Virtual Lecture Library

MODERATOR: So I'm assuming most of you know a lot about what Tim Heaphy has done and what he's accomplished and what he's meant in public life, particularly regarding some recent pivotal events in our nation. So I'll try to be brief here, but I do want to hit some basic points so everybody's up-to-date on what Tim's been about. 

He went to UVA Law School, a distinguished feature of his career. And he's a lecturer at the law school now. So he's got his hand in the academic world as well as in the practice world, which is an important feature, I think, of what he has to offer. 

He was US attorney for the Western District of Virginia under President Barack Obama, which meant he was the chief federal prosecutor for our area of the world. Later in practice at Hunton & Williams, he led the investigation for the August 2017 violent Unite the Right events and prepared a detailed report. 

It's really a magnificent report, if you've had a chance to read it, which went piece by piece through the events of the day, but also was able to bring out the meaning of those events and provide some lessons or recommendations for what we might do in response. 

And then in 2021, I think almost immediately after he became the counsel of the University of Virginia, he was called to Washington, DC, to be the chief investigative counsel for the select House Committee looking into the January 6 assault on the Capitol. And he and others did a masterful job bringing those hearings into being and following through with the report, which was issued in December 2022. 

Tim has then brought these two events together and his experience from these events in a book called Harbingers-- What January 6 and Charlottesville Reveal About Rising Threats to American Democracy. That book and Tim's recollections of these major events of our time reveal what, to me, is a special quality that Tim has. 

He's in the middle of the fray in both of these events. He's working with public officials. He's working with participants. He's working with all those who were affected or involved in these events. So he's in the middle of it as a lawyer in doing the public good. But he has also taken the opportunity to step back and think about them and help us grasp the meaning of them. 

So he's an unusual presence, I think, in the modern day, somebody who's been in the middle of it, but also can help us reflect and understand. And it's in that capacity, I think, that we welcome him today and look forward to his remarks. Tim. 

[APPLAUSE] 

What a nice, thoughtful introduction. I really, really appreciate that, John. I shouldn't be surprised that a retired faculty member does some research before he steps to a podium. So thank you for that. 

So I'm here today to talk a little bit about the things that John mentioned, my experience with the January 6 committee and Charlottesville, but try to relate some of the lessons learned from those events to what's going on in higher education today, particularly what's going on here at UVA. I'm going to try to move from some lessons from Harbingers, from my book, into some thoughts about recent events at UVA. Let me start. 

So I was the university counsel at the University of Virginia from 2018 to 2021. And I should preface all of my remarks today by saying I was hired by President Ryan. I went to law school with President Ryan. I'm a good, close personal friend of President Ryan. I'm an unabashed President Ryan fan, and I don't want there to be any confusion about that as I move forward. 

[APPLAUSE] 

When Jim asked me to be part of his leadership team in 2018, I really had no experience as a lawyer in higher education. I had been in the criminal justice world as a US attorney for years. And what I was able to do at UVA was learn a lot from him and the other good people here, but give him strategic advice about what a university should be, what a public university should be. 

So I was really privileged to work closely with him and the other leaders at the university. And I was happily in that job and thought I would be in there really forever when January 6 happened. I was sitting in my office in Madison Hall on January 6. It was quiet because it was middle of the pandemic, and a lot of our team was working remotely. 

And I was immediately struck that day by how similar what I was seeing unfold on television looked like. Charlottesville-- law enforcement lack of preparation, open violence, threats to public safety. A really searing and difficult event. And I was immediately, much like I was in 2017, drawn to figuring out why and what happened. And I was fortunate enough that I was asked soon thereafter to lead the day-to-day investigation of the House Select Committee. 

So I left Madison Hall and became the chief investigative counsel to the Select Committee. That's me there next to Chairman Thompson and Vice Chair Cheney. And I was in that position from August of 2021 till the end of the committee's work at the very end of 2022. 

And I've put together the Charlottesville events, the January 6 events, how they're similar and what they say more broadly about democracy into this book. I'm not going to go through it today because, again, I want to get to the higher ed stuff. 

But it essentially concludes why did we have so many law enforcement failures, why is it that institutional law enforcement agencies continue to misassess danger when it's presented by these white nationalist groups. It talks a lot about social media as a forum in which people come together, find each other, and organize these events. 

But its main takeaway is what I want to talk about today, which is each of those events started with a core impetus, an issue that started the ball rolling. But quickly, they quickly metastasized to be broad forums for anger, anger at institutions. 

So Charlottesville started with a debate that we were having in this community about civil war statues. If you remember, there was a big public discussion. City council formed a blue ribbon commission whether we should or should not remove these civil war statues. And the two organizers of the Unite the Right rally, UVA graduates, took advantage of that controversy to make Charlottesville a magnet to organize this big Unite the Right rally. 

So there were some people that came to Charlottesville in 2017 motivated by their strong feelings about the statues. But pretty quickly, it became a place in which people with lots of different views, a lot of race-based views, a lot of sense that their historic privilege had been taken away, disconnected from the statues, it became a forum for that anger to spill out on the streets of our community. 

January 6, similarly, started with a core impetus, which was the election. There were a lot of people that I spoke to over the course of our investigation who sincerely believed that the election had been stolen, who had read largely through their social media platforms and listened to the president of the United States tell them that the election was riddled with fraud, that it was unjustly being awarded to President-elect Biden. They believed that sincerely, despite the fact that there really was no empirical evidence that that was true. 

So that was the impetus for the January 6 event. That was the day on which the election was to be certified. Historically, it was a non-event. The states had certified their electors. They were just counted by the vice president and members of Congress. And it happened without any controversy until 2021 when it became a flashpoint for people's anger about the election. 

But just like Charlottesville, there were a lot of people who came to the Capitol on January 6. Didn't really care about the election. They had other agendas. They were mad at government. They were mad at COVID restrictions. 

They were mad for some of the same reasons that the people in Charlottesville were mad, the sense that the government and institutions were straying from the protection of their historic supremacy. So January 6, as you can see by some of the iconography that was present there, became another forum for broad-based frustration and anger at government and at other institutions. 

So that leads me to the core lesson of the book, which is, in my view, having looked closely at these events, the real division in this country is no longer a left versus right, Republican versus Democrat, liberal versus conservative. It's those who believe in institutions, those who have faith in and are invested in institutions, and those who think that those institutions are broken. 

And that transcends right-left. That transcends politics. There are a lot of people on the far left and the far right who don't believe that the capitalist system works for them, who don't believe that government is there to solve real problems, who don't believe the media tells the truth, who don't believe in higher education, who don't believe even in science. 

So that core divide, again, no longer right versus left. It's Insider-Outsider I put this picture of state police on the downtown mall as an illustration of this. I would talk to some people in the morning when we were doing the Charlottesville investigation who would say, what a hard situation for our brave men and women in uniform. They had their hands full. How could they have anticipated this? I feel sorry for them, how hard it was for them. 

And then I would talk to someone in the afternoon who said, well, I didn't expect the Charlottesville police to be there for us on August 12, they're not there for us any Saturday night, that's my lived experience in my community, they're not there to protect and serve. 

Very, very disparate views of police that exist neighbor to neighbor within this community that I really got a chance to develop over the course of the Charlottesville report. There are a lot of people very frustrated, for example, that you had armed state police in riot gear protecting property, the Downtown Mall, while just a block away, they weren't protecting physical safety of the primarily anti-racist counter-protesters who were brawling with white supremacists. 

So there's a lot of frustration that the Charlottesville events pulled the lid off. Very disparate views. And then in January 6, again, I talked to so many people who just sincerely, even after the attack on the Capitol, who just sincerely believed that the election was stolen. 

And the more that I would say to them, well, did it change your view when Bill Barr and the attorney general and the FBI looked into any credible allegation of election fraud and didn't find anything? No, he was just looking for his next K Street job. Well, what about the courts? What about persistent adjudications by judge after judge who didn't find any evidence of election fraud? No, those judges, they're all corrupt. 

So again, it was a questioning of the fact finders, the messenger. And just again illustrates the divide that we face in this country. The lack of confidence extends beyond government to lots of institutions, in particular, higher education. 

Some data, just a couple of slides on data. Confidence in institutions is declining across the board. If you look down the list from business all the way down to Congress, look at how few people actually have a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in Congress. 

These numbers are striking and very, very different from what they were even 15 or 20 years ago. Higher education, less than 50% have a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in our system of higher education. 

Over the past decade, Gallup has measured declining confidence among Americans in most of the country's institutions, including Congress, the media, big business. Higher ed has followed this trend, but it's also experienced the largest decline in public confidence among institutions that respondents were asked about. More and more people out in America have less confidence in what we do at places like UVA. 

The through line from even just in the last 10 years, it was almost 60% of people that had a great deal of confidence in higher ed. It ticked up very briefly last year, but it's down almost 20%. The percentage of people that have very little or no confidence in higher education is almost a quarter of Americans surveyed. 

The trend, as you see, has been persistently growing from 2015 to 2023 and beyond. There's a little bit of a skew in terms of party affiliation here. Republicans tend to have less confidence in higher education than Democrats. In 2024, only 20% of Republicans expressed a great deal of confidence in our higher education system, whereas 56% of Democrats did. 

Now why is that? Why are people losing confidence in higher education? A few general thoughts. One is affordability. I mean, the cost of higher education continues to increase. I have sent three children to two colleges. One of them, thankfully, went to UVA. And that was affordable. 

The other two, I paid more than $80,000 a year for two children to go to college, which compared to when I was in college, the numbers are eye popping. And any of you who have children or grandchildren who are going through this process, you see that every year, it's more and more expensive; and, as a value proposition, harder and harder to justify. 

There's a lot of concern that the value of a college degree in terms of relevance to a career, less and less of a sure thing. There are a lot of our graduates coming out of even places like UVA that are struggling to find work, particularly liberal arts majors who don't have a science degree or an engineering degree or a skill that they can market for employment. 

And then the other one-- and this is the one I want to talk more about-- is that there's a perception among a lot of people that there's a political bias in higher education, that these are places that indoctrinate students into very progressive views. You've heard the term woke before. And that is manifest sometimes in campus unrest, campus unrest in the form of people angry at institutional decisions. 

One of the biggest things that I dealt with when I was university counsel was a sign on a Lawn room door that a student had written-- pardon my language-- "Fuck UVA"-- and plastered that on her door. Again, this is the Lawn. And people are selected for that because of their service, historic to the university. 

And a lot of alums were very upset that we did not remove that sign. It was pretty easy as a lawyer to advise the client. That's really clearly protected speech. It doesn't threaten imminent lawless action. It's not obscene. It's protected. It's a public forum, a classic public forum, the Lawn of the University of Virginia. 

But the amount of backlash and anger that that generated from alums reinforces this notion that there's a political bias, that the university is filled now with young, angry liberals that don't respect the historic traditions of the university. 

That manifests into the classroom. There's a lot of students that I talked to indicated that they would be reluctant to express an opinion in class if it could be construed in any way as conservative, as controversial, certainly if it has anything to do with race or gender or some protected class. 

Some data here. The dark lines are uncomfortable people-- liberals, moderates, and conservatives. Over 50% say that they would be uncomfortable publicly disagreeing with a professor about a controversial topic, expressing disagreement about a controversial political topic in a written assignment, expressing views on a controversial topic during a class discussion, or even expressing that outside of the classroom setting. 

That's troubling to me. College ought to be a place where you do express views that can be controversial, where there's constructive engagement about differences of opinion; people of good faith listening to each other, learning from each other, and coming out smarter and more well informed. 

But increasingly, the data shows there are a lot of students that self-censor that are afraid to express views that could be construed as conservative or, certainly, potentially race or gender based. 

That leads to a lot of backlash against what's called diversity, equity, and inclusion. And it's really important when we talk about this to define what that is. The general schism here in public opinion is that there are people who strongly believe that DEI programs are very important because they promote a diverse environment, which all members have an equal opportunity to thrive. That's more satisfying in the short-term and better preparation in the long-term to prepare students for an increasingly diverse world. 

That has been the predominant view at UVA and elsewhere for years. But increasingly, there's been a backlash to that by critics who say it fosters discrimination, particularly against white people; creates a system of unfair advantages that diminishes a merit-based equality. 

This is essentially a values conflict-- the promotion of diversity and the promotion of merit as that is subjectively defined. This is a very live controversy that's motivating a lot of policy decisions from this administration. And it's a segue into what happened at UVA. 

Majorities of Americans, the data shows, generally support DEI programs. This is a Washington Post poll from just last year, that 75% of the people surveyed think mentorship opportunities for underrepresented groups are a good idea, that anti-bias trainings, that internships, that efforts to recruit underrepresented groups-- more than 2/3 of the people generally support those programs. But there's a very strong and vocal minority of people that think programs like this are actually harmful. 

Now, let's talk about President Ryan's view on DEI. We don't have to guess about what that is because he wrote a very important essay about this in 2023. So for The Chronicle of Higher Education, the preeminent higher ed daily publication, Jim submitted an essay. This was back before the election 2023. It was called "DEI-- The Case For Common Ground." 

And in that thoughtful essay, he laid out his view about this debate, this question of whether DEI programs are or are not useful, important, valuable. The top line is, he says, "I disagree with those who would like to prohibit DEI efforts altogether. Colleges should continue to promote the core elements of DEI, as these efforts are crucial to ensuring opportunity and access, attracting and retaining the most talented people, creating a vibrant campus culture, promoting a richer and more robust exchange of ideals. But in order to preserve and protect DEI, those of us working in higher ed have to take criticisms of DEI seriously and do more to explain our efforts." 

A total defense of the concept, but an acknowledgment that proponents of DEI have to be mindful of the criticism, have to be effective spokespersons for why it works, and have to continue to evaluate the efficacy of those efforts. 

He defines each of the three words-- diversity, equity, and inclusion. And again, this is crucial because so much in this debate about DEI, people have different definitions of what this means. Jim defined them as follows. 

In terms of diversity, "I would define diversity broadly to include not just race, ethnicity, and gender, but a wide range of other factors and characteristics, including geography, socioeconomic status, first-generation status, disability status, religion, age, sexual orientation, viewpoint, ideology, and special talents." 

So to President Ryan, diversity meant not just people of color or historically underrepresented groups coming to the university to teach or to study, but viewpoint diversity, that it's crucial for a vibrant intellectual environment to have scholars and students who come to issues with different perspectives. 

So diversity includes respect for conservative views, respect for and understanding of each other in a constructive way. Really important point that gets lost often in the discussion of what diversity means. 

Equity, "A more accurate and appropriate definition of equity is an effort to ensure equal opportunity, not equal results." A lot of people hear equity. And they think, well, we can't make everybody the same. Some people deserve more. 

And equity doesn't mean equal outcomes. It means equal opportunity. These programs are designed to ensure that every person here has the same opportunity to achieve his or her potential without barriers. So it doesn't ensure equal outcome. It ensures equal opportunity. 

Again, President Ryan, I think, wisely defining what equity means. And then inclusion, his definition in this article is, "Inclusion begins with the recognition that it is one thing to recruit a diverse group of students to attend college or to hire a diverse group of faculty and staff, but it is another thing to help them feel-- to help make them feel at home. That is what inclusion is about, an effort to make everyone feel like they belong and are full and welcome members of the community." 

So once the door opens and people get here, inclusion means efforts to ensure that everyone feels as if they have a place here, that they belong here. And that involves lots of different manifested ways. It's not simply who gets in, it's how we show up for people when they arrive. 

So this is how he defined DEI in his essay. And then on the criticism side, again, this is not a blind adherent to DEI. President Ryan, I think, insightfully said, "It's important to take sincere criticisms of DEI seriously. Although DEI statements and trainings are well-intentioned attempts to create a more inclusive environment, they run the risk of being coercive and run the risk of crossing the line from education to enforced orthodoxy." 

When you force people to submit a statement, for example, about their commitment to diversity in a hiring process, you run the risk of enforcing an orthodoxy. President Ryan called that out and said, we have to be careful about efforts like that don't tip from well-intentioned efforts to include and create a diverse environment to an enforced orthodoxy. 

And he said, "Colleges should ensure, as best they can, that resources spent on DEI are not being wasted. Those involved in the DEI work need to be sincerely committed to assessing the impact of their efforts, shifting away from what is not working and doubling down for what is." 

This is an area of very active scholarship, whether anti-bias trainings work. I worked a lot when I was US attorney on implicit bias for law enforcement, helping officers understand that their core function is the assessment of danger, whether it's a decision to make a traffic stop or assessing intelligence about an event. 

That's a subjective endeavor in which your assessment of what's dangerous is the primary factor, and we bring to those subjective assessments our own biases. And under Attorney General Holder and President Obama, we spent a lot of time talking to prosecutors, talking to agents about that implicit, not explicit, but implicit bias. I think that had a lot to do with the misassessment of danger in Charlottesville in 2017 and at the Capitol, a misassessment that these angry white guys could actually be violent because it's this. It's implicit bias. 

So we have to have data about whether trainings do or don't work. Is there data that when you focus on this, are you exacerbating the problem? Or are you solving it? That's an open question. And in order to be good at this, we have to be self-critical about whether our efforts do or don't have efficacy. 

And President Ryan said that. So this notion-- let me stop here, this notion that President Ryan was this wild-eyed adherent to all things DEI, it's just wrong. It's just flatly incorrect. He presented rather a very nuanced and, I think, very thoughtful and careful approach to this. Defining it, articulating why it matters, being willing to be critical of individual efforts. 

So the narrative that we've heard from the Department of Justice or from some members of our own board, that he was allowing us to go off onto this unlawful tangent of support for DEI programs is just not really borne out by the facts. 

So two years later, after President Ryan's essay, we have an election. President Trump is re-elected. And day 1, literally the first day of his term, he issues an executive order called Ending Racial and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing. Preferencing kept showing up as misspelled when I was preparing this. And it turns out it's not actually a word. 

[LAUGHTER] 

But it's not my mistake. That's what the executive order actually says. The language of the executive order, it calls for the termination of all discriminatory programs, including illegal DEI and Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and accessibility mandates, policies, programs, preferences, and activities in the federal government under whatever name they appear. 

I interpret illegal DEI to mean all DEI is illegal. Not a nuanced difference between legal DEI programs and illegal, but rather an assumption that anything DEI is against the law. We'll talk about why that's not true. 

The guidance after the executive order is followed up with what's called a Dear Colleague letter. The Department of Education often takes executive orders and then interprets them and provides more detailed guidance for colleges and universities in K-12 schools. 

They did that on February the 14th of this year and issued a Dear Colleague letter, which asserts that the executive order extends to all race-conscious spending activities and programming at colleges. Takes a very wide view of anything at all remotely within the broad umbrella of DEI programs is per se unlawful, according to the Department of Education. 

There's been subsequent litigation over this. The Dear Colleague letter has been invalidated as arbitrary and capricious pursuant to the Administrative Procedures Act. Its legality is currently a bit in dispute. The Supreme Court has said that individual injunctions by individual district judges are no longer nationally applicable. So in certain districts, the Dear Colleague letter has been invalidated. 

So this is the legal landscape in which this debate is playing out. Governor Youngkin, soon after the issuance of the executive order on March the 7th, 2025, our own board of visitors, at this point, largely appointed by Governor Youngkin, passes a resolution to essentially adopt the executive order, implement it and the Dear Colleague letter. 

It directs the university to not use racial proxies or indirect methods to circumvent the prohibitions on race-based considerations. It requires that the president update the board within 30 days of the passage of this resolution regarding compliance and substantial policy changes. 

And Governor Youngkin, on the steps of the governor's mansion on March the 7th, stands and says the BOV voted for common sense, saying no to illegal discrimination. Again, illegal, classifying all of this as per se against the law and yes to merit-based opportunity. 

DEI is done at the University of Virginia. We stand for the universal truth that everyone is created equal and opportunity is at the heart of Virginians and Americans' future. Of course, no one can disagree with the last statement, but it begs the question of what is the universal truth. And how do we ensure that everyone who's created equal has the same opportunity? 

So this is the political context into which President Ryan and the people here trying very hard to navigate these new rules step. So what does UVA do? A couple of very specific things. UVA had something called an equity center. It was housed down in a hotel-- on old hotel on Main Street. 

And its basic function was to promote these efforts of equity. Equity, again, of opportunity, not of outcome. The equity center goes away, and it becomes the Center for Community Partnerships. Its focus shifts from creating equal opportunity at the university to being an outward-facing organization that is trying hard to establish better connections between the university and surrounding communities. 

This was always a big priority for President Ryan. We need to be better neighbors. We need to have more interaction with local schools, with local community groups. And that's what the Center for Community Partnerships changes its focus to do. 

Kevin McDonald, the vice president for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, his mandate changes. And he becomes the vice president for community engagement and equal opportunity. No longer focused just on race and gender and protected class, but a much broader focus on community engagement and equal opportunity. 

There's a lot of different apparatus at the university offices, institutional manifestations of DEI. And they shift. The Title IX Compliance Office, the Office of Equal Opportunity and Civil Rights, the Tribal Liaison, community partnerships. We're no longer consolidated under Vice President McDonald in the DEI office, but rather were scattered into student affairs or into the provost's office or into other components. 

And then there's a compliance review, conducted by an outside firm that is still going where this firm is evaluating a very granular way which programs do or do not fit within the legal definition of what's permissible or what's not. So President Ryan, hardly ignoring the Board of Visitors' resolution, takes very specific steps to comply. 

But here's the heart of it. But he's drawing a legal line, a correct legal line that is different from the policy line that the Department of Education and, by extension, the Department of Justice and Governor Youngkin think is appropriate. 

So this is what I do for a living. Now, I advise primarily colleges and universities about things like compliance with Title VI, Title IX, with whether or not certain DEI programs are or are not lawful. And programs that are racially exclusive motivated by a racial preference are per se illegal. You cannot have-- a public school cannot have a scholarship that is set aside exclusively for Black students. That's against the Equal Protection Clause. That is a race-based program. 

You cannot have quotas. We're going to have-- 25% of this department is going to be scholars of color. That's a quota. That's unlawful. When you have rigid racial qualifications, quotas, that is against the rules. 

The Supreme Court-- Students for Fair Admissions against Harvard and UNC, the Supreme Court found that explicit consideration of race is no longer constitutional. It was for a while as a remedy for past discrimination, but the Supreme Court in the Students for Fair Admissions case said that predicate for race-based classifications no longer exists. So schools cannot explicitly consider race. 

But Chief Justice Roberts said it's certainly permissible for schools to promote diversity in the student body as a value and to ask students how their racial identity or any other characteristic affects their participation in an academic environment. Explicitly, in the opinion, he says, it's fine to ask students how their race may manifest in their participation in an academic community. 

So he is drawing the line between a preference, a quota, a statistical qualification, and something more broad, a policy goal. It is not against the law to impose programs that promote the goal of diversity, that recognize the value of unique experience and perspectives. Those are lawful. 

So pipeline programs, recruiting in certain places, ensuring that everyone is invited to participate in our community, recognition of affinity groups to help people feel like they belong, having a Black student organization-- as long as it isn't exclusively available to certain groups, completely permissible. 

Consideration of how race impacts experience or participation, as Chief Justice Roberts wrote in the Students for Fair Admissions case, completely permissible; for faculty members to be hired with the consideration of how their own race or ideology or any other characteristic will affect their scholarship or their participation in the classroom. 

So the line is racial classification is illegal, but broad promotion of diversity, equity, inclusion continues to be lawful and permissible and, frankly, is a protected interest. This is the litigation over the Harvard funding is all about. Harvard's arguing they have a First Amendment right to pursue, as a policy matter, diversity in their hiring and in their student body. 

And they're going to win. They have won, and they will continue to win because the line, again, has consistently been defined by courts between racial classifications, no. General promotion of diversity, yes. 

So the executive order doesn't change that. That's the important thing to keep in mind. Judges and Congress, through statute, articulate what the law is. The stroke of a pen by an executive order cannot change the bottom line reality of those governing statutes and precedent. 

So the Department of Justice, after the board's resolution, launches an investigation. They demand information about UVA's implementation of the executive order, the BOV resolution, and a series of letters. This is prompted in part by the Jefferson Council. 

You all know who they are, a group of alums that has formed its own suit alumni group. Very exercised about President Ryan's approach to DEI. And America First Legal, that's a nonprofit organization that Stephen Miller, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller started between the two Trump terms that has been bringing complaints around the country on these DEI issues. 

So prompted by America First and the Jefferson Council, DOJ starts asking the university questions. The standard response whenever a university gets a letter from the Department of Justice is you gather what's relevant. You go down the list and evaluate compliance with law what is or isn't-- do we have a problem here? Are there programs that arguably are a racial preference that we have to change? Otherwise, what can we defend? And how do we defend that when faced with an investigation? 

I don't know if that happened here. I don't know whether or not there was a robust defense of those steps that President Ryan and others were taken or not taken or whether there was a principled effort to follow the law and defend the university's granular decision program by program as to what happened. 

The reasons for that-- and this is where we get into prospectively what should be changed in my view. Jim Ryan really had almost no advocates to help him with this. The university counsel, the job that I used to have, is hired and fired by the attorney general. That is an inherent conflict of interest. 

It is unfathomable to me that a multibillion dollar enterprise, like a major public research university, does not have counsel solely loyal to the organization. The lawyer for UVA-- and again, I was hired by Mark Herring at Jim's request. And it was really never any daylight between what Mark Herring thought was best for the commonwealth and what I thought was best for UVA. 

But that's not always the case. That's particularly not the case now, where you have an attorney general who agrees with the America First Legal Foundation and the Department of Justice and the Department of Education about DEI. So President Ryan did not have a truly independent voice to defend the very careful legal line that he was drawing when it came to DEI programs. 

The university can't hire outside counsel without getting the AG's approval. This needs to be changed. The General Assembly did change it, vote to change it, and that was vetoed by Governor Youngkin. My understanding is that that will come up again. 

And then if there's a democratic governor, that this likely will finally change so that whoever is president of UVA will have the ability to make his or her own decision as to who the chief advocate should be for the university. And that person will be loyal solely to the leadership and the Board of Visitors, not to Richmond and the attorney general. 

The other issue is the Board of Visitors. Jim didn't have the full support of the Board of Visitors. By this time, this spring-- again, most of the board members had been appointed by Governor Youngkin, who had stood out in front of the governor's mansion, saying DEI is dead at UVA. Accepting that notion that DEI was per se illegal. 

So without his board being prepared to defend the actions of the university, he really had no one to fight for him, no one to fight for us in terms of the lines that were being drawn. 12 of the 17 board members were appointed by Governor Youngkin. One board member was rejected by a Senate committee, and a court in Northern Virginia found that that was valid. So the board was down one member. 

But the key is that the vast majority of the board agreed with the other side, essentially, that the Department of Justice was right, that we weren't going far enough. And again, this is a policy decision, not a legal decision to dismantle DEI. And that is what led to President Ryan's resignation. 

I love this picture because it's perfectly emblematic to me. Here's a man standing literally alone. No one within 10 feet of him. Surrounded at a distance by a huge crowd of admirers on his front lawn. But he's by himself. 

And that is so emblematic to me of how this place failed him. He did not have advocates to fight for him. And he was, therefore, put in this awful position of really having hands tied behind his back and unable to fight. 

And in order to spare the university the loss of federal funding and the disruption that it would have caused if he were to fight unilaterally, likely losing because of the board and the legal representation, he decided to step away. But that image of him by himself to me is just so telling. 

So let me finish by what we should do about this. A couple of very easy fixes. The university needs its own lawyer. Shouldn't be appointed by the attorney general. It should be loyal solely to the president and the board. 

The bill that passed previously would still give the AG some authority to approve settlement of claims against the university over a certain amount, or transactions over a certain value. So it's not like the AG's office would disappear. There would still be some sort of fiduciary responsibility. 

It also would require the university to file a report every year with the General Assembly about its use of outside lawyers. But to be clear, the university would finally have an independent advocate solely looking out for the interests of the board and the president. 

And then the way we designate visitors really needs to change. For so many positions in our government, for judges-- when I was US attorney, I had to go through a committee of lawyers assembled by Senators Webb and Warner, who vetted candidates, who evaluated credentials and then made recommendations to the senators. 

Makes sense. When you have important positions, there ought to be some effort on a merit basis to evaluate credentials. That doesn't happen now. The governor unilaterally picks visitors. The vast majority of them give a lot of money to the governor. 

That's the main qualification. And that's true for Republicans and Democrats. Both sides have perpetuated this. Now, luckily, we've had a lot of really good people that have been serving as visitors, both Republicans and Democrats. But that's been the qualification. 

There's no process. There's no committee. There's no vetting. There's no credentials. There's no identification of certain skills or experiences that might be useful to the board. That's another thing that in my view, needs to change. 

Some specific qualifications. We need three physicians. We need several people that are alums of the university. We could identify certain experiences that are important for participation as a board member. The governor could defer appointment of some or all slots to a committee or to the board itself. 

Instead of maintaining exclusive control over those appointments, I think these kinds of governance changes may very well happen. I think what happened with President Ryan-- I know that governor-- potential governor, Spanberger, is paying very close attention to this. And we might see the General Assembly enact some changes, governance changes that will apply not just at UVA, but at public schools around the country. 

So what's the future of DEI? And this is my personal opinion. I think Jim got it right. I really do. I think DEI ought to include the active recruitment of conservative voices. We need in this community a lot of different points of view. That makes us all better. 

We shouldn't be. We should fight against having an orthodoxy. And we should try to have a community of scholars that can constructively disagree with each other. Diversity ought to reach out into ideology. We should promote equality of opportunity, not outcome, just as he said. 

Everybody who comes here needs an equal opportunity to be their best. And we should create a learning environment in which everyone is welcome. And that sometimes takes some special effort with certain people that haven't historically been welcome, in my view. 

We should defend the value of diversity. We need articulate spokespeople who will say, this is why we do this, this is why it matters; who will stand up and define it's better in the short-term, it's more satisfying to go to college in a place that is diverse, and it's certainly better in the long-term because it prepares our students for the world. The world is increasingly connected and diverse. And if we're not preparing students to meet that by exposing them to different things here, then we're not being all we can be. 

And we should fight and not fold. I've been discouraged at so many clients that I advise. You really can draw a line here and push back against this. And the response I often get is, I appreciate that that's the legal line, but it's really risky for us to risk our federal funding or to fight with this administration. And I get that. But that's why the Harvard case and the schools that are pushing back are so important because, again, fight, not fold matters. 

And then finally, this goes back to some lessons in my book. When I talk about division in America, insiders, outsiders, the last couple of chapters of the book are about, how do we fix that? How do we promote, engage citizens in a democracy? Because democracy really comes down to people. 

And one of the things I talk about is how we teach young people. We should teach democracy skills. We should help students learn how to navigate today's world in an information landscape that's really challenging. We should teach them to be curious, not judgmental. 

We should teach them to be empathetic speakers and generous listeners. We should teach critical thinking. We should teach them to not just trust everything they see, particularly on social media. There's a whole chapter in the book about social media. 

So many Americans now get their information exclusively through curated, algorithm-driven social media feeds that are designed to reinforce the user's original perspective. They pump content to the user based on what the user has read. 

So people are increasingly living in these silos that reinforce their perspective. There's also very little content moderation, very little sifting between what's actually true and what's not true. This is not like newspapers that are held to account legally. 

Social media companies, according to law, are not able to be sued for defamation. They're not content creators. They're bulletin boards, so they can't be sued. If you read something false on Facebook, Facebook has no responsibility legally for that. 

So we need to help our students understand how information reaches them and encourage them to look beyond those sources to get well-rounded perspectives on issues. And if we do this institutionally, if we live these values, that alone will be an example for our students. 

But by the university being prepared to fight, articulating the value of diversity, creating a climate in which diverse perspectives are brought into the classroom, then students incorporate that as a life skill going forward. That's what I hope in the wake of the awful tragedy of what happened with President Ryan. That's how we learn from it and how we get better. 

So with that, I'll stop. 

[APPLAUSE] 

So we have 10 or 15 minutes left I'm happy to take comments or questions. Yes, sir. 

AUDIENCE: One issue you didn't mention that's been running through all this, not just here, but at Columbia and at Harvard and elsewhere was prompt-- my curiosity was prompted by a call I got several months ago by a former rector, who's a good personal friend. And he wanted to know about anti-Semitism on campus. He said he'd heard it was happening here. I don't remember that in my time when I was active here up until about 2015. 

But how does that factor in? That's become a virulent part of this whole conversation nationally, it seems to me, in ways I'd like to hear your comments on. 

TIMOTHY J HEAPHY: Sure. No. And this is very germane to the work that I'm doing with schools now. So anti-Semitism needs to be aggressively addressed. But it's very difficult for a public university to simultaneously protect free speech and create a learning environment that is not hostile to certain interests. 

So if someone stands up on the Lawn and says, from the river to the sea, Palestine shall be free, again, that's protected speech. It is not threatening anyone. It is not inciting violence. But a Jewish student walking by could feel that that makes her unsafe. 

So it's very hard for colleges to simultaneously protect both values, the First Amendment and Title VI, which requires schools to create a learning environment that is not hostile to any group. So the devil's in the details. 

What a lot of schools do is they don't restrict the speech, but they spend a lot of time helping students react to that speech. A lot of support for Jewish students, for example, who feel unsafe because of some of the protest rhetoric surrounding the war in Gaza. 

But it's not easy. It's really difficult. And students have a right to protest. There are a lot of very strong emotions about the war in Gaza. And you can't just turn that off because some people are upset by the words that they hear. But you got to give support to the people that hear the words and that feel threatened by them. 

AUDIENCE: I wonder if you could comment-- this is probably better. I was wondering if you could comment on what I perceive as the spinelessness and the cowardliness of the mass of our universities, not the ones who had the spine to stand up. 

But when I was in last in faculty meeting them-- I'm recently retired, but I looked around at-- I was at the medical center. And the former CEO-- I said, why are you not reaching out to the University of California? The University of Virginia is the premier place around here. The University of California are your friends. 

Why are you not reaching out and saying, powers and numbers? Because otherwise, you'll be picked off. And that's exactly what's happened. And I was wondering, any insight, any thoughts about that? 

TIMOTHY J HEAPHY: Yeah, I've talked to Jim about this. I asked him the same question. Why aren't university presidents getting together? He said, you're assuming that everyone has the same interest. There are a lot of people that see the misfortune at Columbia or Brown or Northwestern as an opportunity. 

So getting universities to somehow align and join forces is difficult because each of them are different. Publics are different from privates. Some boards are appointed politically. Some are not. So aligning on the ideology is hard. And then a lot of them candidly see the misfortune of one as an opportunity for another. 

I work at a big law firm that over my objection cut a deal with the White House. And the same thing has happened in my world. Why is it all the law firms getting together? Well, to be honest, a lot of firms say, they don't cut a deal, then their clients are going to be susceptible to being peeled off. 

There's almost a-- it exacerbates a competition as opposed to concerted action. This is why-- that's why these executive actions that go beyond the law create ripple effects of self-correction that are really, really dangerous. 

AUDIENCE: All right. Thanks I was just wondering, again, about social media. When you look at President Ryan's definitions as you laid them out there, they are very nuanced. And it seems quite difficult to really explain and maintain that kind of definition of nuance when you have social media just yelling out, woke, woke, woke. 

TIMOTHY J HEAPHY: Totally, 100% agree. 

AUDIENCE: Anything we can do about that? 

TIMOTHY J HEAPHY: Yeah, when you're reduced to 140 characters to convey a very complicated, nuanced perspective, you're going to be unsuccessful. So to me, the key is focus on the demand, not the supply. I'm skeptical that we are going to change the rules that govern social media platforms. We're not going to change Section 230, which gives them the immunity from defamation. 

So the focus ought to be on helping consumers be smarter, realize, just what you said, sir, that you're not getting all the facts by just digesting what is fed to you, that a lot of what you read may not actually be true. COVID vaccines are not implanting chips in your body that allow the government to surveil you, even though you read that on Facebook. May not be accurate. 

So be curious. Challenge that. So focus on the demand side and help people navigate that. Because I just-- unfortunately, in a free enterprise system-- these are businesses. They're not doing anything unlawful. I don't think we're going to change the supply. 

AUDIENCE: My question is, how is it possible for university counsel to be loyal to the president and the Board of Visitors, given that we've had two examples recently where the Board of Visitors was more than happy to get rid of the university president? 

TIMOTHY J HEAPHY: Yeah, that's a good question. That's why these two reforms, I think, need to both happen. This happens in companies all the time. So corporations have a board of directors that has a fiduciary responsibility. And there are times when the CEO and the leadership have a difference of opinion. And there are times where the board has a lawyer and the staff does. 

Right now that can't happen because all of it goes through the AG. So if the board has a more thoughtful process, the university counsel is independent and loyal to the university, there will still be times when the board and the president don't necessarily agree. Maybe they would each in that case, without having to go through the AG, would have the benefit of advice. 

So it's not perfect because, again, there may be times. But both of them need to have thoughtful people advising them instead of a monolithic political actor like we have now who advises both. 

AUDIENCE: I have two questions. First, in the Washington Post today, it was reported that President Washington at George Mason University hired his own lawyer to advocate his case. So question 1 is, could that have happened here? 

My second question is the Justice Department often is accusing universities of violating the civil rights provisions-- of violating the civil rights provisions. What is the Justice Department's definition of those rights? And why are universities not actually litigating the Justice Department's definition of civil rights? 

TIMOTHY J HEAPHY: Yeah, two good questions. Let me take the second one first. 100% agree with you that there aren't enough people fighting back and arguing what we are doing is consistent with the civil rights laws and it's consistent with our First Amendment right to promote diversity. 

Too many schools are going beyond what the law requires in order to preserve their federal funding and not fight. They're making a business decision that even if they have a potential claim, they don't want to assert the claim because of the follow-on consequences. I wish more schools would take this on the merits because, again, the Department of Justice position is that anything that's race based is essentially a proxy for an unlawful racial classification. 

I just don't think that that's right. That's an overinclusive view of what the civil rights laws require. This is really a granular issue. You have to evaluate these programs in and of themselves and evaluate whether or not they are or are not consistent with the civil rights laws. And rather than going through that process in good faith, the department is declaring them all unlawful. And a lot of schools are agreeing. 

The question about President Washington's lawyer, I don't know whether the AG approved. It could be that the attorney general said, given that you have employment consequences, I'm going to authorize you to hire your own lawyer. That could have happened. I doubt it. I don't give Jason Miyares much credit for being thoughtful in any way, candidly. 

My guess is that he just did it. And he said, I'm going to hire Doug Gansler, a friend of mine who's the former Maryland AG who represents President Washington, and let them challenge it. Let them argue in court that he should be disqualified. 

My guess is that President Washington is either paying for it himself or has got some outside entity. It's not being funded by the university. So he essentially is just doing it anyway and inviting some challenge to that by the AG. 

AUDIENCE: So conceivably, that could have happened here as well. 

TIMOTHY J HEAPHY: Yes, I mean, it could have been that the president or the board said, to hell with Miyares, we're going to hire our own lawyer. Risky because, again, Miyares could challenge that and could win because by statute, the attorney general represents all state agencies. And that's been interpreted pretty broadly. We never got to that point because, again, the board, the council, everyone essentially folded and said, yeah, it's best for us just to get past this. 

AUDIENCE: Hi, Tim. First, I wanted to say thank you for the amount of work that you put in your career from Charlottesville-- 

TIMOTHY J HEAPHY: Thank you. 

AUDIENCE: --all the way to January 6. 

[APPLAUSE] 

It's much appreciated. You mentioned earlier that we're under a compliance review that I think the board initiated and the president signed off on with regard to hiring an external firm, McGuireWoods, to do this review. 

And I'm wondering your thoughts on if we really can't trust the legal advice that we're getting from the attorney general's office and that's flowing through the board and actually through this compliance agreement and this compliance review that's going on right now, do individual faculty have the right to say, no, I don't want to participate in a compliance review interview and I'd like to have my own counsel present?

TIMOTHY J HEAPHY: Yes. I have recommended to the Faculty Senate that they asked the university to hire pool counsel for individual faculty. When I was university counsel, we had lots of reviews-- review of the health system, review of the shootings of the three football players. 

And we hired lawyers that were exclusively available to counsel faculty members when it's their professional responsibility that is the subject matter of the interviews. Doesn't imply that they've done anything wrong. They just need their own independent advocate to help them understand their rights and obligations. 

So I do think that request that you should have a right to your own counsel, not the university's lawyer, but your lawyer-- and the university should pay for that. And I've recommended that to folks on the Faculty Senate. Yeah. 

AUDIENCE: Thank you very much for this great lecture. But I have a little more challenging question. So DEI was presented to me at one point in some training, that famous picture of the three people looking over the fence at the ball field and there's a little girl and there's a guy and one tall person. The tall person is looking over the fence. The younger teen is on a little box. And there's a big, tall box. So the little girl can look over the fence. 

I once read in the post that that's not really an accurate image. But I understood that the difference between equity and equality was precisely that, that it was more focused on equality of outcome. I understand that Jim Ryan wrote that he didn't think that's what it meant. 

But do you really think that all the people that he hired and all the programs that he did, including the Equity Center, which adopted an abstract version of that picture as their logo, that they were not doing something that was more like equality of outcome as the aim? 

TIMOTHY J HEAPHY: Yeah, I don't know. I can't say that every person that he hired met that standard. I do think that the university historically has had some programs that cross the legal line. I think we have in certain schools or certain departments had numerical formulas. And that is against the rules. I think there were prior administrations, political administrations that made clear that they weren't going to enforce. Title VI, Title VII, Title IX in that way. 

So I can't stand here and say that everything the university has done historically has been an adherence of that line. And I think as President Ryan himself said, we do have to be meticulous about trying to get this right department by department and program by program. 

It's hard. Instead of doing that, though, instead of parsing, hey, maybe we should change this particular program in the School of Medicine, but we should stand behind this thing that the Center for Community Partnerships is doing, we just fold it. We didn't do any of that. We just said, yeah, you're right. 

We're going to-- President Ryan's going to step away. We're going to do this audit. And we're going to-- I predict that this resolution agreement is going to require things well beyond what the law requires, but are, frankly, policy decisions. And that isn't their call. That ought to be our call. 

SPEAKER: Tim, thank you very much for a terrific presentation. 

[APPLAUSE]

[00:00:00.11] DEBORAH ROACH: Welcome back, and before we get started, I just want to say, again, please interrupt, discuss because I thought we had a great session last time. And even for those online, please go ahead and submit a question if you have and don't forget to just let me know.

[00:00:26.91] OK, great, so just as a reminder about where we were, basically last time we talked, we were talking about how aging is this due to an imbalance between damage and repair. And this damage and repair eventually gets really off balance because of this increasing accumulation of damage to the body as we get older.

[00:00:52.25] And also one of the positive take-home messages is that about 50% of that variation in the increase in damage is environmental. And so we can do something, and it's environmental. It's behavioral, and so what we're going to do today is I'm going to actually look at a number of different myths that we have, a number of different ideas that are out there about how we can actually modify aging rates.

[00:01:33.09] And what I want to do is I want to link it to those hallmarks of aging that we were talking about before that. Those fundamental processes that are actually causing the aging damage, and then those processes then increase our susceptibility to age-dependent disease. So that's where we're headed today is to look at what sorts of things can be done, and do they or do they not impact these hallmarks of aging, which we want to look at?

[00:02:05.82] Now what I need to do, though, is I need to pick up where we left off, and the last thing we were talking about is this idea-- why isn't my-- let's see if this works. Why are we not able to-- just try the-- there we go. OK, don't know why. OK, thanks, so we were talking about the development of tools to be able to quantify biological aging.

[00:02:45.60] Because remember, any time you look at a group of people that are the same age, you have to recognize that we're all aging at different rates. And so the question is, who is a successful age or who is not? What are the issues going on? And the other very important take home message from last time was that even within our own bodies, different parts of our bodies are aging at different rates.

[00:03:13.65] And that's different within individuals across the spectrum. So we really would like to develop this sort of tool to figure out how we can distinguish individuals of the same age who may be biologically different ages. And the other interest, by the way, in developing this meter of aging is that it will allow us to be able to identify the critical stages that occur in our lifespans that actually may be determining how we are aging and actually then be predictive.

[00:03:54.55] So there would be a lot of very interesting medical uses for this if we can identify that. Now the other thing that I would-- thing that we'll be talking about today is we'd like to use this tool to actually look at these myths of aging, when people talk about different behaviors and so forth that may influence the aging process.

[00:04:22.14] So what evidence can we use to be able to develop this tool and then evaluate these theories and practices. Now I have to tell you that in my lifetime in the field, as a researcher in the field of aging, when I first got started, the biggest thing was grip strength. And someone would come to a meeting with a grip strength meter, and we'd pass it around. And we've come a long way.

[00:05:01.42] But I have to tell you that this is a very active field of research to try to figure out what this meter is going to be, and it ends up to be very complicated because there are so many different physiological traits that need to be put into this to be able to truly understand and to truly validate these methods. But really, what we're trying to do is measure the cell damage and measure the cell damage as it's changing over time.

[00:05:32.99] And remember, and we finished this last time, this idea that this tool will give us a normal change in pattern, if you will, of the relationship between chronological age and some metric that we have of biological age. What are normal individuals doing? What is the average change? And then who are those individuals who are actually aging at a slower rate, and then we can then look at those individuals and understand why they're aging at different rates.

[00:06:13.60] Aging at different rates really means your cell health. Now, the major tool that's being used these days is something that actually quantifies changes, modifications on the DNA that we can look at over time. And I mentioned these because this is actually one of those hallmarks of aging. Remember, over time, the DNA gets certain modifications attached to the surface of the DNA or around the DNA that end up turning the genes off or turning the genes on.

[00:06:55.40] So in fact, these markers on top of the DNA, which are called epigenetic markers, can actually change over time. And here in this figure, you'll see that one thing we know is that these epigenetic markers change ages going down here. And these epigenetic markers increase with age, and a modification is represented here in red as a gene that's been modified.

[00:07:27.27] So we do know that increases with age, but it differs across individuals. And it differs over time, and it also differs with what particular genes you're looking at as well. And so this is a very-- computationally a very difficult thing to put together, and there are lots of different markers using these epigenetic changes that are out there.

[00:07:56.34] And I went out on the web and could easily find several different markers where you can actually order a kit. And some of them are pretty expensive, but don't go out and buy them yet. This is still a work in progress. But on the other hand, there are a number of clocks out there, and people are starting to use these to quantify biological aging. Yes.

[00:08:30.21] AUDIENCE: What would be the point of buying a--

[00:08:31.83] Yeah, exactly.

[00:08:33.12] DEBORAH ROACH: Well, I don't know. I totally agree with you. I mean, what's it going to do if it's going to tell you that-- well, yes, your biological-- yeah, it's fine if it's going to tell you you're younger, but it's not so great if going to tell you you're older than your biological age. So what are we going to do about that? But it's interesting. One of the takeaway messages from the biological aging clocks that we have so far is that-- thanks, thanks.

[00:09:12.71] One is that-- you know what? We were talking about identical twins last week, and identical twins actually converse-- diverge, excuse me, they diverge over time as they get older and older, which is fascinating. Because remember, there were these twins that looked very different ages than each other. And we also know that the rate of acceleration of these marks is actually indicative of different diseases as well.

[00:09:48.71] So we know that there's an increased disease risk, the higher your epigenetic score in terms of cancer, in terms of Parkinson's, in terms of Alzheimer's. These are all markers that are very important. And before I finish, I want to say that the future here in terms of developing these clocks is to not only use these epigenetic markers on the DNA but to also then combine that with things like blood pressure and cholesterol and other blood markers that we have to really get a good comprehensive marker for the future.

[00:10:31.09] AUDIENCE: Do the epigenetic markers eventually get to the same point if we live long enough?

[00:10:38.65] DEBORAH ROACH: No, no, no, just like aging is very different across individuals so people will have different epigenetic markers, even depending on things like early life diseases and early life stresses. And we're going to get to that right now. Yes.

[00:10:57.86] AUDIENCE: The chat says, 2024 AACR meeting offered an abstract reporting that the increase in cancer incidence among young people is a consequence of early aging within the target population drawn from a UK health care database. Conclusions drawn from prevalence of cancer and blood studies showing high inflammatory markers. Any comments?

[00:11:20.72] DEBORAH ROACH: Yes, so high inflammatory markers, in particular, is what I want to pick up on because the inflammation is caused by senescent cells. That was one of our biomarkers-- excuse me-- hallmarks of aging that we talked about. So, yes, I would be curious to know whether or not there were any epigenetic analyses done in that study as well.

[00:11:51.80] AUDIENCE: I might be able to unmute [INAUDIBLE].

[00:11:58.21] DEBORAH ROACH: Shall I go on?

[00:12:00.97] AUDIENCE: I'm here. It was largely a database study. It wasn't clear-- it was an abstract so it wasn't clear to me that epigenetic studies were done. I suspect a full publication will be coming forward.

[00:12:20.35] DEBORAH ROACH: Right, but if I remember correctly, I think that part of this-- the consistency with this study and what we've been talking about here is that it was early life issues that were impacting later life. Is that correct?

[00:12:39.37] AUDIENCE: Yeah.

[00:12:39.97] DEBORAH ROACH: Yeah, and--

[00:12:42.26] AUDIENCE: And I think the frequency of cancer though was in those-- increased frequency was in those under the age of 50. Cancer below the age of 50 and the--

[00:12:58.64] DEBORAH ROACH: Right, huh, well, that sounds that sounds really neat, actually, and I thank you for that. I honestly can't-- does anyone else have any other thoughts on that--

[00:13:19.71] AUDIENCE: Except that it's entirely logical.

[00:13:21.77] DEBORAH ROACH: It makes sense.

[00:13:22.80] AUDIENCE: Almost tautological.

[00:13:24.06] DEBORAH ROACH: Right, right, right, right, right, right, so what I'd like to do is I'd like to, first of all, look at our first hypothesis that's out there that social interactions impact our aging. And of course, I chose this study also because it uses a epigenetic clock to evaluate this. So we often hear that social interactions are good in terms of our biological aging and vice versa.

[00:14:11.20] That in the absence of close relationships, people often experience faster aging. And actually there are studies from other animals, even birds, raised alone versus in groups are aging faster, and you can look at these hallmarks of aging and see that the ones in isolation are declining faster in terms of some of these hallmarks of aging.

[00:14:39.71] And what I want to tell you about is a very recent study actually was published at the end of last year. And this is from the health Retirement Study which is a big group of about 20,000 people, and this is out of the University of Michigan, and all the participants are over the age of 50.

[00:15:02.69] And in this particular part of their study, they surveyed people three times over a span of 10 years. And what they did was at the end of these 10 years, they actually took a blood sample, and they're going to be looking at this epigenetic clock. and I want to tell you a couple of things that are really positive about this study.

[00:15:26.90] First of all, it's a long term study of the same people. It's not just a snapshot. It's a longitudinal study for 10 years. That's great. And also, it's a prospective analysis because they actually measured people's social interactions and so forth at the beginning and then through the study, and then did the blood sampling later.

[00:15:50.58] So the question is, is the level of social interaction, social support, and is that at all reflective of the rate of aging if we can use this epigenetic clock as a measure of the rate of aging?

[00:16:09.20] So they asked these people these survey questions like do you feel like your friends support you and that they understand your feelings? And can you open up if you have a serious problem? The scale goes from no, not at all, to yes a lot. And then how often do you see your friends? And then they also asked this with respect to family and children as well.

[00:16:37.74] So over this time then, so the results were such that individuals who have higher social support and contact frequency with friends had significantly slower epigenetic age than participants who perceived their support to be lower, and they had fewer contacts with friends. And then similarly with family, that the more contact with children and so forth impacted their biological age in the way that we expected. And so they also-- in this study, they also then controlled for demographic traits and took that out and also in terms of health of the individuals.

[00:17:29.71] AUDIENCE: What about sex?

[00:17:30.84] DEBORAH ROACH: And there were no differences between genders.

[00:17:36.36] AUDIENCE: That's interesting.

[00:17:36.99] There's two comments. One person suggested that we hold all questions and interruptions until it ends so that you can finish. And then there's a question that says, what is this imply regarding introverts versus extroverts?

[00:17:51.67] DEBORAH ROACH: Thank you for the second as well. I want to address that second question because this is actually-- I don't know how much they took in personality into consideration, and I think that this is really considered the first step, and this is the most up-to-date study that I could find in terms of looking at social relationships, but yes, there are many other layers to be looked at.

[00:18:22.12] And, in fact, one of the other layers that needs to be looked at is they didn't really talk about negative relationships. They kind of offered our lives for family or sometimes even friends. So, in fact, that's missing.

[00:18:36.37] And the other thing that's missing is that this was done in the US and there may be cultural differences elsewhere, and I believe that it was a completely Caucasian population that they used. So again, there may be differences here as well. So there are limits.

[00:18:55.75] I see a shocked look on one of our members here at the table, and I want to explain that this is a problem with any of these long-term studies that-- and I'm very aware of this in aging that asks volunteers to come in and they're often very wealthy, and they're white, and they're-- it is a problem, and they're usually highly educated too.

[00:19:25.07] And so that there's--

[00:19:26.69] AUDIENCE: Like us.

[00:19:27.84] DEBORAH ROACH: Yes, exactly. But there is a bias. There is a bias, and there's a lot of bias. But this is one of the first applications of a biological clock analysis to social relationships. And so I think at this point, things look-- are positive.

[00:19:51.48] Now what I'd like to tell you where this biological clock in this epigenetic marker was really first used because it's kind of an interesting study, and that is-- I need to remind you perhaps of a little bit of history.

[00:20:09.61] I don't know if you recall, but in 1944-45 in Holland, the Nazis were really actually trying to punish the population because they created this-- there was controversy because the Dutch were refusing to transport Nazi troops, and so the Nazis blockaded the food supplies, and so there was a major famine in the Netherlands in 1944 and '45, 20,000 people died. So it had a major impact on the population.

[00:21:02.48] And one of the things that happened, one of the things-- one of the analyzes that was done was that they looked at people who were pregnant during this time, and this is a time when food rations were very low that the graph here is actually looking at the number of kilocalories per day in the population went way down to 500 during this blockade.

[00:21:35.77] And they looked at children born then shortly thereafter, and they looked at their health and basically, they found, number one, that before the age of 63, they had a 12% higher mortality rate than the cohorts that did not suffer this stress. They had increased obesity, diabetes, schizophrenia.

[00:22:04.78] And now we know because of further analysis that there were epigenetic markers on the DNA of these children following because of this famine.

[00:22:20.11] And there's something that's incredibly interesting, is that one of the major epigenetic markers, one of the genes that was turned off was a particular gene that's in high frequency in centenarians. And in other words, people that we know that live to be 100 have a high expression of this gene is called IGF1.

[00:22:44.56] And it influences the anti-aging pathways that are inherent in our bodies and I'll get to that in a minute, but that was turned off in these individuals. And so here we have a scar of a experience from very, very early childhood, which carried over and increased the susceptibility to age-related diseases and also lifespan. Really fascinating.

[00:23:19.03] But it really is something that people are following up with, and it's clear now people are using-- are actually recognizing that, in fact, a lot of these early life experiences do leave these scars on our genome, which then impact our later life. Yes.

[00:23:44.11] AUDIENCE: Someone put in the chat, it actually depended on what trimester.

[00:23:47.98] DEBORAH ROACH: Yes. Absolutely. Yeah, I didn't want to go into too much detail, but that's absolutely right. There was the particular trimester, and I honestly can't remember which one.

[00:24:01.21] And so it's fascinating, and so now actually there are a lot of discussions going on now about how poverty, how refugee status and things like this are impacting people's epigenome, which will then impact their later life and their rates of aging.

[00:24:22.26] Now before I move on, I do want to remind you we had this figure last week and this was basically these hallmarks of aging that I keep referring to, and so what I wanted to mention was that here we've been talking about these social interactions and the early life experiences that are impacted by these epigenetic markers.

[00:24:47.84] And these epigenetic markers are a major component of our aging biology, if you will. And remember the whole point of the reading that we did the other day last week was basically to say we need to understand this basic biology, and we need to understand that and tackle those issues before we can really understand the age related diseases and the susceptibility that we're really fundamentally experiencing and want to follow up on.

[00:25:25.58] So I'm going to leave this epigenetic clock behind at this point, but it'll come up as we're continuing. What I'd like to do-- there are no other questions, right, Kelly?

[00:25:39.47] AUDIENCE: No.

[00:25:41.88] DEBORAH ROACH: I'd like to shift a little bit and talk about some age-related damage that occurs that I haven't told you about yet, and that's oxidative damage, and I need to talk about that before we can evaluate some of the other ways that we can manipulate aging.

[00:26:02.58] So oxidative damage is a major source of damage to the body. So I have-- there's a tomato up at the top there and it's being left out, and it's declining and it's becoming oxidized, if you will. And in the similar sort of way, our cells also become damaged over time, and suffer from oxidative stress.

[00:26:32.53] And basically this idea that there are all these-- there's a high level of free radicals that are causing this, and I'll tell you about what that is in just a second, but I do want to have you note that there are a lot of diseases and problems here associated with oxidative stress. And so this is a major problem, and this is a major increase-- this is a major issue that we need to address.

[00:27:03.48] Now where's all this oxidative damage coming from? It's coming from free radicals, which are basically molecules that are missing an electron. But no matter what, we end up-- there are lots of different sources of this free radical damage, and so exposure to light, air pollution, and smoking, inflammation that's all causing oxidative damage in our bodies.

[00:27:39.63] And I also want to note right here and we'll get to this in just a second, our basic metabolism actually creates free radicals that cause oxidative damage. The saying is every breath you take hastens your death.

[00:27:57.94] [LAUGHTER]

[00:28:06.40] So some of these things, we can do something about. We can't do a whole lot about. But there are-- we do have defenses against this oxidative damage. Now this is, again, one of these examples of damage increasing with age, but we do have some repair systems.

[00:28:27.92] The central repair system for oxidative damage is antioxidants. So here we have a cell, and these red dots are the free radicals that are damaging the cell caused by radiation, toxins, chemicals, stress. And all those free radicals are bouncing around and causing all sorts of damage in the cell.

[00:28:57.30] Well, we also have antioxidants. They give an electron-- they give up a spare electron and they can stop those chain reactions. They can stop that damage and pull the free radical out of circulation. And basically, they neutralize it.

[00:29:22.38] And so where are these antioxidants coming from? Well, there are two types of antioxidants. We have within our bodies, the primary internal antioxidants that we have. Does anyone know? Has anyone ever-- does anyone want to take a guess at any of this?

[00:29:50.73] I'm going to ask you-- OK, I'll get to the second part in a second. I hope you can. But our internal antioxidants are things like-- you may have heard of sodium superoxide dismutase and catalase, and these are antioxidants in our bodies that actually can attack this oxidation process and stop some of it. We can also we also have secondary dietary antioxidants. Anyone know what those are?

[00:30:33.65] AUDIENCE: Hear about blueberries and dull vision.

[00:30:35.72] DEBORAH ROACH: Yeah, well, they are in blueberries. Yes, there are things like vitamin C and vitamin A. And to get to your point, there are lots of plant phenols and flavonoids and carotenoids.

[00:30:54.65] All of these pigments and so forth that are in plants are antioxidants, and this is for me, when I was teaching aging this was my chance to say, listen to your mother, and these are all antioxidants.

[00:31:13.25] Our foods or our supplementary defenses against oxidative damage, and there's very good evidence that these types of foods and so forth do stop these-- stop this oxidative damage. Now what I want to talk about, though, is to get back to that metabolism a little bit.

[00:31:42.79] So the myth there or fact that I want to address is what about exercise because as I said, metabolism is increasing the free radicals. On the other hand, we went to a function last week at our granddaughters preschool, and on the gym wall, they had this, why should I exercise?

[00:32:13.61] Well, we know that there are some good things about exercising. My stamina is increased, sharpens my thinking, my body gets leaner, helps me relax, relieves stress. So which one's right?

[00:32:27.22] Well, it turns out that we've always thought that exercise was anti-aging, but we haven't really had a lot of good evidence of it except that of course, we do know that there are a lot of positive things that occur.

[00:32:45.02] For example, building muscle and steering away from the decline in muscle gain and that sort of thing. And here, if we just look at the figure for a second, there are lots of other types of positive impacts of aging on the body.

[00:33:08.11] Now what I want to tell you about is a study that was actually published in 2021 where they had 3,500 adults, and they followed them. They were from 18 to 79 years old, and they followed them for 12 years. So again these longitudinal studies to follow what impact does exercise have over time?

[00:33:35.64] And those results are what's pictured here. And so they-- first of all, they compared individuals who were working out about anything greater than 150 hours. In other words, they were-- this is about 30 minutes a day for five days a week in terms of working out, and they compared those to people who did less than two hours a week, so pretty sedentary people.

[00:34:09.48] But these they showed remarkable improvements in all the ways that we might expect them to, and they also had better balance and all that sort of thing. And that's all great, but what about those-- what about aging? And this is really neat because this is the first study that actually ever looked at aging with the markers that we want to use those hallmarks of aging.

[00:34:40.00] And I put a red circle around the hallmarks that were impacted, and you can see absolutely all of the nine hallmarks of aging that we've talked about were improved, and they had markers with from these people over this time to demonstrate that, in fact, yes, exercise does-- it does decrease the number of epigenetic markers.

[00:35:10.15] It does improve protein folding. It impacts every single one of those factors, and so it clearly is a very positive thing. And by the way this happened for individuals at all ages in this study.

[00:35:27.66] But wait a minute-- what about the metabolism? And how do we understand that? And what they found was to go back to our figure here, but now I'm showing the results here. What the exercise did, exercise is a little bit like a stress because it's creating oxidative stress in the body, is creating damage. But it's a levels that these people were exercising in.

[00:36:00.76] What happened was these primary internal antioxidants were up-regulated, and they were actually working harder. And this is actually very-- it's very promising because it's like it's saying basically a good behavior going to-- working out and going to the gym and so forth actually makes your body respond and fight this process of aging. And it's really neat because it says that, in fact, we do have inherent processes that aren't maximized.

[00:36:40.27] Now I need to mention that-- I think you can go back to this slide and you can see-- see the but here? Longevity effects on aging, but the last-- if, in fact, you're exercising an extreme amount, so that extreme amount is about five hours a day for seven days a week. now that's a lot.

[00:37:08.65] But there's very clear evidence from a number of different studies that this actually causes more damage and the repair processes can't keep up. And in fact, there is no upregulation of these internal processes because they're just totally overwhelmed and it's too stressful. There's excessive weight loss, there's chronic injury, and decrease in the immune system and all sorts of things.

[00:37:38.32] So there is a limit, but it's very nice that a mild stress does actually up-regulate the anti-aging pathways that are inherent to our bodies, which is really kind of cool. Now so let me now-- so yes, in fact, exercise does improve your agent in multiple ways.

[00:38:07.45] So what I'd like to do now is to look at caloric restriction because you-- my gosh, this gets so much publicity about people doing fasting, people doing all sorts of reduced diets and so forth to improve their aging.

[00:38:35.08] And a lot of the interest in this has come from studies that were first started with rodents and also with some non-human primates, and I'll show you two-- these are two rhesus monkeys who were put under caloric restriction.

[00:38:59.98] So we have canto here and Owen over here, and they're both the same age. It's kind of like looking at those twins the other day. Now this says-- in the fine print here, it says although a senior citizen is-- average lifespan and capacity is 27 years, and he's aging fairly well. Actually, I'm not sure he looks so happy, but that's how I look. And his skin is smooth and his blood work shows he's as healthy as he looks.

[00:39:32.60] Well, he was getting what? He had about 50% less-- fewer calories than Owen who gets more food. His posture has been affected by arthritis, his skin is wrinkled, his hair is falling out, and he's frail, and his blood work shows unhealthy glucose levels. So clearly, there's evidence from animals.

[00:39:58.88] Some of the other-- in some of the rhesus monkeys studies, there were differences in lifespan, and that's been shown in rodents as well. Lower core body temperature is another common feature, lower blood pressure, delayed reproduction is also a common response to this treatment.

[00:40:27.13] But again, we haven't had many studies done with humans, although many people want to just believe this and just go for it. Now there is a long term study that's been going on. It's actually started in 2007, and this is-- it's called the calorie study, meaning the comprehensive assessment of long-term effects of reducing intake of energy. That's where calorie comes from.

[00:41:01.18] This study was started in 2007, and it has about 220 individuals in it. My first exposure to people who were part of this study was at a meeting in the middle of the summer in a big auditorium, and it was-- I remember giving a talk and asking someone later, who are those people in the back row with their ski jackets on? And they said, those are the calorie people. They come to all these meetings. And their core body temperature was clearly being impacted by their treatments.

[00:41:42.27] Another common response to this is extreme fascination with food and psychological issues and depression and so forth associated with having to live under these-- to do this type of cutting back now because most of these in the calorie study, the goal is generally to have a target reduction of about 25% of normal calorie intake.

[00:42:20.54] And what I want to tell you about, though, is a study that was just published in 2003, and this was, again, one of the very first studies to be able to look-- that actually looked at these hallmarks of aging, and asked the question, does this work in humans?

[00:42:45.20] And the target now was that they were going to go-- they were aiming for 25% reduction in caloric intake. It actually ended up to be about 12%, and they can measure this by doubly-labeled water and so forth. And there was also lots of behavioral support for people to stay on the diets, and to keep the participants from dropping out of the study and so forth.

[00:43:16.89] So the results were-- the graphic shows that basically the muscle health was something that was well preserved in this study because that was quite surprising because, in fact, on average, individuals lost about 20 pounds in the first 12 months, but then after that, they didn't lose weight.

[00:43:46.86] But their muscle mass was conserved, and their muscle function was preserved. The only other treatments that have ever been shown to actually do that are exercise to preserve this.

[00:44:02.78] The other thing that's very interesting is that now this study went on, they followed these individuals for only two years, OK, and so this is just a two-year study. So we don't know how it impacted their mortality rates and that sort of thing. And the study was actually relatively small because in the end, the they had only 220 individuals monitored, and the numbers were too small to be able to do a lot of analysis, but they did do some good blood work.

[00:44:38.12] And looking at these hallmarks of aging, in fact, they did find that things like protein folding, things like cellular senescence, and epigenetic markers were all improved. Everything that has a red line around it suggests that, in fact, that this did work and that this short-term study does suggest that there are some positive things about caloric restriction.

[00:45:12.57] Now as I said, it's a very difficult thing to think about doing, and it's very hard to do, and in fact, many people are trying to look at the pathways and say, OK, so what's going on when we're doing caloric restriction? And can we impact it in ways other than reducing calories? And it turns out that just like exercise, this is a mild stress.

[00:45:40.32] Caloric restriction is a stress and in response to that stress, the antioxidants and other pathways are actually up-regulated, and there's very nice evidence that there are these-- the anti-aging pathways that are being affected here are again inherent to our organisms-- to our bodies, excuse me.

[00:46:06.63] And so , again, the sample sizes are small. It's very, very difficult, and there are a number of pharmacological mimics that people are trying to develop that would actually try to touch these same pathways and get these same results. So we'll see.

[00:46:29.76] This is something that I'm sure there'll be more written about in the future, but yes, it's very interesting and, in fact, caloric restriction does seem to be working-- does seem to work.

[00:46:45.00] So how about-- thinking back to Madame Calmette from last week, what about that red wine? Remember I said--

[00:46:53.35] [LAUGHTER]

[00:46:54.71] That sparked a little conversation last week. So does red wine decrease your rate of biological aging? And this came out of what was called the French paradox. This idea that how is it that the French can have this high-fat diet, so much cheese, and actually still have a relatively long lifespan within the population?

[00:47:27.07] And so one suggestion was that it was the wine. And, in fact, there's something particular in the wine. It's this substance called resveratrol. And resveratrol is on the market, and you can buy it online, and it's supposed to help fight dangerous free radicals, help slow the aging process and all that sort of thing.

[00:47:57.66] AUDIENCE: Oh, come on.

[00:47:59.19] DEBORAH ROACH: Yeah.

[00:47:59.34] [LAUGHTER]

[00:48:00.72] OK, well, wait a second. This is still out there as a suggestion for aging, but I have to tell you about another study that was done with mice. Now these mice, there were three groups of mice.

[00:48:25.29] In group 1, they had a high fat diet, 60% of their calories from fat. Really high-fat diet. Group 2 had the high-fat diet plus resveratrol. And group 3, which is our control group, is a normal diet.

[00:48:43.74] Well, the mice in group 1 gained a lot of weight, and they started dying early and they had issues with a lot of blood markers associated with diabetes and that sort of thing. They were having a hard time. They had a relatively short life span.

[00:49:07.51] The individuals in group 2, they still had a weight gain, but they did not have those markers associated with diabetes. And, in fact, they had an extended life span that was the same as those mice in group 3. So the resveratrol had some impact, and that's why this got so much excitement and so much publicity. I think a cartoon in The Washington Post really summarizes the issues.

[00:49:46.38] So honey, you'd be better-- you'd be healthier if you lost some weight. Listen, there's good news. Scientists gave obese mice a compound found in red wine, and the mice stayed healthy. The study said that to get the same dose as they gave the mice, a person would have to drink between 750 and 1,500 bottles of red wine.

[00:50:14.51] [LAUGHTER]

[00:50:17.47] And see? It's getting better and better. OK?

[00:50:23.37] [LAUGHTER]

[00:50:26.22] It doesn't work. It doesn't work. But there are-- right now there are studies that are being done by the same group that in fact, tried to push resveratrol as an anti-aging cure.

[00:50:50.11] They're now working on trying to figure out what this pathway is, and can we find some other pharmacological solution to do this? Right now they don't have anything. There's nothing out there, and the resveratrol itself doesn't work. So what I'd like to do--

[00:51:14.26] AUDIENCE: Yeah, but we still want to drink our wine.

[00:51:16.15] DEBORAH ROACH: Yeah, you can have your wine, yes, but at least you don't have to poison yourself with alcohol--

[00:51:20.71] AUDIENCE: --1,500 bottles.

[00:51:23.59] DEBORAH ROACH: That's right. That's right. Now there's something else. I've presented this last thing as a myth or a fact but, in fact, it's really something that I-- the only reason I want to present this in this way is that it's something we all need to be looking for and at. And what I'd like to talk about is some future work that's being done. It's actually going to target some of the damage and removing some of that damage.

[00:52:03.81] And so because-- the whole idea here is that if we could remove damage from the cells, then maybe, in fact, we will then reduce our susceptibility to age-related diseases, and maybe we'll be able to maintain our health span if we can remove damaged cells.

[00:52:22.32] And I want to tell you the basic problem here is that-- so here we have a young individual, and we have healthy cells, all these white cells, and then we have a few senescent cells. And senescent cells are really defined as cells that have stopped dividing, but they're still alive, but they're non-functioning.

[00:52:51.20] And what happens is that these cells that are still there but they're not dividing anymore, actually excrete these red substances which are called senescence activating substances. And so they're causing-- they're starting to cause a little bit of inflammation.

[00:53:11.75] And as we get older, we have even more of these senescent cells, and the excretion of these senescent activating substances is actually decreasing the function of healthy cells and making healthy cells decline in their function as well. And so we have lots of-- this is actually the major source of information.

[00:53:42.14] So the idea is, what if we could remove some of these senescent cells? And the reason that this is so important for us to want to talk about removing senescent cells is that, first of all, we have this increasing number of senescent cells as we get older, and that just exposes us to more and more of these age-related diseases.

[00:54:10.80] And as you can see, we get all the way out to the end there. And we've got frailty sarcopenia, which is muscle declines and decreased healthspan. And all of that can be traced back to this accumulation of aging cells.

[00:54:28.74] And so the hope here is that maybe-- what happens if we could remove some of these cells. And so normally, our immune cells will help to remove some senescent cells, but our immune system declines with age and that process becomes more and more-- becomes less efficient.

[00:54:55.97] And so there are these drugs that have been developed, these senolytics that basically-- the idea is that they will then repair-- they will then eliminate these senescent cells from our bodies and repair and help us maintain function.

[00:55:17.08] And the neat thing is that there's good evidence in mice that this is going to work because-- so what they've done is first of all, they took old cells and they put them into a young mouse, and the young mouse got older really very quickly. And then they actually gave these senolytic drugs to old mice, and actually they maintained their health for longer, and they actually lived longer.

[00:55:52.70] And they even did it the other experiment where they put these senescent cells in the young mouse, and that they also gave them these senolytic drugs and they live longer, and it lived they lived-- there wasn't the same declines that they had found without the drugs.

[00:56:11.04] And so in many ways, this drug is a fountain of youth, and people are really actually very excited about it because it can be used to target cells. For example, it can be used to target cells that are causing neurodegeneration, cells that are causing osteoarthritis, and arterial arteriosclerosis, and there are-- so there's a lot of interest in using these target drugs to look at different systems.

[00:56:46.86] And so I looked up this morning to see what human trials are going on, and they are starting to recruit. We don't have any data on this yet, but they are starting to recruit people to actually use these senolytic drugs, and they have been approved to do so in some situations.

