What Does Productive Protest Look Like on Campus?

Eboo Patel: This is the Interfaith America Podcast, and I’m Eboo Patel. 

[music]

Welcome to a special episode of Interfaith America with Eboo Patel. It’s special for all kinds of reasons. First, we have a special guest who was actually on the first season of the podcast, my friend, Laurie Patton, who is the outgoing president of Middlebury College and the incoming president of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Second, it’s special because we had this conversation in front of a live audience. I want you to imagine 25 extremely bright faculty from around the country in the room as part of the Teaching Interfaith Understanding Seminar, which is funded by the Lilly Endowment and is in partnership with the Council of Independent Colleges.

It’s a group of faculty who are either currently teaching or will be teaching courses related to interfaith studies in a range of departments, from religion and philosophy to nursing and education. Laurie and I have been facilitating this seminar for 10 years. It’s always one of the best and most intellectually intense weeks of the year. As part of the seminar, we typically do three or four plenary sessions, which is basically Laurie and I discussing a set of things that both interest and confound us. We thought that we would have one of these sessions for both the seminar participants and also use it for the podcast.

For this particular session, I wanted to go over a topic that confounded me when it happened. It’s a topic that Laurie was at the center of, which is the upheaval that happened in 2017 at Middlebury College when the political scientist Charles Murray visited the campus to discuss why working-class white voters voted for Donald Trump in 2016. We’re going to hear how Laurie engaged with the culture of her college to shift it from one in which conflict was highly disruptive to a culture in which conflict is an opportunity to learn and to build understanding. That is the culture that prevails at Middlebury today, and it is because Laurie Patton had a philosophy of conflict transformation that she effectively put into practice.

Welcome to a special episode of Interfaith America with Eboo Patel. Let me say if there were bets to be taken on October 8th, 2023, about a campus that might have very disruptive activity in the wake of the Hamas attacks on Israel and the impending Israeli response, my guess is that Vegas would have put a lot of money on Middlebury being a college that would have erupted, simply for one fact, because of the experience in the public consciousness of what happened in Middlebury in the winter of 2017.

Having known Laurie and knowing Middlebury a little bit, I wouldn’t have made that bet, but my wild guess is lots of people would have said, “Boy, I wonder if Middlebury is going to erupt in the way that we know that it erupted in the wake of Charles Murray’s visit in 2017? I bet it’s going to erupt this time.” It didn’t. I’m going to actually take Laurie through a three-part question sequence here. One is, what did happen in the spring of 2024 at Middlebury when it came to how that campus had conversations and conflicts around, in some ways, the mother of all divisive issues in the United States, which is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? What did happen?

The second set of questions I want to take Laurie through is, let’s relive, to the extent that it’s emotionally standable, what happened in the winter of 2017. Obviously, what I’m trying to get to here is a little bit of a compare and contrast. What happened in the spring of 2024, what happened in the winter of 2017 in the wake of Charles Murray’s coming to Middlebury? Let’s draw two scenes here.

Then, Laurie, what did you and your partners at Middlebury do in the wake of the disruptions of 2017 to build a culture at Middlebury that could withstand the inevitable conflicts that are going to come to American life and to campus life? Those are going to be the three parts. I’ve just talked [unintelligible 00:04:32]. Let’s let the audience know you’re here.

[00:04:34] Laurie Patton: Hi.

[00:04:35] Eboo: Do you want to sing a song or say a prayer?

[00:04:36] Laurie: No, I won’t sing a song, but I will say it’s great to be here on this second episode with you of our conversation. There’s so much to sort of jump in on, and if you want, we can just–

[00:04:48] Eboo: Maybe we start with the scene of what happened at commencement with that roll of paper as a symbolic scene of how the campus handled this very challenging conflict, and then maybe draw a larger scene from there. Take us to commencement.

[00:05:03] Laurie: Sure. 2024, by 2024, we had lived seven years of addressing and moving forward from a place where our institution had broken open. On the one hand, I wouldn’t recommend it. On the other hand, I would recommend it. If you have a point of reference where your institution had its fundamental values challenged, its fundamental understanding of itself challenged, and you have to gather together and share resources and develop resources to address something, 2024 spring was a time when we had done as much of that as we possibly could. I’ll share exactly what that looked like.

The scene you’re referring to is the scene at baccalaureate. We had worked all spring. We had a number of different episodes, including an encampment, to work with students who were concerned about Israel-Gaza. That moment was a moment during the baccalaureate address, after the baccalaureate address. We had worked very hard with students to help them see what disruptive work was and what disruptive work was not. In their minds, this was the work of conscience. The students for justice in Palestine, this was the work of conscience.

They also understood what harm looked like. There are lots of different forms of vocabulary that they had in their head related to the tools of conflict transformation that simply didn’t exist in 2017. The story that I told you yesterday, I’ll tell again for this episode, and that is, as we exited the baccalaureate, there was a very long trail of paper on the hill going down from the chapel that were the names of the Palestinians killed. There were some parents who were upset, tried to take the paper off. Then another parent who said, “No, I am Palestinian, I am related to those folks.” Then they walked away, continued to argue, talk, et cetera.

