watch the communicators monday night at 8:00 eastern on c-span2. coming up next on american history tv, a panel discussion with university and nonprofit presidents who are historians by training. they talk about their transitions to leadership positions and how their history backgrounds helped them in their roles as executives. this panel was part of the 2016 organization of american meeting heldnnual in providence, rhode island. it is about an hour and 50 minutes. >> i am john butler. i am the president of american historians. we are here to discuss historians. the theme is very appropriate, and part because the conferences on leadership, which i am

term,tly aware is a corny ok? but we live in a society that is in need of that quality, and many historians serve as officers in their universities, as officers in their colleges, and officers in their department. we -- when we were on graduate school, no one ever said anything about that subject. none of us were trained to be department chairs. no -- none of us were trained to be dealings -- deans. and none of us were trying to be historians. i mean, historians. [laughter] oh dear. pa so, we thought this would be an interesting panelnel that you would like because we have a

number of distinguished presidents who are historians and most of us -- it is a little awkward because most of those are greeting each other because we know each other as historians. we have seen drew and earl and ed on panels, giving papers. we have read their books. here they are as presidents -- former president of the university, president of the university, president at one of the major universities of the united states, and we don't often think about that great to what extent did the role as historians help them in their positions. does it help them and their positions? and we also would like to invite a conversation about higher education. thatl know perfectly well these are not easy times for higher education. these are difficult times for higher education in terms of states, especially in institutions, but also in terms of our culture. and bill o'reilly says

introduces a faculty member on one of his panels, he is inclined to say, professor. and that is not a compliment, right? -- the question is, how we how do we come for him the role of history -- how do we comprehend the role of history and higher education? and i think we have three individuals who can help us. we regret that one of our panel members, the president of the university of texas at san antonio, through a whole series of bizarre schedule changes by airlines, is not able to be here this afternoon. so i very much regret that. we have three excellent panelists, and i want to introduce them in alphabetical order. i will say one thing and that is, there is no interest for anyone outside except there is no lights appear.

so i have to hold them up like this so i can see them. ed harris received his ba at the university of tennessee and his phd at yale. he is known among ourselves as historians for a number of books, "the promise of the new south," and for a fabulous new digital project called "the valley of the shadow, two communities in the american civil war." he was the ninth president of the university of richmond from 2007 to 2015, and he will be the president of the organization of american historians in 2017 and 2018. is known for her historical works, " the role of the intellectual in the old south," and her most recent

book, which attracted enormous attention, both for the substance of scholarship and emotional impact the book presents, and because she happens to be the president of harvard university, "death in the american civil war." she is the 28th president and the first woman to be president of harvard university. she began her presidency in 2007. earl lewis received his ba from concordia college in morehead, minnesota. he is a phd from the university of minnesota. he's the author of a wonderful book called "in their own interest," as well as a book he co-authored called "love on trial, an american scandal in black and white." which he has done with joe william trotter,

the african-american urban experience. he is the sixth president of the andrew w. mellon foundation, which he began in 2013, and we are honored that he will be the president of the organization of american historians in 2018 and 2019. manage the to discussion, and i am going to sit in the audience. thank you very much for coming and i will -- and it will not take this over. thank you very much. [applause] ed: good to see everybody. i appreciate audience participation. first, i would like to torture my colleagues and friends with hard questions and maybe you will forget what the question was and i will be able to get out of it. i want to ask a question than most people in the room would be

thinking. what the heck were you thinking of to give up a very nice job as a professor writing these books, teaching, leading in your profession, and to trade all of that for the relentless hassle of being a university president, or of the burdens of giving away all that money? [laughter] you, what it begins with what the heck were you thinking -- i will start with drew. andrew: thanks, ed. my story is one of a slippery slope because i never intended to take on an administrative role and through my many years , of teaching, i resisted them as actively as i could. when in 1999 the president of harvard came and said, what i consider being the dean of the

newly established radcliffe institute, it struck me as something that maybe i would think about. he was very persuasive over a number of months. but, what was appealing to me about that was it seemed as if i could pursue a scholarly career and continue with that, but help launch this very important new aspect of harvard that i thought would establish women at harvard in a very different way from what had been the previous arrangements, and i thought that was an important thing to do. i went under something of an allusion. -- illusion. part of what made me do it was, i felt the increasingly i was being asked as i became more senior in the profession to do administrative tasks of one or another, which did not count and for which i had no administrative support. i thought, all right i will make , this my day job and we will