[00:57:08.12] And interesting thing is that you might want to ask what is this senolytic drug? What is it? What's it all about? It turns out it's a combination of a leukemia drug and also the plant compounds that are found in fruits and vegetables, and it's this cocktail that is somehow, at least in mice looks very promising. So I can't tell you whether or not this is fact or fiction yet, but it's something to look forward to.

[00:57:43.88] I'm running short on time, so let me just-- I'm going to skip forward and say that, yes, you can modify your rate of aging, and remember when we started out, we talked about-- the goal of research in aging is to try to minimize this period of time here, this age related-- when we were suffering from age-related diseases and to expand our health span as much as we can.

[00:58:17.55] Factors that are slowing aging that we have talked about are having a robust social support, healthy nutrition rich in antioxidants, low calorie intake, no smoking, moderate exercise and appropriate responses to stress. And factors that are accelerating aging are just the opposite of those.

[00:58:39.18] And in fact, there is increasing evidence these days, and in fact, we can modify our rate of aging, and then also improve our health span, which is actually pretty exciting. So I'll leave it at that, and I know I've just come to the end, but if there are any questions, I'm happy to answer them.

[00:59:08.05] AUDIENCE: Now the red wine comes out, right?

[00:59:09.76] [LAUGHTER]

[00:59:11.59] DEBORAH ROACH: That's right. That's right. So are we all set on line 2? Good.

[00:59:17.92] AUDIENCE: We're going to talk again about the lobster because it sounded like that's what we want to do with this. We want to--

[00:59:24.61] DEBORAH ROACH: Throw away our bodies now. We can't do that. That's right. That's right. That's right. That's right. Yeah, we can't really do that.

[00:59:33.04] AUDIENCE: Where were the studies that you saw.

[00:59:35.41] DEBORAH ROACH: Pardon me?

[00:59:35.89] AUDIENCE: Where were the studies that you saw?

[00:59:38.43] DEBORAH ROACH: All over the place. And this is something that-- this is one of the reasons I really enjoyed teaching the biology of aging was that every time I looked and including for these talks, things are updated, and it is a fast-moving field, and that's we-- it's nice. And there was more and more coming for sure.

[01:00:04.99] AUDIENCE: I want to ask if your slides would be available.

[01:00:07.91] DEBORAH ROACH: Sure. Yeah. Yeah.

[01:00:11.26] AUDIENCE: Can you talk a little bit about appropriate stress response versus a poor stress response?

[01:00:16.81] DEBORAH ROACH: Yes, well, we could go back to the exercise and see that extreme exercise, of course, was bad for the body, but appropriate exercise actually regulated natural anti-aging pathways.

[01:00:33.61] And in a similar sort of way, when we think about psychological stress or any other types of stress where we up-regulate our corticosteroid levels, and if we stay-- if we have a high level of sustained stress for a long period of time, that actually costs the body.

[01:00:57.49] And it will cost the body in terms of epigenetic markers that we've been talking about and it'll also stress the body in other ways, whereas if appropriate response would be somehow to modulate that and address stress issues in a managed way that keeps those stress hormones at a low level. Yes.

[01:01:25.16] AUDIENCE: I'm so stressed right now, and have been for months that I cannot find a good stress response. Sorry. I've seen shrinks, I don't know, It's hypothetical, of course. So what it's suggesting there is really not that--

[01:01:50.84] DEBORAH ROACH: No, well, I think what I'm suggesting is recognizing that and trying to figure out what is an appropriate response and try to figure out things like-- well, what other things could you do that are good for you? Make sure you diet. Make sure you're exercising. Make sure you're getting out in nature. Those types of things.

[01:02:16.85] AUDIENCE: Do something about the politics of the society that I'm in.

[01:02:21.62] DEBORAH ROACH: Stop watching the news. There you go. Yes.

[01:02:27.14] AUDIENCE: Perhaps consistent mild exercises you're taking seems to reduce stress. I mean, if you're under-- if you have a stress that you can't change the stress but you may be able to change your response to it.

[01:02:45.88] DEBORAH ROACH: Right. Yeah, I think that's right.

[01:02:49.51] AUDIENCE: James said, I'm 83. When do you think the senolytics will be available?

[01:02:53.92] [LAUGHTER]

[01:02:56.62] DEBORAH ROACH: I wish. Yes, there are a number of things that are being developed these days. That was just the one that I chose to talk about, but yeah, there's a lot of stuff that's out there.

[01:03:09.05] And there are also a lot of these pharmacological solutions that are targeted at the dietary restriction, and there's one that's called rapamycin, which actually was discovered in the soil on Easter Island, and it was first discovered because it's an anti-inflammatory agent and people were interested in that with respect to the immune system of people who are on Easter Island.

[01:03:44.03] AUDIENCE: Are there studies of taking through fields as it were the reserve patrol, so you don't-- I mean, a few glasses of red wine is fine, but 1,500 day is a bit much. But can you take enough resveratrol not to have side effects? Perhaps you wouldn't get the pleasure--

[01:04:08.04] DEBORAH ROACH: This is one of the-- these side effects are a major issue on all of these types of pharmacological interventions. And with respect to the resveratrol, it turns out that, in fact, it has a very short shelf life. And so by the time you get the little bottle of pills, a lot of them may have lost the-- be out of date. And so that's another issue with respect to that particular drug.

[01:04:35.33] And as I was saying with this substance that they are now working on with respect to dietary restriction and this idea that maybe there will be things out there that we can up-regulate these pathways, but then still have a regular diet, and not have to take reduced calories and that kind of stuff.

[01:04:58.24] AUDIENCE: Is there a theory to why women live longer?

[01:05:01.50] DEBORAH ROACH: Well, I'd love to TALK-- So the question is-- the question is, why do women live longer than men? And does anyone have any thoughts before I--

[01:05:14.98] AUDIENCE: We do a lot of those things that you talked about.

[01:05:20.05] DEBORAH ROACH: You're saying better-- you're saying we're better behaved.

[01:05:21.99] [LAUGHTER]

[01:05:25.30] I'm not going to go there.

[01:05:30.40] AUDIENCE: Female babies do better than boy babies in the nursery. So some of it is probably genetic.

[01:05:37.81] DEBORAH ROACH: They do. And, in fact, this difference between males and females starts really early stages in life.

[01:05:49.47] AUDIENCE: Yeah, you talk to a pediatrician.

[01:05:50.57] DEBORAH ROACH: That's right. And I have to tell you, though, that it actually-- there's no evidence right now that in humans, that females have a slower rate of aging than male in terms of the biological. If we could measure biological age at this point in time, there's no evidence.

[01:06:11.61] And so a lot of it has to do with the fact that we have two X chromosomes and then males have XY chromosomes, and any genetic diseases that may be carried on an X chromosome that may on one of our X chromosomes-- would be expressing it from the chromosome that actually does not have that defect.

[01:06:42.33] Whereas a male they have an X chromosome disease. They have to express it because they don't have that duplication of genes. And in fact, there was also a really neat study in today about two weeks ago, about the disappearing Y.

[01:07:01.65] Someone at UVA was doing-- is doing a study about the Y chromosome and diseases on the Y chromosome. And in fact, so that-- in fact, the Y chromosome itself may carry some genes that impact lifespan in males. And then there's also questions of hormones. Estrogen is generally positive impact and testosterone is it can be associated with some behaviors that are not positive. Yes.

[01:07:38.41] AUDIENCE: I don't know whether it was a UBI study or not, but I read recently there's been a number of new genes discovered on the Y chromosome. So yes, and I don't know whether they're good ones or bad ones.

[01:07:49.69] DEBORAH ROACH: Yes, right. No, but that's right, but the trouble is that there's no duplication, and so you're stuck with what have. Yes and so, yes-- that's another reason that females live longer than males.

[01:08:06.70] In some situations and there's also a lot of discussion about whether or not there may have been some selection for females to live longer than males. In other species because of their maternal care.

[01:08:21.01] And so if there's any selection for longevity because it increases it's survival of the offspring, may be the case. And there's a bit of a controversy about that with respect to human populations, and there's evidence on both sides.

[01:08:38.32] But it's absolutely true with whales. And pilot whale females live to be 90 years old. They stop reproducing when they're 40, but they live to be 90. And but if the female dies then her offspring have a higher chance of dying as well. And if she's not around because she is beneficial-- primarily because she's a wealth of knowledge about when best to find the salmon and food sources.

[01:09:08.45] And so it's neat and similar sorts of patterns are found in elephants as well, the elderly matriarch is quite critical to the survival of her offspring, and if she dies, then it's a problem. I could keep going.

[01:09:26.68] [LAUGHTER]

[01:09:30.95] But thank you very much, all of you.

[01:09:32.58] AUDIENCE: Thank you.

[00:00:01.84] DEBORAH ROACH: Hello.

[00:00:02.72] AUDIENCE: Hello.

[00:00:03.10] AUDIENCE: Hello.

[00:00:03.49] AUDIENCE: Hello.

[00:00:04.57] DEBORAH ROACH: I'm Deborah Roach. And I hope that you all are here to talk about the uplifting story about aging.

[00:00:13.79] [LAUGHTER]

[00:00:14.94] AUDIENCE: Old age.

[00:00:17.19] DEBORAH ROACH: And so I am fairly freshly retired only about a year and a half ago now from the Department of Biology. And while I was in biology, I actually taught a course on the biology of aging for about 25 years. And so I've gotten to know a lot about the field. But when I think about the field of biology, the biology of aging, I have to tell you that I don't just think about humans.

[00:00:54.82] I also think about plants. And I think about other animals as well. And so as we go through and talk about aging, I'm actually going to throw in some examples from other species too. But, of course, the focus for today and for the next week is really to talk about human biology of aging, and what we can do about it, how we can look at some of the myths that are out there and know what works, and what really doesn't work, OK?

[00:01:29.99] I have to say, first of all, that I said I taught this class for a long time. But I was talking to 18 and 20-year-olds. And it's different when you want-- I start the class out. And I always say, well, what's aging? And they look at me. And they talk about the cells and the sort of thing. And they had no idea. And so this is a really different audience for me to talk to. And it really makes it-- it's kind of fun.

[00:02:01.05] So I think all of us have a sense of what aging is all about. And so please, as we go through this, ask questions, OK? I'm sure you've wondered, what's this seminar going to be about? So what is this I've been thinking about experiencing over the years? So please don't hesitate to ask questions. And for people online, I'd also say welcome. And please write questions in to Kelly. And Kelly, just go ahead and raise your hand when someone else has raised a question. And is everything, before we go on any further, is everything OK online? So we're all set?

[00:02:47.03] AUDIENCE: Yes, thank you.

[00:02:49.06] DEBORAH ROACH: Yeah, OK.

[00:02:50.24] AUDIENCE: Maybe you let us know where they're going to pan the audience.

[00:02:52.74] [LAUGHTER]

[00:02:55.79] DEBORAH ROACH: OK. So when we think about aging, it's, of course, as the population has aged, and so forth, there are just many, many more books and myths, and there's so much out there that's really been thrown at us. And as a professional in the field also, I've always been surprised at how captured people feel, and militant almost, about what their research is about and how what they're doing is going to solve the problem.

[00:03:39.51] And so I go to meetings and so forth. And you see people living, their research, people working on caloric restriction or are eating very little at lunchtime during the breaks, and that sort of thing. And so it's really very interesting to think about all the ideas that people have about aging. And I guess what I'd like to say is the big take-home message is that aging is complex. And there is no one answer. So that will be the take-home message.

[00:04:22.74] But there's also an optimistic message that I hope you all walk away with. And that is this idea that, in fact, we can do something. We can actually look at biological processes and see that we can reverse this process, or increase our defenses against this process. And so that's where we're headed. And that's what I hope that you'll start to understand as we move forward.

[00:04:49.64] So today, what I'm going to do is I'm going to talk a little bit about lifespan, and then move into defining exactly what aging is all about. And then what I want to do is I actually want to then tackle one of the myths. And the myth that we're aiming for here is this idea that social interactions like these, the retired faculty association, actually can have an impact on biological aging. And I'm getting way ahead of myself. But I just want you to know where we're headed.

[00:05:30.67] And so let me get started. And I cannot start a-- I can't start a discussion about aging without talking about the two people, male and female, who have lived the longest. And this is Madame Calment, who lived for 122 years, and Mr. Kimura, who lived 116 years. And we all want to look at these individuals and say, wow, how do these people live this long? And what were their secrets?

[00:06:18.73] And I have to tell you that there's been a lot more research done on Madame Calment. In fact, there's been a book written about her. And some of the secrets as people talk about it from her are that she ate pounds of chocolate.

[00:06:37.60] [LAUGHTER]

[00:06:42.28] She drank red wine regularly. And the other thing is she rode a bicycle until she was 100.

[00:06:50.41] AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

[00:06:51.22] DEBORAH ROACH: And, yeah, seriously. And she lived independently until she was 110.

[00:06:56.65] AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

[00:06:57.88] DEBORAH ROACH: Yeah. So, I mean, this is someone we would call a super ager, because it wasn't-- she was living long. But she was also healthy. And I have to tell you that in my professional network, I knew someone who interviewed her. And he would interview her every couple of years to get information, see how she was doing, take all these health measurements. And one time when he was there, and he was in his mid-sixties, and he was finished his analysis and so forth, and was about to leave, and he turned and said, see you next year. And she said, yeah, you don't look so bad.

[00:07:42.73] [LAUGHTER]

[00:07:45.04] Saying that. Well, she, at that time, she was 117. So another take-home message from this is a sense of humor is actually a really good characteristic. And maybe it had something to do with this fact that she was a super ager. I don't know. But what I can tell you is that there's a lot of research going on looking at these people who are living to late ages, and trying to understand what their characteristics are, do they have unique genetics? Do they have innate behaviors? Do they have different unique environments, diets, and that sort of thing, to try to put all these things together? And there is a lot of research that's going on with respect to that.

[00:08:35.44] And there was something that I read about just recently, which suggests that when we think about the-- very often, you think, well, people who have genes that are going to predispose them to a high chance of getting Alzheimer's disease, for example. Well, it turns out, the expectation is that those people will have shorter lifespans. Well, it turns out that there's now a lot of good evidence that, in fact, some of these people who are living to these late ages and are healthy are also carriers of some of these genetic age-related diseases. Wow.

[00:09:24.58] And so the question then is, do they have other parts of their genome which are actually counteracting their susceptibility to these diseases? Or in fact-- or is there something about their environment that actually is limiting the expression of these deleterious diseases? And so it's really very interesting. And there's a whole lot that's being done to look at these, as they called, unexpected heroes, those who are living for really long periods of time. Now--

[00:10:03.39] AUDIENCE: What did they die of?

[00:10:07.85] DEBORAH ROACH: Honestly, I don't know. But I have had friends of mine who are in this field. And they get so frustrated when the doctor then signs what did they die of? Old age. And-- yeah, yeah. But that-- I don't know. I don't know if there are any physicians in the room, are there? Yes--

[00:10:29.69] AUDIENCE: I'm a retired pediatrician.

[00:10:31.03] [INTERPOSING VOICES]

[00:10:33.23] --be helpful.

[00:10:34.82] DEBORAH ROACH: OK. So you won't be able to speak to that. But it is a good question. And I don't remember with respect to Madame Calment and Mr. Kimura. But--

[00:10:47.39] AUDIENCE: Maybe there was no autopsy done, right?

[00:10:49.53] DEBORAH ROACH: Right. That's true, too. That's true, too. It's a good question. So what I wanted to do was I wanted to take you-- actually remind you of one of the things that actually the paper that you read all raised. And that was this idea that, in fact, we have increased lifespan over time in a very dramatic way. And this is, this is actually life expectancy. Life expectancy is basically the average lifespan of a group of individuals who are born in a particular year.

[00:11:32.37] And so what I'd like you to see here is that, in fact, life expectancy was, from the 1700s, until to the mid-1900s, was pretty flat. It was about 30, 35 years. And then we've had these dramatic increases in life expectancy. And such takes us to the point, as mentioned in your reading, that we have Hong Kong and Japan who have a life expectancy now of 85 years, OK? So that's the average lifespan.

[00:12:12.79] So there are many more people who are going to be living to really late ages, given this change. It's been a dramatic change. In fact, the change was-- this was a very linear change here. In other words, every 10 years, there was an increase in life expectancy about 2 and 1/2 years, so really, really fast. Any suggestions about what was going on here?

[00:12:39.66] AUDIENCE: Penicillin, maybe?

[00:12:40.86] DEBORAH ROACH: Yeah. Clearly, a lot of antibiotics and all sorts of things, yes, that would have impacted mortality rates.

[00:12:54.90] AUDIENCE: Vaccines.

[00:12:55.81] DEBORAH ROACH: Vaccines, yes. And, so clearly, a lot of health advances, but a lot of social advances as well. Hygiene, you think from the-- going from the mid-1900s until now, things like hygiene, just basic socioeconomic levels, increasing food and lifestyle. And so--

[00:13:21.24] AUDIENCE: And infant mortality--

[00:13:22.08] [INTERPOSING VOICES]

[00:13:23.96] AUDIENCE: Those figures are funny because they-- again, somebody, everybody.

[00:13:30.04] DEBORAH ROACH: That's right. That's right. Infant mortality is the biggest point in the lifespan that has changed with respect to mortality rates during this period of time. But there is also all age mortality has actually improved as well, even for the elderly. But infant mortality is one of the key factors which has led to this. And there's a lot of discussion in the literature about whether or not we're reaching a limit, and things are going to start to slow down or not. But it is resulting in an extremely extended lifespan.

[00:14:08.32] Now what I want to do is also mention that environment is something that's very important. And one way we can see how the environment is important is to look at the US. And so this is life expectancy by state. And I always find it fascinating that, in fact, there is such a range here. So the best performing countries primarily out in the West have a life expectancy within the state between 78 and 80 years old. And those are the worst performing. It's almost 10 years less than that. It's 71 to 75 years. And that's this purple color here. And--

[00:15:01.47] AUDIENCE: Let's go somewhere else.

[00:15:02.79] DEBORAH ROACH: Pardon me.

[00:15:03.30] AUDIENCE: Let's go somewhere else.

[00:15:04.59] DEBORAH ROACH: Yeah, that's right. That's right. Yeah. That's right. Even in Virginia, we're not doing as well as we might-- as we might like to. But yes--

[00:15:13.50] AUDIENCE: So it doesn't take ethnicity into consideration, I suppose. The West coast is your Asian population.

[00:15:22.10] DEBORAH ROACH: Well, I think that you're raising a really good point. And that is that there's a lot of heterogeneity in the US. And so in fact, that's why the US is not one of the best performers. The US is ranked like 47th in terms of life expectancy compared to other countries. And a lot of that is due to the heterogeneity with respect to ethnicity, with respect to socioeconomic situations, and things like that are really--

[00:15:52.48] AUDIENCE: --comparing states, migration patterns, where people want to live-- half the state of Washington--

[00:15:59.00] DEBORAH ROACH: Yeah.

[00:15:59.82] AUDIENCE: Yeah. I mean--

[00:16:00.82] DEBORAH ROACH: That's absolutely right. And in fact, there are also differences among states. And I'd love to superimpose another map to show these differences in terms of issues with respect to socioeconomic levels, but also things like addiction, and things like that. As we know, we've heard about the opioid crisis. And we know that it's been isolated in certain parts more than others. And that has an impact.

[00:16:35.91] AUDIENCE: I think that Florida surprises me. I would have thought that would have been--

[00:16:39.58] DEBORAH ROACH: Yes, yes.

[00:16:40.68] AUDIENCE: --top of it. But I guess all those old people are dying.

[00:16:43.84] [LAUGHTER]

[00:16:46.32] DEBORAH ROACH: Thank you. That, they do OK. So what's the take-home message here? The take-home message is that when we think about lifespan, really, there are-- let me go back a second, and to say that when we think about lifespan, one of the things that's very important is environment. A lot of the things that we've been talking about are environmental impacts on lifespan.

[00:17:16.89] And so when we think about also this expanding life expectancy, and so forth, what we also want to recognize is that as we increase lifespan, there's this area of healthspan. We, sort of, mentioned that a little bit earlier. And this is an idea that you're fairly healthy for some part of that lifespan. But then there is this phase of the lifespan where you are suffering from age-related diseases.

[00:17:53.32] And so when we start thinking about aging and understanding aging, we want to-- ideally, most of us don't really want to keep pushing out lifespan so much, especially if it means pushing out this period of age-related diseases. Really, what we'd like to do is to maximize this period of healthspan, and then have a very small period of age-related diseases.

[00:18:27.67] And to go back to what we've been talking about with respect to lifespan across the US, and historically, we have to recognize that both the environment and aging are determining lifespan. And the goal of most aging research these days is not so much to increase lifespan as we historically have been, but really to try to figure out how we can tackle this piece. And so we'll be talking about that in multiple different ways.

[00:19:06.84] And there is some good news, though. And that is that, in fact-- When we think about lifespan, there is a very large-- as we've been talking about, there is a large environmental piece. And so that means that, in fact, we can do something. It may not be as complicated as we may have thought.

[00:19:37.06] So what I'd like to do is to say, OK, so what is aging? Now OK-- now your reading for the session today talked about how much historical interest there has been in finding the fountain of youth. It's this idea that we're going to find this restorative spring. We're going to all jump into it. And then we're going to come out the other end. And we're all going to be young again.

[00:20:17.17] I like this painting from the 1500s, where, in fact, they're bringing in old ladies on carts and on stretchers. And they get into these restorative waters. And then they come out as young males on the other side. And it all suggests that, in fact, there is something special going on. But in fact-- and that we just have to find the right answers. And we'll be able to solve all this problems. In fact, you know the stories about Ponce de Leon, who went out to look for the fountain of youth. And what did he find? He found Florida.

[00:20:57.42] [LAUGHTER]

[00:21:03.29] AUDIENCE: And they're all white there. They're all white. That's, you know, an interpretation. But there were Black people.

[00:21:09.09] AUDIENCE: Really?

[00:21:09.74] AUDIENCE: I know these ones.

[00:21:11.96] DEBORAH ROACH: So--

[00:21:13.67] AUDIENCE: I've never been to, is it called Albemarle dermatology. But is that what it looks like?

[00:21:20.87] DEBORAH ROACH: You're right.

[00:21:21.74] AUDIENCE: They seem advertised--

[00:21:22.59] DEBORAH ROACH: --restorative, yes.

[00:21:23.41] [INTERPOSING VOICES]

[00:21:25.28] AUDIENCE: --facials and restorative this and

[00:21:27.29] [INTERPOSING VOICES]

[00:21:28.19] DEBORAH ROACH: Well, this is a big business, with advertising yourself is doing some anti-aging type of restoration. Yeah, it's a big business. So there is some good news when we look in the natural world. And that is that there are some species that can escape. And I'm going to tell you about one of them. And that's the lobster. And you'll never look at lobster again the same way.

[00:22:00.86] So negligible senescence. Senescence is-- and is what we're referring to as aging OK? And negligible senescence is that here's a species that doesn't seem to show any aging. Well, how does it do it? So what happens, a lobster continues to get bigger as it gets older. And as it gets bigger, a big lobster, it's about two feet long, can make about 100,000 eggs, huge level of food production. And as they get older, they make even more eggs.

[00:22:43.14] And so what happens, though, is that as they get bigger, they have this hard shell on the outside. And what they're going to do is they're going to shed their aging body and throw it away. So basically what happens is that this lobster will then-- the skin cells under the shell start to get enlarged.

[00:23:10.69] And then basically, they drain the calcium out of the shell, because they're going to need that calcium later on. And then they're going to basically pump seawater in and throw off their body. And just before this, what they've been doing is making the foundation for their new shell. But with-- this would be like throwing away all our skeletal-- all--

[00:23:41.89] AUDIENCE: Does that happen all at once?

[00:23:43.69] DEBORAH ROACH: No. In fact, when they're young, it does it about-- they do it about five or six times a year. And when they're older, they do it about once a year. And so-- yeah, come on in. So the idea is so in fact, they don't age.

[00:24:07.33] AUDIENCE: But we get rid of ourselves every seven years, don't we? We replace them, more or less, all of them.

[00:24:12.25] DEBORAH ROACH: Not all of them. And the trouble is that we're accumulating other damage. And so--

[00:24:18.55] AUDIENCE: Not fast enough.

[00:24:19.87] DEBORAH ROACH: No, that's not enough just to get rid of ourselves, because we've got a whole lot of other things that are getting damaged. But this is one way to, in fact, to have no aging. But I want to ask you a question. So do you think that to say that the lobster doesn't age, do you think it lives forever? Is it immortal?

[00:24:41.80] AUDIENCE: It's a different lobster.

[00:24:43.49] DEBORAH ROACH: No, no.

[00:24:44.50] [INTERPOSING VOICES]

[00:24:47.38] No, let's just say this one individual, OK?

[00:24:50.92] AUDIENCE: Well, it's changed everything.

[00:24:53.59] DEBORAH ROACH: It has changed, yeah.

[00:24:55.09] AUDIENCE: Doesn't a lobster have organs?

[00:24:57.28] DEBORAH ROACH: It does. It does. It does. And in fact, they have-- their organs actually have cells that have the ability to constantly continue to repair, and so forth. And so they've got other mechanisms as well. But the throwing away of the body, except for those internal organs, is something that's the most--

[00:25:23.56] AUDIENCE: Is a 15-year-old lobster as tender as a-- yeah. Really, I mean, so you got this 27 pounds lobster, we would enjoy the meat.

[00:25:35.65] DEBORAH ROACH: Yes, Yes. Yes, exactly. But you know what's interesting? And this-- just mentioned this. There's this wonderful book by Trevor Carson on The Secret Life of Lobsters. And it's really about conservation of fishing with the fishermen, and then all of the biologists who want to be sure that you've got the idea that you're preserving the oldest individuals to keep the populations going.

[00:26:08.70] And so in fact, there's a very narrow window that you're allowed to keep the lobsters, because these big mamas, if you will, are very critical to keep the population going. But an individual lobster, if it can continue to get bigger and so forth, over time, it's not going to live forever, OK? It's just not going to age. It's not going to get any older.

[00:26:39.86] But there are other things that go on. There are other-- mortality of a lobster is also dependent on the environment. Every organism encounters some level of environmental mortality. It may be constant, but it happens. And so even by accidents or whatever random chance alone, age independent mortality is happening.

[00:27:04.69] AUDIENCE: Are they easier prey for other animals--

[00:27:08.41] DEBORAH ROACH: No.

[00:27:08.83] AUDIENCE: --when they get older?

[00:27:09.85] DEBORAH ROACH: No, don't think so. I don't think there's any evidence that that's the case. So, in fact, the general thought is that there's sort of a constant probability of dying with age, but that that's fairly constant with age. And that's actually how you would define not aging.

[00:27:29.48] AUDIENCE: They get diseases, or--

[00:27:33.38] DEBORAH ROACH: Not that I-- honestly I don't know.

[00:27:36.35] AUDIENCE: OK. How do they die? I can hardly wait to hear--

[00:27:40.40] DEBORAH ROACH: Well, there are situations with predators that come along. And actually, one of the things, one of the most vulnerable stage in a lobster, then we're going to have to go on, the most vulnerable stage in the lobsters, when they throw off their skin, they throw off this body. And in fact, they haven't actually solidified this hard outside shell. That hard outside shell prevents a lot of predation. But before in between times, when they don't have that shell, they're actually very vulnerable.

[00:28:14.53] AUDIENCE: Certainly. All right.

[00:28:15.90] DEBORAH ROACH: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So I've mentioned that, in fact, that no aging means that, in fact, there's this constant chance of dying just due to predators and other environmental factors. And in fact, aging is then this idea that, in fact, your chance of dying is actually going to be increasing over time.

[00:28:43.61] Now, I want to show you this as we transition here to say, what is aging. And I want to show you this with respect to a beautiful. picture here, painting, actually, that represents the bridge of life. But it actually was a very specific painting. And this painting was put together in response to the Benjamin Gompertz, who, in 1825, put together the mathematical, a good mathematical understanding of how death rates change with age. They increase in a linear fashion. And they keep increasing as you get older. And that's depressing. But anyway, we'll get back to that.

[00:29:39.85] And this picture actually shows this very nicely. And that is that as an infant, some individuals may be carrying genetic diseases, and so forth. And so this skeleton here with the skull on the top is representing ancestral diseases that some infants may die of very early on in life. But then this child and young man have very few things except random chance sorts of things that are impacting their death rates.

[00:30:14.76] And the way that's represented here, this is very violent. The way this represented is that as we go through ages of life, these weapons that are used to cause mortality, if you will, become more and more accurate. OK. So here a bow and arrow here, and some sort of a musket here.

[00:30:38.73] And then here, just remember, this is from the 1800s, this was the ultimate weapon, which was very accurate, the Winchester rifle. And so over time, these causes of mortality become more and more accurate, and more and more precise until life ends, and some limit is reached. And so this was basically to depict this idea that, in fact, the older you get, the higher the chance you have of dying. And that's one of the fundamental features of aging.

[00:31:19.50] But I want you to-- I really want to translate that into something that makes sense. And I'd like to think about it as a balance between damage and repair. So when we're young, then we have-- there are a number of things that can cause damage. And we'll talk about those in a second here. But when we're young, there's a very nice balance between damage and repair. And most there's-- what little damage that occurs with respect to environmental factors, for example, the repair systems were working too. And everything's in very good shape. And in fact mortality is very low.

[00:32:12.74] Then as we get older, damage levels increase. And so-- wait a second here. The repair processes may also increase to a certain extent. But then the repair processes themselves may start to decline. And so we get this imbalance between damage and repair. Now, from a-- yeah, let me just leave that there like that, because what I want to do is I want to take you to the next slide here.

[00:32:46.49] And this is what I've been talking about. And this is this balance between damage and repair. And what's determining that? Some of it is our genetics. But a lot of it is environmental factors. Environmental factors are increasing the levels of damage. And when there's a lot of damage, there's repair. But there's a lot of unrepaired damage that starts to accumulate with age. And the higher the levels of damage accumulation then lead to aging, lead to this functional decline, and lead to the susceptibility to age-associated diseases and cancers.

[00:33:39.28] Before I go on, does that make sense at this point? OK. And I want to use one example just to let you know-- give you an example of this in a little more concretely. I want to talk about the accumulation of DNA damage in the body. And when I talk about the environment, I'm talking about things like radiation, chemicals, toxins, that sort of thing, which can damage the DNA. And I'm also talking about metabolic processes that are occurring. And we'll talk more about that in the next session that we'll have.

[00:34:20.00] But in fact, even metabolism creates damaging materials that can then have an impact on the amount of DNA damage. And then what happens is that with this accumulation of DNA damage, we actually have a decline in cellular functions. We have cell death. We have aging of the body. And also, as it turns out, we have a decline in DNA repair mechanisms. And then we have this, again, accumulation of damage, which is then contributing to aging.

[00:35:04.89] Now in your reading, the reading talked about the hallmarks of aging. And I don't want to spend a lot of time on this. But I did feel that given that it was in the reading, I wanted to mention what they were talking about. And so here, we have things like genomic instability that's associated with cancers, and that sort of thing. And all of these are processes that are fundamental to the biology of aging.

[00:35:44.37] And generally speaking, there are, depending on who you read, they're either 9 or 12 fundamental processes that are getting damaged, increasing the levels of decline in function. And these are then genomic instability, epigenetic alterations. So what that means is that our DNA is actually getting these caps on them. And we're going to talk about this in a few minutes a little more. But our DNA is getting modified with these chemical markers, which then end up turning the genes off. It's not changing the structure of the DNA. But it's actually turning genes off. And well, let me hold back and talk about that a little more later.

[00:36:41.93] And I'll just tell you about a few more of these things. But our chromosomes actually have these little caps on them. And over time, those caps get smaller and smaller and eventually reach a limit. And so we can't go through the cell cycle. And what we do, what we end up with is we end up with a lot of dead cells in our body. We have this accumulation of dead cells in our body. And so one of the pathways that we need to then try to sort out is how can we get rid of that? But this declines in telomere function can lead to immune system problems, and all sorts of things.

[00:37:28.38] And let me just talk a little bit more about one of these, and then we'll move on. This idea of proteostasis, and this idea that there's this accumulation of proteins in the body, which are no longer folding correctly. And there are all these errors that start to accumulate. Well, those are the types of errors that are associated with Alzheimer's, with Parkinson's, and with cataracts.

[00:37:58.51] And so all of these changes that are occurring at the cell level in the body are not only themselves creating functional problems for us, but they're also interacting with each other as well. And so there's a lot of cross-talk here between all of these different changes that are occurring. And the take-home message is aging is really complex. And again, there's no one answer that we're going to come up with that's going to be able to sort all this out.

[00:38:40.74] And the idea is that we have this accumulation of damage, which then results in these functional declines. But it's only really if we understand this biology piece of it, which we're only just beginning to understand. Are we really going to understand how we may be able to ameliorate some of these conditions?

[00:39:06.18] So I don't usually use bullet points in my slides. But I am here because I want to be sure that we get all of the different pieces, if you will, of what aging really is. So aging is time independent. Some of us are aging fast. And some of us are aging slowly, even if we're the same age. It's progressive, cumulative, increases in damage. And that's-- we can't-- everybody is experiencing that. That's a universal feature.

[00:39:47.92] And it's caused by both extrinsic and intrinsic factors. As I said before, some of it is-- a lot of it is the environment, toxins, and so forth. But it's also intrinsic. There are metabolic processes that are creating these wastes that are causing the damage. It results in the deleterious loss of physiological, structural, and cognitive function. We all know that. And eventually ends in death.

[00:40:17.90] Now. It's unpredictable. And I think that one of the other things that needs to be understood is that it's universal. If we look across all of the different species that show aging, every individual on that. species, whether it be humans or horses, they all age. And it's something that's shared among them. So what I want to do is to shift a little bit and ask and say, take you back to the reading and say, is aging a disease? I'd like to ask that question.

[00:41:08.28] AUDIENCE: No, good point.

[00:41:09.47] AUDIENCE: No, don't think so. I think it's just lifespan determined. Because if we-- like a butterfly has a lifespan. All Different organisms have lifespans. And we have one of them. And when I just see it all around, it's sort of like people get to be 80. It's like there's something that happens that's qualitatively different. And then--

[00:41:36.26] AUDIENCE: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:41:38.73] DEBORAH ROACH: And how is that different than other disease?

[00:41:42.12] AUDIENCE: We all have-- we all have diseases from acne. I mean, and they're age-related. I mean, I don't have acne anymore.

[00:41:49.36] [LAUGHTER]

[00:41:52.37] DEBORAH ROACH: Yeah, yeah.

[00:41:55.60] Well, yeah.

[00:41:57.00] AUDIENCE: So different things happen at different times in a human being's life that aren't-- looking for a cure of aging is just going to happen.

[00:42:07.80] DEBORAH ROACH: Yeah, that-- yeah, that's-- does anyone else want to comment?

[00:42:11.59] AUDIENCE: Well, I was so unsettled when I read that it was a disease. And that's what the article says. I thought at the end, it would say, aging is not a disease. But that's not where it ends. It's still it's that position forward. But it's hard to think of aging and disease in the same sentence. But that's what you want us to do.

[00:42:35.26] AUDIENCE: I thought just the opposite.

[00:42:36.85] DEBORAH ROACH: Yeah, so-- yeah.

[00:42:38.32] AUDIENCE: That's what I got out of it is aging is not a disease, something that happens. And as far as I can tell from what I read, the disease is something that occurs at any given moment during the aging process. But it's not the same. And we probably be happy have you explained what you really mean by that.

[00:43:06.60] DEBORAH ROACH: Well, one of the things-- I mean, I think you've both-- this is good because I can take off from this here. Because first of all, not every-- we don't all suffer from the same diseases. We all suffer from aging. But we don't all suffer from the same diseases. So that's one big difference between aging and disease. We can't cure aging. But we can hope to cure most diseases, OK? We don't talk about a cure for aging as we talk about a cure for a disease.

[00:43:48.44] AUDIENCE: How do we know we can't cure aging?

[00:43:52.80] DEBORAH ROACH: Because even-- I'm going to show you-- well, let me just flip to this for a second and show you that if we were to eliminate diseases, and particular, age-related diseases that we are vulnerable to-- if we were to eliminate heart disease and cancer, we would actually only add about seven years life expectancy. And we would be susceptible to other diseases.

[00:44:25.51] AUDIENCE: Yeah. I'm not thinking of eliminating diseases as eliminating aging. I'm thinking of it as a different process of eliminating the damage that's done somehow, damage that's done, sort of, all over our bodies.

[00:44:43.45] DEBORAH ROACH: Right. And, in fact, I think that there's a general consensus that what we want to figure out how to do is to push out the functional declines that are due to the accumulation to the latest ages. Aging biologists-- or biologists, excuse me, not aging biologists. Biologists study aging. Really, they use the expression, they want you to die with your boots on. In other words, you have-- you try to figure out how to push off the functional declines, the susceptibility to the age-related diseases to the very, very last stage, and keep that as short as possible. But we won't-- there's no expectation that we'll be able to cure all the aspects of aging.

[00:45:32.78] [INTERPOSING VOICES]

[00:45:35.68] AUDIENCE: --that you showed that arrow [INAUDIBLE].

[00:45:38.91] DEBORAH ROACH: That's right. That's right. That's right. But to get to your point, Beverley, about what the paper was saying, my understanding of what the paper was saying was that, in fact, there are differences between aging and disease. But they were suggesting, well, maybe to get bring attention to any say, drug that may be available to actually put off or to delay aging to a later age, the only way that we're going to get the FDA to notice that is to call-- is to somehow, yeah, put these two things together, because aging is such a complex thing.

[00:46:30.49] It's hard to make it sexy in terms of funding, and that sort of thing. And so I think that that's really what the point was, was we're-- how can we-- how can we get the funding that's necessary? Because, in fact aging itself, you go to the National Institute of Aging, and in fact, people are studying age-related diseases. They're not actually doing a lot with these actual processes, these hallmarks of aging decline--

[00:47:02.68] AUDIENCE: The age-related disease can be something that occurs among people of a certain age and still not be-- it's kind of a correlational relationship, and not a causational--

[00:47:16.20] [INTERPOSING VOICES]

[00:47:17.76] DEBORAH ROACH: --causation.

[00:47:18.72] AUDIENCE: --business in this paper. It's just have to look at it very carefully.

[00:47:24.48] DEBORAH ROACH: That's right. And it's that causation, it's that basic biology, which is what we need to get at.

[00:47:30.31] AUDIENCE: You can intercede and alter those processes.

[00:47:33.22] DEBORAH ROACH: Yeah, yeah.

[00:47:34.02] AUDIENCE: Otherwise-- so age-related disease, to me, is just in this-- in my group, there's more likely to be Alzheimer's. And then now that's not a good thing. So what do we do about it--

[00:47:49.78] DEBORAH ROACH: What do we do about it? That's right. That's right.

[00:47:52.29] AUDIENCE: --into that.

[00:47:52.96] DEBORAH ROACH: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.

[00:47:55.18] AUDIENCE: OK.

[00:47:56.88] AUDIENCE: Well, age-related disease, there are clearly genetic diseases that are age-related that are not primarily environmentally determined.

[00:48:07.77] DEBORAH ROACH: Well-- but there are-- but there are environmental factors, which may mediate the seriousness of any of those age-related diseases. So I think there's a combination of both genetics and environment that are important. But yeah. Yeah, you're right. You're right.

[00:48:26.69] AUDIENCE: And one of the things that-- I'm sorry I was late. I had a trouble-- I'd never been to this place. I'd had trouble finding it.

[00:48:33.69] AUDIENCE: Many of us did.

[00:48:35.61] AUDIENCE: age-related.

[00:48:37.72] AUDIENCE: I was at NIH. And there was one researcher who was able to actually transplant young-- transplant the thalamus in rats. And you can actually see on the slides the difference between the young cells and the old cells. Now, I don't know what that would have to do with human beings, but it certainly would have to do with what you're talking about, that the young cells can recover or can repair some of that damage, and the old cells cannot. But this was in the same living organism in the brain that have some young cells and some old cells.

[00:49:18.63] DEBORAH ROACH: Wow, wow. Yeah, I don't know about that work. But it sounds fascinating. Yeah, yeah. That's neat. I don't want to run too-- I know I'm not even going to get through everything I was going to do. But let me-- let's go on here. Because what I'd like to do is I'd like to show you these two gentlemen here, OK? Now, how old do you think they are? Anyone want to take a guess?

[00:49:53.35] AUDIENCE: Well, there's a gentleman sitting right next to me. And I missed his age by about 15 years.

[00:50:03.64] [LAUGHTER]

[00:50:06.45] AUDIENCE: I'm actually 42.

[00:50:07.52] [LAUGHTER]

[00:50:16.02] AUDIENCE: Are they the same age?

[00:50:17.11] AUDIENCE: I was going to say that--

[00:50:18.16] DEBORAH ROACH: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, they are. They are. They're both-- they're both actually 72. This was part of-- one of my colleagues was working with Danish twins. And the Danish twin study is a really big study that they've been following people for a long period of time. And they asked nurses, they show them photographs and say, how old do you think this is, and this person is, and then show another picture. And how old do you think this person is?

[00:50:55.62] So the perceived age of the gentleman on the left was 80. And his brother, who was the same age, was perceived to be 73. And that's like summarized here at the bottom of the slide. Those who looked older had a higher probability of dying. And even after just, just two years. And so this is really interesting, because, as we talk about aging, and as we try to figure out how are we going to measure how fast someone is aging, we need a meter. We need some way. We need some way to be able to identify how old people are, and what their susceptibility is to dying, what their functional situation is.

[00:52:03.27] But I have to tell you that even in the lab, if you have nematode worms, and they're all genetically clones of each other, and they're in exactly the same environment, and they have different rates of aging. So there's some random chance that's going on, too. And so we don't really know how to-- the puzzle has been to figure out how are we going to measure aging and understand the damage levels that are accumulating. And yeah.

[00:52:41.81] AUDIENCE: --just having two really quick comments there. Probably, many of us have been to 50th high school and college reunions. And the perceived age of our classmates, the differences is really strange.

[00:52:53.48] AUDIENCE: Amazing, isn't it? Yeah.

[00:52:55.85] AUDIENCE: And this is another strange comment. I wondered if the older-looking brother had had a hair transplant, had had Botox, had had a different wardrobe, might he have been treated differently by his physician? Might he have-- might there have been other things that influenced the death rates?

[00:53:18.15] DEBORAH ROACH: You're right.

[00:53:19.95] AUDIENCE: Are they identical twins?

[00:53:22.38] AUDIENCE: No.

[00:53:24.66] DEBORAH ROACH: Yeah.

[00:53:26.24] [INTERPOSING VOICES]

[00:53:28.21] --they've got-- yeah. And so-- and they've got-- they're both-- they did this for both men and women.

[00:53:34.64] AUDIENCE: I guess the question would be if they were identical twins, would they look the same?

[00:53:39.98] DEBORAH ROACH: Right, right.

[00:53:40.86] AUDIENCE: Because of aging.

[00:53:41.94] DEBORAH ROACH: Right. No, the answer is no. They don't. They don't. And in fact, it's absolutely known that in fact, any way that we can measure function, and so forth. The twins actually seem to diverge the older they get in terms of their biology, in terms of their function, which is--

[00:54:06.12] AUDIENCE: Which has certain environmental factors and situational.

[00:54:09.43] DEBORAH ROACH: That's right. That's right, it does. It does. But we know from the worms, even if the environment is constant, that doesn't help.

[00:54:19.56] AUDIENCE: But before you go, that's just fascinating. So if at a certain age, what if one went into an exercise program or a training program? It seems like that should make some difference. But you're saying not necessarily?

[00:54:34.49] DEBORAH ROACH: Well, it does. And so that gets me to where I'm headed. So this idea that really what we want to do is-- these guys are the same chronological age. And so what I'm saying is that really, what we want is something that will measure biological age so that-- chronological age is how many birthday candles do you have on your cake.

[00:55:03.19] And then, on the other hand, biological age is how much damage is accumulated in your cells. And it's this-- and really, that's what we want to know. We want to be able to know who is aging at a faster rate than the next person. And the other reason it would be really nice to get these aging meters, if you will, is that-- and this takes me back to what I'd like to talk about in the bigger picture of things is, it would help us to evaluate the myths.

[00:55:41.38] It would help us to say, OK, if you take this treatment, did it actually reverse your biological age? Did it change? Did it actually make you age at a slower rate, accumulate less damage than the person who had a placebo? And that's what we want to do, is we want to be able to set this up.

[00:56:06.14] And so what I'm going to do is-- OK, I know. So the data that's being used for this is, and I'm sure many of you have probably heard about this. But there are a lot of studies going on across the world. I'm just going to talk about one of them. And that's the Baltimore Longitudinal Study. And the Baltimore Longitudinal Study has had-- it's been going on for 60 years. And it's been following people for a long time. And it's still taking in new people.

[00:56:44.92] The gentleman down here has been in the study for 51 years. And so he goes in, I believe it's every other year. And they have this whole host of physiological traits that are measured on him and all sorts of tracking that's done, both with blood samples, as well as metabolically. And they're trying to find out who are the super agers, and what sorts of markers might we be able to use to be able to develop this meter that we're going to be able to distinguish people who are the same chronological age, but different biological ages.

[00:57:34.38] So there have been a number of interesting results from this study. One of the things is something that we've already talked about here. And that is that there are more differences between people who are older than people who are younger. It's not that-- when we were younger, we used to say all old people look alike. And so they all must be. No, it's actually there are more differences. We are more different as we've gotten older.

[00:58:03.24] And really, what the whole plan is here is to try to understand what's normal aging. And the really good news, and we've sort of talked about this a little bit, is that, in fact, when we look at variation in biological age, and we look at all these people that have been coming in, repeated measures of the same individuals over time, just it's a gold mine of research and data. About 20% of the variation in performance changes over time is due to genetics, but 80% of it is lifestyle.

[00:58:46.55] Some of that's fixed. Some of that was fixed before age 30. So some of the things like education levels, early life diseases, those sorts of things, all do have an impact on this, what we're calling biological age. But they're fixed. But there are a large part, probably about 50% of that lifestyle impact on aging. It's actually also are things that we can do ourselves now.

[00:59:18.67] And that's really-- I'm going to just summarize today's talk by saying that, what we want to do is we want to measure biological age. And we know our chronological age. So there'll be those people who have a normal aging rate. But there are those who are the super agers. And in fact, as they're older, their biological age is actually much younger. And then there are, of course, those who have accelerated age, like the older-looking twin.

[01:00:03.24] And so what I'm going to do, I didn't get quite through everything I had planned to talk about today. But what I'm going to do is I'm going to take, first of all, define a nice meter for biological age that has been created. And it uses this damage accumulation on the DNA to actually measure biological age.

[01:00:33.98] And then I'm going to use that tool to then test some of our myths, some of the myths like, how does having a good supportive social structure in your life matter? Does it really matter? What about diet? What about exercise? And I want to look at those types of interventions that we hear about all the time and say, is it actually impacting biological age? Or is it just making you feel better? So that's where we're headed. And I really look forward to talking to you all. And thank you ever so much for being such an engaged group. It's been really fun.

SPEAKER 1: All right. Danny, it's all you.

SPEAKER 2: Things out there?

SPEAKER 1: Sure.

SPEAKER 2: Hello. Welcome to a special 0 degree edition of Retired Faculty Association speaker series. Before I introduce our speaker, I'd like to let you all know that our next speaker will be on Wednesday, January 31, at Alumni Hall at 4:00 PM, and it will be Phil Bourne, who is the founding dean of the UVA School of Data Science.

The title of his talk will be the "UVA School of Data Science, A School Without Walls." And this is going to be what we hope will be the first in a series of talks about what is new at UVA. So it's my pleasure to introduce Kelsey Johnson. Kelsey is Professor of Astronomy at the University of Virginia. She has published over 100 research articles, mostly focused on the evolution of galaxies.

KELSEY JOHNSON: Oh, my God you did your homework.

SPEAKER 2: Yes, I did. She is a recipient of numerous research awards including NSF Career Award, NSF Distinguished Lectureship, a Packard Fellowship. She has also written for a broader audience and articles in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Scientific American.

She is one of the university's recognized best teachers. She's a recipient of a UVA All University Teaching Award, a Z-Society Distinguished Professorship or Professor, and she's been named as one of the Atlantic Coast Conference's distinguished professors.

As she is the current president of the American Astronomical Society, she's a past director of the Echols Scholars Program, and she is the founding director of UVA's Dark Skies Bright Kids Program, which is a program to enhance science education in underserved areas.

And finally, I'd like to mention that she is the author of the 2019 children's book Constellations for Kids, a copy of which will be given to my granddaughter at Christmas after I read it. Please join me in welcoming Kelsey.

KELSEY JOHNSON: Oh, my gosh. Thanks, . Wow, that's a treat. I didn't know you were doing an introduction at all. So once again, folks on Zoom, really, really happy to have you here. If something goes wrong technically on your end, please give a shout out. I don't think anyone in the room can hear you. I think Kelly is monitoring the chat, so go ahead and throw something in the chat if you need to, and she'll let me in the room, but also I've got you in my earpiece.

This is fun. As you may know, you may not know yesterday was the last day of classes. I don't know if you care about that anymore. So this is a great way to celebrate the end of the semester by talking about the beginning of the universe, which for me is fun. This is how I have fun.

And also I'll say it is a treat to have people in the room who are here of their own free will and want to learn, and there are no grades involved and I don't have to grade anyone, and I think that that's great. Sorry, there's a request to allow recording, so I'm to go ahead and allow that.

We are going to go from 0 to 60 in terms of existentialness pretty fast. And so I want to start with a little bit of just grounding us, and I'm going to start by telling you what I think is a kind of embarrassing story about my oldest daughter, who is now a third year here at UVA, majoring in bio chem, by the way, so if anyone wants to help her out.

She was about-- I want to say she was four years old. We live out-- we live down past North, like in North Garden, like down-- like Dr. Hose is our go-to, for example. So we have a pretty long drive into town. And I was driving her to preschool one day. She was about 4. She was siting in the back seat as she's supposed to, and it's raining. The rain is important part of the story.

And she's sitting back there kind of quietly staring out the window, and I think for those of you who have children, I think you know that when children are quiet for a long time, you know it's not quiet inside. Something is going to something is going to surface.

And I was kind of driving with some trepidation, hoping we could make it to preschool and could get to work without something erupting. And out she comes with her little voice from the back seat and she says, mommy, I have a question. And I think right away I know that tone, and I know she's going to come out with some Zinger because the week before she was like, mommy, I have a question. And she's like, where did the first mommy come from? And I was like, Oh, no. I'm not ready for this.

So she says, mommy, I have a question, and I'm like, OK. sweetie, what is it? And she's like, where does water come from? It's like, oh, phew, I've got this. so, I mean, keeping in mind she's 4 and explaining the water cycle to a 4-year-old isn't like totally trivial, but they know what rain is and they know what lakes are and they know what clouds are, evaporation is like the trickiest part of it.

But it was-- I thought it was going OK and I was pretty proud of myself explaining the water cycle to a 4-year-old while driving into town in the rain. She's watching the rain and I'm thinking that's why she's asking about water and maybe it is, and she's getting this-- I'm keeping my eye on her in the rear view mirror and she's getting this-- I call it crumple face when kids are just like, I'm not happy and I don't know how to express it, so my face is showing all of my emotions.

She's getting this crumple face, and I can tell she's unhappy and I'm like, what is wrong with my explanation of the water cycle? I feel like I nailed this. And she's like, no, mommy that's not-- no, no, where does water come from? What do you mean where does the water come from? And she's like, well, like where does it come from before it's in the rain? And I was like, oh, OK, so I'm an astronomer. I've got this.

And it turns out if you don't know this, this is kind of a fun fact, you can share it your next holiday party. Most of the water on Earth came from comets. And so there are these huge dusty-- I call them snowballs, but there's no snow in space. These huge dusty balls of frozen water of some form that crashed-- the early solar system was nasty and stuff was flying around and crashing into Earth, and comets brought a whole lot of water that was then frozen but became liquid to Earth.

So I'm explaining this to her and I'm trying to do it again in terms for a 4-year-old, and also the self-talk in my head is like, oh, no, now she's going to be worried about comets hitting Earth. So I'm prepping myself to try to tell her that comets hitting Earth are really-- could still happen, although I'm not going to tell her that, but it's really unlikely. We don't want it to happen anytime soon, and you're totally safe.

I'm ready for that follow up, and she's getting crumple face again and she's like, no, mommy, no, where's the water come from? And I'm like, what do you mean where does the water come from? I told you where it came from. It comes from comets. And she's like, no, where does it come from before the comets? And I was like, oh, no.

So on our drive to town, we went through the water cycle. We went through comets, we went through molecules and interstellar clouds, we went back through stellar nucleosynthesis, and then all the way back to the Big Bang, at which point, guess what she asks, where does it come from?

And I was like-- well, fortunately, we had pulled into daycare at that point and I parked the car and said, well, sweetie, lots of people have different ideas about this. I don't want to use words like hypotheses or theories because she's 4. Lots of people have different ideas, and we don't really know which one is right, and she's like, well, like what ideas? We're at school. Let's go in.

So I like this story, one, because I get to reminisce about my then 4-year-old who is now 20. I also like it because I think it speaks to-- I saw lots of you nodding. It speaks to this like, I think innate curiosity we have as humans to know where things came from, where we came from, what our origins are.

But the other thing that this story highlights to me that's really important is this concept of infinite regression. For every cause-- we're so used to taking causality for granted. If you drop a cup, it will break, and there's a cause. And we can take causality like x caused y and something caused x and then something caused the thing that caused x, and we just live with causality as part of our everyday life.

But when we hit the Big Bang, when we hit the beginning of the universe, this infinite regression actually becomes a problem. And even if I could tell you, and this is the spoiler alert, I'm not actually going to tell you what caused the Big Bang, just I'm going to give you some options, even if I could tell you what caused the Big Bang, then being educated, intelligent, curious humans, your next question might be, well what caused that thing that caused the Big Bang? And then what caused the thing that caused the thing that caused the Big Bang?

And we end up mired in philosophical infinite regression, and it's not clear what the path out of that is. And so we really hit the intersection here of science and philosophy and theology and think that's what makes it really cool to talk about. So yeah, Kelly.

Oh, that's annoying. I wonder how I can stop that and show what fun would it be if there isn't a technical problem. I wonder how to make that go away. Be well, I mean, we could just do it this way, and that could just make this really big. Not ideal, but it would work. Kind of a hack. Maybe we need duct tape and WD-40, and then everything will be fine. Is this doable enough? Does that work for people online? OK. Thank you for letting me know what that was.

Yeah, that's what I did, and then, I mean, I'll do it again. I'll do it again, and you can see what happens, and folks online can tell me if they're seeing the same thing. Yeah, our folks online seeing the same thing? Oh, all right. I wonder if I can hold on. Maybe I can make those go away. This slideshow.

OK. Let's try this. How about now? OK. Let's go with that, and then we'll see what happens. I can't see what I'm doing, but that's OK. That's overrated anyway. Let me-- I'm trying to move the Zoom window, which is blocking my controls. All right. That's fine. We'll wing it. If anything goes wrong, I'm sure you're a very forgiving audience.

So now what I want to do is take a moment and try to get our heads around the timescales we're talking about. I think even for astronomers who think about this every day, the timescales we're talking about, I think we kind of get desensitized to them. I imagine it's like if you were a surgeon and you do open heart surgery every day, you might get desensitized to blood and Gore and people dying, I don't know.

So for astronomers, we deal with these incredible timescales every day, but I think it's important for what we're talking about that we have kind of a visceral sense of this. So I want to introduce you to-- where did this is go? There we go. Here we go. The cosmic calendar.

All right. Now I've figured out how to turn them off. Let's see. Will this work? There's an off button. OK. If you fall asleep, I'm blaming it on you. I don't know how to keep the-- I've never taught in this room, so this room is like magic to me. I don't know what's going on. Let's try that.

All right. So this is what we're calling the cosmic calendar, and it goes from midnight on January 1 right to 11:59:59:59 on December 31. So it's the arc of a year with the Big Bang on midnight of January 1st and then the whole year January, February, March, April, you've got your months down, all the way down to December.

This is a time scale that we have all experienced many times, which is why I like it. Some of us have experienced this timescale more than others, but it's an arc you have a visceral sense for. So if you imagine this whole year with the Big Bang happening at midnight on January 1, it isn't until sort of May of that year that we even get galaxies like the Milky Way. So spring like the flowers are blooming. We get galaxies like the Milky Way.

It's not until September that we get our solar system. So we're in what I think is the best weather in Virginia in September. So we're September, and it's not until November that we get like eukaryotes, we're starting to get sort of decent kinds of life. We don't get multicellular life at all until December. So that's the arc of the year.

We're going to zoom into December, and on this calendar, the whole first half of December, it doesn't look like much happens at all. Imagine that if you were a critter living at that time, you thought it was very eventful, but from our perspective it's kind of like nothing happens.

So now we're in December. We're the last month of the year. It's not until Christmas Day that dinosaurs are doing their thing, and they go extinct five days later. So their whole arc of dinosaurs like ruling the Earth was like all of five days. And if we zoom in to that very last day, the whole arc of our evolution from primates happens on that last day on December 31. So I want you to get a visceral sense of really how incredibly young we are. And we can zoom in even more.

So here's that last minute of December. The whole year has gone by. Think back to what you were doing a year ago on January, and more than that time has gone by. And basically all of human history, all of recorded human history happens in that last minute. We have sort of prehistoric life here with some artifacts, all the way up to-- we get through written records, we have Christ, we have Muhammad, we have the Chinese dynasties, all of that goes up to here.

So guess what, we're going to zoom in once again to that last second so that very last two of December 31, it's literally about to till midnight where everyone celebrates and clinked champagne or whatever it is you do. I'm usually in bed, but some people celebrate, I'm told. That very last second is everything from the Scientific Revolution, through the Industrial Revolution, through the wars, up until today.

I think this is incredible right think this helps to keep our human hubris a little bit in check in terms of how young we actually are. So just to make this a little bit more personal, on the scale of this cosmic calendar, think for a second about what your lifespan has been and what you have lived through and the experience of the universe, and I won't make anyone share their answers, which I would do if I were teaching a class, but the average human life scale, the average human life span on this cosmic calendar is 0.23 seconds.

So don't know what you've done in the last 0.23 seconds. Apparently, you're wasting your life like listening to me talking. 0.23 seconds is like-- it's not even-- it's practically not even measurable. That's a photo finish and a race. So we really have some look back time here to reckon with.

Now that we've set the stage, we have a better I hope a visceral sense of the times that are involved. We can go all the way back to the beginning. And before we do that, what I want to do is spend a little bit of just a minute talking about the phrase Big Bang Theory to begin with because if you are a cross-section of normal humans and probably you're not because of who you are, but most normal humans have some pretty big misconceptions about what the Big Bang is and isn't. And popular culture really doesn't help with this, but I want to make sure we're all on the same page.

So the first problem with the phrase Big Bang Theory is, of course, the word theory. And part of the problem here with the word theory is that the word theory has been co-opted by popular colloquial language to mean like some idea someone's uncle had that whatever may or may not be true. It might be crazy. But in a scientific sense, theory has a real meaning. Theory means it's not just some random hypothesis, it's actually something that's been tested and is being tested, and can be tested.

And in the case of the Big Bang, what's even worse about using the word theory is that in science, the word theory is supposed to be used when something is being tested, but it hasn't been tested as much as it could be. Once you have tested something in every way you possibly can and you've thrown every test at it with independent data and independent methods and you've tried to break it over and over again and you can't break it, then you call it a law.

Effectively, that's what the Big Bang is. We have a mountain of evidence from all kinds of independent lines of inquiry that tell us that this is what happened, and we've tried to break it, and we can't. This is the only viable scientific answer we have on the table.

I want to be clear about the word scientific because there are things outside of science that could also be answers, but this is the only answer that can be empirically tested for the origin of the universe, and insofar as we can test it, it has passed with flying colors over and over and over again. So it really should be a law. It shouldn't even be a theory. The other so-- I want to back up. So we know that the Big Bang happened, but we don't know why it happened or how it happened, and those are different issues, and that's where we're headed.

The other problem with the phrase the Big Bang Theory is the term Big Bang. So for most people who see the term Big Bang, you might think that means like an explosion. That would make sense. And it turns out that's not actually what we mean, and this goes back to-- I don't know if any of you have heard of a scientist, a physicist named Fred Hoyle.

He was really quite brilliant and very popular in the mid 1900s, had lots of incredible advances scientifically, but he was, I would say, a staunch dyed-in-the-wool atheist. And because of his beliefs about atheism, he thought that the Big Bang meant that there had to be a creator, and if there had to be a creator, he didn't like it. And so he spent his life opposing the Big Bang to his deathbed.

He opposed the Big Bang because he thought-- because it didn't align with what he thought his beliefs were, which is like antithetical to science, so there's some irony built in here. But Hoyle was a very popular figure, and he did lots of radio shows and wrote things, and he was on a BBC Radio show and was making fun of this hypothesis for the creation of the universe as we know it.

And in making fun of it, in jest, he called it the Big Bang and it stuck. And now we're stuck with it because terminology and science has the inertia of-- I don't even know what has the most inertia of anything. Something big. It's a lot of inertia. And so we're stuck with the term Big Bang. It doesn't mean what we mean, though.

When we as astronomers talk about the Big Bang, what we mean is there was this tiny, little, possibly finite nugget of a universe that started out incredibly small, at least the observable universe started out credibly small, and in ridiculously short timescales, expanded a whole lot. If want to put numbers on that, it went from being like this tiny little-- you could think of a tiny little piece of the fabric of spacetime expanded by a factor of 10 to the 26th.

Now I don't know how many of you remember-- I know not all of you are mathematicians or scientists, but 10 to the 26th means you take 10 and you add 26 zeros to it. It's a really big number. I don't even know if it has a name-- a gazillion, bazillion, quadrillion, million, like I don't know what that is. it's a really, really, really, really, really big number.

And so the universe started from some kind of a pocket of the universe, this tiny little nothing, expanded by a factor of 10 to the 26 in 10 to the minus 32 seconds. So that's the opposite. So 10 to the minus 32 means we take a decimal point, and we put 32 zeros. So it expanded extraordinarily fast, much faster than the speed of light in what we call cosmic inflation. That is what we mean by the Big Bang. It's not an explosion in space. Is an explosion of space.

And to put a finer point on this, that means that the Big Bang literally happened everywhere, including where we are now. So 13.7 billion years ago, the Big Bang happened here, like right here, and the universe has been evolving since then, and here we are. So the Big Bang happened everywhere. It wasn't a place in space.

Now what caused that cosmic inflation, what caused it to expand by a factor of 10 to the 26th and 10 to the minus 32 seconds is an open question. We don't know the answer to that. In any case, this word causes lots-- this phrase causes lots of problems, especially the word theory in popular culture.

Back to this cosmic calendar. Now what I want us to think about is how far we can push science. In terms of our trying to understand the origin of the universe, what can we do with empirical inquiry? What can we do-- how far back can we do it? And that's where the rubber hits the road. If we can't test it, it's not science.

So thanks to an amazing new telescope known as the James Webb Space Telescope, we call it JWST, well, one of the things Danny didn't say in my introduction because I don't-- he said everything else he possibly could have.

I was on the advisory committee for the James Webb Space Telescope when it was being-- when it was being commissioned, and so I don't know if you all have been following the news releases from James Webb, but the photos that are coming out are just-- they're just breathtaking and phenomenal. I pulled this one as an example.

This is an image of the universe from-- well, there are galaxies that are-- sorry, let me back up. I realize you all don't stare at these images every single day like I do. So this is an image where the telescope is staring at this tiny little point in the sky and collecting light. And we see everything in that cone of light.

And so some things that we see in this image are actually not terribly far away. So, for example, a couple stars are peeking and you can see one here, you can see one up there because-- you can tell because they have these diffraction spikes which are-- for the record, stars don't actually have spikes. It's from optics, and we don't need to worry about that.

But when you zoom in, and just so you know, this is an image you can find online, and you can zoom in to actually see it with the proper detail to really see what you're looking at. You can zoom in and see teeny tiny little smudges that you can probably barely even see from where you're sitting. We can zoom into those, and we are looking at baby galaxies from when the universe was still like in the middle of January, from when it's less than a billion years old.

Now just to show you a few of these, I wanted to zoom in a little bit. Here are some of those teeny tiny baby galaxies. These are galaxies-- we're literally looking back in time because light has travel time. So we're literally looking back in time from light that has been traveling to us for 13 billion years. And so we are seeing these galaxies from when the universe was ballpark half a billion years old, halfway through January, and I love these. You can see they don't look regular. They don't look like nice spiral galaxies, they're blobby and they're clumpy, and they're super red, which has to do with what they're made of.

But JWST is-- oh, I really should probably plug my computer in, shouldn't I? That didn't occur to me as we were starting up. So JWST is giving us this power to look back to just incredibly early times. Let me pause for-- there we go. The alert went away that my computer is about to lose power. But that's not the farthest back we can see. We can also see back to here, when the universe was only about 300,000, 400,000 years old.

This is the cosmic microwave background. This is relic radiation from when the universe was basically a hot soup. I'm not going to go into the physics of this, but the point is we can get light from when the universe was 300, 400,000 years old. Now I want to show this because this image, the cosmic microwave background, in terms of empirical inquiry, which I care a lot about as a scientist, this is the farthest back we can get light ever.

So we can't probe the universe with telescopes earlier than this time. That is our limit. We can do a lot, like we can learn a lot about the universe back to there, but this is our limit in terms of actually using light. That's not the end of the story, though. It turns out that before this time, the universe was basically a hot soup, and I mean, a really hot soup, to be clear, not like a tepid lukewarm soup. Like a really hot soup.

But the physics of that are really straightforward and really well understood. It sounds like it ought to be complicated because we're talking about the beginning of the universe, but it's not. It's actually really straightforward physics. And to that point, we can in physics laboratories today recreate conditions and study them back to-- I want some kind of suspense music right now. Think how far back we can actually recreate conditions in the universe. 0.00000009 cosmic seconds after the Big Bang.

This to me utterly blows my mind. Now don't want to say these are small scale experiments, it's not like they're recreating the whole universe, but they can recreate in small pockets the conditions that existed in the universe at the time. So this is where empirical inquiry-- this is our limits of empirical inquiry right now, and I think it's actually pretty astounding.

It turns out that in terms of cosmic time though and everything that was happening, the difference between 0 and 0.00000009 cosmic seconds is a lot. A lot happened in the universe and that sort of fraction of a second, but this is one of our limits in terms of empirical inquiry.

So as we look back, so part of what I wanted to do is give you a sense of where we have confidence, where things are speculation, and where we throw up our hands. And so we have lots of confidence. Actually, the modern universe is far more complicated than the early universe.

We have all kinds of weird asymmetries and physics has done stuff, but as we go back in time, we can go back to 10 to the minus to 10 to the minus 4 seconds, and we still have a pretty decent understanding of the physics. I wouldn't say it's complete, but it's decent. We're not blind. When we go before that, physics really starts to lose our ability to test it. We're not quite there, and then now my zoom screen is blocking the bottom. I wonder if I can make this go away. That worked? Yes. OK.

Where we really hit a wall, so I've taken you as far back as astronomy can go with telescopes, I've taken you as far back as we can go in labs, and then we have theoretical physics at all, regardless of whether we can test it. That hits a wall at 10 to the minus 43 seconds. This is known as the Planck time.

When we hit the Planck time, all hell breaks loose in terms of physics, for a couple of reasons. One is that now quantum mechanics is sort of ruling the day because of the time scales, and the spatial scales we're thinking about. What that means-- for those of you who aren't familiar with quantum mechanics and that probably means your normal well-adjusted humans is that spacetime itself is not well defined.

Space and time are not well-defined entities. In fact, it means they're kind of a frothing, foaming, not defined form. So even defining-- talking about spacetime at all when we hit 10 to the minus 43 seconds doesn't even really make physical sense. So that's one problem.

The other problem, when we hit 10 to the minus 43 seconds is that this point, the two major pillars of modern physics that have held up to every test that's been thrown at them, we have general relativity on one hand, which deals with gravity and mass, and on the other hand, we have quantum mechanics, which deals with really, really small things. These are the two pillars of modern physics on which almost everything else is based.

When we get to quantum scales like this, and the two places this really rears its head in the universe are the Big Bang and in black holes, those two pillars of modern physics don't get along. They're not compatible, which means we know that we don't know the physics. We know that. Something's got to give, we just don't know what it is yet. There are some hypotheses out there, but they're not testable yet.

So we know we don't even know the physics, we know-- so literally the laws of physics, as we understand them, break down. That makes it awfully hard to proceed in terms of even empirical inquiry or science or logic or theory. And so this is where I think scientists have to be really careful about being honest about what we know and what we don't know.

After-- I should say before 10 to the minus 43 seconds, the only real leverage we have is to ask whether the hypotheses on the table are consistent with existing physics that seems to work. If they're not consistent with existing physics it seems to work, we tend to rule them out. If they are, they stay on the table. But there's probably a lot of stuff that's not even on the table because we don't know the physics that we don't know.

So we go back to equal zero, maybe one of the problems that now comes out of physics and our understanding of the Big Bang is that one of the conjectures that's on the table is that time itself, as a dimension, came into existence with the Big Bang. So if that's true, that would mean that time is finite. The alternative is that time is not finite, that it's infinite.

And both of these options, that time is infinite or time is finite, have sort of philosophical problems we have to work through, and great thinkers have been thinking about these for a very long time. So, for example, one of-- I happen to have an intellectual crush on Thomas Aquinas. I just-- I don't know where that came from, but I do-- he spent a lot of time thinking about this, and he used this argument thinking through the philosophical problems to actually conclude that this meant that God, a God existed and that God existed outside of time.

So how did he come to that? So one of the problems with time being infinite is-- let's say time is infinite. Let's say it goes back infinitely far before the Big Bang. Well, the question comes up, if time is infinite, of all these points in time, why did the universe began at this one, and not some other one because it should-- and why did it not already begin because there was an infinite amount of time before that? So what was happening then? And, in fact, if time is infinite, why has everything not run down? everything should run down.

So there are these-- all these problems with time being infinite. There's a fun quote, well, supposed quote. There's a little bit of debate on this, and if any of you are experts on this, I would love your take on it.

So many, many centuries before Thomas Aquinas, Saint Augustine was thinking about this, and there's an anecdote that he was asked, well, what was God doing before he made the universe? Which gets to this question of, if there was an infinite amount of time before the universe, what was going on? So what was God doing before he created the universe? And Saint Augustine answered along the lines of he was preparing hell for people who pry into the mysteries of the universe. So I guess I'm in trouble.

But what if time is finite? If time is finite, we also have problems. And a lot of it comes down to our system of linguistics and our inherent exposure and reliance on causality. If there's no time before the Big Bang, it isn't clear how we have causality. How can something cause something if there's no temporal framework in which that can happen?

And so we run into all kinds of problems with words like, we can't talk about before the Big Bang because that doesn't make sense because there's no time before the Big Bang. We can't talk-- we can't even talk about causes. Can't even talk about what caused the Big Bang if there's no time before the Big Bang. And so we end up in another philosophical problem.

So to be clear, I don't know what the way out is. Great people have been thinking about this for a long time. I don't have really anything to add to the thoughts. They've already come up with excerpts that it keeps-- this literally keeps me up at night.

I don't know if any of you ever have insomnia because you're thinking about stuff at work, sometimes it's like sociopolitical stuff, but sometimes, for me, it's like intellectual stuff. I get myself into an intellectual knot about this at night and can't fall asleep and it drives me crazy. So thank you for being here. It's like group therapy to listen to me talk about it.

The next philosophical problem is this-- let's just put the whole time thing aside and say, OK, we don't understand time, we know we don't understand time, let's put that aside. We also have this problem of demonstrably, in terms of empirical inquiry, we have something. We are here in this room. We have something. Why do we have something instead of nothing? It's only like one of the biggest questions of the universe.

And the problem with getting at this question is it turns out you have to define something, and you have to define nothing. So I'm sure this is greatly amusing to people who are paying tuition for my students. When I cover this material in class, we actually spend a whole class period talking about different types of nothing. I'm not kidding you, because we take-- I mean, think about if you were to define nothing, how would you define it?

It's just it's not a well-defined concept even academically. And so we have to think about how we define nothing. So to define nothing, I want to invite you to consider some different types of something. So normally, when we think of things, we think of actual things like tables or people or even light, we can think of as a thing.

So we think of-- I'm going to call it mass energy. Matter energy, we think of as like normal things, and I think normal people, when they think of nothing, just think of not having those things. For sure, not having tables and chairs, maybe if you're being even a little bit more abstract, not having energy, not having light. So not having those things. And that's fine. That's one form of nothing.

But there are other things that sort of exist in their own way. So, for example, space time in astrophysics, spacetime is actually like a malleable fabric. You can't touch it per se. We don't interact with it physically that way, but it's a thing that we think of as real that exists. So that's a thing. So you can imagine there being space, time that doesn't have anything in it but you still have that spacetime. That's not nothing.