Then a third person, a family member I’m assuming, came and sort of tapped down the piece of paper that was like scrolling down the hill to continue it as a nonviolent form of protest and reminder.

The reason why I like that story is because the conflict didn’t go away. Jean-Paul Lederach’s inspiration was in conflict transformation as distinct from conflict resolution or negotiation is that tension you’re always going to have. The point is making it constructive rather than destructive. I have no idea if the people who were arguing actually had a relationship afterwards. That would have been way too utopian.

I want to make sure that the story I tell of the spring of 2024 is not a utopian story. It is not. There are still people mad, et cetera. We had a very tough spring like everybody else did. I was incredibly proud of the students in the end, all students, even though there are still students mad. If they weren’t, then I’d be worried about our campus. If they weren’t conflict, then I’d be worried about our campus.

[00:09:09] Eboo: I want to just interject here. The first thing I want to say is if I were a playwright and if I wanted to do a happy ending to the US version of this, not what’s happening in the Middle East, I don’t know what that happy ending looks like. If I wanted to do a happy, realistic ending, I would end with this scene at Middlebury. Because a group of people is registering not just a point of view, but like a gruesome reality, 40,000 people killed in a beautiful and poetic way. It elicits a set of emotions from other people.

One of my simple lines in the Middle East is like, “It depends where your family is.” If your family is in one place, you probably feel one way. If your family’s in another place, you might feel another way. It elicits an emotion from somebody else. Then a third person comes in and says, “Actually, I’m involved in this way.” Then a fourth person comes in and does the enormously symbolic thing of simply putting the paper back. That’s like a Tony Kushner scene, like to end Angels in America, right?

[00:10:27] Laurie: Right.

[00:10:28] Eboo: That’s the first thing I want to say. The second thing I want to say is Middlebury might’ve had a tough spring, but you didn’t call the NYPD in. You were not trapped in your office by student protesters. There were not fights in the quad.

[00:10:41] Laurie: No, there were lots and lots of conversations. The other thing that I love, there are two articles written about our resolution, one by Bill McKibben and Mother Jones, another in The Christian Science Monitor. The day that the resolution of our encampments happened, there was someone who is very far left on our campus who publicly praised the resolution. I got a letter of thank you from probably the most center-right person at Middlebury.

I’m like, “Okay, I’m done. I’m out. This was perfect. This is never going to happen again.” It is worth telling the story of how we got there. Also staying there is incredibly hard. The Tony Kushner moment is great, but staying there, that’s going to be this summer, that’s going to be this fall, all of those kinds of things. It sort of relates to your second question, but I had been at Middlebury a year in March of 2017.

[00:11:51] Eboo: Yes, so we’re moving into the second part. I want to draw a couple contrasts. I want to just paint, do a little bit more scene painting before formally moving into the second part. The scene painting that I want to do is, it’s interesting that it’s Mother Jones and The Christian Science Monitor, readerships in the thousands or tens of thousands that carry the story of, huh, the campus that symbolized the eruptions of winter 2017-

[00:12:22] Laurie: That was Trump.

[00:12:23] Eboo: -which was widely carried in The New York Times and especially The Wall Street Journal, et cetera. Newspapers read by millions of people. When that campus manages to absorb conflict in a way that is characterized by conversation and multiple points of view in constructive tension, The Wall Street Journal is not there. That’s very interesting. I’m not casting, I read The Wall Street Journal every day, literally every day. I’m not disparaging, I’m just stating a fact that there’s something happened that was right. Literally, Bill McKibben writes this in Mother Jones. Something is going right at Middlebury and people should be paying attention.

Let’s shift to 2017. I want to preface this by saying, do you remember that in the summer of either 2015 or 2016, it was in the wake of The New Yorker article on Oberlin, which I think it was Nathan Heller who writes this in The New Yorker. It describes this culture of deep conflict at Oberlin at the time where professors are saying, “I cannot teach this class. Literally, this class is unteachable. My students from far left and center left can’t talk to each other.”

I asked you, I said, could that happen in Middlebury? We just don’t have that culture. I only bring this up. There’s zero got you in that at all, obviously. It’s only how this could happen anywhere. How this is, and how, as you said-

[00:14:03] Laurie: Absolutely.

[00:14:03] Eboo: -when a place that surprises you reaches a certain point of like, okay, we can’t do this again and we need to like take proactive, I don’t want to call it preventive. We need to have a proactive plan for what cooperation looks like. We can’t just expect the culture as it is to absorb it.

