Institute of Technology. And Patrick Scanlon mentions having been a ghostwriter as part of his career. And so I thought this was a very interesting perspective to talk about artificial intelligence, particularly generative artificial intelligence and tools like ChatGPT that can write sort of like humans write. And he quotes this other scholar, Kathleen Jameson, who says, he says, Kathleen Jameson argued that the rules for authorial authenticity change when people become elected officials. noting that we don't expect our elected officials to write all of their own speeches. We know they have speechwriters that do a lot of that work for them or write it entirely or help them in some fashion. And we kind of change our understanding of, as she says, authorial authenticity in that context. And then Scanlon says, now those rules have to change when we have access to the internet. That is because of generative AI, we need to change rules. how we think about authorship and authenticity. And I'm going to go to Stacey to start this one. Stacey, do you take this or leave this?

Stacey Johnson 42:19

I leave it. And I want to actually leave it in such a way that we start to question whether elected officials should be using ghostwriters also. Can we leave all of it? Can we go back and undo everything that we've previously decided about what it means to be a creator, to be an author. He uses the word subject matter expert, which is a word that comes up in higher ed a lot, especially if you're working in instructional design or online course building. And I've always been someone who has like a slow food approach to online course building. I love it when the faculty member does 100% of the effort learned 20 different skills in order to put together one course absolutely becomes a different person at the end of the course building process than they were at the beginning I think the subject matter expert should be constantly learning developing growing acquiring new skills so if that's our our standard then I already have been fighting back against this idea that One person gets to just be the smarty pants knowledge provider and not have to learn any of the tangential skills associated with creating a product. And then other people are going to swoop in and fill all those knowledge gaps in an assembly line fashion so that we get a consistent product at the end of it. That's terrible. Let's not do that anymore. Let's make it hard and painful and a learning process for absolutely everybody.

Unknown 43:48

Yeah.

Derek Bruff 43:48

So if you're a subject matter expert, I'm using air quotes there, you need to learn how to communicate your expertise. If you're a politician, you need to learn how to write your own speeches. Is that essentially the argument you're making?

Stacey Johnson 44:01

I think if politicians were actually writing their own speeches, we would be voting for better people because we would find out early on who they are and what they think. Wouldn't that make the political process better for all of us to really know who those people are up front?

Derek Bruff 44:18

That's a great question. How about I talk to, how about I ask our political scientist on the panel? Liz, do you take this or leave this? Stacey's a leave

Liz Norell 44:26

it. How about you, Liz? I'm also a leave it. And I also, I think I'm concordant with a lot of what Stacey said. I think people who are creating content should get credit for it in just about every context, especially when I think when we're writing and there's a byline. And so like if a president, let's say, wrote a memoir and there was a ghostwriter, I would want the ghostwriter to get credit. I generally think that when presidents or other elected officials give speeches if other people contributed to the writing of those remarks. They may not need to be named in the speech, but, you know, there should be some transparency around that, perhaps when the printed copy of the remarks are distributed. But, you know, to the specific point that Stacey was making, I think we do currently have a president who is writing a lot of his own remarks. And it has not really led to electing people who are particularly eloquent communicators. So I'm not sure that I can agree with that. Although maybe, I don't know, but I'm- That was very well put, Liz. Thank you. So anyway, I- I don't think that anything has changed. So I agree with Kathleen Hall Jamison, whose work I love, that the rules for authenticity perhaps are different in particular positions, but I don't think that they should be. And I don't think that we need to change them again because we have generative AI available.

Derek Bruff 46:14

All right, Viji, take it or leave it.

Viji Sathy 46:18

I think I'm going to, I think I'm going to buck the trend here and I'm going to, I'm going to take it. I agree with the take, you know, giving credit where credit is due, but I also think that the level of expertise that's required around communication that, you know, I feel like I value my colleagues who are much better at it than I am. And if I had the ability to rely on them to communicate something really important, I would like to bring them in to that. And so I think this is just an idea of, are the tools in our toolkit expanding? And maybe I'm too far in this direction of thinking about like, what does this offer people who don't normally have access to technology? something like this and what platform could they have with these kinds of tools? I know there's a lot of dark places you can go, but I kind of go in the place of like, wow, what if everybody had access to something that made them better at communicating or X, Y, and Z, who might we hear more from and the platforms that they could share it in. So I think I'm going to take it.

Unknown 47:29

Yeah.