see how that goes. i will still be able to have my scholarly life. well, i had less of a scholarly life than i expected when i got to radcliffe. but i did find it absolutely feminist -- absolutely fascinating to be working any team with other people. it's a much more shared experience to be an administrator, and to be able to push agendas in a way that advanced important goals for other people's scholarship and other people's careers. so, i really enjoyed it. i got kind of ensnared in the whole challenge of what is happening to american higher education. of through a series completely unexpected developments, i ended up taking on a much larger administrative task and becoming the president of harvard. that also was a situation that enabled me to engage with issues in higher education in a really robust way, and that's been very rewarding. >> i'd say it was great until you left out the part that you

became president of harvard. maybe talk a little bit more about -- you still had a very good job at radcliffe. was the presidency and -- was the presidency an expansion amplification of that , work, or did you see a different sense of mission? drew: it was a different sense of mission, in which i felt decisions i could make, policies i could embrace, questions i could engage, would be ones that would really matter for an institution i felt really mattered. i had been part of the university's council of deans. i had been in a front row seat for a lot of the big questions of higher education that harvard confronted. i was very interested in them and i felt that i understood a lot about what the university needed, and what i might able to contribute.

ed: when the opportunity came your way, you saw that this could be something very exciting you would like to take. earl? what was your path? earl: i answered yes to a question in 1990 the changed my -- 1990 that changed my life. i had moved from berkeley to michigan because i did not want to do administration. in 1990, i was asked to be the director of the center of the african-american institute at the university of michigan only a few months after i moved. i said yes. within the first six months i discovered something about myself. so much about academic life was about deferred gratification. in this role i could help build , an institution and see it move forward, and do it immediately. i said once to a friend, it's funny to walk into your office in the morning and realize that by the time you leave in the afternoon, you actually could have gotten something done to change the course for a number

of other people. that led from a path from the director to then dean at the university of michigan for almost eight years, nine years. and then and then provost at emory for another 8 1/2 years. by the time came the job came -- i was on the board of trustees of the mellon foundation. it seemed the right move at that particular moment. but a lot of it goes back to the way john framed the question. i had mentors as i was going through graduate school. we never talked about assuming leadership roles. russman minard, one of my advisors, had a whole series of administrative jobs and when he and i would find a moment to sit and chat, i would listen to him. and i realized that i may not

want to do it and i-70 did nothing i wanted to do it between 1984 and 1989, but by the time i got to michigan i was able to see that it was consequential. i look at the audience and i see a few people that work with me, during that time at the university of michigan. what we were able to do than was -- what we were able to do then was also building program. but a program that allowed a number of the graduate students with whom i work to understand something about institution building, that is easy to complain about the place that you call home. it's much harder to figure out how to change it. that requires some attention to structures and the interaction between structure and culture and how individuals place himself in those structures and cultures to affect change. ed: now you are presidency of a foundation. how would you compare the two?

earl: at the time that i was offered and accepted the presidency of the mellon foundation, i was also contemplating the presidency of a university. i remember, i called her dear friend of mine, we had grown up together, and this friend had headed hr operations at coca-cola. i called her and said, look, i have this set of options for me. we have known each other since the fifth grade and she started laughing. i said why are you laughing? she said let me get it right, , you get too big for money or for money too vague -- you get to beg for money or give it away. [laughter] i said, it's not quite that easy. she said, let me say it again. you get to beg for money or give it away. in that moment, recognizing -- being a provost, we are going

through the recession and coming out on the other side. you have consequences not only for those individuals, but the health of the whole region. i kept thinking, is there another way to begin to be able to affect the kinds of opportunities that have already been important to me? the mellon foundation has been unique in the sense that about 70% of our dollars go to top -- to support higher education anyway. it's not walking away from higher education. it is figuring out a new way to partner and help to shape some of the opportunity structures for american higher education. ed: this is where i answer the question i asked myself. it's a fascinating story. [applause] [laughter] [laughter] not so much, really. i was a professor at the university of virginia for 20 years and wind of the various ranks. i was chair of the faculty senate. they asked me if i would like to be dean at the college and

graduate school of arts and sciences, which is about 70% of uva. i thought, being department chair looks hard. it looks better. you get an office and do that. but like you, it was a place i cared about a lot. it felt to me when i became the dean of arts and sciences, that i was the chair of a large committee. that is what i thought. let's all work together, let's make good things happen. i did that with every expectation of doing it and then quitting and getting back into full-time history business. finishingas i was what i set out to do, raising money for a big building, other things, i was supposed to go to up next year, the university of said, wecalled and would like for you to be

president. and, to go to a place that is fundamentally an undergraduate institution seems counter intuitive. but, i looked at it and thought, to be able to have the sense of efficacy and to shape an entire institution the university of , richmond is fortunate in having a large endowment, but had not yet shown it could really be a diverse, inclusive place in all dimensions. i thought for somebody who spent , most of his waking hours in a 19th century american south worrying about slavery and civil war and segregation and injustice, to be able to go to the former capital of the confederacy and have this institution poised to do great things and see what you can do with it, said only the pieces -- suddenly the pieces came together. i love the university of virginia, but then decided wonder was this constellation of opportunities to do this. drew kindly accepted the