[00:14:24] Laurie: Yes, I think that’s a really important point. It’s something that we learned in a very tough way in 2017. Those of you who may or may not be aware, Charles Murray has written a number of different books. He was actually coming to talk about another book, one of his more recent books on class in the United States. He’s a Middlebury parent and he had come once before. There are some really interesting things that the press will never get right. The press does not have the interest of higher education at heart, and that’s hard, but that’s a whole other podcast, which maybe we talk about, maybe we don’t.

All you can do is be faithful to yourself and realize that the larger story that you want to tell, the more complex story that you want to tell needs to get told in one-on-one with your alums, with your students and so on. The other piece is that there’s a fascination on the part of the press with elite top 20 liberal arts schools, as well as the top 20 universities, whatever that is.

There are many ways in which the narrative logic wants to make it a metonym for all of higher education when it doesn’t represent all of higher education at all. It should be much, much broader and the story way more complex. That being said, so it was right after the Trump election, Murray’s book, The Bell Curve, was interpreted by many of our students to say that they did not belong at Middlebury because it was shown on any number of levels that they’re, by The Bell Curve, according to this interpretation of The Bell Curve, there are debates to be had about that, was that their intelligence was lesser and by measurable standards.

We had all the usual responses that an academic institution should have. We had reading groups on it. We had planning groups. We had all of it. I remember being at one of the planning groups and conversations before Murray came and a student panel, a student turned to me and said, trust the students. I’ll never forget that because I shouldn’t have. It was hard because I should have trusted some, but not all.

When we were in the room, many of the students, as Murray started to speak, he was being interviewed by Allison Stanger, many of the students got up to protest and to chant to stop him from speaking. He paused, they continued to chant. We felt after about 10 minutes, we already had a plan. We moved the interview into another space where the conversation could continue. There was an attempt both by some of our students at that point, mostly outside Antifa, folks from Burlington and other folks from around to pull fire alarms, stop the conversation.

Then outside, there were a group of students that gathered around the car, the group, Allison and Charles Murray, as they were leaving to try to get to the car. Then they gathered around the car. Many, many multiple interpretations of what happened in that moment. In the tussle, Allison Stanger had her hair pulled and she was injured. Her neck and head were injured. She wrote about it in The New York Times. That became the moment when we became an iconic campus. Now, as a president, you can do lots of things. You can say, actually, other stuff like that happens on other campuses.

[00:18:32] Eboo: Let’s just pause for a second.

[00:18:33] Laurie: Yes, sure.

[00:18:34] Eboo: I want to just highlight some things. It’s really Middlebury and Berkeley that are that where–

[00:18:40] Laurie: UVA, those three.

[00:18:42] Eboo: Yes, you’re talking about the Charlotte?

[00:18:44] Laurie: Yes.

[00:18:44] Eboo: Okay. What do they symbolize? One is not letting somebody speak. In a way that’s not just disruptive but is borderline violent. I think the second thing, and I want to say this as somebody involved in higher ed and considers myself an intellectual, did not let somebody speak who was seeking to illuminate in some important realities in the world. The Bell Curve, which I don’t like, was written 25 years ago. Charles Murray’s recent book at that time was on what has happened to the white working class.

[00:19:21] Laurie: That’s right.

[00:19:21] Eboo: David Brooks called it the most important book of the year. It was a major book that could have illuminated some things about the election of Donald Trump to a group of people who only had a single explanation, which is racism. I think a third thing about that, which struck me was, and this is Charles, reading Charles Murray writing in this, the group is chanting Charles Murray’s anti-gay, like Charles Murray embodied every type of evil, and Charles Murray’s like, “I’m actually not anti-gay. I was one of the first conservatives to be on the side of gay marriage.”

Again, what’s interesting to me here is, it’s the intellectual part of this, like, “Wait a second, do you not want to hear a rigorous analysis of what might have happened in November of 2016?” It isn’t the reason you’re paying lots of money to go to Middlebury every year to learn things you might not know. If you already know everything, what are you doing here?

[00:20:22] Laurie: Yes, and none of our students would claim that, nor is that an accurate claim. I get how it would be interpreted that way, and what was interesting about that time is all of the advanced conversation involved all of that. There was a discussion of the book. There were lots and lots of things. There was something else there, and what I think is important, first of all, Murray didn’t stop speaking, they continued the interview, it was just a question of whether people could hear and how many people could hear. Lots of different things.

I would rather not stay in this space, only because there are 20 things the press got wrong, and continues to get wrong, including the national story, but it doesn’t really matter, that’s the national story, so the more important thing you need to do as a leader is to say, here’s where we did not live up to our values, here’s what we need to do to hold students accountable, and here’s how we need to think about impact and harm. That spring, and then moving into the next summer, we spent most, and in the fall, we spent a lot of time dealing with the aftermath of everything that that was.

We had continued reading groups, we had lots of free speech around it, we’ve had, I would say, more conservative speakers in the last seven years than most places have had. The press will never cover that. My response to you was accurate, but what was missing was the sense of rage around Trump, and the election of Trump, and the sense of helplessness that the students have to do anything about it, and this is an incredibly important piece, that there was also, we were in a rural space in Vermont, where you couldn’t go to a protest. After Trump was elected, there was nothing except this, to say, “Okay, now, we’re going to take this, we’re going to move into this space, we’re going to take this step.”