Derek Bruff 47:31

Well, I'll weigh in and balance it out. I was a taker as well, although I'm very much compelled by Stacey's point that we should know who the ghostwriters are. So I was at a conference a couple of years ago, and I got to hear a Yale scholar, Julian Posada, talk about book authorship. And we have this notion that, you know, my name is on the cover of my book, so I wrote it all by myself. But that is blatantly not true, right? I had input early in the process from my editors and from colleagues. I had peer reviewers later in the process. I had copy editors, right? And, you know, we do some thank yous and we do what we can, but it feels like if the product, whether that's a politician's speech or some other written product, if it's a product of multiple people and multiple voices and multiple talents, maybe we just acknowledge all of those talents and voices, right? And so maybe I'm going to take it. Maybe I'm gonna leave it. I'm confused now. I think- I was confused too. Yeah, because I'm also persuaded by this idea that there are people who can kind of get more done with a chat GPT that can kind of express themselves and find an audience maybe that wouldn't be there otherwise. And I'm okay with that too, right? I think some of it comes down to authenticity and at least how I think about it. If we have a politician- who has terrible ideas and a great speech writer. It'd be great to know that in advance, but we do have methods of finding that out eventually. There's a whole process around the work of that type of leadership. And so at some point, it's pretty clear who the person actually is. And so I think that's what I wanna lean into is kind of the value of authenticity. And do we have, if we have a work product from say a student, do we have enough process around that to know that this is the student's authentic voice? And I think that's what some of what generative AI is pointing out, that we have a lot of assignments in higher ed that don't have that kind of process. There's nothing leading up to it. We just send them on their way and we see a paper at the end of it. The assignment itself is very artificial. It doesn't have any authenticity to it. The students don't care about it, right? I think when you move, when you lean into process and you have more authentic assignments, it's much easier to figure out who the authentic voice is, even if they get some copy editing help from a robot. Liz?

Liz Norell 50:10

Yeah, I just want to, I feel like we can't have this conversation without also acknowledging that when we talk about, you know, authorial credit, am I saying that word correctly? Authorial credit, when we question, you know, who has written something, that this is often a, existing within a racial framework. So like when I think about officials who have been criticized for, you know, incidents of, you know, perhaps poor citation practices, et cetera, it is often not the same people who were saying, you know, presidents all almost all white men, all men, if they have a speechwriter, well, that's just what they have to do in order to do their job. But when you have, for example, a black woman who's the president of a university, any incident of you know, poor citation practices as grounds for dismissal. Like there's definitely a component here and it's the same for students. Academic integrity investigations are much more often leveraged against students of color than they are against white students. And so I feel like we have to be cognizant of that context when we're having these discussions.

Viji Sathy 51:35

I agree with that. And I think that has to do with the policing part of it, right? Like then we don't police it. We just say, if you have assistants, name credit the people who are part of it and credit the tools that you use too. Although it starts to get murky because I'm like, I don't always say I used Excel to make a figure. People know the tools. So where is the line that we draw where we say, here are the tools that enabled me to make this presentation or the speech or whatever it is?

Stacey Johnson 52:03

I want to also sort of double down on one idea that maybe I didn't express super clearly in my first pass, which is I actually think that clear communication in itself is a murky concept because it also plays into hierarchies that are subconscious for most of us. So I believe, I suspect that the people who are going to benefit a lot from having tools like this at their disposal are are not the people we're hoping will benefit, but who will get, you know. I think it's going to be people who are already sort of privileged in that people want to hear from them or people are excited to hear what they have to say, or because of who they are, they're perceived as having a hierarchically more valuable sort of knowledge. So one of the things, you know, I'm a languages, person, a languages faculty member from way back. And so one of the things that I value very highly is varieties of language and varieties of communication styles. That is not universally beloved in the public sphere, having an accent or using different varieties of English or being a non-native English speaker. And so are we saying that you're a non-native English speaker and you can clean that up and i'm using air quotes and sound more like this other group of people and therefore have your knowledge respected as more hierarchically beneficial or useful or valuable right i don't want people who are non-native english speakers to do that i want to hear their thoughts as they come out of their mouths and i want to engage with people as they actually communicate and so i understand the value of giving everyone those democratic tools to express themselves well But expressing themselves well is such a loaded concept for me that I'm scared that we'll just all end up sounding the same.

Derek Bruff 54:07

Well, I know we all have lots more thoughts about all of these essays, but our time is coming to an end, and I want to respect your time, dear panel. Thank you for sharing your ideas, your perspectives, your experiences. These have been some hard conversations today, or hard topics. The conversation has been great. The topics have been hard. And so thank you for being a part of this.

Liz Norell 54:27

Thank you. It was great. Thank you. Great fun. Thank you, Derek, and good time.

Derek Bruff 54:32

Thanks to our three Take It or Leave It panelists, Stacey Johnson, Liz Norell, and Viji Sathy, for sharing their perspectives on some very hard topics. In the show notes for this episode, you'll find links to all the essays we discussed during the panel and links to more information about each of our fantastic panelists. I would love to hear from you about today's panel. What perspectives would you take? Which one would you leave? How are you navigating the current moment in higher ed? You can click the link in the show notes to send me a text message. Be sure to include your name so I know who you are, or just email me at derrick at derrickbrough.org. Intentional Teaching is sponsored by UPCEA, the online and professional education association. In the show notes, you'll find a link to the UPCEA website where you can find out about their research, networking opportunities, and professional development offerings. This episode of Intentional Teaching was produced and edited by me, Derek BrUFF. See the show notes for links to my website and socials and to the Intentional Teaching newsletter, which goes out most weeks on Thursday or Friday. If you found this or any episode of Intentional Teaching useful, would you consider sharing it with a colleague? That would mean a lot. As always, thanks for listening.