Likewise, we have-- even if we didn't have spacetime, we have these rules or these laws of physics. Now they're super abstract and super conceptual, but they're still things that exist, that inform the universe and tell the universe what to do. So the first type of nothing is really pretty straightforward. We just don't have chairs and tables or light.

The second type of nothing means we don't have chairs and tables, but we also don't even have the room for them to be in. We don't have this arena in which things can exist. And that's harder to conceptualize, but it's not, I think, terrible.

And this third type of nothing is more like-- it's a nothing, nothing. We don't have stuff, we don't have the room for the stuff to be in, and we don't even have the rules that the stuff needs to follow. So when we talk about this, when I teach this material in class, we have to be really careful what we mean when we say we're getting something from nothing, and what does that mean.

And when we go through the different options for what could have caused the Big Bang or preceded the Big Bang, one of the things I invite my students to do and I want to invite you to do is think about what, if any kind of nothing they came from. And in many cases, you'll find they didn't come from nothing, and all we've kind of done is kick the can down the road because we just have a different kind of something.

I love this quote, I get hung up on this a lot. This is one of the things that drives me crazy. I think I have a very hard time envisioning a cosmos without laws or rules that tell things how to behave. But why those? And what sort of-- this is a quote from the late Stephen Hawking. "What breathes fire into them, and gives them a universe to describe?" So this is where I get really hung up.

One thing I want to point out before we start working through the options, for what could have caused the Big Bang is this, and this is my only slide with math. If you don't do math, that's fine. You don't need to. I'm going to explain this. This is actually a remarkable feature of the universe that I think is kind of underappreciated. It turns out the universe that we live in, that, we can observe has a net worth of 0.

And so it actually is in some sense nothing. What the universe did was it seems to have taken out a loan from somewhere. So in other words, what I mean by this is that if we look at math like we can look at all the math in the observable universe, all the mass energy that has the positive value, and you could-- if you wanted to fill it in, you don't need to.

So we have positive energy from the mass energy of the universe, and then we have gravity and we have potential energy. And if you think back to whatever physics, you might know potential energy is negative. In the observable universe, the positive mass energy is as near as we can tell. Exactly equal to the negative energy of the Earth.

And so the universe seems to have a net worth of 0, which is fascinating because now it's not-- why do we have something instead of nothing? So in some sense, we still kind of have nothing, but there was some mechanism for a loan. Where did the loan come from? Who is stupid enough to allow this line of credit to the universe? Like, I don't know. So the universe has taken out a loan, and so the question is where did that loan come from? What is it that gave the universe the ability to have these two in balance, the positive and the negative?

OK. Let's go through some options. I'm not going to tell you which is right because I don't know. I'll probably tell you which is my favorite, and I'll tell you why it's my favorite. And being my favorite, of course, doesn't make it right. It just makes it my favorite. So one of the first options on the table for what caused the Big Bang is a cyclic universe. This is a concept and a philosophy that has been popular across many peoples, across time, there's a lot of wisdom in different cultures that brings thing into cycles.

And so it has a lot of appeal, right, a cycle has appeal, it has an aesthetic appeal, it has an appeal in terms of balance. So in this case, we have a Big Bang and the universe goes on and expands, and eventually because-- it's like throwing a ball up in the air. You throw a ball up in the air, and eventually the ball slows down and it falls back.

The universe is kind of doing the same thing in this scenario. So we threw the ball up in the air, it went up as high as it could, and then it starts falling back down and collapsing. So in this scheme called the cyclic universe, right it just keeps going around and around and around the circle, and it may be that the universe we're living in is somewhere over here. We're still expanding.

Turns out, at least in the observable universe, we have effectively ruled this out. And what happened was-- this happened a couple of decades ago actually. This was a huge question. The question was, how fast is the universe expanding, and given how fast it is expanding, how much of that expansion slow-- it's expanding, but is that expansion slowing down? And how fast is it slowing down? Because that will tell us the fate of the universe.

So two really high-powered independent teams went out to measure how fast the universe is decelerating. The ball is going up in the air, but it's slowing down. How fast is it decelerating? They both went out independently like the Nobel Prize is on the line, there's a lot of fighting, intellectual, good-natured fighting, mind you, but like the teams are both literally vying for the Nobel Prize.

They go out to measure how fast the universe is decelerating, and the data start to come in and things are looking really wacky, and more data come in and they look more wacky and the teams talk to each other and they're like what is going on because both teams found independently simultaneously that the universe is not, in fact, decelerating, it's accelerating.

And this is what we call dark energy. It's one of the greatest mysteries in modern physics. We don't know what it is. We have some hypotheses, but none of them are bearing fruit. So for reasons we don't understand, something is injecting into the-- energy into the universe, and its expansion is actually accelerating. It'd be like-- if you threw that ball up into the air, and instead of slowing down and falling back, it actually accelerated away from you and like shot out into space, that's what the universe is doing.

Granted, there's a lot of physics about this we don't know. And we know we don't know and we don't understand, but insofar as we do understand it, there's no way this is going to happen right in fact, the fate of the universe is quite grim, very cold, very dark, everything moves apart from each other, and eventually there's nothing within your horizon.

So there's physics-- like, I said there's physics we don't understand. There are ways that this could turn around if we can come up with some kind of phase transition the universe could go through. But for now, I think this is off the table, which is sad because it would be a lovely explanation.

Next up, this is probably the most conceptually challenging I think of the explanations for the beginning of the universe. This came from Stephen Hawking and his collaborator, Hartle. Their idea was what if the universe didn't have a beginning because time didn't have a beginning?

And the way they thought about this, the analogy I like to use is you think about the globe of the Earth, and how lines of latitude and lines of longitude are orthogonal, and if you were to go-- you're an intrepid explorer and you're going to the South Pole, and those lines of latitude and longitude continue to be orthogonal, let's imagine the lines of longitude as lines of time right so as you go back to the South Pole you're going farther and farther and farther back in time.

When you get to the South Pole, this remarkable thing happens because of the coordinate system we use. There's nothing particularly special about the South Pole, except for that's where the Earth axis happens to have us rotating, but because of the coordinate system we've used and the fact that that's where the Earth's axis goes through, when you get to the South Pole, when you're at the South Pole every direction is North. There's no east, there's no West, it's just North.

And so what effectively happens depending on the coordinate system you choose, if you choose a system like that on the globe is that as you move back in time toward the South Pole, time the lines of latitude actually curve in and sort of act like space. So as you go back to the beginning of time, what would be time equals 0, time actually becomes spacelike.

So in this scenario that Hawken and his collaborators came up with, imagine this is the South Pole. As we go back in time, time curves in and becomes more spacelike. And so if there were before, it would be over here on the left, except there can't be because time sort of just goes to this pole and because of the coordinate system we're using, there's nothing before. It just is what it is.

So I think about this in terms of types of nothing. Now we get out of this causality issue, we get out of the issues of time being finite or infinite, but we still have to explain why this whole sort of situation exists to begin with, like why this? Where did this construct come from? It's still something. It's still not nothing. It just kind of kicks the can a little bit down the road.

OK. Next option, back to quantum mechanics. I love quantum mechanics. In this case, this is meant to be sort of a visualization of how we think about the fabric of spacetime when we get down to quantum mechanical timescales.

So like I said earlier, on these scale, space and time don't exist independently as things it's like a frothing foam, and so maybe out of this sort of quantum foam like a universe kind of bubbled up into existence and maybe this sort of throat here got pinched off and it went and floated off on its own.

I think that if you were to go to a party of physicists and sort of poll the room on what they thought the most likely explanation was for the creation of the universe, this is probably what most physicists would say if I had to guess, in part because there's a quantum loophole. We like that there's a quantum explanation that could get us to how this might happen.

Now there's a big difference between in quantum mechanics sort of particles popping into existence out of, I would say quote nothing, but it's really from quantum fields, and universe is popping into existence, but the loophole is there and there's a scientific path there. It doesn't explain where all this came from to begin with. So again, we're just kicking the can down the road.

Here's just another-- it's a slight variation on this. This gets into what is called eternal inflation. The idea is out of some initial quantum foam that in the cosmos, maybe it wasn't just our universe that came into existence. Maybe other universes are coming into existence too or did come into existence of all different shapes and sizes and properties and parameters.

Many folks like this idea because it helps us explain things like fine tuning, which I'm not planning to talk about today, but if you want to talk about fine tuning we can. This gets us an explanation for how fine tuning might happen.

We have membranes. So in this scheme, what you have to do because we have these puny 3D human brains that aren't so good at thinking about other dimensions, we have to envision that all of our three dimensions in space are actually like a two-dimensional membrane by analogy, and that we can't perceive this extra dimension for whatever reason.

There are viable hypotheses on the table with peer-reviewed papers with lots of citations that our universe could actually be a three-dimensional membrane sort of floating in a higher dimensional space that we call the bulk because we're really creative. And these membranes-- our membrane may not be the only one.

Who's to say like, I know we always default to thinking we're the center of the universe, and I'd like to think that we can move past that. But humans just have this tendency. There could be other membranes too, and maybe they're all floating around in this bulk. And what happens if they collide? Like, oh, OK, stand back. So that is one conjecture that is on the table for what caused the Big Bang.

This is going to sound maybe a little bit shocking this is starting to be empirically testable with what we see from particle properties in the lab. I won't say it's ruled out, but it's not looking promising right now. So but the fact that this is becoming empirically testable, I think is actually also kind of astounding.

This is my favorite explanation, just to be clear. The idea here is that in any universe when you form a black, hole and we form black holes all over our universe, what happens is within that black hole, within the mouth of the black hole, so you can imagine this scenario is a black hole forming in a universe, a baby universe could get spawned off.

This really technically could be like a wormhole, if you've heard of wormholes. Technically, they're called Einstein-Rosen bridges, which in the Thor movies, they actually got right and called by their proper scientific name. So if you want to go back and watch Thor, they call them Einstein-Rosen bridges. It turns out concepts like wormholes, which are allowed in general relativity, although not yet observed empirically, are very, very sensitive.

And if they exist, we think they would probably close off really fast. So in this, case a baby universe would be formed, the umbilical cord to this universe would probably be cut off fairly quickly, and then you would spawn off this whole sort of other baby galaxy. This, like I said, no empirical evidence for it, but it's my favorite probably in part because I have kids, but also I love all the possibilities this opens up.

It means with every black hole or maybe every black hole there's a new baby universe, which is kind of fun to think about. It's fun to think about our universe having come from a parent universe, which, by the way, all of our observations are consistent with. The Big Bang is consistent with this happening, and this would be the equivalent of like a white hole from the other side.

It gives the possibility of natural selection, and so in this case when baby universes are formed they could inherit some of the physical characteristics of their parent universe, kind of like genetics. And some universes would be more prone to make black holes than other universes. And if they're more prone to make black holes, they're going to have more babies. So you can imagine sort of almost evolution in terms of physics. So that is my favorite explanation.

And finally, you can't talk about the Big Bang and not talk about this-- a huge fraction of our population, and I'm not-- I try really to be really careful when I'm teaching this to not show my hand to my students, and I'm also not going to show my hand to you, but a lot of people believe, for reasons like Thomas Aquinas did, that all of this points to their having to be something outside of human our human ability to comprehend, including the possibility of a creator.

Now I want to be careful here because we're not necessarily talking about a conventional god. That's on the table, sure, we can't empirically test it. It could be, for example, a high school experiment. And some metaphysics extra universal concept, some super higher power being is literally doing a lab experiment or a homework assignment, where they're super higher being teacher has said, create a universe that evolves to have intelligent life. That could literally be a homework assignment. We can't rule that out.

And, in fact, it could also be a simulation. I know that is like a batshit-crazy idea that most people have a knee jerk reaction against for good reason, but there are actually deep philosophical papers written on the possibility of the universe being a simulation and what that would mean, and it's not as unlikely as it might sound, especially when we look at what would be needed. So a higher power of some kind is still on the table. It's outside of the realm of empirical inquiry.

And then the final explanation I always leave with, because we have to acknowledge our human brains and their limitations, we like to think that we're super intellectually advanced, and maybe we're the most intellectually advanced creatures on this planet, but that's not-- our DNA is what? Barely more than 1% different than chimps, some biologists in the room will correct me on that if I'm wrong.

What if our DNA were like even 1% more further advanced in terms of intellectual ability? Imagine what we could do? There's no way I could teach my dogs quantum mechanics or general relativity. There's just no way. So who's to say that we're the apex of intellectual achievement, that we've thought of everything that could be thought of, and that we've-- and we're just all that? I would argue that we're probably not as great as we think we are.

So we have to acknowledge-- we have to acknowledge if we don't want to be full of hubris and arrogance and myopic, that there are probably options and solutions we haven't thought of because we maybe don't even have the ability to think of them.

So finally, I just want to remind us one more slide after this. Right now, as of now, maybe this will change in the next generation, the limit of science, the limit of testability empirical inquiry is 10 to the minus 43 seconds. I would argue that any scientist that tells you that we know what happened before 10 to the minus 43 seconds is full of it, because we can't. We don't have the physics to do that.

Before that time, and this is meant to be an analogy to that South Pole as we go to the South Pole because of our coordinate systems. I just love this. I think here be dragons. It's unexplored, and we don't know. And I actually think that's one of the most beautiful things about it. I love talking about things in science that are open to possibilities for which we don't have answers, and we can think about possibilities, and we can be creative, and we can dive into what I think in this case is a really rich interdisciplinary space.

So I will leave that there. I'm right on time, I think. And, Danny, do you want to take questions or maybe Kelly you can tell me if there are any questions online. I'm happy-- I love questions. You all have been teachers. You know what it's like if you finish a lecture and no one asks you questions. It's like really depressing.

Yeah, good question. Let me repeat this for folks who are online. The question is when I showed the slide of-- can't hop to it quickly-- the cosmic microwave background, which is a big oval of blotchiness that you might recall the question is, why can't we see farther back in time than that? Which is a really, really great question.

Yeah. Well done. Yeah. Yeah, there have been three different generations of telescopes that have looked at the cosmic microwave background. In fact, did my senior thesis as an undergraduate using COBE data, which was the very first one. The problem is, and this gets into a little bit of physics. So if you want to turn out for the-- turn out for the physics, that's OK, but if you want to hang on, that's OK too.

Before that time in the universe, atoms were ionized, which means-- I don't mean to be pedantic, but I don't know if everyone has the same background. Like electrons and protons, we're not hanging out together. Every time an electron would try to join a proton and become an atom, it would get re-ionized. And so you have this plasma, you have this soup of protons and electrons.

What happens is the way that interacts with light because light is-- another name for light is electromagnetic radiation. And what that means is that as electromagnetic radiation, when light interacts with charged particles like protons and electrons, its path actually gets bent. And so because the universe-- before that time period, before 300 400,000 years was completely ionized, what that means is that light was doing like a Plinko.

Light would travel like this way a little bit and then go this way a little bit and this way a little bit. It just kept getting bent and bounced around and moved, and so it's kind of like seeing-- the best analogy I have is, what is it? Like translucent glass in a sense where you can see there's light coming from behind it, but you have no information about what's behind it. And because the light just keeps getting processed and moved from those ionized particles, so it's not that there isn't light from before, it's that all that light from before it has just gotten remassaged and moved around.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

KELSEY JOHNSON: Yeah, all of it. Yeah, all of it, even radio wavelengths. Yeah, it would be great because it sounds like a lot about this. So radio light can make it through a lot of stuff. We won't get into the physics of that, but like you know that intuitively. You could turn on a radio and hear and you would get radio reception because radio can make it through stuff walls and clouds of gas and dust, but even radio light in this case can't do it, which is a real pity. So it's a real observational limit for light.

Now one thing you didn't ask but I'm going to answer anyway is there's a new-- I'm a great professor, right? That sounded really bad. I love answering questions people didn't ask. The question that maybe you would ask if I gave you enough time is we have another tool under our belt now that came online in the last decade that doesn't involve light-- gravitational waves.

We now have a way. We have detectors and they're nascent. But we have detectors that can actually measure ripples in the actual fabric of spacetime from massive things doing things in the universe. It's like if you could imagine playing in a lake and you spin around with your hand, your hand in that lake makes a wave, it makes a ripple that goes out. It's the same thing in the universe when massive objects move. They make these ripples in the fabric of spacetime.

Now for us to detect them right now with our nascent detectors, they have to be really big, whomping ripples, like black holes merging kind of ripples, but it's a new tool, and that could allow us to probe farther back in time, not with light, but with gravity. And so that tool I think is really over coming decades is really going to come to the forefront.

AUDIENCE: So you [INAUDIBLE].

[LAUGHTER]

KELSEY JOHNSON: I love talking to you people. Dark matter gets factored in with the mass energy because it does have mass, and so we infer the-- sorry, I should back up and explain dark matter to people. When we look out at the universe, there is something there, we don't know what it is, but it interacts with gravity. Gravity appears to be the only thing it interacts with. It doesn't interact with light, it doesn't appear to interact with any of the other forces. It only interacts with gravity.

Because it doesn't interact with light, that means we can't see it, we can't see it, either an absorption or emission or it's anything that does like that, but we can see its effect on stuff around it. And so we infer actually tremendous amounts of mass in the universe that we can't see. The fraction of mass we can see like tables and chairs and people and atoms and hydrogen and gas is incredibly small.

Most of the mass in the universe is in the form of this dark thing that we call dark matter, again, creativity for astronomers. We don't know what it is, but that is factored in because we can infer how much of it is there, even if we don't know what it is. So that gets factored into the mass energy bucket.

OK. So let me repeat the question for folks online. So the question-- the person has read Larry Krauss, who we could talk about later, have some issues with him-- what is the best book on my favorite baby universes? Probably the easiest to thing to find on the market right now is there's a physicist named Lee Smolin, S-M-O-L-I-N, who is generally credited with coming out with this idea. So he has some popular books on it.

The other thing-- I'll just put on the table in a very self-aggrandizing way, is I have a book that's coming out next fall that we'll talk about this. So if you want to wait nine months, you can get my book too, but the best book on the market right now is probably Lee Smolin's book, S-M-O-L-I-N. Anything else?

AUDIENCE: Could you explain again the mass? Because the [INAUDIBLE].

KELSEY JOHNSON: I can try. So the question is, how the mass energy in the universe is equal to the gravitational potential energy in the universe, and why that equals alone. So I'll start with a caveat that we only know what we can know from the universe that we can observe, and so there is a caveat there. There could be stuff outside of the observable universe, we don't know what it's doing.

But when we look at the observable universe with our Fancy Schmancy telescopes like James Webb or the very large array or any telescope you want, we can basically add up all of the mass energy in the universe by looking at the galaxies, looking at the dark matter, looking at the light. We can add it all up and say, how much is that? And that's all positive energy.

Then those very same telescopes, we can look at all of those things. Look at how much gravitational potential energy they have, look at how fast the universe is expanding, and we can determine how much negative energy things have dynamically. And so we do that and we add up that bucket of how much negative energy things have, and then we add up this bucket over here of how much positive mass energy exists in the universe.

And as near as we can tell, there's a little bit of wiggle room here because we're talking about astronomy. We're happy if we're within a factor of 2. But as near as we can tell, they're the same, which means the net energy of the universe is 0 or as close to 0 as we can get, which is wild.

And so what that means is normally one of-- many conservation principles I think are sort of drilled into students in school, and one of those conservation principles is the conservation of mass, there's conservation of momentum, there's conservation of energy.

So in this case, it's the conservation of energy is what really troubles people about the Big Bang because if we believe in conservation of energy, and then we get to how do you have something instead of nothing because that sort of violates our cherished conservation principles, well, if the net worth of the universe is zero, we haven't actually violated the conservation principle. We still have the same 0 energy we might have had before the Big Bang.

The question is, how did we go-- how do we go from having nothing, like no mass energy, to still having nothing, no mass energy, but also like a fancy house and a car that we owe the bank for? It's not clear how we were allowed to do that. I don't have a better answer for you. I hope that helps.

AUDIENCE: I think given the hour, I'd like to thank you, Kelsey, for [INAUDIBLE].

KELSEY JOHNSON: My pleasure. My pleasure.

AUDIENCE: And there's more.

KELSEY JOHNSON: There's more What the world?

AUDIENCE: So this is our much coveted Retired Faculty Association gift. Let me pull it out. If you can hang your Black holes on [INAUDIBLE].

KELSEY JOHNSON: Wow.

AUDIENCE: The other hanger made by [INAUDIBLE].

KELSEY JOHNSON: This is beautiful. Are we saying that people need more potassium? What is the message here? So I love bananas. This is great.

AUDIENCE: It's a banana thing in the conservation of [INAUDIBLE].

KELSEY JOHNSON: I love it. Thank you. That's great. And thank you for-- wow. I can't even imagine how you would make this. That takes a lot of talent. Well done. Well done. I'm very impressed.

Oh, God, yeah, I don't need another Jefferson cup. I don't think anyone does-- this was really fun for me. I hope it was fun for you, and I hope you learned something.

AUDIENCE: Yes. Thank you.

KELSEY JOHNSON: You're welcome. All right. Folks online, thank you for being there. Thank you for your questions, and I hope the technical part wasn't too annoying.

[00:00:09.63] KATHRYN THORNTON: OK, good afternoon. Nice to see everybody who made it out today. I'm Kathy Thornton. I'm president of the Retired Faculty Association. And if you came here today thinking you were going to hear Phil from the School of Data Sciences, you're in for a surprise. We had been hoping to get Ken Ono to come talk to us for quite some time now.

[00:00:31.42] So we were delighted when he graciously stood up at the last minute and agreed to come here and help us out. So we'll try to get Phil back on another occasion, but we are very happy to have Ken Ono here with us. Ken's impressive bio is in the email message that Kelly sent you yesterday. So I encourage you to read that, and you can wonder, like I do, how in the world he does all those things.

[00:00:56.31] But I'll touch on just a few things. Ken is the STEM advisor to the provost, and the Martin Rosenblum Professor of Mathematics. He's also Professor of data science, courtesy appointment, and professor affiliate in the Department of Statistics. And in addition to his extensive scholarship and professional service, he is actively involved in mentoring mathematicians of all ages.

[00:01:23.05] Outside of academia, he was the associate producer and mathematical consultant on the 2015 film, The Man Who Knew Infinity, which he says is available on Netflix if you want to check it out, about the mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan and is a technical consultant for elite swimmers, including NCAA national champions, Olympic medalists using mathematical analysis and modeling to help them with their performance.

[00:01:53.17] He mentions just a few minutes ago that he has another film out now or coming-- that he'll talk to us-- he'll maybe tell us a little bit about that if we beg him in a little bit. But not in his bio, but memorable to me, he starred in a Super Bowl commercial in 2022. As a world-renowned expert in number theory, the Molson Coors company called on him to definitively confirm that AD is a larger number than 64. And that was an attempt to lure beer drinkers from the 80-calorie Bud Light to the new 64-calorie Miller Lite.

[00:02:34.12] So apparently, beer drinkers are a pretty stubborn lot. So I remember that, and you were awesome. Without saying anything, he had this look on his face that said, that's the dumbest question I've ever heard. It was amazing. So we're looking-- you were amazing. So I'm looking forward to hearing from him today. When he's finished, we'll have about 15 minutes of question and answer, and then we will enjoy some fellowship. Over to Ken.

[00:03:05.44] KEN ONO: Delighted to be here. I haven't been here-- thank you.

[00:03:10.27] [APPLAUSE]

[00:03:13.47] I came to the University of Virginia in 2019, not so long ago, and I have to say this is probably the best decision I've ever made professionally. My parents, they still are with us. They live in nearby Baltimore, so it's a great opportunity to also be closer to home but without being too close, if you know what I mean.

[00:03:36.30] I've had the opportunity to meet with many of you before. Some through work. We had lunch at-- do you remember? This is a world famous astronaut, and I remember you telling me the stories about being in the-- I don't even know what part of the spaceship you call it, but in the vacuum. It's fascinating. In my work here at the university, unlike anywhere I've worked before, it's been wonderful to get a chance to talk to people who are experts in so many different things.

[00:04:05.97] And so I hope the lecture I give today is interesting, but might be more interesting for me to speak to you than it will be for you to listen to the lecture that I'm giving. The union of knowledge that's represented by a university faculty is incredible. And at a place like the University of Virginia, I'm amazed that all of you came to a talk like this.

[00:04:33.80] And I think it speaks to the quality of institution that UVA is. Great, well, so thank you for coming, and I hope that your relationship with the university continues to be a strong one. And in my role in the provost office, I invite emails. My job in the provost office is to promote STEM, science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, both on grounds and to the greater community.

[00:05:03.32] And so if you have ideas, let me know because it's only through, like I said, the accumulated knowledge of the faculty and all of the people in our community. Only with that help, can I do my job. Great, and that could also include complaints. Feel free to complain, because as you all know, graduate students are really good at complaining. So it's payback time. Great.

[00:05:31.81] Yeah, so the lecture I want to give, I'm a little bit nervous about it because there's some math, not too much math. But the point of this lecture is really about a story, and it'll take me a few minutes to get to that story. And so I feel like it's important for me to tell you that there is this important story coming. So the reason why I mention that is that for many of us in our individual fields, there are those-- how to say-- superstars who come along very rarely, whose ideas are so important that they really propel fields forward.

[00:06:16.13] They're very rare. Think Einstein. Think Newton. And in my case, there is an Indian mathematician by the name of Ramanujan, who I'm going to raise up to that level. Maybe you know his story, but maybe you don't. But if you don't know his story, what I want to impress upon you is that, one, I do deeply believe that as a mathematician, he earns that right to be in the league of those names.

[00:06:44.75] But on top of it, his personal story, for many of you, it might be what you take away from today's lecture because this man that I'm going to talk about means so many different things to different kinds of people, even if you know nothing about mathematics. So a different title for this lecture could be, why does the man who knew infinity matter?

[00:07:08.48] And by the end of this lecture, I hope at least one of my answers to that question speaks to you. So to begin with, I just want to admit, I'm a son of a mathematician. My father came to this country from Japan shortly after World War II, and he was invited to this country because he was good at math. He got a post-doctoral appointment at the Institute for Advanced Study.

[00:07:31.70] And so I was born in a country where my parents were, quite frankly, aliens. They came from Japan. They came from the country that bombed Pearl Harbor. So I won't go into that in much greater detail, but I want you to imagine what that was like. How do you leave everything that you know, barely able to speak English, and end up accepting a wonderful academic opportunity in a country where everything that you were taught would be either despised, or I think you can picture where I'm going with that.

[00:08:05.44] So I was brought up by my parents who had this very strong belief that there was nothing higher than pure mathematics. In fact, when my parents hear me talk about some of the other work that I do, my dad, he kind of snickers at it. Why do you care about swimming, or why do you care about-- OK, but that's my dad.

[00:08:29.02] So my dad would subscribe to this view, where if you arrange fields by purity, mathematicians are not even on the map. But I hope that you agree that here at the University of Virginia, that's not what we think. Mathematics, we like to think, is the language of science. And just by driving across ground, you can see it. We have a brand new school of data science popping up.

[00:08:54.20] I assure you, there's a lot of math there. There's lots of things going on there, but maybe the first takeaway is that, although I will be talking about a little bit of pure math at the outset, I want us to adopt a holistic view. Great, OK, but now for the math. So very simply, as a pure mathematician, if we were to not think about what the applications of mathematics might be, some of us, and I still think this way for a couple hours every day.

[00:09:29.03] For me, when I think as a pure mathematician, I think I'm doing art. I'd like to think that I'm a musician with numbers. I'd like to think I'm drawing pictures but with functions and numbers. And as strange as it might be, I just want you to accept that. And what sorts of features would I want to look for in a mathematical problem that would be beautiful?

[00:09:51.87] Well, these are things that I can explain. We like symmetry. A mathematician is really bothered when there isn't symmetry. So I like symmetry, like what you will see here in this picture. Things that are mirror images, reflections. Things that are unchanged under rotation. Things that are translation invariant. I like that. But going beyond the art that might be embodied by these ideas, there's real science that is born out of these ideas.

[00:10:23.33] So in your high school algebra class, you probably remember studying functions f probably in the variable x. You probably wrote down things like f of x equals f of negative x, or f of x equals f of x plus a, or f of theta plus 2 pi is f of theta. And you might remember that those are examples of the mathematical formulas that embody the symmetries I just described to you, might be objectionable.

[00:10:50.40] But if not, they mean the same thing. And depending on whether you are or are not a scientist, you probably still remember that trigonometry is based on a lot of these functions. And depending on what you remember or enjoy in science, you might have written down equations involving these sorts of parameters a lot. And you either enjoyed them, or you didn't.

[00:11:20.96] But the only point I want to make is that a lot of what is central to trigonometry and the basic stuff that you study in physics and chemistry begins with just these three kinds of symmetry, which I hope you could agree are beautiful. And if we're going to send rockets out to space, I'm sure you know, you need to get these equations right.

[00:11:48.92] It turns out that in the world of pure mathematics, there is a different level of symmetry that I might have a difficult time convincing you is beautiful. It's called the theory of modular forms. It's something that's way beyond trigonometry. If you don't want to-- this is almost over. So it's like going to the dentist. We're almost through the novocaine part.

[00:12:11.72] There are functions that are called modular forms that embody infinitely many symmetries at once. A mirror reflection is one kind of symmetry. A rotation is another kind of symmetry. The translation is one kind of symmetry. Can you imagine a function that is required to satisfy infinitely many distinct symmetries at the same time? It should sound like that's impossible, but there are such things.

[00:12:38.54] And the symmetries I'm describing involve functions that are symmetric with respect to this crazy picture on the right. It's not beautiful what you see on the right, but there is a world in mathematics where you ask that a function satisfies this crazy rule, which I'm not going to describe, but there's infinitely many of those rules.

[00:13:01.95] There's only three of these rules. There's infinitely many of those rules, and this is the world in which I live when I think about pure mathematics. And let me tell you that you don't have to memorize anything on that slide. But if you drink the Kool-Aid, if you drink the Kool-Aid and adopt that this is actually beautiful, then I can introduce you to 20th and 21st-century mathematics if you are willing to take that dive.

[00:13:28.30] We're not going to do that. I'm just going to give you a glimpse of what is accessible to you as a scientist if you learn that stuff. How is this related to the story I'm about to tell you? I'm going to tell you there was a prophet who died over 100 years ago who believed that there was an Indian goddess who gave him as a gift visions of mathematical formulas that he wrote down in his notebooks.

[00:13:56.10] These formulas we don't understand. Many of them, we don't really understand to this day. I'm going to tell you about what we can prove if we know some of those formulas, and those formulas are about the functions I'm describing here. So what are some of the applications. This is an application from high school or elementary school.

[00:14:18.94] You probably remember the Pythagorean theorem, a squared plus b squared equals c squared, where a, b, and c are the side lengths of a right triangle. Great, all right, that's not the most important equation in the universe. But maybe for a middle school student, it's everything. I regret to say, it's only one example. So where I'm going with this, and I think maybe some of you will know this theorem called Fermat's Last Theorem.

[00:14:47.27] There's a famous theorem. It was proposed as a problem in the 17th century, and it's about the equation a squared plus b squared equals c squared, except where you place the exponent 2 by any larger number. a cubed plus b cubed. Could that ever be a c cube? Could the sum of 2/4 powers ever be a 1/4 power. And if you're a pure mathematician, you wouldn't care about whether anyone else in the universe cared about the answer.

[00:15:15.27] You just wanted to know. Are there numbers that you can plug in for a, b, and c to solve that equation? So this might not speak to you, but if it does, I'll tell you one of the most important advances in mathematics in the last 30 years is this work by Andrew Wiles, where he confirmed that no matter how hard you look, you will never find a solution.

[00:15:39.26] And this is an important thing. You can look for things forever not know whether there is extra terrestrial life. You might not know whether there are certain things out in space. In mathematics, sometimes you can actually prove something is literally impossible, but it's probably hard. Just because you've never seen something, doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

[00:16:03.27] Here's a picture. I'm a social guy, before I lost my hair. I had hair. So here is a photograph of me with Andrew Wiles, who proved this big theorem. And when he proved this theorem, he got on the front page of the New York Times. And my friend James Maynard, who won a Fields Medal. And what I like about this picture is off in the background right behind Andrew's right shoulder is a picture of the man who I'm going to spend most of today talking about, Ramanujan.

[00:16:30.69] Without this prophet, who was an autodidact I haven't really told you very much about yet, this fancy theorem could have never happened. What else would have been inaccessible to us without this Indian prophet? Well, another one of the most famous results in the recent history of mathematics has to do with sphere packing.

[00:16:54.80] So if you have a hornet's nest in the backyard, you might cut it down, and you might be really angry. But imagine slicing that hornet's nest in half and looking at the beautiful pattern that the hornets have mastered. Have you ever thought about that? It's beautiful. It's called a hexagonal lattice, and this lattice has this very beautiful property that if you were to fill in each of those cells with a circle, it is the most efficient way of filling up space using circles.

[00:17:28.23] The bees. The hornets figured out the solution to this mathematical problem. Nature knew the answer. But what if I wanted to fill up space using spheres, balls all of the same size? You would think that's an easy problem. You'd think Whole Foods has figured it out when they stacked their oranges. Is there a smartest way to stack oranges?

[00:17:48.81] Would you believe that we didn't know the answer to that problem-- the most efficient way to stack cannonballs-- until about 30 years ago. What might be kind of embarrassing to the mathematicians is that the guess that Whole Foods uses turns out to be the right answer. So there are instances where you know what you're supposed to prove, and you confirm your speculation.

[00:18:17.56] But there are also instances where you turn out to discover you're absolutely wrong. Now, it turns out that in mathematics, there are many problems like this. And in signal processing, where you're sending messages back and forth, say, from a satellite to Earth, errors can creep into your messages. How do you make sure that the message that you get from a satellite was the intended message?

[00:18:42.89] Well, the sphere packing problem is a model of that. What if we invented a language where maybe some of the characters would get screwed up when the message reaches us. But if we make sure that they never collide, which is something like having tangent circles that never overlap, maybe we could devise the optimal mathematical model to avoid having errors.

[00:19:04.27] So I'm kind of dumbing that down, but I think you get the idea. Circles that never intersect or tangent would be models for the simplest way of separating information so that they never collide, and you wouldn't be far from correct. And so the question is for higher dimensions, what is the optimal way of filling up space with circles of the same size?

[00:19:26.08] Would you believe we've only been able to answer that for five dimensions? So imagine your alphabet. Maybe you invent your own alphabet with 90 characters. How would I fill up 90-dimensional space? We wouldn't know how to do that, but we did solve that for dimensions 8 and 24. And that was a big thing that won Maryna Viazovska the Fields Medal two years ago.

[00:19:52.51] And what was her key? These magic functions that this prophet told us about. The very functions, as [? prophet ?] I'm going to end up telling you about, wrote down the functions that appear in this cutting-edge work. And just to prove that I was a social guy. So yeah, this is me. I still had hair back then, and that's with Maryna. She's only the second female to ever win the Fields Medal, and this is amazing work.

[00:20:21.40] If you've ever flown on an airplane, you probably have been canceled, quite frustrated. You're probably aware of the fact that airlines have hubs, and if you fly Delta, you might go to Atlanta. And you might wonder what's the mathematical reason behind that? Well, that's an example of a problem in mathematics. How do you connect 1,000 points optimally-- called graph theory-- without having too many edges?

[00:20:47.41] I don't want to have to have a flight that connects every two cities on the planet. That would be horrible, horribly inefficient. So what's the trade off? What's the mathematical theory that's the trade off between having high connectivity, while at the same time, having an efficient network. So here's an example of what is called a Ramanujan graph.

[00:21:11.42] It's highly connected, but it is efficient, and it is not over connected by having too many edges. And this was the result of a Wolf-- this won Peter Sarnak the Wolf Prize. And without again, this Indian prophet, this work would have been impossible. I think you're trying to get my theme. In physics, it is true. You can carry out a calculation or observe something from space that confirms or offers something like a confirmation for speculation of Einstein.

[00:21:43.46] That's a big thing, and I'm trying to make that parallel, that level of depth. And for me, if you're interested in gravity, one of the most difficult things that we don't understand is how gravity works. We know some rules. Newton's laws of motion. Newton's laws of gravity are mathematical equations that we believe the heavenly bodies obey.

[00:22:10.22] And by making telescopic observations of the heavenly bodies, you might be able to predict with some accuracy the existence of something you might not ever be able to see. Let me give you an example. Wouldn't you think it was wonderful if there was a mathematical theory that said, point your telescope out there, and you're going to find a Black hole?

[00:22:31.48] That's not crazy. We're almost there. We are almost there using gravity. But you know what we're not good at? We're not good at understanding gravity. Let me give you an example. There's this famous story of a planet called Vulcan. I think maybe some of you, maybe many of you know it. It's not just from Star Trek. There was a planet called Vulcan that is supposed to orbit inside the orbit of Mercury.

[00:22:55.31] Vulcan is hot. Mercury is [INAUDIBLE]. OK. And that prediction was based on a strong belief that Newton's laws held at all scales. There are even astronomers in the 19th century who wrote papers saying, I finally found planet Vulcan with my telescope. OK, well, science is two steps forward, one back. That would be backwards. There is no planet Vulcan, and the point about gravity is we didn't understand, and we don't still really understand how to apply mathematical equations properly because there are hypotheses.

[00:23:33.24] And of course, I'm talking about Einstein's theory of relativity. People didn't really understand at the time that the mass of sun exerts relativistic effects that have to be taken into account. This is how science works. Two steps forward, one back. You learn a little bit more. And what we don't know, honestly, is anything about gravity.

[00:23:53.27] So the problem of quantum gravity is often called one of the hardest problems in physics, and one of my works is related to a mathematical model that was developed by Ed Witten, professor at the Institute for Advanced Study. It's called the umbral moonshine problem. I solve that using these modular forms, again, using equations that were written down in a notebook long before anyone even knew what a black hole was.

[00:24:22.93] And it actually even made it in to television. This is fun. This is Sheldon, apartment 8A, or whatever it is on TV. And those are some of those equations that you can find written down over 100 years ago in a notebook that you can find in a library in Madras. And it solves these theorems. So this is the backdrop. I wanted to say that a lot of modern mathematics flows through these functions with infinitely many symmetries.

[00:24:54.97] And I want to impress upon you that the collection of applications is broad. One of them, which already came up, which might be surprising to you, is it helps people win world championships, set American records, and hopefully in Paris, come back with a whole bunch of records. So I won't have time to go into how the modular forms appear here.

[00:25:19.25] But let me just say there's some differential equations that are used to keep track of movement in space. We model them, and I think a lot of the other countries and college teams wonder what we're doing under the hood. Maybe we'll tell some time, but I just want to show you a short film clip of two of our Olympic champions, medalists Kate Douglass and Alex Walsh. They won silver, and bronze in the Tokyo Olympics in the very same event. And I'm going to show you them executing something called butterfly, and I just want you to watch.

[00:26:04.14] And what you might have noticed is that they were completely different. They were swimming the same event. Did everyone see that? Just look at the timing of their knee kicks. Look at the timing of their knee kicks. I don't want to take much time going over and over again, but I think you can agree, they look very different.

[00:26:28.85] The theory of modular forms, just like the Human Genome Project allows for medicine, is precision work. You go to the doctor, and they take your blood. They run a DNA test. They come back a couple hours later saying whatever the outcome is. There's a good chance they're doing a screen against the Human Genome Project to help you.

[00:26:52.84] So what I want you to think is that we're doing some of the same things to precision train our athletes instead of saying, Michael Phelps does this, Katie Ledecky does that. So we want to swim like them. I want every other coach on the planet to say that because what we will do is we will assemble a digital twin of each athlete and determine what is best for them.

[00:27:12.72] And there's some differential equations that come into play, and then we have a year to train the athletes to actually execute what we think they should be doing. And there's a lot of factors, aerobic capacity, so on and so forth. But at the end of the day, it is science and all of that. Everything that I know, and almost everything I've ever done in mathematics, comes from the story I'm about to tell you.

[00:27:39.48] So whether it's Olympic champions, getting on a television show, Big Bang Theory, solving Fermat's last theorem, or signal processing, it's all related to the story I'm about to tell you. I hope this is OK. So now the math is over. Are we good? Srinivasa Ramanujan, for this lecture, I'm going to call him the modular forms prophet.

[00:28:02.41] No more math. But here, modular forms, I want you to think that's heavy important stuff. And as mentioned earlier, I was very lucky in that I was invited into this project. And it was a film called The Man Who Knew Infinity. At first, I was invited to help out with the art work, and I still can't believe any of this happened.

[00:28:28.86] By the end of it, I was going to film festivals and ended up being an associate producer of a Hollywood film without any knowledge of the film industry at all. I knew I could find Hollywood on the map. I know if I go to LA and look up on a hill, there might be a word that says Hollywood. So I knew literally nothing about making films, which was actually quite an interesting experience because I had no stake in the industry when I joined onto this project.

[00:28:57.02] And it was fun. I was like a Boy Scout. It was super fun. But to tell you where this story begins with me, I need to go back to 1984, Saturday, April 7. I was in 10th grade. We were all in high school once, and I don't know if my experience as a tenth grader will resonate with you. But in 10th grade, the last thing I wanted to be was anything that my parents wanted me to be.

[00:29:29.64] And I admitted that my father was a mathematician, and Professor Jack Morava, who's in the audience right here. He was a he was a colleague of my father's at Johns Hopkins, might even remember me at this height. And my dad might have shown off that I could solve geometry problems, and I hated that. Last thing I wanted to be was a mathematician in 10th grade.

[00:29:51.96] Saturday, April 7th, 1984, this letter arrived at the house, and it brought my father to tears. It's a long story that I won't go into, but let me read this letter to you. Dear Sir, I understand from Mr. Richard Askey, Wisconsin, USA, that you've contributed for the sculpture in memory of my late husband, Srinivasa Ramanujan. I am happy over this event.

[00:30:16.68] I thank you very much for your good gesture and wish you success in all of your endeavors. Signed S. Janakiammal. To make this long story very short, let me just say, and I tried to plant the seed of this thought in an earlier comment I made, is that my parents took a risk leaving Japan to come to this country shortly after World War II.

[00:30:42.58] They came from the country that bombed Pearl Harbor, but the reason that he came was that my father was one of many Japanese mathematicians who attended conferences in Japan that were held by the Young National Science Foundation. The National Science Foundation in this country was formed in 1950, and one of their first acts was to rebuild universities in the country of Japan.

[00:31:09.67] I think we should be proud that as a country, we did that. And my father, along with a large list of Japanese mathematicians, attended this conference. And important professors from Harvard, University of Chicago, and Princeton came to help rebuild the universities. One of these professors was named André Weil. And André Weil, at this conference, gave a lecture about this Indian prophet who he had been studying, and he invited the Japanese students, you should study this guy, Ramanujan, because nobody else yet is, and it's going to be important.

[00:31:49.31] And Jack can tell you, oh my god, there was a generation of Japanese mathematicians that worked in this field leading to many of the results that I described. So why did this bring my dad to tears is because, think about it, in the early 1950s, they had a choice to make. Do they leave their family to come to a country that they thought would hate them?

[00:32:15.58] And so in receiving this letter, he was reliving this very famous conference in Tokyo where the Japanese students huddled around saying, we should go to America. We might not be welcomed there, but we should go to America and see what we can make of ourselves. What did I hear [INAUDIBLE] when I was in 10th grade? I thought, this is the strangest letter.

[00:32:37.33] It doesn't even say "Takashi Ono." It's not really to. It's written to you and a bunch of other people. So here is where Ramanujan first became important to me. My dad tells me, you're not going to believe this, but this guy, Ramanujan, who died at the age of 32, left behind notebooks that we still can't figure out today. I study them.

[00:33:00.08] I have copies in my library upstairs. I'll show you. And mathematicians all over the world are trying to figure out that page or this page or this entry, and they're making a living out of it. And then on top of that, this Indian mathematician is a two-time college dropout. That's what I heard as a tenth grader. The 10th grader, I'm thinking SATs.

[00:33:22.52] I'm supposed to go to one of these schools. GPA. By the way, it's much worse for kids today than it was for me in the '80s. But it was still-- I think you get it. And I heard my parents say for the first time, it's not the pursuit of grades that matters. It's the quality of your achievements and the quality of your character. And the story I'm about to tell you about what this guy overcame to become somebody.

[00:33:48.18] So for me, Ramanujan mattered because it indicated hope. I'm not about to join some race and education just because that's what we're supposed to do. There is a level where even my parents will say something is beautiful and worth doing that's not related to a credential or a grade. And as a tenth grader, I needed that.

[00:34:09.57] So the first time Ramanujan mattered to me-- might come as a surprise to you-- but it was that. And that's what this letter means to me. Come visit me in my office. This is the most valuable thing that's on the wall in my office. So, Ramanujan, when did he live? He lived a long time ago. He was born-- is this interesting?

[00:34:29.04] So Ramanujan was born in the late 19th century in lush South India, Tamil Nadu. If you've never been to India, go. Make sure you get your shots. Because if you don't get your shots, you will regret going. But it's a beautiful country, very beautiful. People are very kind. And in fact, if you've never been, you'll probably learn a lot about the culture, but you might end up learning more about yourself.

[00:34:54.91] He was born in the late 1880s. He was born a Brahmin, and what won't come as a surprise is that he was an outstanding student as a high school kid, and he won a scholarship to college. What might come as a surprise, and this isn't normal, is that he discovered mathematics as a young boy. And by the age of 13, had discovered much of trigonometry by himself.

[00:35:23.09] And as a teen, he received, as a gift from a friend, a book. I've actually seen this book. His book is called a synopsis of elementary results in pure mathematics, which was little more than an Almanac of formulas. He wanted to go to Oxford or Cambridge in England at the time. There was no such thing as Stanley Kaplan. There was no such thing as the internet.

[00:35:50.97] You might have to hire a tutor that could help prepare you for the entrance examination, and there's a good chance they would use this book. But this gift, this book, when Ramanujan received it, was an introduction to what he thought was higher mathematics. And it ignited his passion for mathematics. And following the style he found in these notebooks, he decided to make his own notebooks.

[00:36:14.07] Actually, that's weird, right? If you get a book for a class, the first thing you probably-- you're probably not thinking, I'm not going to write my own book on the subject. But yeah, for Ramanujan, formulas started coming to him, and he started leaving them in his own notebooks. And he thought that's how math was done so tried to imagine what the rest of the universe would think trying to make sense of his notebooks when this was an absolute amateur from every perspective.

[00:36:44.97] Ramanujan ended up spending all of his time doing math, and as a result, he flunked out of college. He was given a second chance, but he flunked out again. But that was certainly not the end of the story. He found a job as a clerk. He was very good at numbers, and so what he did was he worked as a clerk in the Madras Port Trust doing the accounting, the books. And at night, he did his formulas, filling up three notebooks with formulas.

[00:37:13.95] And nobody could comprehend his math. By the way, equals, for all of you. If I said a equals b, we already know, that means that we agree that a and b are the same thing. There's no equal sign means? For Ramanujan. equal sign didn't mean that. So if you were to make your way through his notebooks, you'd be very frustrated. That equals that. I can see that they're different. What is he talking about?

[00:37:41.31] So, like I said, we made a film, and I'm going to slowly walk through the story. Is this OK? It's interesting? So the film is better than me talking. So we made a film about the story that I'm telling you, and we didn't want to have math be really that important.

[00:37:59.94] But we had to somehow convey the idea that there are people out there, quite a few, definitely not the majority, would never win any election. They found math beautiful so we wanted to get that across. Let me share with you a film clip where we want to introduce Ramanujan's isolation, not having anyone to communicate with about his mathematics, but at the same time, get the idea that math could be a work of art.

[00:38:29.83] [VIDEO PLAYBACK]

[00:38:34.97] - Go ahead. You can look. Please.

[00:38:51.57] - What does it all do?

[00:38:55.87] - It's like a painting, I think, only imagine it is with colors you cannot see.

[00:39:06.17] - What good is that?

[00:39:09.31] - Not much for you, I'm afraid. But for me, it is everything. Maybe there is someone else who can see and understand it as well. And for them, it will be important.

[00:39:26.66] - Have you met them?

[00:39:29.68] - No, not yet.

[00:39:36.60] - I want to understand, more than just colors I can't see.

[00:39:45.48] - What do you see?

[00:39:47.76] - Sand.

[00:39:48.81] - Yes. Imagine if we could look so closely, we could see each grain, each particle. You see there are-- there are patterns in everything. The color and light. The reflections on water. In maths, these patterns reveal themselves in the most incredible form.

[00:40:15.86] [END PLAYBACK]

[00:40:16.57] So I hope you feel that. I love that scene. When we invite our students as first years into our engagement courses, I know what they're thinking. They're thinking, how do I get into that class, or what major will be best for me? But I think, like all of you as faculty members, that's maybe not the first thing that we want them to think about.

[00:40:42.11] They're embarking on a journey, where they're going to become something else. We always talk about helping people find their passion. What does it look like? So in the film, we wanted that to be something along those lines. If you've never met someone that talks about numbers in this way, I hope that achieves that goal.

[00:41:03.43] So like I said, I invited you all to go to India. And if you do go, I invite you to go to the University of Madras in Chennai, and you can go to the library at University of Madras and ask the librarian, can I see Ramanujan's notebooks? And believe it or not, they'll bring them out. I don't think it should be allowed. I feel it's something like, I want to see the Book of Kells, go to Trinity college, produce them for me.

[00:41:32.30] But in India, they'll do it. And so I've done this a number of times, and I learn something every time I do it. And it's definitely kind of a special experience. So Ramanujan, obviously, somehow became known, although he was in isolation in India. He was in people-- his friends encouraged him to start writing out to the mathematicians in the West.

[00:41:59.81] And he wrote a letter to a very famous Cambridge professor by the name of G.H. Hardy. If you were a biologist or if you know anything about genetics, you'll know the name Hardy because this is the Hardy of the Hardy-Weinberg law. And the letter he wrote to Hardy begins with these very beautiful words. I beg to introduce myself to you as a clerk.

[00:42:23.48] I've had no university education. I have not trod into the conventional regular course, but I'm striking out a new path for myself, and the results I get are termed by local mathematicians as startling. In our film, we were very lucky. We had Jeremy Irons play G.H. Hardy. G.H. Hardy read the letter, which was startling, and he invited the Indian boy, Ramanujan, to study with him in England in the early 20th century.

[00:42:54.08] He arrived in 1913, and I want that to sink in for a moment. The world was about to enter into the depth of World War I when this was happening. Hardy was a distinguished chaired professor at Cambridge. Ramanujan was a poor two-time college dropout from India at a time when India was subjugated as a small piece but large geographically and by population piece of the British empire.

[00:43:19.76] It is extraordinary that Hardy read this letter and invited Ramanujan to study with him. It is extraordinary that happened. Had Hardy not responded, everything I just described at the beginning, whether you like math or not, would have never happened. And at least for me and for many of us working in the sciences that pertains to, that would be a history that we cannot fathom.

[00:43:48.04] It would be like not having cars, if you ask me in my field. Automobiles were never invented. And we asked Jeremy to replicate this pose. And he-- kind of amazing, actually. Yeah, so Hardy invited Ramanujan to study with him in Cambridge. At first, Ramanujan did not agree, did not accept the invitation out of fear and also for cultural reasons, because at the time, it was frowned upon for Indians to make this long journey across the seas.

[00:44:22.98] But he accepted, and I'd like to share with you the scene where Jeremy-- I'm sorry, Hardy and Ramanujan meet for the first time in Hardy's Cambridge office.

[00:44:35.93] [VIDEO PLAYBACK]

[00:44:36.30] - Ramanujan, we decided that for the good of everybody, you should attend some lectures.

[00:44:44.16] - But I'm here to publish.

[00:44:46.35] - Yes, all in good time, I hope. But first, we need proofs of your work.

[00:44:54.03] - It's really nothing to worry about. It's simply a question of acquainting you with the more formal methods that will benefit our future work together.

[00:45:04.62] - We need a common language. You wouldn't expect us to converse with you in Tamil.

[00:45:09.84] - No, but you expect me to speak English.

[00:45:15.66] - Quite. So there'll be plenty of time for publishing.

[00:45:21.57] - I'm sorry, but with all humility, how does anyone know that? I don't want this to die with me.

[00:45:29.29] - I assure you, it won't.

[00:45:31.11] - Thank you, sir. But I have much more to share with you. As I told you, the letter only contained a small sampling of my discoveries. You'll see I have even found a function, which exactly represents the number of prime numbers less than x in the form of an infinite series.

[00:45:46.95] - Exactly?

[00:45:48.00] - Yes, I thought if we were going to publish, it should be something groundbreaking.

[00:45:54.34] - This is the most unexpected.

[00:46:08.18] - This will take a lifetime.

[00:46:11.69] - Maybe two.

[00:46:15.27] [END PLAYBACK]

[00:46:17.13] I'm glad that you laughed because this was a little joke that I kind of snuck in there because I have lots of friends that will be proud to say that they are a part of that lifetime. It was a little nod to them. Yeah. OK, great. So this is kind of an important scene. It emphasizes that Ramanujan had not revealed to Hardy how much he had, but it also reveals that Ramanujan had no idea that you were supposed to give arguments, give support, evidence.

[00:46:48.17] It meant nothing to him because his ideas were visions from a goddess, and maybe we don't want to go there. And then, of course, well, you don't expect us to speak Tamil. I think that speaks volumes. All right, so glory and tragedy together, despite the fact these two people could not be more different. The shared English professor, and the two-time college dropout in Ramanujan who didn't know how to write down formal mathematics.

[00:47:19.81] Two people who shouldn't have been able to get along. And at first, they didn't. But by the end of the day, they did. And they wrote 30 papers together, laying the groundwork for what I call this modular forms theory, which I hope I made a good case at the outset, has become the stuff of 20th and 21st-century mathematics.

[00:47:41.35] Ramanujan overcame racism and the difficulties of World War I to achieve this. It's extraordinary that this ever happened, and I'm going to get to that in a moment. I want to return to that. And this is a little bit funny. Ramanujan as a Brahmin was a vegetarian. He couldn't eat the English food. So you can probably predict the joke I'm going to make.

[00:48:04.96] If you go to England today, the English food is Indian food. It just wasn't that 100 years ago. Tikka masala, where do you go for that? Go to London. And despite these hardships, Ramanujan was the first Indian scientist elected a fellow of the Royal Society, and he was elected at the age of 30. Try to imagine being elected to a National Academy at 30.

[00:48:29.57] But then imagine being, for the time, an Indian. Crazy, but this is all true. By the way, I want to touch on this point. In 2018, just a few years ago, right before COVID, was 100th anniversary of Ramanujan's election as fellow of the Royal Society. A big thing. Now, there are a lot of distinguished scientists that are members of the Royal Society. Newton, Rutherford.

[00:49:00.20] I mean, this is an old society, centuries old. So if the society took upon itself as an obligation to recognize all the famous scientists that are members of the Royal Society, there would be no time for doing science. So they exercise the most extraordinary standards when they decide who to celebrate years after their election.

[00:49:27.85] In 2018, I'm delighted to say the only scientist that they recognize from the class of 1918 for 100th anniversary was Ramanujan, and many of us descended on London and celebrated. And it was really special. from the physicists to the signal processors to the mathematicians, we had a really beautiful weekend telling our stories from so many different areas of science.

[00:49:58.45] Regrettably, there's tragedy here. Ramanujan fell ill towards the end of his stay in England. He returned to India, hoping for a turn to good health. It would not be, and he died in 1920 at the age of 32, which makes you wonder what science don't we have access to today because he died at 32. It's hard to get tenure by 32. You thing about [iNAUDIBLE] right?

[00:50:23.59] That is mind boggling to me. I'm often asked, what would you want to know about Ramanujan if you had a time machine or had you been able to live a proper life? And yeah, it's crazy. I would like to give him a personal computer, even just a hand calculator. What would he have been able to discover if he had access to computing power, even a small percentage of what we have available today?

[00:50:50.86] So this is the idea of Ramanujan. I wrote about this with my student, Robert Schneider, for a Hollywood magazine, because it was hard to put into words because he means different things to different people. And what we wrote is this, Ramanujan matters because he represents endless curiosity and untapped potential, which we all have to believe in to proceed in the sciences.

[00:51:15.91] Science usually advances on the work of thousands over generations fine tuning and extending the scope of understanding. But from time to time, creative fireballs like Ramanujan burst onto the scene, propelling human thought forward. Whether it's science or whether it's being an iconic figure, a role model for students of science. He certainly, I think, speaks to that.

[00:51:45.03] Here's a picture that is going to answer, I think, the question, why does Ramanujan matter in a direction that you might not be expecting. And this might be a date that you don't want to remember. Maybe it's one you want to remember. This is the last week of October in 2016. Essentially, one week right before a presidential election.

[00:52:09.99] The outgoing president was President Barack Obama. And as is tradition, as is tradition-- this is not politics. I'm talking about Ramanujan, by the way. As is tradition, an outgoing president holds transition events for the leading candidates to be the next president. You probably know about this, and this was a Friday.

[00:52:32.83] And what the Obama administration did was devoted Friday to science. So they brought in France Cordova, my friend. She was, at the time, the director of the National Science Foundation brought in the director of DOE, NIH, so on and so forth, to train the incoming transition teams about the business of being president. You get to oversee and participate the execution of science in this country. That is an awesome responsibility.

[00:53:04.24] And to our surprise, Obama thought there should be-- well, maybe this part isn't a surprise because maybe they always just do this. But Obama thought, well, we have to have a social event to end this week of transition events. Let's have a party. So while I want to screen the film, The Man Who Knew Infinity, our little independent film that maybe most of you have never even heard of.

[00:53:30.67] So I want to screen for the transition film, for the transition teams, this film, and let me tell you why. And this is before COVID. He said, on the horizon are many significant challenges that the scientists of our future will have to contend with. You know some. Do we have green energy? Climate change? We're still looking for the cure for cancer.

[00:53:56.62] And whether you like the mathematics or not, when I saw this film, what spoke to me was that you had an Indian, basically a Black man in England, who somehow got along with this distinguished English professor. And you're telling me he proved some of the most awesome results in mathematics? I don't care about the mathematics, but that says we need international cooperation in science.

[00:54:26.89] I want that to be the story of Ramanujan. None of us thought that when we made this film. We made this film like, I love Ramanujan. I want to tell that story. These two very different people, just seeing their interaction, you didn't know that that's what it would mean to the President of the United States. So he invited us. Jeremy Irons came, and this is us standing in front of the West Wing of the White House right before we screened the film to end that week.

[00:54:57.02] What are we doing here? Maybe you recognize DJ Patil at the time. He was the chief data scientist for the United States, and we did a little event live on stream to maybe five people. I don't know if anybody ever watches it, but here we are giving a math problem to whoever was out there watching. And the problem is, what is the smallest number that is the sum of two cubes in two different ways?

[00:55:21.90] And if you were aware of the story of Ramanujan, there is an answer. If not, that's just a very strange question that Ramanujan happened to know the answer to off the top of his head. And who knows answers to questions like that off the top of your head? And this is an example of how extraordinary Ramanujan was. If you want to know the answer, there's a Tesla out there with the license plate, and that's my number.

[00:55:47.15] But isn't that amazing? Our little film didn't make a lot of money. It took eight years to make, and it had this unintended interpretation. So the last slide I want to show you is this. We got a lot of help to make this film. Making a film about a mathematician in a period film is not like making Batman versus Superman or a Marvel film.

[00:56:17.40] People aren't saying, oh, yeah, please, I will give you my $8 million to make this film. I won't mind. It doesn't work that way. It's very hard to make these films, and we got help from the Breakthrough Foundation. I think you might know the Breakthrough Foundation. They give out prizes to distinguished scientists. You know their names like Mark Zuckerberg, Yuri Milner, Jack Ma. They have assembled a giant pot of money to support science, and they made our film possible.

[00:56:51.00] They don't generally advertise that, but they helped make our film. And the little payback, the little thing that they requested was, well, can we screen the film at one of our events, and could you bring some of the actors? So the Breakthrough Foundation funds SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, and they asked us to bring our film with the actors.

[00:57:22.14] And we would be an activity at the end of the SETI conference. You might actually remember the SETI. This particular conference. This is when they announced something called Breakthrough Starshot, where they're going to send these little spaceships. I don't know where they are on that now, but that was that event. And so at the conclusion of the screening, Yuri Milner asked me to come up on stage.

[00:57:44.90] I'd met someone named Jill Tarter, who turned out to be really amazing. She was the first lead for SETI. Yuri Milner said, we're going to do a Q&A with you. Everyone in the audience is a scientist. They're going to get the autographs from these, but you're the scientist. So I probably had a little bit-- one or two glasses of wine too much for dinner before this.

[00:58:11.76] And I don't know what got into me, but I recognized everybody in the audience is from SETI. So I did say something almost exactly like this, just like all of you searching for extraterrestrial intelligence. Maybe we should be searching our own planet, too, for natural, earthly intelligence. Isn't that what our movie is about?

[00:58:37.66] Ramanujan almost was never brought into the light. And as I mentioned, and I use very carefully the term, it is unfathomable to me to imagine where we would be today had he never been brought into the light. And he was an extraordinary outcome. 15 minutes later, walking to the parking lot, a man by the name of Edward Serazin-- you might know his name.

[00:59:01.39] He recently stepped down as president of the Templeton World Charity Foundation. He ran down the driveway, said, you are so right. I was about to give all this money to SETI. I'm giving it to you. So thanks to the Templeton World Charity Foundation, we've been doing it. And we've now given out $5,000 little grants. $5,000 can transform your life if you're-- for what? Right?

[00:59:31.78] You don't have access to the internet, or if you're from Egypt with no access, $5,000 can literally change your life. And so, yeah, as of last June, we've given out 125 prizes to students from 23 different countries. I have some-- well, I don't want to go into many examples. Here are some of our first winners. This little boy on the right, he's now a graduate student at Oxford.

[01:00:03.02] But we discovered him in Qatar, and he had invented his own formula for pi, digits of pi. One of our first winners, we discovered her as-- I don't want to say we discovered her in the sense of science. We brought into the light. She came from a very small village in China, and thanks, in part, to our award, she ended up going to MIT.

[01:00:29.56] She graduated from MIT in three years. She won something called the Morgan Prize. She won something called the Schafer Prize. She won something called the Rhodes Scholarship. And today, she's a PhD student at Stanford in mathematics while concurrently enrolled in law school at Stanford. If we had not made this film, she might still be in that village.

[01:00:54.76] And I remember her telling-- she's kind of a difficult person, actually. So as awesome as that is, you could imagine it's a very-- right? But I remember her saying, my parents just wanted me to get married, find a boy, go to MIT. Even as a student at MIT, go find a boy. So anyway, that's what I wanted to talk about. I hope this was interesting.

[01:01:16.55] [APPLAUSE]

[01:01:24.62] You have a fascinating story, and you are a gifted speaker. Who else?

[01:01:34.56] Can you hear me? May I just say that the man knows what he's talking about. He's not making this stuff up.

[01:01:43.58] KEN ONO: Ramanujan?

[01:01:44.81] AUDIENCE: Sorry. OK, OK, all right. No, you, you're the story that you're telling.

[01:01:51.80] KEN ONO: Thank you. Thank you. Everyone, that's Jack Morava. There's a whole theory of mathematics named after him. Yes, there is.

[01:02:06.94] KATHRYN THORNTON: Who else has a question?

[01:02:08.13] AUDIENCE: If he was called The Man Who Knew Infinity.

[01:02:10.21] KEN ONO: Oh, thank you very much. So-- oh, I totally dropped the ball on this. There was a biography by Robert Kanigel, who was a journalism professor at MIT, about Ramanujan called The Man Who Knew Infinity. Wrong answer. He wrote this book in the early 1990s. He called it The Man Who Knew Infinity because he thought it would be kind of a catchy title.

[01:02:35.89] Rather luckily, on our first day of shooting in London, the night before the first day of shooting, I got that question. And Robert said, you got to come up with an answer right away. It's not acceptable to say it was a catchy title. And rather beautifully, there is an excellent answer. So in number theory, there's a function called p of n that counts the number of partitions of n.

[01:03:01.45] It's very easy to define, but I'll spare you. It's a sequence of numbers that grows at a very rapid rate. It starts out with the numbers one, one, two. But by the time you get to the 20th term, it's in the hundreds of thousands. It goes very quickly, and one of the major accomplishments that Ramanujan came up with was what's called an asymptotic formula for these numbers.

[01:03:27.51] It wasn't the exact right answer. It gives you an approximation. But what does it mean to say you know infinity? Well, this was my opportunity to explain what an asymptotic formula is. Although you're not getting the right answer, measured the right way, it becomes perfect.

[01:03:44.41] So if you have an approximation, and you divide it by the actual numbers, as you write down more and more cases, if that gets close to one, that is an example of a formula that gets perfect as you go to infinity. I think some journalists even wrote that down somewhere. So in any event, it's just an asymptotic formula, and anyone who knows that, we'll call them the people who infinity.

[01:04:08.37] KATHRYN THORNTON: Who else?

[01:04:17.96] AUDIENCE: Some of these ideas are so important that they're just discovered independently by people working in different fields, and that's certainly true of symmetry. But it also means there are language distinctions between what different people mean by symmetry. So metallurgists and chemists and all have developed a specific language. And they also tend to be restricted to three dimensions, rather than more multiple dimensions.

[01:04:43.23] But the problem of packing oranges, for example, was known by those a long time ago. So hexagonal close packing and face-centered close packing both are equivalent things there. And so this may be confusing to many people because the meaning that some modern physicists and mathematicians use for symmetry is much more general than the idea of symmetry by the classical metallurgists and people like that.

[01:05:13.36] KEN ONO: Exactly right. Yeah, let me clarify what I was saying about hexagonal. So you can construct infinitely many different kinds of packings that get really, really close to what turn out to be the optimal packing. The hard part is to prove you can't actually find one that's a little bit better. So in practice, these other lattices that had been produced, nobody in their right mind should ever be trying to reproduce them in nature. So there are these instances where the answer nature that comes quickly are clearly, but are difficult to establish, are optimal. In the higher dimensions, it's all bets off.

[01:06:02.72] AUDIENCE: Yeah, can we bring it home a little bit? Can you talk a little bit about the university here, some of the things that are going on as it relates to this? The timing seems to be extraordinarily opportunistic. The fact that we've been given the kind of money to develop in the way we are. Could you just say a little bit about what's happening here and how unique or not is what's going on here?

[01:06:28.47] KEN ONO: OK, I feel like I'm back at work. Did this all day. I had meeting with UVA today. Yeah, I'd be delighted to. So in my role in the provost office, I think I've had the perfect job made for me. I get to be a cheerleader for the extraordinary talent that we have here at the university and help develop that. So some examples include, of course, our student body.

[01:07:02.55] But the most prominent examples that I think you all see evidence of will be, for example, the School of Data Science. We received a $200 million gift to build a school of data science here at the University of Virginia, which I predict within 10 years will be one of the four or five best in the country. If you compare with what other universities are doing, there are a few exceptions. Berkeley is doing a great job.

[01:07:28.46] There are a few exceptions, but what is closer to the truth is schools are trying to figure out what is data science. And even places like UCLA, which in your mind probably is one of the best public universities, struggling to figure out what that should mean. Should we hire two more statisticians and two more computer scientists, and maybe they'll form an alliance?

[01:07:49.62] We've got a dean, Phil Bourne, who is the head data scientist for NIH, which had the most extraordinary data science problem, the human genome, at our helm. And we've assembled an extraordinary group, and that's one thing that's happening. The Manning family, you might know Gordonsville for the barbecue exchange or the cute-- Gordonsville, which, by the way, I'm delighted to say that my PhD advisor is from Gordonsville. Basil Gordon was my PhD advisor.

[01:08:24.12] And when I was his student many years ago, he talked about the lovely campus that Thomas Jefferson built in Central Virginia. Basil Gordon was from Gordonsville. The Manning family have resurrected that spirit of Gordonsville that we all get to enjoy today, and on top of that gave another $200 million to establish this institute for biotechnology.

[01:08:48.93] People don't just give $200 million to universities because they like the universities. The Mannings have no direct connection to the University of Virginia. They could have given their money to any number of schools. And the truth is, we had to prove to them that we had the ability to prove we could do something with that $200 million, leverage it, and make something out of that.

[01:09:13.30] That's exciting. If you have diabetes or have a family member that struggles with diabetes, you might know about this Dexcom device. It's an integrated insulin pump with a glucose monitor. That is state of the art stuff. It used to be that you had to-- your finger-- it's horrible. But there's a lot of scientists and researchers here at UVA.

[01:09:39.89] They had to come together at the right time to realize that potential. There was a mathematician by the name of Marvin Rosenblum. I hold the chair that was endowed in his honor. He taught a course on differential equations that was taken by Boris Kovatchev, who was a visiting graduate student from Bulgaria many, many years ago. Why do you know that name?

[01:10:06.10] Because he's now the director of our Center for Diabetes Research. He took the mathematics there and recognized that he could turn that into an algorithm that in real time can make very precise predictions about where your glucose level will be given these 40 or 50 different parameters. That is a math problem. But there were engineers that he could work with that said, I can make the pump.

[01:10:29.14] And they've been perfecting that. Those sorts of things that go beyond what might be your image of the university, which for many, I predict, is the college. Jefferson's image of the college. That's not going away. It's a colored history, but let's make no mistake. There's a lot that's happening from the School of Data Science to a brand new dean in the School of Medicine. Engineering is-- we have a great engineering dean, Jennifer West. If you've never met her, I encourage you to meet her.

[01:11:02.90] This is an exciting place to be. So I don't know if I'm answering your question. Maybe it could be as go to the Forum Hotel and have a nice meal because all of that has been transformed. The number one law school in the country at a public university is University of Virginia. We are lucky. Yeah, am I-- do I do my job well? Tell Jim.

[01:11:31.26] KATHRYN THORNTON: Who else? Got time for one or two more.

[01:11:35.49] KEN ONO: Go run with Jim.

[01:11:41.58] AUDIENCE: So infinite ideal movement for the human body that you are working on right now, and I'm curious to know where that's going, and is an entire science being developed based on that?

[01:11:57.84] KEN ONO: I don't-- we are-- hmm. So I don't-- that's not my research area. I do that for fun. So I do that for fun. So what is it that we are doing? Let me describe it in a different way. And if you're interested in it, our article was-- we wrote an article. People were asking about it. It will come out in June, and a trimmed version will appear in Scientific American right before the Olympics.

[01:12:27.52] What we do isn't data science applied to sports, and let me explain why. There are reasons why in AI and large language models, so on and so forth, people are taken by the power of supercomputing. But when it comes to many important questions, it gives you the wrong answer. It trains to-- these entities generally trained to what has either been observed before or is the average of what can be scraped from the internet. If you want to set a world record-- I'm sorry.

[01:13:09.86] You want to do something that has never been observed before. We want to do the anti large language model, the anti AI. So there's some things where what you want to do is the average or the majority. Winning an election, you want the majority. But if you want to set world records or make an important advance in science, you don't.

[01:13:36.01] You use these tools because it allows you to have access, almost real time, to the accumulation of knowledge. That's what I think is the true power here. Does that answer your question? So what do I really do? I subject the athletes that we test to lots of strange looking tests with video and various kinds of sensors, and we assemble what we call a digital twin, and we try to imagine how, given this person's characteristics and their current aerobic capacity for that event, how might they be able to best execute that race.

[01:14:18.95] So this has several kinds of-- this is useful for coaches in a number of ways. First of all, we might identify a flaw that is easily corrected. OK, that's easy. Every coach can probably even do that with their eyes. They might not know the severity of a flaw because they don't know the numbers, but they might say, that doesn't look as fast as that.

[01:14:42.36] With our work, I can tell you how much you should predict how much you can say. The power of science is a predictive tool. But another way in which it is useful is that I might identify what is really someone's best event, and they don't know it yet. So the first story that I think the university promoted about our work with the swimmers was the story of Paige Madden, who ended up going to the Olympics.

[01:15:09.70] She won a silver medal, but it's very difficult to make the Olympic team. The top two in an event get to go. 120 qualify per event. You have to be one of the top two. But there's a catch. If you swim on a relay, you have to be top six because four make a relay. But there are several rounds, so they have alternates. And the customary wisdom would be go for one of those six spots in a relay because they take six.

[01:15:36.10] And in our work with Paige, I said, no, I really think you should swim the 400. And I know there's someone named Katie Ledecky who is going to beat you every time. And I know that means you're racing for one spot, but you can do it. And at the time, her best time was four minutes and nine seconds. And I think it was something like 19th in the country.

[01:15:59.78] And the coaches thought I was crazy. And when they got to the Olympic trials, we were very lucky because one of the first days at the Olympic trials was the 400. And they were like, don't race it. Save all of your energy for the 200 to try to get-- well, you know, why don't you just get the rhythm of the trials out of the way so that when you swim, the 200, the nerves are gone.