invitation to introduce me at my inauguration. i did that for eight years and it was intense and fun and great. but my goal from the very beginning was to come back out the other side when i had enough energy to write books and talk and teach. i've always done it sort of one foot touching the brake. that is not true. i'm all in. what all of us have in common is curiosity to actually see how an institution runs. it is so interesting when you see it. all of the years when i was dean, people would come up to me and say, ed, how are you doing? i'm fine. no really, you are the dean. you can't be doing well. i would tell them, no, it's fun. no, it's not. they talked about it like i had

a terminal illness. everybody makes a joke about going over to the dark side. because from the position of a faculty member to get up every day and solve problems that somebody else causes, it does look like the idea of health. - hell. when you get into it, you realize solving a problem that somebody else causes is a contribution to the institution and its fun. i'm done not because i didn't like it, just because there is still stuff i really want to do. so, i believe in the program. -- in fact john just said that he would reflect a little bit on how it could be that being trained as a historian equipped us in any way whatsoever to have these jobs, because you could think that studying dead people for a living might not be the best training for managing living people.

it could also be the case that we don't really have to think very much about budgets and so forth. so was it just that we had time , on our hands because history was so easy that we had time to go into administration, or was there something about historical training that make people think we could do these jobs? drew: yes or no? i am not sure whether my history training persuaded others that i could do the job. but it certainly has been a huge in doing the job and i think about it in this way looking at being a historian, -- particularly being a historian of the civil war and looking at this short period of time when enormous change took

place, give you perspective on what makes change, what makes people resist change, how do you persuade people to change? a lot of leadership is actually about change about trying to make institutions better, about trying to find goals, identify goals, cheap goals that can bring people together and forward together. and for me thinking about the women i wrote about in "mothers of invention," resisted change in the civil war context, chose to embrace certain pieces of it, reject others, what motivated them, what was behind their decisions i found that , that kind of reflection about change has been enormously helpful to me. and so, and when i see a problem, when a problem comes to me, i always begin by thinking what is the history of this problem? where did it come from? how did it evolve? therefore, how can i get a

handle on the intricacies of it and address it better? so i approach my work like a historian and i think my consciousness of historical opportunity and contingency has been essential to what i've done as a president. earl: i would agree with drew in all respects. i started as a social historian. that meant my early days counted a lot of things. and trying to figure out how to look for patterns where the first glance and evidence would not suggest the necessary pattern. inside of institutions, that ability to sit and look for patterns, because they are not always linear. my good friend joe wagner, the president of emory, was quoted in the "chronicle of higher education," reflecting on a conversation we used to have. i used to tease jim, saying, you are thinking like an engineer. he would say, historian, right? and i would say, yeah. and there are ways in which patterns, are not always linear,

and working inside institutions, you can identify problems. there are not always solutions the first time around. so, this ability to actually pause and reflect on the fact that a different moments, it was not obvious that you would get from a to b. so you had to engage individuals and a series of conversations and counter conversations to move whatever the issue was. and that piece of having both the perspective of the historian and the training of the historian, i found useful more often than not. the other part is also the attention to the interdisciplinary approach to the world. as a historian, my first job was in african-american studies. i remember going to teach in berkeley in 1984 and being taught by a group of graduate students in the new ethnic studies program. all of a sudden, they were forcing me to rethink i had not

read before. that it was that edition all peace, not just the historians, but their ability to interact with a whole lot of literature that opens up a whole other set of questions. inside of institutions, it is that ability to hear one's colleagues and figure out what they are trying to say, and understand how their perspective connects to yours, not only leads to new discoveries, but positions institutions and -- institutions for new possibilities. that pays of the disciplinary training of a historian and the position of saying, this is how i think about the world, this is the way i was taught to think about the world, but i'm learning from you in a new way also there are different ways of changing the lens of analysis a little bit. it is both a historical aspect, the willingness to embrace others. i think he played dual roles in my career. ed: history being not particularly jargon or model bound, you have to kind of open

to every discipline. we have something to learn from every discipline and have something to contribute. often felt when i was president and dean that you are sort of watching history in three dimensions. there are immediate consequences. the unexpected happening all the time. , all of our work is about justice and conflict. dish -- do you think -- is there any consequence, a connection with the fact of what we chose to study, in some ways we would seek out that opportunity from the institutional roles in which we live? earl: i'm not sure i would draw a causal relationship here. there may be some association the kinds of questions because -- at least the institutions i've been a part of have also

found themselves, not separate from the major polls of activity really animating society. , you write about african-american history in the 19th and 20th century it's , impossible to ignore the question of inclusion, it's impossible to think about how one defines the shaping and reshaping of democratic possibilities in the nation. those kinds of questions come to the contemporary institution. you think of the university as some will say the escalator to opportunity and mobility in life, but it's also a place where we know, to this day american public high schools are , more segregated today than they were when i was coming through in the 1950's and 1960's. it's an interesting way where the university then becomes a place where a broader cross-section of students first encounter themselves. my questions about not only who