I think that those six or seven months were probably harder than the actual event at a certain level, because you realized your own powerlessness against a national narrative that will not allow the full story. You also have to take full accountability for what happened, how you think about it, which was massively different than Berkeley, massively different than UVA. It didn’t matter, because it was a moment where whatever the other story is, as a leader, I had to say, “How am I responsible? What would I do differently?” The number one thing that made a difference for me and leadership at Middlebury to do what we then did next was to say that, to say, “Yes, here are the three things I would have done differently.”

What I said to the board, instead of, “Hey, this is right, and I was right, and we did everything right,” et cetera. In my book, Who Owns Religion? I talk about moral entrepreneurs. I got involved in identifying when people look at other campuses and say, “Hey, this is what I would have done,” et cetera, was watching my fellow presidents write about stuff. “This is what we had in place, which is why it will never happen.” We had every single one of those things in place.

The better thing to think about in higher ed is when are you not living up to your values? How do you shift that? The three things I would say for us were, number one, I was actually too involved. I was too connected to too many things in that space, and didn’t have a magisterium, I do now, but I certainly didn’t then, from which to say to everyone, “Hey, let’s not do that.” I’m not sure it would have made a difference.

Second, we did not have the relationships of trust and social capital between the activists and the administration. We had a lot of relationships of trust between the students and administration, but not around this question of activism. That just made a huge difference. Third, we didn’t work with students to see that there was something at stake for them that was bigger than their desperate need to say, “Okay, this is unacceptable, whatever my perception is,” and so on.

That I’m here, there’s got to be something at stake for me to be here to discuss these as ideas. That’s a very, very powerful thing. I learned in that moment, so that was the first thing, too involved. Second, needed more social capital with people who are going to be activists- [crosstalk]

[00:25:19] Eboo: Through somebody else, Laurie. If the first thing is you’re too involved, but the second thing is you need more social capital, more bridges and more trust, it’s other people in your administration who are building those, not necessarily you.

[00:25:31] Laurie: Right, exactly. It has to be both, but it has to be a very specific kind of trust that works through the organization. Then the third was a better security plan, really straightforwardly. What happened then after those six or seven months, far left couldn’t stand that we’d even had them there at all. What are we doing allowing this? You are really creating a horrible learning environment for my student of color, parents, students, et cetera. I had students who wouldn’t shake my hand at reception, students of color. The other, the far right, the far-right media is very interested in creating poster children for any number of reasons. That was what happened on the far right.

Getting it from both sides, you realize that you’re probably doing fine. I did a piece in The Wall Street Journal, an editorial, which was on our June reunion on freedom, that colleges should become more diverse, but not at the expense of free speech. It was very well received overall. It was a good thing to have done, was an editorial piece or a weekend editorial thing.

I did a book on metonyms and the ways that metonyms work in ancient India, but you can see it working in political life. Then you have this really interesting set of challenges. You know your college is way more complex. There were way more possibilities happening. It doesn’t matter because that event not only became the metonym, but also it remained a failure. For us, for my leadership and so on. Naming that and having the courage to say as a leader and as an institution, we’ve got to do it differently.

[00:27:28] Eboo: I think there’s so much that’s really important here. I’m imagining like deans and college presidents listening to this. Basically, one of the things that they’re getting from this, I’m getting it from this is there’s a certain period of time when you are going to re-litigate the event. There’s going to be lots of different people in the wider world and also on your campus trying to force their interpretation. You’re trying to come to your own interpretation of what happened. Not only they’re creating interpretations and the bad guy in all of those interpretations is you.

Part of what I’m struck by, Laurie, is you keep on saying six or seven months, six or seven months. I’m going to give six or seven months to thinking about what happened and how we could have done it better. I’m going to overtake responsibility without denigrating myself. Now I’m going to think about how do we handle this in the future? I want to move to the third part here and I want to scaffold this in a couple of ways.

Our friendship of 20 years, it’s been about 20 years now, maybe 18, and then our working together closely for 10 years, a couple of things I know about you. One is you wrote the defining article on pragmatic pluralism. Which is people from different identities need each other and not in high abstract way, but like in a, the Shabbos goy, we need each other. I’m curious about, was there a philosophical paradigm like pragmatic pluralism that guided your thinking? The second thing I want to ask in relation to that is you have told a story in the seminar previously, such a great story, you say, “If you were the minister at the church in Salem, Massachusetts, where dozens of women are accused of witchcraft and burned, what do you do when the witch hunt is over?

[00:29:28] Laurie: Right. How do you rebuild?