[01:16:22.34] She went to the Olympics in the 400. She cut six seconds that day. So the second way is the predictive power. There's actually four ways. The third way is aspirational. Given your digital twin, you should be able to, if everything works out, which is the long list of things and usually don't work out, but you might be able to aspire to swim this race with this time. And it's shocking.

[01:16:49.83] At the University of Virginia, I have files that say "world record for," and "a world record for." This is how you do it. And the coach will say, that's impossible. So you have one year to build this skill. And now I just read the news. Read the news. Kate Douglas two weeks ago broke the oldest record for women in the breaststroke, and she didn't even rest to do it. Just wait. Wait till Paris.

[01:17:21.26] And then there's the fourth part. If you're now as an athlete, having enjoyed this sort of data for the last three or four years, when you get up on that block for national championships, it's amazing how calm you are. Everyone else from all the other teams are nervous. This is the race I've been waiting for, and from their mind, I see it.

[01:17:39.85] All I have to do is Dr. Ono's formula, and I'm going to do well. Yeah, yeah, it's crazy. And there's that psychological-- It's real. They are so calm. And you know what? They haven't lost. We won 11 of 18 events at the last collegiate national championships for the women in an American record time. But it's a formula.

[01:18:08.27] KATHRYN THORNTON: Do you do have a security detail that protects you?

[01:18:10.81] KEN ONO: Yeah, so I'm not going to answer-- I'm not going to tell you how we do the digital twin.

[01:18:15.76] AUDIENCE: Can you work with the men?

[01:18:17.55] KEN ONO: I do. They are coming a long way. We own the 200 freestyle relay record without any of them being All-American. Top 16, four men, 50 yards. We own the American record. None of them are top 16 in the country.

[01:18:34.03] AUDIENCE: You have two. If you have about three or four of your best young swimmers, coming next year.

[01:18:38.41]

[01:18:40.14] KEN ONO: We do. We do and have already-- yes. So Tom-- and I've already been working with them. I've gone out to-- I've worked with Team USA and the junior national team.

[01:18:48.69] AUDIENCE: I hope you have a bonus in your salary.

[01:18:52.50] KATHRYN THORNTON: I'm hoping he has a bodyguard. Well, let's thank our speaker one more time, and then we can adjourn and chat. We have a gift. A small gift. This is made by one of our local craftsmen, Bob Ribando over there makes that, and that is-- apparently hanging bananas is the most efficient mathematical way to store your bananas.

[01:19:15.59] KEN ONO: Thank you very much.

[01:19:16.57] KATHRYN THORNTON: Thank you very much, and I hope you enjoy some refreshments with us. Thanks, everybody.

[01:19:20.27] [APPLAUSE]

[00:00:01.25] MEL LEFFLER: Welcome, everybody. I'm delighted to see so many people here today. I'm Mel Leffler. I was a Professor in the History Department here for many years and Chair of the History Department and Dean of the College and Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.

[00:00:20.45] I'm especially delighted today to be able to introduce my friend and my colleague, Risa Goluboff. Many of you know Risa as the experienced, dynamic, thoughtful Dean of the law school. We historians, however, know her as the author of two truly outstanding books. The Lost Promise of Civil Rights, published in 2007, and another book called Vagrant Nation, that came out about a decade later.

[00:01:06.81] For each of these two books, for each of them, Risa won not one but several of the most prestigious prizes that the historical profession and the legal world can bestow on any author. And as a result of her distinguished scholarship, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and President Biden, a year or two ago, selected her to be a member of the prestigious committee that oversees the writing of the official history of the Supreme Court.

[00:01:52.54] In her work, Risa shows how the law shapes and is reshaped by human agents who make critical decisions about the meaning of the law and its possibilities. In The Lost Promise, she illuminates, in a very provocative way, how the lawyers who developed the strategy to overturn Jim Crow legislation in the 1940s and the early 1950s, nevertheless, may have lost an opportunity to promote economic equality and social justice for all working-class people.

[00:02:55.27] In her second book, Risa shows how vagrancy laws were challenged in the 1960s by activists and lawyers who used the Constitution to challenge prevailing police practices and who thereby reshaped the meaning of freedom in the United States. In other words, in all her writings, Risa relates the law and the Constitution to society.

[00:03:38.00] And it's in this context that she's now exploring Charlottesville 2018 as legal history. Many of you probably know that she led a committee here at the university to assess how UVA dealt with the events leading up to and during those two turbulent tumultuous days of August 11 and 12, 2018, to the extent that she now has time-- Risa, do you really have any time? [LAUGHS]

[00:04:14.68] To the extent that she now has time. She's pondering how to write a book about those days. And she wants to interrogate her own role. She wants to illuminate how white supremacists use their constitutional rights to free speech to maximize their visibility.

[00:04:40.39] And she wants to examine how different groups, organizations, and government agencies struggled to organize a legal response to those two days-- two days of violence, two tumultuous days that shook our university, our city, and indeed, our nation. Risa, we look forward to hearing what you have to say.

[00:05:11.27] [APPLAUSE]

[00:05:20.54] RISA GOLUBOFF: Good afternoon. Thank you, Mel, for that lovely introduction. And I think it was 2017, so people were trying to-- yeah, but that's OK. So I'm really happy to see you. And I feel badly that on this joyous occasion, when everyone is together for the first time, post-pandemic, I'm going to talk about something very serious. But I think it's important and I hope you'll stay with me.

[00:05:50.01] So as Mel said, I have chosen to talk about this topic that is quite new in terms of being a scholarly project that I'm engaged in. And I've called it "Charlottesville" as Legal History. We don't tend to think of these two days as "Charlottesville" because "Charlottesville" means so much more to us, but people in the outside world tend to call it "Charlottesville," hence, the square quotes.

[00:06:14.39] So one of the things I've thought about in sharing this with you is that we don't talk, as scholars, very often about what a project looks like at the beginning. We see the outcome, we see the book, we see the article, but we don't often say here's when the aperture opened, and here's all the possibilities of what this project could be from the beginning.

[00:06:38.58] We look back and we recreate it, how it falls nicely into what it became. But I'm going to talk about what it looks like from the start, before-- when the aperture is opened and there is all these possibilities before it closes again. And I will tell you, I am still in the open aperture moment, so I don't have set answers to what a book could look like, though that is what I'm aiming for.

[00:07:02.22] So as you might imagine, and I'm sure as many of you feel this, too, this journey, for me, of figuring out what a book about Charlottesville would look like, is a very personal one to me. So the first part of this talk is organized explicitly around three points of autobiographical inflection. And then the remainder is more analytical about the project.

[00:07:26.49] And I've organized it this way partly because I don't really know how else to organize it. It is autobiographical. Why I have come to this project is very personal. I am both in it and trying to be above it and look at it with some perspective. And so my journey is partly me coming to terms with what happened.

[00:07:46.59] In part, though-- and I don't think this will be a surprise to any historians in the room, but I wonder what other scholars of other fields will think of this. I think all the work that we do is always related, in some ways, to our autobiographies. And who we are shows up in certain ways, in how we conceive of and organize all of the scholarship that we write.

[00:08:07.59] OK, so the first moment of inflection, I think of this as so many cases. So in December 2018, I was at a holiday party, an alumni event, talking to a local judge who was an alumnus of the university and the law school, who told me that he had 13 distinct cases on his docket, different types of cases, all related to August 11 and 12.

[00:08:33.41] And it made me start to wonder how many other cases were out there, of what kinds, were they civil or criminal cases? Were they in state court or federal court? Like many of you, I was living in Charlottesville during these events. I'd been living here for 15 years at that point with my family.

[00:08:53.60] I was an active member, still am, of Congregation Beth Israel, the local synagogue. A faculty member at UVA and I had been dean for all of one year when this happened. I led the university-- I led the law school community in the aftermath. And then as Mel mentioned, I chaired the committee that was created by the university to coordinate its response. And I spent much of the 2017, 2018 school year working on and leading that committee.

[00:09:21.39] So given my involvement and the fact that I'm a historian and a civil rights and constitutional lawyer, a lot of people had encouraged me to write about these events and their aftermath. But prior to this conversation with this judge, I had been pretty resistant.

[00:09:35.79] I'd written some smaller things and given some speeches, but even after a year and a half, it felt too raw to write about. And my own feelings about it felt too complicated. But when the judge started talking about his docket and these cases, I saw the scope of the cases in a new way. And I could see the beginnings of an archive.

[00:09:55.23] In the past, to the extent that I had thought about writing it, it was really kind of part memoir, part institutional accounting about my roles in the institution. But for the first time, I started to think about what Charlottesville meant to a legal scholar and what it would mean to think about the law in what happened on those days.

[00:10:13.36] And so this was the first time the aperture had opened. So I started to identify all the cases that I could that were related to August 11 and 12. And I found 109. And there are still more coming and I'm still counting them. Of these 109 cases, you have likely heard of three.

[00:10:32.05] Two involve James Fields, who was the person who drove his car into the crowd and killed Heather Heyer. So one of those was a state murder charge against him, and the other, a federal civil rights charge against him. And the third case you've likely heard of is Sines versus Kessler, which is the multi-million dollar private, federal, civil rights lawsuit against the White supremacists. There was a big trial here almost two years ago now.

[00:10:58.85] So these three cases already give you a sense that not all of the cases that came out of August 11th and 12th were the kinds of state criminal prosecutions that you might expect to see. There were charges for various criminal acts like assault, failing to disperse from a riot, using pepper spray and tear gas.

[00:11:18.70] But given the thousands of participants in this violence, one might have expected to see more than the 78 state criminal cases that I have found in my archive, and more with white supremacists as defendants, as they only make up a third of the defendants in the state criminal cases that I have found.

[00:11:36.89] Indeed, what you find instead are a whole bunch of different kinds of suits-- wrongful death suits, First Amendment claims, civil rights claims, the Confederate statutes cases-- statutes cases themselves. So after my conversation with the judge and as I amassed these records, I started asking fairly basic questions. A narrow and conventional thought about the law were the questions I wanted to know.

[00:12:02.08] I wanted to know how did these cases come about? How did different individuals, organizations, social movement, actors, government institutions, how did they all mobilize different legal actions in different legal forums in response to these events? In other words, what has the now six-years-long legal response to two days of violence and lawlessness looked like? How does the law respond to violence? Does it? And if so, how does it repair the breach in the rule of law?

[00:12:37.51] Moment of inflection, too, I think of as the one particular case. So the first one was the many cases. This one is the one particular case. So two months after that conversation with the judge, on Valentine's Day, 2019, I was called for jury duty.

[00:12:54.82] I went into the courthouse downtown, and there was a lot of energy and there were a lot of people. And one got the sense that there were definitely more potential jurors who had been called than usual. Something was up. So I went into the courtroom and I realized that I knew the defendant.

[00:13:10.57] She was a high school teacher who had been my kid's summer camp counselor for many years. She was a defendant because during a press conference, Jason Kessler, one of the organizers of the rally-- this press conference was held the next day on August 13. He held this downtown in front of City Hall. And she was arrested for assault and battery for, quote unquote, "bear hugging him and yelling, 'We love you, Jason,'" which led to the two of them falling to the ground.

[00:13:40.49] So according to him, she was assaulting him. According to her, she was trying to protect him from aggressive counter-protesters who had showed up at this press conference. The judge gave us a bare outline of the facts of the case than I just described to you, though it had been in the news. And he told us that Jason Kessler was the complaining witness, though he was not in the courtroom at the time, but I would later learn was in the court house at the time.

[00:14:10.93] So during voir dire, I shared that I knew the defendant. And I later shared that I knew Jason Kessler in my various roles as dean and chair of the University's response. One after another, many of the other potential jurors in the room also stood and shared their stories, where they were on August 11th and 12th, the harms they suffered, their views of and feelings about the White supremacists.

[00:14:38.34] Twice, the prosecutor asked the judge not to continue the voir dire process in open court for fear of contaminating jurors who might otherwise be unbiased, but the court-- the judge said no. As the process went on, it indeed became increasingly unlikely or seemed increasingly unlikely that they would be able to seat an unbiased jury.

[00:15:00.44] The judge and the lawyers eventually conferred in chambers and we were removed from and then brought back to the courtroom. The judge told us that an agreement had been reached in the case and thanked us for our service. And the defense attorney said that our presence resulted in the case being resolved and also thanked us.

[00:15:18.38] We later learned that the defendant had to apologize to Jason Kessler, perform community service, and maintain good behavior. And the case would be dismissed after six months. That experience was a galvanizing and empowering one for me, individually, and for the other jurors-- the other people in the juror pool that day, collectively.

[00:15:38.44] And even as I know, intellectually, and as a lawyer and the dean of a law school, that the law cannot tolerate vigilante justice, in my heart, I had not really understood why the defendant had been prosecuted at all. And so the outcome, and even more, the way the voir dire functioned to invite cathartic testimonials, seemed, to me, to re-impose community norms, allow for community healing, and affect a kind of rough justice in the face of what seemed to so many in the courtroom that day, an unjust charge on behalf of an undeserving complainant.

[00:16:11.95] This experience refocused my lens and it raised a whole new set of questions for me about my incipient project, although, to some extent, those questions sounded in a scholarly register, concerning the role of the jury and especially how such juries and trials more generally operate in a small town like Charlottesville. These questions were fundamentally of a different sort. They were the questions of a Charlottesville local, a community member and parent, a juror and citizen, a participant and interested party, a university leader, and a dean.

[00:16:45.08] It seemed to me that this jury process had worked in some crude and whiggish way. And I wanted to know, in that crude way, whether the law had worked in the other 108 cases I had been amassing. Who won those cases? On whose behalf was the justice system effectively mobilized? On whose behalf was it not effective? Where did the power of the law come down?

[00:17:11.21] I wanted to know, was the law providing redress? Did it and would it protect us? And the us that I had in mind were those for whom I did and do feel responsible. Those I want to protect and defend-- my children and my students and my university and my various Charlottesville communities-- against them, the white supremacists, who came here to do and cause violence.

[00:17:38.57] Though I understood the thoroughgoing normativity of these questions, I found it exceedingly difficult to escape them. So I began looking at my archive through this new lens. What I saw were some instances where the law seemed to work in just this way.

[00:17:56.46] There was a state civil suit that was brought under the Virginia constitution and statutes that argued that any militia had to be under the authority of the state. And this led to consent decrees permanently prohibiting the rally organizers and militias and alt-right organizations and their leaders, essentially, from returning to Charlottesville in groups of more than two with weapons.

[00:18:16.70] This meant that they did not return on the first anniversary of August 11th and 12th, which contributed to the peacefulness of that anniversary. It is also the case that the three high-profile cases I mentioned before somewhat showed the law working in this way. A state jury found James Fields guilty of first-degree murder and other charges, and he was sentenced to life in prison.

[00:18:39.23] In the federal civil rights case, he pled guilty to 29 of 30 counts and he was sentenced to another term of life in prison. And in Sines v Kessler, a jury found 23 defendants liable and awarded them $26 million in damages. But then there was the flip side. The urgency with which I wanted the law to work, resulted in no small part, from having seen the law, emphatically, not work. In this same sense, on August 11th and 12th themselves.

[00:19:09.90] What we had all witnessed and what I spent so much time responding to in my institutional roles was the failure of the law, in the sense of the police monopoly, on violence and force, around the statue here on August 11th and all day on the 12th. The law is meant to stand between these interactions, prevent the violence that we saw, and it failed to do so.

[00:19:33.25] The notoriety of Charlottesville nationally and internationally seemed to derive as much from the failure of law to prevent this violence, as from the demonstration of hate offered by the White supremacists themselves. The cases that followed hardly seem poised to rectify these harms. There were only four prosecutions stemming from the violence around the Jefferson statue at UVA on the 11th. And only 21 stemming from the rally itself in downtown Charlottesville on the 12th, despite the thousands of people involved.

[00:20:04.06] The main Justice Department took no action. And six years later, it is not clear how much monetary redress there has been, including none yet collected in Sines v Kessler. My equivocal answers mostly highlighted the flaws in my questions. The answers, obviously, depend on any number of things-- what it means to win or lose-- and it's hard to tell from many of the cases.

[00:20:26.63] In fact, the defendant in my case, was that a win or a loss? I saw it largely as a win, but one could see it also that she had to do community service and apologize and maintain good behavior as a loss. The answers depend also on the timeframe that one has in mind and the notion of causation.

[00:20:44.45] Did the law work because litigation served to bankrupt many of these white supremacist organizations and then send them back to the internet from the streets, which meant that we didn't see many additional events like Charlottesville, or did it fail because experts now think that that shift might be to blame for the increase in individual lone-wolf white supremacist and anti-Semitic attacks, including mass shootings nationwide?

[00:21:10.00] Whether these cases have been successful or not depends also broadly on what one thinks of the law. In order to understand how the law worked, one needed to, and I did, expand my archive to the cases that were not brought, as well as to the ones that were, to the administrative responses in UVA and other institutions, to developments in the Charlottesville City Council and Charlottesville politics more broadly, to state legislatures, federal agency actions, and social movement responses on all sides.

[00:21:41.74] Even as my archive began better to match my usually more capacious vision of the law, in which law operates within and on and is operated in and on the rest of the world, neither beginning nor ending in the formal legal processes that made up my initial archive, I still found it difficult to escape my crude, normative questions, my relationship to these events, and their legal ramifications.

[00:22:06.28] But still, these questions would not have produced a book that I wanted to write. And so the project might have ended there without moment of inflection number three, which I think of as the invitation. In the summer of 2019, I was invited to give the plenary lecture for the annual meeting of the American Society for Legal History.

[00:22:25.27] And that invitation was an epiphany for me. It highlighted that I am not only dean and chair and juror and community member. I am also, and perhaps first in time among those things, a legal historian. And that epiphany prompted a whole host of new questions, a legal historian's questions, about how to tell the story of Charlottesville as legal history.

[00:22:48.07] Questions about sources, people, institutions, processes, narratives, arguments, perspectives, normative challenges, and the relationship between law and history and legal history. Not just any aperture was open now. The legal historian's aperture was. And I could finally start to see the analytical alongside the personal.

[00:23:09.34] So in the rest of the lecture, I'm going to describe how one might adjust and how I have thought about adjusting both the methodological and then the narrative lenses of this project, before I return at the end to the problem of autobiography that I don't think the legal historian's lens can solve.

[00:23:26.33] So the first lens adjustment is a methodological one. And it's about the role that law plays in this story. So as soon as I started thinking like a legal historian, I could see more clearly that my frustrations with my earlier questions stemmed from the crude way that I was thinking about law only as output.

[00:23:43.82] So legal historians and legal scholars generally discuss how the law is output, the opinions that come out of the judicial process, but it is also input. Law also shapes society itself. Law is also, a third thing, its own arena of struggle. So I'm going to talk about each of these two. I've already talked about law's output, though you didn't know that's what I was doing.

[00:24:06.33] Now I'm going to talk about law as shaping society or what legal historians call the constitutive power of the law. And then I'll talk about law as its own arena and how these two ways of thinking about law open up new vantage points on this project. So legal historians call law as input the constitutive power of the law.

[00:24:26.06] We live within the frameworks the law create. We don't always see them, but they inform how we think about ourselves, our relationship with others, our institutions, our actions. When I got married, one of my advisors was a main proponent of the constitutive power of the law. And I came back after my wedding, and he said, how does it feel to be institutionalized?"

[00:24:48.08] And I didn't know what he meant at first. And then I realized he meant I am now in a different legal category. Being a wife comes with a legal institution. And that's kind of a good example of what the constitutive power of the law means. That we can't actually even understand ourselves or see the world, except through the legal categories that exist everywhere.

[00:25:09.57] I sometimes find that very hard to see, and it's a very abstract concept, but I see it very clearly in this history of August 11th and 12th in two regards, with regard to race and with regard to free speech. So the headline about race and August 11th and 12th, at the time, was the surprise that many whites expressed at the existence of these blatant forms of white supremacy and that many people of color, and especially Black Americans, found less surprising.

[00:25:39.18] But whichever way you saw it, August 11th and 12th seemed either to reveal or confirm the prevailing stories about the end of overt racism were not true. Thinking constitutively, it is more than that. It is also that the form that the law has taken over the past 70 years has structured our thinking about the world and the racial categories we use.

[00:26:02.97] And we can see this in the rhetoric and framing of the White supremacists, their self-presentation, and their claims. Whereas many of those who marched on August 11th and 12th identified themselves clearly as white supremacists, Jason Kessler called himself a white advocate. And he and others insisted that they were not white supremacists. They were merely white advocates.

[00:26:25.62] This shift, this use of the phrase, "white advocate", was made part-- was made possible, in part, by the domination of an anti-discrimination approach to equal protection law over the past 70 years. That approach, which is quite ascendant today, treats all race-based governmental action as constitutionally equivalent. It does not differentiate between, say, Jim Crow segregation and affirmative action.

[00:26:52.11] This approach framed August 11th and 12th. By deeming all racial categories suspect, the dominant anti-discrimination norm, wittingly or not, lent rhetorical, intellectual, and constitutional heft to the position of the white supremacists. It facilitated white victimhood and white racial grievance as the losers in a discriminatory legal regime and facilitated the rhetoric of white discrimination and the white advocate.

[00:27:21.07] The background conditions of free speech doctrine and its penumbras even more fundamentally shaped every aspect of what happened on August 11th and 12th. And the background conditions I have in mind are the constitutional and cultural norms. That peaceful expression is protected and categorically distinct from action, and in particular, from violence.

[00:27:41.56] In public forums, our law says speech must be allowed within certain content-neutral constraints like times and places and manners. Speakers engaged in peaceful protests are deserving of fundamental protection and receive the imprimatur of the law. In the context of August 11th and 12th, the dominant form of this legal framing was an event that never actually took place, and that was the Nazis marching peacefully in Skokie, Illinois.

[00:28:11.38] That image and that framing did enormous, sometimes visible and sometimes invisible, work in shaping what the university, the city, the courts, the lawyers, and the various police forces saw, how they prepared for and responded to the event, what they understood to be their options and degrees of freedom, how the counter-protesters responded, and how unmediated interactions between white supremacists and counter-protesters unfolded in a whole host of contexts.

[00:28:38.16] So to give just a few examples, as you know, prior to August 11th and 12th, there were several other events that took place during what has been called the Summer of Hate. And the police's understanding of those events was that it was their job to ensure that the white supremacists could speak freely and that the counter-protesters would not try to stop them. And they distributed a First Amendment refresher leaflet to all the police in the city to remind them of the importance of the First Amendment here.

[00:29:06.77] Another example that I find particularly telling is that when the city tried to revoke the white supremacist permit and move the event from downtown Charlottesville, the white supremacists retained as their lawyers, the ACLU of Virginia. There are few things in our society that reveal or reify the free speech backdrop of a case than the involvement of the ACLU.

[00:29:29.96] And that is especially true when the court agrees, as it did here, that the permit revocation had been based on the content of the white supremacists' speech, rather than public safety, and was therefore unconstitutional. The point here is not that the white supremacists weren't free speakers. They were, but that free speakers are also or can also be violent actors. And that they can be both free speakers and doers of violence.

[00:29:56.90] Adjusting the lens to see law as input then, we can make visible the often invisible or submerged legal categories, the legal ocean in which we all swim. And doing so, I think is enormously fruitful. But I still struggle against this methodological lens adjustment, in part, because I feel the pull of my own normativity, and in part, because I miss the people and the human agency.

[00:30:22.01] I fight against the tendency toward abstraction and inevitability. The law does. The law constitutes. The law structures, talking about backdrops and frameworks. As I explore these background conditions, what I see is people strategically deploying these background conditions to their advantage or trying to.

[00:30:40.88] So how did the white supremacists get constituted as free speakers? Were they really just the passive beneficiaries of this abstraction of the law? At whose behest does this constituting happen? And who else deployed or tried to deploy the law in what ways?

[00:30:56.62] So brings me to the final conception of the law, beyond the methodological approach, to think about the law as output, and then second, to think about it as input, as I did just now. A third is to think about the law as a medium, as its own arena of struggle. And actors on every side, in August 11th and 12th, saw the promise of deploying the legal process as one among many arenas of struggle, alongside formal politics, social movement jockeying, social media and regular media, and the physical, violent arena of struggle that occurred on the streets of Charlottesville and on our grounds.

[00:31:34.98] Both groups did so pervasively in a variety of directions and to a variety of ends. And who won in these individual cases was sometimes the point, but only sometimes. The goal could easily as be-- could as easily be harassment or coercion or incapacitation or bankrupting and scattering an organization or using the law as political theater and a platform for one's views or as proof of the government's complicity in the domination of someone else's views.

[00:32:04.02] This approach gets at the way we are awash in law, not only in the constitutive sense, the background understandings, but also in a very mechanical sense, that the availability of legal processes and the opportunity to deploy the power of the law on one's behalf, pervades our interactions with one another. You could say that the availability of these mechanisms is itself constitutive.

[00:32:26.52] But I think of it like this-- if the constitutive approach makes visible laws otherwise invisible presence, this law-- this approach tries to make sense of the highly visible uses of law everywhere. And it moves law from background condition to foregrounded weapon. It shows how people self-consciously and in sophisticated ways trade on as well as resist the background legal rules.

[00:32:50.25] So for some examples, this is, I think, what Jason Kessler and others were doing when they announced that they were not white supremacists. And indeed, when they called themselves "unite the right", that was intended to place themselves within the tradition of protected political speech. They were merely a conservative political coalition coming together in Charlottesville to peacefully protest the decisions about the Confederate statues.

[00:33:17.07] They reinforced the Skokie image, announcing in those early days that they were engaged in peaceful demonstrations and asserting, nobody here is committing violence. According to a legal expert who testified at the Sines v Kessler trial, the white supremacists purposefully distinguished between their public face and their private plans, attempting to maintain plausible deniability that would, quote, "shield themselves" from being blamed for wrongdoing, including criminal conduct.

[00:33:44.76] He cited the Daily Stormer style guide, which said, quote, "It's illegal to promote violence on the internet. At the same time, it's totally important to normalize the acceptance of violence as an eventuality or inevitability." Counter-protesters fought the free speech framing of the white supremacists at every step.

[00:34:03.81] Sometimes they rejected the speech violence distinction, viewing the speech itself, hate speech, as inherently violent. Our constitutional law does not view hate speech as inherently violent, and it is in fact protected. At other times, they tried and often failed to shift the white supremacist from the category of free speakers into the category of committers or at least intentional provokers of violence.

[00:34:28.86] They begged law enforcement to intervene and to retain its force, its monopoly of force, on August 11th and 12th. And they tried largely unsuccessfully to shift to themselves or at least share the mantle of free speakers, for example, by engaging and centering the clergy, who are clearly peaceful protesters.

[00:34:49.75] We can see in their failure, the confluence of the constitutive and the instrumental. In a free speech narrative, with only two clear roles, protected free speaker and heckler, the White supremacists had claimed the speaker role. And the counter-protesters found it very difficult to escape the heckler role and position themselves as equally protected and protectable free speakers.

[00:35:12.28] The frustration that they felt at this framing is palpable, and we could see it in all of their sources. It is as palpable as the vindication of the violence that the white supremacists felt when it was engaged in. These struggles over deploying legally available categories were most acute in the speech context, but you see them in the 109 cases all over the place.

[00:35:35.71] People on both sides were calling upon the law to back them up. They were using the law regularly and strategically and aggressively, often unmediated by lawyers, partly for strategic reasons, partly because many of the folks involved could not afford to retain lawyers. That said, lawyers have always been a big part of my scholarship and they are a big part of this story, too.

[00:35:58.46] There are lawyers from outside of Charlottesville who see themselves as defending democracy and see these cases as part of that defense. There are the locals who see themselves as part of the defense of Charlottesville, working in tandem with local progressive activists. Lawyers for the white supremacists, who have taken up that cause.

[00:36:19.43] The Virginia ACLU lawyers caught up in a conflict between free speech absolutism and their substantive political commitments, as well as federal prosecutors, federal public defenders, committed generally to the rule of law and the right of every defendant to a lawyer. And this will certainly be their story, too.

[00:36:37.88] But the effect of reading through this archive is one in which many cases, the law is brutal and direct and unmediated. The law really is a field of battle. It is not high-minded ideals or sedate concepts. It is the often ugly and crude imposition of state power into acrimonious relationships, political and ideological disagreements, violence, and conflict. And the law is, of course, all of those things. And so it's no surprise that we see them all here.

[00:37:10.65] So onto the narrative. Those are the methodological moves, as I said. I haven't quite decided on where I land, but that opens up the aperture. So the other aperture that opens up is how to frame the project. How big a story is this or how little? Where to start and end the story. What role does Charlottesville itself play?

[00:37:27.73] So I want to start by zooming out to what I think of as the grand narrative. The grand narrative is not my speed, at least, not as a way to begin a project. I like to begin at the margins. I began The Lost Promise by thinking about those who are held in involuntary servitude in the 1940s. And I thought about Vagrant Nation. I started there with Vagrants.

[00:37:48.27] I eventually came in to fairly central things in our legal and political history. Brown or the 1960s writ large. That said, I did initially think of Charlottesville as the center or a center of this project. And up until now, I have largely focused on August 11th or 12th as almost the singular unit of analysis.

[00:38:09.19] But there are many other centers for which Charlottesville might be the margins. You can put this zooming out in terms of spatial, rather than conceptual terms. Charlottesville is clearly part of a national and, in fact, global story, or you can put it in temporal terms. Charlottesville might be some middle point between different beginnings and endpoints. And we historians are always in the business of choosing where to start and where to end.

[00:38:34.41] Or you can put the zooming out in disciplinary terms. Legal history, often, maybe always, in modern form, combines with other sub disciplines of history-- political, social, cultural, economic, individual. So if you zoom out in all of the above, I think part of what makes Charlottesville Charlottesville is its resonance with so many different narratives about the late 20th and early 21st centuries, and in particular, with the grand narrative of the 21st century about the relationship between race and democracy,

[00:39:06.66] Arguably, this story goes back to the origins of our nation, in which white supremacy is deeply bound up with our aspirations for democracy. More directly, this grand narrative begins during Jim Crow, with white supremacist violence in places like Tulsa and Wilmington, that Charlottesville echoes. As well as post-Charlottesville white supremacist rallies in Boston DC and elsewhere.

[00:39:29.91] The same era that spawned the Confederate statues as part of the terror that violence was meant to do, whose continued presence and meaning raised conflicts about American heritage and our relationship to race, as well as the relationship between local, state, and national ideas about politics, race, and inequality, continues the narrative.

[00:39:49.47] Then it moves with the Civil Rights movement, in all of its forms, and the 70-year dynamic of civil rights progress and backlash that we have seen since Brown versus Board of Education, including resurgent or newly visible forms of white supremacy, anti-Semitism, and Christian nationalism on display during August 11th and 12th.

[00:40:09.12] It continues on into the national prominence of new movements for Black equality, the mass of protests after the killing of George Floyd, and the focus clearly at issue on August 11th and 12th on police and criminal justice. When racial equality activists did reclaim the mantle of free speakers, and white supremacists became, again, the counter-speakers. And then again with recent political and legal backlash against those movements.

[00:40:35.79] These dynamics are on display in politics as well as in law and social movements, with the election first of Barack Obama and then Donald Trump, and the race and class politics those elections reflect. And then, of course, on January 6, which both grew out of August 11th and 12th in certain concrete ways and resembled it in more general ones, the rise of global fascism, anti-Semitism, and political violence, and the challenge to US democracy that has dominated the political and legal landscape for the past several years.

[00:41:05.73] All of this culminates in questions about the relationship between democracy and pluralism and whether democracy can survive true pluralism as we head toward majority-minority status in a few decades. It's unclear to me, at this moment, whether this grand narrative will turn out to be a story of continuity or change, of declension or triumph or irony or tragedy, of Charlottesville as part of a last gasp of white supremacist reaction or the continuation of an enduring internal racial tension within our democracy, or a major inflection point in the breakdown of that democracy. It remains to be seen.

[00:41:42.83] That this history is so recent, seems both to curtail possible endings as we are still very much in the middle, and also to proliferate them. We do not yet know which aspects of this history will look significant from some future perspective, when historians will be preoccupied with new and different questions to which these events might provide an answer.

[00:42:03.52] What is clear is that this grand historical arc that has not yet ended, decenter Charlottesville in August 11th and 12th. It moves from particular to general. The Charlottesville statues are interesting because they're related to all Confederate statues. White supremacy in Charlottesville is tied to white supremacy everywhere.

[00:42:23.38] In this story, Charlottesville might become a case study, or a lens through which to understand all of this, or perhaps just a footnote to this larger story. And my fear is that, ultimately, it will not be a story about Charlottesville at all, which brings me to zooming in rather than out.

[00:42:46.53] And I think of this as law, place, and power. So much as I resist the Charlottesville moniker, this is very much the story of an actual place, actual people, and an actual community, or set of overlapping communities, our communities. We lose something if we lose sight of that.

[00:43:04.62] The personal stories, how a community experiences trauma, is a protagonist in that trauma, can be responsible for that trauma. The small city's reckoning with it's, our own history and our own aspirations for the future. Of course, it is necessary to frame this project to make sense of Charlottesville and its place in the larger world as part of that grand narrative, but not at the expense of the specific and the grounded, the archive I have been creating, the rich and textured sources, and the legal historical questions my own jury service-- my own jury participation generated.

[00:43:39.58] So I would start by zooming all the way in to that courtroom, or rather, the many courtrooms in which jurors encountered August 11th and 12th in related cases. In so many cases, over 100 jurors would be seated-- we'd be called to seat 21. In the Fields case, the voir dire transcript spans more than 1,000 pages. And the voir dire itself took over 27 hours.

[00:44:02.23] Groups and individuals engaged in voir dire that showed themselves in this transcript, they show a testimony of trauma, catharsis, anger, defiance, and healing. And there are so many snippets in there about these personal experiences. I was at this place at this time, and this is how those events affected my life.

[00:44:25.51] So many people who referred to Heather Heyer as Heather, who had never met her when asked, but that was how they thought about her. Those who, in case after case, had personal stories to tell. And those who after my jury-- my jury participation, ended early because the case was dismissed. Perfect strangers offered to drive each other home after this shared experience that they had had in this courtroom.

[00:44:53.53] This story might have something to say historically about juries. There's a common story historians tell about how, once upon a time, juries were self-informing. They were chosen for their knowledge of their community and the events at hand. But at some point, between the 14th and the 16th centuries, jurors were no longer expected to have such knowledge. And such knowledge, in fact, became disqualifying, or at least biased knowledge became disqualifying.

[00:45:19.97] So in that context, what do you make of a voir dire process and a case that was resolved after testimony that reads like a ritual of personal and community catharsis? Whatever it tells us about juries, it most certainly definitely tells us something about Charlottesville, the place, not the symbol.

[00:45:40.30] I don't want to romanticize my jury service or overstate the sense of unity that I see in these voir dire transcripts, because, we have all seen something very different from that in our small Southern diverse, stratified university city in the aftermath of August 11th and 12th, where there has been a lot of anger, a lot of acrimony, and a lot of question of responsibility.

[00:46:03.84] It's been a major inflection point for us here, highlighting inequalities that had long been submerged. And asking what we should do about those equalities has shaped our local politics and governance ever since. This is most emphatically that story too. A story about both coming together and coming apart.

[00:46:23.09] Sometimes I think I have to tell this story, not that I am the only one who can-- I am certainly not-- but because I am among those who can. I know things that cannot be found in the traditional sources, like the story of my jury case. The only inkling in the actual trial transcript that the jury pool played any role in the outcome of that case was the defense lawyers thanks, otherwise, no one would know about the testimony that happened there.

[00:46:50.20] We often think, as historians, that sources become less available with distance in time, that records are not made or they're lost, firsthand participants and observers are no longer available to share their memories. So I was surprised, in 2022, how much is lost to the proverbial record immediately.

[00:47:08.53] We have a transcript. We have an abundance of-- overabundance of sources, and yet, the record is still so partial. And partial in ways that are, to me, vitally important. I am a primary source, and perhaps that brings with it a certain obligation to tell some version of this story.

[00:47:27.83] But sometimes I think I can't possibly, precisely because of my personal relationship to these events. And you can see I'm back in the autobiography section at the end of this lecture. For one thing, my participation creates not only access but challenges. I am a potentially unreliable narrator with many roles to navigate. And I worry that it is wrong to place myself in the center of the story or in it at all.

[00:47:53.50] For another, I remain unwilling, perhaps unable to let go of my moral framing of these events. I have called those who have incited-- who incited violence on August 11th and 12th white supremacists, rather than "unite the right" or even something more neutral, demonstrators, or protesters. I don't want to see them as they saw themselves or as they tried to get others to see them.

[00:48:18.13] And even as I acknowledge that some counter-protesters also engaged in violence and in illegal acts, the moral asymmetry in the causes of the two groups pervades my sense of everything that occurred. I am not sure it makes sense to write a legal history in which one does not try to understand the motivations of all the actors and, certainly, of those who play significant roles.

[00:48:41.84] And finally and most fundamentally, I am not sure I will write this book because it may just be too hard. I had not wanted to write this book. I had not wanted to write about the violence of August 11th and 12th when I had imagined writing about it directly.

[00:48:57.95] My conversation with the local judge, my jury pool experience, and my thinking about Charlottesville as legal history made it possible. Turning to law would provide distance from the humanity and the inhumanity of the story. Thinking of this project in terms of formal law, whether triumphant or failing or ironic, whether constitutive or pluralist, whether part of a larger narrative or in a close reading of sources, would create a buffer from the horror, would abstract away from the humanity.

[00:49:25.70] But as I have worked through this open aperture moment and what it would really mean to do Charlottesville as legal history in any of the ways that I would want to, I realized that all of those distancing moves necessarily fail. Of course, I can't hide behind law. That is not how or why I do history. Certainly, not how or why I do legal history.

[00:49:48.26] I don't want to push the people, the violence, the humanity, and the inhumanity from the center to the margins, and play some dry and abstract notion of law at the center. I don't think these margins and that center, the lived experience of the law, and the formal legal process can be separated.

[00:50:07.66] A legal history book devoid of all of that would be one that I don't want to write and would probably not find all that interesting to read. And so, as I've amassed my archive and thought about writing a book, the non-law has kept hitting me in the face. And I use that violent analogy on purpose because there is so much violence here. Violence that I can't avoid if I'm going to do this story justice as legal history or in any other way.

[00:50:34.64] As I sat writing the first version of this lecture for the plenary address a year ago, we were commemorating the fifth anniversary of these events. And as I wrote, literally, bells were tolling on UVA grounds for the dead and injured. Media interest was renewed. The Cav Daily reprinted articles from the days and weeks afterward, including an interview with me in my capacity as chair of the response.

[00:51:00.03] How can I write this story, I wondered, even if I call it legal history? I don't know if I will or where I will end up, but I do know this-- if I write this book, It will involve law as output, input, and everything in between. It will involve law and humanity and inhumanity. It will be messy and normative and grand and specific and personal and deeply flawed. I hope that I will be able to write it. And I hope that you, who also lived through these events, will want to read it. Thank you.

[00:51:33.59] [APPLAUSE]

[00:51:48.11] SPEAKER: Thank you very much. That was very enlightening. Those of us who were here during that have, I'm sure, our recollections of it. And as the queen says, recollections may vary. But that's important to catch that variety of recollections. So Risa has agreed to take some questions. Just to let you know, we are recording this, so let's try to get the questions on the mic. So if you raise your hand-- Denny has one and I have one. And I'm sure you have lots of questions.

[00:52:25.30] AUDIENCE: I'm just wondering, in this whole story, does the fact that President Biden has mentioned Charlottesville, does that help the dynamic? Does it diminish it? Does that-- how does that influence what might happen?

[00:52:39.08] RISA GOLUBOFF: Yeah, absolutely. So I left some things out for the purposes of time. But one of the things that I definitely am aware of is that President Trump commented on Charlottesville. President Biden launched his campaign from Charlottesville, speaking explicitly about Charlottesville and democracy. His administration also launched a new domestic anti-terrorism project from Charlottesville a couple of years ago.

[00:53:06.01] And I think what that says to me is the resonance of Charlottesville in national politics, up to the highest levels, is really significant, which is why one can't tell the story of Charlottesville just at the local level. It is embedded in national politics.

[00:53:23.03] It has become a symbol of a number of different things for different people. But it is truly something that speaks to people on the national and I think even global stage. So it is something that will definitely be a part of the book if it is written, but didn't quite make it into the lecture.

[00:53:43.20] AUDIENCE: Hi, I have a quick question. I'm clearly not a lawyer, but when does free speech cross the line? If you're carrying tiki torches up the lawn, that seems to go beyond speech into action. And I also know that a year afterwards, some mothers went out and bought every tiki torch that they could find in Charlottesville so that it didn't happen again. But where is that line? And how does the law deal with it when it starts to get murky like that?

[00:54:16.11] RISA GOLUBOFF: It's a great question. And I will say, first, I'm not a free speech expert, though I have written about it some in this context. But there are others on my faculty who can do more justice to your question. But the tiki torches themselves do not necessarily switch from protected to unprotected speech.

[00:54:38.04] And in fact, the even greater weaponry on August 12th didn't even necessarily switch people from protected to unprotected speakers. The line is really violence, imminent threats. There are a few others, but in this context, it's really violence and imminent threats.

[00:55:00.28] And best practices when you are facing an event that's going to have protesters and counter-protesters who might engage with one another in violent acts are to keep them separated. And that is not what happened on either August 11th or August 12th. And I think part of what made Charlottesville resonate so deeply is people really did expect peaceful protest.

[00:55:28.40] Whether they should have or not is a different question. But all the people planning for the response were expecting peaceful protests, peaceful counter-protests, and they did not create the conditions to keep apart these two groups. And I think it was a sea-change moment, in which that was not the intention of the white supremacists.

[00:55:48.39] And it's very clear they lied to the university police about what their intentions were on the night of August 11th. They told them they were starting in a different place than they were. They started earlier than they did. And so their intentions were violence. And that is pretty clear in the aftermath, but it wasn't necessarily clear at the time.

[00:56:08.77] The other thing that became clear at the time was that the university did not have mechanisms in place to regulate the time, place, and manner of protected speech. So the white supremacists needed a permit to be in a city park, but they did not need any permit or to inform anyone of their intentions to be on ground.

[00:56:29.11] So one of the things that we did in the aftermath as well was create a content-neutral time, place, and manner regulation to enable the university and the police to know when speakers were coming and to know where they would be and whether there needed to be protection for counter-protesters.

[00:56:47.94] I will say, though, in the vagrant nation, I do talk a fair bit about the blurry lines between protected and unprotected speech, and where those lines are drawn and how those lines move. And it's not an easy answer to the question.

[00:57:02.67] Let me say one last thing about that. The reason I mentioned August 12th is constitutional protection for the individual right to bear arms is fairly young in the United States. The first case was in 2008. And in 2017, it was a fairly immature doctrine.

[00:57:19.20] And I think one of the things that we're still working out in the aftermath of 2017 is what the interactions between the First Amendment, free speech, and the Second Amendment, the right to bear arms, look like. And I think one possibility is the bearing of arms is symbolic speech, as were the tiki torches. And symbolic speech is protected.

[00:57:40.85] Another possibility is can you regulate the Second Amendment right in the name of protecting the First Amendment right, or does the Second Amendment right trump the First Amendment? So these are questions that haven't been answered yet and I think are really important to.

[00:57:58.30] AUDIENCE: This is a naive and uninformed question, but given the prominence that you've laid out for us of this incident in Charlottesville, why did it happen here? Do we know how they picked this place? I should know that, but I don't. And I'd love to know how it happened here rather than somewhere else.

[00:58:18.13] RISA GOLUBOFF: It's a really good question. And others might have different answers for me, but I'll tell you my answer. I think there are at least two reasons, and they're complementary. Well, maybe there are three reasons, I don't know. They're all related. But let me go through it and I'll see how many I end up with.

[00:58:34.80] So Jason Kessler and Richard Spencer, two of the organizers, are graduates of the University of Virginia. And I think they saw the direction of the university as a betrayal of their sense of where the university commitments should lie and of their understanding of the founders and their understanding of Jefferson.

[00:59:01.67] I think that was exacerbated by the decision to remove the Confederate statues. Obviously, the Confederate statues are the reason they say they came, but there are Confederate statues in lots of places. So to me, I think they, in part, chose Charlottesville and UVA because they felt betrayed by a university that has become more pluralist, that has been trying to reckon with its past, that has been trying to live beyond its history of enslavement and white supremacy. And I think they saw that as a betrayal and they wanted to reclaim this place for the ideals that they believe in.

[00:59:39.51] I think the second really important point is that they were looking to provoke violence. And they wanted to come to a place where there would be an active progressive community that would meet them. And that would not stay home and that would vociferously protest their values and their actions, and they got that. I mean, that is what happened here.

[01:00:02.85] So I think there's a less rosy story about the university that could be told, that they feel comfortable in the university. And they came back because this is their university and that's the nature of this university. That's not the university I know.

[01:00:17.13] It's not the university that I think anyone here has been working toward for a long time. But there are critics out there who I think would say that as well, but I think it was a combination of feeling like it should be their university and is no longer, and wanting to come to a place where they would meet resistance.

[01:00:37.60] AUDIENCE: Thank you for your talk. One part of the story that I don't think is discussed very often is that 150 white supremacists came and caused this problem, but the students got together about six or seven days later and created something called "Take Back the Lawn".

[01:00:57.65] And I was part of it. And it looked like there was somewhere between 3 and 6,000 people there, and peacefully protested against the white supremacy. And that doesn't seem to be part of the narrative anymore. And I wondered if you have any comment on that.

[01:01:14.34] RISA GOLUBOFF: Yeah, I mean I think it should be part of the narrative. And again, I didn't mention it here just out of time, but if you've ever gone to the webpage and the website that was created after August 11th and 12th by our committee, the main picture on that webpage is of Take Back the Lawn.

[01:01:32.42] And I think it was a very significant moment. I was there, too. And the fact that our students did it, the fact that faculty, staff, administrators, alumni, Board of Visitors members were there, it was a really cohesive response.

[01:01:49.07] And when I've spoken less academically and more, I don't know, inspirationally about this, to me, I think Charlottesville has to be a rallying cry. I think a lot of people think of it as a tragedy, which it was, and yet the response to it was, "This is not our-- that's not what our place is. We won't allow that to be what this place is."

[01:02:12.30] And I think a lot of what we did after the students and all during that following year, was to say, "How do we make sure that we are not the place that they want us to be? How do we make sure that we continue our commitments to inclusive, plural, tolerant, equitable, being that kind of institution?" So I think you're absolutely right.

[01:02:37.69] AUDIENCE: Risa, thank you. I thought that was a really wonderful talk. But I'm wondering why anti-Semitism plays such a small part in your narrative. Anti-Semitism, after all, was probably the dominant trope of the white supremacists.

[01:02:58.30] And anti-Semitism should be important in your story because you're narrating it partly in an autobiographical frame and you identify yourself as part of the local Jewish community. And it's sort of surprising then that you don't interrogate that issue of anti-Semitism more explicitly. I wonder what your comments are.

[01:03:23.56] RISA GOLUBOFF: It's such a good question and I appreciate it. And, of course, I have a few answers, as I always do. So one of them is I am a historian of race and movements for Black equality. And I don't know as much about the history of anti-Semitism, and that's something I have to learn more about.

[01:03:43.95] So I think the short answer is I think it will be far more significant when I write the book if I write the book, and should be. But I don't yet know the frames in which to put it perfectly. And so it's harder for me to spin out what those look like right now. So they are certainly meant to be-- it is certainly meant to be a part of the book. I don't disagree with you that it was a huge part of these events.

[01:04:13.19] I will also say, I guess, part of why I don't talk about it more, well, I think two other reasons. One reason why I don't talk about it more is my discomfort with the autobiography. So I've never been a person who has written about myself. I have always been a person who has written about others, and so I haven't yet figured out how to navigate that.

[01:04:37.58] And when I talk about this in other registers, which I do, I talk about what it was to be the mother of two children who experienced this and how it changed our sense of the Jewish community in Charlottesville and our sense of safety and security, and what it did to our synagogue. And yet, I hesitate to do that in this project. And I imagine I will, at some point, have to, but I have not yet.

[01:05:06.26] And I guess the last thing I'll say about it is, from my institutional frame, it was really telling to me in the aftermath of these days, when I talked to so many students, faculty, and staff around the university to figure out what our committee should be doing. And the Jewish members of our community I talked to in the university were really worried about safety and security and were really worried about, were they going to come back? Was the synagogue safe? Was Hillel safe? Were there safe-- were they safe on campus?

[01:05:38.33] And the Black students I spoke to were worried about a much more fundamental thing, is this a white supremacist institution? Do I have a place here? And we spent a lot more time, institutionally, I think, thinking about the racial questions than the anti-Semitism questions, partly because-- the first thing we did was the safety and security stuff. That had to be the first thing.

[01:06:04.01] And we addressed that and we did-- we took a number of steps to ensure safety and security as best we could. And happily, they did not come back and mostly have not come back. But the sense of a lack of belonging was so profoundly different among our students of color than among our Jewish students.

[01:06:25.37] And so a lot of the way I thought about our institutional response was also framed by race. So that's to explain why I think more about race. But I don't disagree with you. And I do think that at the end of the day, the anti-Semitism story has to be a major one too.

[01:06:43.08] AUDIENCE: Thank you, Risa. I like the question to you about why it happened here and not elsewhere because I think it takes us to a methodological question that you raise. When you go to the constitutive powers, you're thinking about how you go from the events of history to a sense of history, [INAUDIBLE].

[01:07:09.54] There is a new French reception of that called Il Y A, There is, which is about the mode of appearing of a phenomenon, the very way it enters into our world. And you may want to look at the work of Claude Romano for that. He has a book called Il Y A, There is. And he writes about precisely how you go from [INAUDIBLE] to the new way of looking at it.

[01:07:47.59] RISA GOLUBOFF: Wonderful. Thank you. I will look at that.

[01:07:52.97] SPEAKER: Anyone else? More questions? OK, well let's thank our speaker so much for that.

[01:08:00.73] RISA GOLUBOFF: Thank you. Thank you all.

[01:08:01.98] [APPLAUSE]

KATHYRN THORNTON: Interesting presentation today that I'm really looking forward to. So I'll keep my remarks brief so professor Vaish can have plenty of time for her presentation. 

First, I want to sincerely thank all the donors who responded to our Giving Tuesday appeal and who donated throughout the year. Since August, we've received 23 gifts ranging from $25 to $500 from our board of directors and officers, and from our general membership. Your generosity has enabled us to pay our major expense, our $3,000 annual fee to the Alumni Association who does an excellent job of providing administration, communications, our website, and the tech expertise to present our seminars, provide closed captioning for them, and also to archive them on our website. 

After paying our outstanding bill for closed captioning today, we will have sufficient funds to end this year in the black with about $2,000 in the bank, which is a great relief. Since we suspended dues at the beginning of the pandemic, the retired faculty association is completely dependent on your support. So if you feel so inclined when you're working on your taxes or thinking about your charitable contributions for this year, we are always grateful for your financial support anytime of the year. 

Second, our last event of the academic year will be on April 10th when President Ryan will host a talk and a reception at the Boar's Head Inn from 1:00 to 3:00 PM. It'll be a similar format as last year's event with a Q&A session led by Dick Brownley and a few questions from the audience. Appetizers, soft drinks, beer, and wine will be served at that. So put April 10th on your calendar in ink if you use a paper calendar. 

So now I would like to hand over to Dennis Proffitt, a member of our board of directors who will introduce our speaker.

DENNIS PROFFITT: Hello, I'm Dennis Proffitt. I'm a retired faculty member from the Department of Psychology, and it's my pleasure to introduce my colleague, Amrisha Vaish. 

Amrisha is one of our own. She graduated with a bachelor's degree from the University of Virginia in 2002 with double majors in psychology and in English. She then received a master's degree from the University of Chicago in 2006, and then a PhD degree from... in 2010 from the Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and also from the Free University of Berlin. 

She stayed on at Max Planck for four years, first as a post-doctoral researcher, and then as an institute fellow. We hired her in 2014, and she is today the Pamela Feinour Edmonds and Franklin S. Edmonds Jr. Discovery Associate Professor of Psychology. 

She has received a number of awards for her research. In 2018 from the Association of Psychological Science, she received an early career award and in 2021 from Max Planck Institute, a sabbatical award. She's been recognized for her outstanding teaching at the University of Virginia with a Mead Honored Faculty Award in 2017. And in 2019, an all university teaching award. 

She's published approximately 70 peer reviewed journal articles and chapters. Her research has been funded by grants from among others, the Sir John Templeton Foundation and from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. 

Today, she's going to be talking to us about her research on the foundations of morality and cooperation in early childhood. Amrisha.

AMIRSHA VAISH: Thank you so much, that's such a kind introduction. I'm really pleased to be here. Thank you for the invite and I'm delighted to talk to you today a little bit about some of the research that I've been doing and that we're continuing to do in my lab. So yeah, I'll share my screen and get started. Can you see that okay? 

ATTENDEE: Yes.

AMIRSHA VAISH: Okay, great. All right, I'm gonna hide- There we go, all right. 

So I'm gonna talk to you today about the foundations of morality and cooperation in early childhood. I thought I'd begin by just providing a kind of a quick overview of some prior work that we've done, that I did as part of my PhD in Leipzig, in Germany, and then continued some of that work here. 

And then I'll delve a little more deeply then in the second half into some more recent work that we've been doing here into one specific facet of morality or moral motivations. And so that's kind of how I'll set the talk up. 

I received a few questions and I've tried to incorporate them into the talk just where they seem most relevant. So I'll discuss those as well as we go. 

Oops. 

Okay, so humans are of course, intensely social beings. We benefit greatly from living and cooperating in groups, by exchanging goods and services, by coordinating our efforts to obtain food, by defending ourselves against predators and so on and so forth. But group living and cooperation can also be problematic because individuals may tend toward selfishness. And so, although individuals benefit by being part of a group, it may be in each individual's interest to care more about him or herself, to make others give more and take less than their share while he himself or she herself gives less and takes more. And this kind of selfishness will eventually lead to the collapse of the group and thus also to the loss of the enormous benefits that we gain by living in groups. 

This is a really fundamental social dilemma that we need to resolve in order to succeed as individuals, as groups, and really as a species. And so the critical question is then what helps us resolve this fundamental social dilemma? 

The solution, or at least one very important solution to this fundamental dilemma is morality. As Dennis Krebs argued in his 2011 book, morality functions, "the function of morality" "is to help people maximize their gains" "from cooperative social relations" "by inducing members of their groups, including themselves," "to behave in mutually beneficial ways" "and to resist the temptation to advance their interests" "in ways that jeopardize the welfare of others." 

So Krebs' focus here is on the functions of morality, right? What has morality evolved for? How did it benefit our ancestors and how might it serve really fundamental functions for human life today? And the argument is that morality has evolved to allow us to live and interact and work with others, that is, essentially to foster cooperation. 

And I'll just make a note here about the terminology. When I say cooperation, I'm not using it in the narrower sense that it's often used, which is working together with others. That is the literal sense, but in a slightly, in a somewhat broader sense of cooperative social relations where we benefit each other in some way. And that could include working with others, but it's also helping others, sharing with others and so forth, showing concern for others and so forth. 

So Krebs' argument here is that morality has evolved to foster our cooperative social relations and to help us solve this fundamental social dilemma of group living and individual selfishness. And this is broadly speaking, the approach that I take in my work as well when I ask about morality and moral development and development of cooperation. 

So humans are, for the most part, moral. We help others, we share with others, we comfort others, and this is what I call, and is often generally called in the field, prosocial behaviors, so behaviors that benefit other people. We feel and show concern for others. We make moral evaluations. So when we see other people doing bad things in particular, we make, you know, have certain reactions. We make evaluations about those individuals, and we often may punish those transgressors in various ways. 

And we are also motivated by what we think about as moral emotions. So things like guilt or gratitude, which is what I'll talk about during the second half of this talk. And so this morality, you know, all of these are really critical for humans to live and work together in groups for our morality and for cooperation. 

It's clear that as adults, we're equipped with this impressive arsenal of moral or morally relevant capacities, even if we of course don't use them at all times, but we are equipped with them. And these are all vital for living and working with others and for upholding cooperation. 

But what we have only recently begun to understand are the developmental foundations of these prosocial and moral and cooperative capacities and their underlying mechanisms. And this is the question at the heart of my research. 

There was a question that I received about recruitment and how we, in general, in this kind of work, how do we recruit children and families to participate in our studies and the work that we do? And in addition, relatedly, what was the impact of Covid on our ability to pursue this work? 

And so just briefly, let me just say, so I've conducted a lot of the work that I'll talk about in back in Germany, and then of course, a lot of it here as well. And in both places, which and commonly in the field in which people do lab studies with children and with families, we have children and families come into the lab. And those are often from a kind of database, and that's true here at UVA as well. We have a shared database across several developmental labs where we recruit participants from just events out in the community. 

So we go to farmer's markets and sometimes like, you know, mom and baby yoga type contexts or other contexts in which families, just the park, the library, places where families may be kind of open and interested in hearing about what we what kinds of things we do, and maybe signing up. And once they're in our database, then when their children are the right age for a particular study, we get in touch with them and if they have the time, they come into the lab, we then offer them a small, like a gift for the child, sometimes a gift certificate. 

In addition, we also go into museums. More recently we've been going into the Discovery Museum, which is downtown. We have a partnership with the Richmond Museum, The Children's Museum in the Museum of Science in Richmond. And so we set up a booth and if we have a study that's right for that kind of environment, then we often take it there. 

And then in Covid, which was the second part of that question, it really did impact our research a lot. We had to pause a lot of our ongoing studies because we couldn't have families coming in. And of course, even once adults were vaccinated, that was a big lag until children were, young children were vaccinated. And so there was really a long pause in in-person studies that we were able to do. 

However, we did pivot to doing studies online where that was possible, where the method permitted and the questions permitted themselves to be conducted online. And so we did actually collect a lot of data from families that signed up just to participate via Zoom in our studies. So just to - that's just to give you a sense of what we're, ya know, how we've been recruiting. 

One question that often comes up in that context is about representation and kind of the diversity of the sample. And that is something we've really been working hard. And so in part, for instance, going into the museums allows us access to a much more diverse population than actually having people coming into the lab. The online testing that we started to do during Covid actually allows us to reach far beyond Charlottesville and even ya know, Virginia, right? We can get people from anywhere in the US and actually at some point, hopefully even across the world, can sign up for our studies and do those studies. And so we can actually really start to increase the diversity of our sample in those ways. It is something we're working towards. 

Okay, so that's just to give you a sense of kind of how we, you know, the logistics of conducting some of this work. 

So let's return to kind of what are the developmental foundations of this, of these kinds of moral capacities? I have in fact, or we, with my colleagues and students, have in fact, addressed all of these aspects of morality and cooperation that I mentioned in one way or another in our work. And all in all, we have shown that actually from really quite early in development, remarkably early in development, children begin to develop and to display some of these most critical foundational moral capacities. 

For people who have young children or grandchildren, sometimes that can be surprising because children don't always seem to act in the best moral ways. They're not always as helpful as perhaps they could be. So, you know, of course the fact is that we are all both helpful, altruistic, prosocial, moral and also selfish and looking out for our own interests. And those two things are always in competition in some sense. And so the point is that a lot of these capacities already exist and we do see evidence for them in various contexts, even if in real life, in everyday context, they don't always emerge and aren't always evident. Okay, so for instance, in our work, we have shown that children help others, share with others and comfort others. This is these prosocial behaviors that I mentioned. This is not just my work, but other work in the field as well. By 14 to 18 months already, children begin to show the capacity to help others in simple ways. Here's a video from one of my studies in which, that shows a really nice example of sharing. This is a two-year-old child. She was given two balloons. And then in these picture and pictures, these little, the smaller videos here, you can see the experimenter sitting here with one balloon of her own. And at some point, that balloon is gonna float up to the sky or to the ceiling, rather, and she's not gonna have a balloon anymore so she's gonna be sad. (woman speaking in German) This is is German, but when the child speaks, you'll be able to, there's some subtitles. So her balloon has just flown up to the ceiling, she's trying to reach for it, as you can see down here. 

And the child is watching intently. The child will now go to her mother who is sitting in the corner and she's telling her mother the balloon is gone and I can't reach it. And then she goes to one of her own balloons and shares one of them with the experimenter and is clearly happy to have done so, right? Is not upset that she had to give up her own balloon. She's happy to have helped this experimenter in her time of need. Okay, so we see these kinds of behaviors from quite young ages across a variety of contexts. And we've even found that the motivation that underlies these early prosocial behaviors of helping and sharing seems to be genuinely other oriented, okay? 

And so what we've shown in various ways is that children are not motivated by some, for instance, selfish desire to receive credit for helping, to be seen as a good helper, to be liked and so forth. This is one example of how we have shown this. So we've used pupil dilation, that is the dilation of the eye's pupils, where we measure how dilated children's pupils get in various contexts. 

So what we find, first of all is that when children, and these are two-year-olds, when they see someone in need of help, we see that their pupils dilate. Their somehow, their sympathetic nervous system is aroused, okay? They have, they're engaged and they're sort of interested and motivated in this context when they see someone in need of help. Importantly, that arousal goes back to baseline levels, that dilation goes back to baseline levels as long as the person receives help, regardless of who provides the help. 

So on the left hand side here is children's pupil dilation after they provide help and zero is back to baseline, so this is returning to baseline, and this here is when someone else provides help. You can see that their arousal also goes down in that case. It remains high in comparison when no help is provided. So when that person, that need is not in fact fulfilled, that pupil dilation stays high, suggesting that when they help themselves, the main motivation is not that they be recognized for helping or they receive credit for helping, but rather that the person be helped, suggesting that it really is an other oriented, altruistic or prosocial motivation, okay? 

We've also shown that children feel concerned for others and display concern for others. So in lots of work prior to my own, there was a quite a lot of evidence that already by about 14 to 18 months, infants show concern for people who are in distress. So someone who's bumped their knee and is in pain, you know, they show concerned facial expressions and then go over to the person and try to help in some way. So that had been established. 

What we have shown beyond that is that this concern is really quite flexible. 

And so for instance, we find that young children, two-year-olds, show concern in their facial expressions and their actions, even when the victim, the person who was harmed, does not show any overt distress. 

So here we ask whether children can sympathize with a victim of harm, only if the victim displays sort of overt distress in their face at being harmed, which had already been shown before, or whether they can also sympathize in the absence of that kind of distress in sort of a more sophisticated cognitive way where they're having to kind of imagine how the person might feel, right, and arrive at that concern in this moral complex way. And we found that in fact, by 18 months to two years, they did show concern even if the victim didn't display any overt distress. 

In addition, we've shown that on the flip side, they don't always show concern anytime someone shows distress. So here we found that when they see someone who is, you know, hasn't really been hurt in any real way, but is showing a lot of distress, children show less concern for that person than for a person who's showing distress after really having been hurt. 

Here's a video of what that looks like. So this is a three-year-old child, and in front of this child is the experimenter that you'll see talking when I switch the video on or moving. And what's gonna happen is that he's gonna reach over here and his sleeve or his shirt is gonna get caught in this box. So he's not really been hurt, his sleeve is caught, he's not really in pain, but he displays distress as though he were, okay? And the question is how much concern do children show for this individual in this context versus a context in which his hand really is caught and he may well be in pain? So this is when his sleeve gets caught. So he reaches over and his sleeve is now caught, and this is the child's reaction. You can see the child isn't really buying it, is kind of looking around, looks, turns around to face, I think her mother who's in the background there. And then we of course resolved the situation and lift up the box and he says it's fine again. And the question is how much concern did they show? And we found that in fact, by three years and in other labs, this has been shown at even somewhat younger ages, children show less concern if the person is a crybaby, right? Is showing distress even though they weren't hurt versus when they're showing the exact same distress in a context in which they were hurt. 

So children really seem to have a pretty flexible concern system where they're really showing concern for individuals who really seem to be in need and not just based on some kind of superficial overt cues, okay? 

We also have, we and other people have shown that children from young ages seem to be making some kinds of implicit moral evaluations and to be punishing or intervening in moral transgressions in some important ways. 

So here, just to summarize some of this work, we found that by three years of age, children withhold resources from transgressors. So if they see one person harming another person, when the transgressor, the person who caused the harm later needs some resources, is reaching for some resources that she needs to complete some task, children are less likely to hand those resources to her than to a person who didn't cause any harm. And so children were not themselves affected, but they saw someone hurting another person and they then withhold resources from that person. 

We also find that they protest against moral transgressions and also report on moral transgressions in the form of tattling. So here's an example of a three-year-old in a context in which this- So this was done with puppets rather than the actual adult experimenter causing the transgression because we found that children seem to feel more comfortable speaking up against a, you know, a puppet doing something bad rather than an adult doing something bad. 

And so, although they do that to some extent even when an adult does something bad, but they seem to do it sort of more willingly when it's quote unquote, sort of like a peer or a puppet, okay? So this cow is gonna be mean and is going to destroy a picture that was drawn by a different puppet who's now left the room. So the second puppet is out of the room and this cow puppet is now going to be mean to that puppet by damaging a picture that that other puppet drew and you can see how the child responds. (woman speaking German) (child speaking German) (child speaking German) So now the other puppet is coming back and the child is reporting on this action and sort of tattling, right? And so they're clearly intervening, she's clearly, you know, invested in this and is objecting to it strongly and is then reporting on the transgressor. 

So you might think perhaps she's doing that because she's worried that the elephant puppet or the victim is going to blame her for destroying the picture 'cause she wasn't in the room. We subsequently have conducted, my student, Malta Yucel, who's pictured here. Her - One of her studies in my lab was to explore exactly that alternative. So in this case we had it, we set it up such that the thing that was going to be destroyed was in this box that the child didn't have any access to, only the transgressor had access to. And nonetheless, when the victim then returned to the room, children did tattle about that behavior. Even though everyone knew that the child couldn't have accessed this thing and couldn't have destroyed it and therefore couldn't be blamed, children still protested and tattled against this transgression.

So they seem to really kind of care that other people aren't harmed and they sort of take a stance and try to intervene, okay? And then finally, we have recently, more relatively recently begun to investigate moral emotions or sort of basic forms of moral emotions and how they might be guiding some of these moral behaviors from early in development. And the question- And so I thought that what I might do for the rest of the talk is to zoom in on this piece and specifically on the gratitude piece, how we've been - and talk about how we've been examining the emergence and the prosocial functions or moral functions of gratitude in young children.

Before I do that, there was another question that I had received about how our work and our findings relate to Piaget's construct of morality and cooperation. And so just to add address that briefly, that's a really good and important question.

So for those who don't know, Jean Piaget was of course one of the most important, if not the most important developmental psychologists, a really kind of influential figure in the field of developmental psychology. And his theories on all aspects of development have been extremely influential. And he had a whole theory that he put forward on moral development as well. So in broad strokes, the things that Piaget proposed have been supported. So he talked about sort of increasingly sophisticated forms of moral thinking over the course of the preschool and early school years into adolescence.

That certainly continues to be, hold true as the research proceeds. He also talked about the processes of moral development and the construction of morality. And in particular, he talked about how for children, it's really important to interact with their peers as they're constructing morality. That that's how they really begin to learn to sort of think about morality and what it really is and when rules can be broken and when they can't, and how we construct rules and so on and that they do that much better with peers, with equals rather than with authority figures like parents or teachers. And that has been supported as well. 

More recently, the work suggests that children really do show more sophisticated reasoning and discussions when they discuss moral dilemmas with their peers and with their parents. That being said, some of the details of Piaget's proposals have not held up. So it seems like, at least in the moral realm and in some other realms as well, Piaget may have really underestimated children's capacities quite a bit, partly because of the methods he was using. And as the methods become more sensitive and sophisticated, we're able to get earlier understandings than Piaget did. So, you know, he proposed for instance, that children aren't really able to take others' perspectives very well at young ages, and it's really quite late, about seven, eight, nine years of age, that they are able to take others' perspectives. And that turns out to not really be true. Children are pretty good at taking others' perspectives. They don't always use them, just like adults don't always use others' perspectives, but they are available to children, at least in some basic ways from quite early on.

Children talked about- Excuse me, Piaget talked about how early on children view all rules as being, basically coming from authority, as deriving from authority figures, that authority figures, parents, teachers decide all the rules that they follow. And it's only over much later in development that they begin to understand that some rules like moral rules, you know, hold even if authority figures don't endorse them or haven't proposed them. Whereas other rules, like conventional rules, such as what we wear to school or what we wear to go to bed, those are conventional and you know, those can be changed and those really are constructed in some sense by consensus and in particular from authority figures. And so that turns out to also not be true.

So our work and other people's work has shown that actually from really quite early on, children already have an understanding that some rules are authority contingent and other rules kind of have inherent value regardless of what authority figures say. And so that differentiation happens really early on as well. Okay, so yeah, the broad strokes are right, but some of the details of what he proposed haven't really held up with time, okay.

So what I wanted to do now is to actually talk about, focus in on this moral emotions piece of our work and specifically about the development of gratitude and its functions. So the starting point for this work is what I consider to be two fundamental requirements for the safeguarding of cooperation. One - First is that once a cooperative interaction has been initiated, it has to be maintained. That's just as simple as saying, in order to keep cooperation going, we have to keep cooperation going.

We have to maintain this sort of ongoing cooperative, mutually beneficial interactions. And the second is that we also, especially as our groups get larger and we begin to interact with previously unknown individuals, with strangers, we also have to initiate new cooperative interactions. And so the question then is what motivates us to do these things? What motivates us to reciprocate, to maintain our cooperative interactions and what motivates us to initiate new cooperative interactions?

So to answer this question, many people, including myself, have turned to the social emotions. So the viewpoint, the starting point here is that emotions evolved, or we think about emotions as having evolved to provide a relatively automatic means for guiding cognitive and behavioral processes in adaptive ways, okay? And so here emotions are serving an important function, an evolutionary function, which is to guide our behaviors and cognitions in adaptive ways. And so the tuning of the emotional system to our social needs may then underlie behaviors of really high social import and mediate social norms.

So the emotional, the extent that the emotional system is tuned into our social needs, into the kinds of things that we need to do in our social environments, then those, that emotional system may be really important for motivating us to act in socially important and cooperative ways, okay? And so then taking this view of social emotions back to our two requirements for safeguarding cooperation, the proposal is that both of these functions, I believe are met by, at least in part, by the social emotion of gratitude.

Okay. So gratitude, there's of course, as you might imagine, lots of different definitions of this in the literature, but the most kind of basic and widely accepted one is that gratitude is a positive emotion that signals that one has benefited from another person's goodwill. So we have received some kind of benefit and it was through another person's goodwill and it urges one to respond prosocially to one's benefactor. That is, to reciprocate. I should say here that, of course, this is the most basic kind of skeletal definition of gratitude, right? Is that we've benefited from another person's goodwill.

We know that we feel gratitude for all kinds of things that don't fully fit into this. People talk about gratitude for beautiful sunsets and gratitude for God, or gratitude for, you know, having one's family or whatever it might be, right? All sorts of things that aren't exactly this. And I think that's right. I think that gratitude does spread to a lot of other kinds of experiences. But the idea here is, from an evolutionary cooperative perspective, this is most likely to be the place that gratitude evolved and it has now taken on a lot of other functions. But that's certainly a point of discussion and debate. What is it exactly, what isn't it? And then what functions does it serve in this and other contexts, okay?

So, but taking - accepting this view of it for our purposes, the research suggests that adults report more gratitude towards benefactors who help them and benefactors who help them intentionally rather than if that happens by chance. So they really seem to be tuned into the benefits that they receive and also the fact that someone had goodwill towards them, they intended to benefit them. And adults who are made to feel grateful towards the benefactor then both help their benefactor in return, so reciprocate or pay it back. And they do so more than, for instance, individuals who aren't made to feel grateful and also more than individuals who are in a positive state, like they're amused, but they haven't been made to feel grateful.

So the systematic studies of this suggests that gratitude really does promote this kind of paying it back behavior, which helps to maintain our ongoing cooperation and also adults who are made to feel grateful help new individuals, interestingly, more than do adults who are not made to feel grateful. So this is this paying it forward or initiating new cooperative interactions. And so gratitude seems to do both of these things among adults. And in recent work in our lab, we've been exploring the developmental origins of these pro-social functions of gratitude that help us both maintain and initiate cooperative interactions. So I'll just talk about both of these pieces.

First, we'll begin with paying it back or reciprocating. So for this first step into examining the development of gratitude and this kind of effect or the its function of promoting reciprocity, for the first step, we identified two critical aspects of gratitude that have been identified in the literature. It's the realization, and this is similar to what I already, how I defined it, right? Gratitude is a realization that one has oneself benefitted, I have received benefits from someone's intentional actions or their goodwill, right?