-- so that questions about not only who we are but how , intentional are the programs we crafted, this discourse of interaction and engagement -- those kinds of questions we have been dealing with forever. questions of power always animated almost everything i've ever written, questions of power , race, and class. my favorite story is when i was provost, and there was a labor dispute issue and i had a group of students who were determined that i was going to side with them. i had been a labor historian, and had written about american unions. so they started quoting me my own work. [laughter] and i remember sitting there thinking, this is a surreal moment. saidlooked at them and let's see if i can raise the ante and see how serious they are about this. i said, you have quoted me. i will clear my schedule for the next month and we will have a

seminar for two hours for the next month where you can actually understand the work you are now referencing and put it into a broader context. they didn't bite. they didn't want that counted. but i realized my ability to actually call their bluff forced a change in the conversation. but we ended up doing was created a two-year study of class relationships. that encounter did not die there, but it changed the direction of the conversation. i said, if you're going to be serious, it takes time to do real, serious scholarship. what we need to be about as a learning institution is not the blurb that can be tweeted, but in-depth analysis. we spent two years. i can still remember, i had one

of my games looking at me saying, earl you can't study , class. i said, yes we can. he goes, no you can't. it's going to lead to class warfare. uh, no. that's not what this is all about. we ended up moving the conversation that started with a group of students through the council of the deans back into studies that were to help shape and reshaping secure policy and practice. those are the kinds of ways in which i realized both what we do, how we do it has impact on the institutions we try to lead. drew: i think of a quotation from nanny rice burroughs that i have often used in speeches, which is, education is democracy's life insurance. and so, if you think about what of institutions

of higher education, especially at a time when the issues of access and opportunity are so front and center for higher education it seems to me very kinds at peace with the of concerns we have addressed in our own work, and that's very similar to what you were saying. we are also southern historians, we are not just historians. when you are a southern historian, you are so aware of how the neglect of education in the south, the blocking of access to education, of course for slaves entirely by law, but then the slow, slow, slow evolution of a public school system in the south, all of those things have been so much a part of the inequities we have all studied. and perhaps that reinforced in my mind this sense of the power of education and what it might be able to accomplish.

so, it has made me feel that this is consistent with the concerns i have written about in my work. >> one of the skills is critical thinking. let's maybe not so self-congratulatory. we have been to some of these meetings and you think, history was good, that i wish i knew this or that or the other thing. do you got anything? earl: there were days -- i took more stacked courses than most of my colleagues going through graduate school. there were still times when i was dealing with budgets and trying to do analysis, and there were other kinds of training that i thought would have been useful. in the end, most of us on these roads jokingly say if you don't, , you hire the person who does have those skills. that becomes important.

for me, the best part about the job, particularly in a university setting, is the ability to constantly learn. and so, what's exciting -- i'm not a biologist, but i can still remember sitting with a colleague who was a medicinal chemist who was talking to me about cell death and how you tune out the signals and walked me through a tutorial. when i was in reading, i could understand it better. i thought, you know, i may actually have one of the better jobs because i can call someone and learn something about a subject matter that it takes others several years to gain that kind of training. to bethat ability comfortable in knowing that you are not an expert, but you are surrounded by experts, and you

can call on them any time. and my joke was, i would get up in the morning when i was provost and would laugh at my computer. my sister would hear me and my room laughing. she would say why are you laughing? said, what i discovered a long time ago -- go back to when you were in elementary school and middle school or junior high school and remember the smartest kids in class? get that visual picture of the smartest kids in class. now you are a university administrator and your surrounded by 1000 of them. on any given day, at least 1/3 will still tell you that they are the smartest kid in class. [laughter] if you can relax in at understanding, you can still do your job reasonably well. ed: you work in a fairly simple institution, so you may not have the need [laughter] .