[00:29:29] Eboo: How do you rebuild? I’m curious, like both in the was there a paradigm that guided you? Was it the one that you’ve developed yourself, pragmatic pluralism? Was there a historical moment that you’re basically like, I am the minister in the church of Salem, Massachusetts, and I am rearranging the pews in the church, which is the story of?

[00:29:50] Laurie: That’s Joseph Green. Nobody knows who Joseph Green is for, I’d say, the same reasons that people don’t actually know the complexities of what happened on each campus in any given moment, which is covered by the press. Thank you for that.

There was a philosophy. There were two philosophies, really. The first is we absolutely need to train faculty, beginning with faculty, then immediately after that students and staff to think with the tools that are different than the tools that they currently have to manage freedom of expression, to manage conflict, to manage political activism, all of that, that we need to actively provide tools and multiple tools for that.

We had assumed, like most colleges in 2016, that we had those tools. We didn’t. That was a very straightforward thing.

[00:30:54] Eboo: Can you just name a couple of those tools?

[00:30:55] Laurie: Yes, so restorative practices, conflict resolution, getting to yes, which is what I’m trained in as a conflict mediator, deliberative dialogue, which many, many policy folks actually think through and use now for different activist groups actually dialogue with each other. Those are the three, but there are many more restorative justice and so on.

[00:31:20] Eboo: Which is to say, let’s name the category, how do you have, this is my name, I’m going to please rename it if it’s wrong. How do you have constructive conversations over eruptive conflict?

[00:31:34] Laurie: Exactly.

[00:31:34] Eboo: Eruptive being your term, the eruptive. Abortion is going to be eruptive. Just expect that. A presidential election, the Middle East conflict, it is going to be eruptive. Very few of us are born with the qualities, the skills, the knowledge to have a conversation around that, particularly when there’s all these social forces that are encouraging, polarizing conversations, you need to teach those skills.

[00:31:59] Laurie: 100%. You absolutely need to teach those skills. That’s the first thing that we all knew. That because I have training in this and background in this, and there are many, many people at Middlebury who were engaged in this before and after. That’s the interesting piece. We knew that we could capitalize in it because much of leadership is seeing where the kindling is and lighting the match. It’s not necessarily building the fire because the kindling’s already there. We saw how many different people had worked in conflict transformation, conflict work.

Jean-Paul Lederach’s idea of conflict transformation, that’s the two things, the philosophical approaches that I wanted to share with you. Jean-Paul Lederach’s idea is that you need to do two things to transform conflict, not just resolve it. You shouldn’t just focus on a single episode and then you’re done. That you actually look at the social structures underneath that are causing the conflict and you do as much to address those as you resolve the specific issue. That he came, he inaugurated, I’ll share.

This story, by the way, is way more important than any specific incident on any specific campus. I cannot underscore that enough. This is a story of everyday intellectual discipline, of everyday emotional discipline, of an entire community. It’s a way more interesting story. It’s what Joseph Green did when he rearranged the chairs after the Salem witch trials. It’s a great story, but it’s never told because our society isn’t motivated to tell those kinds of stories in the way that, or incentivized in the same way.

Jean-Paul Lederach’s ideas really informed a lot of our work initially. Even prior to that, we also felt that that training of faculty in those skills was something that we wanted to call the Engaged Listening Project rather than anything around resolution, anything about happy endings, anything that could even remotely imply anything like it’s all better now. Because the narrative that the press tells, all you want to do in response to the press is say it’s all better now. You can’t say that. We had a million-dollar grant initially for the Engaged Listening Project from Mellon to say, “Let’s just listen to each other faculty. You think you had skills to think about diversity of viewpoint in the classroom, you don’t. Not only do you not, but you have to just listen. The first thing you need to do is listen, listen, listen.”

That’s the second thing is you heard me say yesterday in our seminar, the power of the pause and the power of listening. People make fun of it as a modality, but when you actively take on listening as a discipline, you have a responsibility to the other. You have a responsibility to make sure that you’ve heard the other person accurately. That particular power of the pause, which is what I should have done as a leader in 2017, taken a pause, not necessarily cancel classes, just taken a pause. All of those things were incredibly important to think about collectively for faculty.

We did a year or two of the Engaged Listening Project. We had more and more faculty interested in it. We had the folks who were on the center left and the center right who actually were friends talking to each other. Then we got a little bit farther out. Now we have about 50% of our faculty, if not more now, have been trained in this Engaged Listening Project in which they were in the early phases of our initiative introduced to these basic skills and ideas.

A lot of people think they already know it. I thought I already knew all of it. Yet part of the everyday discipline of creating a community that is committed to conflict transformation is actually saying, actually, I don’t. The head of our entire conflict transformation initiative now continues to get retrained in restorative practices, in deliberative dialogue, in conflict transformation.

[00:36:23] Eboo: Yes, you’re like a Jedi, like you constantly go to Yoda.

[00:36:26] Laurie: Always going in that space.

[00:36:28] Eboo: Can I ask you a question about this?