So there's two pieces to this. I have received benefits, not just someone has received benefits and I received them from another person's, due to another person's good intentions towards me rather than just by chance, for instance. And so this leads us to this kind of table here where, you know, the child, right, being the recipient receives benefits and the benefits were given intentionally. This is kind of our grati- This is our classic gratitude case. And that can be compared to the child receives benefits, but they were given unintentionally. And that's, you know, that shouldn't be gratitude because even though I received the benefits, I don't recognize you as the person, you as having done that intentionally for me. And then we have someone else receives benefits intentionally, so I can evaluate that benefactor positively, but I don't feel grateful because it wasn't done for me. And then we just had the kind of minus, minus case, benefits were given unintentionally and to someone else.

So it's this top left corner that's the gratitude corner, the gratitude cell and the others are kind of control situations that have some pieces of gratitude, but not both. And so the idea here is that if we create situations that, that have each of these, are in each of these cells, then it's this one that we should see the greatest reciprocity in if it's something like gratitude that motivates young children to reciprocate. And so to test this, we had a group of three-year-old children, and this was based on prior work showing that children do reciprocate by this age, but prior work had not kind of tried to tease apart these different factors, okay?

So what we did here is that we basically had children participate in a study with two puppets and the child and each puppet played a game, and at some point the child ran out of the little items that the child needed to play that game. And then one of the puppets shared resources with the child, okay? So the child ran out and this puppet shared some of its resources with the child so the child could continue playing. Or in a different condition, this other puppet ran out of resources and the benefactor shared with this puppet. And then in half the cases, the benefactor did so intentionally so that she'd really handed them over to the child and said, "I don't need these anymore, you take them." Or in the other half, she just placed them near the child or near this puppet if this was the puppet that needed resources and just placed them near them, but didn't actively hand them over. And so the benefit was the same, but it was not done with intention.

Then we had this final kind of test run where we actually measured children's reciprocity, where in all cases now, the benefactor puppet ran out of resources and the child had the opportunity to share. And the question was how many does the child share with this benefactor? And does the child do so most in that condition in which there was, you know, the gratitude cell where the actor gave resources to the child and did so intentionally? And then we just had a second game, a second trial, which was identical, but with a second game just to get two data points per child, okay?

And so what we found is that indeed, as we had expected, children reciprocated or gave the most number of resources across both of those games to the benefactor when the benefactor had benefited them, the child and done so intentionally than in any of these other cases. And it was significantly higher, statistically significantly higher than all of these other cases. So this - what we consider to be the gratitude condition in which someone has really shown goodwill towards the child is where the child reciprocated most.

The child, you can see, was not motivated to reciprocate when they received the exact same benefits, but it was not done intentionally. And even in the case in which the other, where the benefactor was generous to someone else, children showed some reciprocity, but not nearly as much as in the case where it was directed towards them and intentionally, okay?

So by three years of age, then this work suggests that gratitude or something like gratitude, gratitude-like responding, motivates children's reciprocity because we found that children were most, reciprocated the most or paid back the most when they had benefited from the benefactor's intentional actions. It was not simply due to greater sharing with generous people.

So they weren't just, you know, being equally generous to the actor when she had shared with someone else. It was specifically about this interaction that really kind of heightened that motivation to reciprocate. And it was not simply due to gaining benefits. So it wasn't just, regardless how of how I got them, the point is that you gave me some and therefore I reciprocated. It really was about this specific relationship.

You showing me that you have goodwill towards me by providing me with benefits. I wanna mention here, I have an asterisk here because I think it's really important to acknowledge that of course we didn't directly measure gratitude. We don't have evidence that that's exactly what children were feeling, right? And to be honest, at these really young ages, it's hard to know how one would do that. But our approach here is to say if what's happening is some nascent, some early form of gratitude, then this is what we would predict. And so this is just one study.

We have other studies where we've made other predictions about if children are motivated by gratitude, this is what we should see. And the more we get converging evidence from different paradigms and questions, that children behave in ways that are consistent with gratitude, the stronger the conclusion can be. But it is really important to note that what we're seeing here is their reciprocal behavior. It's not directly kind of how exactly they're feeling.

So that is really important to acknowledge and something I'll return to at the end. And so, but we do think that a nascent gratitude-like mechanism may help to maintain cooperation from really quite early in development. I'll mention that we've also tested something along these lines with younger children and they don't yet show this. And so that does seem to be some important development that happens between two and three years of age where they begin to really care about who's benefiting them and whether it was done intentionally or not. A

ll right, and then the second piece of this is the paying it forward. So among adults, gratitude has been shown to increase helping and generosity not only towards one's benefactors but also towards non-benefactors, towards new individuals. And the idea here is that, so Bob Fredrickson is a really famous psychologist who said that positive emotions, gratitude included, function to help us broaden our relationships and to build, broaden and build our relationships, okay?

And so the idea here is that one of the things that gratitude is doing is not just to keep this ongoing relationship going, which is a really important function, but perhaps it also helps us to branch out and to broaden our relationships to other people. And indeed, there is evidence from adults that when people are made to feel grateful towards one individual, they are not only more likely to help that individual, but also new individuals. So they show up paying it forward behavior. And the question that we've been asking in my lab recently is whether children also pay it forward, and whether that paying it forward behavior is motivated by something like gratitude.

This is all work that was done by my graduate student who just finished this past summer, Stefen Beeler-Duden. So I'll be presenting some of his work that he's done in my lab here at UVA. So what he did in a first study is to ask about- Just created a very simple situation in which children received benefits. And in both cases, they received the same positive outcome but in one case, it was due to help that was provided by someone. In another case, it was not due to help.

They found the same outcome, but it was not as a result of someone providing them help. So in both cases, the child benefited, but in one case, help was given to them and then they got the positive outcome. In the other case no help was given, but they still got the positive outcome. So the sort of level of happiness about the outcome should be similar. The question is whether the fact that it was due to someone's help, does that create a gratitude-like response where, like adults, children perhaps also pay forward in that case? Okay, so here we tested three-year-olds and four-year-olds, again drawing from prior work that suggested that perhaps something important is happening at these ages.

And what Stefen did is he created a difficult key-finding game. So in the middle of the room was this locked box with five attractive stickers, and what we did is that in each corner of the room, we placed a box full of foam, little foam, little toys or just pieces. And we told them that the key to this locked box is in one of these containers, is in one of these boxes in the corner of the room. And their task is to first locate that key and when they do, they can go and open this box and retrieve these five stickers. And so this is what that looked like.

If you can see this, here's the table in the middle of the room with the locked box here. This is Stefen, this is the participant. And then each corner of the room has one of these boxes. And so they see this locked box and they're told you need to find the key, but before they start searching, they receive a note. So in one condition, half the children receive a helpful note from the previous- You know, we told them someone else, Sally or Sam, we gender matched to the participant child, played this game before and they've left you a note.

So they received a helpful note from the previous child in which Sally or Sam wrote, "This game was so hard, "but I found the key." "I really want you to get the cool stickers," "so I'll tell you where I found the key." "It was in the blue box." "You should look in the blue box." So really kind of directing them and helping them with what children believed was going to be a very difficult game. And the other half of the children were in the non-help condition in which they also received a note from Sally or Sam, but the note was non-helpful. It was positive, but it was non-helpful.

So it said, "This game was so hard, but I found the key." "These stickers are so cool," "I'm excited that I found the key," "I had fun playing the game." okay? So half the children received a helpful note. Half the children received a non-helpful note. Importantly, then when they searched, they always found the key because in the help condition, we had placed the key in the blue box, which is where the note directed children to. But in the non-help condition, we placed a key in each of the four boxes.

So no matter where children looked, they found the key. So you know, we sort of controlled for how long and how much effort it took to find the key. And so they always found the key, the outcome therefore was always positive. They were always able to come and open this box and retrieve these five stickers, okay? So once they had gotten the five stickers, we now said to them, you can keep all five stickers or you can share with this other child, a new child. So we made it clear that they wouldn't be sharing with Sally or Sam. We gave them an envelope, we said we're gonna be mailing this out to another child that wasn't able to come in. And if you want, you can keep all five stickers or you can share some of them with this other child and then I'll send it in an envelope. 

The question was how many stickers would children choose to share? What we found is that the three-year-olds, this is the two bars on the left hand side, did not share differently across conditions. So this is the number of children who shared in both, in each condition and you can see that they're not very different in red, right, compared with the blue who did not share. But the four-year-olds did show a significant difference in the two conditions. So more four-year-olds shared stickers with that new child if they had received a helpful note than if they had not.

And when we looked at the number of stickers shared, as you might expect, we also saw a difference. So four-year-olds showed a difference in the number of stickers they shared as well between the help and the non-help conditions. The three-year-olds did not, okay?

So this first study showed that by four years, but not yet by three years, children do show greater pro-social behavior towards new individuals and it was not simply due to gaining benefits, it was not just because they got a positive outcome, it was specifically when they had been helped to get that positive outcome that they showed this paying it forward behavior. The question that Stefen still wanted to ask though is can we get closer to understanding whether this is really something that's motivated by gratitude? The way that we did this is that we adopted, without getting into a lot of details for sake of time, into what's called the OC- So we used the OCC model, this is named after the authors, Jerry Clore actually being a recently retired faculty from the psychology department.

And the proposal basically in the OCC model of emotions is that emotions are essentially appraisals of various aspects of a situation. So they're situational appraisals. And when certain kinds of appraisals happen, then those essentially lead to us feeling a certain kind of emotion. And in the case of gratitude, the proposal is that gratitude involves a couple of different appraisals. It involves the beneficiary positively evaluating particular situational components, specifically the beneficiary being pleased with the personal outcome.

So I received a benefit that I'm happy about, but also and critically, approving of the benefactor's actions, right? Therefore evaluating the benefactor positively. So not just that I'm happy about my positive outcome, but that I think that someone, this individual did this for me and so I think highly of them, I evaluate them positively. And these two appraisals together lead to the emotion of guilt or just are the emotion of guilt, okay? So Stefen then applied this model back to our key-finding and sticker sharing task. So we had a new group of four-year-olds come in. We again had them participate in this difficult key-finding game.

And again, half of them received a help condition and half of them received a non-help helpful note. Then we had this resource distribution where they could keep all five stickers or they could share some of their stickers with a new child. In addition though, Stefen asked them two additional questions. He asked him how happy they were and why do you feel happy? So this is about that positive outcome.

This is the question about how much do you evaluate your positive outcome? You know, how happy are you about this positive outcome that you received? And the idea here is that because they both were able to access these stickers, they should be equally happy in both conditions. The key difference should be in the evaluation question about evaluating the note writer. Is Sally good, bad, or just okay? So this is that second appraisal of the note writer of the helper, and we think that this is where we should see a difference where children in the help condition should positively evaluate their helper more than the children in the non-help condition, okay?

So first we replicated that first finding from the study - from the first study where the four-year-olds again shared more when they had been helped than when they had not been helped. So this was a sort of good way to know that we had a robust effect. Then we looked at those two questions and as we had expected, we saw no difference in the level of their happiness, the reports of their happiness. So children in both conditions said they were equally happy and they actually gave us very similar reasons for their happiness as well, which was something like, "I got the stickers, I'm happy."

But then when we asked them to evaluate the note writer, Sally, children in the help condition evaluated her much more positively than children in the non-help condition. And really importantly, those evaluations predicted how many stickers children shared with the new child. So the more positively they evaluated Sally, the more likely they were to pay it forward. So that critical appraisal that we believe is that one of two critical pieces of gratitude was really predicting how likely they were to pay forward these stickers to a new child.

And so the four-year-old's responses were, we think, consistent with gratitude. They paid forward more if they had been helped, they evaluated the helper more positively than the non-helper and their positive evaluation of the helper predicted their paying it forward behavior. So we think that gratitude may help initiate new cooperative interactions from early in development as well, which is a new and exciting direction for us to be exploring, because there really hadn't been much work on this. But it really does look like, in a situation that should elicit gratitude, children are not only motivated to reciprocate, but may actually be motivated to expand their cooperative relationship, their social interactions to others.

All right, to just conclude this, then, to live in and to benefit from groups, from our group living, we must maintain ongoing cooperative relationships and initiate new ones. This is what I argued to be the kind of two critical pieces, two fundamental requirements. And I think that gratitude star, because as I said, we haven't directly measured gratitude, but something along the lines of gratitude might serve these fundamental prosocial functions from early in development. It seems to motivate pay it back behavior or reciprocity by about three years. And it seems to motivate children to pay forward just a year later, by about four years of age.

Of course, one can have really interesting discussions about what's going on between three and four years? Why not earlier, what happens later? And I'm happy to have those discussions face-to-face at some point, but I'm not gonna delve into them here. But I think those are really important and interesting questions. And so overall, I think that children may become skilled from an early age to sustain and therefore to benefit from widespread cooperation. What I'm gonna do just really briefly, as we're just in the last five minutes, is just talk very quickly about some limitations and open questions, and therefore also about some ongoing and future directions in this work.

So the first is just again to reiterate, this is gratitude star. We haven't directly tested gratitude. I would argue even when we ask adults how grateful do you feel? How guilty do you feel? How proud do you feel, whatever, it's not clear how much we're really tapping into the real phenomenon even there because anytime you have someone reporting on their own feelings, then there's lots of room for noise and error. Nonetheless, we haven't even done that here. We're looking at the behaviors and sort of inferring that it's motivated by gratitude, but there's lots more open questions in that domain for sure.

The second piece of this, and it is important to sort of talk about the fact that, as I mentioned, what we're looking at are these really basic ideas of gratitude, but of course, there's a lot of sophistication and complexity that emerges over the course of development and into adulthood. And those nuances are something that we're only just starting to explore. We've been looking at these really basic phenomena for now.

We're starting to think about some of the nuances of gratitude versus related but distinct processes. And one of those that Stefen and I have gotten really interested in is gratitude versus indebtedness. So the idea being that whenever someone helps us, even if they do it intentionally rather than by chance, we don't always feel gratitude, we can sometimes feel indebted. So when a bank gives us a whole lot of money, we may feel glad that we got the money because we can do with it what we need to do, buy a car, buy a house, but we feel indebted, we don't feel grateful, right? We need to pay back. We have that obligation hanging over us. So the bank gave us a benefit, the bank did it intentionally, and yet we don't always feel grateful for that. We feel indebted perhaps, right? And so that difference is something that we are really starting to explore. When does that kind of sophistication emerge? And one difference that's in the literature that's talked about is the, a key difference is the intention behind the benefit that's given. So gratitude, the benefit is given freely. There's a real interest in your welfare. I care about you, therefore I'm giving you this thing versus indebtedness where perhaps you want something in return, like the bank that wants it back and wants it with interest. And so that intention seems to really matter and that's something that we're really starting to explore as well.

Let me just skip here a little bit so I make sure to get to this. So that's one thing that we're beginning to explore and so please stay tuned. That was part of Stefen's dissertation work, and so that's something that we're hoping to have some answers to soon. And then the second, sort of the last limitation and open question here really is this concern about the fact that we have predominantly white participants from only weird populations. Weird being western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic. Germany, US. You know, anytime you're looking at these contexts, it's a very, very specific, very small subset of the human population. And so it's hard to make generalizable species-wide claims for sure. And that is something we're aware of and something we're really starting to really address.

And that's the final question that I had received here as well, just about how does the culture, how does children's cultural background and values and so forth influence their moral and cooperative tendencies? This is a really, really important question. It's something we've been thinking a lot about. In fact, we are just beginning a project funded by the John Templeton Foundation. It'll start this fall where we explore gratitude, the development of gratitude and the socialization of gratitude. How to parents, teachers, grandparents talk about gratitude, think about gratitude for their children in India and the US? And to really start to see how much of this generalizes and how much of it does not. So that's something that we're gonna get started on soon.

But more broadly, I think the question really is an important one. Some of the basic capacities that I talked about, helping, sharing, showing concern, those are things that have been studied across lots of different contexts and cultures, and there seems to be some universality in those really early capacities, sharing, a sense of fairness and so forth. And then the other piece that's emerged by looking at this is the fact that it really changes over development to look increasingly like your home culture. So children initially look fairly similar in some of those really basic capacities, but that begins to be shaped over the course of the first eight to 10 years to begin looking increasingly like the adults in the culture. So sense of fairness, you know, how should resources be distributed? That begins to look increasingly like what those around you are doing. And so there's undoubtedly a really important influence of one's culture and upbringing on our moral and cooperative tendencies, and we're gonna start exploring that in this context of gratitude as well.

Okay, so just to finish up then, you know, I think the work that I've talked about and plan to do is really beginning to shed light on the developmental foundations of morality. We see that from early in development, children have this capacity to be compassionate and caring and to sustain and promote, and therefore benefit from the kinds of cooperative social relationships that we think humans have needed to survive and to thrive in our evolutionary history. Okay, so with that, I thank you for your time and for the invitation.

And I hope this was interesting and useful. If you have questions that you'd like to email me about, I'd love to have conversations offline. So yeah, thanks very much.

RICHARD BROWNLEE: Greetings from Charlottesville, Albemarle and the University. For the entire community continues to mourn the tragic deaths of three outstanding UVA student athletes. This past week has been a challenging one to say the least. With many unanswered questions and an overwhelming sense of loss. Such a senseless tragedy was certainly unexpected here and coming to grips with such a harsh reality will take time. Numerous events have occurred this past week to honor and remember these three young men including: a 5K memorial run on Saturday morning, an amazing memorial service held at the John Paul Jones Arena on Saturday afternoon, attended by over 9000 people in person, and many others watching livestreamed. Hopefully the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday will be a time of comfort and of joy and of healing with friends and family. 

I'm Richard Brownlee, President of the UVA Retired Faculty Association and on behalf of the Board of Directors, I welcome you to our second virtual Zoom presentation of this academic year. 

Looking ahead for just a moment, on Monday January 30th, 2023, Associate Professor Amrisha Vaish will be presenting "Moral Development in Early Childhood" via Zoom. Finally, we expect that President Ryan will host his annual event for retired faculty sometime in March. Now before I introduce our speaker, I need to address our rather precarious financial situation. As you are aware, as we have not been able to meet in person at our traditional luncheons over the past several years, our Board made the decision to suspend our annual dues and to rely instead on voluntary donations. That worked okay for a while as we had a reasonable balance in our account at the UVA Fund. Unfortunately, although we have received donations from some of you, we have not received enough to cover our expenses these past few years. Consequently we have depleted our small surplus and have relied on the generosity of our Board to actually remain solvent. Our annual expenses amount to about $5000 a year which include $3000 we pay annually to the Alumni Association for services related to our website, communications with members, and Zoom presentation. It also includes the cost of providing closed captions for our Zoom events. Presently our account balance is not sufficient to cover our anticipated expenses for the coming year. So if you have benefited from our programs these past few years and would like to support us financially, I strongly encourage you to do so sooner rather than later. Until such time as we return to charging membership dues, donations are the only source of revenue that we have. 

Now it gives me great pleasure to introduce today's speaker, Professor Allen Lynch, who will be discussing the very timely topic of the Russian War in Ukraine. Allen Lynch is Professor at the Woodrow Wilson Department of Politics at the University of Virginia where he teaches international relations and Russian. In 2018, he was also, he was appointed Senior Research Associate at the Center for Russian Studies, East China Normal University, Shanghai. In 2022 he was appointed visiting professor at the Free Italian University of the Social Sciences in Rome, effective Fall 2023. In addition to his teaching and research at Virginia, between 2010 and 2012, he was Director of Research at the University Center for International Studies. Between 1993 and 2008, he was Director of the University's Center for Russian and European Studies raising an amazing $1.5 million for graduate fellowships in Russian and East European study. He's held the White Burkett Miller, incoming chairs at UVA and also the Dragis Chair at Old Dominion University. His current research interests include Russian foreign policy, Russian politics and comparative perspective, and relationships between international order and political development. Courses offered include Russian Foreign Policy, Russian Politics, American-Russian Relations, Domestic Politics, and American Foreign Policy. His books and monograph include "Vladimir Putin & Russian Statecraft", "How Russia is Not Ruled: "Reflections on Russian Political Development", "Does Russia Have a Democratic Future?", "Europe from the Balkans to the Urals", "The Cold War Is Over-Again", and "Political & Military Implications "of the 'Nuclear Winter' Theory" and "Soviet Study of International Relations" which received the Marshall D. Shulman Award of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies. His articles have appeared in numerous learned journals in the United States and around the world. His works have been translated into Russian, Chinese, French, German, Serbo-Croatian, and Polish. Professor Lynch has been a Visiting Professor at numerous institutions. So many, it's almost hard to keep track of them and I'm not sure how he's managed to go all these places. Including German Council on Foreign Relations Berlin, East China Normal University, Shanghai, The Graduate Institute for International and Development Studies, Geneva. Ah, something close to home. Old Dominion University. The Graduate School for Social Science in Paris. The Radio for Europe Institute in Munich. And the Russian Research Center, Harvard University and also at Columbia University. In 2007, he received teaching awards from the University of Virginia and the American Political Science Association. In 1997 he received the Kleinhans Award for Service to UVA's School of Continuing and Professional Studies. His articles have appeared in publications such as "New York Times", "The Christian Science Monitor", "Foreign Affairs", "Foreign Policy", "The Bolton of Atomic Scientists", "CNN Today", and numerous other journals and newspapers in North America, Europe, Russia, and China. He has consulted for the U.S. Intelligence Agency, the FBI, the U.S. Airforce's Special Service School, the U.S. Online Inspection Agency, and the U.S. Army's National Ground Intelligence Center, and the Kettering Foundation. 

This won't surprise you I suppose but Professor Lynch is fluent in Russian, French, and Italian, and reads several other European languages. German, Serbo-Croatian, Spanish. His PhD in Political Science is from Colombia University. He has a certificate from Columbia's Russian Institute, a BA from the State University of New York at Stony Brook where he majored in history and graduated summa cum laude. At Stony Brook he was also an All-American kicker punter in the 50 team National Club Sports Association. And this allows me to finish up with something that's a lot of fun. I find very interesting and a little light-hearted before we get into a very serious conversation. But in 2017, somehow he was recruited to be the place kicker on the Virginia Silverbacks Semi-Pro Football Team. Who I believe when they play their home games, play here at Charlottesville, at Charlottesville High School. Part of the Atlantic Football Association. He's made the All Star Team in 2017, 2019, 2021. I believe he has two championship rings which probably are quite large and quite nice and a real treasure and rumor has it, he is the lead senior citizen and I imagine he raises the average age whenever he walks onto the field. So without further ado, I want to welcome Allen Lynch. So thank you Allen for being part of our retired faculty presentations. This is certainly a timely and important topic. We look forward to your remarks, excuse me. I will probably disappear from the screen for awhile and let you take over and probably come back at the end and maybe help wrap things up and see if there might be someone to answer questions. But I know you received a few questions in advance from the participants and that you're planning to address so. With that, welcome again. Thanks for being with us and I'll turn it over to you.

ALLEN LYNCH: Thank you very much Dick. Dick, you can hear me fine? I presume you're a proxy for everybody else right? Okay, very good. Well thank you for that really extraordinarily gracious introduction. Time is brief so I'll just say that listening to it Dick, I kind of wish my parents were here listening. My dad, because he would definitely be proud. But my mom because she would actually believe all of it. So thank you for that. As you said, at the beginning, this is a really difficult time we're going through at the University. You know I was in the classroom on Wednesday, it was very difficult, very traumatic. Everyone is sharing this trauma of what I can assure the retired faculty is, all of my colleagues. All of our administrative colleagues are working as hard and as seriously as they can to assure the students that we have their backs and that we will work with them flexibly to get them through this difficult end of the semester period. So keep that in mind and so I note that. I also note among the participants here, a number of friends and colleagues. I first want to point out Mr. Craig Littlepage because quite a few years ago, Mr. Littlepage signed an authorization for me to practice kicking my footballs on the rugby field at UVA and without that I probably wouldn't have been in shape to make the team back in 2016, 2017. So Mr. Littlepage, thank you very much for that. I also see my colleagues Julian Connolly and Jim Hart here and I don't know if Mel is attending, but Mel Leffler from History was instrumental in getting me involved to give this talk today. All right, so to the subject matter which is explaining the Russian war in Ukraine and it is not a special military operation. It is a war. I'm going to briefly, at the outset, just address four questions that were sent to me ahead of time. Give you very telegraphic answers and then hopefully in the course of my presentation, the reasoning behind my answers will become clear. I assume Dick, you probably want me to stop, to leave about 15 minutes or so or 20 minutes or so for Q and A from the audience. Is that right?

RICHARD BROWNLEE: Actually, we're not gonna, we're not going to allow them to have that opportunity. We do it in advance.

ALLEN LYNCH: All right, fine. Very good.

RICHARD BROWNLEE: You can go close to the time and I'll come back on, probably at the end.

ALLEN LYNCH: Very good.

RICHARD BROWNLEE: And I might have one or two things to ask you. But you can pretty much go until close to one o'clock.

ALLEN LYNCH: All right, very good. All right, so first let me explain what that object is behind me. I gotta move aside for a second there. That is the official crest or coat of arms of the Russian State today. As it was of the Russian Empire until 1917 and the Russian Revolution. I won't go into detail on the iconography of it except to note that they borrowed the double-headed eagle from the Byzantine Empire, in effect, the Russian Empire. You would know the famous expression, two Romes have fallen. A third has arisen, that's Moscow. A fourth there shall not be. That's reference to that imperial legacy. You see the orb and the scepter of imperial power. You'll see the cross here and in several other places. The, in the center of the crest is actually Saint George slaying the dragon and above me, most critical for our purposes: three crowns representing Russian statehood. The largest crown immediately above me is the crown representing what the Russians called Great Russia, Velikaya Rossiya. We call Russia. But the other two crowns were added in the course of the 17th Century as the Russian state began to expand progressively into, toward Europe. 

Began to push back Polish influence in Ukrainian borderlands. Ukraine means borderland by the way. Those two crowns represent, one of them White Russia or Belarus. And the other represents Little Russia, as the Russians call it. Malorossiya, or what we call Ukraine. So what you see from the very beginning is the idea of Ukraine is actually integrated into Russian political identity. The identity of the Russian state. And the Russian state that has emerged over the last half a millennium, let's say since the time of Ivan the Terrible, has not just been a state that is famously authoritarian and centralized and even despotic. But also one that's been imperial in character. That is, as Russia expands across the vast Eurasian Steppe, it also encounters non-Russian, non-Slavic, non-Orthodox Christian peoples and because it is a land-based empire, like the Austrian Empire, it's required to integrate them in one way or another into its own central polity. Unlike the European empires which are overseas empires and almost always maintained a fundamental distinction between the metropol at home and the colony abroad. That is to say, in 1947 Britain could grant independence to India without, they believe, calling into question the fundamental significance of British statehood. Whereas for the Russian case as we'll see, the idea of a sovereign Ukraine apart from Russia and even possibly integrated into a non-Russian international order is something deeply traumatic and calls into question fundamental notions of what Russia is as a polity, what it is as a state, even what it is as a society and as a culture. So that's why I put this up here, and by the way, this is no casual icon. 

This is the crest in front of the Russian Parliament building or Duma. So this has ultra, ultra official significance. All right, that's the preamble. The questions that were addressed to me, "Was this war inevitable?" The answer is no, but. You'll see I'm going to address three factors or tendencies that I believe shaped this war. I call one of them Russian colonialists. I call another Ukrainian ethnonationalists but I call a third American maximalists as well. In order to avoid this war, there would have to have been fundamental changes in all three of those axes or tendencies. That is, Russian colonialists, American maximalists, and Ukrainian ethnonationalists. Secondly, "Is Putin's march into Ukraine analogous "to Hitler's march into the Sudetenland in 1938, "in Czechoslovakia or the Rhineland in 1936 "or rump Czechoslovakia in March of 1939, et cetera?" And here my answer is no. We need to be careful about these kinds of analogies. Actually, a central part of my argument is that Russian overall policy towards Ukraine has been a constant, since the independence of Russia from the Soviet Union and of Ukraine from the Soviet Union in 1992. What has that policy been? Basically that the fact, the inconvenient fact, from Russia's point of view. The inconvenient fact of Ukraine's sovereignty should not get in the way of Russia establishing its own primacy along the post-Soviet borderlands which also are largely Russia's historical imperial borderlands as well. That policy has not changed. It precedes Putin. I'll give you some evidence of it in a minute. But it's been pretty constant since 1992 for the last 30 years. 

What has changed are the instruments that Russia uses in order to try to enforce that policy. Those instruments have changed, they've escalated intensity and violence over the past three decades. To a certain extent, as the stakes involved in trying to reconcile Ukraine's formal sovereignty with Russia's primacy in the post-Soviet space as those tensions have increased as well and to a large extent, in connection with increased European and North American involvement, the European Union and NATO involvement in terms of competing with Russia for Ukraine's international orientation. The third question was, "Are there substantive economic reasons "behind Russia's intervention?" I don't think so in the strict profit and loss sense. But rather in the strategic sense. Ukraine and Russia being part of the Soviet Union for three quarters of a century and before that, for several centuries part of the same empire, were extraordinarily integrated economic zone. As they also were integrated cultural zone, social zone in terms of intermarriages, even in terms of the integration of Ukrainian elite, especially eastern Ukrainian elites into the upper levels of the Russian Army, especially in Soviet times. Rather, the fear was that a Ukraine that would gravitate toward the European Union would have an extraordinarily disruptive effect on existing Ukrainian-Russian economic relations. Much of eastern Ukraine, it's a coal and steel region - most of its steel exports went to Russia and it was completely integrated into the Russian military industrial complex for instance. It's those kinds of reasons rather than any particular striving for raw materials. 

There has been some oil discovered in northeastern Ukraine and also in the Black Sea. In my judgment those are not primary reasons, but rather it's the broader strategic stake that Russia sees. What will Ukraine's international orientation be and to the present day, there's been no break in the consensus of the Russian elites that a sovereign Ukraine should not however be somehow integrated into an international system that Russian elites, by their definitions, define as hostile to Russian interests as well. I'll give you an example from personal knowledge. Back in 2011 I was in a conference in Shanghai, Dick mentioned my association with East China Normal University there, and there was a very senior Russian official. His name was Sergey Karaganov. He was the Chair of the Presidential Council on Defense and Foreign Policy and he said, to the shock of his Chinese hosts, "Thank God for the Russia-Georgia War." Which took place in five days of August of 2008. "Thank God for the Russia-Georgia war." Everyone was shocked and then Karaganov continued "Because it means there won't be a Russia Ukraine war." 

This is December of 2011. In other words, for Putin's government, the Russia-Georgia war was a punitive expedition. Not just against Georgia for daring to dream of joining NATO, but to send a message to NATO and the United States, "Don't even think of moving NATO toward Ukraine." And Karaganov concluded by saying, "If Georgia was a red line for us, "then Ukraine is a triple red line for us." Actually the Russian government has been pretty consistent in making that point for more than 25 years. Going back, even into the 1990s, before Putin came to power and we have been pretty much just as consistent in either not hearing it or disregarding it. I'll come back to the interaction of these colonialist and maximalist agendas in a little while. And finally, "Is there a substantial threat to Ukraine?" "Or rather, is this simply a product "of some kind of feverish Russian paranoid imagination "about plots between NATO and Ukraine?" Well I would just point out that military planners everywhere in the world are responsible for engaging in worst case planning and in the case of Ukraine and its geographical situation along the vast Eurasian Steppe or Great Plains, the border between northeastern Ukraine and downtown Moscow, that's less than 400 miles. From the northeastern border of Ukraine to downtown Moscow. Across virtually featureless Great Plains. No military planner in the world can devise a purely defensive strategy for worst case scenarios along that topography. The fear is not that NATO is going to plan some kind of new Operation Barbarossa and strike the Soviet Union and invade it. But rather that it would turn Ukraine into a strategic barrier against Russian influence further afield in Europe and in Central Eurasia. 

There was also a fear that given Ukraine's progressive integration as a de facto partner into NATO, something that I'll document in a little while, they could not exclude the possibility that Ukraine could be integrated directly or indirectly into NATO's strategic systems, aimed at targeting Russia. If not including the basic of NATO systems in Ukraine, at least using Ukrainian soil for intelligence gathering operations which could be integrated with weapons systems outside Ukraine. None of this could be lightly dismissed. Especially given the generally downward trajectory of Russian-American relations since the end of the 1990s. So, and then finally, there is, and it's reflected in the symbol behind me, this idea that somehow, and it's a colonialist expression, Ukraine cannot be something real independent, apart from Moscow. 

They are to some extent, a lesser people without their association with Moscow and you can see how the Russians have woven the idea of Ukraine into their own conception of Russian statehood. That's real, that's not invented. All right? What they have discovered since the invasion on February 23rd is that there is such a thing as a real Ukrainian nation. It's much more substantial than they had imagined before but consider this. Everything the United States, virtually everything the United States and its NATO partners have done since February 23rd, has essentially reinforced Putin's belief that he was justified in starting this war in the first place, if he was starting the war in order to prevent Kyiv from being used as a strategic cudgel or wedge of NATO and the United States. What he calls the 'Collective West' against Russia. 

All right, so that's how I reply to the questions in brief. Let me give you my arguments in some greater depth and detail. First, one of the most remarkable things about this war is that Russia has been fighting it. A major war in Europe without significant European allies, except for Belarus. I don't consider that to be a significant ally. And against a virtually united European and North American coalition. Consider that last year, in 2021, Ukraine's defense budget for the whole year was about six billion dollars. The United States, since February 23rd, has authorized more than $65 billion. Of all kinds of aid, military and financial, toward Ukraine. 10 times the size of the Ukrainian defense budget. This war therefore violates one of the central lessons of Russia's international history. Going back almost half a millennium of Russia's really modern statehood. Since the time of about Ivan the Terrible in the mid to late 1500s. That is don't go to war in Europe isolated, without allies, and against a powerful European coalition. Every time Russia has done that, it has lost. Every time that Russia has gone to war with powerful European allies, even if against other European states, it has tended either to win, to minimize losses or to acquit itself reasonably well. Just to give a couple of examples. On the negative side of the ledger, for about a short generation in the 1570s, Ivan the Terrible waged what was called the Livonian War in the Baltic region. For primacy in the Baltic Sea area. Something that Peter the Great would pick up more than a century later. But he fought that war alone, against a coalition of Poland, Lithuania, and Denmark at that time. And ultimately had to give up that ambition and left behind an exhausted and bankrupt Russia which is the deeper background to the time of troubles, the succession crisis after Ivan would die later after the war. Secondly, The Crimean War. 1853, 1856. Russia is fighting on Russian soil, in the Crimea. Integrated into Russia. Against a Franco-British-Turkish Coalition. Loses that war, decisively. And in fact that loss is the trigger to another major internal transformation. This time, the liberation of the serfs and a rapid-paced Europeanization of Russia on a pace the country had not seen previously in its history and really wouldn't see, arguably, until the immediate post-Soviet period in the 1990s. 

Even World War One, Russia was formally in alliance with the British and the French but because the British could not force the Turkish Straits, this was Winston Churchill's scheme at the time, they were defeated by the Turkish Army. The British and French could not render decisive military aid to Russia through the Crimean area and Russia was in effect, forced to fight a three-front war against the Turks, against the Austrians, and against the Germans. They actually did pretty well against the Turks and the Austrians, but they couldn't fight a three-front war that included the Germans and we know the result, defeat and revolution again. Note the patten: External defeat triggering internal convulsion. Either of a revolutionary kind or of a transformative kind, the liberation of the serfs. Last example is Russia's loss to Japan in the War of 1904 and 1905. It fights Japan alone. Doesn't regard Japan as a serious opponent. Has no allies. Japan actually is indirectly supported by the United States and most European countries. Russia loses an entire army in South Manchuria and two fleets. The far eastern squadron and the Baltic Sea squadron. And it's forced to sign a humiliating piece, actually presided over by President Theodore Roosevelt. So that pattern is pretty clear. When Russia goes to war alone without significant allies and faced with powerful allies directly or indirectly, the strains are such as to expose the limitations of Russia's, otherwise seemingly impressive, aura and structure of power. Where on the other hand, Russia has engaged in such wars with powerful allies, it has tended to reap very considerable and long-lasting benefits. Peter the Great fights his long northern war against Sweden with allies like Poland-Lithuania, like Saxony, like Denmark, and he prevails after a two-decade long war. Establishing Russia as a Baltic and European power and rendering the establishment of his new capital, Saint Petersburg, safe. Catherine the Great at the end of the 1700s, basically partitioned Poland amongst Russia, Prussia, and Austria. Eliminated Poland, Russia's major rival in Europe for centuries, from the face of the political map of Europe and it did so without provoking a countervailing coalition because it did so with other powerful European states who benefited equally as did Russia from the elimination of Poland from the map of Europe. Immoral but prudent in terms of statecraft. 

The Napoleonic Wars, Russia emerges at the Congress of Vienna, after the war, as the dominant land power in Europe in coalition with the British, with the Austrians, and with Prussia. The principal powers of the day. Again, a coalition war and fast forward to the 20th Century, World War Two. Stalin's Russia defeats Nazi Germany in a really vital coalition that included the United States and Great Britain and their principal allies. Marshal Zhukov, the Soviet Eisenhower, was taped in 1963 in retirement as having stated that without American lend lease aid, the Soviet Union could not have equipped its reserve armies in the field and could not have continued the war on the offensive after the defeat of Germany at Stalingrad in early 1943. So, and the last example, more contemporary. On the eve of the Gorbachev period, the Soviet Union had found itself in an international isolation. A coalition composed of the United States, its NATO allies, Japan, but also Communist China, and a ratio of economic powers may be 7 to 8 to 1 compared to Russia's GDP, Gross Domestic Product, and when you take technological gap into account, the gap was much, much greater. And it was that impossible strategic deadlock that Gorbachev came into power and said, "We can't tolerate this anymore." "We have to find a way to break the stranglehold "that this international isolation "is imposing upon our economy "and even upon our longer term military future." 

So this is really a remarkable development. The fact that Russia is fighting this war, virtually alone, against a coalition composed of almost all European powers. Even the neutral Swiss have gone along with the sanctions against Russia. Neutral Finland and neutral Sweden are now joining NATO. A strategic nightmare from a Russian point of view. Of course, Putin did not think he would be waging a major war in Europe. He went in thinking he would have maybe a war of one or two weeks, decapitate the Ukrainian government. The number of troops, fewer than 200,000 that he deployed at the time, reinforces this idea and I think this is in part because he thought, "Ukraine is certainly not a European state." "It's not even a state." He told this to George Bush, President Bush, in Bucharest at a NATO summit in April of 2008. He said, "You know, George, "Ukraine is not really a state at all. "Most of it's ours, the west is Polish "and in between, who knows what it is?" This a fundamentally colonialist attitude. It's just that the colonial relationship is based on centuries of landward expansion and integration, not overseas. Now the three principal factors or tendencies that in my view, explain this war. 

Why this war took place now. Outbroke in February 23rd of this year, as opposed to five years ago, 10 years ago, 15, or 20, or 25 years ago. Three tendencies. One of them I call Russian colonialist. The second I call American maximalist. And the third I call Ukrainian nationalist or ethnonationalist. I'm gonna be very brief on the Russian factor because I happen to think the American factor is more important. In terms of triggering Putin's decision to go to war at this time. Alright? And I also think the Ukrainian nationalist factor is of lesser significance because it's mainly connected to the American factor in the Russian perspective. So briefly, I would just point out from the Russian point of view. It's not simply a colonialist attitude, it's also the attitude of great powers in their immediate borderlands and you don't need to know much about the Constitution of the Russian government or Putin's thinking about Ukraine to know that when great powers encroach upon the borderlands of other great powers, those great powers become very, very sensitive. Just think about in the case of the United States, probably the principal trigger that mobilized American public opinion against Germany before the First World War was not the sinking of the Lusitania. But rather the leak by the British of German telegram cables to Mexico promising to Mexicans the return of Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico in exchange for a Mexican alliance with Germany that would tie down the United States in the Western Hemisphere. Any great power is going to be sensitive to the incursion of other great powers in their international hinterlands. But on the Russian case, that great power or realist concern is magnified by the ways in which Russians think about it. Especially Russian elites, but many Russian people, ordinary people as well. About Ukraine and Ukrainians and their relationship to Russia. 

It's represented iconically in the three crown crest of state that you see above me. As early as August of 1991, Boris Yeltsin, our liberal ally for awhile stated that Russia retained a right to intervene in non-Russian states with large Russian populations if they should face serious discrimination from their new sovereign states. He specifically mentioned Ukraine and Crimea. In 1992, the Russian Parliament or Duma, right behind me, passed virtually unanimous resolutions declaring that Crimea was actually Russian and not Ukrainian, even though it was jurisdictionally part of Soviet Ukraine and then post-Soviet Ukraine, following a 15-minute meeting that Nikita Khrushchev convened in 1954 on the 300th anniversary of the union of the Russian-Ukrainian crowns consigning Crimea over to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic as opposed to the Russian Soviet Socialist Republic that it had previously belonged to and had belonged to Russia, really since its annexation by Catherine the Great in 1783. Moscow's mayor, Yury Luzhkov, a very powerful and ambitious politician with aims of becoming President one day, also embraced the Crimean cause. Fast forward, this is all before Putin. In May of 1997, the same month that the United States declared that Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic would join NATO and the same month that NATO and Russia signed a charter to basically compensate Russia for the admission of its former Warsaw Pact satellite allies into NATO, Russia also signed, simultaneously, a charter with Ukraine. The Russia-Ukraine charter. The substance of which was that the Russian-Ukrainian relationship is not to be understood in terms of NATO expansion and the Russia-NATO relationship. As far as I can tell, this was basically ignored at the time, and this has been the crux of the controversy between Russia and the United States and NATO in the 25 intervening years. 

What should be the orientation of Ukraine economically, strategically, otherwise in between Russia and the West in a dynamic, post Cold War international environment? And I could go on except just to remind you that time and again, Russia has been willing to pay a price, a significant price to try and keep Ukraine, however sovereign, within its international fold as it decided what that was. In 2006, January, in the middle of winter, the Russians cut off the supply of natural gas to Ukraine in the hopes of forcing internal political pressure to get rid of their somewhat difficult President, from Russia's point of view, Viktor Yushchenko. Putin repeated the same tactic in January of 2009. In late November 2013, when Ukraine was about to sign an Association Agreement with the European Union, Putin intervened. He promised 15 times as much economic aid as the EU was providing, about $15 billion, and he promised longterm delivery of natural gas on which Ukraine was almost 100% dependent on Russia, at a fraction of the world market price. So again notice, escalation of means as the stakes escalate in terms of where Ukraine's international orientation is. And I'll just leave that there because then we get to the explosion of the crisis in early 2014, the annexation of Crimea and the immediate background to the current war. 

My point is this: Russia's determination to keep a sovereign Ukraine firmly within a Russian international orbit has been a constant of Russian policy for the last 30 years. That has not changed. What has changed is the willingness to raise the stakes to maintain that policy. By the way, not so different from the U.S. policy toward Vietnam between 1950 and 1968 or 1970 to 1972. Maintain consistency of policy but raise the stakes. Indirect to direct. Economic to political, diplomatic, and eventually military. Indirect military to direct military. The pattern is quite comparable in this respect. Now to the American, what I call, maximalist factor because that has not been a constant. That's been a var- intermittent variable. The U.S. was strongly involved for a brief period of time in the early 1990s. Anxious as it was to induce Ukraine to turn over the nuclear weapons that it had inherited from the Soviet Union to Russia and they did so in a treaty, signed in January of 1994 which resulted in Ukraine becoming a nuclear free state, something that many Ukrainians currently regret in light of the current war. Once that achievement was consummated, American interest in Ukraine kind of ebbed. 

I'm not arguing that the United States was eng-, as some Russians are arguing, I'm not arguing that United States was engaged in a nefarious, longterm plot to seize Ukraine from Russia. But rather, United States was never interested, nor was the EU, in engaging Russia and Ukraine in a longterm conversation about what Ukraine's international orientation might be. About whether there were ways in which Ukraine could choose for Russia without choosing against Europe and the United States. Ways in which Ukraine could choose for the European Union and the United States without choosing against Russia. Neither the Russians, nor the Americans, nor the Europeans, nor the Ukrainians for the most part were ever truly interested in that kind of a conversation. This is my principal framework for understanding the outbreak of the war. So that when crises occurred, there was no backdrop of contacts, of concepts, of policy instruments to try and absorb shocks and minimize damage but rather to revert to instinctive patterns of behavior, many of which were left over from the Cold War, to try and maximize one's own influence at the expense of the other. We see this recurring in 2004 during the famous Orange Revolution in Ukraine, the fall of 2004. Where a hotly contested election in which the Russians thought they were able to, by economic inducements, low natural gas prices, and manipulation of the electoral machinery, they could put their own candidate forward. Turns out, many of you will remember the photographs, the sea of orange in downtown Kyiv, capital of Ukraine, thousands of European and North American election monitors, there officially on the invitation of the government. But expert in the arts of exit polling and electoral observation, pretty conclusively proved that the first results resulting in the pro-Putin candidate were falsified. This created a season-long crisis in that fall, resulted in new elections. That resulted in the coming to power of the anti-Putin candidate, Viktor Yushchenko. Now, many Americans, west Europeans say, "What, these were non-governmental organizations. "It's just a matter of observing electoral proprieties." Yes, that's true. But from a Russian point of view, when the United States and the European Union and NATO cite non-governmental organizations, the Russians think about the old Comintern or Communist International, which was technically a non-governmental organization although many of those electoral companies and NGOs were indirectly funded by Western governments to foundations funded by their governments or parliaments, and they Russians don't see a principal difference between those NGOs and Western strategic interests. 

They see a coincidence in introducing Western liberal political standards with containing Russian influence and it's from that moment that you begin to see domestically in Russia, a series of laws designed to insulate the Russian political system from outside Western involvement, observation, interference ,and so forth and that will continue till about 2012 when finally the U.S. Agency for International Development was excluded from Russia. Um.. In the period of the Obama recent, let's say from 2009 on. This was a period, andthis is a topic of my lecture today later in my class, this was a period of fairly substantial accomplishments at the bilateral level. Nuclear arms control agreements, the United States committed to bring Russia into the World Trade Organization, the Russians and the Americans collaborated make mutual concessions in terms of inducing Iran to sign an agreement, a treaty, limiting its nuclear weapons capabilities and so forth. I won't go into all the details. But there was never really any attempt to discuss what the contours of an international regime might be along Russia's borderlands. How Russia and the West might interact in countries like Ukraine. I would just note that in April of 2008, a NATO conference officially declared that Ukraine and Georgia, will, not would, not might will one day join NATO. Although they gave no timeline, no calendar, no criteria. The Germans and French were against it because they felt it was unduly provocative toward Russia. The Americans insisted and that insistence largely continue to the present day. You may recall that in the several months preceding the outbreak of war on February 23rd, the Biden Administration consistently refused to qualify that promise and say, "Ukraine's international choices "are a matter for a free people to decide "what its international alliances were." I think most careful observers, including, by the way, our current Director of the CIA, who was also Ambassador to Russia several years back, have argued that, you know, the attempt to move toward the integration of Ukraine into NATO's security partnerships was an extremely provocative move to Russia. As indeed, it did prove to be. So what we see generally is episodic attempts, when crises arise, to assert American interests and values, even at the expense of Russia's, in an area Russia considers to be its most sensitive western borderlands. From about 2011, 12 and 13, the United States is basically retreating from dealing with Russia's borderlands issues. More concerned with Iran. It's getting cooperation from Russia with Iran, but that didn't translate into any common American Russian dialogue on what the international orientation of Russia's borderlands, countries like Ukraine and Georgia should be like. Indeed, throughout this period, it was mainly the European Union that was dealing with Russia and the Europeans dealt with the Russians the same way the Americans were dealing with the Russians. Mainly on a unilateral take it or leave it basis. 

For instance, in the summer of 2013, the Russians demanded, really, that they be included in any talks regarding Ukraine's accession to membership or associate status in the European Union, on the argument that their economies were so profoundly interdependent that anything happening in Ukraine would redound, have reverberations in the Russian economies as well. The European, EU, Brussels officials consistently refused to acknowledge the legitimacy of Russia's requests, considering it to be a purely bilateral relationship between Kyiv and Brussels. The result was again, proving the consistency of Russian policy. In the summer of 2013, the Russians imposed an embargo upon almost all of Ukraine's exports to Russia. Believing that the economic pain would be such that it would induce Ukraine to reevaluate its course toward progressive associate membership in the European Union. The United States was content to let the Europeans take the lead in that until the situation exploded following the use of force by the Ukrainian government against demonstrators, in early December of 1913 - excuse me protesting the refusal of the government as promised, to sign the European, the Union Association Agreement. This expanded into a kind of second revolution in Ukraine. At which point the United States now becomes very prominently involved in the issue, and I'll just leave you with one particular piece of evidence here. And that is in early February of 2014, in the midst of these demonstrations and armed encampments surrounding the government, almost making the government hostage, with government offices taken over in most of Western Ukraine on an anti-Russian basis, we have on video, and you can look it up very easily on YouTube, we have a telephone conversation between Victoria Nuland, Undersecretary for Political Affairs in the State Department, and Gregory Pyatt who's the U.S. Ambassador in Kyiv. So the conversation is taking place in Kyiv and Nuland is talking on the street to Pyatt in his office. And what they're doing is they're going through a list of candidates for a future Ukrainian government. Thumbs up, thumbs down, maybe, so so. Names, details. Turns out it was on an open phone, not coded. The Russians got it all. And they published it. 

Much to the embarrassment of the Americans but the Americans never denied the substance of it. In effect, United States was reviewing the suitability of the composition of the future Ukrainian government. A Ukrainian government that would be organized on a predominately anti-Russian basis and that was committed toward integrating itself into, let's call them Euro-Atlantic institutions, the European Union, and NATO, as rapidly as possible. It's in that context, especially following the collapse of a compromise agreement that involved the Russians and the Ukrainian opposition in med-February, the flight of Yano Kulvrich to Russia eventually, the collapse of the previous government, and the taking of power of a government pretty much along the lines of that approved by the Americans in that telephone conversation. It's in that context that the Russians seized Crimea and then begin to foment resistance in eastern Ukraine that is the deep background to the current crisis. Time is getting short so what I want to do, by way of trying to clench my argument about the importance of the American, what I call maximalist position. But certainly, in the context of a longstanding Russian policy determined to retain Ukraine as a vassal state of Russia, even if it observes the formalities of Ukrainian sovereignty, an item that largely went unnoticed in the United States on November 10th of last year. November 10th 2021. United States and Ukraine signed what is called a Charter of Strategic Partnership. Charter of Strategic Partnership. Here are some key passages. November 10th 2021. "Guided by the April 2008 Bucharest Summit Declaration "of NATO." That's the one that promised that Ukraine will be in NATO. Two, "The United States and Ukraine share "a vital national interest in a strong, independent "and democratic Ukraine. "Deepening Ukraine's integration "into Euro-Atlantic institutions." Three, they agreed to "implement defense "and defense industry reforms, "deepening cooperation in such areas "as Black Sea security, cyber defense, "intelligence sharing, and countering Russian aggression." By the way, in 2021,NATO conducted six naval exercises in the Black Sea near Crimea that included the Ukrainian Navy. Four, "United States remains committed "to assisting Ukraine with ongoing defense "and security reforms and to continuing its robust training "and exercises. "The United States supports Ukraine's efforts "to maximize its status as a," quote, "NATO-enhanced opportunities partner. "To promote interoperability." That is to say, to make sure that Ukrainian and NATO forces can use the same equipment, or interchange personnel, ammunition, exactly as is being integrated right now on the battlefields. Finally, "Ukraine intends to continue to enhance "democratic civilian control of the military, "reform its security service, "and modernize its defense acquisition processes "to advance its Euro-Atlantic institutions." Euro-Atlantic is codeword for NATO. I want to, on the question of whether this could've been foreseen or not, these are remarks that I made at a conference in Warsaw, Poland, in June of 2019. So 2021, so what three and a half years before the war began or so. Quote, In the context of increased American arms deliveries to Ukraine, which actually began, accelerated under the Trump Administration. In the context of training Ukrainian troops to be interoperable and meet NATO standards. Polish troops were training Ukrainian troops, Poland is now a NATO member on Polish soil. Ukrainian troops have been serving in Iraq under Polish command, et cetera. Here's what I stated. Quote, June 2019. "It is difficult to see how Putin's government "or any likely alternative to it "can accept the logic of Ukraine's de facto integration "into NATO. "By pursuing policies toward Ukraine "that assume that the country must be "in the exclusive orbit of Russia or the West, "Russia and the West have been pushing Ukraine "with its numerous east-west fault lines toward partition. "Indeed, this has already begun..." Back in 2014. "To preclude further partition, not to mention "a direct U.S.-Russian confrontation over Ukraine, "U.S. national security leads "will have to address an issue "that their Russophobia prevents them from admitting. "Which is that Ukraine cannot be stabilized "without Russia's agreement." Ukraine cannot be stabilized without Russia's agreement. "As far as Russia is concerned, "its leaders need to take Ukraine sovereignty seriously "or they risk creating a kind of continental, "anti-Russian Cuba "on their most sensitive western borderlands." Which is exactly what's happened by the way. "As for Washington, "how long will it take for its leaders to realize "that providing Russia, a power like Russia "with nothing to hope for and much to fear "is a recipe for impasse at best and war at worst." I'll end as follows. And I haven't really addressed the Ukrainian ethnonationalist one. I would just note, immediately upon taking power in February of 2014, this new government, basically pre-approved by the United States basically removed the official status of the Russian language in Ukraine. An item that proved to be extremely provocative for the 10 million or so ethnic Russians and many millions more of Russian speakers. Especially in the east and south of the country and in Crimea which provided very fertile ground for Russian fomentation of armed rebellion at that time. But insofar as these three tendencies, ethnonationalists, Ukrainian nationalism, Russian colonialist tendencies, and American maximalist tendencies, insofar as they have interacted to produce the current war, that any durable settlement will have to reflect changes in all three. Russian colonialist, Ukrainian nationalist and American maximalist. As to the Russian colonialist premise, can Putin's government or any likely alternative fully accept the implications of Ukrainian sovereignty? That is, can Moscow accept the premises of a good neighbor policy? 

Abstaining from efforts to manipulate Kyiv's internal affairs and focusing exclusively on the two countries' international interactions. As to the American maximalist premise, can Washington make explicit what's always been implicit? That is, Ukraine will not become a member of NATO and NATO countries will not deploy weapons in Ukraine or near Russia's borders, capable of striking deep into Russian territory. As to the Ukrainian nationalist premise, can Kyiv renounce building Ukrainian statehood on a predominately anti-Russian basis, both at home and abroad? That is, can it renounce an exclusively Euro-Atlantacist international vocation and make a convincing demonstration that its Russians also, more than 10 million of them, are an integral part of post-Soviet Ukrainian statehood? Just to state that proposition I think is to make the case that we are now dealing with, and after nine months of war which of course produces its own awful dynamic and logic, we're now dealing with an awful and complicated political and diplomatic Rubik's, I call it a Rubik's pyramid, with these three sides: Russian colonialist, American maximalist, Ukrainian ethnonationalist. As complicated as each change, as change in each side of the pyramid may be, the task is magnified by the reality that change along each side of the pyramid also depends upon change along the other two. So I'll leave you with that. I thank you for your attention, and Dick I turn the floor back to you.

RICHARD BRONWLEE: Wow, wow. Thank you Allen. Just a comment, maybe or two as to what's ahead. It doesn't sound like there's an end in sight any time soon.

ALLEN LYNCH: Correct. Um...There have been some really major changes over the past several weeks, especially the last two months. The Ukrainians managed to foil the Russian strategy in far eastern Ukraine by seizing most of the province, if not all of the province, of Kharkiv. By the way, just to show you that, in the extreme interdependencies here, what the Ukrainians call Kharkiv, the Russians call Kharkov and Kharkov was part of the Russian polity since the 1530s, right? So the Ukrainians have pushed the Russians out of the Kharkov provinces. They are pushing gradually into Russian-occupied areas of the Donbas region, which has been a center of the war in the east. They have managed to force the Russians to evacuate Kherson in the south. The only regional capital the Russians have captured. And of course, with enormous logistical and weapons assistance, and intelligence assistance, by the United States especially, but NATO partners of the United States in general. We're in a new phase of this war. The Ukrainians believe they have the advantage on the ground in military operational terms. I think they are in a short term favorable position where they can exploit long Russian lines and depleted Russian forces and demoralized Russian troops to look for, let's call them culminating points, where they might be able to achieve decisive breakthroughs. Whether they will or not, I don't know, but I'm convinced they think they can. In that case, why should they stop fighting right now or agree to a ceasefire on the altar of negotiations with a Russia whom they believe is fighting this war to eliminate Ukrainian nationhood which is what about 90% of Ukrainians believe by the way. 

On the Russian side, I think they are convinced that they have no significant offensive capabilities for the foreseeable future. That was the meaning of their evacuation across the river from Kherson. I think they're desperately looking for new defensible lines in the south there. Ukrainians I think are determined not to give them time to find those lines. And the Russians in exchange, I mean, in reply to their inability to maintain effective ground operations, have resorted to basically terror campaigns against Ukrainian cities by focusing especially on key civilian infrastructure like electric power grids, water plants, distribution of water, in the belief that A, they might be able to coerce the Ukrainians into stopping this destruction and stopping the war. I think that's a fantasy. Or B, at least it will have the effect of eliminating and neutralizing Ukraine as an international factor, regardless of the outcome of the war. And that's where the bet is right now and I don't see the incentives for the Russians to agree to this either.

RICHARD BROWNLEE: Allen I again, thank you very much. This is fascinating. It would be nice to think there's a little more reason to be optimistic but this has put things in perspective so that we can follow what's going on in the future with a lot more understanding.

ALLEN LYNCH: This is. Yeah, this is a little bit of a dark conclusion but the truth is, if there's one note for optimism, it actually is that the situation can still get a lot worse. It's not as bad as it could be, believe me.

RICHARD BROWNLEE: Wow. Uh... (coughs) As you look ahead, did I hear correctly that you may be joining our retired faculty ranks here in another year?

ALLEN LYNCH: Yes, if my Silverbacks football team makes the playoffs, we have a spring schedule. Then I should be able to retire from football a couple of weeks after I retire from UVA on May 23rd.

RICHARD BROWNLEE: That's gonna be a major change on two significant dimensions. Are you ready for that?

ALLEN LYNCH: As Napoleon said, (speaks foreign language). You first commit yourself and then see what happens.

RICHARD BROWNLEE: Well that's great. Although you do have the assignment in Rome coming up this next year I guess.

ALLEN LYNCH: Yes, that's right. At the Free Italian University for the Social Sciences. That's the post-retirement plan.

RICHARD BROWNLEE: Wow, thank you for a great career at Virginia. Thank you for sharing your thoughts with us.

ALLEN LYNCH: Thanks to all my wonderful colleagues out there in the audience. Thank you very much.

RICHARD BROWNLEE: Well that's all right. All right, thanks everybody for joining us and we'll see you next time. Over and out.

RICHARD BROWNLEE: Welcome for joining us. Siva and I—and I had not met Siva till a little while ago—were actually just catching up on a lot of things. But greetings from Charlottesville, Albemarle, and the University, where I have to tell you the leaves have turned and the colors are absolutely spectacular. Last week, UVA Today included a short video of the current splendor of the Lawn, and if you haven't seen it, I highly recommend it. I don't know exactly which day it was, but they had about a minute video and it's absolutely wonderful. So check it out and take a look at the splendors of the Lawn. It's really something.

I'm Richard Brownlee, President of the UVA Retired Faculty Association, and on behalf of our Board of Directors, I want to welcome you to our first virtual Zoom presentation of this academic year. It was a real pleasure to see some of you last month at Alumni Hall for our Fall Reception, which was actually our first in-person event in over two and a half years. The weather was lovely, and we enjoyed socializing and enjoying some beverages on the patio before moving inside to the Manning Pavilion to enjoy some delicious food and to hear some interesting and very informative remarks presented to us by Executive Vice President and Provost, Ian Baucom.

Needless to say, there is a lot going on here at the University. Lots of construction. You pretty much can't go anywhere without looking at the construction, and we have a whole lot of new Deans. I was at a Darden function the other night, and I think I heard that our Dean, Scott Beardsley, who's only been here, I think maybe seven years, is sort of the Senior Dean. So that's pretty extraordinary, really.

Siva, am I right on that?

SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: That sounds about right. Yeah. Yeah. I'm just trying to think. Yeah, they've all changed over since Scott got here. He is the Dean of Deans.

RICHARD BROWNLEE: Wow. That's what they said.

Anyway, we had a great evening with the Provost and we really appreciate him being here—or with us that evening. It really was. And it was nice to be back in person, although it's clear that people are still hesitant and the appetite for in-person gatherings is, you know, we're still working our way through that.

So as I look ahead, our next event is scheduled for Monday, November 21st. Professor Allen Lynch will present "Causes and Consequences of the Russian War in Ukraine", which I imagine is going to get all kinds of interest for a couple of reasons. One, the topic itself. Plus, I hear Allen Lynch is quite an extraordinary speaker. So we look forward to that.

We had considered the possibility of holding this event at the Omni, but it's looking more and more like it will probably be presented via Zoom, which will also give us the opportunity to attract a wider audience and also to record it—which we're doing with this session—so we can post it on our website like we've done with the previous presentations. We'll be making a decision within the next few days and we'll put the decision on the website, but my guess is it will probably be presented via Zoom.

Then going forward, on Monday, January 30th, 2023—hard to believe we're zeroing in on 2023 already—Associate Professor Amrisha Vaish will be presenting "Moral Development in Early Childhood". Again, via Zoom.

Finally, we expect that President Ryan will host his annual event for retired faculty again sometime next March.

So now it's my great pleasure to officially introduce today's speaker.

Siva Vaidhyanathan, am I right on that?

SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: It's pretty close. Vaidhyanathan.

RICHARD BROWNLEE: Pretty close, all right. Not too bad, all right. Cool. Thank you.

Anyway, his background is both very diverse, fascinating, and interesting. One of the things I love about doing this is that I get to learn a lot about faculty who I haven't had the opportunity to know before, and this is one of those occasions.

Well, Siva is the Robertson Professor of Media Studies and Director of the Center for Media and Citizenship, and is the former Chair of the Department of Media Studies and former Director of the Deliberative Media Lab at the University of Virginia. He is the author of a number of publications I found very interesting: Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy, Intellectual Property: A Very Short Introduction, and The Googlization of Everything: Why We Should Worry.

He has two previous books: Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How it Threatens Creativity, and The Anarchist in the Library: How the Clash Between Freedom and Control Is Hacking the Real World and Crashing the System. You must lay awake at night thinking up these titles, Siva.

SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: Thank you, thanks.

RICHARD BROWNLEE: He has appeared on an episode of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart to discuss early social network services. That's all that I have. But I was fascinated by that, and I'm sure there's a lot to that story. He has also appeared in several documentary films including Terms and Conditions May Apply, Inside the Mind of Google, and Freedom of Expression. In 2016, he played a prominent role in the higher education documentary Starving the Beast and was portrayed as a character on stage at The Public Theater in New York City in a play called Privacy.

I wonder how all this stuff happened. As I was reading through this, I've been thinking—lots of backstory to this.

SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: Oh my gosh.

RICHARD BROWNLEE: He has written for many periodicals, and this is an impressive list: The New Yorker, The New York Times, Bloomberg View, American Scholar, Dissent, Chronicle of Higher Education, The New York Times Magazine, Columbia Journalism Review, Washington Post, Esquire.com, The Virginia Quarterly, New York Times Book Review, and The Nation.

He's a frequent contributor on public radio and a few stations that you might actually recognize: BBC, CNN, NBC, CNBC, MSNBC, and ABC. He's currently a regular columnist for The Guardian.

After five years as a professional journalist—I don't know what took you so long, Siva—from the University of Texas at Austin. He's also taught at Wesleyan University, the University of Wisconsin at Madison, Columbia, New York University, McMaster University, and the University of Amsterdam. He's a fellow at the New York Institute for the Humanities and a faculty associate of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard.

He was born and raised in Buffalo, New York, and when I read that, I thought of two things: snow and great football.

SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: Right.

RICHARD BROWNLEE: So I assume—and we talked earlier—you are a Bills fan, and I'm sorry.

SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: Currently happy.

RICHARD BROWNLEE: Currently happy. We'll see how it lasts. But they look almighty good and they've put it to my Steelers not long ago. So anyway, welcome and thanks for your willingness.

SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: Thank you.

RICHARD BROWNLEE: On a semester where you're actually on leave.

SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: Yeah, sure.

RICHARD BROWNLEE: Taking time to present to us The False Promise of Digital Democracy.

SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: Yeah.

RICHARD BROWNLEE: It was great chatting with you this morning. Welcome. Thanks for joining us, and unless you have any questions of me, I'll sort of disappear and let you take it away.

SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: All right, thanks Richard.

So I ran into our Provost, Ian Baucom, a few weeks ago and he mentioned that he had a great time speaking with all of you and he was super excited that I was doing this. So yeah, I mean, this is a really cool opportunity. I hope some day soon to be retired faculty. It seems like a pretty good gig.

RICHARD BROWNLEE: It's a pretty good gig, and especially staying here in Charlottesville.

SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: Yeah, really.

RICHARD BROWNLEE: Maybe you see behind me, I live sort of out on the reservoir toward Earlysville. It's gorgeous out there.

SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: Great.

RICHARD BROWNLEE: And over the weekend I went to the baseball game on Saturday. Beautiful—they actually beat Maryland 18 to nothing the second game, which was a lot of fun to watch if you're a Virginia fan. And as I was leaving, the fans were coming in for the Wake Forest–Virginia men's soccer game.

SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: Right.

RICHARD BROWNLEE: And then yesterday I had a rotary oyster roast out in Greenwood, Virginia. I know, you talk about a lot of farm out there. Stunningly beautiful, and all I could think of is how blessed I am—and those of us who retire and stay in Charlottesville are.

SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: Like many people, I moved here to raise a little one. My kid was a year and a half old, 16 years ago when we moved here. But over that period of time, my vision of the future has now much more shifted towards your lifestyle. And Charlottesville seems to be ideal for both raising a little one and enjoying the later years.

So I'm gonna tell you a story about digital democracy—or actually about democracy. But really it's about democracy over the last 30 years. It's a story every one of you knows intimately because you lived through it, you saw it, you felt it. If you're like me, you worry about it, right? You're wondering how we got to 2022. How did we get to a point in 2022 when we're less secure about democracy—not just in America but in the world—than at any point in our lifetimes?

Think about all we used to take for granted, right? We used to take for granted that outward expressions of antisemitism would be shunned by those in power and squelched in the public sphere. We used to assume that efforts to limit people's ability to vote would be quashed by the courts and fought by the Justice Department, and that we were on a long campaign to empower people in the broadest sense—in terms of what they could say, the fact that they could vote, their ability to actually interact in a qualified, dignified manner in the public sphere.

We thought that things like literacy and education and the improvements therein were going to lift us. We assumed that our technological prowess—which is one of the things that has led the United States to this position of being the most militarily powerful and wealthiest nation in the history of the world—would also empower democracy, lift democracy, strengthen democracy, get us to believe and trust in democracy.

So first I want to take you to a high point. A point we all lived through. A point that again, if you're like me, gave you chills, right? Gave you a sense that, oh my gosh, things are possible. 1989, right? 1989—I was approximately the same age as the people I teach today. I was in my early 20s. In 1989 I saw people my age tear the Berlin Wall down. I saw people my age stand in front of tanks in Tiananmen Square. A few years earlier, I had seen people my age throw rocks at police in South Africa. And then ultimately watched the South African regime crumble. A few years before that, I had seen people my age stand up to the military junta in Brazil and overthrow that government and establish democracy that seemed, until very recently, to be very...

RICHARD BROWNLEE: Erin, I lost it...

SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: All right, I'm back.

RICHARD BROWNLEE: Okay, good.

SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: I think it was on my end. I think my internet went out for a moment. Sorry about that. Yeah, so anyway I was bringing you back to the 1980s. A moment when we were just all stunned and thrilled by the fact that democracy was something that the rest of the world seemed to be coming around to, right? This system is messy. But it's ultimately good, right?

It's better than the things we have tried out elsewhere. It affords some level of dignity, some process. Some hope, some openness, right? It doesn't have all the answers. In fact, its strength is in the fact that it doesn't have all the answers.

So there we were in 1989, looking around the world and saying—I'm sure you did, I did—I can't believe this happened so fast, right? Because for so many years before that—for 40 years before that—we were not confident that a significant portion of the world would ever embrace democracy or be allowed to embrace democracy. Then it seemed at that point like it was on the rise.

Now we got a story out of that moment that I think has distracted us pretty badly, and it's a story that comes from a very tempting vision of history. One that people in my field of both media studies and science and technology studies call technological determinism—the idea that because a technology changed and then the world changed, the world changed because that technology changed or arrived, right? That there's this almost automatic unfolding. That technologies of a certain kind have a bias in favor of exposure and connectivity and freedom, and thus feed democracy.

And the story comes from some unfortunate early scholarship on the Reformation and the printing press that was very limited in its scope and was explicitly technologically deterministic. I think it biased a lot of people—or twisted a lot of people—into looking for the next printing press. And in the 1980s, even though we didn't have a public internet that was identifiable, we had an academic and scientific internet at the time, and a military version of it. But even then, we were hearing people talk about how communication technology, distributed widely, would—not just could, but would—liberate humanity. By connecting humanity. By letting ideas flow freely.

And this was embedded in this neoliberal moment of globalization—the idealization of globalization. That if money could flow freely across borders, and humans could mostly flow freely across borders and find the best market for their labor and the safest place to live and the place where their ideas flourish—and if, most importantly, ideas could flow across borders—we could all reach optimal states. That was this weirdly naive assumption that so many people, especially people in power, held in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

So you can pull up quotes from Ronald Reagan and from Bill Clinton and ultimately from Hillary Clinton as late as 2014, talking in this idealized way about information technologies being necessarily liberatory. And again, we had that reinforced during 1989 because word got out that one of the most valuable tools that dissidents and revolutionaries and protestors were using in Eastern Europe in the 1980s was the fax machine.

Now this is not untrue, but it's a bit overemphasized. If you wanted to look at the media dynamics of the late Cold War, you have to take the fax machine into account—but you also have to take the photocopier machine into account, and you have to take satellite television into account, and you have to take shortwave radio into account, and you have to take books smuggled in suitcases across the border into account. All of that mattered to build up the intellectual and social capacity for people to feel the need to resist.

Now one of the things about 1989—and I've been reading quite a bit about what happened in those days, and not just relying on my memory as a young person with my eyes glued to CNN—was that in fact, CNN mattered. Probably more than the fax machine. Now television at that point was a pretty old medium. The notion of global satellite news television was not so old, but it wasn't that new in 1989. So the question of why that happened in 1989 has a lot more to do with the particular economic and political consequences of policy choices—often made 20, 30 years earlier—coming to a head in the late 1980s.

Now it's—we all know. We lived through it. It's a really complicated story, but to say the fax machine liberated Eastern Europe is not the case. It mattered, but only because it was present. Other things mattered, and so it mattered because everything mattered.

So let me flash forward to 2009. In 2009, we see what was hopefully, at the time, called the Green Revolution in Iran. It turned out not to be a revolution at all. It was an urban-led, cosmopolitan-led, educated-led protest movement against the Iranian government. A much smaller protest than the one we're seeing right now across Iran, which is in all the cities and towns across Iran. But at the time, it was the largest protest against the government of Iran, and it arrived just after Twitter was invented.

One of the things we saw in 2009 is that activists in Iran—who were again urban, cosmopolitan, educated, and often had family and connections in Western Europe and in the United States—were tweeting about what was going on. The immediate assumption, and false assumption, that was echoed through CNN and BBC and by really shallow commenters at the moment, was that this was a Twitter revolution. That it was a Twitter-driven revolution. Why? Because they watched it happen through Twitter. Because nobody had reporters in Tehran. So there was no other way to know what was going on besides Twitter.

What was happening was the people who had access to Twitter in Iran—very few, in the thousands—were using it very well to connect with human rights groups, with expats and expat communities, with political organizers, and mostly with journalists through Twitter, telling them, often in English, what was going on in the streets of Tehran. And what happened on our side, the receiving end, is we thought, "Oh my gosh, this is all happening on Twitter because that's all I see," right?

So a terrible error was made, but the line stuck. If you go back and look at CNN clips from 2009, time and time again you hear them talk about it being the Twitter revolution. They even brought on journalists who actually understand social media and technology, and some scholars who would time and time again say, "It's not a Twitter revolution. These are real bodies in the streets putting themselves on the line. It has nothing to do with Twitter." And the chyron would still say "Twitter revolution," and CNN would repeat this because to them, that was the story, right? It didn't matter what was really happening in the world.

Flash forward again. Two years later, January 2011. Protests break out in Tunisia and then in Egypt. Actually, they broke out in late December in Egypt—just no one over here paid much attention. And within weeks, the longstanding dictatorial government of Ben Ali in Tunisia and the Egyptian government also collapsed. Nobody saw this coming. Nobody could've predicted it. The CIA didn't predict it. The State Department didn't predict it. Scholars of that area didn't predict it. These seemed to be really solid dictatorships with brutal police forces at their disposal.