drew: you and i became presidents in 2007, right? we are feeling our way and the whole world falls apart, with the recession in 2008. that was a time when i learned very fast a lot more than i had known before about finance and budgets and how to manage cutting budgets and all of those things. but it would have been nice had i known more and did not have to learn so much in that pressured moment. ed: you and i spoke for some reason during that time, and i asked if you had any advice for me. she did or did i think this is advice all of us can benefit from. she said, ed, don't spend money you don't have. [laughter] yes, you did say that. the thing, what is surprising is that i can take the point about begging for money but it does not feel like that when you do it.

it's -- by the time you are talking to somebody, they know why you are talking to them. it's basically telling a story. it's the same skill historians have. how do these pieces fit together? how much might they project into the future? i did not even know what the annual fund was when i became dean. every year you have to raise this money? i think it probably went into academic life not ever having to think about money, so it is ironic that for 14 years it's , what i thought about. it's all more interesting than you might think. i would say that turning on your e-mail and getting hundreds of messages every day and all the time, none of which you can ignore, it's physically exhausting. how do you honor that responsibility that we are making sound nice here? how do you keep up with that and

then go to a reception, and eat hors d'oeuvres five nights a week? it's physically taxing. a want to ask you one more question before we see what folks in the audience might want to talk about, about higher education more broadly, about the humanities more specifically, and history even more specifically than that. you are both in positions to see a huge part of the american higher education landscape. reading-- we keep basically an editorial everyday in one form or another about how we are feeling, how the system is failing, about how american higher education is so deeply flawed. you have seen it up close, you've seen it from the inside, you've seen all these e-mails and the problems they signal. you've seen 1000 of the smartest kids in the room. how do you believe that american higher education is in trouble? or do you think they are sources

of strength we have not tapped? or have people missed specified the situation -- mis-specified the situation? earl: i will start. in talking about american education both inside and outside the united states, we usually phrase it beauty and the beast. over the last 15 to 20 years, a lot of people still talk about the beauty of the american higher education system. the fact that it is still notwithstanding the increases. it is still more affordable and accessible than others. that was 2 million first-time freshmen in 1949, to 14 million

by 2010. you end up with a range and part of the beauty piece. the beast becomes our own both internal critique and a lot of , folks have been critiquing american education and live inside the walls. they sense and understanding. you get a sense of everything from academically adrift to other ways of describing where arere and what student learning, and not learning, and then pundits from the outside who will jump on, of course, questions about cost and completion, and other issues. it i actually think there are three major challenges that american higher education will greaterrhaps with even force over the next years. one, i think that we live in an era where more and more people are asking a question about values. sometimes very simply about

return on investment. but it is really about the value of higher education, particularly the value of a liberal arts education as a form of being educated. we find ourselves trying to draw distinctions between skills and -- skill attainment and the ways in which people are educated. that is a critical question that will have to be addressed. we need to be able to say with more evidence qualitative and , quantitative, how we think about the value. is not just about the first job you get out of college. it is not where you are 30 years from now. because if that is the case we will have large swathes of jobs that will not be filled. the second question is also about universities and their commitments. it's one thing to -- as both the obama administration and other administrations have emphasized

over the last few years, access. the next question has to be how we really think through completion. one of the most fascinating questions for us, and for all of the work about the disruption in american education, i think we have not been disrupted yet because the critical change will be on how graduate programs around the country, particularly the humanities, begin to wrestle with how students learn, and the degree to which we make better use of the learning sciences, cognitive sciences, and we do this across the different disciplines. because harvard's graduation rate sits at one end of the spectrum. if you go all the way down to the community colleges in the american landscape and where we are talking some places in single digits after six years and other places at best 12%, there is a range of human talent that actually gets lost along the way.

and the most elite and the most elite american higher education cannot be separated from those institutions that are resource poor and resource stressed. ,and somehow we have to figure out where this relationship is across the host system. the third is the most complicated and perhaps most difficult conversation we will phase -- that moment of democratization, disclosure in the range of institutions between 1950 and 2010 has led us to a new moment. there's a question, do we and can we support the whole range of institutions across the whole complex? when you name the thousands there are different ways in , terms of how we assess. that's a critically important question. since every time i have said this -- i have said this in a couple of different settings. college and university presidents will come up to me and say afterwards will we , survive? i'm a historian.

i can't predict the future. there are markers of what one needs to think about as you look at whether or not you are still successful in being able to educate a group of students. that is the critical question. that means i'm not as concerned by the changes in humanities and enrollment in a two to three-year cycle. you will see some volatility and high and low points, but that's not as concerning as these mega-questions about higher education in general. ed: it does strike me that in all the things you read about in higher education in united states, the fundamental fact of democratization. we might expect it to be more expensive, you are educating millions more people who are first-generation. millions more women. millions more people of color.