[00:36:29] Laurie: Yes. Then we’ll go to the transformational moment.

[00:36:32] Eboo: Laurie, I’m curious, so some of the common and very salient intellectual activist approaches of our time. I can’t engage with somebody who denies my humanity, social changes about dismantling systems of oppression, anti-racism, and hundreds of institutions have named themselves anti-racist. Anti-racism is not about listening to people with whom you disagree.

Anti-racism, there’s an incentive structure. I’m simply being descriptive here. There’s an incentive structure to say, to identify things that are racist and to seek to erode or eliminate them. This has to have come up in the Middlebury culture of you are requiring me to harm myself as opposed to identify things that are racist, dismantle systems of oppression, et cetera. Did you see engaged listening as an alternative, not just activity, but paradigm? How did you deal with the discourse of the salient activist paradigm of the day?

[00:37:44] Laurie: Those are great questions. A couple of thoughts there. There are two forms of academic change that actually work. Having a commission and making recommendations. I’ve never seen it work once. I’ve been a dean or a president for 15 years. It’s never worked once. What does work are two things, have a party and see who comes and say something politely for 10 years, 10 times a year. I know that seems cynical, but it’s not, it’s quite idealistic, in fact.

In regards to all of the paradigms that were out there, those paradigms were important on any number of levels. Those paradigms have something to say. If those paradigms do not account for disconfirming evidence, then they’re not intellectual, they’re ideological. My approach and the approach of the faculty leading the seminars, and by the way, the faculty did this. I supported it. I helped create the grant. I gave some of the things, but let’s be really clear. My focus and engagement and support on this was intellectual, but it was never top-down in the way that it could have been in another place. Because I don’t have a faculty or a culture that could accept top-down.

Lots of folks still, they grumble, oh, now they’ll say, conflict transformation’s top-down. A, have a party and see who comes. The answer for us is not to have yet another ideological smackdown. We have the best debate team around. We can have debates as long as we want, but to have another ideological smackdown in which the fantasy of both the far left and the far right is, “Hey, at some point,” and you see it all the time on YouTube, so-and-so schools someone else on this particular issue. It’s the moment of ultimate triumph. That’s a fantasy. It’s never going to happen, especially when your work is to remain intellectual and to allow disconfirming evidence, which is my number one criteria, in a situation where people could think in so many different ways and in so many different contexts. That’s the way I would talk about and address that particular issue. To shut it down, to shut down, say, oppressor versus oppressed paradigms, some of which are legit and some of which are not, or some of which I would disagree with, let’s put it that way for me, would make it worse. Because then you are going to simply be the thing that they want you to be. You want them, they want to have an oppressor, but what if you refuse to be that as a college president, but something else.

Transformational moment for us was a donor who understood all of this, who watched as we held all the students to account, and the far left got really upset that we actually gave sanctions to the students. Far right, I think the word on one very far right publication was Craven, because we didn’t kick anybody out. That’s what you’re dealing with in terms of all that stuff. You survive it, you live with it, and the only thing you can do is go forward with your own vision with integrity.

I was incredibly lucky because the board knew that, and the board could see the depth of thought that we brought to the healing process. Those two things that I mentioned, number one, the power of all of these skills as tools to live as a citizen in the public square, i.e. college, and two, the power of the pause. I had a donor who had lived through all of this with me, and they said, “Okay, what’s your dream?” I wrote a very institutional focused dream with my development office, and then they said, “Oh, come on, that’s way too institutional, write me from the heart.”

This happens once in a lifetime, this never happens. I’m like, “Okay, I’m going to write from the heart,” and I wrote what I thought would be a place where five pillars in our high school training, in our Bread Loaf School of English, in our undergraduate curriculum, in our undergraduate experiential learning and residential learning, in our graduate programs, and in our study abroad programs, we would infuse conflict transformation into everything.

Again, have a party and see who comes. If we had required it, it would have failed. They said, “This is exactly what I was expecting.” We ended up with a $25 million grant to do this work. That’s where in the middle of, we started by expanding and the nugget and the center remains the Engaged Listening Project. We have now created a cluster of courses, which is the basis of a curriculum in conflict transformation skills. We have about 100 internships every year where students use and get trained in conflict transformation skills in any number of different flavors and go to their internships with that paradigm.

We have 70 graduate fellows who are training in language teaching and diplomacy skills in our campus in Monterey, in translation, medical translation, you name it, in nuclear and weapons of mass destruction, non-proliferation, where many of our fellows are, where they use the basic paradigms of conflict transformation to infuse everything that they do professionally. We have all of our 37 sites abroad now have either experiential or scholarly student offerings in the modes of conflict transformation in that country. We have a high school program at our Bread Loaf School of English, as well as some of our collaborative work with folks in Russia and in Russia related countries on weapons of mass destruction.