How did they fall so quickly? Well, oh my gosh, look—there are all these activists using Facebook, can you believe it? And again, this is the story we got. This was the first story, and it's a story that's lasted. The notion that the Arab Spring—which was actually neither Arab nor spring, because it started in the winter and continued for several years in some ways, and also wasn't really Arab in its totality, and I'll explain that in a minute—was fueled by or enabled by or even caused by social media, specifically Facebook.

Mark Zuckerberg was more than happy to take the pat on the back. He was careful not to claim that his little social network that was invented to help college students find each other and find dates would actually contribute to the overthrow of dictators.

He was at least cautious enough not to make that direct claim, but he certainly rode the wave of it. He gave a commencement speech at Harvard and found himself on the covers of every business magazine in every airport—you know, as the guy who is giving voice to the people around the world and that somehow social media is this great tool of democracy.

Now here's the problem—and again, I'll say the same thing about social media in 2011 that I said about fax machines in 1989. And that is: yeah, they mattered, but only because everything mattered. And to look at an event like that and not look at everything is to commit historical error of a spectacular variety.

It's also important to remember that you can't run a controlled experiment on history. You can't go back and run 2011 again without Facebook. You can't go back and run 1989 without the fax machine. So you can't know how enabling those technologies were, right? You can't say, "Oh my gosh, this would not have happened without." You do know—and this is important—that people tend to use whatever communicative technologies are available to them at the time. They use the ones that are most effective for their goals. They're not thinking theoretically about it. They're just using what works, all right?

So we have inherited a strain of technological determinism that has twisted our sense of what matters in history and twisted our sense of what matters to democracy.

Now social media takes it to another level. Let me quickly define what I mean by social media. Instead of just listing Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and WhatsApp and all this stuff that gets counted as social media—look, social media is inherently dynamic. It's about constant flow of stimuli across your screen of various sorts, right? So there's constant motion, constant updating, and this gives the user an itch to scratch. The user must return to see what the user is missing at any given point. That dynamic nature of social media is one of the things that defines it.

Another is user-generated content—that most of what flows on social media is created by the users themselves. Facebook has three billion users around the world right now. Three billion. There are 7.4 billion humans on Earth. Three billion of them are on Facebook regularly. We've never had anything in human history like that. And those three billion people are uploading photos and writing text and posting video of their dogs or their white supremacist rallies—whatever it is they're posting is flowing into the system at millions of uploads per second in more than 110 languages around the world.

So when you get a sense of that scale, you know that that's really what is driving this whole thing—you and me and the three billion others who are posting stuff constantly to these systems.

We also have to focus on the fact that social media generally affords you the ability to set out an individual profile that can be linked to other people's individual profiles, thus creating what people in the industry call a social graph. So that when you have several hundred Facebook friends, they are sort of layered in terms of the amount you interact with them. And the companies know this, and they structure your experience to reflect what your group—what your social graph—tends to be interested in. Because their goal as companies is to keep you coming back and keep you on that screen.

So the social graph. And then part of that is that constant surveillance of your activity. Constant recordkeeping of your activity. To be able to then turn it into a predictive engine—and that's what I call algorithmic amplification.

So, so far the attributes I've listed: dynamic, user-generated content, there's a social graph, there's surveillance, and there's algorithmic amplification. Those are the basic elements that make social media social, right?

But beyond that, lately, machine learning has played a deep role in that process.

So many of the decisions of what we see on these systems are no longer guided by rough human guidelines and are much more about a dynamically learning computer system that's taking in habitual data and predicting things—and then creating the reality that they predict, right? So that's what's going on with social media.

Now you can imagine once that happens—once users are the chief producers of content—well, that sounds really democratic, right? And this has been the myth of the internet since the 1990s. The notion that as soon as we all get these devices that let us have cameras, video, audio—you know, we can post anything from anywhere. How democratic is that, right?

And look, there's a lot to it. If I see a cop beating somebody up, I can get the video. I can spread it around. There's some hope for a resolution to that, right? Some hope for justice if it's in fact a case of injustice. If I witness something beautiful, I can spread that too. Like you just saw my dog walk in—my Golden Retriever. She's the chief character on my social media feeds. Her name is Whiskey, she's lovely. And this is what my left hand is doing—I have to scratch her. She demands it. There she is—hey Whiskey there.

So look, that should've democratized everything, right? That was the assumption. We've been trying for centuries to put microphones in front of people—to give people the voice. So it's not just elites, right? It's not just rich people and powerful people and educated people who get to speak, but we all get to speak. And if we all get to speak, that'll be beautiful.

Until we all actually speak. And at that point, we have cacophony, not democracy—which is where we are. So that's—giving away the end of my talk—that is the ultimate culmination of what we have built over the last 30 years.

But here's the thing. Let me go back to the Arab Spring and outline some misunderstandings that we had almost instantly about the Arab Spring and that have persisted.

Number one: that people used social media primarily for the organization of the Arab Spring. That's absolutely false. Very few people in Tunisia and Egypt used social media at that time, because very few people had smartphones and very few people were connected to the global internet. Those who were lived in Cairo or lived in Tunis—again, cosmopolitan, educated people, expats or former expats, connections with family and friends and coworkers in other countries. They generally worked for international companies, for instance, and they were the ones who were used to using Facebook and used to using Twitter—mostly Facebook.

Now Facebook and Twitter had been available in Arabic for only a few months by the spring of 2011. That's important too. So the fact is, as I said earlier, people will use the most available media technology to them. In the case of the protests in North Africa in those months, the most pervasive communicative technology—and the one that the protestors found the most useful—was what we call SMS. Short Message Service. The most basic text messaging service built into the most basic cellphones.

Because those were the ones Egyptians had. They had had them for a decade. They used them for everything. And they were fail-safe. The Egyptian government could not turn off the SMS system like they turned off the internet for two weeks, because they didn't run on the internet. They ran on the phone system—on the global digital phone system. Meaning that Egypt could not turn off the global digital phone system without turning off the government's ability to function as well—along with every bank, right? There was just no way they were gonna do that.

So they did cut off the internet for two weeks, but they didn’t cut off these Nokia phones—click, click, clicking short messages to people. That’s what people used to stay in touch and say, “Hey, don’t go to that corner, the police have gathered there,” or “the military is gathered there. Go to this corner.” Or, “Everybody meet in the Square at 11 p.m.” That would be what they would do, right?

And the other technology they used were photocopied fliers—just like in 1989—because the photocopiers always work, and fliers can be anonymous, right? You can literally fly them, and they get the message around. So that was really important too.

The second thing was that TV somehow didn’t matter—but in fact, just like in 1989, the images of young people protesting in one country gave confidence to young people protesting in other countries. In this case, it was CNN, it was BBC, but it was also this new network called Al Jazeera. Al Jazeera had been kicked out of Tunisia at the time, but they had people stringing for them and reporting on it from Tunisia and spreading the message to the rest of the Arab world and beyond. A lot of people in Europe watch Al Jazeera. A lot of people in North America watch Al Jazeera as well. And it also has its own YouTube channel, so the videos were getting around. Al Jazeera, more than anything, brought the story to the rest of the Arab world—what was happening in Tunisia and Egypt.

This leads to my third observation, which is really important to remember: the activists knew this. The activists played for the television cameras—because that’s what activists do when they know how to do their job well. So they played to the TV cameras by tweeting, by putting things on Facebook, because they knew that TV reporters around the world were following them there, by posting short videos on YouTube that they knew TV could pick up and post. We all see YouTube videos running on CNN all the time. They knew that this was a way to feed CNN some material. But CNN at the time didn’t have any reporters there. It took them more than a week to get people to Cairo because it was so chaotic.

It’s also important to remember that, as I said earlier, language matters. Fewer than 10% of Egyptians were on Facebook at the time in 2011. Now it’s something like 80%. And fewer than 5% were on Twitter. And again, both Twitter and Facebook had introduced their services in Arabic in 2010—just a few months before this had happened. So they hadn’t had time to build a following in those countries beyond those who spoke and read English. So again, they’re tweeting and posting in English, and the journalists over here are eating it up—in English—and thinking that this is a reflection of everybody doing everything there, right?

So look, again, social media mattered because everything mattered.

Now here’s the other thing about the Arab Spring that I think we have to pay a lot of attention to. As I said, it was neither Arab nor in the spring. It started in December, for one thing. It lasted several years after in its various forms. It was actually more accurately described—if I were to name it—as a Pan-Mediterranean youth uprising. It was a youth uprising across the Mediterranean against the cost of living, against corruption, against oppression, against police brutality.

If you look at the protests that happened between 2010 and 2012 in Tel Aviv, in Ankara, in Istanbul, in Athens, in Rome, in Barcelona, as well as throughout North Africa, they were led by young people. They were led by young people who had taken inspiration from Achbor in the Balkans some years before. And their chief points of complaint were endemic corruption by established, old leaders in the governments and their inability or unwillingness to pay attention to the lack of social mobility—especially for overeducated people who were basically working in shops because they couldn’t get the technological jobs they thought they could get. And they were frustrated with the increased cost of living.

There were massive protests in Tel Aviv over rent, right? And rent’s still terrible in Tel Aviv. So all of this was happening in the Mediterranean at the same time, but people never—journalists were not paying attention to the Mediterranean as an area to study, right?

They see the sea as a barrier, not the place that unites all of these formerly Phoenician outposts. But that's actually what was happening.

Now you have to add Bahrain to this. Bahrain, which is not in the Mediterranean, did encounter the same kind of political protests inspired by Al Jazeera. In that case, it was the Shia majority in Bahrain rising up against a Sunni dictator, and that really concerned the Saudis. The Saudis sent troops into Bahrain and crushed it.

So where were the protests in the Arab Spring that turned out not to be successful in the least? Well, there was one successful site—and it's often forgotten—and that was Morocco. The king of Morocco was very concerned about these protests in the streets that were just as loud and just as threatening as the protests in Tunisia and in Cairo. He immediately brought the leaders of the protests in, negotiated a new constitution, and they had elections. He calmed the streets, and to this day, Morocco is a bit of a reformed monarchy rather than a brutal monarchy, and that has made a huge difference. That might be the most successful place, right?

Tunisia just voted itself into authoritarianism, much like many countries around the world are. So at that point, the Arab Spring is extinguished. We all know what’s happened in Syria. Syria was one of the bright lights of the Arab Spring in early 2011—it turned dark really fast. We all know the chaos of Libya. Again, Libya being one of the great hopes of the spring of 2011, with the same kind of protests. And we all know that, yeah, they overthrew a dictator, and then it got real bad—just as it has in Egypt, which has been a terrible tragedy.

Lebanon had uprisings. The Lebanese government has not improved in the least. It was a quasi-democracy before that, so they didn’t really have an authoritarian dictator to overthrow, but it had its own situations. And again, Bahrain.

So, where was the success? And how do you credit social media for that?

Ultimately, I think when people look back on 2010 through 2012 and they look at all these uprisings, they’re going to tell a very different story than the triumphant one that we seem to carry with us even to this day.

So look, we have built this global media ecosystem, and it was built on this promise of democratization—that giving people voice is giving people power. That ideas would flow freely, and we would sit back and think about the best ideas and adopt them and move them forward and act as good, informed citizens, as Thomas Jefferson always believed we would.

And look around. It’s not happening. What the heck went wrong?

Well, it turns out that democracy needs a few things. First of all, democracy does demand motivation, right? So you need to have the ability for like-minded people to find each other, set an agenda, and set themselves on a course of action. That’s how the action of democracy happens. That’s how you get change within a democracy.

So your factions—the factions that concerned James Madison so much—the factions that would ultimately result in either a lockdown or a balance of power or some sort of compromise, find themselves, form themselves through democratic action—through this process of motivation.

It turns out we have done great on this one, right? The tools we have through this phone are the greatest tools for motivation we’ve ever found. If I want to find 20 like-minded people right now and go to the downtown mall and protest something, it would take me a few hours. Using my various social media platforms, I could find 20 people who are mad about something—I don’t know, the rearrangement of the yogurt section of Wegmans, you know? We can all go down and protest that thing, right?

You can find something and get—it’s so easy, right? The barrier to entry for that kind of activity is lower than ever. The search costs are lower than ever. And you can direct people in very clear ways.

So this is why it's so easy to fill the National Mall with women who are angry about Trump’s election days after the inauguration. It’s why it’s easy to fill the streets of Charlottesville with Nazis in 2017. It’s why it’s so easy to overrun the Capitol of the United States in 2021. It’s why it’s so easy, relatively, to have something like Black Lives Matter, right? So it’s not all fascists—but it’s all motivational. And that is incomplete and ultimately corrosive to democracy if you have motivation without deliberation.

Democracy demands deliberation. Democracy demands the capacity to build civil society, the capacity to build and believe in the rule of law, and the capacity to embrace norms of civil discourse along with that passion of motivation, right? So this is the cerebral part of the democratic equation. You might call it the Apollonian to the Dionysian balance that we need in democracy.

So yeah, we need these technologies and motivation. They’re great. They’re also dangerous. So how do you make sure that we maximize the great and minimize the dangerous? Well, you leaven it with the Apollonian. You leaven it with deliberation.

Now what we’ve neglected—in fact, dismantled—over the last 40, 50 years are our institutions that foster deliberation: universities, public schools, chautauquas. Any method—journalism, right?—where we actually deliberate on the pages of journalism. We don’t even have pages anymore, right? We’ve defunded, denatured, disrespected these institutions that were never great at it but always allowed us at least some deliberative capacity. And we’ve neglected that.

Why? Because there’s no immediate commercial payoff for them. Because there’s no short-term payoff for our political leaders to invest in them. But think about all the institutions we’ve built up over human history that were meant to let us get beyond short-term gratification—all the churches, all the monasteries, all the temples, all the mosques. None of those are about immediate gratification. They’re about deferred gratification. They’re about coming together as a community. They’re about deliberating and thinking deeply about what is offered as the truth or the way or the path. And then stepping back and getting out of your daily life and thinking deeply.

And we have developed these machines that are really good at making us feel—and terrible at making us think.

Now, in 2016 we saw this come home, and it shouldn’t have surprised us. Because if we had been watching the world’s largest democracy in 2014, we would’ve seen this authoritarian playbook played out on social media and through the larger media ecosystem in India with the first overwhelming election of Narendra Modi as Prime Minister. And he has since made it clear he’s an authoritarian leader. He has no interest in protecting the rights of religious minorities in India. He has no interest in protecting the status or safety of castes that have been oppressed for many years. He is entirely a Brahmin Hindu nationalist, and he is determined to use his iron fist on the world’s largest—soon to be former—democracy.

And he used social media. He used armies of trolls to harass people. He spread all kinds of nonsense through Facebook, through WhatsApp, and he continues to. He’s mastered it. He’s set out how to do it, and lots of people learned from him.

Most immediately, again, had we been watching in early 2016, Rodrigo Duterte did the same thing in the Philippines. He ran an entire campaign on Facebook. That’s all he did. And in the Philippines, he’s basically destroyed the media systems there completely, and everything runs on Facebook now.

Could’ve seen it in Myanmar, which was never a democracy—or at least briefly it was in the 1960s. But now it is again a military dictatorship, basically ruled through Facebook, where all the information and all the myths and all the lies spread through Facebook. And that’s why we’ve seen genocide—one of the reasons we’ve seen genocide in recent years in Myanmar. And the expulsion of the only glimmer of hope for democracy—the party run by Aung San Suu Kyi.

Now we could’ve watched around the world.

Instead, Americans—we tend to pay only attention to ourselves. And then we were shocked that the Trump campaign used Facebook so effectively. And they used it—definitely. I can get into it in detail some other time. They didn’t use it exactly as I think people think they did. It wasn’t really about Russian propaganda. Russian propaganda was there. It probably made a tiny little bit of effect, but not enough to sway the 80,000—it was only 80,000 votes that made him President across three states, even though he lost the popular vote, right?

What did actually sway those votes in an important way is the advertising platform built into Facebook. And again, I can go into that in deep detail some other time. It’s in my book Antisocial Media, which you see right over my shoulder. But what matters here is that Trump’s people understood that the media ecosystem had changed—and the Clinton campaign did not. The Clinton campaign was still running the Obama campaign from four years earlier—or maybe even the Obama campaign from four years before that—and made a terrible mistake and totally underestimated the power of Facebook.

And then, you know, that’s one of the reasons Trump became President. And since then, he’s doubled down on this—on the biases of this media system, which are not left or right. The biases are toward immediacy, anger, passion, expression, motivation. They are against— the biases are against—deliberation, and thus ultimately against democracy.

So now we have to look forward to a runoff in Brazil, which will be once again the test of whether democracy is resilient enough to bounce back or live through this media ecosystem. And the situation in Brazil is much worse than it is in the United States. That should be what we’re watching very closely, because if democracy fails in Brazil, it can fail anywhere—and it probably will.

So I’m gonna leave you with that gloomy note. I opened with 1989, a very hopeful note. I’m ending with 2022—and I’m worried. So I’d love to entertain some questions from you. I know I have three prepared questions here.

RICHARD: How would you like to do it?

SIVA: I’m sorry, you’re muted... Let me open up the chat here. I don’t know if the chat’s open to everybody. Or wait, I see a hand—gotcha. Otto has a hand up. Let me see, how do I do this? Maybe I don’t do it, maybe Erin does it. And Whitt has a hand up. I can’t really hear anybody speaking, so...

Good to see many old friends in this group here. People I’ve known for years—and good to see you again.

SIVA: Can we get people to either type their stuff in the chat? Or... Oh, Otto is there—maybe I can. Maybe someone can unmute Otto? I don’t think I can.

OTTO: Well, since you asked.

SIVA: Hey.

OTTO: I found your talk fascinating, and I think that though I am in science rather than media, communication, or government, I think what we’re seeing now as far as the passion and, frankly, nastiness on social media is not surprising to me—because it was there on citizen band radio 40 years ago.

SIVA: Yes.

OTTO: If somebody was anonymous, they could be very nasty—and unfortunately were.

SIVA: Absolutely, and I’m glad you brought that up. So citizen band radio was fascinating. Those of us who study the history of media don’t pay it enough attention. I’m really glad that you remember it when it was a big thing. I remember all the lyrics to that hit Convoy from 1975, actually. And you know, what we saw with citizen band radio again was this sort of unfiltered, peer-to-peer, user-generated, content-driven system that had virtue. It played a role in people’s lives. Remember, the people that use this stuff are not fools. They get value out of it. It was used very effectively for emergency communication, for collaboration, for community support if someone needed help. Navigation, I think I might have mentioned. But it was also easily abused for really nasty things.

Especially as the audience grew beyond truckers—where it started—to the general population. Now all of a sudden you would see sexual harassment and all sorts of nasty things happen in it, and the discord and the dislike of it ultimately drove it away. I mean, it was quickly replaced by cellphones—even early cellphones—which served all of those positive purposes better and got rid of all of the negative stuff.

So you know that Nokia phone that people used in the late ’90s and early 2000s? That was a really good device. Because it was so limited, right? It could be used to send short messages, but you couldn’t be elaborate on it. You couldn’t send video, couldn’t send audio. I mean, you could send text, but it had to be short. But you could call a person directly, and you could maintain real-time, peer-to-peer communication globally. That seems like a really good balance. Maybe we should’ve hit the brakes there. But instead, we have these really powerful computers that do way more than any of us need—and way more than is probably good for us...

RICHARD BROWNLEE: Siva, could you access the three questions that were saved early?

SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN: Sure. Right, so the first question is: one element of the digital drawbacks is the labor burden placed by tech companies and governments on creators, makers, and citizens, right? So yeah, user-generated content—but also we are responsible suddenly for helping to filter these systems and shifting the means of production, all the while transferring wealth to the holders of the algorithms.

How can we lead a movement to flip this relationship, right? So there’s rent-seeking going on, basically. We’re doing all the work as producers of the content that is really valuable, and as labor in the sense of helping them determine what is popular, what is useful, what is valuable, and what we want. And in many cases, they ask for our help identifying troublesome content, right? So a lot of the burden is shifted to us.

And we often hear—when I give talks in the public—I often hear, “What can I do to fix this problem?” And I’m like, “Why is it your problem? You’re not making the money, right? It shouldn’t be your problem. You’re the victim.” And in fact, there’s nothing we could do. If you’re one of three billion people, there’s nothing you can do about anything.

But yeah, how do we flip the script? Well, there are two ways. One, everybody should buy and read my book. No, I mean, that would probably not hurt—but it has to do with understanding that this relationship actually exists. Once you see the system for what it is—that we are not customers, that they don’t really care about us, that we’re basically cattle being used by them—and that they are making tremendous money by sucking money away from outlets that are advertising-dependent, that might actually foster a healthier political and social and cultural ecosystem, right?

So every dollar that now goes to ads on Facebook or on YouTube, on Google Search, is a dollar that used to go to your local newspaper, that used to go to your college newspaper, that used to go to local radio stations, that used to go to Time magazine. And all of those institutions now are running on skeletal staff—if running at all. They are having to twist their editorial choices to pander to the algorithms of Facebook and Twitter and WhatsApp—well, WhatsApp’s not algorithm-driven—and Instagram.

They all have big teams that they actually pay good money to run their Instagram sites, as if that is going to enhance democracy, right? And they’re doing this because they have to. They’re seeking eyeballs, they’re seeking attention, so they can sell their ads somehow. Otherwise, all the ad money goes to those new companies—Facebook and Google, and to some degree, Twitter.

Twitter actually is a terribly run company—probably will be out of business in two years. So how do we flip the relationship? Once we understand the relationship broadly, then we can start asking questions about what fuels this relationship. And what fuels this relationship is surveillance—the data hoovering that’s going on by these companies.

If we actually had a political movement in this country to take on these companies, it wouldn’t necessarily focus on antitrust. That’s one tool, but I don’t think it’s actually a really effective one. It would focus on data rights—that you and I are making the data, creating the data, and that we should probably have some stake in how that data is used. We should have to give explicit permission for particular uses of that data. Slow down the ways that this data is harvested and deployed to make it a lot more costly to these companies to do the things that they do. If you build costs in through that kind of regulation, you might not flip the relationship, but you can at least curb the excesses of it.

Alright, the second question is: What is it about biases and lies in digital media that was not present in non-digital media of the past, and what do you propose as solutions to the current state of affairs?

Okay, so yeah—I want to assert that lying is not a 21st-century phenomenon, right? That’s why there’s a commandment about it, right? So of course we’ve had disinformation, misinformation. I love telling people about the election of 1800—especially at UVA, right? Because 1800’s kind of an important year for the founding of UVA and the status of Thomas Jefferson, right?

And the fact is, that election was probably the most overrun in U.S. history by fabulous stories—spectacular stories—about both major candidates, Adams and Jefferson, and Burr. All the problems with them. And you know, almost everything was false. There was no massive voice of reason. There was no centrist determination of what the truth—capital “T”—is, right? There was no Walter Cronkite. There was no New York Times.

There’s a very brief period in human history—and in U.S. history—where we had what you might call a ballast that determined for us what was reasonable, what was true, what was meaningful, what was important. And that was this very brief moment between 1945 and, let’s say, 2000, when this collection of—often called “mainstream media,” though there are certainly better words for it—the establishment media helped weigh our public deliberations. And they did so at great cost, because they shut out minority voices, emerging voices. They shut out a lot of issues that a lot of us wanted to have paid attention to. And that’s why there was this movement to increase the number of voices.

But again, you increase the number of voices, you increase the cacophony. You have to remove filters. So there was some gain and some loss there.

So no, lies are not new. What’s new is not the truth/false axis that matters. It’s the Apollonian/Dionysian axis that matters. That’s what’s changed, right? What’s changed is now what flies around the world quickly and what lands in front of our eyes effectively are emotional triggers—the Dionysian, the passionate.

The pictures of my golden retriever—they’re the most popular things I have on Twitter. I have a whole Instagram account for the golden retriever because people love it. It makes them feel good, right? She makes them feel good.

Why did we all get on Facebook in the first place? For the baby pictures and the puppy pictures and the news from our nephews about high school graduation. The cute stuff like that, right? The good stuff. The stuff that warms us. But it’s all very emotional.

Now what that means is these machines are driven by our emotions. They are affective machines. They’re feeling machines. They don’t care about the logical, the truthful. That’s just not even in the range of their capabilities of determining or judging. They don’t care about that. They care about what moves us—because what moves us is what gets us to click. We click, we share, we like, we comment, we post emojis, we make new comments—to create feelings, to share feelings, to feel something.

I pick up this phone 100 times a day just to feel something. So that’s the axis that we have now. We’re playing on and we have maximized for the Dionysian and minimized for the Apollonian—for the passionate over the deliberative, right? For motivation over deliberation.

What that appears—if you start asking questions about truth and falsity—you’re like, “Oh my gosh, look at all this conspiracy theory stuff.” Look, in 1975, 20% of this country did not believe that people walked on the moon six years earlier. That’s amazing. Why did that conspiracy theory flow? It wasn’t because of social media—we didn’t have it. It flew ear to ear, mouth to mouth. Some of it was the National Enquirer was pumping that stuff out. Some of it was that there were underground books being published about it.

And even today, something like 10% of Americans don’t think that people walked on the moon. There are major NBA players with degrees from places like Davidson, and the University of North Carolina, and Michigan who don’t believe people walked on the moon. I actually wrote a little thing about this and gave a talk about the moon landing conspiracy theories that are still amazingly salient today. And they’re connected to flat earth theories, by the way. There are hundreds of flat earth groups on Facebook. I don’t know why they don’t all join one group, but apparently they have different takes on the earth being flat.

So look, it’s a crazy thing out there. The thing is—crazy finds itself easier now. Social media has removed those barriers to finding like-minded people, right? That’s part of motivation. So you can find other people who don’t believe people walked on the moon, who don’t believe that the earth is round, who believe that Jews control everything and are going to kidnap all the babies. There are people who believe that—and they’ve always believed that—but now they find each other in 10 minutes with a couple of clicks. And that is new. And that’s what we haven’t taken account of.

We have removed all the brakes, all the friction from that system, and made it way too easy for that to happen. And that’s one of the reasons we have cacophony. And that’s one of the reasons we have chaos. And that’s one of the reasons it’s so hard to have a decent conversation about anything serious.

RICHARD: Sort of leads you to the last one there.

SIVA: Yeah.

RICHARD: Let me just say before you answer that—this has been fabulous.

SIVA: Yeah.

RICHARD: Thank you. Thank you so much. Great to meet you and thanks for being with us and sharing your thoughts.

SIVA: Okay. Well, third question—and I’ll just finish it, I’ll say goodbye after that—is: How did digital technology impact the January 6th attack on the Capitol?

Yeah, so again—we can’t run that experiment. We can’t isolate a variable and say, “Would it have happened without digital technology?”

I do want to point out that the United States has seen its share of chaotic, violent political moments over the years in the absence of social media and digital technology, right? The Haymarket Square riots, for instance. Again, regardless of your political affiliations or what you think about a particular historical moment, it has always been possible for like-minded people to find each other, fill a square, and find themselves in a violent situation.

That particular one has some of the enabling markings—or amplifications—of our current media ecosystem. By that I mean, these people again found each other really easily through various social media platforms, largely the ones devoted to the extreme right. There are some social media platforms that are almost the exclusive purvey of the extreme right. And so Facebook and Twitter tend not to be the real villains here. They do contribute a bit. And of course, everyone’s using their cellphones to coordinate everything, right?

I don’t know how people got married before cellphones, for instance. You’re gonna bring a couple hundred people together and make sure they all get their hair done? I don’t know how you do it without a cellphone—but people did, apparently. So that’s what I mean. It’s just so easy to put bodies in one place now, to give them a unified message, and let them loose.

So I would say January 6th, 2021, was made easier by these technologies—but it certainly could’ve happened anyway. The United States has had its dances with fascism. We had a massive Klan rally in Madison Square Garden in 1925, right? This is not a first. We’ve had the Klan run large states of this country for years. The entire history of American racial oppression inspired European fascism and has been, in turn, inspired by European fascism. It’s a solid field. It’s a constant strain in American life, and it breaks out into real life every couple of decades.

But every time it does, it has its own particular markings of the moment. So if we could wish away our phones and our digital technology, I think we would still have fascism. I think we would still have it in a different way, though—in a different valence, a different tenor—and maybe we would address it differently.

So how do we address this stuff? Well, here’s the sad thing. There are two answers to that. One: I don’t know. But what I do know is it’s going to be hard work. It’s going to require building up that capacity for real social interaction, right?

Social media is misnamed. It’s actually very antisocial. That’s the name of my book, right? It actually evaporates social connection—desiccates social connection. Real social connection requires the acknowledgment of someone else’s humanity and dignity. And none of that is necessary when we do it through our phones. It’s possible—it’s not absent—it’s just not necessary.

But when I talk to my neighbor, it’s necessary. I look at my neighbor and I say, “This is a person with three kids. This is a person who pays taxes. This is a person who has to deal with my dog barking at six in the morning.” A human being. I have to recognize that. And even if we have a huge disagreement, there is a foundation of a shared acknowledgment of humanity.

Now, that’s not always good enough. People kill their neighbors all the time, right? That’s the story of Jerusalem. But it does mean that that’s at least easier to build.

So how do we build a capacity for that kind of acknowledgment? It’s not a technological question. It’s a social question—and to some degree, a spiritual question. But it all gets led politically. We have to make these things explicit political choices. We’re going to choose democracy, or we’re going to choose fascism. But the worst thing to do is to stand back and lapse into fascism.

All right, I’ll leave it at that. Thank you again. I’m really glad that you entertained me today with this. I’m easy to find: siva@virginia.edu. Pop me an email if you have any more questions. It’s good to see my old friends—especially Alf. Good to see you, Alf. All right, I guess I’ll leave you.

RICHARD BROWNLEE: Okay, thanks.

Greetings once again from Charlottesville and your university, as we celebrate Black History Month here. I'm Richard Brownlee, President of the Retired Faculty Association. And on behalf of the board of directors, I wanna welcome you to our second virtual Zoom presentation for 2022, "Threshold Literature and Iranian Women Writers." I will be introducing Professor Milani momentarily.

Much has happened here since we were last together for Emeritus Professor James Childress' superb presentation on "Ethics in the Time of COVID-19." As a reminder, his presentation and our other presentations are available on our Retired Faculty Association website. Also, if you wish to update your contact information, you can do so on the homepage of our website.

The Commonwealth has a new Governor, and Executive Vice President and Provost Liz McGill is leaving UVA to become President of the University of Pennsylvania. Her departure was a bit of a surprise, but President Ryan wasted little time and appointed Ian Baucom, Dean of the College and Graduate School of Arts & Sciences, as the new Executive Vice President and Provost. He will be transitioning to that new role next month to give him time to overlap with Liz McGill prior to her becoming President at Penn in July.

The spring semester is well underway as some 17,000 undergraduate students and 9,000 graduate students return to grounds. Classes are mostly in person, and the university just recently lifted its vaccination and booster requirement. Although the good news is over 99% of our students have already complied with the previous vaccine and booster requirements. In addition, the university also just lifted its temporary ban on food and beverage inside school facilities, including sporting events. I think one of the reasons our basketball team looked so good over the weekend was the concessions were open again in JPJ and the audience had a lot more energy. Great win for the Hoos. However, the university's indoor mask requirement does remain in effect.

Looking ahead to our event next month, March 21st with President Ryan, his office is still cautiously optimistic that it might be an in-person event. As soon as we know anything, we will let you know.

And now it is my great pleasure to introduce today's presenter, Professor Farzaneh Milani. So as not to miss anything or get anything incorrect, I'm going to refer to my notes here as I introduce her. Farzaneh Milani is the Raymond J. Nelson Professor of Iranian and Gender Studies. She is the former chair of the Department of Middle Eastern and South Asian Languages and Cultures, and past director of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies. She holds a joint appointment in both of these departments.

Professor Milani has published several books and articles in both Persian and English. She has written for such publications as The New York Times, The Washington Post, Christian Science Monitor, Ms. Magazine, Reader's Digest International, USA Today, and All Things Considered among others. She has presented more than 270 lectures nationally and internationally. A past president of the Association of Middle Eastern Women's Studies in America and a Carnegie fellow, she was a recipient of the All University Teaching Award in 1999, the Zintl Leadership Award in 2015, and the Cavaliers' Distinguished Teaching Award and Professorship in 2020.

The Nobel Committee of the Swedish Academy invited her to join it as a member of its board of external experts for literature. Professor Milani will serve in that capacity for the next three years.

Farzaneh, welcome, thank you for agreeing to present this fascinating topic to our retired faculty. And I must say that is one impressive list of what you've been spending your very fascinating life doing. It's amazing, and I couldn't have gone through that without consulting my notes. So thank you for sharing those with me so I could do a reasonably good job of welcoming you and giving our audience an idea of what you've been doing with an incredible life. So welcome, and thank you. This is a fascinating topic, and I will say in just talking briefly, you are on sabbatical this semester, but spending some time in Charlottesville, is that right?

FARZANEH MILANI: That's right, yes.

RICHARD BROWNLEE: Well again, thank you, I will magically disappear from the screen here and let you take over and make your presentation. And I'll remind folks that it will be on our website within a few days after the presentation is made. So take it away, we're really looking forward to hearing from you

FARZANEH MILANI: Thank you, Richard. Thank you for this most generous and kind introduction. I'm truly grateful, and good afternoon dear colleagues. I feel honored to be in the presence of such a distinguished audience. As an Iranian American, as a writer whose books are all banned in her country of birth, I do not take for granted the privilege to share my thoughts freely and openly with you. Thank you for being here, thank you for listening.

My presentation this afternoon will be divided into three interconnected sections. I will begin with a few words about the state of the arts in Iran. In the following section, I will discuss women writers in contemporary Iran, and I will conclude with the observation that in the poetic and narratological architecture of Iranian literature in general, and women's literary tradition in particular, thresholds have a special place. Threshold within this context is a liberating space for women who wield the pen in a segregationist culture like Iran.

The 1979 Islamic Revolution, like all revolutions, had several unintended and unexpected consequences. Let me give you two examples: post-revolutionary cinema and women's literature. I believe these two might be two of the most glaring and prominent examples. The Iranian booming film industry before the revolution was nearly shut down after the revolution. You might remember that almost half of all movie theaters were destroyed or utterly burned down—32 in the capital city of Iran alone, 255 nationwide. Ayatollah Khomeini linked cinema with the onset of corruption, licentiousness, prostitution, moral cowardice, and cultural dependence. Yet today, Iranian cinema is one of the most respected national cinemas in the world. It is also one of the most globally celebrated forms of Iranian arts, aptly characterized as a revolution, and I believe it is. It is critically acclaimed worldwide. It is honored in major international film festivals, it has garnered numerous awards all over the world. And as you might recall, it won the Oscars for Best Foreign Language Film for the first time in 2012 and then again in 2016.

Post-revolutionary literature followed a similar trajectory as the film industry did. Although soon after the revolution, the new clerical regime executed some prominent writers and poets, banned others, and succeeded in driving a large number of writers into exile, it failed to silence them in the long run. In spite of all the problems—and believe me, there were many—from execution to imprisonment, from street harassment to court summons and interrogations, from anonymous slander to official denunciation, from anxiety and anguish to forced conformity to the regime's haphazard interpretation of morality and religiosity—poets and writers, after a temporary lull, emerged with renewed energy and rigor.

This graph prepared by Writer's Block indicates how the revolution, in its violence, in its anti-intellectualism and isolationism, had a great impact on a whole generation of Iranian writers and poets. The revolution not only monopolized the world's attention, it also cut off those writers who stayed in Iran from the world, and those who went abroad from their country of birth. The lives and careers of many writers were disrupted by forces beyond their control. The post-revolutionary literary scene can serve as an indicator of the political tiff in Iran. Book publishing blossoms during times of political tolerance, which unfortunately has been rare. It suffers when reaction collides with reform. Even so, the number of published titles, as you see on the graph, has increased substantially over the last four decades.

In spite of the violence perpetrated against literary figures and the 7,000 publishing firms in Iran, I have to say that admittedly and regrettably, fear of the written word is nothing new in Iran. It is almost as old as Iranian literature itself. Writers have been intimidated, abducted, put under house and country arrest, exiled, executed. They had their property confiscated, their lips sewn together, their tongue cut out, their fingers broken. Their mutilated and tortured bodies hung from cranes in public squares. There is a whole category of Persian literature, both prose and poetry, devoted to such atrocities reserved for those who wield the pen and speak truth to power.

The Islamic Republic of Iran, however, has taken this unfortunate history of repression and censorship to new depths of depravity. The current literary and artistic scene is notable for mysterious disappearances, night raids, ransacking of homes, burning of books, round-the-clock surveillance, withholding of publishing licenses, brutal questioning by the secret police, trial in kangaroo courts, and suspicious deaths. A string of killings of writers shook the country in the 1980s and 1990s. A number of dissident writers were murdered. And in 1998, the government attempted to assassinate 21 members of the Association of Iranian Writers together by sending the bus in which they were traveling to Armenia to attend a conference down a ravine.

The Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, who I'm ashamed to say, like his predecessor Ayatollah Khomeini, is a published poet, blamed foreign perpetrators shamelessly. He said, "The enemy is creating insecurity to try to block the progress of Iran's Islamic system." But finally, when denial was no longer a viable option, the Ministry of Information issued a rather brief press release and blamed some of its staff. It claimed that under the influence of rogue agents, these innocent people have committed criminal activities.

Small wonder then, if poet Simin Behbahani, nicknamed lovingly, "The Lioness of Post-Revolutionary Iran," believed and wrote, "We write our books, not with ink, but with our blood." And now that the Supreme Leader has surrounded himself with his ideological clones, the Islamic Republic is exercising even tighter and more brutal control over literature. A wave of state repression is in full swing in Iran these days.

On September 26th, 2020, Baktash Abtin, a poet, a filmmaker, and the three-time member of the board of directors of the Iranian Association of Writers, was sentenced to six years in prison. His alleged charges were: spreading propaganda against the state, illegal assembly and collusion against national security, and—listen to the last one—encouraging women to immorality or prostitution. The latter indictment was so ludicrous, it was eventually dropped from the list of his accusations. Abtin was taken to the overcrowded Evin Prison in the midst of the pandemic, and he died from COVID on January 8th, 2022. He was 48 at the time. A photograph of him shackled to a hospital bed went viral in Iran.

What, we might ask, was so dangerous, so menacing about a poet whose only weapons were words? What had he done to deserve such fury and cruel death? And this in a country where literature is sacred, it is considered the national scripture. People grow up kissing poetry books. They go on pilgrimage to the shrines of their literary figures. Why, we should ask, is such a country now the fourth worst jailer of writers and public intellectuals in the whole world?

According to the Freedom to Write Index from PEN Association, Iran—after China, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey—leads other countries in detaining writers. According to Writers Without Borders, Iran is one of the most restrictive countries in the world when it comes to the freedom of expression. Freedom of expression—Iran now ranks 173 out of the 189 countries that were investigated.

Mr. Baktash Abtin, like his literary colleagues, knew the exorbitant price he would have to pay as a writer and a poet. He knew the consequences of his actions, but did not fear them.

A few months before his early death, he said in an interview, "Freedom has never been gifted to anyone on a golden plate. In a country like Iran, death is very cheap for intellectuals, freedom-loving people, and those who fight for freedom of expression. We're not worried to face trials, to go to prison and endure suffering." Abtin, like the Iranian people, believed in the enduring power of words. He knew politicians come and go, governments are voted into office and chased out of it, but the magical power of words remains. In his own prophetic words, a little before his death, "I am a tombstone, I have a thousand names and I shall return every time I hear my name." And surely Abtin's message is louder today than it has ever been before.

Yes, poets and writers can be censored, imprisoned, executed, but their message is undying. It cannot be handcuffed, it cannot be shackled to a hospital bed, it cannot be killed off, it cannot be wished away. In a recent interview Mahsa MohebAli, a talented and prize-winning novelist, said, "If you are a writer in Iran, you have made two mistakes. Being a woman is the first, being a writer is the second." MohebAli has a point. The choice of literature as a career has been more hazardous for women in the country with a long history of sex segregation, especially now at a time when the new regime is obsessed with the reintroduction of sex segregation into nearly every aspect of life.

The clerical regime went as far as reversing a fundamental right that women had enjoyed since 1936. That is when Reza Shah Pahlavi issued a decree banning the veil, oblivious to the fact that the clock of individual rights and liberty cannot be turned back. The Islamic Republic reimposed obligatory veil, but women have resisted and fought their re-veiling and their resegregation. In the last four decades, paradoxically, Iran has experienced a mass exodus of women from segregated spaces to the public arena and from inside the country to outside Iran. Whether women teach or study in institutions of higher education, whether they appear in front of the camera or behind it, whether they write books or communicate through blogs and online forums, they are present in the public square and the public discourse.

To the best of my knowledge, never before in the written history of Iran have women moved so far outside the framework pre-ordained by their culture. Never before have women emerged as such a formidable civic force to be reckoned with. This considerable population shift, and I believe heroic resistance, have led to an outpouring of creative energy and the unprecedented presence of women on the national and international literary scenes. The refusal to remain behind closed doors, excluded, unacknowledged, unseen and unheard has given rise to the Iranian women's literary renaissance.

This renaissance is at the intersection of opposites. It is the tale of two competing narratives. On the one hand, it's the story of governmental repression. On the other hand, it is the triumphant tale of artistic effervescence. It is the story of a regime fixated on separating the worlds of men and women in public places and the chronicle of an unwavering refusal to put down pen or to succumb to silence and denial.

Undeniably, sex segregation is not new in Iran. It predates the revolution. For centuries, in addition to divides defined by class, religion and ethnicity, there existed in Iran another partition of the social order—one that was based strictly on anatomy. Visible and invisible walls and veils separated the world of men and women who were not related to each other by marriage or blood. Sex segregation, we should remember, is not about faith, it's not about piety or safety. It's about control, it's about domination and exclusion, it's about barring women from active participation in the public sector.

Segregation establishes complex interconnections between bodies and borders in physical and symbolic senses; it curtails women's freedom of movement. Even today, to be issued an Iranian passport, I, like all Iranian women, need the written permission of a male guardian. In a society with an ideal of femininity as asynchrone, silence and invisible, women writers could not easily publish or flourish, and they did not. A woman's voice, like her body, was subject to strict concealment. Her silence in public places was legitimized, spiritualized, fetishized. It was idealized and considered part of her physical beauty and desirability. Exceptions aside, the power and privilege of the written word belonged mainly to men.

Having suffered the impact of segregation on their bodies and voices, women writers have had to subvert a powerful system of control and confinement. They knew desegregation was central to their literary enterprise. They knew they had to trespass traditional boundaries. They knew, to become a published writer, they needed a room of their own and economic independence, as Virginia Woolf had remarked, but also the freedom to leave that room and return to it at will. Without the unconditional, untainted, and unrestricted right of entry and exit, a room can become a prison cell.

To break the spell of their textual, quasi-invisibility, women had to make the circulation of their bodies and their voices central to their artistic project. That is why, thematically speaking, the literary universe of contemporary prose and poetry by Iranian women is built on spatial tropes of movement and containment. Metaphors of restraint and captivity—such as walls, veils, imposed silences, fences, gates, cages, blind windows, closed doors, and bars—coexist side by side with the desire to sprout wings, to fly, to flee, to run and dance, and sing through the texts, to bear witness, and to push boundaries into the unsaid and the forbidden.

The genealogy of this desegregating movement can be traced to the mid-19th century when more and more Iranians, both men and women, began to interrogate sex segregation. Women writers and poets, always at the forefront of social and political movements in Iran, demanded the expansion of their citizenship rights. As early as 1848, that is a few days before the Seneca Falls Convention in Upstate New York, an Iranian woman, a poet named Qurratul-ʿAyn, walked into a congregation of 81 men at Badasht, a hamlet in Northeastern Iran. She unveiled her face and her voice, and proceeded to address the all-male congregation with calm and composure.

Qurratul-ʿAyn is the first woman to publicly unveil herself in the Islamic Middle East. When she entered the all-male gathering, pandemonium erupted. Some men were startled, shocked, stunned into silence; some were furious. One man raised his dagger against her, some left the gathering. One man, one Abdol Khaleq Esfahani, in whose biography I have been fascinated, closed his eyes and covered his ears, not to see and not to hear. Still, he felt distraught and disoriented, cutting his throat with his own bare hands and splattered with blood, he fled away from the scene. A few men, however, supported Baraghání. They considered her unveiled presence, her unveiled body and voice, the emblem of a new era, and the symbol of other forthcoming forms of denunciation.

Although Qurratul-ʿAyn was called a heretic, although she was sentenced to death and her body was thrown in a well, her message lived on. Indeed, the scene at Badasht captured with dramatic intensity the events that were to be replayed—and are still to a certain extent replaying—in Iran regarding women's desegregation and unveiling. Since then, questions such as, "Where is a woman's proper place?"; "What are the consequences of her public presence?"; "How would her unveiled body and voice redefine masculinity and femininity?"; "How would her freedom of movement modify her important role as wife and mother?" have been at the heart of Iran's continuing struggle for democracy.

That is why the reorganization of physical, social, and dispersive spaces runs like a unifying thread through the work of female writers and poets in contemporary Iran. Pioneering women stood at the threshold of the private and the public, the inner and the outer, and made distinct and significant contributions to Iranian literary maternity. Entering hitherto inaccessible and unexplored territories, they generated new ideas and new themes. With their gaze fixed to the gateless sky, they conceptualized a way of stepping out of designated spaces and bringing the readers into forbidden interiors and interiorities.

They explored taboo topics such as family and gender relations, domestic violence, the difficulties of reconciling family commitments with artistic aspirations, mental depression, drug addiction, child custody battles, sexual relationships, and the right to choose one's partner. Most importantly, I believe, they brought a search for democracy and the yearning for gender equity into bedrooms, family rooms, and kitchens across all classes. This challenge to traditional definitions of power and authority, this advocacy of change within the privacy of the family unit, was most consequential and least tolerable for the Islamic Republic.

True to form, the very first decree of the clerical regime on 26th of February, 1979, just a few days after Ayatollah Khomeini returned to Iran from exile, was the repeal of the 1969 Family Law. The genie, to the chagrin of the ruling elite, however, was out of the bottle and could not be put back in. Women insisted on the recognition of their full-fledged humanity.

In her novel The Blue Logos, published in 1996, Shahrnush Parsipour, one of Iran's foremost novelists and imprisoned for five years, writes, "I was entering the depth of darkness, the deep of the sea. I felt cold. I was becoming an absence. I wanted warmth; I wanted love; I wanted light; I wanted presence. I screamed, why do you always keep me in the deep of the sea?" Repeating the same question, "Why do you keep me in the deep of the sea?" seven times in a single short paragraph, Parsipour rejects enclosure, but also pays homage to her predecessor, Forugh Farrokhzad, who had written in a poignant and much celebrated poem, Let Us Believe In The Dawn of the Cold Season: "Look how heavy time stands here and how a school of fish chew my flesh. Why do you always keep me in the deep of the sea? I feel cold. And I despise this mother-of-pearl earrings."

The image of light and life trapped under a deep and frozen sea, like the image of a caged bird, like the image of a woman locked up in a beautiful doll house, like that of water stagnating in a ditch, is a central trope in the work of Iranian women in the last 170 years. Cognizant of the healing powers of words, of literature, women used words to pull themselves out of the burrows in which their voices had been held prisoner. "I make a rope out of words and slowly pull myself up from the depth of darkness, from the bottom of the well," writes Goli Taraghi in The First Day, an autobiographical short story published after the revolution and after her nervous breakdown and hospitalization.

Women refuse to disappear from the scene, to recede in the dark, to recede in the deep of the sea, in the bottom of the well. They refuse to stand still behind stringent codes of segregation and suspended opportunities. They ignored the command, "Go home, you don't belong here." Shiva Arastoui, the prolific poet and novelist who has garnered a number of prestigious literary awards in the last few years, expresses her determined presence in the public square. "The narrator of my stories," she announces with great pride, "has been involved in the revolution; she has been a student, has attended the university, has been present in the streets with boys her own age at every step of the way, and has not found the time to stay inside the house. She wants to say, 'I exist.' She wants to say, 'I, too, am a human being.'"

And so it is that in the narrative architecture of these works, thresholds have a special place. This is a space of transit and transition, a place to pause and to move. It's a third space, an in-between territory, the entry and the exit point simultaneously. It is a neutral space, a space of freedom and experimentation, a space that defies dichotomies, classifications, and categorization. It's a space of peril and safety at the same time. Perhaps that's one of the reasons some Jews affix a Mezuzah with a scroll of Torah verses inscribed on it to the doorpost and kiss it upon entering and leaving the house. And some Muslim families hold the Qur'an over the head of a person crossing the threshold.

As I use it here, thresholds are fluid spaces that allow thinking outside the binaries where, in fact, binary opposites are in generative reciprocity. Thresholds offer a spectrum of options, rather than only two extremes. They offer a space for the conjunction "and" rather than the conjunction "or." Thresholds are different from borders, boundaries or limits. One might even say they're ontologically and metaphorically antithetical to them. They can function as bridges rather than walls of separation. They offer a space where exchange of ideas is possible, biological thinking is fostered, creativity blossoms.

Perhaps that's why for thousands of years, experienced Iranian storytellers have begun their stories with this enigmatic opener, Yeki Bud Yeki Nabud, "There was one, and there wasn't one." Can the moment of artistic creation—when the created becomes the creator—be described more accurately?

Standing at the threshold of the private and the public, overcoming absence and erasure with their boundary-pushing works, women are publishing a record number of books and moving into traditionally male territories. While there have been poets for millennia, going back to the very beginning of Iranian literature, today there is a women's literary tradition in Iran. Women are writing some of the most interesting and provocative fiction. They dominate the fiction best sellers list. Not only is the number of women novelists significant, but a phenomenal growth can also be seen in the number of women publishers, literary critics, and translators.

Remarkably, these authors have viably different social, political, and religious backgrounds. For instance, Belgheis Soleimaini, who has authored some of the most popular and award-winning novels in recent years, hails from a small village. She voluntarily wears a veil, and discusses Western and non-Western literature and philosophy. She deals with fascinating non-binary things.

Many of her female protagonists reach boundaries and defy familiar frames and certainties. They live under borders between city and village, tradition and modernity, intellectuals and commoners. The revolution has also been a catalyst for expansion of literature. It has ushered in an era of unmatched geographic growth.

Gina Nahai, the celebrated author of several novels about the Iran Jewish community, captures this phenomenal emergence of women writers in the Iranian diaspora, which is a rather sizable community of Iranians dispersed all over the world. That is six and a half percent of all of Iran's current population. Nahai writes, "Once upon a time, I was one of two Iranian women authors writing and publishing in the West. I know this is hard to believe, given the current wave of novels and memoirs by Iranian women authors about Iran, or by American authors about Iranian women, or any other variation thereof. That was then. Nowadays, hardly a week goes by when I don't meet or hear about another Iranian women writer writing a book. I find them everywhere, at readings and lectures around the country, at the hair salon and the grocery store."

Free from the restrictions of governments and self-imposed censorship. This is the first time in more than 11 centuries of written Persian literature that a considerable number of women are winning or being nominated for some of the most important literary awards in the world. This is the first time that the works have been met with worldwide reception, translated into many languages, included in anthologies of literature and have made it to the list of best-selling books in various countries. They are praised and analyzed in some of the most prestigious newspapers and literary magazines. They are taught in schools and universities. This is the first time that prose, rather than poetry, is enjoying unprecedented popularity and recognition.

Building on the works of their literary foremothers, profoundly influenced by globalization trends, the works of these women do not fit into a homogeneous framework. They are diverse in terms of style, narrative strategies, techniques, political perspectives, methods of narration, and of course, literary merits. Altogether, Iranian women inside and outside the country are producing a radically dissenting body of writing with a momentum never before experienced. And if we accept that stories no more than the storyteller, just as poems no more than the poets and dreams no more than the dreamer, then this newly emerging body of work is the harbinger of upcoming political changes.

Although women have fought in recent decades for political leadership, the powerful Expediency Council and the Guardian Council, and of course The Supreme Leadership, are barred to women. Even though several women have nominated themselves as presidential candidates—40 in the most recent election—they have been consistently and systematically disqualified from running. Currently, less than 6% of seats in the parliament are held by women. President Raisi has not included a single woman in his cabinet.

The political landscape, however, is quite different. Female heads of states, even female prophets, abound in these books. The female narrator of the prize-winning novel My Bird, published in Iran by Fariba Vafi, proclaims matter-of-factly, "I must be king even if I don't have a crown on my head." The young and sassy protagonist of the graphic novel Persepolis, by Marjan Satrapi, goes even further and declares herself the first female prophet in the long line of male predecessors. And in the taboo-bursting, semi-autobiographical novel Disoriental, published in France by Negar Djavadi, the pre-Islamic Iranian prophet Zoroaster is a girl.

Bridging the intellectual divide between literary texts and political realities, with the benefit of hindsight and the wisdom of foresight, standing at the threshold of East and West, Iranian women writers and poets are greeting the world. They are welcoming hospitable readers and announcing the dawn of a new era in Iran.

"I will come, I will come, I will come.

And the threshold will be filled with love.

And there, at the threshold,

I will greet all those who love.

And I will greet the girl

who stands at the threshold,

and is filled with love."

We just have a few more minutes, I hope you will be patient with me. And I apologize for going over time. The price women have paid to nurture their creativity has been exorbitant. In the words of Simin Daneshvar, Iran's foremost novelist, "Let Simone de Beauvoir come and live for a year the life I live here in Iran, and if she can manage to produce a single line of writing, I will change my name." And Shirin Ebadi, the human rights activist and the Nobel Peace Laureate, portrays women writers in a "space-age battle helmet."

But beneath the unpredictability of the past 42 years, beyond the unforeseen twists and turns, one thing is sure: the regimes, repression, and violence have lived side by side with the inspiring resistance of the Iranian people. And I believe it is at the intersection of opposites that marvels or catastrophes can be created. In the words of Rumi, the poet philosopher, "The clash of opposites is as old as time itself. The harmony of opposites is eternal life, it is paradise."

Indeed, when sunlight and falling rain coexist, a rainbow is born bridging Heaven and Earth. When light and darkness dwell side by side in the sky, dawn arrives and the sun rises. Conversely, when opposites work at cross purposes, tragedy can arise. When the atmosphere is polarized, when the negative charge in the storm cloud collides with the positive charge in the ground, lightning can occur. When divisive views and discourses deepen in a country, social unrest, even civil wars can happen.

The Islamic Republic of Iran has reached such a point. It has reached the height of a polarized and polarizing moment. This is a veritable crisis on religious, cultural, economic, and political levels. Will this critical juncture, this particularly fraught moment in Iranians' history, when the contradictions between normative morality and social realities are widening and growing, give birth to lightning, or will it create a rainbow? Will the nation descend into a bloody chaos and succumb to violence, or will it survive and continue its longstanding nonviolence struggle for democracy and freedom of expression?

It is hard to predict the future of a deeply fractured country. This enduring uncertainty has been truly exhausting. At times, over the last 42 years, I have felt like a cat without whiskers, disoriented, being alerted, vulnerable. Like all Iranians inside and outside the country, I have witnessed one crisis after another. I am tired of going from crisis to protests and tensions, from vindictive rage and revenge, suffocating sanctions, discarded accords, and the possibility of a cataclysmic war. I am worn out by dreams of peace renewed, and dreams of peace betrayed.

This, however, is not the only story. There is also another story, a story that takes me to places in which I have left my childhood behind, places that continue to be with me in my dreams, in the setting of my earliest and most profound memories, a place in which my parents and my ancestors are buried. Iranian literature offered me a shelter and a refuge, it offered me a surrogate home, a portable country. This country, this portable home, never refused the safe entry and safe exit. It did not ban my books. It did not accuse me of flimsy charges. To the contrary, it became my valid passport to an enchanted world of wonder and mystery. It became my perennial garden. I put down roots in it, I turned it into a place to grow in, to find my voice in, to plant my ideas in.

Every time I stood at its threshold, every time I opened its gate, a familiar scent wafted out of it. A scent of home, a scent of effortless belonging, a scent of jasmine and childhood and old memories, a scent of borderless humanity and generous hospitality. It was in this literature that I found another kind of history. The kind of history I could not find in Iranian history books. I am referring to Iranian people's heroic struggle for freedom, democracy, human rights, and human dignity.

"My country, I will build you again, if need be with bricks made from my life. I will build columns to support your roof, if need be with my bones. I will wash away the blood off your body with torrents of my tears. And when darkness leaves this house, I will paint my poems blue with the color of your sky."

I apologize for going over my time. I wanna thank you for your patience, I wanna thank you for listening. Take care.

RICHARD BORNWLEE: Happy new year everyone. Greetings from Charlottesville and again, from your university. I'm Richard Brownlee President of the Retired Faculty Association and on behalf of your board of directors, I wanna welcome you to the initial presentation for 2022. 

I think it's fair to say that many months ago, when Professor Childress agreed to do this presentation, we knew that it would be an interesting and timely presentation. But I'm not sure that any of us actually thought it would be as timely as it turned out to be. 

So in a little bit, we're gonna hear on a talk on Ethics in a Time of COVID-19 and I will formally introduce a Jim in just a moment. Much has happened here since we were together last month and heard Bob Chapel's very interesting presentation on the Evolution of the American Musical Theater. 

As a reminder, his presentation, and all our presentations are available on our website, including closed caption. You will see when you go to our website that we've updated it a little bit and made it a little more user-friendly and you will find all of our prior presentations and other useful information under the section called "Events and News." 

Also, since we were together, our football team has hired a new coach, Tony Elliott, so we now have two coach Tony's in Charlottesville. COVID-19 prevented our football team from participating in the Fenway Bowl. And it's also causing some problems with our men's and women's basketball team as they try to negotiate the COVID situation. 

On the academic front the J-Term is well underway, mostly online, but some in person. The spring semester classes are scheduled to begin, I believe January 19th and the present plan is for those to be in-person classes. However, just last week, the university academic division has announced, and let me get this right, that students, faculty and staff must show proof of a booster shot by January 14th, rather than the initial date, which was February 1st. Also faculty with extraordinary health issues can ask to begin the semester online rather than in person. So the administration is continuing to monitor the COVID situation very carefully and doing all it can to make sure everyone is as safe as possible. 

Finally, winter arrived a week ago today, we got six to 10 inches of very heavy, wet snow. We also got high winds and so power outages were rampant. And many people were without power for three, four or five days, even a week. And some of them are just getting it restored as we speak. 

However, the Grounds were beautiful. The first snowfall is magnificent. Lots of folks were out enjoying that. And the UVA website actually has a very nice video showing just how spectacular the lawn is when we have an amazing snow storm. 

Turning now to retired faculty association business, subsequent to today's presentation, Emeritus Professor Childress will be offering four followup seminars for those of you that expressed interest in attending them. I believe two are later this month and two will be next month. Also next month, we will have a Zoom presentation by Professor Farzaneh Milani on "At the Threshold, Women Writers and Contemporary Iran", which you won't wanna miss. Then in March, we have our event with President Ryan. The president's office is still cautiously optimistic that we may, maybe we'll have an in-person event. 

And now it is my great pleasure to formally welcome Emeritus Professor James Childress, who will speak to us on a topic of "Ethics in the Time of COVID-19." I asked Jim to send me some information to use in the introduction. I'm always amazed at what our retired colleagues have done. And to say that Jim has had a distinguished career would be an understatement. So let me share some of the things that he sent with you and then I will officially welcome and turn the program over to him. James F Childress is Professor Emeritus at the University of Virginia. Until 2016 he was university professor and John Allen Hollinsworth, professor of ethics with appointments in the department of religious studies, the school of medicine and the Batten school. 

He was the founding director of the Institute for Practical Ethics and Public Life. In his 44 years at UVA, he taught over 19,000 students and co-directed 50 dissertations. In 2002, he received the university's highest honor, the Thomas Jefferson award. Jim Childress is the author of numerous articles and several books in biomedical ethics and other areas of ethics including "Principles of Biomedical Ethics" coauthored with Tom Beauchamp now in its 8th edition and translated into a dozen languages. He is also co author of "Essential Public Health Ethics." Jim is an elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. And rarely for someone in the humanities, an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine. He's been actively involved in many national committees on bioethics and public policy. Including 2020, the national academics committee that developed the framework for allocating vaccines for COVID-19. Thus, he's more than highly qualified to speak to us today about what he's going to speak to us. Jim received his BA from Guilford College, his BD from Yale Divinity School and his MMA and PhD from Yale University. 

Jim, welcome, and thanks very much for agreeing to make this presentation and it's fascinating. It's certainly of interest to our retired faculty. And as I mentioned earlier, I don't think long ago, when you agreed to do this for us, we thought that it would continue to be as timely as it is. What are your thoughts at this point before I turn it over to you?

JAMES CHILDRESS: Well, certainly we had thought it would be to a great extent a look back, but it turns out we're still in the middle of things. Different from what we were a year ago, but still in the middle of things. So thank you Dick. And thank all of you for joining this discussion today and I hope to see many of you in the followup seminars that will be highly interactive. No lectures, just discussion so we can think about some of these issues together. 

Also, want to thank Natalie Booker for handling the technology and advancing the slides today. I'll often just say, next slide and next. That's implied there is please do that. (chuckling) And she's graciously consented to doing that today. I'd also like to thank several participants for submitting important questions in advance. And I've tried to respond to those in the presentation itself. If I fail to do so follow up with me and we may have time at the end and you may submit things in chat. But I suspect since I'm responding to the seven or eight questions I received in the presentation, there won't be a time at the end. So my title is, as you will recognize a riff on time. 

Next slide, please. 

Next slide, please. 

My title is a riff on "Love in the Time of Cholera" by Gabriela Garcia Marquez, Nobel prize winning novelist. And ethics is as complicated as love is in that novel and ethics in my view is too important to be left to ethicists. Those who are specialists concentrating in the scholarly study of ethics. Because we're all involved in making assessments and judgements and determining what courses of action, making evaluations of policies and the like. In response to one participant's question about where these ethics, ethics-related issues in COVID-19 arise and are resolved. We're in a pluralistic society with various levels of government and various parts of society involved in making decisions. And they're always different degrees of authority and legitimacy assigned to those involved, often contested. So you'll hear in this discussion attention to a lot of different agents who were involved at different points, and many of us are involved in different ways in this process as well. Next, please. In 2020 just, as the pandemic was starting 300 plus medical students were removed from clinics in part because there wasn't sufficient personal protective equipment for all the clinicians and the medical students too. So there was a requirement for the removal of these students from their clinical internships, many of which had just started. As a result medical school needed some non-clinical courses now to enable students to continue to make progress toward their degrees during this time of shutdown. So, and talking to my wife Marcia Childress, a specialist in medical humanities, I mentioned that I've been involved in a number of years co-teaching courses on confronting epidemics. Sometimes entitled confronting plagues, and that maybe that'd be a possibility. And together over a few days, we put together a proposal for a course on Confronting Epidemics: Perspectives from History, Ethics and the Arts. 

And we taught that to 300 medical students for two weeks. We placed the current pandemic at this early stages in the context of plague, cholera, 1918, 19 influenza and HIV/AIDS. We were assisted in this process by Christian McMillen, a historian at UVA, whose little book "Pandemics: A Very Short Introduction," which I strongly recommend served as a kind of anchor for the course. And he graciously joined us for a lecture and Jordan Love and Fralin Museum kindly helped us with images and librarians helped in various ways. And it was a course, that we enjoyed doing very much. In the process we were reminded in these early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, that societies are never fully prepared. That they learn less from the past than they should. 

That they almost always began by denying the realities, confronting them, and almost always display limited transparency. Furthermore, they engage in naming, trying to say, are this originated where and who's to blame for it. And then blaming people in various ways for this situation. 

Next slide please. 

The lessons from the past even if there were learned are never sufficient because as a Yale pandemic historian, Frank Snowden has indicated, and I think rightly each epidemic, each pandemic, has its own personality. 

And this of course relates in part to different modes of transmission. A cholera transmitted through unclean water and other ways it's very different from the transmission of influenza or a COVID-19. Furthermore, the ages most severely affected are often different. 1918, mainly healthy young adults, children under five and those over 65. COVID-19 mainly older adults and adults with underlying conditions. In the US we've been particularly hard hit, over 835,000 deaths, 15% of the world's death total. And yet we have only 4.7% of the population. 

Next slide, please. 

Now public health, so important is often neglected until a crisis erupts. And then we say, "why didn't we do more?" It's basically what we as a society do collectively again, involving various parties in society, as well as the government to collectively to assure the conditions in which people can be healthy. 

And as I mentioned earlier, in a response to a question that the variety of agents and tasks, and thus a variety of ways and agents to address ethical issues and thus to make decisions regarding ethics along the way. And yet there are various laws and government policies, state, and federal, that structure in the way we respond to pandemics, but these are often not determinant. So they still leave a lot of room, even though we ethically assess them and determine whether they're appropriate or not. They still leave a lot of room for ethical decision-making, whether by clinicians, by local health departments. So it's not simply structured in terms of a set of state or federal laws and policies. One other preliminary point, we need to distinguish a public health lens and thinking about problems from a medical lens. They overlap to be sure, but the public health lens is focused on populations. And the medical lens is focused on individuals with particular needs. But again, many in medicine take and rightly take a public health perspective or use a public health lens at times, next please. So if we're thinking about an ethical framework for public health. 

We can say that from the societal standpoint, there is an ethical imperative to control the spread of infectious diseases, incidents of chronic diseases and so forth. Based on different ethical principles, one is principle utility, which requires the maximization of benefits, but that involves balancing benefits in relation to harms. Another is principle of justice, equity of fairness, but that's also a limiting principle because it indicates that we can't simply talk about maximizing benefit. We also have to ask how those benefits and harms are distributed when we develop policies in the public health arena. And then there are other limiting principles and include respect for autonomy or liberty, privacy, confidentiality, truthfulness. All of those point directions and set limits on what may be done in policy and practice in public health. But it's important to note that balancing is required because all of these are prima facie binding. That is they're not absolute, they're binding other things being equal. And in certain context, they need to be balanced. 

Now that balancing will often involve attending to moral dilemmas. In Tom Stoppard's play "Professional Foul," a character says there wouldn't be no moral dilemmas if moral principles worked in straight lines and never crossed each other. But they do cross each other in public health and elsewhere. And particularly in two areas that we're going to emphasize today are the area of compliance with public health directives and allocation of resources for and within public health. Two other points to note. Public health is not the only societal good that's obvious. And we've heard a lot of discussion about, well, we may need to trade off public health for education, public health for the economy. 

And that is sometimes true, but public health is often important for education and the economy for those to succeed, but still trade-offs do have to be made at points. And furthermore, in thinking about public health, we need to avoid what sometimes appears, and that is that there's a conflict between the individual and society or community. And again, conflict sometimes emerge and we'll talk about some of those. But still from the standpoint of successful public health collaboration, cooperation, that is often what is essential. 

Next, apologies. 

One participant raised the question about how we can talk about and resolve ethical issues in our society at this time, given that factual circumstances are often contested. That is what counts is a fact is often contested. And we are aware of the difficulty here, and there's no easy way to resolve it. But what we have to do for ourselves is we're trying to make the assessments is to develop an understanding of the facts, given the best sources we can find. And try to take that understanding and think about it in relation to the principles we're talking about. So what is going on? What is the problem we're facing? And we do have to answer that before we can use the principles to guide or direct actions and policies, knowing that there will still be a continuing debate about those facts. And the answers that we come up with in terms of the factual circumstances are actually often shaped by a larger interpreted frameworks, metaphors, stories, et cetera. And one that I will feature in this discussion today is thinking about public health as a war against a virus. Which has often been the way in which the approach to the coronavirus has been undertaken, this is a warfare.

Next please. 

The Harvey Fineberg head of the NAM in 2020 said that "the President says we're at war with coronavirus, it's a war, we should fight to win." Well, we were unprepared or under-prepared at all levels in starting this war that is responding to the presence of the coronavirus. And we lacked the resources to do traditional public health interventions of testing, pricing, tracking cases, quarantine, isolation. All of those things that early on can help mitigate the pandemic as it's emerging. And we still are trying to catch up in many of these areas next, please. 

Next slide, please. 

We have skipped over a lot of slides skipped to Natalie. Go back, there we go. That's the one that somehow got skipped. So in this war effort, one of the things we need is observance of public health measures. And there are several of those you're familiar with them and many others. But one of the critical questions is how to secure the public's compliance with these established public health measures. And in our society, a liberal pluralistic society, liberty or freedom sets a presumption. It is a rebuttable presumption, but it is a presumption in favor of non-coercive measures. We get part of these measures when we're trying to set out policies to address a problem in public health. And we are stuck with loud debates over freedom. Now we're divided into ideological camps. 

Next slide please. 

Okay, this is not coming up, Natalie. There. So the next slide is a blues rock song written by Van Morrison sung by Eric Clapton. It's a song bound to freedom against lockdowns. ♪ Stand and deliver ♪ ♪ You let 'em put the fear on you ♪ ♪ Stand and deliver ♪ ♪ But not a word you heard was true ♪ ♪ Do you wanna be a free man ♪ ♪ Or do you wanna be a slave ♪ ♪ Do you wanna wear these chains ♪ ♪ Until you're lying in the grave ♪ ♪ Is this a sovereign nation ♪ ♪ Or just a police state ♪ ♪ You better look out, people ♪ ♪ Before it gets too late ♪ Well, that's a cry to freedom over against various efforts to take actions, effective actions against the pandemic. 

Next slide please. 

Now this is not new. It occurred in the 1918 influenza and other public health crisis as well. But it's hard for you to read, but the woman on the right in the photograph is wearing a sign that says, "wear a mask or go to jail." And then they advertise them on the other side, wear a mask and save your life from the Red Cross. That was in the 1918, 19 influenza. It was usually mask or jail or fine, but again, it varied from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. There were conflicts, but probably not as ideologically driven or as divided as now. 

Next slide, please. 

Now in thinking about these matters and working with the notion of a presumption in favor of liberty and this society, the intervention ladder of metaphor introduced by the Nuffield Council on Bioethics. And I've modified this for my own purposes, gives you a number of ways you can respond to and try to secure compliance with public health measures. And simply we're providing introduction, a neutral provision of information poses no problems to the standpoint of liberty. Persuasion, trying to convince what data or images or stories, you know, dramatic stories such as in the case of the vaccination. The conversion of someone who was an anti-vaxxer after getting COVID-19 and suffering some of the consequences. There are stories of conversion, changing the mind. Enabling choice by providing free vaccines and masks, for example, or providing time off to go and get a vaccination. Or guiding choice by changing the default. So if we're nudging in various ways, or moving from opt in to opt out. Or guiding choices by incentives, providing money for vaccination. Or in New Jersey, shots and beer, it was one, you got a free beer if you've got a shot. Or if you got a vaccination, you've got a free pass to state parks in some states, or you got an entry into a lottery that might have college scholarships, and so forth. 

Incentives, but then there may be a fine line between guiding choice by incentives and guiding choice by disincentives. 

French President Macron has sparked outrage by saying he intends to annoy the unvaccinated. Apparently a close translation of the French word used is piss off the unvaccinated. But it was connected with the measures under consideration, like preventing the unvaccinated from entering most public spaces and transport. Now the line between five and six may be murky at times as to whether you're creating a disincentive or providing an incentive. 

But as you move up this ladder harder and harder to justify, but justification may be available again, depending on the crisis we're facing. Restricting choice, vaccination or job, and then eliminate choice. We don't forcibly vaccinate people in the United States or the laws we've had in place. State maybe require vaccination then the penalties it may end up with paying a fine or end up then going to jail if you don't pay the fine, but we don't forcibly tie down people and vaccinate them. That would eliminate the choice. 

Next slide, please. 

Now, as we move up that ladder, we consider questions like "What would be effective?" "Is there an alternative?", "Can we accomplish the aim we're after in terms of protecting public health, without resorting to the more extreme measures?" "Are we engaged in the least infringement of liberty that we can consistent with realizing the objective?" And "Are we doing this impartially?" And in terms of respect for our fellow citizens, are we informing, explaining and justifying the French matter adequately. Next slide, please. 

Now, another way to think about this is that what we're after in the public health context is communal responsibility in the sense of ensuring that people are responsible to and for the community in terms of protection of public health. And I might go about that by imposing community that is trying to ensure communal responsibility through coercion. Or you might go about it by expressing community that is trying to elicit this responsibility to and for community through expression of solidarity. 

And there I think is strong priority for the second, but sometimes it's necessary to impose coercion as well. Next, please. One of the questions that we're facing now and that the Supreme Court will be weighing in on as it's weighing in on vaccine mandates, is, is it fair or unfair to allow religious exemption to vaccine mandates? Now we have state granted exemptions for parental objectors to school vaccine mandates. Medical in all states, religious in most, personal, philosophical, moral in some. But states are not required to recognize religious and personal, moral, philosophical ones. Virginia says it recognizes the exemptions religious ones unless declared emergency or epidemic. 