this should be a great accomplishment, but instead, it's like, well, somehow we lost control of the story and all of -- and all the story is is one , form of failure after another rather than a fact that this escalator of mobility -- we all know it has challenges. the fundamental fact is that we are educating a much broader swath of the american population than we did before, and it's not surprising there are strains that go with that. drew: i would like to build on the point that just made and when ien -- and say travel internationally, i am reminded that american higher education is absolutely the in the of the world. we are looked at in our domain of higher education as doing something that is so admired. and it is so odd, as you say, the critiques -- it's all a

narrative of failure inside the united states. and i think that is dangerous because it means we now disinvest in higher education, people are suspicious of higher education, people say don't send your children to college, i will give them an award not to go to college. and so i believe we need to , shift this narrative we are telling. if i could just say something about another story we are ,elling about higher education earl did such a great job of listing the number of challenges that i get to pick the one i want to talk about. education ist about getting a job and that all it's about. and it is not learning to be a citizen or expanding imagination , or the human dignity that comes with learning and growing through learning it is not about asking questions and being a

person who can see beyond the immediate next step in a life or in a society's life. rather, it is so instrumental instrumentalized. widespread. many of us in higher education forced back against a proposal from the department of education for a measurement system that would evaluate institutions based on salary of graduates at their first job. that was an appalling notion. this came from sources that should have been making other kinds of arguments for higher education. so we need to tell that story because they will diminish what american higher education has been if we simply moving towards this instrumental version of training that come in my view, is not truly education. ed: the fan were so much about is the story of high costs and debt, not that it's not true but it can dissuade people who might

get scholarships and go to college for free. but they are just been told over and over again, look at this cost. that is a mistake we made perhaps letting sticker cost the one thing. the fact is the language of defeatism actually is going to become a self of filling prophecy. but people who might have come in at an earlier year say they don't want to come out with $100,000 in debt. not knowing that they are not going to. that is what bothers me. the story that we tell is impeding the progress we could be making. i want to ask one more question and then invite people to come up and i have more questions if they don't as a kind of threat. how do you feel about our intellectually

and institutionally? vital feel history is a -- despite all of these pressures, i mediate job salary, rankings, that the problem of the job market, do you go good about american history intellectually and institutionally, or do you feel there are red flags? i would speak beyond , itory in responding and say regard history as a humanities field. the institution for which i work defined it as a social science. but i insisted it is a humanities give. ed: you are the president. [laughter] it can be both, but i would like to talk about it for a moment in the context of humanities. we need to communicate better with larger publics. we need to explain why history

matters to people beyond our own colleagues and members of our profession. i think the humanities needs to do that also. my book about death in the civil war was made into a film by brooke burns. and i traveled around with rick and did events. sitting on the battlefield at antietam on the 150th anniversary of the battle and having people just interested in history, asking billy fascinating questions. reenactors,e not maybe they were, but the kinds of questions were like, did that for gay turn right? why did these people fight? they were so profound, and so embedded in human experience. and how can we bring those kinds of questions closer to those of us who want to devote our lives

to meditating about them? and take a wonderful, wonderful work that is done by historians and somehow get it into that kind of conversation. i felt blessed that rick burns did this with my book because it enabled me to have that closeence, but i hadn't -- but i had nothing close to that. and it really made me think, i want to do more of this. i want to figure out how this can happen. i don't need it as a dumbing down, or great popularization, how do we share more? how do we get people to invest more in what we do? earl: from where i sit at the foundation we are encouraged in a way given the number of faculty and indeed the world coming in with new proposals and

ideas. a are being able to explore new topic, make it available in a digital form, and come up with new ways of partnering across disciplinary bounds. thinking in new ways about the public nature of scholarship in public humanities and public history. institutionsnew needing to be created. it becomes another sort of moment from one place in our history to the other. we're going to situate important historical questions. i also reminded of something else. nonprofessional historians come in with the challenges and sometimes we talk to one another and how we talk to a broader set

of publics. interest in what we have to say. that too was a challenge and opportunity for us. people who are interested in that. institutions such as university and colleges to reach into that interesting questions that are historically oriented. we've not had a dearth of new ideas to come before us. that is exciting. there is this real sense of an energy there.

the struggles over whose idea will prevail and how does that voice get inserted into the pre-existing narratives? point going back to a drew made earlier, education linked to democracy and our ability to interrogate ourselves and advance an argument. >> i have a poignant sense about all of this that i don't think we have ever been writing better history with greater ability to reach rotter audiences. see all of the

those wanting to have the fortunate lives we had and you realize that structurally, the deck is stacked against them. one thing that is important for us to think about is how long will these great ideas keep ways tof we don't find nurture the humanities? i'm glad to see people lining up. >> i will envelop what i need to say. >> i'm a phd student at brown talkede bastion is you about how your background in history influenced your approach to administrative work. i would like to ask about the reverse side.