My mode of academic change is ubiquity. This is the story. Whatever has been written in 2017 is not the story. I cannot say that strongly enough. It is neither accurate nor true. This is the story. The reason why I say that is because this was people planning, people thinking about, “Okay, having the argument, is it too practical in education? Really? Middlebury is doing this really vocational thing.”

I am lucky because I do the highest scholarly stuff. I do ancient India philology and history of ideas. I have credibility to say, yes, and this is absolutely essential right now. If I were a nurse or a social worker, I wouldn’t. Because you’re just bringing your own paradigm. I’m saying, no, this paradigm matters and it matters for all of higher education. The last three years we have gone full guns, excuse the metaphor, to make it ubiquitous.

I have been, this is the story, I have been blown away by the results, which brings us to this spring. Why have I been blown away by the results? For two reasons and they’re unexpected. The first is that our students see that bonding social capital matters as much for their education as the protest, form a protest that breaks down relationships. That is an incredibly hard thing to teach. We by sheer accident had a dialogical group between folks identified with Israel and folks identified with Palestine in the spring of ’23.

As I mentioned yesterday, the goal following one of our paradigms that we teach around deliberative dialogue is all about being brave. It was nothing more than that. It was just a single brave thing. There was true connection that happened. When October 7th happened, yes, we had all the stuff. We had a Jewish vigil that wasn’t good enough for some of the folks who are connected to deeply Israel identified. Only two, but it didn’t matter. In a small community, that does matter. We had a Palestinian vigil that folks felt who were Israel identify harmed by. We had someone who had river to the sea on their door. We had all those things.

The thing that really profoundly made a difference is all of those students kept talking to each other. They cried, they were mad, they kept talking. Hillel decided that they would have a bake sale of challah bread and sell it. The Muslim Students Association bought it. They collectively donated to World Central Kitchen. I just looked at that and I said, the students figured that out. We taught them how to use those tools. They then figured that out. That was a moment. It was small, it was everyday. It was a bake sale for God’s sake. Yet it signified something incredibly powerful about what they were saying about what’s possible.

As we did have an encampment, we started with, we have a 24-hour arts festival called Nocturne. In Nocturne, they had a beautiful die-in that was attended by a number of different folks. It was artistically done. It was done by dancers as well as artists. It was a performance. On the side of the tent, it said, keep talking about Palestine. I thought, this is great. I’m proud of them. It was nonviolent. It was something they felt they needed to do. It was about talking.

Then the next day, a group of students, maybe 30, had checked out tents for a class camp project. That was the phrase. Of course, it was the encampment. We do not have a law against tents in our campus. It was not obstructive. The students had done a ton of research about what was and wasn’t appropriate. As we continued to talk with students, we immediately got into engagement with the students. We also have another tradition, which I would highly recommend if you can manage it. That is a tradition of direct conversation between trustees and students.

The other thing that really makes a difference is you have to have something at stake. We said immediately to the students, who did not ask us to, or the initial ask around divestment from Israel, we said, not going to happen. We said, what we are happy to do is talk about more Palestinian students coming. We’ve always been open about our investments, but we’ll continue to create another group, which we did in 2019, to look at our environmental investments. You talk with the trustees.

Suddenly we had something that everyone had something at stake in. That also, I just want to be very clear, made a huge difference in the nonviolent resolution of this. We said, I had four amazing folk, back to your point about deans and so on. One was trained as a conflict mediator, Khuram Hussain. One was trained in really good ways in educating people about investments, my CFO. The third was a dean of students and VP for student affairs, who’s really good at maintaining relationship, but stating boundaries.

We had maybe five or six conversations with the students. It was real. They were experiencing pressure from national organizations. They, many of them, felt like success should mean getting arrested and being on TV. Yet we were able to say, if you want to have a long-term conversation with our trustees and with our admissions office about having more Palestinian students, we already have admitted several, and more conversation about what our endowment can and cannot be invested in, this is, here they are, trustees are ready to talk.

Each time it looked like the national pressure was so great that they were about to erupt or do something, because that’s real, and they’re not the same students, they’re two generations removed from the students in 2017, they stopped short of that, because they knew that the trustees would no longer speak with them, and that would be the break. They had something at stake.

They also had a paradigm. Between the encampment, we had a trustee meeting, and then we had graduation. We also wanted a document, which I’ll be happy to send to you all, that was not a document of resolution, not a document that ended a negotiation. The press has it entirely wrong. It’s not worth my correcting. It was a document of shared values, and that meant everything for us. We stated a document of shared values, and a lot of the far, the extremes on both sides got upset for various reasons. We didn’t say divest from Israel on the one side, we didn’t say release of the hostages on the other, but the rest of it was a shared statement of values, and I also was blown away.

It was hard won, but students loved it, we loved it, but, and it started to be used in a number of different campuses where there were violent resolutions. People started to circulate it, and I was really proud of that. I’ll end by saying the 2019 conversation around divestment from fossil fuels included a moment when I lost my temper. If you’re a very nice person, you’re only going to lose your temper every once in a while, people do listen.