Next slide, please. 

Now we do have a recognition of conscious objectors to military service when we're thinking about war against external enemies. So that extent to war against contagious disease. Well, the government's grant of an exemption is not constitutionally required in either of those so far. And UVA scholar, legal scholar, Doug Laycock has argued that it shouldn't be constitutionally required in the vaccine area in response to public health. But as noted that the Supreme Court is now structured in a way that we could get a different interpretation of that. Next slide, please. There are two basic questions about a religious exemption. One is what makes a claim religious. And there's a very broad definition in the conscience of the reduction of military service set of legal decisions. And then the second question is that if we determined the claim is religious, does the claimant for exemption from vaccination, sincerely hold those beliefs. Now some hospitals have granted some religious exemptions, to staff, they often don't spell out the conditions that need to be met other than providing a statement of one's beliefs. In part, because there seems to be an interest in not providing a template that insincere objectors might use. But a number of objectors have resigned or been dismissed from medical institutions. 

Mayo clinics, 73,000 participants in all 97% of them vaccinated about 700 or so were dismissed for noncompliance with the requirement for vaccination. 

UVA Health according to the CBO Weekly, more than 7,000 people employed and 128, either resigned or retired or were suspended without pay for not meeting the mandate. So really fundamental questions of fairness get raised by whether we allow an exemption on religious grounds in addition to medical grounds to a vaccine mandate, that is arguably important for controlling the pandemic. 

But again, we'll get Supreme Court weighing in on this, given the oral hearings last week and other hearings that are scheduled. Next, please. So claims for religious exemption the examples are my body is a image, I'm made in the image of God, my body's a temple of God, should not put foreign substance into it. Or the cell lines are made from aborted fetuses years ago are used for testing vaccines or for the production of vaccines. Now there's division in Roman Catholicism over this as well as in other traditions. And Pope Francis has said, "the vaccines are important," okay. Some bishops and archbishops have determined otherwise. And some institutions like a hospital in Arkansas said, "alright, we're going to test your sincerity on this. If you really are opposed to the use of vaccines, because they're made from cell lines that were derived from aborted fetuses made for testing or production, then what about your responses to other medications as well? How do you respond to Tylenol or Sudafed or Tums?" And it's trying to test sincerity by looking at consistency and constancy in terms of action in relation to belief. 

I mean, you see how complicated this whole area is. 

And it's one again that we'll be hearing a lot more about over the next few months. Next slide, please. Now there is a turn of the war metaphor that we need to attend to. And it partly connects with the kind of conflict we've just seen because some of the resistors to vaccination and other restrictive measures say that the war is not really about coronavirus. And they sometimes even deny the coronavirus existence. But it's really a war against them, particularly the unvaccinated. 

Now it's really hard to find common ground in this context and going back to our debate about what are the factual circumstances we're facing and how can we find a common ground for coming in some resolution of ways to approach this pandemic. This, we need to understand that, that war metaphor can get used in various ways and who is being attacked then gets viewed quite differently. 

Next slide, please. 

Now the next set of issues, I want to focus on, have to do all connect with provision of resources for the war against the novel coronavirus. And here macro allocation decisions determine how much of a good is made available in the US as we discussed a mix of public and private institutions and mechanisms determine the extent of scarcity enhance rationing and triage. They determined how much of a good is made available in the society. For example, a test, a rapid test, how widespread are they will be depending on a mix of decisions by private and public institutions. But then we have the hard question that has to be faced. And that is "How do we go about rationing our triage microallocation?" If the goods that we're thinking about are scarce, and if the goods such as ventilators are scarce, these decisions may determine who shall live when not all can live. 

Next slide, please. 

Now there's a recognition that in a war-like public health crisis, there may be crisis standards of care, and this will be delivering care at an optimal level that can be delivered and a catastrophic event. But it will be different from what goes on in usual healthcare operations. And this may occur in an earthquake or hurricane, or it may be more pervasive and extending over time like a pandemic influenza or COVID-19 pandemic. 

Next slide, please. 

Now there are many rationing triage decisions in the pandemic, and I've given a list of several things that have been scarce at one time or the other, and have had to be rationed. And I'll talk about a few of those as we try to think through how best to approach rationing and triage decisions using the triaged model for more time. 

Next slide, please. 

So triage in wartime or in a disaster setting, often appeals to the principal utility which we talked about before. Doing the greatest good for the greatest number, but this does require a specification. It requires specification in terms of say medical utility versus social utility and within social utility between broad or narrow versions. So, we might be thinking for example, in treating patients with COVID-19, maximizing the welfare of patients suffering from that disease, or at risk for worst disease. We consider their needs and the probable benefits of the different treatments that are available and see which patients would have the greatest needs and which would have the most likely to benefit. Now, that's standard in a disaster or wartime setting and when crisis vendors of care are used. Is there a role for social utility of whether decisions that are being made would maximize the side as welfare? Well, there may be a role for a narrow version of social utility about giving some preference to people in central roles or trying to preserve certain functions. In World War II the stories told and the theater in North Africa after penicillin became available. 

The decision had to be made about whether to treat the soldiers who were suffering from venereal disease. Thus had been wounded in the brothels versus treating the soldiers that had been wounded on the battlefield and were at risk of infection from those wounds. And according to this story, a decision was made to treat those who have been wounded in the brothels because they could be restored to fighting capacity. Well, that notion of restoring to fighting capacity is something that plays a role in the military setting. It could have a role in a pandemic setting as well, where you think about essential workers, especially medical, but not only medical and possible priority for them. But if social utility is thought about in a broad way of general, social worth or value, then that gets excluded from the calculus. It unfortunately, sometimes sneaks in. But it's something that doesn't fit within this kind of model of triage of doing the greatest good for the greatest number. 

Next slide, please. 

But if we take the model of triage focused, especially on medical utility, with some attention to narrow social utility. There have been calls to modify this kind of triage because of the differential impact of the pandemic. Compared to white people, Latinx and Black people in the US are much more likely to be infected much more likely to be hospitalized and more likely to die according to data from the CDC. 

Next slide, please. 

So what's to blame for this differential impact? It's not the result of biology or genetics of race or ethnicity, but of unjust or racist structures. Given the disproportion of presence of people in communities of color, among low-paid essential workers, thus lacking adequate protection, or being unable to work from home. Or in overcrowded living conditions or with higher rates of co-morbidities that are associated with worse outcomes from COVID-19. 

Next slide, please. 

So in addition then to thinking about the decision-making in terms of medical utility, there is a need to consider social corrective reparative justice. So by modified triage, you're rationing by attending to biases and predictors of outcome and looking very carefully at those to make sure that those are not racially affected. We might modify point systems and pay account of indexes, of disadvantaged communities. We might assign points in a weighted lottery, that address some of those issues. Now, it might make a difference where we're thinking about this in relation to what resource. For example, it may be easier to do this for upstream measures like vaccination, than for downstream measures like ventilators, where it's a life death decision. And it may seem quite inappropriate and unfair to bring in these considerations at that point. But this is a matter of debate that continues. 

Next slide, please. 

What we're looking at in terms of vaccination. And this was the committee that I had the opportunity to serve on for the National Academies. We did introduce, and the CDC advisory committee on immunization practices also introduced, a principle on mitigation of health inequities. That in addition to maximum benefit and equal concern regarding respect for everyone and other principles of fairness, transparency, and evidence-based and so forth. We need to attend to how we can mitigate health inequities. 

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fAnd one way to do this is to look at the risk of acquiring infection, risk of severe morbidity and mortality, risk of negative soocietal impact and risk of transmit infection to others. And use those risk-based criteria. Those will connect a lot with what we talked about in terms of the structural conditions that tend to give rise to more problematic, more harmful outcomes of COVID-19 infection to members of minority communities. And so that's important to keep in mind. Then it's also important to keep in mind the social vulnerability index that may help us think about how to distribute a vaccine to ensure access. So it's not enough just to get allocation criteria of which people should be in which group for the early phases, but how do you get the vaccine to people in those categories? And I must say that UVA Health, Blue Ridge Health District and others in the Charlottesville community were very effective in reaching out to parts of the community that in general would have less equitable access to medical resources and to vaccination. Because of transportation problems, because of inability to get off from work, et cetera, et cetera. But would also be at greater risk of infection and there really was quite effective in reaching out to these communities. 

Next slide, please. 

Another tension that sometimes arises in doing this is potentially between maximum benefit and equity. Now both are important as I've emphasized, we've gotta keep them in harmony, but sometimes conflicts and tensions kind of rise. Especially for example, because of the time required to ensure that equity is being achieved. For example, and during the vaccine rollout a year ago, Dr. Grace Lee asked, "Are we turning too many away in order to get the right people vaccinated?" And this is where you may have a tension between the overall goal of public health, where it's to try to bring the pandemic under control, getting as many vaccinations as possible. And making sure you achieve equity. Again, we want both, but tensions can sometimes arise in the process. 

Next slide, please. 

So another participant question asks about monoclonal antibodies and the current debates. And you've remembered these as the lab grown antibodies that reinforce recipient's natural immune system require an infusion for use. They were very effective against earlier variants, but only one is effective against the Omicron variant. 

Next slide, please. 

And the controversy that is erupted is federal government took over distribution of the states. Because some states were pushing monoclonal antibodies over vaccination. Florida seem to be doing that unless, they really wanted to be able to buy vaccines directly for the states and legislation was being proposed federally for that. And taking over a distribution to the states, the federal government recommends a prioritization based on age, vaccination status, immune status, clinical risk factors. This gives priority for those who are immunocompromised or can't get a proper immune response or an adequate immune response, of whether they're vaccinated or not. And then the unvaccinated 75 and older or 65 and older, if there are clinical risk factors and so forth. Now, part of the problem seems to be that some states have restricted or tended to go in the reduction of limiting monoclonal antibodies to the unvaccinated. 

There was one report on one state that took that direction. You can see out in the parties arrangement this might occur. So one participant's question was how do we look ethically at those that are unvaccinated because of refusal. And here I think that whatever this may or discussed or resentment, we might have that it's important that in thinking about the treatment of this'll come up in relation to another question as well. And that we try to think about the criteria in terms of need and probability of successful outcome. Just as we'd treat with the organ transplant, someone who gives excessive alcohol, we required the person to go off that before we're getting a transplant. But we don't think about the person as different in setting up whether to consider a transplant or not on the basis of what happened in the past, but rather what happens going forward. And that we then use the criteria that are appropriate for whether the people were vaccinated or not. 

Next slide, please. 

So, one other question that came up is "Suppose in a COVID surge, a hospital was overwhelmed by the unvaccinated. How should admission, care, and ICU priorities be set for COVID patients and others needing care?" And my response related to the point I just made is we should not treat the unvaccinated and vaccinated differently in care. That is other than how they work out in terms of the need and probability of successful outcome. And we should treat then COVID and non-COVID patients equally, except when it might be important to treat COVID patients in ways to prevent a viral spread. So you can get at the impact there in a way that can relate to the pandemic differently than if you're dealing with a non-COVID patient. 

Next slide, please. 

One of the issues that we have to face and we'll talk about in seminars is vaccine allocation distribution in the US and globally. And we've done a lot, but certainly not enough for global vaccination, both to protect ourselves and also justice equity. But the controversy is the extensive use of boosters and potentially even more boosters, which could be used to vaccinate in underserved countries. And so how we work that out is something we will think further about. 

Next slide, please. 

Now, basically we're gonna have ethical rationing. We need to have open transparent public processes and public health context, flexible, and revisable feasible, workable, et cetera. 

Next slide, please. 

And public trust is crucial here. And one of the questions that came up is how we can get that. And public participation is one way, but public communication and communication to the public and justification to the public is another. And certainly apart from these big ideological divides, we've had considerable difficulty in terms of communication and justification and think just the controversy about mask in March of 2020. Think about the most recent debacle regarding quarantine and isolation given the recommendations from the CDC that many felt were confusing. And that many felt also were based less on science and more on the limited supply of tests. That's the kind of context in which distrust arises, even apart from the ideological divide. But in the final analysis, we won't have success in public health unless we have public cooperation. 

Next slide, please. 

A few points in closing about professional responsibilities and particularly obviously healthcare professional clinicians, participation's indispensable in the planning and implementing the rationing. And nevertheless, there are tensions between traditional professional values, for example, hippocratic tradition, benefiting the individual patient. And the values involved in rationing and triaged like medical utility, or even narrow social utility. 

Next slide, please. 

Consider the kind of dilemma of ICU beds or ventilators is that's going to start treatment for example, a ventilator to see whether there's possibility of successful treatment. It's funded as a trial shortage of ventilators, wanna see what might happen and the early response to then later for particular patients. If limited progress, you may need to stop to reallocate for candidates with greater chance of survival. That posed, especially in early part of the pandemic, tremendous ethical distress. It's important that this should not involve not abandonment of patients, any patients, and there should be provision of care, including palliative care. And it can be again, ethical care in a crisis. 

Next slide, please. 

But this puts a tremendous burden on conditions, moral distress, moral injury, moral trauma. In the pandemic, I'll just take one part of this slide in Italy, reports of doctors waiting in the hospital hallways because of the choices they were going to have to make. And this is certainly a factor in condition burnout, along with the other unrelenting sources of distress as displayed. For example, in the tragic Dr. Lorna Breen case familiar to most of us in Charlottesville and many nationally. 

Next slide, please. 

So one question came about what has happened in terms of institutional structures and support, and this is where it's focused, particularly on ethical decision-making. And I don't have in response to that question. And we'll look forward to finding out more about actually what has happened regionally and nationally in terms of different institutions. I'm familiar to some extent locally and with anecdotes from different places, but not systematically. So it's important that there be support for clinicians in decision-making for particular cases. 

And here we have Ethics Consorts Service, Moral Distress Consult Service, well ethics committee making policy recommendations. We have the institution as a whole UVA Health now, and broader than that with community engagement, as well as a community of moral discourse. And I must say in the larger ways I've been involved, I've been tremendously impressed with the moral seriousness and thoughtfulness of our clinical colleagues and others associated with this enterprise. It's been an honor and privilege to be in some conversation with them. But it's also been important not only to have those structures of support, there's also important to have role separation. And one example of that is, I mean, triage committees to relieve a particular position of a triaged decision regarding his or her patients. For example, whether to commit to the ICU or allocated ventilator and so forth. 

Next slide, please. 

The final slide, other than calling your attention to the follow up seminars to which you're invited is that we need to maintain moral foundations while making tragic choices. "When societies confront tragic choices, whether fundamental, social, cultural, ethical values are at stake, they must attempt to make allocations in ways that preserve the moral foundations of social collaboration." That's a comment from Guido Calabresi and Bobbitt "Tragic Choices." And this is very important because this too will pass and we need to be able to continue the social collaboration that's so important in the future. So how we decide is important, our choices reflect who we are now as a society. For example, solidarity, commitment to equity or the like thereof, and we become. Thank you very much for your attention. And I welcome any of you to submit questions by chat and also by email, and will look forward to engaging several of you in the seminars, thank you.

RICHARD BROWNLEE: Greetings from Charlottesville and from the colorful fall grounds at the university, whereas you can probably tell looking behind me, the leaves have turned and the area, whole surrounding area is every bit as spectacular as you remember it. In fact, today in UVA Today, there was a short video clip titled "Fall is in the Air on the Grounds." And it's wonderful.

So if you get UVA Today, I suggest you check it out because the scene around the lawn and the Grounds, this is a very special university, and this time a year it's absolutely amazing. So those of you that have tuned in, check it out in UVA Today. It's a great short video.

I'm Richard Brownlee. I am president of the Retired Faculty Association. And on behalf of your board of directors, I want to welcome you to the third in our series of monthly Zoom presentations for this academic year. I imagine some of you might actually have been wondering if we do have a president, because during the first two presentations I was missing in action. And I wanna thank Pat Lampkin, board member, Vice President Kathy Thornton, and a past president Sharon Hostler for taking over and doing such a great job in my absence. But yes, we do have a president, and I'm hoping that I will be present going forward.

Although I wasn't able to attend the first two presentations in person, I did go on our website and watch the recordings, and they were both excellent. I highly recommend them. Just go to our website, then look at schedule, past events, and you will find them with a closed caption option.

I also want to thank those of you who have contributed to our association. We're not wealthy, and since we've decided again this year to not charge dues, we need about $5,000 in donations to cover our out-of-pocket costs, including the invaluable services we get from the UVA Alumni Association who actually do all the Zoom presentations for us, and also the cost of the closed caption, which is not only available during the live presentations, it's also available if you go on our website and look at the recordings.

Now it's my pleasure to turn our attention to today's very fascinating, relevant, and timely topic. And the way if history is any indication, it probably is, this topic is gonna be relevant for some time to come. Confederate monuments and the Lost Cause. I want to welcome back board member Craig Littlepage, and I want to give a very special welcome to history professor Carrie Janney. Hello to both of you, and thank you for bringing this very informative and interesting topic to our audience today.

Craig, in the interest of time, I wanna turn the program over to you quickly so that you can more formally introduce Carrie and also give our audience a little idea of what they are about to enjoy. It's great to see you. Thanks for arranging the presentation today, in addition to doing the one a month ago, and all the service you provided on the board. So if you are ready, I will magically-

CRAIG LITTEPAGE: I'm ready.

RICHARD BROWNLEE: I will magically disappear from the screen and turn it over to the two of you. Thanks again, and we really look forward to a fascinating presentation. Take it away.

CRAIG LITTEPAGE: Thank you, Dick And good morning to all my colleagues that are viewing this and as well to our guests that are joining us as well. We are so fortunate to have the opportunity today to welcome as a presenter a very special person. She's an author, scholar, researcher, teacher, fan of the Cavaliers, among other things. Professor Carrie Janney. Thank you for joining us, Carrie. Few people would have predicted the various ways that current events aligned with the narrative of the Lost Cause. And we'll talk more about that in just a second, but first talk a little bit about you and your story. You grew up in the Commonwealth of Virginia. You graduated from UVA and returned to Charlottesville after teaching at Purdue University. First of all, what led you to study the Civil War while you were a student at the University of Virginia?

CAROLINE JANNEY: Thank you so much, Coach, for inviting me. It's such a pleasure to be part of this. I wish we could all be in the same room and to be doing this in person, but thank you again to everyone. So how did I come to study the Civil War? Well, I was always interested in history and I have to credit not only my parents and grandparents, who instilled that love of story and appreciating the past.

My parents took us to Yorktown and Jamestown and Lancaster, Pennsylvania, all of those places, Mount Vernon, but I also had a fourth grade teacher who was instrumental and she would tell stories. So I loved history from a very early age. I couldn't wait to get the fourth grade because we did Virginia state history in fourth grade. But I was a government major undergrad. I was going to law school. I was gonna follow in the footsteps of my father and grandfather, and my fourth year I took a class pass/fail by a guy some of you may have heard of. I think his name is Ed Ayers, something like that. (Richard laughing) And it changed my world. I took that class again. I took it pass/fail. It was my fun class to take. And I thought you can get paid to do this for a living? Now, granted I was blissfully ignorant of the academic job market, but from that path forward, it was too late to apply to grad school at that point, so I was already working for the National Park Service, continued to do so, and applied to PhD programs. So, it's very unusual to go to the same place for your PhD program that you did undergrad. But again, I was a government major. I had had Ed, I'd had Grace Hale as history professors, and that was it. And so it was a whole new world and I stumbled again, blissfully ignorant of what it meant to be an academic in terms of the job market, but that was my path.

CRAIG LITTLEPAGE: So you studied as an undergrad and as a grad student as well, and ended up falling into kind of the Civil War space. How has your perspective on the Civil War changed from when you were a student to where you are now as an expert in the topic?

CAROLINE JANNEY: Oh, in so many ways that I can't even begin to account for them. But understanding the complexity and nuance, I probably wanted to go to law school for many reasons, but I thought, like so many people, that the Civil War was guns and flags and battles, and that was all there was to it. And actually when I came to grad school, I was gonna study 20th century Southern history, and kept getting pulled back into the 19th century. And I firmly believe that the Civil War was the most important event in American history. Even more so than the revolution. I can take on Alan Taylor and others. But it was that moment when democracy truly, truly was threatened. And we can talk about the reverberations that that still has today. But I think it's the complexity and the fact that something that seems so simple, something that buffs study becomes an avenue for understanding almost every aspect of the American experiment of American history, from race to religion, to gender relations, it's all there. And I think you can never finish unpacking and discovering all the many ways, that it's still with us today.

GRAIG LITTLEPAGE: So we're gonna get into the Lost Cause and the monuments and all the other angles of those topics, but let's go back to August of 2017 and you're teaching at Purdue in West Lafayette, Indiana. You hear the news about the chaos and tragedy that's unfolding in Charlottesville, in part due to the controversy surrounding monuments. As an historian and a scholar, what went through your mind when you processed the news about what was happening?

CAROLINE JANNEY: Well, we were actually on a family vacation in North Carolina at the beach. Was with my father and brothers, all UVA people, all people that hold Charlottesville very close in our heart, and we all sat watching and being incredibly emotional. And I think in that moment, I wasn't a scholar. I was someone who loved this town and this university, and was kind of hit upside the head by the level of violence and brutality and the things being spewed, the symbols that were on display, in this place that I loved so viscerally. And when I got back to West Lafayette, one of the first things that I was part of was putting together a teach-in and thinking about what Charlottesville, and I mean, it still bothers me to this day that when people say Charlottesville, that's what they're referencing, August 11th and 12th. But I put together, along with members of the African-American Studies department, some people in political science, we put together a teach-in where we addressed what was going on here and covering every facet, from the rise of the alt-right to Lost Cause and ostensibly a demonstration that began to "protect" these monuments. And that was my first kind of foray into stepping into thinking about how to comprehend this as a scholar and how to comprehend this as a teacher, and how to use that as a moment to have these difficult conversations with not just students, but the lay public about what all of these different things coming together and how they're all interconnected, and the ways in which they're not, as well, being weary of making connections that don't exist.

GRAIG LITTLEPAGE: So, help us then understand the difference between history and memory, and why this distinction matters, particularly in relationship to the Civil War. What is memory?

CAROLINE JANNEY: Right, so I'll start with history, 'cause that might be easier to understand. So history is what happened. It is interpreted. It is, what happened doesn't change over time, but the way in which people understand it and the way in which we explain it changes with more information, with new context, but history, what happened doesn't change. The way that we interpret it can change. Memory is something that tends to be claimed. It tends to be claimed by groups and it's wrapped more in mythology and it's passed down from generation to generation. And so when I say that it tends to be claimed, it's this is ours, this belongs to no one else. History, you know, doesn't belong to anyone. It's there. And so I make a big point in my classes of teaching the difference between here's what happened, here's what we understand to happen, and here's how we can explain why it happened versus this is something that is felt and something that is protected. I think when you hear people using words like protection, they're really talking about memory. They're holding something sacred and sacrosanct. History isn't sacred. And so it's not just the Civil War. We can talk about whether it's the American Revolution or the "pioneer experience". All of those things have been wrapped in myth and mythology that then become more part of memory than the historical event or events that happened.

GRAIG LITTLEPAGE: Okay. So you wrote a book, "Ends of War," and the context of it being the Lost Cause and related topics and the history memory topics. You wrote in your introduction, and I'll quote, "The immediate aftermath of Appomattox confirmed that a deep and abiding commitment to the Confederacy had not ended with the surrender. In some ways it had only begun." End of quote. So my interpretation is that there's a suggestion that the end of the Civil War and the Confederacy has actually served as kind of a launch for an extreme right movement. Is that a fair interpretation?

CAROLINE JANNEY: It's a long launch, but yeah, so this is my most recent book that looks at what happened after Appomattox, what happens to a rebel army after a civil war, and so the weeks and months after Appomattox. And even though I have spent the better part of 20 plus years thinking about the Lost Cause and Civil War memory, it wasn't until I dove down into the research in that immediate, I even, I'm not even sure I want to call it post-war period, but the post-Appomattox, the post surrender of of Lee and his army. It's refusal to admit that not just defeat, but that they were on the wrong side of things, and this kind of digging the heels in by Confederates, former Confederates, rebels, and this defense that becomes wrapped around it that they use as a mantle, that they use as a protective shield to justify so many things, but never thoroughly defeated. I don't think there was ever a golden moment when Confederates were so thoroughly defeated that they were willing to accept any circumstances. And so we can see that pushback right away. We see that pushback with black codes that are issued in the summer of 1865. We see that pushback and reelecting Confederate officials to Congress in the fall of 1865. So they will concede that they lost on the battlefield, but not that their motives, that their cause had ever somehow not been righteous.

GRAIG LITTLEPAGE: So one of the things that would intrigue me to hear about is what you found as some of the major challenges that you had in writing the book. I mean, the research and the detail, the conversations, the meetings, the negotiations are all things that you go into in great detail of the book. And maybe I'm answering the question, but for you as a writer, and you've done this before, was there anything unique about the research and writing of this book in comparison to some of the other works that you've done?

CAROLINE JANNEY: So, anything unique in that regard? I spent a lot of time at the National Archives for this project and used many more government-produced records. They're produced by the Army for the most part, but that in of itself lends, well, it lends itself to a different not only type of research, but then type of questions that you're asking and the type of answers that you get. And I would say that the most challenging, two things were challenging about this particular project. One is balancing the social and cultural aspects with the legal history and how to understand the two, how to understand the dispersal of people and then the legal ramifications that were at play. But the other big part of the story that I wanted to make sure I included was the home front, and specifically African-American experience. And those voices are simply so much harder to find. And think I found ways in which I could use reports from African-American newspapers, accounts from members of the United States Colored Troops, so the African-American soldiers in the Union Army. And then some former Confederates were very, we might call them bold. I don't think they thought they were bold, but matter of facts about the violence that they committed against African-Americans, both civilians and soldiers. And so by their own accounts we know some of these stories. So those were the probably most challenging aspects.

GRAIG LITTLEPAGE: Okay. I want to also ask our attendees to think about questions that you might have, and if you have questions for Professor Janney, that you can use the chat function. Send them to me via the chat function, and we can get those questions answered by Professor Janney. Carrie, what do you think has to take place before we see some of the polarization and this new version of what I call kind of the new Lost Cause, but before this movement loses some of its steam.

CAROLINE JANNEY: So there's two different things I think going on here. One of the things, if we're talking specifically the Lost Cause, as in the Confederate Lost Cause, and the way in which that has played out in Civil War memory in American, how Civil War memory has played out in American history, there's an arc that happens, and I'll sketch that very briefly. And that is after the Civil War, Confederates will develop and embellish this notion of what we call the Lost Cause, which is the best case scenario. I think the easiest way to think of it is this is the best case explanation for why Confederates fought and why they lost. And this argument, this justification that they tell themselves changes over time. If people are interested,

I can go into the various aspects, the various tenants of that, but they're constantly being pushed back and they're pushing against the Union version of what the war was about that says the war was first and foremost about preserving the Union, and eventually about ending slavery. And there's a third component, which is the emancipationist's cause. So this is people like Frederick Douglass, who are from the get go saying this war was always about ending slavery and the goal was always emancipation. These three are competing with, of course, the white version, so Unionists and Lost Cause really being the dominant voices.

But the Lost Cause isn't something that most Union soldiers, that most families of Union soldiers are willing to address. So this notion of reconciliation that both sides agree to forgive and forget, and we're all just one big happy family, that's something that's more of an act. It's not really a belief. The Lost Cause will kind of dip, but then it will gain some credence in the early 20th century. And here we have popular culture to thank. In particular, "Birth of a Nation" in 1915, and "Gone with the Wind," the book and then the film in 1939. And with that, this white Southern interpretation of the Civil War seems to gain a national audience. And by the time we get to the 1960s, that also is very much the Lost Cause sets aside reconciliation as the two main ways that the country is thinking about and remembering the war. But what I have clearly seen, and I teach courses about this, I try to track the changes. That the Lost Cause has fallen out of favor among the vast majority of Americans, white and black, even among the vast majority of white Southerners.

That rhetoric has really been marginalized, and we saw that in the sesquicentennial in 2011 through 2015. So the Lost Cause in terms of Confederate ideology has very much been marginalized. But what we have going on, there's been a lot of discussion about whether some of the current political debates, the partisan divide, whether there is another version of the Lost Cause, and I would say that they are related in the sense that they use many of the same tactics. They employ, in particular, the former president, employs many of the same tactics that Lost Cause advocates did. He likes to silence anyone who objects to him using terms like rhino.

Anyone who is no longer loyal gets kicked out of the mainstream. So there's some parallels here, but we need to be very, very careful in drawing direct lines from the Lost Cause, the Confederacy, to partisan debates today. They absolutely overlap. They absolutely overlap. But if we want to be thinking historically and thinking about context, we need to be very careful of how we connect those lines and when there is a causal relationship and when there's not.

GRAIG LITTLEPAGE: Okay. We can have a broader discussion at another point about this reconciliation before we try to move forward and so forth and so on. But we have a question from one of our attendees, and the question is this. How did your identity as a white Southern woman color your engagement with the research and the writing of your book?

CAROLINE JANNEY: Yeah, and I would say that probably much more so for my first book, which was my dissertation that looked at Ladies' Memorial Associations. These are former Confederate women, and maybe the word former doesn't even apply, but Confederate women after the Civil War is over who initiated the project of creating Confederate cemeteries. So just like the one that's here on Grounds, that was created. In fact, that was the first thing that I wrote about as a fourth year undergrad, the Ladies' Memorial Association forming that cemetery, and then they also started the practice of Memorial Day. And I think I came to that project in part because I didn't understand why it was white Southern women who were so much at the forefront of this. And it absolutely was about my own identity of struggling to understand why it was women, why former Confederate women, white women felt the need to do this. And so that's the way, it's kind of these these personal questions. I grew up in a town that I used to joke had as many Confederate monuments as it did stoplights, which was two. And I didn't understand as a kid, despite being surrounded in the Shenandoah Valley by the Civil War, I didn't understand why there were monuments to a defeated people. And so that's the way in which it plays in with my trying to kind of understand where in the world I come from and why these people that in many cases were in fact, my ancestors, why did they do these things. So, struggling to comprehend that.

GRAIG LITTLEPAGE: Okay. And you and I had a brief conversation, but we have a question with regard to the research that was done that finds a quantifiable connection between Confederate monuments and the prevalence of lynching. And you reacted to that in terms of your perspective as a historian. Can you maybe give us a little bit of insight on that?

CAROLINE JANNEY: Right, so maybe all people say this in different disciplines, but I wish they had consulted a historian on this project because I have so many questions about it. The conclusion that they come to is that if a county had a higher number of lynchings, then that county was likely to have a Confederate monument, and they admit that there's no causal relationship there. I don't find that surprising, that counties that had high numbers of lynchings therefore are likely to have a Confederate monument. That plays in perfectly with what we might expect. If they had asked the question the other direction, I think that might've offered more fruit. That is, if they had asked if a county has a Confederate monument, is it likely to have a strong history of lynching, that we might've seen those connections more. And if you look at their map, it suggests that that's not the case. So I'm not sure that their evidence bears out the claims that are being made by, and to be fair, they hedge themselves in the, the actual journal article and some of the news reports have drawn this direct line. I have other questions as a historian that I would ask, such as are the counties with the highest number of Confederate monuments, what was the percentage of men from that county who fought for the Confederacy? What was the percentage that survived as veterans? What was the economic base of that county? 'Cause these monuments don't really go up until the early 1900s. They take lots of money. You have to raise money to groups like the United Daughters of the Confederacy that are doing it. So I don't disagree with their conclusion that there is, that white supremacy and racism is tied up in this, but I don't think the evidence as it presents itself right now makes a lot of sense out of context.

CRAIG LITTLEPAGE: Okay.

CAROLINE JANNEY: That's the historian, that's what I do.

CRAIG LITTLEPAGE: Okay. And in August of 2020, you penned a Washington post article, which, the title of it, "The South's Mythology Glamorized a Noble Defeat. Trump Backers May Do the Same." That was in August of 2020 before the election, and we have seen this stuff kind of play out over the last couple years as it relates to some people's denial that the election was lost. It was stolen in their minds. Take us back to when you wrote that and what you were, how you made that projection, that Trump backers may be looking at the same sort of rationale as what we have seen in the aftermath of the Lost Cause and how that seems to be just simmering at this point.

CAROLINE JANNEY: Right. It seemed to me that all the signs were there, that there was an excuse in the making, a myth in the making, if the election didn't turn out the way that Trump and his supporters wanted it to. That there were already these messages being sent out about fraud in the election. There were already messages about those who were being disloyal. And we, again, I'm very cautious of drawing a direct line from the Confederate Lost Cause to conversations about, or allegations, I should say, about a stolen election, but the same methods were at work here in terms of building a popular consensus, that these that had almost no basis in truth, but people could latch onto them and believe them, and that's precisely what the Lost Cause did. If you say something loud enough, long enough, even a small, but vocal minority can have a big impact, and where the Confederate Lost Cause is concerned, we saw people even before the surrender at Appomattox saying, oh gosh, like, if we're gonna be defeated, it's because they have more resources than us. And if we are defeated, that's the only reason, which becomes a central tenant of the Confederate mythology. And so we saw that buildup. And in order to get a myth to work, you have to have enough buy-in from the get go. And so by putting it out there, even before the election happened, people were willing to grab onto it. And as we've seen, it's only exploded since that time. So again, scream it loud, scream it at the top of your lungs, say it everywhere, and again, the same methods that we see with the Lost Cause.

CRAIG LITTLEPAGE: So in a sense of self fulfilling prophecy.

CAROLINE JANNEY: I mean, I could be very, very wrong if the election had gone another way, but I felt like that I was seeing these patterns that were recognizable.

CRAIG LITTLEPAGE: Okay. Here's another question by one of our viewers. Can the Civil War be viewed in a wider sweep of human history and essentially economic tribalism, which is a millennia old phenomenon? Can we contract the roles of individuals and whole populations in such conflicts?

CAROLINE JANNEY: That's a big, broad question, but what's the phrase about economic tribalism? Is that the phrase?

CRAIG LITTLEPAGE: Yeah. Can the Civil War be viewed in a wider sweep of human history and essentially economic tribalism, which is a millennia old phenomenon?

CAROLINE JANNEY: I mean, perhaps, because, I say that hedgingly. I have to think about this a bit more, but thinking about the way in which most wars, many wars, most wars have some sort of economic-

CRAIG LITTLEPAGE: Right.

CAROLINE JANNEY: Root.

CRAIG LITTLEPAGE: Indications, yeah.

CAROLINE JANNEY: I mean, that is absolutely the case where the American Civil War is concerned. It is about the extension of slavery into the free territories. And even though the vast majority of white Northerners were not opposed to slavery, and certainly were not on board with civil rights or equal rights for African-Americans, they didn't want to have to compete with slave labor. They wanted free labor, meaning free white men performing labor for themselves. So, yes, at its heart. Now, there's so many other issues around that because slavery was not just an economic system in the South. Every aspect of life in the South, whether you were white or black, was bound up in slavery. Religion, gender relations, labor relations, every aspect of life in the South was bound up in slavery. So we can't boil it down to just economics, but sure, I will say that that is certainly one way that we can understand the American Civil War.

CRAIG LITTLEPAGE: Okay. Have you seen a New York times article, an essay today by Noah Feldman, and it's regarding Lincoln as a dominant force of making the constitution what it is today, and do you agree with this analysis? And the fact that you haven't seen it might be difficult for you to comment on that, but that was a question that just came in. Let's see. We have another question regarding someone that grew up in the state of Pennsylvania. And the question is this. I grew up in Pennsylvania, Union state, yet I was taught in high school in the mid-'60s that the Civil War was about states' rights, not slavery, and that Robert E. Lee was a brilliant general and honorable man worthy of admiration by all Americans. Why was this Southern narrative so prevalent in the North?

CAROLINE JANNEY: So, there are two parts to that. This is a fascinating question. The notion of Lee as an American hero had gained credence by the turn of the 20th century. And many of you are probably familiar with the fact that Lee was one of the two statues that Virginia had in the U.S. Capitol recently removed. But there's a reason that it was Lee. There were gestures in the 1920s, early 1930s. Arlington Mansion, which had been Lee's home, was dedicated as a shrine to Lee by the U.S. government. And so there was a great deal of sentiment. In fact, we can go all the way back to 1870, the year of Lee's death, that he was heralded as a national hero by many in the North, mostly Democrats in the North. But nevertheless, there was this notion that, in fact, he was an American hero figures back pretty early. So I'm not surprised by that part of the education that this person received. That doesn't surprise me at all. There are plenty of people who were praising Lee very early on. There was an effort at Gettysburg. The Lee monument, the Virginia monument, excuse me, that has Lee on the top.

There was a proposal as early as 1903, I believe it was, by a member of the Pennsylvania legislature for Pennsylvania to pay for a monument that would feature Lee as a gesture of reconciliation. So that part doesn't surprise me. I am a little bit surprised about the state rights argument, because that does tend to be more sectional in nature. So I can't help but wonder whether your teacher had been taught that way. Certainly the textbooks that were taught in the South well into the 1960s and '70s, that is the explanation that's used. I have several textbooks, one from Virginia and one from Mississippi, that I use in my Civil War memory class from the 1950s. That's what the war was about. And it's clear to see that that people who came of age, whether it's Strom Thurmond and others who become the resistance to segregation that they were had been brought of age on this type of education. So I am surprised about that aspect because when I taught at Purdue, the one thing that really struck me was how many of my students used first person to talk about we freed the slaves. And so there was very much a regional identity. I had to explain to them that in fact Indiana was not on board with the emancipation, but that that regional notion is in some cases still very much alive today.

CRAIG LITTLEPAGE: Okay. What's your view on why Robert E. Lee was portrayed as a national hero?

CAROLINE JANNEY: There are several factors that go into that. Part of it was his West Point background, and he had been superintendent at West Point. He was beloved by the men who served in his ranks. And he gets a lot of credit, and we can debate whether this is fair or not, but he gets a lot of credit for not being willing to be a vocal defender of the Lost Cause. In private he seethed about Reconstruction policies, but he refused to publicly ever condemn the Johnson administration, to condemn the federal government. And so he was credited as being someone who helped bind the nation's wounds, to use Lincoln's term, to try to heal the nation. So I think that's why so many white Northerners were willing to say, okay, what he did was wrong. It was probably even treasonous, but he is doing much to bind this nation back together. And he was seen by those in the military as a brilliant commander. And so those who were looking strictly at the battlefield could highlight that aspect without talking about his decision to resign his commission and fight for the Confederacy.

CRAIG LITTLEPAGE: So in your book you talk a lot about the negotiations at Appomattox. Ulysses Grant was in a pretty difficult situation following the orders from Lincoln and trying to hit the sweet spot of, you know, the Confederates had lost the war, but yet there's really no tangible admission that they believed that. But talk about the awkward position that Grant was in during those conversations.

CAROLINE JANNEY: Right, so Grant is charged solely with compelling the surrender of a Confederate army, of Lee's army. He can not deal in political issues. He can't touch anything like that. He simply needs to compel the surrender. And he's giving the terms that he thinks are what Lincoln wants him to do. He also is cognizant of the fact that, and I think this is something that we lose sight of, that the goal of the Union army was to end the rebellion and reunite the country. And so if your goal is to reunite the country, you know, a massive trial for treason is only going to compel, probably lead to more bloodshed. Grant is also incredibly worried about the prospect of guerrilla warfare. And he thinks it is much more stable and predictable to compel the surrender of soldiers rather than to let them disperse and wage a different type of war. It's one thing to face armies on a battlefield, it's another to have to fight a guerrilla-style war.

And so Grant is offering terms that he believes are not only magnanimous, but will in fact convince Lee to quit fighting. He wants to end the war as soon as possible. But these terms very quickly get him into trouble. And members of the cabinets, jurists in the North are all very quickly condemning Grant's terms as much too lenient because they fear that they will protect Confederate leaders, especially military leaders, that the paroles will act as a blanket pardon and that they won't be able to be prosecuted for treason. That actually is how it plays out, but people are very worried about this. And I think we, because we fast forward into Reconstruction so quickly, we don't understand the complex negotiations and the legal questions. There's so much of this is about the laws of war and how you treat a belligerent during a war. If you have conquered, if you have won a war, you don't, you don't try your enemies. So it's this complicated dual legal status the Confederacy has, both as an enemy belligerent and rebellious citizens.

CRAIG LITTLEPAGE: So, in 2020, there were approximately 170 monuments nationally that were taken down, removed, et cetera. Is this urgency to remove monuments helping at all in terms of the healing and the reconciliation? What is your view on what the role of this monument's removal kind of cements us in this position, this paralysis that we have right now of, you know, two very, very vocal voices about monuments should come down, we're ruining history, et cetera.

CAROLINE JANNEY: I think it's twofold. On one hand, I don't think it's a stretch to say that a fair percentage of white Southerners hadn't looked at the monuments the way they started looking at them after May of 2020, after George Floyd's murder, and after these conversations, these kinds of visceral conversations about what Confederate monuments meant to contemporary African-Americans, much less why they went up in the first place. And I'm certainly not speaking for all white Southerners, but I certainly anecdotally had enough conversations with people saying to me I simply never thought about it that way. They were part of the landscape, and I didn't think about it that way. So I think there's a shift that's going on. I think it goes back to what I said a little bit earlier that the Lost Cause doesn't have the grip on the white South that it did even even 10 years ago, that we're seeing more people questioning these things that they were taught as children or stories that were told to them by their grandparents. I think we're having more conversations. And that doesn't exactly get to reconciliation so much as a conscious grappling with the past and with symbols of the past. But the other thing that we need to keep in mind is that these challenges didn't start in 2020. They accelerated in 2020. But conversations and challenges to the Confederate battle flag and monuments go back to when those monuments went up.

John Mitchell, the African-American editor of the Richmond Plant in Richmond, viscerally opposed the Lee monument going up in 1890. So the number of people that are willing to challenge those things has increased. But even if we look at the Confederate battle flag, keep in mind that when Atlanta hosted the Olympics in the 1990s, Georgia had to change its state flag that included the Confederate battle flag. And so there were conversations about that in the 1990s. They came back again in the early 2000s, debates about Mississippi's license plate and also about mascots, such as Colonel Reb. I mean, these conversations aren't brand new, but we have seen them certainly accelerate in the past couple of years. And they're all-

CRAIG LITTLEPAGE: So it doesn't-

CAROLINE JANNEY: I'm sorry, go ahead.

CRAIG LITTLEPAGE: Yeah, no, so it doesn't get confined to the symbols of the monuments, but the flags, the, as you said, the mascots, and we had the state of South Carolina after the mass shooting down there.

CAROLINE JANNEY: Right. That's when the flag came down.

CRAIG LITTLEPAGE: Yeah.

CAROLINE JANNEY: Above the state house there. And so Bree Newsome famously ascended the flagpole and took that flag down. And Nikki Haley, a Republican governor at the time, was willing to order that the flag not go back up. So that was a 2015.

CRAIG LITTLEPAGE: Mmm-hmm. Okay. Let's talk a little bit about your students in this whole discussion, because I know how important that is to you. Are your students processing Civil War history and making a lot of these connections with what's going on now, statue removal, denials about the election being lost and stolen, et cetera, et cetera? Are they making those kinds of connections with the history of the Civil War?

CAROLINE JANNEY: So, I haven't taught the Civil War course since the election. And so, but last time I taught it, we were talking about impeachment. And so they were making that connection-

CRAIG LITTLEPAGE: Okay.

CAROLINE JANNEY: With the current issue. But absolutely yes. They seem to understand increasingly that it's not something that is relegated to the past, and studying it isn't just studying troop movements. I'm a military historian, too. I understand all that, I do all that. I love taking them to the battlefield. But they understand and they're asking questions about how this connects to contemporary social and political issues.

CRAIG LITTLEPAGE: Okay.

CAROLINE JANNEY: And they, I would say that they are even more cognizant in the past couple of years of the ways in which those connections are so relevant.

CRAIG LITTLEPAGE: So when you started talking about your students, your face lit up, it really did. We had a presentation a few months ago regarding the impact of the pandemic on teaching and learning. What are some of the things that you took away from the 2021 academic year in terms of remote teaching? Were there any positives that came out of it from your perspective?

CAROLINE JANNEY: So I did not have to teach a big lecture class. In 2020 I was teaching the bigger lecture course, and it became asynchronous. You know, PowerPoints with me talking over them. And that connection was just absolutely lost with students, and I didn't want to have to teach a big course like that again. So last fall I had a small, it was my Civil War memory seminar. So it was 15 students. And that worked okay because everyone was on the screen and we could have those conversations. There were some silver linings, things that I hadn't considered before. Some of the quieter students that were afraid to speak up could privately chat with me and say, I have this question, but I don't want to speak up, and so I could could ask them, There were ways of pulling in students that simply aren't possible in a regular classroom. It's nice to have it as a backup, but I cannot tell you the difference of being back in the classroom. Students are overwhelmingly enthusiastic. In the mornings, you say good morning to them, and that there's a whole chorus of good mornings. And they, in individual office hours, they tell me about how meaningful all their time is here now. Whether they are second years or fourth years, they want to just get everything out of their college years that they can, both academic and social. I mean, they're telling me about participating in things they'd never thought to participate in before, because when they didn't have the opportunity, they realized how much they missed it. So they, and they've been terrific. They wear their masks, they do what they need to do, and I'm just happy to be back in the classroom with them.

CRAIG LITTLEPAGE: Now it's an opportunity for an advertisement. Tell us about some of the great work that's being done at the John Nau Center of a Civil War History.

CAROLINE JANNEY: Oh, thank you for asking.

CRAIG LITTLEPAGE: Tell us what it is and what you're doing.

CAROLINE JANNEY: Sure. So, the center was established five years ago by John Nau, and we have a couple of different hats that we wear. One is for the larger public. We have public programming, which will be again, back in in-person this spring. Our big annual conference will be on March 29th, and this year's theme is going to be Civil War medicine and health.

So we have a couple of different Civil War scholars and medical scholars coming in talking about the various, and it's not just about soldiers. Widow's pensions, widows of USCP soldiers, and the things that they had to deal with in terms of health after the war, and talking about the ways in which disability and depression became issues in the post-Civil War years. So that is coming up in the spring. We also have a lecture, another lecture in late April about the 6th Wisconsin by a very good friend of mine and colleague at Marquette University, Jim Martin. So those are kind of the public facing things that we do, but we also have two websites that we launched last spring. One is called Black Virginians in Blue, and it looks at African-American soldiers from the United States Colored Troops who were born here in Albemarle County. And so it allows us to see the lives of these men, most of whom, none of whom enlisted from here in Albemarle. They had been dispersed, whether through slave sales, or some of them had been emancipated and had moved to places such as Pennsylvania, but it allows us to look at the lived experience of people. It's local history on a large scale. We also have another one that looks at UVA Unionists.

So white men and professors who attended UVA, who fought for the Union army. Confederates get all the glory. They were the ones who had the reunions, the monuments, but there was a contingent of men who attended UVA or taught here. Tuttle, I think, might be one of the most well-known names. Tuttle dormitory was a Union veteran who came back as a biology professor in the post-war period. We have internships for undergrad students. I've worked at getting more and more at National Park Service sites. So we have them at Manassas, Appomattox, Richmond. This year we're gonna have one at Vicksburg. So lots of experiences for undergrad students and lots of opportunities for them to do research. That's just the tip of the iceberg of some of the things that we do.

CRAIG LITTLEPAGE: That's great. Well, you talk about your students and the work that they're doing in support of the Nau Center, and more generically, you talk a lot about your experience with teaching student athletes. And maybe you can just take a minute or two and talk about your experiences of UVA students that are also student athletes.

CAROLINE JANNEY: I have had the most wonderful experience with my student athletes. I have three this semester, and I love hearing from them about, you know, what life is like on that side. I certainly wasn't a student athlete, so I am all the more impressed with all of the things that they manage to accomplish, the hard work that they've put in on and off the field or track or whatever the case may be. And they are simply a delight. And I will say that was true at Purdue, as well. I have had nothing but positive experiences. But they also all know that I bleed orange and blue, and I'm looking forward to the first basketball game tomorrow night. But, and I tell them, tell me when you have a meet, tell me when you have this going on, and I will be there to cheer you on. I love to, you know, I had field hockey player last year and made sure that her classmates knew how well they were doing. So for me, that's my fandom and teaching that kind of goes hand in hand.

CRAIG LITTLEPAGE: That's awesome. Before we close, is there any closing remark that you want to make? Anything that we didn't touch on that's particularly important. I want to pitch the book once again, and here it is. The "Ends of War." And I would recommend it highly to anybody that wants to have some great holiday reading. But is there anything that you want to say to put a punctuation mark on our conversation this afternoon?

CAROLINE JANNEY: I would just go back to the difference between history and memory, as we look at all aspects of the greater world that we live in. And my other point of emphasis is that, man, this is a special place. And I just, I am so appreciative of being here, of being part of this community of faculty and students and the broader Charlottesville community. So, thank you all. It's just a pleasure to be part of this again.

CRAIG LITTLEPAGE: And Carrie, and behalf of the Retired Faculty Association, I want to thank you not only for today, but for your efforts in bringing great value to our students, bringing great value to the university community, not only through your teaching, but through all the work that you're doing with the John Nau Center. It's been a pleasure to have you today. This has been such a timely discussion that we've had given all the things that are going on, the Kessler trial starting, and you know, all the discussion about monuments and everything else. We probably could have gone on easily another hour or so, but your time is valuable. We're not gonna hold you any longer, but I want to again express our appreciation for your joining us today and taking some time to give us some perspectives on the work that you're doing and what you've seen over many, many years in your research and your teaching, so thank you.

CAROLINE JANNEY: Thank you.

CRAIG LITTLEPAGE: Okay. And with that, I'll bring our program to a close. I want to reiterate the message that Dick brought to us at the beginning, and please be reminded that the association is not collecting dues this particular year again, but we are very willing to accept any donations that you might have. We look forward to not only our next presentation, but hopefully reaching a point during this academic year when we will be able to meet in person. And with that, I will bring today's presentation to a close, thank everybody that joined us today, and as Carrie said, basketball season's starting tomorrow. Football game, big one on Saturday night against Notre Dame. And so many of our other fall sports are doing so incredibly well. Let's support those kids and those coaches that are teaching and instructing them along the way. So, thanks everybody. Look forward to seeing you in person very soon. Again, thank you, Carrie.

SHARON HOSTLER: The association, this is the second in our series for this academic year of our presentations on a monthly basis. I bring you greetings from our President, Richard Brownlee, and our Vice-President Kathy Thornton. This is Sharon Hostler, the past present chairing today's meeting. I also bring you greetings from Richard saying that, we all need to send our checks please and buckets of gold to the Retired Faculty Association Care of the Alumni Association. So that paid commercial is done. 

It's my pleasure today to get us started with a brief introduction of my charismatic colleague, Craig Littlepage. Most of you know his incredible story. He grew up in Pennsylvania and did marvelously of course in high school, but he was a student at Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, and he graduated in finance. And while there also was on the three Ivy League Championships and captained the last. Then he went through a period of coaching at Rutgers and Yale and Villanova, and actually briefly at the University of Virginia, but it wasn't until 1990 that he came joined our staff as a leader, as an Assistant Director. And at that point he was the first African-American to actually begin that process of being a leader within the Atlantic Coast Conference. It didn't take long, I think a brief decade for him to become the full Athletic Director. And I think the rest of it has been history. 

He recently has been inducted into the hall of fame for the National Association of Collegiate Directors and Athletics. One of my best times ever in my leadership roles was being Vice-President next to Craig Littlepage, Vice-President with John Casteen as President. And he saved me on many, many mornings. So I would like to start by giving his title, which is about being a Director of Athletic in a competitive Athletic Department. And just add that I hope in his comments he mentions how he forged a relationship with academics, especially with his good colleague, Carolyn Callahan, and the gifted program at Curry. Craig, it's wonderful to have you here. The floor is yours.

CRAIG LITTLEPAGE: Thank you very much, Sharon and good afternoon colleagues. What I'd like to do in handling this is to at least initially provide some perspective, some context with the building of our athletics department at the University of Virginia, because I think that it helps inform number one, just how far we've come in terms of excellence in that athletics here at the university. And I think it will give a really good background with how we approached building the program, who some of the key people were in helping to make this program grow and be successful and be the program it is now under the leadership of Carla Williams. 

So I'll start with a perspective of the program as it related to that point in time in the middle of 1970s when I came to the University of Virginia. The Director of Athletics at the time was a gentleman named Gene Corrigan who really did set the tone for athletics. And before I go into how he set the tone, Gene went on to become the Director of Athletics at Notre Dame after he left UVA, then he became the President of the NCAA for a period of time. And then he was the Commissioner of the Atlantic Coast Conference. So he's somebody that during his career in his life was an iconic figure in college sports. 

But at that point in time, as I said, Gene really did set the tone for athletics at the University of Virginia. UVA had a good athletics program. And the perception that people had of the program, athletics program at the University of Virginia at that point in time, again in the mid 70s in particular, was that it was a program that did things the right way, it graduated its student athletes, it played by the rules and it provided a wonderful experience for the student athletes that participated in the program. 

Candidly, at that point in time, there was not a lot of discussion beyond those things that I just mentioned. And in particular, what I would like to reference is that, there really wasn't a lot of discussion around competitive success, particularly in the sports outside of football, men's and women's basketball, and maybe the two soccer programs and two lacrosse programs. 

And the reason for that was because there really weren't the resources in sports other than those I mentioned, football, men's and women's basketball, men's and women's lacrosse and soccer. The other sports really didn't have the resources to compete in athletics. And as a result, it was again graduate your kids, play by the rules, and if you're able to win every once in a while, that was good. And so it was a program that really didn't have a lot of success. Football at that point in time was not successful at all.

As we transitioned, made the transition into the 80s, football under George Welsh was becoming a successful program and competing at a pretty high level and winning. We had Debbie Ryan that was leading the program in women's basketball, and they were just starting their ascension, men's basketball under Terry Holland. Men's, and women's soccer. were starting to gain some traction. The lacrosse programs were really starting to show signs of being competitive. And there was during the 80s a feeling that there were sports that we could be competitive on an annual basis from a national perspective. 

Then we got into the 1990s, and I would say that there we started to see that additional sports were becoming competitive, particularly on a regional basis. And the reason that we were starting to achieve some success at that point in time in the 90s, was because we had some great coaches. I mentioned George Welch, I mentioned Debbie Ryan, Bruce Arena in soccer, Terry Holland in basketball, Jim Adams in men's lacrosse, Jane Miller in women's lacrosse and field hockey. But at that point in time, there were really only six sports among the 20, I think that the number at that point in time, was 24 sports programs that were fully funded. That is that, there were only six of our sports that had the full compliment of scholarships allowed by the NCAA. And those six sports that were fully funded also had the NCAA limits in terms of the number of coaches that were committed in those sports. 

The other 18 sports during that era, the early 1980s in some cases had part-time head coaches, part-time assistant coaches. And in some cases, volunteer assistant coaches, the facilities in those sports were not good at all. And so the 1990s, as a result again of some modest improvements in competitiveness on the part of many more sports, the 1990s became a decade where there was a reckoning and the reckoning was that facilities were lacking. And we brought on board beginning in 1990 such facilities as MCCUE Center, Klockner Stadium, which is still the soccer and lacrosse facilities, David A. Harrison Field, which resulted in upgrades to the football stadium and the playing field in particular. The Aquatic and Fitness Center, the Turf Field, later in the decade the Carl Smith Center. 

Carl Smith donated a large sum of money to expand the stadium and bring it up to a standard that was appropriate under the circumstances from an ACC standpoint, and as well, a more regional standpoint. There were conversations in the decade of the 90s about University Hall and how to make improvements to University Hall. And first of all, there was a question about whether we would be capable of raising the money to make those improvements, because we really didn't have at that point in time, a stake in the ground where we could say to people, look we've done this before, we've raised huge dollars before for athletics. So we really weren't sure that we could do it, but the factor that led us to the decision that we weren't going to renovate University Hall was that, all the improvements that we were contemplating at that point in time, weren't going to make additional seats. So it really didn't net a lot of sense to spend, $20, $25 million to make improvements if we weren't gonna be able to increase the number of seats. And that decision or that factor was the result of the structure itself that had a self-supporting roof. That if the roof came off, the whole building would fall down. 

And there really wasn't a way other than to maybe dig into the ground and sink the playing surface of being able to generate more seats. And even by going into the ground instead of going up, we were only gonna be able to net about 1,000 additional seats. Again, it really wasn't an investment that made a lot of sense at the time. But again, the decade of the 90s became a decade that we really started to understand that we could achieve success in more of our sports, but we still had a lot of work to do as it related to facilities. 

So as we got into the year 2000, the perspective that I can share with you at that time was that college sports itself was changing dramatically. And the biggest change was that television and the media was becoming a more integral part of the process of exposure for intercollegiate collegiate athletics. TV influenced the desire to show in game experiences that fans and student athletes, that the competitors were having, they were to show the excitement of college sports across a number of different sport platforms. 

And UVA was becoming more successful at higher levels. The basketball program was in and out of the top 10, football was one of the most stable and consistently performing programs. The men's soccer program was just starting to win national championships. Women's soccer was very competitive, men's and women's lacrosse were winning at a national level in addition. And the question was being asked at that point in time in the year 2000, can this type of success that those sports were having be duplicated in our other sports programs. 

Terry Holland retired from the position of Director of Athletics in the spring of 2000. And there was an ongoing narrative around the university as to what the future of intercollegiate sport would be. And that was because for a number of years leading into the year 2000, the Athletics Department was accruing a persistent, but small deficit on an annual basis. And the university put together a task force, and it was established to address this persistent deficit. 

In 25 words or less, the Athletics Department was underfunded. As mentioned earlier, we had sports with really bad facilities. Again mentioned earlier, we had sports that had only part-time coaching staffs. 18 or 19 of the sports didn't have the full scholarship support. So the task force went about over a number of months to do some benchmarking and to try to get the essence of where the program was and potentially what the program could be. 

And at the end of that study, the task force put out a report that gave the University of Virginia with regard to its athletics programs, three options, to be able to operate effectively and fiscally sound approach in the future. Number one was to cut sports, that is to eliminate maybe as many as a half a dozen sports. Many of those sports that were considered for being eliminated were on the men's side. And that was in part a response to the need to comply with Title Nine. 

The second option was to tier sports, that is to maybe not cut those sports, but to take those six, seven sports and make them glorify club sports. That they would not have full-time coaching, they would not have scholarship support. They would compete on a very regional basis. And again, a much different approach than having an intercollegiate program that was going to seek national prominence and compete on a national basis. 

And then the final option was for athletics and the university to get serious about intercollegiate sports. And in getting serious, it was to put a stake in the ground and to say we're gonna fund the program appropriately. We're going to come up with strategies and ways that we could build facilities, fund scholarships, provide the operational support. And the Board of Visitors and other major stakeholders reacted by saying that UVA should not ever be in a position of not being able to pursue excellence and strive for what excellence in everything that it did. And that should also include the excellence that should be pursued in sports. 

So the Board of Visitors basically was saying, no, we are not gonna cut school sports, but we're gonna find a way to support athletics in such a way that they can compete and be among the leaders in intercollegiate athletics programs nationally. So at that point in time, and this is the summer, I'm sorry, the fall and the spring of the fall of 2000 and the spring of 2001, they began a number of what I would call town hall sessions with the major stakeholders. And the question was being asked as to why the University of Virginia and its athletics program could not be more like Stanford, Notre Dame, UCLA, University of Michigan, Penn State, schools that had the great academic reputations and high academic aspirations, and as well compete in intercollegiate athletics at the highest levels. 

So the discussions were started. And again, in the timeframe of the spring and summer of 2001 discussions were being started about the basketball facility, the baseball facility, tennis, the name Paul Tudor Jones should be a prominent name in many minds of people around the University of Virginia. Paul Tudor Jones came to a basketball game in February of 2001, against the University of North Carolina. It was a great game, a great atmosphere and everything, but he made a comment at the end of that game, something to the effect, "Boy, the atmosphere is really great, "the energy in the building's great. "The fans are really into the game. "But boy, University Hall is at dump." And we knew that. 

And we had, as I said, started conversations around the university community about what could be done to create a better environment for fans as it related to men's and women's basketball. I was hired in August of 2001. And one of the first things that I did in taking over as a Director of Athletics was to change the narrative in terms of how we looked at our athletics program. I mentioned earlier that we never talked about competitive success, we never talked about winning. And part of the discussion and the points that were brought up in the stakeholder sessions where, why won't we talk about, we wanna win? 

And so we decided to take a real strong look at that. And in the developing of our 10-year goals, we decided that we were in fact going to articulate the fact that we were gonna have not only goals about the experience of our student athletes in terms of them graduating and getting a degree and getting a great education. But we also gonna talk about competitive success and people that we're going to invest in our program really did wanna see tangible results in terms of continuing high levels of graduation and academic performance, but also winning. 

So we set up the goal of winning and over a 10 year period of time we were committed to trying to win 12 national championships and 70 Atlantic Coast Conference championships, all right? So those were goals we wanted to make and win. 

Third goal was to build the best quality facilities that would be appropriate for our intercollegiate athletics programs across the board. 

Number four, we wanted to have fund raising and financial goals to hopefully endow our scholarships and to provide the other operational support that would be needed to have a nationally competitive program. 

Number five, we would have as a goal, recruiting the best prospective student athletes in the country as they were evaluated and rated by our coaching staffs. 

And then number six, our goal was to comply with Title Nine. So we had to really get serious with raising funds. And at the time our fundraising entity was the Virginia Student Aid Foundation. We made a transition in terms of the VSAFs name. We renamed it, the Virginia Athletic Foundation, because we were gonna call on our foundation to do more than just fund student athletes support, funding scholarships, in other words. 

So we were gonna become with this move a more comprehensive fundraising model. So we were gonna fully fund our programs in terms of scholarships. We were going to fund the academic support program through our foundation, provide large amounts of funding for summer school support for student athletes. And then we were also gonna build better facilities. The blueprint for success then became that we needed to invest in buildings and we needed to invest in people. 

And when I talk about investing in people, I refer specifically to the scholarship support for student athletes. We had to create about 20 more scholarships to go to the NCAA. And as it related to investing in people and our coaches, we had to convert part-time positions into full-time, particularly among our head coaches and as well with the number of assistant coaches that were not full-time. We had to convert those positions to full-time and really support them in terms of the operational needs that they would have to be able to go out and recruit to go out and play competitive schedules, et cetera. 

So at this time, in terms of this blueprint for success, investing in buildings and people, we also looked at developing a profile for the kind of leaders that we would want to bring to the University of Virginia. And we were looking at a new generation of intercollegiate sports in terms of coaching and what it is that would relate to coaches that would be looking at the development of their student athletes in a holistic way, not just to focus on their athletic development and even beyond the academic success. The other ways in which they as coaches and leaders could provide a blueprint for developing their student athletes as leaders in the community and other areas of their experiences at the universities. 

The other thing that we were looking at in terms of the profile for new leaders was, we looked at those coaches whose careers were ascending, both when we looked at head coaches that we may bring to the university as well. We were looking at assistant coaches who had great pedigrees, that worked in good programs. And again, people whose careers were ascending at that point in time. So the profile then was for the teacher coach, the person that was truly viewing themselves as an educator and not just an instructor. 

We would bring people to the University of Virginia in the form of head coaches in particular who heard what our expectations were in terms of our goals, knew that they were gonna be accountable for their program and the goals that we had established as a department and their ability to feed into achieving goals at a very high level. Coaches and leaders that we're looking at the full development, the holistic development as I said before, other student athletes leaders that really did value education and people that really wanted to be at the University of Virginia. We thought that those were the types of things that were gonna be very important in terms of how we looked at and evaluated coaches. 

Another area, when we started to look at the people part of this and the leader part of this was making sure that we were hiring people that were the best fit for the University of Virginia and not just people that were coaches looking for head coaching positions. So we were gonna hire the people that were the best fit and then we were gonna support them with the resources, and then finally just let them do their jobs. 

And so, as we started on this area of turnover, that was gonna happen with some of the coaching positions, we were at the same time, developing a culture, we were developing an environment for these coaches and their staffs and their student athletes to be successful. And it was gonna be a culture in which these new leaders, this new generation of leaders, coaches, were coming to the University of Virginia, that they were really gonna believe in it. 

One example of that kind of culture that was being developed was, Mike London, who was the football coach at the time was speaking at a donor event at which there were other head coaches at the, it was actually a luncheon. And Mike had asked to be the first speaker because he had to leave to go on a recruiting assignment. And he was asked to speak about his program and kind of what was up and coming for Virginia football, et cetera, et cetera. And when Mike got up to speak, it was a little bit of surprise to everybody, but he spoke less about his program than he did about the programs of the other coaches that were in the room. And I remember he talked about Steve Garland and wrestling. He talked about George Gelnovatch and the soccer program. He talked about Steve Swanson and the women's soccer program, but he spent about five to 10 minutes. 

He did talk about his own program, but he spent as much time talking about the other coaches and the other programs in the room. Mike left, and then the other coaches came up and Steve Garland came up and he did kind of the same thing. He talked about his program, but he talked about his admiration that he had for Brian Boland and men's tennis. He talked about the admiration that he had for the golf program and so forth. George Gelnovatch came up and he talked about his respect for the other coaches and their programs, et cetera. 

And this is the kind of culture that we ended up being able to build, where there was the respect for education, the value of education, the respect that they had, that the coaches had for each other, and the ability of these coaches to work together, to help each other out, to draw along the lessons that were being learned each and every day here at the University of Virginia. So I would say that, that is the main part of the presentation. 

I'd like to maybe make a transition and talk about some of the backstories and people when that was the Director of Athletics, and we would go to donor events and so forth, they'd love to hear stories about the coaches and how we got the coaches to come to the University of Virginia, the work that they were doing, et cetera. What I wanna emphasize before going into that though, is that, I learned a lesson very early in my administrative career. 

Jim Adams was the men's lacrosse coach in the early 1990s. He was retiring. Jim Copeland was the Director of Athletics. And he told me that he wanted me to head up the search to find a new men's lacrosse coach. I went to Philadelphia to watch the Men's Final Four. Didn't really know a lot about the lacrosse coaching community, but the Director of Athletics at the University of Pennsylvania fella by the name of Paul Rubincam. And they were hosting, University of Penn was hosting the Fnal Four. I was able to get some time with him. And he says, " Craig, really what you need to do is to focus on what you know about the University of Virginia. What makes it unique and great, and don't worry about hiring the best coach in the country. Your job is not to hire the best coach. Your job is to hire the best fit. The person that as a result of whatever characteristics they have, philosophies that they have, really does align with the University of Virginia." 

And he said, "By the way, again not to focus necessarily on the best coach, but the best fit. This guy, that coaches at Brown University, Dom Starsia is the best fit in my opinion for the University of Virginia." So I took that advice and we worked very hard and we were able to bring Dom Starsia to the University of Virginia, where he won a number of national championships and ACC championships. But the lesson about focusing on the best fit was always in the back of my mind as we embarked on searches. 

So in the middle of 1990s, I was still the Associate or Senior Associate Director of Athletics at that time. And our head women's soccer coach Lauren Gregg was leaving. And so Bruce Arena, who was the head men's coach at the time, came in to see me knowing that I was gonna head up the search and he was telling me, he said, "Let me tell you the person that you should be looking at to bring to the University of Virginia, the person that is really a great coach, but a great fit for UVA. And that's the head soccer coach, women's soccer coach at the University of Maryland, April Heinrichs." 

Now April not only was a very successful head coach at that time, but she was also the first woman to ever be inducted into the national soccer hall of fame. So we're talking about a superstar. And I'm thinking, how can we pull such a prominent figure in the sport of women's soccer from a competing school in the conference. But anyway, I made the call, got permission, talked to April, recruited her very hard, and we were able to bring her to the University of Virginia. 

And again, it was a move and a hire that really did raise the eyebrows of many people around the college soccer, women's soccer community in particular. Not too long after that April, I think she coached with us five or six years maybe. And we were in the mode for hiring another women's head soccer coach. And I was really spinning my wheels to be able to find the right person and the right pool of people that we could talk to. 

And out of the clear blue, I get a phone call from the Associate Director of Athletics at Stanford University, a woman, whose name is Cheryl Levick. And she says, "Craig, I understand that you're in this search for a women's soccer coach. I've got a name for you and somebody that would be a terrific fit for the University of Virginia." So I was "Okay, sure, whose that?" She said, "It's Steve Swanson, "our head coach here at Stanford University." 

And the first reaction many times that you have when somebody at a particular school is trying to support their coach as a prospective candidate for a position, something's wrong, something's not right. So I started asking Cheryl questions and basically she said, "Well, Steve is really an unusual guy. He came here and he made a commitment to his wife "that they would stay here no more than five years. This is the end of five years. And for no other reason, he wants to fulfill the commitment that he made to his wife and be somewhere other than Stanford University." 

At the time Steve and his wife were living in a two or three bedroom condo in Palo Alto with three or four children at the time. And it was really a tough situation, but Steve's roots were in the east and in the Midwest. He really wanted to get back to the east coast and to come to a place in the ACC with an academic reputation, like University of Virginia was something that he was very anxious to pursue. So we were able to hire Steve Swanson on the recommendation of the previous employer, which that doesn't happen very often. But certainly Steve, who's been here over 20 years now and has had so much success, not only here at the University of Virginia, but with the women's national team program, et cetera. 

I remember very vividly an interview that I was doing for the first time with a candidate for the head baseball coaching position, Brian O'Connor, who at the time was the associate head baseball coach at the University of Notre Dame. And I remember meeting Brian at an airport motel outside of the Cincinnati Airport. And I walked in, he was already there. He was seated. He had these two binders. And as we sat down and got through all the small talk, he says, "Okay Craig, here's what I want you to look at." 

And although I had a series of about 10, 12 questions that I wanted to ask, Brian took me through his notebook, his playbook, so to speak. And in it, he had addressed every single question and in the areas that I thought were gonna be relevant. How he's gonna put his staff together, how and where he was gonna recruit, how he would put his competitive schedule together, how he would make sure that the academic demands for the student athletes in baseball, given that they play 50 games a year, were not going to be the second priority to baseball. How he would continue to motivate his kids, lead his kids to understand how important the academics were, et cetera, et cetera. 

And I remember 10 minutes into the conversation thinking to myself, this is our new head baseball coach. Well, fast forward, about another month, Brian, in fact was offered the position. He took the position. He'd been introduced to the university community as the new head baseball coach. And as I was introducing him I made remarks about how when I interviewed Brian, I knew five, 10 minutes into that interview that he was gonna be our coach. 

Brian comes up to speak and the first thing that he says was, "Craig, I wish that you had told me that. Then I wouldn't have had so many sleepless nights over the last month worrying about whether I was getting the job or not." But clearly he's a guy that's done just a heck of a job leading that program. I remember a phone conversation that I had with the head baseball coach at Notre Dame prior to getting a chance to meet Brian. 

Paul had taken his teams on a couple of occasions to the College World Series, a very very successful coach. And I called to get a recommendation from Paul about his Associate Head Coach, Brian O'Connor. And again, I had all the questions I wanted to ask. And as I started asking questions, he says, "Well, Craig, I'm just telling you hire the guy." And again, I'm trying to ask questions. I ask a question, he answers it real quick, he says, "Craig, hire the guy. I'm telling you, Craig, just hire the guy." Some coaches I have to ask all these questions. When I get to asking my questions, the answers to the final question, and he says, "Craig, I'm telling you, listen to me, hire the guy. You will never regret it." And I remember that quote to this day. 

And about 10 years after Brian was on our staff, my wife and I had to fly into Cincinnati. We were going to a conference of some type. And it was the first time that I'd been at the Cincinnati Airport since that time that I had interviewed Brian O'Connor. So I thought to myself, what a wonderful time to just give Brian a call? I had been on the road a couple of weeks at that point and hadn't seen Brian in that period of time. I called Brian and said, Brian you know where I am right now? He said, "No, where?" I said, "I'm just coming through the Cincinnati Airport". And he kind of chuckled and says, "Yeah, that was a great day that we spent together, wasn't it?" And this again was 10 years after we had hired Brian. And the end of the conversation was, "Craig, I just wanna tell you how much I appreciate the fact that you took a chance on me and that you hired me to be the baseball coach at the University of Virginia." 

So I could go on and on with stories about our coaches and that sort of thing. And I had a couple of Tony Bennett stories that I'll tell as well, but before I go too deep into those, there were a number of questions that were submitted earlier. And I'm gonna try to answer a couple of these real quickly. And if there are questions from anybody that's in the audience today, I would like to handle those as well. 

One question talked about or asked about, "What is your wisdom on selecting winning coaches?" And the first thing that I would say, and I addressed this a little bit, we made sure that we or your administrators were the experts that we knew more about the University of Virginia and what made for success in our sports at the University of Virginia. And I, in particular as a leader of the program, had to make absolutely sure that I had as much information about what translated into success at the University of Virginia. 