has your experience as presidents or administrators changed your perspective on history or understanding history? >> a great question. who has a great answer? is in part,ll say yes, but mostly no. the point ofto interdisciplinary scholarships. grand challenges we can identify that require a multidisciplinary team. way i realized in the looking at scholarships and how they are organized elsewhere is that there is a team approach. most programs do not teach that team approach. some folks know, i started doing that early on but grew it over time as i assumed more administrative roles, building

out research teams that were multi generational. sure that worke could get done, but it improved the work. work oneveral people this project in relationship to one another improve the work and that is something i learned looking across the institution. anthe digital work i have end we are still doing, what is great about it is that it is a team. any of much bigger than us could do buyer selves. it if i is the laws of thermodynamics and generates more energy than it consumes. i have never been one about judging the people of the past. they are dead and cannot fight back.

when i imagine the responsibility of leading men you battle to death, when just have the day to day responsibilities we have, you lose sleep over having to reprimand somebody, all of a sudden, i'm a lot less judgmental about the people that pass and why didn't they see that? i suddenly understand. >> i will give you a really specific example. when i was dean at radcliffe, i reported -- i reported to larry summers who is an economist and whenever i talk to him, he wanted to talk numbers. how many times is a new manuscript displayed in your library likely to be taken out in the next 10 years and is it worth paying for it? a world where he stop things as numbers and analytics and i was writing this republic of suffering, mostly

ignoring writing it. i got six months of leave and actually wrote it. a chapter about counting the dead at the end of the war and the of session with coming up with a firm number and what that meant and why it was needed. that chapter would not have existed if i had not been exposed to this economist, analytical way of approaching the world, so it came right out of that new experience with numbers. there's a very specific answer. >> i'm at rutgers university and i served as chancellor for 10 years. foran arts and science the four years before that. these discussions are very close to my interest. if i could begin with a short story, i was editor of my

college newspaper and denounced the administration every single issue because that was what we did in the 60's. provostraduated, the who handed me my diploma said to me what are you going to do next year? i said i'm going to the university of chicago to study for phd. he said that's wonderful. i've bet you'll end up in administration and i told my friends how insulted i was. he obviously understood me better than i understood myself. the interest in how the university was run in those kinds of things reflect themselves and who ends up in administration. i want to mention one other i came to rutgers and applied for the position as my firstad written

book on the role of investors in progressive era reform in the city of chicago and i developed a notion of what an urban university should be. it should be lots of scholars going out and studying the city, so when i interviewed there, i said that's what i want to do. they hired me and indeed, that's what i did. my model of all of this came from my early research on that and other things of that kind. one more and i won't monopolize. when i left administration three years ago, i decided i wanted to do scholarship again and i have been writing a history of urban universities. one of the things i discovered is that the term urban university has been pejorative.

it shouldn't be, but it has been. it means working class, low income, commuter and that is mostly what people have thought about when they talk about urban universities. shaping the way i'm writing this book. had i known that before, i would have used it in various ways and my role. at curry college in milton mass. as you may be aware, the connecticut state legislature has proposed taxing yale's multi-million-dollar endowment. what is your reaction and how would you respond if a similar proposal was made in your home state of massachusetts? >> the house ways and means also thinking about

possible actions and relationships to large endowments and they have asked all universities with endowments over a billion dollars to respond with lengthy answers to a lengthy questionnaire. many institutions have posted these as they were due back in washington on april fools' day. to find one you from your university because it will give anybody in the room who works at such a large place, because even if you don't look at what endowments do, i think they are very poorly understood. such taxes.ose 35% of ournt funds budget and were it to be taxed, we would have to reduce aid somewhere. it would have to come out of our

operating budget and our endowment has enabled us to hugely increase financial aid in recent years and undertake a to the of activities benefit of students and community members. view,are, in my appropriate philanthropic accomplishments and should be given the philanthropic exemption from taxation. missouri.m st. louis, i am not a historian, but i am here with my colleague and want to say to you all that i never thought i would come to a place where history and the thatbilities of greatness we can achieve with history would move me to tears. ago, i started with

matthew. but fort a historian, 25 years, he has been reading your works, civil war, revolutionary war, politics, thataphy and emerging from because of a journey he was on, the conclusion that the history of african americans in the united states is not being properly told and that there is an element of contribution that is so significant that the united states as we know it would not be the greatest nation in modern dreaming just are thatnough to believe getting that history right can and will change the way we think about ourselves, our people, and

our nation. said at the end of your talk, to take this history and move it from the phd level, which is what we are committed to do, so that the masses can read it and understand it and receive it and gain hope and dignity and honor and standing for their ancestors and , imselves, it is so powerful have just started a year ago and he has been working on this for 25 years. in what youh power have written. we are taking what you have written. we are not making up any history. the history is there.