In 2019, students kept protesting around divestment, and I said, the trustees have taken your concerns. You don’t need to protest anymore. The people that are getting in the way of you are you, and you should be writing them thank you notes. The next day when the board was about to vote on our entire Energy 2028 plan on in the environment, there was a huge bag of thank you notes and some flowers, and I kept saying, let’s do 2019.

When the board came, and I’m like, okay, I said to the board in no uncertain terms, “You think this is Middlebury as usual? There are no encampments, there’s none of that? This was hard won. We stopped everything for two weeks to work with the students to get here.” What they greeted the trustees were, was thank you notes and flowers. The thank you notes began with something incredibly important, which is, this is my first genocide.

Now, we can have a debate about that word, and we know that SJP is very clear about the word that that is an accurate description of what’s happening. What that said was, as a student, as an 18 to 22-year-old, I am trying to grapple with this level of violence. We had pro-Israel identified students say, this is my first massacre. You as an educator have to take that into account as you work in relationship with these students.

The other thing that, so I was really proud of the fact that the students withstood national pressure week after week after week to do something different and instead chose relationship, instead chose the conversation with trustees over and over again. It was so hard. That’s the first thing I’m proudest of. The second is, it’s a weird thing to say, but students coming in and saying, we’re a national leader in conflict transformation. We have to do ABC as a way of holding us to account. It was like, “Wow, how did that happen?”

The transformation was extraordinary in which students pride in the fact that we lead in conflict transformation after four years, five, six years of just constant has really shifted. They have institutional pride in that, that makes a real difference. The third thing is that they haven’t forgotten over the summer, they are still meeting with the trustees. It’s hard. There’s a very far left wing of SJP that keeps posting, “Tell the trustees to stop stalling.” The trustees in conversation with the students who are meeting with them say, “Hey, you just posted this. We just saw it. Don’t say that about us. That’s not good faith.”

It’s not like it’s pretty or easy, but they have stuck in there with that relationship. That is extraordinary too. Those are the three things I’m proudest of. That’s the real story, end of diatribe.

[laughter]

[00:55:08] Eboo: Not a diatribe at all. I love this. Thank you, Laurie. One of the things that I love to quote is John Courtney Murray’s line, that a civilization is people living and talking together. That’s literally the definition of civilization. John Courtney Murray says it in reference to college campuses. This is the place where we excel at living and talking together. Alasdair MacIntyre says that part of the definition and purpose of a college is initiating people into conflict in a way characterized by conversation. That is what you all have sought to do at Middlebury. There’s so much that I learned from this. I just want to say a couple of things in the closing of this podcast, and then we’ll let our friends in the Teaching Interfaith Understanding Workshop have a bit of an intellectual and emotional break here.

One is you have to give some time to re-litigating the event. The eruptive event. You gave six to seven months, and you have to recognize that there’s all kinds of competing agendas. There’s a national story, which is somewhere between partially true and an outright false. There’s multiple interpretations internally. There’s people internally trying to get into the national narrative. There’s all kinds of layers happening. You have to give a certain period of time to dealing with the problem that erupted. Then you have to say, and now we’re moving forward.

In moving forward, what matters? Keep it local. Examples of trustees talking to students as an example of the local. We’re going to keep this within the family. We’re going to be aware that other things are out there. We’re going to keep this within the family. Relationships are king. Conversations are queen. We engage one another in ways that build relationships, and we do it through conversation, and nobody is born knowing how to do this. It’s a skill set, and we learn that skill set over and over and over again.

A big part of what a leader can do is to create the conditions principally by finding other people on campus who can lead this. It doesn’t feel top-down. It feels like a facilitated culture, a facilitated culture. It’s not about resolving conflicts. It is about recognizing that we are going to be a community that can talk itself, talk to itself while there is a conflict going on. Guess what? That is a particular kind of community. That is a kind of community that in any diverse society, that’s what you want. You want a community where people can talk to themselves amidst the conflict happening. Thank you, Laurie.

[00:57:41] Laurie: Absolutely. I love your summary. The only thing I would add is that you have to do all of this in a way that focuses on the integrity of what you’re doing in the midst of national pressure that I believe an international pressure in social media, in the public square, which is in my view unprecedented in human history. I think that the toll that that takes on young people is very real. That skill of continuing to think about integrity in the midst of that pressure, and it’s going to look different on every single college campus is an absolutely necessary 21st century skill to be educated.

[00:58:34] Eboo: Great. Thank you. Thank you, everyone here.

We would love to hear your takeaways. Let us know in the comments or wherever you live on social media. You can find us on Twitter at Interfaith USA and Instagram at Interfaith America. To read more about this conversation and to find resources and stories about bridge building in our religiously diverse nation, visit our website, interfaithamerica.org. I’m Eboo Patel.

Intro/outro music provided by Mysterylab Music and composed by Mott Jordan.

Credit music provided by Die Hard Productions.