when i hear presidents of great -- you can move and discussioning the and we are in a very, very volatile time where it is important we get the history right. i'm not sure i have so much of a want to let just you know our history is impacting me just over the last year as this untold story of these 12 generations of african-americans from 1607 that have so, so impacted this nation that they are indispensable.

i don't know what to say about ,t, but the power of history and i am not a historian, but i have seen the power of history and i want to thank you all for helping us to understand that. [applause] >> i can't really follow that. thank you. auburn university and i did want to ask dr. faust about her time as president, but i'm short on time. thinking about changing the narrative about what it is liberal arts do and what is history does, i wanted to ask what can we do as professors, adjuncts and students, what are

ways that we can begin to do that if we don't have the resources presidents and >> lettrators have mark me venture a partial answer to a very complex question. arts includes more than the humanities, so talking about the arts and sciences that have been formulated in a way -- one of the challenges, if we just stick on the humanities to become more familiar with two things -- one, the patterns on the aggregate level, but also what happening on the local level. they come through the foundation or field sites, i recognize

2008, patterns have not been the same across institutions or departments in institutions. there are some departments that have seen significant growth and enrollment and others that have inn pronounced decreases enrollment. there are ways we talked more generally about what is the value of a liberal arts to ation and going back point that was made, if we allow the narrative to say was only and whent first job tony answered a recent question and would say i know that are, the question way was posted and there are certain if itou would not take was all about rational choice.

there are ways we choose our professions because we like them and we choose a way of studying because it enhances our ability to see the world in a new way. imagine in your job at auburn and elsewhere, if i would encourage people to read any one thing, spend some time looking at the humanities indicators because they give you a macro view of what has been going on over a long trendline and allows you to question the narrative of crisis and dim. an inflection but i don't know if it's the most prevailing way to understand change over time and you need a point of reference and that may be a place to start.

>> coming to the oah when you comesome mileage, people up when they were undergraduates and they are here now and they remember things you said. it's an often alarming fact to remember. when we talk about these crises, we forget we have a far more powerful tools and any film or even any best seller and that is the classroom. we have the chance to talk to backe and have them talk to us and explore things they never would have thought about before and remember for the rest of their lives. that's one of the remarkable things about being dean, would you remember professor so-and-so ? she changed my life in 1965. i went back and told my colleagues at a remember ascended does matter.

i worry that sometimes we discount the same way we andount the democratization discount the tools in our hands right now. with your adjuncts or graduate students or professors giving a lecture published over a long the capacity for changing lives we have as dorians, as thaters is enormous power you see when you step out of the classroom and spend your time creating opportunities, you realize how precious what is in that room really is. there is one more person and i think it's fair that that person gets to answer a western and in we will end for the day. the education school and when i was hearing you talk about this narrative of failure

with a large emphasis on instrumental is him and the use of urban as a pejorative and so on, it struck me how similar the conversation is, those expressed i leaders in k-12. historically, someone once quipped that university presidents stop getting worried about k-12 once they invented admissions offices. i'm wondering how you see the relationship between this discussion happening in higher ed and in k-12, whether or not there is any opportunity for thereo be joined or is something you are trying to position against higher ed that parallels what is going on in k-12? were speaking, i was thinking to myself that maybe these expressions of hostility should encourage us because they

all say education really matters to be, that they really care about it, or else they would not bother to criticize us so vigorously or worry so much about it. i do think there are common threads and that is one of them between the k-12 debates and university debates. universitythe debates have a different character in that a lot of it is inflected by the cost of higher education, that people worry about it because they struggle to make it possible. access.ry about with those, they are more situated into communities and families understand them better and have more direct influence over them. i see a lot of differences in these two. the one in common is this is important to families and individuals and they are going

to express themselves about it. mentioned, it is time for drinks. you see the body language -- thanks so much to my colleagues and thanks to all of you. [applause] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org] >> i am a history buff. i do enjoy seeing the fabric of .ur country and how things work >> i love american history tv, american artifacts is a fantastic show. next that is probably something i would really enjoy. american history tv gives you that perspective. >> i am a c-span fan.

>> on lectures in history, robert childs from the university of maryland talks about labor and social unrest at the turn of the 20th century as well as the reforms that tried to combat this discontent. he describes the tension between corporations, workers and the government over issues such as working conditions with -- which led to various strikes and how all levels of society sought to alleviate fears about the rapid societal changes of the gilded age by a return to nature movement as evidenced by the creation of urban parks. professor charles begins with a brief example of music. this class is about 50 minutes. ♪