So I looked back over my career and the hall of fame level coaches that I was able to work with and work alongside of, Debby Ryan, George Welch, Jim Adams, Dom Starsia, Terry Holland. I mean, I could go on and on about the just unbelievable coaches and hall of fame level coaches that I was able to work alongside of. So I think that I knew more than anybody, about what translated into success in intercollegiate athletics and coaching as anybody. 

And I would say number two, the wisdom came from relationship building and having the ability to draw on the knowledge that people in the different sport communities and the college intercollegiate athletics community, more generally, the expertise that, excuse me, the different people had. That informs one of the Tony Bennett stories. 

And I was working as the chair of the NCAA men's basketball committee or had served as the chair of the men's basketball committee. And when we had the opening, which led to Tony Bennet's hiring, I had a conversation with a gentleman named Tom Jernstedt, who was the Senior Vice-President at the NCAA and commonly referred to as the godfather of the Final Four. And he had been the leader of the Final Four for 38 years at that point in time. He called me and basically said, "Look, I know a guy who would be perfect for you at the University of Virginia. 

It's the young head coaches now at Washington State University, Tony Bennett." I knew of Tony mostly through his father who was a very successful basketball coach at the University of Wisconsin, Green Bay and the University of Wisconsin, Madison. But I didn't know very much about Tony and I started to cast a wider net and asking other people about Tony Bennett as a coach and that sort of thing, but it was a Tom Jerstedt who's now deceased who opened my eyes to this outstanding young coach, Tony Bennett, who has graced the sidelines for the University of Virginia and has won a national championship in basketball for us. 

So that's the wisdom that I have on selecting winning coaches. So being an expert on the institution, number one, and drawing on relationships of people that I have met over a 44 year career in intercollegiate athletics. 

Another quick question that has come up is, "Were advisory committees helpful to you as you built the program? In what ways?" And I would say yes, advisory groups were very important. I mentioned the listening sessions that we had with stakeholders shortly after I became the Director of Athletics, the task force report was another advisory that really did kind of set the stage for people feeling as though excellence at the university should also include athletics. 

Any number of advising entities, the Athletics Advisory Council, which included many faculty members in addition to those interactions with faculty. I would routinely invite faculty members and senior university administrators to be my guests in the suite at the football games and basketball games and other opportunities around the university maybe they could have been confidential so forth. But I wanted to make sure that the faculty, those that might have issues with athletics would have an opportunity to ask me questions directly. 

Carolyn Callahan, the Faculty Athletic Representative, she and I were very close friends and still remain very close friends. She would often bring me concerns that she would be hearing among those faculty with whom she would interact on a daily basis. So all those different types of committees, councils and informal gatherings allowed me an opportunity to develop meaningful relationships with faculty and university administrators across the board, as well as folks in the university community more generally. 

And always having that perspective of what faculty were thinking, particularly as they were thinking about, athletics was important to me, and it helped our administrative team are the types of things that made people feel as though we could be trusted to do all that we could to preserve the academic standing and the academic traditions here at the University of Virginia, as we were building the athletics program. 

I'm gonna digress for a second and just see if there are questions that come from the audience before we wind down and call it a day. Questions that may come up, Sharon, are you gonna be kind of the gatekeeper on this?

SHARON HOSTLER: I think that we have the questions. And I think that one of the issues we'd like to have addressed is about the student athletes receiving financial compensation and what you know about that and what that has looked like as we begin the season. Not just here, but nationally.

CRAIG LITTLEPAGE: Yeah, and that's a great question. Very topical question, relevant to the era that we're in right now. Candidly while I was the athletics director, I didn't see a day come where we would be talking about providing resources to student athletes, beyond their scholarships, beyond the other collateral benefits that accrued to student athletes in the form of summer school, academic support, mentoring, and other advising and so forth. And it took me a long time before I got to the point that I could understand the value of that. 

So I do think that there are pros to it in that, student athletes now have much different needs than student athletes have had in any prior era of intercollegiate athletics. 

And you have more student athletes for example, that come from one family homes and I'm talking not just at the University of Virginia but more specifically when you look at it from a national standpoint of, student athletes who have been in homeless situations, have lived with their football coach, have lived with other families, student athletes that come to our institutions that have families of their own, student athletes that come to the institutions that have to help in terms of support for their own moms, their own dads, their grand moms, the people that raised them and so forth. 

So I see the wisdom in expanding the scope of what it is that's provided to student athletes. Certainly on the other end of the spectrum, there are concerns about what the competitive arena will have this support to student athletes. mean in the future, will the name, image and likeness, the compensation student athletes get a name, image and likeness, will this become a part of the recruiting pitch? And although by rule, the NCAA does not want that to be resulting in a bidding war if you will. But certainly I'm concerned about kind of the wild wild west mentality that's out there right now as it relates to compensation that student athletes might receive. So I see the benefits of it. And as long as we can keep it reigned in, and it doesn't become a recruiting ploy where schools are just trying to outbid each other for the services of the prospective student athletes, I think that it can be something that's really good.

SHARON HOSTLER: Thank you. There may be some of these questions you don't want to answer, but we have a little bit of time left and.

CRAIG LITTLEPAGE: Sharon, I stalled one question that your remarks might've been a preface to a question that related to diversity within the baseball program.

SHARON HOSTLER: Yes.

CRAIG LITTLEPAGE: And I think that this is a very legitimate question and the perspective that I would add on this question as it relates to why we haven't had much diversity in our baseball program over the course of the last couple of decades. I first think that you have to look at what is happening in a more global environment. And if you read or hear anything about Major League Baseball for a number of years now, Major League Baseball has been very concerned about the lack of youth programs in various communities around the country for baseball, in particular in minority communities. 

So I think that it starts at that level that fills the pipeline that there are so few or they're less and less youth baseball programs that are being pursued by youth in African-American and minority communities. And it makes the pool of potential prospects, high school prospects, very small. Now there are a couple of schools that have done a pretty good job, Vanderbilt University being one of them that has had over time a number of diverse candidates on their baseball program. And one of the reasons that they've had successes is because they have a very robust process of being able to offer financial aid to their prospects. that really does give them a little bit of an advantage over many other schools. 

But I think that the quick answer is that there are so many fewer bonafide prospects in the sport of baseball, in particular prospects that will have the grades and that have the abilities and so forth. But it is a topic that coach O'Connor and I, while I was the athletics director, we talked about it. He does a lot of thinking about it now. He's involved in a lot of discussions, both within the college baseball community, as well as the broader community. And he's very aware of the Major League Baseball initiatives and concerns, et cetera. So it's just something that we've got to do better at, in terms of college baseball generally, but specifically at the University of Virginia as well.

SHARON HOSTLER: So, I'm a pediatrician, Craig and I'm watching my grandson suddenly become a QB one when he wasn't really totally prepared to do that as a senior. 

And I wonder about what the future of football is. And in general, I mean, I worry about the, I know we've got all the helmets and we're doing a lot better job on the sidelines, but I've been watching these high school games in North Carolina, and I gasp a lot. And I wonder they certainly, with the issues with COVID, I mean, I'm just wondering if football is going to be in the next decade, continue to be a professional sport and a collegiate sport. I'm curious about what you think. Or is football so much that American pastime that it's gonna stay forever and I should stop worrying. I think you should stop worrying.

CRAIG LITTLEPAGE: Football's not going away anytime soon, either at the professional level or at the college level. And I think that if you look at it in terms of professional leagues, there's nothing bigger than NFL football. As you look at the things that are happening in college athletics, the realignment of conferences and schools that are moving from one conference to another, the TV contracts that are being executed by ESPN and Fox Sports and other regional carriers are going higher and higher. So college football is not going away. 

And I think that you would look, I believe at high school and youth football as kind of the element, the category, if those programs at the youth level start to go away, I think that then you're gonna have a couple of years lag time of the impact that's gonna be felt in the college game and then ultimately the professional game. But I guarantee you that 20 years from now, we're still gonna have football at a very high level in all of these different areas.

SHARON HOSTLER: Okay. All right. This grandmother will be quiet.

CRAIG LITTPLEPAGE: Okay. If I could -

SHARON HOSTLER: Yeah go ahead.

CRAIG LITTLEPAGE: If I could just, before we close Sharon, there are a couple of names that I would be remiss if I didn't mention them in terms of how our program grew and the success that we had. And I'd like to mention a couple of these names, and I do this understanding that, I know that I'm not gonna be able to include everybody, but there are several people that were so instrumental in the work that we did and the success that I had, that this is an opportunity for me to mention those briefly, but certainly John Casteen and Terry Sullivan as leaders of the University of Virginia, were so good to me in terms of helping me, supporting me. Leonard Sandridge, there are dozens, if not hundreds of people that have excelled at the University of Virginia in their positions, that would say that Leonard was the person that was key in terms of them having success. And certainly was the case with me. Bob Sweeney, all the rectors, our Senior Administrative Staff, John Oliver, who is my Executive Associate AD. 

We had other people like Dom Catcher, Berry Parkhill from a fundraising standpoint. Gentleman who was the Chair of the Board of Visitors, Student Affairs and Athletics Committee, Charlie Glazer. He was one of those people that was always talking about athletics, always pumping up athletics, always making people understand what a great value add having a great program would be. 

And so many donors, Paul Tudor Jones, Phil Wendell, Bill Goodwin, Carl Smith, John Grisham who's been a great friend of football, basketball and baseball. Amy and John Griffin, so many great people. We would not have had success that we had nor would the success that's being achieved right now would not have happened without all those people and dozens of additional folks, including the coaches that we were able to bring to the University of Virginia.

SHARON HOSTLER: So Craig, thank you for that. And I want to just as we end, I want you to tell us, in the fabulous years you've had here as a leader and as a resource, what was the most fun? What was the one point you that you'll never forget that you were having such a good time?

CRAIG LITTLEPAGE: I would say generally the great success that we had in terms of winning NCAA championships, baseball and basketball in particular, but lacrosse and swimming this year. Although I was not the director of athletics this past year when the women's swimming program won the national championship, but generally speaking the championships, but even more so seeing on an annual basis, the level of success that our student athletes would have, that the student athletes had, which are experiences that I think help to guide them and have them ascended in their respective careers as they leave the University of Virginia. So the development of our student athletes and the success that they have had outside of the University of Virginia beyond their college years on Grounds.

SHARON HOSTLER: Thank you. Terrific, some applause for Craig. And thank you very much. We'll see you next month. Right, Craig?

CRAIG LITTLEPAGE: Thank you Sharon.

SHANON HOSTLER: Thank you very much Craig.

CRAIG LITTLEPAGE: Thanks for everybody listening in.

SHANON HOSTLER: Don't forget to send your checks to the Retired Faculty Association, at Alumni Association.

SHARON HOSTLER: Good day, everyone. Happy sort of rainy spring day. But this is the Retired Faculty Association, the University of Virginia, on our last programming for this academic year. It has been terrific to spend the pandemic with you on Zoom. Next year, we have an active program already in process, beginning in September, when we're going to hear from the students about how they have weathered this pandemic experiment that we've all been living through. 

We don't know, just like you don't know-- and I suspect the governor doesn't know and Jim Ryan doesn't know-- whether that's going to be live small group, how it will be. But just know that we will be back. And we welcome all of you to return. 

There will be no dues. But we continue to say thank you. Keep sending those funds because it still does cost something to be able to get the Zoom and the recording and the closed caption. So be generous. It's the end of the year. We're delighted to-- especially our treasurer, Bob Ribando, delighted to receive all your contributions. 

Before I introduce the master of ceremonies for our final session, I would like to thank you all for the opportunity to serve as your president and to introduce Richard Brownlee from the Darden School, who is our new president, who will, I think, take over very shortly. So welcome, Dick. We're delighted to have you in the leadership role. 

RICHARD BROWNLEE: Thank you. Sharon, I want to say thank you to you for leading us through this extraordinary year, where we had to change everything we were doing and how we did it. And thanks to the board. And also, thank you to the UVA Alumni Association and Jessica Weissman, who has worked with us. 

It's taken a real effort to pull this off. And thank you to all of our members for staying with us and participating. We look forward to a great year next year, whatever it will look like. 

SHARON HOSTLER: Thank you. And now is my opportunity to turn the program over to Professor Craig Littlepage. I've just taken my power, right, to announce that. It's a street professorship at this point in time. It's not fully endowed. But it may be after the donations come in, Craig. 

Craig Littlepage is a former director of our athletics department, vice president, and leader here for many years and one of my most respected and delightful colleagues and helped me through the years many times from the School of Medicine all the way to Madison Hall. So Craig, the program is yours. Please introduce us to Ted White. Thank you. 

CRAIG LITTLEPAGE: And thank you, Sharon, not only for the introduction but also for the collaborative work that we did over many, many years. And thank you for the leadership that you provided to the Retired Faculty Association. It's my pleasure this afternoon to introduce Ted White. Ted is the Deputy Athletic Director for Strategic Advancement. And I'm very pleased that he's able to join us today. First of all, Ted, the title, Deputy Athletics Director for Strategic Advancement, tell us what that means. 

TED WHITE: Yeah, we're actually still figuring that out, Craig. That is a new title bestowed upon me in January. First, I would like to thank you for this opportunity. I'm really excited to be here today. 

And I would say to Sharon that for those of us who have been in college athletics for a number of years, you are a professor. You're our professor. And I just wanted to make sure to put that out there. 

So I have been involved in student development and sport performance for years and years and worked with Carla for 14 years before coming to Charlottesville a couple of years ago to join her team. And she asked me to take on a couple of specific projects when I first arrived. And now that those are up and running, she asked me to get involved in what she is calling strategic advancement. 

It's not exactly fundraising. It is partnership development. I think one of our goals, as it was yours for years, was to win championships across all sports without giving an inch on the academic side or the student development side. And there are very few institutions and athletic departments around the country that can even attempt that. 

And we recognize that we are probably not going to ever have the financial resources that some of our competitors have. And so we've got to be really creative and thoughtful about our resource gathering. And so that's what the strategic advancement is all about. It's about trying to find competitive advantages where others may not be looking, whether it's in partnerships or non-traditional fundraising opportunities. 

CRAIG LITTLEPAGE: So you grew up in California but ended up spending most of your professional career in the Southeast on the Atlantic Coast. How does that happen? How does that work? 

TED WHITE: Yeah, great question. So I grew up in a California that not many know exist. I grew up in a very isolated, kind of economically depressed area of Northeastern California, where folks either worked in the lumber industry or the railroad industry. 

My parents were from Berkeley and Oakland. And the city of Oakland bought some land up in the mountains to send kids in the summer and to create a satellite community college campus. And so my parents worked on the community college campus in a little town called Quincy. 

And so I grew up understanding when we left Quincy in the summers to visit family in Oakland and Berkeley. I had a real understanding of what a major college campus environment was like. And when I was back in Quincy, I watched kids that were older than me either stay or leave. 

And almost all of those who left left because they had an opportunity to go to college. And about half of those played a sport. And so I grew up thinking that my opportunity to leave that little area was through college sports. 

And when my college career ended, it seemed like a natural fit for me to go into the business and try to impact student athletes. I really saw college athletics as an opportunity to create access to education. So that became a passion of mine. 

I started at the University of California Davis and ended up at UC Berkeley for a few years. But this was in the late '90s, early 2000s, before academic progress rate and graduation rates really became something that was actively measured. And so I became aware that there were a lot of student athletes who didn't really have true access to a meaningful education. 

And I realized that a lot of the great work to be done was in the Southeast. And I had an opportunity to go to LSU and work with their football program when Nick Saban was the coach in the early 2000s. They had a situation where the average freshman football player was on academic probation by the end of their first term. 

And so it was very typical for someone to be admitted to LSU as part of the football team and then immediately fail two or three classes and get off to a really bad start. And so they were looking for someone to come in and help turn that around. And I saw that as a great opportunity. 

Most of my colleagues at Berkeley thought I was crazy. My wife thought I was a little nuts. But we packed up and moved down to Baton Rouge and rolled my sleeves up and really got to work in that space around creating opportunity in this sense of engagement, academic engagement. And that led me to a phone call with Carla, who was interested in creating similar opportunities at Georgia. 

As you know, the SEC competes at everything. And so the work we were doing at LSU started to get some notice across the conference. So the turnaround in terms of grades and graduation rates at LSU after a couple of years got Carla's attention. 

And so we struck up a relationship over the phone. And just started talking shop about of what programs worked, what didn't work, what we'd like to try. And that led to a job offer. 

And so I joined her at Georgia, spent the next 12 years doing similar things, just experimenting and trying to figure out ways to engage student athletes on the academic side and the personal development side. Eventually, that grew into programming that expanded beyond academics. So once we had really established a firm hold on the academic success, we started branching out into personal development, community engagement, leadership development, career preparation, and then into the sport performance side, which I've really enjoyed. And when she took the job at UVA, she invited me to come join her and continue exploring. 

CRAIG LITTLEPAGE: Here you are. 

TED WHITE: Yep, that's right. 

CRAIG LITTLEPAGE: So you've been at UVA now for three years. What has impressed you the most about the university and the athletics program and your experiences here on grounds? 

TED WHITE: Yeah, it's the people, hands down. It's an incredible environment. And one of my favorite activities is working in recruiting for some of our sports, particularly football and men's women's basketball. But to talk to prospects about the opportunities that exist at Virginia that are unique because of the people who are at Virginia. 

A lot of the work that I've done over the years, you didn't necessarily have the full support of the university, the department, the coaching staff, the community. You might be swimming against the current in promoting academic engagement with elite student athletes. And what I found at UVA was that you're swimming with the current when you're speaking that language. And the partnerships and collaborations that we can create throughout the UVA ecosystem are really powerful and have allowed us to create some really unique programming that just doesn't exist anywhere else. 

Because not only are the people at UVA, whether it's faculty or alumni, administrators, students, world class, but they're really open to connection and collaboration. And it's that combination that I found to be really unique. I've never experienced that anywhere else. 

CRAIG LITTLEPAGE: So there's been a focus over the last decade or so on student athlete welfare and student athlete development. Tell us about what UVA is doing to ensure that our student athletes have the tools that they need to reach their potential, both while they're here and enrolled and as well when they leave grounds to start their own careers. 

TED WHITE: Great. Yeah. So I'll talk a little bit about that unique program that we developed. And we call it Pathways. And it revolves around five key areas. One is, of course, academics. Another is career preparation, leadership development, community engagement, and personal development. 

Each of those five areas is made up of engagement types. In our minds, we wanted to come up with some traditional and some non-traditional engagement types that really asked student athletes to think outside the box in terms of their experience. So we looked at the research and tried to figure out, what are the most important aspects of the undergraduate experience, the most meaningful and the most lasting? 

And it turns out that while some of them are in the classroom, many are outside the classroom. And so we started collecting opportunity types across those five areas. And I'll give some specific examples in a moment. 

And we front loaded the student athlete experience with assessments and reflective exercises. And so we reached out to a couple of departments on grounds, one being contemplative sciences. Contemplative sciences helped us develop some unique and specific reflective exercises for first-year student athletes in combination with a couple well established assessment exercises. 

Student athletes start digging in and trying to figure out exactly what they may want to do alongside their sport and beyond their sport. And it is related to a career. But it's also related to their values and who they want to be and who they want to impact down the road. 

And then they enter our web-based system with some of that knowledge that they're developing about themselves. And they start making choices on their interests. So it could be a career-related interest. It could be entrepreneurship. It could be economics. It could be teaching. It could be social justice issues. It could be cultural issues. 

And then they pick from the engagement types in each of those five categories. And so, for example, in academics they can pick a faculty mentor. They can pick a class for interest. So rather than taking an elective by path of least resistance, as we call it-- so for years and years all across the country, student athletes have-- when it comes time to pick an elective, they may ask the juniors and seniors on the team, what's the path of least resistance for my elective, the one that's not taught at 8:00 AM or the one that's, quote unquote, "the easiest?" We encourage our student athletes to pick electives based on a passion they might have. 

We look at undergraduate research opportunities, study abroad opportunities, things like that, classes that have projects, things that are really meaningful, and ask students to search by those in academics. Under the career tab, it's things informational interviews with alums and other partners that we may have out in the world, job shadowing opportunities, externships, internships,. And under personal development, it could be organizations across grounds. And then under leadership development, different opportunities for certificate programs or academies that they could join and the like. 

So then a student athlete would hit a button at the end of that selection process. And a customized menu will pop up for them based on their entries. And they'll be put in touch with organizations, departments, faculty members, alumni who are doing that work and passionate about that work so that we can connect the student athlete with those individuals and those organizations to really engage and hopefully fuel their interest forward. 

So they're not just taking classes and checking boxes. They're really engaging and networking and connecting with people and doing meaningful work. And then hopefully that translates to when they graduate and go into the world. And they either give back or they continue interacting with that community online. 

CRAIG LITTLEPAGE: So you made a reference to this just briefly in one of your previous comments. But we have a question from one of our viewers related to the types of things that are talked about, particularly by our coaches and administrators like you and Carla, to prospective student athletes. What is it that gets the attention of these 16-, 17-, 18-year-old young people that encourages them and facilitates an interest in the University of Virginia? 

TED WHITE: Well, what we found is that this Pathway program, because it's designed to respond to an individual student athlete's interests, it is really compelling and intriguing to our prospects. One of the things that I've been most impressed in athletics at Virginia is our coaching staff across the board will not-- they are true to the University and true to their own philosophies in recruiting. I have worked at other institutions where you may have coaches that are willing to tell any recruit that has enough talent whatever it is they think they want to hear to get them onto that campus. And then we'll work out the details. 

That is not the case at Virginia. I think our coaches have all been attracted to the University of Virginia because they respect the values of the university. And they want to win championships without giving up anything on the academic side. And so they recruit to that. 

And the philosophy is that if you cast a nationwide net, there are enough really talented athletes in any sport who are also really passionate about other things and want to engage in the full experience. And so the fact that our coaches, whether it's football or men's basketball, women's basketball-- across the board, their original pitches and their searches for prospects include that. So when the parents and students come to meetings with our staff and with myself, they get really excited about the individualization and the customization of the whole experience. So we really don't have to do a lot of the same things that other schools do. 

CRAIG LITTLEPAGE: Here's another question from one of our colleagues. A topic of concern nationally has revolved around the number of transfer student athletes and the transfer portal. So many student athletes are leaving their institutions, particularly in the sport of men's basketball, with this thought that maybe the pastures are greener somewhere else. What are the reasons for the trend? And what is it that you think the NCAA and the member institutions will do to address the concerns that so many have about frequency of transfers? 

TED WHITE: Yeah, I'm actually on the Transfer Working Group committee. And so I've been involved in those conversations for the last year or so. I think between the transfer legislation NIL, which I'm sure we'll get to at some point in this conversation, and even the gambling concerns that are coming, there are some very real threats to the way we want to go about this enterprise. 

So we want to encourage student athletes to engage academically and develop as people while they're developing as athletes. And that is unique in the Power Five. There are very few of our competitors that are committed as committed as we are to this across the university. 

And so I have and my colleagues have real concerns about this transfer legislation and the environment because it is a result of public pressure to allow student athletes the same flexibility that coaches seemingly have in terms of leaving a job for another job for a better opportunity. And so the public perception is that coaches and administrators can go anywhere they want anytime they want for a better deal. But student athletes cannot. 

Up until this point, a few sports-- basketball, baseball, football, hockey-- the student athletes were asked to sit a year in residence before they were eligible to compete. And that was because transferring impacts academic progress. So anytime you transfer, you're likely to lose credits. And if you transfer twice, you're likely to lose more credits. 

And so you're less likely to graduate on time. And the research said that in those sports in particular, athletes tended to leave at higher rates than other sports when their eligibility was exhausted. And so the thought was, all right, well, let's ask them to sit for a year. That'll make them think really hard before transferring. 

But it will also give them a year in residence to establish a major that they're interested in, catch up on the front end with graduation percentages, and have a much better opportunity to graduate when their eligibility is exhausted. And I think our fear is that because the graduation rates that have been published and promoted across the country in the NCAA have led people to assume that everyone graduates and there's no problem anymore-- and so let's just open the floodgates and let kids choose where they want to play. And so it's going to be really interesting to see what type of impact that has. 

Our coaches are already struggling with what that means for them in terms of recruiting because it creates a cycle. And we're already seeing the cycle. If one of our student athletes transfers and let's say it's a sophomore and the freshman that had come in under that sophomore is now thinking, oh, I've got an opportunity, and then we bring in a transfer right back over the top of that freshman, that freshman now wants to leave. And so it creates this vicious cycle where kids are coming and going every time someone else transfers in. It makes somebody nervous about their position on the team. And I think what we're trying to figure out is, how do we survive in this environment without giving up what makes us successful? And that's going to be a trick. 

CRAIG LITTLEPAGE: So a quick history lesson from a guy that's been in this business since 1973. The transfer requirements up until recent years were that in every sport, student athletes that wish to go to another institution had to sit out the one year, put in that one year of residence. And then the rules started to evolve. And they carved out that all those sports except for football, men's and women's basketball, hockey, baseball-- those other sports, the student athlete that wanted to transfer could seek a waiver. 

And they would have to go through a process at their institution. And they'd have to get a hearing with the people outside the athletics department to get a waiver to be able to transfer to a new institution and then participate in their first year. Those opportunities were not made available to the football, basketball, ice hockey, baseball, student athletes. 

And because of the publicity around student athletes in those major sports, if you will, being treated differently, a disproportionate number of those student athletes that were not given the chance to participate if they transferred right away, ethnic minority student athletes in particular, and the perception that, well, you're letting your coaches leave, you're letting administrators leave, and they don't have any kind of penalty, the public furor over that inequity between the student athlete and the coaches and administrators and the number of student athletes that were ethnic minorities that were being treated differently and much more restrictive, that's how we got to this more permissive legislation, which basically allowed student athletes in all sports that if they wanted to transfer, they could leave and participate at their next institution right away. 

And as that legislation has taken effect, as we see almost every day in the newspapers, there are student athletes that are leaving because of, in some cases, frivolous reasons and not bona fide academic reasons. Sometimes, it may be that they have circumstances at home with a parent or somebody that's ill. But there's got to be a lot of conversation-- I know you're involved with it-- concerning, is there a better way to go about this and monitor it? 

TED WHITE: That's absolutely right. And the conversations that we're having as a committee have already turned from allowing this to happen once to, how can we stop it from happening two and three times? And so the NCAA legal advisors are already talking about, well, if you let them transfer one time and play immediately, there's no argument for stopping them the second and third time. So we could be just really lifting the lid off this thing and being asked to study the academic fallout over the next few years before correcting it again. That's what I'm a little worried about. 

CRAIG LITTLEPAGE: Yeah, another topic that's been getting the attention, unfortunately, of the courts, state legislators, and Congress is the topic of the name, image, and likeness. And I know that you're involved with discussions and a lot of conversations around that. For those that aren't familiar, can you give us a CliffsNotes version of what name, image, and likeness refers to? 

TED WHITE: Sure. So name, image, and likeness refers to the ability for amateur student athletes at the college level to benefit financially from their name, image, or likeness. And so it runs the gamut from student athletes who may have other interests outside of their sport that they can benefit from financially while they're in school. Up to now, there's a really rigorous process that they would have to go through in order-- for example, if they were a musician or if they wrote a book, it would be really difficult to profit from those things. And so part of NIL is freeing those student athletes up so that they're able to benefit financially from skills and talents that they have outside of their sport that are really healthy pursuits and they should benefit from. 

Another aspect is marketing, licensing, those kind of things. So imagine at Virginia the sales of Kyle Guy jerseys or Mamadi Diakite jerseys, allowing student athletes to benefit from a percentage of those sales if it's specific to their jersey or their number, selling autographs, hiring an agent, which is a very controversial aspect of this. But that would be allowed. Student athletes would be able to hire an agent. 

Those agents would be allowed to go out and seek marketing deals for student athletes. So for example, a student athlete might be able to make their own deal with Nike outside of the apparel deal that the university and the athletic association have with Nike. They could make a deal with one of our local partners-- Wegmans, for example-- and benefit from those things. 

So there are several states that have passed legislation. And I think Florida and Mississippi are the first to open this up this fall. The NCAA has been put on notice that they better come up with something across the country this summer that allows student athletes to benefit. I think that it's all in the details. 

And the NCAA is obviously trying to come up with some sort of parameter that would stop universities and big donors and coaches from getting involved in using these opportunities as recruiting inducements so that a young 17-, 16-year-old who's thinking about their education makes the choice because they might get a $30,000 deal on a billboard in one town. And they don't factor in the education that they may or may not get. 

CRAIG LITTLEPAGE: So absent the NCAA having a standard for name, image, and likeness right now, what we have potentially are 50 different states coming up with their own legislation in this regard and in consistencies between those pieces of legislation which could create a competitive advantage in one state compared to another state, particularly when you're talking about conferences that have member institutions from four or five different states and how those pieces of legislation could be different. What do you think are the chances that the NCAA can somehow get a consensus and come up with a standard and one piece of legislation that applies to all 350 some odd Division I schools? 

TED WHITE: Yeah, that's a great question. I believe that they will come up with something over the summer that could be enacted. I think where it's going to get tricky is that there are going to be several states who would want, whatever the NCAA comes up with, to be more open. 

I think there are a couple of states, like California and Florida, that it's no holds barred. Just let it fly. Anything goes in order to push the envelope and to create a recruiting advantage for the universities in their states. So I think that's where it's going to get a little tricky because the NCAA doesn't want to just blow the lid off the whole thing. You want to create some sort of parameters. 

So I think there'll be some sort of compromise by the end of the summer. But that's my best guess. I know that the state of Virginia is interested in considering NIL legislation. I don't know. It's too late for it to go into this cycle. So I don't know when that would happen. 

We have been working for the past year or so on NIL education for our student athletes. So when this first started coming around and looking like it was a reality, I approached Carla and said, hey, can we get ahead of this and create an educational program that's a little maybe different than what our competitors are looking at and work with our university partners and create educational opportunities that go alongside with our long-term vision for education and prioritizing education? 

And so we've worked with Darden, the law school, McIntire, Baton, and some others to create a layered educational program so that student athletes, if they choose Virginia-- rather than tell them, hey, we can get you X number of dollars by putting you on a billboard, we're going to talk them into the idea that pathways will help them develop their real interests. And then through connections with content experts in our faculty and our alumni base, they can really find out exactly what goes into having a long-term, successful opportunity in that area. 

So if you want to start your own sports camps, for example, we would connect you with the law school and maybe a faculty member in commerce and obviously our compliance department so that you could really dig in and find out exactly what goes into this and how to be successful at it long term and not just look for a flash in the pan, a few quick bucks. 

CRAIG LITTLEPAGE: Yeah. So I think as a reminder to our listeners, name, image, and likeness-- and if you agree, fine. If you don't agree, that's fine too. But name, image, and likeness is a step removed from actually paying athletes by-- in other words, this is not pay for play when you talk about name, image, and likeness. Would you agree? 

TED WHITE: I would. This is in response to that. And as you know, Craig, the pay for play argument is playing out in the Supreme Court now. So there is a possibility that we end up there. So we're all watching that very carefully and hoping for the best. 

But my hope-- I've actually come a long way and come around on the NIL over the years. I just hope that we don't nationally lose sight of the value of education because I do not hear in the conversations how we're going to protect the real opportunity for education for student athletes. So I'm hoping that gets reinserted into the conversation. 

CRAIG LITTLEPAGE: Right. So another major topic over the past 13, 14 months has been the pandemic. And it's disrupted so many different aspects of our lives. What are some of the impacts that have been most concerning to you as it relates to our program at UVA? And as part of your answer, you could talk a little bit about the terminology, the bubble, what that is, and what it's like being in the bubble, so to speak. So what have been the big issues as it relates to impacts, disruptions on our student athletes and academics, et cetera? 

TED WHITE: Yeah, well, we went into this at the very beginning thinking that we were going to shut down. We started the conversation last April and went into the summer as a team thinking that there's no safe way to move forward. And so we're going to start preparing for a semester or a year without practice or competition. 

And so we started building programming that we thought would be important on the student development side for student athletes that would replace training and practice and travel and competition. It started to become clearer and clearer over the summer that the Power Five conferences in the ACC in particular were going to find a way to move forward and practice and compete as safely as possible. 

And so over time, working closely with experts from the medical system, the ACC, and University of Virginia systems, just months of trying to figure out, all right, how we do this? And starting very, very slowly at first and meeting with every student athlete, particularly the fall student athletes at the end of the summer and saying, you have a choice. 

You do not have to return. You do not have to practice. You do not have to compete. Your scholarship will be held for you. You would be at no risk of losing your scholarship. If you'd like to sit out, that's totally fine. 

And then I think it became this week by week, March through the year, trying to figure out what a bubble looks like at on the college level because it really isn't a bubble. It's the closest thing we could come to a bubble. But the difference between the NBA and an actual bubble and a college, quote unquote, "bubble" is that we could create a bubble around practice and around meals and around travel and competition. 

But that leaves a lot of time for student athletes and students to exit and re-enter that bubble. So that became a real challenge. And so really had to work hard at communicating through and with our coaches to our student athletes that, hey, this is going to take extraordinary commitment to playing your season and playing your sport and being really disciplined when you're on your own time and not putting the team or your coaching staff or your season at risk by exiting any kind of bubble that you would have in your apartment or your dorm room, that kind of thing. 

So a lot of collaboration across grounds, a lot of collaboration across Charlottesville. Some of the unique expenses incurred involved extra buses, extra planes, busing to places like Tallahassee, Florida, instead of flying commercial. So we did without commercial flights. So we said, nobody can travel commercially. 

If you can't do a charter, then you're going to have to do buses. And if you do buses, you have to sit student athletes six feet apart on the buses, which means you have to take more buses. Yeah. Hotels where you either have a single person per room or you're with your roommate so that if somebody tests positive on the road, then you're less likely to contact trace anyone else beyond the person you probably would have already contact traced, which would be your roommate. Lots and lots of little things like that. And then, of course, the testing, just the sheer volume of the testing two and three times a week, depending on the sport, whether they're in season or out of season, to try to catch any positivity early enough in the process where they may not impact anyone else. And then arranging for quarantines and apartments and hotel rooms. 

CRAIG LITTLEPAGE: Right. So looking at it as an outsider, which is basically translated to be what I read in the newspaper, you guys have done a marvelous job staying ahead of things. And certainly, to think that there were going to be zero cases was an unrealistic expectation. But were you pretty pleased with the response on the part of the student athletes and the coaches to a very, very limited set of interactions with those people that are important to them, not only their teammates and classmates and so forth but families? These are kids, I would assume, that weren't having access to being able to see their families at events. 

TED WHITE: That's right. So yeah, in season, for example, if you take football, their families were allowed to enter Scott Stadium to watch football games. But they were allowed to interact at a distance for a short period after each game, masked and distanced. But otherwise, yeah, students, once they arrived on grounds in the summer, were not allowed to go home. 

And so basketball, for example, arrived in July, beginning of July. And typically, you can go home for a quick break over Christmas, sometimes right around Thanksgiving. They did not go home until the end of the NCAA tournament in April. 

CRAIG LITTLEPAGE: Wow. 

TED WHITE: Yeah. So they made some incredible sacrifices. And they all had choices. They were all given the opportunity to opt out if they felt like this was just too much to ask. And so it really was impressive at how dedicated they were to their teammates and their sport and their development and their commitment to it. Where we saw some slippage was in offseason activities, away from practice, away from competition, if student athletes went home for a break. And they were in an offseason. 

CRAIG LITTLEPAGE: Mm-hmm. How about in terms of academic performance? Has there been any impact on academic performance that you could attribute to, lack of full in class instruction? What, if any, have been the academic impacts on the student athletes? 

TED WHITE: Yeah, this is really interesting for me. Because having been involved in academic support for almost 30 years now, for a long time, I argued against online coursework. In the early mid 2000s, there was a push across athletic departments to encourage student athletes to enroll in online courses, particularly asynchronous courses, so that they wouldn't conflict with practice and training and that kind of thing. 

And so for years, I pushed against it. And student athletes at the time would usually clamor for that experience. They thought it would just be easier and better. And of course, that's before I came to the University of Virginia. 

But what we have found-- and it happened pretty quickly-- was that they don't like it. They really don't like the online environment. They can't interact with classmates. They can't interact with their faculty members, in some cases, graduate students and TAs. 

They like the in-person interaction. They can't form study groups that are meaningful because they can't develop those relationships with classmates on Zoom. And so over time, they have slowly kind of shut down in terms of active engagement. 

Last spring, you would see students go into breakout rooms and actively engage. And by the middle of fall, a breakout room was just an excuse for a timed break where all students would just shut their cameras off for however many minutes the faculty member told them they'd be in the breakout room. They just didn't want to do it anymore. 

And so you've got students really struggling with staying engaged. They're fighting through it. Interestingly enough, grades have gone up. And we attribute that primarily to the flexibility and grading options. 

And so you can take courses pass/fail or letter grade now. And so what students will do is if it's not an A or B, they'll take it pass/fail. And so the GPAs are a little inflated. We were probably the only Power Five school in the country that did not beat ourselves on the chest publicly and throw out our GPAs, because we knew that they were artificially inflated. 

We had a 3.6 department GPA in the spring. We had over a 3.5 in the fall. Typically, we're somewhere at 3.0, 3.1. And so we were happy for the student athletes that they got those grades. But we knew that there was another side. 

And in the fall, what we found is that student athletes withdrew from and failed to pass. Now, they changed their letter grade options. So they weren't F's. But they failed to pass more courses in this fall than they had in any semester that we could track. 

So there is a little bit of fallout. It's a little invisible. It's underneath. And it's in some withdrawals and some courses that don't impact GPA. But there is a disconnect and a lack of engagement to a certain degree. They want to be back in the classroom. They want to interact with faculty. They want to interact with the other students. 

CRAIG LITTLEPAGE: Great. We got about five minutes to go. And this is a topic that I feel compelled that we talk about a little bit. And so much over the past year has been focused on social justice. 

There's been a lot of conversation around teams nationally that have shown support for the different causes by locking arms, by kneeling during the national anthem, by putting slogans and words on the front and the back of their jerseys, and so forth. You've been a leader among folks within the ACC and certainly here at the University of Virginia on the Committee on Racial and Social Justice with the Atlantic Coast Conference. Tell us a little bit about that experience and what you have learned from it and what you brought to the University of Virginia as a result of those conversations. 

TED WHITE: Thank you for bringing that up. I'm really proud of the ACC for the creation of this committee and for allowing student athletes and coaches and staff across the conference the platform. So I'm excited about that. 

I think nationally, there are some opportunities as well. But from the beginning of the spring, when it became clear after the situation with George Floyd's death that people wanted to express their passions, we started engaging our student athletes and encouraging them to dive deep into their emotions and to go beyond hashtags and t-shirts. So that's what we asked of them. 

And a year and a half ago when we were first developing Pathways and we came up with one of the interest areas was social justice-- so that was baked in from the beginning-- we ran a pilot study with Curry and Paul Harris, Professor Paul Harris, to learn more about our Black student athlete experience. And we spent a summer doing this with some focus groups. 

And what came out of it was the formation of a student athlete-run organization. And it's called BOSS Black Student Athletes Offering Service and Support. And they are an official student organization. 

Another group of student athletes formed a social justice student organization. And so we work through those groups and the general student athletes and Pathways to find out what students are passionate about and then encourage them to get involved with organizations and faculty members and departments, like the Equity Center on grounds, to do more than just post something on social media, do more than just wear a t-shirt pregame. 

We understand the value of those things and support those things. But for example, our men's basketball team, a large percentage of our student athletes decided to take a knee during the national anthem and did so for the entire semester or the season. We met several times as a team, had the team and staff meet with several members of our university community, including the Racial Equity Task Force chairs, and asked them just to think and be able to express why they were taking a knee during the anthem and be able to clearly express their personal reasons for that and to respect teammates who may not want to kneel for the anthem and vice versa. 

So our thought is always just to dig deep for each individual and encourage them to get involved, whether it's voting and voting rights, fair housing, access to health care, education. We actually have a leadership academy. And we call it an Ethical Leadership Academy. 

It's a two-year curriculum. And because we were in Zoom this year, we weren't able to execute our originally planned second year curriculum. And so we broke our 30 students up into five categories of six students each based on their interests. And their job this semester is to identify organizations and alumni and faculty who are doing work around social justice issues and create opportunities for themselves and then opportunities to feed back into pathways for future student athletes to engage in. 

CRAIG LITTLEPAGE: Great, great. And one closing question. In your position as the deputy director of athletics, you have to have an interest in every sport and every student athlete and every coach. But I'd like for you to tell the audience that you have an interest in one specific team, a Major League Baseball team. Who is that team? And how the heck did your affinity with this Major League Baseball team start? You and I have had this discussion. 

TED WHITE: That's right. Yeah, we share this. So I'm a lifelong New York Yankees fan. I played baseball in college. So I'm a baseball fan. My uncle played for the Dodgers. My father-in-law played for the Giants. My son is a pitcher at the University of Michigan. So baseball runs through our family. 

And I joke all the time. I told you guys a little bit about where I grew up. And so in the '70s, in an isolated little mountain town in Northern California, you had the TV that was about, three feet high but sat on the floor. And you had to go over to it and click it on and wait for it to come on. 

And you got four channels, including PBS. And so you got a couple baseball games a week and a couple football games a week. And that was it. And so I was five hours away from the teams in the Bay Area. 

And so they were no different to me than any other team. It was who I saw on TV that were my hometown teams. And at that time, in baseball, it was either the Reds, the Dodgers, or the Yankees. And in football, it was the Raiders, the Steelers, or the Cowboys. And I ended up picking the Cowboys and the Yankees and sticking with them for better and for worse. 

Right now, the Cowboys, it's a lot worse. But I've been a lifelong Yankee fan. And I enjoy getting to be a fan. You know this, Craig. You can't really do that. You don't get that when you're working in college athletics. And so that's my one little outlet as a sports fan. And I enjoy that. 

CRAIG LITTLEPAGE: Great. Well, I'd just like to thank you, Ted, for spending an hour with us and the Retired Faculty Association this afternoon. And intercollegiate athletics for our audience is facing some of the most significant challenges in the history of NCAA sports in this next two to three years. 

And I would say that the University of Virginia, with Carla Williams and Ted White and the other staff members at the university, are the types of leaders that we know will be involved in so many of these discussions and will come up with solutions that really do preserve the types of things that we have all become sports fans of particularly at the college level, the reasons that we've become college sports fans. So we thank you, Ted, for not only your time today but for the work that you and your colleagues are doing in the athletics department. 

You're running a great show over there. You guys are so well regarded nationally in so many things that you do. So thank you again. Thank you also for your friendship and for making me feel still being a part of the athletics program at the University of Virginia. Thank you very much. 

TED WHITE: Thank you, Craig. And thank you for making it so easy on us. It's been an easy transition. You did a phenomenal job. And we feel very fortunate every day to be able to work in this environment that you created. So thank you. 

CRAIG LITTLEPAGE: You know where to reach me. But you won't need me. I know that. Thank you again for being with us.

SHARON HOSTLER: So welcome, everyone, to our monthly session of the Retired Faculty Association. It's my pleasure to introduce President James Ryan today. He's our ninth president, and he's completing his third year in this office as of August. When we were all last together at the Boar's Head two years ago, we were welcoming and listening to President Ryan's report to date. 

And at that point, which seems like it's ancient history, Carr's Hill was under renovation and President Ryan's family was still living in Boston. And since then, a lot of things have happened, including the pandemic. I was just saying to President Ryan that one of my warm memories was of an early broadcast that he did to the community after we were in lockdown, in which his daughter, Phoebe, was coaching him from the sidelines. 

And I asked him whether that was going to be true today. So I will introduce President Ryan, and he can answer that question. Well, where is Phoebe? 

JIM RYAN: Phoebe is in school. She is a freshman at Western Albemarle, and they just started having in-person classes. So I am flying solo, which should make you as nervous as it makes me. 

SHARON HOSTLER: Now, does that mean that she's also flying solo without you as her tutor? 

JIM RYAN: [LAUGHS] She knows well enough not to have me tutor her. Her older brothers are her tutors. Once she hit sixth grade math, I was useless to her. I'm sorry to say. 

SHARON HOSTLER: It's nice to know our weaknesses. 

JIM RYAN: [LAUGHS] 

SHARON HOSTLER: And avoid them. I would say, that in the past, probably some of our weaknesses have been on online education, but the pandemic has changed that for all of higher ed. And I have a son who's a high school history teacher, and for, I think, anyone in education. And so I'm wondering what although we had to scurry to get ready, but what impact this is going to have on, I think, higher education in general. 

But also, specifically, I think people are worried about the impact at UVA and worried, specifically, about whether that means we're going to have fewer in-person classes as we go forward. And so there's several parts of that. 

JIM RYAN: So I actually think that this whole experience has reinforced the value of in-person classes and in-person experiences. I think that our faculty have done an amazing job of providing a great education as best they can online, but I think most of them would tell you that they prefer the in-person experience for most aspects of teaching. 

So if anything, I think it underscores the value of in-person classes and residentially-based education, frankly. At the same time, I think we-- So I don't think we'll see fewer in-person courses, especially for undergraduates, especially for the professional schools. clinical teaching, obviously is really difficult to do online. I do think we'll see more online offerings, but largely in the sphere of master's programs, certificate programs, the School of Continuing and Professional Studies, we already have a fair bit online. 

And I think we'll just continue to add to that stock, because we now have a lot more material, and we have a lot more faculty who have become adept at teaching courses online. But I think the core academic experience for those who are full-time students in Charlottesville will absolutely remain in person. 

SHARON HOSTLER: I think there'll be a lot of parents and faculty delighted to hear that. But are you able to give some examples of some of the innovations that you've observed with the online teaching? I personally am surprised to see either a lot of rapid adaptation and some complaints that a lot of people have gotten incredibly creative. And not just the younger faculty, I think some of the older faculty have done some fabulous jobs. 

JIM RYAN: Yeah, I do too. And I've sat in on a number of classes, and I think faculty have taken advantage of the technology to really provide an engaging experience. And two things that I'll mention, but there are a number. One is that, it turns out, not surprisingly, it's a lot easier to bring in guests if they don't have to travel to Charlottesville. 

So I've talked to a lot of faculty who have brought in amazing people from, not just across the country, but around the world, to visit their classes, because all they have to do is get on Zoom. And I think that's really enhanced the experience. Another thing which seems simple, and it's not a breathtaking innovation, but is still important to acknowledge, a lot of faculty have utilized the chat function in Zoom to great effect. 

And they have noticed-- and there's research that backs this up, that you sometimes get more and different kinds of student involvement if the student can simply write in a question in the chat, rather than have to raise his or her hand, stop everyone, and all eyes turn to the student. So students who might be shy or reluctant to speak up are engaging more in online conversations than they would in real life, which is fascinating, honestly. 

SHARON HOSTLER: And I'm only familiar with Darden, who valued class participation, and of course, there was always the students who said, but I don't want to have to ask that question. And so that's going to be your group that's going to be happy to have the chat function. Another question that's unique to UVA in many ways, and that is what the tradition of student self-governance has been during this period of COVID. 

I mean, has it helped? Has it hindered? How have you accessed it? What things would you like to share with us? 

JIM RYAN: I think, overall, it's helped. I mean, students who are involved in student government and involved in some of the major organizations have had to bear a lot of weight on their shoulders. And it has been tough for them, but they've risen to the occasion. And I think, overall, it's helped us. So I'll give you a couple of examples. 

The University Judiciary Committee, UJC, has adjudicated all of the alleged violations of the health and safety protocols related to COVID. And we had to make a decision last summer because we knew we were going to put in all sorts of restrictions that we wouldn't normally have, like wearing a mask or limiting the size of gatherings or social distancing. And inevitably, not everyone would follow those protocols. 

And so the question was, well, how are we going to adjudicate those who violate those protocols? And Pat Lamkin was really firm in saying we ought to follow the process that we have in place because that's how you're going to continue to engender trust and credibility among the students. So we have a student disciplinary system in place that is largely run by students. And I think that was a smart decision. 

Now, at times have we wished that the process could be more efficient? Sure, but sometimes efficiency and credibility don't go together. And so even though I think the process, at times, has been slower than we would have liked, I think it's been more credible. 

Students have also been enormously helpful in public service campaigns in helping out their fellow students who are in isolation or quarantine. There's a campaign called YOUva Y-O-U, YOUva that is completely student-led, that has really been about encouraging adherence to public health measures. And that has been enormously helpful as well. 

But more generally, I think that the personal responsibility that comes from student self-governance, whether you're actively involved in it or not, and the sense of a shared community, has been something that we've been able to call on during a really difficult year. And I think that's helped a lot. I mean, the basic truth is that you can keep the pandemic at bay, even in a large community, if people follow simple public health measures. 

But they're difficult to follow day in and day out, wearing a mask, going to only small gatherings, staying socially distant. I mean, and to ask students to do that for now, over a year, is an awful lot. And they haven't been perfect, just like adults. Grown adults have not been perfect. 

SHARON HOSTLER: No, no. 

JIM RYAN: But they've been remarkably good. And they're the reason, honestly, why we've been able to make it as far as we can and make it as safely as we can. So I think that is connected to student self-governance. 

SHARON HOSTLER: Well, I've been thinking about the RA's and what a terrific responsibility they've had. I mean, always they've had I mean, and I've always been amazed, across grounds, about what direct primary responsibility they have. But in this time, amazing. 

JIM RYAN: Yeah. You're exactly right to call them out. I mean, it's an enormous responsibility, and a tough job, frankly. A tough job under any circumstances. 

SHARON HOSTLER: Any circumstances. 

JIM RYAN: But this year in particular, I mean, look, universities aren't made for social distancing. I mean that's kind of-- [LAUGHS] 

SHARON HOSTLER: We want our hugs, Jim. 

JIM RYAN: That's not the-- 

SHARON HOSTLER: We want our hugs. They're important. 

JIM RYAN: That's not typically why people come to a university, is, hey, what I'd love to do is come to a place where I have to stay six feet apart from everyone else and wear a mask and only see a few people at a time. So it's so countercultural, not just at UVA, but at college campuses across the country. 

SHARON HOSTLER: And it would be interesting to see, down the line, about who decided to come on grounds and who decided to stay at home and Zoom, about what their experiences are going to be. I don't know if you've had any feedback, but I think-- 

JIM RYAN: Yeah, it's a great question. It really varies. And I think there are some students who are happy they stayed home and some students who regret that they stayed home. I think there are some students who are really happy they came and some who might regret that they came. One interesting-- 

SHARON HOSTLER: Isn't that the definition of adolescence, though? 

JIM RYAN: Could be. Yeah, well, I mean, it's also the variety of personalities that you have in any large group. But one data point is we had 100 more students in the spring semester than we did in the fall. So those who-- a number of those who sat out the fall, I mean, they participated remotely, came to grounds or to Charlottesville. They lived off campus in the spring. 

SHARON HOSTLER: I was going to ask you about off grounds, but I won't do that because that's not a fair question at this point in the pandemic. But it's one of always my interests is in the community, off grounds. And especially in a time like this with isolation, it feels like that it's a double isolation, in some ways. 

JIM RYAN: Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, depending on the living arrangement, it can be really isolating. 

SHARON HOSTLER: Right. So this is a, I would consider a stuffy question, but 

[LAUGHTER] 

Not as much fun as talking about students. 

JIM RYAN: None of your questions are stuffy. 

SHARON HOSTLER: Oh, well, this is a stuffy question. And that is, what impact the state laws and rules and regulations have-- are they going to impact, particularly in Virginia, higher ed? And are there some that may, in fact, help higher ed in it's quick recovery to a previous high? 

JIM RYAN: Well, I mean, stepping back, I will say that a number of the governor's executive orders have helped us along the way. Sometimes, we have imposed restrictions that are tighter than the governor has prescribed in his executive orders. And that can be challenging, because it can create some confusion and some question about, well, if the governor says you can have 25 people, why are you saying you have 10? 

And, obviously, it has to do with the fact that we're a densely-populated community and have a lot of people living in residence halls. But by and large, having a framework that takes the pandemic seriously, that's been the background, that has helped an awful lot. Going forward, the state and the federal government, frankly, have provided a significant amount of funding to help us offset both the costs related to COVID and lost revenues. 

And that will, obviously, help us, because it keeps us on a pretty solid financial footing. The most important issue right now, as I'm sure you know, is vaccinations. And we have been in partnership with the Blue Ridge Health District. We don't decide who gets which vaccines when, but we have offered to be of assistance, as much as we can, to get vaccines into arms as quickly as we can.

And that has been a good partnership. And the supply of vaccines, right now, is the limiting factor. It's looking brighter, right now, than it did a couple of weeks ago, and you're starting to see the supply increase. But that's going to be the ticket to a normal fall. 

SHARON HOSTLER: Well, I just have to compliment the university and my vice president, Craig Kent, because I do think that out in the community, for us, UVA, providing the vaccines, has made a huge change in what we've been able to do and in a quick mount up. I mean, particularly in the group where I live, which is the over 75's, we were saved by UVA stepping forward, and being greeted and welcomed with-- even as folks came with a lot of confusion. 

I mean, that first day, the memos went out to the parking lot attendants and to everyone around, and people weren't sure where they were supposed to be and whether this was the right place, people who didn't use UVA as is their health care provider. It was very-- I was very proud of all of us, at that point in time. 

JIM RYAN: Well, I'm really glad to hear that. I mean, they deserve an awful lot of credit. I mean, and again, it's a great partnership with the Blue Ridge Health District. But UVA was able to mobilize incredibly quickly. And there are some bumps along the way in terms of how you signed up and some confusion about that, which is to be expected. 

But it's now going incredibly smoothly and incredibly efficiently. And like I said, the limiting factor right now is the vaccines. I mean, we could be vaccinating more people than we are if we had more vaccines, which I hope are coming. 

SHARON HOSTLER: And computer literacy for the older group. I mean, access to a computer, knowing how to use it, has been another a major obstacle. I mean-- 

JIM RYAN: Yeah, yeah. 

SHARON HOSTLER: Personally, in many of my colleagues, that's what we've done is try to make that interface, because I think-- and we're, again, we're in Charlottesville. When you talk about Southwest with folks where there's not broadband, where you can't-- I mean, even if you have all the access. 

JIM RYAN: Yeah, yeah. No, that's exactly right. 

SHARON HOSTLER: So continuing on with the health, always is comfortable for me, so-- 

JIM RYAN: When do we get to the law questions? 

SHARON HOSTLER: No, no, later. So the mitigation for COVID has made a huge difference. I mean we haven't had flu. The kids haven't been in the hospital with RSV. Change in colds. So what do you see is going to be our behavior? And if there's ever a post-COVID-- I mean, I'm reluctant to even use that expression, but a post-COVID-- as far as student health and as far as our behaviors on grounds and in classes. 

JIM RYAN: Yeah, it's fascinating, isn't it? Because early on-- 

SHARON HOSTLER: Washing your hands is important. 

JIM RYAN: Yeah no, absolutely. So I think some of those things will continue, and I'll get to that in a second. But if you go back to the summer part of the conversation about what to expect in the fall and the winter, was the combination of COVID and the flu, and that was something that we had to wrestle with in thinking about whether we were going to have students back, whether we were going to allow in-person classes. 

And it was Craig Kent in a conversation who said, well, I mean, if people are wearing masks and they're socially distancing to prevent COVID, well, that's going to prevent the flu as well. And as a simple observation, but it proved to be true. I mean, the flu numbers are much lower than they normally would be. Same with the common cold. 

I was thinking about that just yesterday. I've not had a cold in a year, which is unusual because in a job like mine where you're traveling a lot, meeting a lot of people, shaking a lot of hands, you inevitably pick up a cold here and there. I would imagine that people will be more cognizant of washing their hands, something as simple as that. I think it will be a while before handshakes become the default greeting. 

I wouldn't be surprised if we continue to do some enhanced cleaning of dorms and classrooms. And I would not be surprised if people continue to wear masks in certain situations where the ventilation is not great and you're around a lot of people. So airports, could be in some densely packed classrooms. That one I'm not so sure about, because I don't know about you, but even a year into it, it still doesn't feel normal to wear a mask. 

SHARON HOSTLER: Yes, I wasn't a surgeon because of my fogging glasses. 

JIM RYAN: 

SHARON HOSTLER: That and a few other things. Yeah. 

JIM RYAN: Me too. 

SHARON HOSTLER: No. No, and the fact that we can go back in the gym now. Try to do cardio with the mask on. I mean-- 

JIM RYAN: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, no kidding. I've tried-- 

SHARON HOSTLER: --for my brain. 

JIM RYAN: No, no. Yeah, I've tried to run a few times with the mask on. It doesn't work. 

SHARON HOSTLER: And certainly, you wouldn't want to do a double mask, would you? 

JIM RYAN: No, no, no, no. Yeah, no. 

SHARON HOSTLER: No. I mean, what's happening to the-- can I ask you this? What's happening to the running community during COVID? How has that changed? 

JIM RYAN: It's still thriving virtually, but group runs are not happening. So people run with one or two people. And yeah, I mean, it's one of many things that have been disrupted by COVID. I mean, one of the things that I love the most about the running community, or part of the running community, were Wednesday morning track workouts, where you just see 40 or 50 people coming together early in the morning. 

And that's obviously not happening. But Mark Lorenzoni has done a great job of organizing races. There is a group-- I can't remember the name of it-- started, that is specifically designed to attract a diverse group of people to run together in Charlottesville City neighborhoods. And particularly trying to attract people of color into the running community. 

And you may have seen there was a story in The New York Times about it. And I think that's a great effort, and a welcome addition to the running community. But it's still going on. I ran a marathon on Sunday down at Riverview park. It was a tiny marathon that Mark Lorenzoni put on. There were 15 of us who ran the marathon. And it's very flat, but it's only two miles long, so you have to go back and forth like 12 times. 

SHARON HOSTLER: And somebody was counting for you, I hope, or were you able to remember that? 

JIM RYAN: [LAUGHS] I had to be reminded a few times. 

SHARON HOSTLER: OK, all right. Well, so we're going to move past sports and kids. What are the changes that the university has had to make, operationally? I mean, you've got everyone working at home still. 

JIM RYAN: Yeah. 

SHARON HOSTLER: And you read a lot in the paper about how-- are people going to come back into the office, and then people beginning to say that they miss-- they actually miss being in the office and they miss the camaraderie. I'm curious about whether you're looking at that return to work and what it looks as like, one of many of the operational changes that you-- 

JIM RYAN: Yeah. It's a great question. And we have started to pull together groups to address the question of what changes or innovations have we adopted during COVID that we want to continue. Because there absolutely are some. And so there's one group focused on what does work look like after COVID. There's another group focused on what innovations around academics would we like to continue. 

So I think one big change that you're going to see continue is flexibility. So flexibility about work. You're right. People differ. Some people are dying to come back into the office. Some people have discovered that it's much easier to work at home. I imagine you'll see something somewhere in the middle, where people will be able to-- they'll have to be in the office at some times, but have more opportunities to work at home than they did in the past. 

I can imagine continued flexibility around the academic calendar. So one of the things that we did this year, because we knew it was going to be an unusual year, was to include a J term class and a class from the summer session as part of normal tuition. And the thought was some students might want to spread out their classes across something closer to the calendar year rather than the academic year. 

So imagine a student who just doesn't like online classes that much, rather than having to take four at a time, could take two in the fall and one in J term, and three in the spring-- sprinkle it out. I think the ability to take courses from a distance enables flexibility. So going back to the first question about online, all of our J term courses were online, and they were free. But I think it's that combination that led to a seven-fold increase in the number of students who took a J term course. 

So there were 7,000 students who took a J term course. 

SHARON HOSTLER: Did you have to increase the number of courses offered or-- 

JIM RYAN: Yeah, we did. So we led by the provost office and by a number of deans put together, and faculty, obviously, because they're the ones who did the work. Signature courses that were supposed to be big topic questions, so it was a course about pandemics, and they were team taught, for the most part. And by all accounts, really successful. And I expect there will be larger than usual enrollments in the summer, which is also going to be online. 

Some of the other changes that I imagine will continue is we have had to collaborate across typical silos and lines and departments and offices far more than you normally would. And I bet that will continue, because we now know each other. I mean-- 

SHARON HOSTLER: 

JIM RYAN: When the pandemic hit, I was 18 months into my presidency. The chief operating officer was a year into her job. The provost was six months into her job. And Craig was three weeks into his. 

SHARON HOSTLER: Trial by fire. 

JIM RYAN: For better or for worse, it now feels like we've been working together for about a decade. And we've also gotten to know people across the university. And we've realized that, for a lot of issues, you have to bring people from different parts of the university together if you want to get a full picture of what are we doing right now, what could we be doing better. 

So just think about something as simple as testing students and then isolation and quarantine, which was key to our response to COVID. Well, you obviously need health professionals who are going to help you not only create the test, but create the lab and then think about how you're going to administer the test, but then you need people from student affairs who are going to figure out, OK, how do we best take care of students if they're in isolation and quarantine. 

Then you need people from facilities and from the chief operating officer who are going to secure the housing, which in our case, was a combination of old dorms and hotel rooms. If all those people are not in the room at the same time, you're not going to solve the problem. And so I think having flexed those muscles and develop those relationships, that will continue. 

A couple of other things. We've done more telemedicine and more teletherapy during this, and I bet that will continue as well. And we have suspended requiring students applying to provide an SAT or ACT score, just because the whole testing system has been disrupted. We've extended that for another two years and are going to look at the data and see whether that's something to continue or not. 

And I don't know at this point what we'll find. Our applications increased pretty dramatically this year, I think, in part because we went test optional. But what that does to our ability to analyze and assess the potential of students, I think it's too soon to too soon to tell. 

SHARON HOSTLER: So how did you handle the tremendous surge in admissions applications? I mean, it was major. And how did you all cope? I mean, there's certainly schools haven't sent out responses yet because they're still going through the applications. I don't know what we're doing, but-- 

JIM RYAN: Well, I believe Greg Roberts and Steve Farmer brought on more readers of applications for the first round. And frankly, they had to work harder than they ever have before to deal with the volume. 

SHARON HOSTLER: Right. And is our class going to be any bigger? Or what have we done as far as-- what do we think about acceptances? What are we aiming for? 

JIM RYAN: We're not aiming for a larger class. It's an inexact science to predict the yield, and sometimes there are surprises. But the target that we have has not increased from last year. The issue of growth comes up all the time, and I think there is room to grow on the margins and to grow strategically. But I think everyone recognizes that part of the character of this place is its size. And if you grew dramatically, UVA would no longer be UVA. 

SHARON HOSTLER: Well, because this is a faculty group, we want to know about new faculty hirings. And I'm relieved when you tell me that the finances have been eased by some of the subsidies. But I think this audience would like to-- especially those who are worrying about their positions being filled out recently-- 

JIM RYAN: Yeah. 

SHARON HOSTLER: --what hiring looks like and how that's changed. 

JIM RYAN: Yeah. So as you know, most of the hiring happens at the school level. So there's a decent amount of variation. And I think some schools are feeling the pinch more than others, honestly. To look at a macro level, and then how we view it from the center, so to speak, our costs and lost revenues from COVID were significant. 

I mean, I think over this period and into the rest of the spring and the summer, the estimate is about $140 million. Which is real money, obviously, even in a place that has a multi-billion dollar budget. But through some budget cuts to central offices, through the federal and state funding-- which is, I think, at this point, close to $80 million, which is terrific-- and then through really smart financial moves like deferring, for a year, debt payments from auxiliary units to ease the pressure on them, we're going to come out of this fine. 

Now, that doesn't mean, there aren't financial constraints. There are always financial constraints. But we have been able, especially with respect to faculty, we've been pretty successful in using the Strategic Investment funds to raise funding for faculty chairs. So we provide matching funds for donors who provide funds for faculty chairs. And we've been able to create well over 100 new chairs. 

Now, not all of them will go to new faculty, some will go to existing faculty. But retention is as important as recruitment, as you know. So we'll continue to rely on CEPH funding at the center, both for faculty chairs, but also to support cluster hires to support targets of opportunity hires, and help the strategic recruitment of faculty that are priorities for deans. 

SHARON HOSTLER: So I expect that recruiting is pretty cumbersome during this time, with having to do interviews through Zoom, but have we continued to hire and will we have new hires coming on? I mean, our do you have any idea what our new faculty hires look like at this point? 

JIM RYAN: I don't know numbers. I'd have to ask Liz. Yeah, it's-- [LAUGHS] going back to the trade off between efficiency and other values, in some ways, it's more efficient, but it may not be as productive [LAUGHS]. 

SHARON HOSTLER: We're doing an internship. I mean, tomorrow we'll find out the internship match, but hiring people you're going to live with 24/7 by Zoom feels a little strange. 

JIM RYAN: No, I know, I know, I know. 

SHARON HOSTLER: Oh. 

JIM RYAN: Yeah. No, we've had similar challenges. I mean, we have conducted searches, and are still conducting searches, for three deans. 

SHARON HOSTLER: Yeah. There was a question about how we're doing with those searches, how close we are. 

JIM RYAN: Yeah. Really well. They're all at different stages. Some are further along than others, but they have-- each one of the searches has attracted amazing candidates. I mean, really amazing candidates. And I'm confident that there are going to be-- each one of them will be successful. 

We just announced, I believe this went out, a new vice president for Student Affairs. And that was more cumbersome, like you said, because it was online. And we had finalists come to grounds, because it's such an important position, and we wanted to spend time with them in person and they wanted to see the grounds as well. 

SHARON HOSTLER: So along the lines of the finances, so what impact has the pandemic had on philanthropy? I mean, have we been able to continue with our development issues? Are there changes in focus from the people who want to give? How are we feeling about campaigns? 

JIM RYAN: It's a great question. We started off the fiscal year pretty slowly, so that's over the summer, but ended the calendar year and have continued, this year, to be really strong in development. We have seen our alumni and supporters who are not alumni have stepped up to fund a number of things related to COVID, including COVID-related research, which has been great to see. 

And overall, we are now, I think, just past the $300 million mark for this fiscal year, which is ahead of our 10-year average. So we're doing pretty well, given the pandemic. Nothing close to last year, which was a record-breaking year of $800 million. We will not get to $800 million this fiscal year, but we are 2/3 of the way to the $5 billion goal of the campaign, which is ahead of schedule. 

So I'm pretty pleased, given everything that's been going on, that philanthropy has continued, and if anything, is picking up. And our advancement team, led by Mark Llewellyn, deserves an awful lot of credit. I mean, they have not missed a beat in terms of staying engaged and keeping alumni and donors engaged. I mean, they have had more Zoom more of that than you can imagine. 

And I've had more participants, I mean, multiple times the number of participants that they would have at in-person events, both because it's much easier to turn on your Zoom than to drive across town and because it's not a lot of competing entertainment. [LAUGHS] 

SHARON HOSTLER: The programming has been great. 

JIM RYAN: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So-- 

SHARON HOSTLER: Yeah. And people have choices. It depends on what their undergraduate institution's doing. What their graduate institution-- 

JIM RYAN: Right, right 

SHARON HOSTLER: --other communities. Yeah. And say, well, I donated to New York Times or maybe Middlebury's conversation. 

JIM RYAN: [LAUGHS] 

SHARON HOSTLER: We're coming down to the end of our time. So on behalf of the faculty who are still here teaching, as opposed to the faculty who are Zooming in, many of whom should be kind of getting their vaccinations, there is a very self-interested question here about whether you and Dr. Kent have considered about trying to immunize for COVID, your current faculty as a group. 

I mean, we've had our public school teachers going through one system. We've got the over 75's and the over 65's, but it does somehow feel that, maybe, focus about our own community could be coming online sometime soon? 

JIM RYAN: Yeah, so those faculty who didn't fall in 1A or 1B will be part of one city. We're not at yet 1C in this health district. Some other regions in Virginia are 1C. When we get to 1C, I don't know whether there are plans to set up a vaccination site right at UVA or whether we'll continue to use the site that's on Route 29, the old Big Lots store. 

SHARON HOSTLER: We call it Big Shots now. 

JIM RYAN: I know, I love that. Yeah, very clever, very clever. [LAUGHS] So I don't know. And some of that will have to be done in consultation with the Blue Ridge Health District. But I look forward to the time when we get to 1C, for sure. 

SHARON HOSTLER: Yeah, I think we all do. But we're close, but just not close enough. We'll change our behaviors, which is the hard part. 

JIM RYAN: Yeah, exactly. 

SHARON HOSTLER: And just to make your day, what are your thoughts about the future of the Greek system and secret societies at the university? 

JIM RYAN: So that's a great question. My view is, and I've said this to the leaders of the Greek system, I can't seem to find the leaders of the secret societies, they don't self-identify. 

SHARON HOSTLER: Oh, come on. 

JIM RYAN: They are defined. 

SHARON HOSTLER: Certainly they came to visit you when you were named. We know that. 

JIM RYAN: Yeah. I mean, they left me-- 

SHARON HOSTLER: Oh, yeah. 

JIM RYAN: They left me things. So what I have said to them is, the thing I would most like to see is for Greek life to become much more diverse than it is. Because I think it is an opportunity to form close friendships that last a lifetime. And it's an opportunity to create a more intimate community in a large place. 

And those are valuable things, but right now, it's not especially diverse. And I think that, if over the future, the system does not become more diverse, it could continue to be a source of controversy, and maybe even increasingly irrelevant, as students decide they would rather be among a diverse group. 

So I would love for them to be part of what I view as an ideal scenario for universities, which is, it's an opportunity for you to meet and become friends with people you never would have met otherwise, and to learn from them and to forge friendships that would last a lifetime. That can happen in all sorts of ways, but I think the Greek system could play a really important role there. And like I said, I have made that point to them every time I can. 

SHARON HOSTLER: Well, then maybe the follow up question should be, what role is the university playing-- or do you hope it might play in supporting, promoting, discussions of civility and how we model that and how do we, as a major institution in this community, how do we facilitate it? 

JIM RYAN: Yeah, it's something I've been thinking a lot about over-- well, for a long time, but especially over the last six months. It turns out that we're obviously in a polarized time. A pandemic doesn't help. People are not at their best when they're emailing or on social media. They just aren't. So in some respects, it's gotten worse-- or on Zoom, than they are in person. 

And I think that one of the most important roles for universities, and this goes back to the idea of engaging with people who are different, is to enable people to have productive and civil conversations with those they disagree with. And the polarization that exists outside of universities also exists within universities. And I think it's a real problem. 

So some of the things that we've been doing, I asked Leslie Kendrick, who is the vice dean of the law school, to chair a committee on free speech and free inquiry. And you may have heard of the Chicago principles. I don't think that we should adopt another university's principles about free speech. We have a pretty good heritage when it comes to free speech, given the connection that UVA has to both Madison and Jefferson. 

But I do think it's important for us to articulate or rearticulate, in some reasons, the importance of free speech and free inquiry as a fundamental value of UVA. Colleagues from my office have also, at my direction, been meeting with student groups that are dedicated to promoting conversation and debate across lines of difference. Not surprisingly, given that it's UVA, there are about a dozen student groups dedicated to this. 

And the question that we've been posing to them is, how can we help elevate your work? Because I think we're going to get further if this is not just from the top down, but is also led in part by students. We've also kicked off what we're calling democracy dialogues, which the first episode, for better or for worse, was on January 6, the same day that the Capitol was attacked-- 

SHARON HOSTLER: I was there. 

JIM RYAN: --in some ways, underscoring the need for democracy dialogues in an incredibly dramatic fashion. And the basic idea there is to bring in experts on topics that are important to our democracy or democracy around the world, who have different points of view, so that you not only learn from experts about an important topic, but you see how people who have different views can actually have a productive conversation. 

And that's the whole point of that. And then last, we just had another-- I think it's our third Double Take. This was virtual. And this is, really, just a storytelling event based on the NPR program, The Moth. I don't know if you've ever heard it, but it's one of my favorites. And we ask anyone who wants to submit a story, and then pick eight or so, and they would, in the past, tell it live at old Campbell Hall. They did it virtually this time. 

And it's something that I started when I was a dean of the Harvard Ed School. And I thought it would be useful for people to hear the stories of others who are in their community that they might not have heard, both to understand the simple point that everyone has a story, but also to understand that the person who you think you had nothing in common with, turns out you might have something in common with. 

And the hope is that you not only learn about the stories of eight people, but you think about-- if you're in an audience anyway-- the stories of the people to the left or the right of you. And I think that it's much easier to have a conversation where you disagree with someone you already know and trust. So in some respects, knowing someone else's story before you start talking politics is not a bad recipe for having a productive conversation. Because if you don't know their story and you assume all sorts of things, you're not going to get off to a good start. 

SHARON HOSTLER: I think that's a great ending for us. 

JIM RYAN: All right. 

SHARON HOSTLER: And I thank you for being here, and I give you the floor for any parting comments you'd like to make, but I think Double Take is now on my list. 

JIM RYAN: All right. Well, Sharon, I want to thank you for the great questions, and I want to thank everyone from the Alumni Association for putting this together. And I wish all the faculty the best. I hope you're safe and well. And I never want to pass up an opportunity to thank you for your service to UVA and your continued engagement. So thank you. 

SHARON HOSTLER: Thank you, thank you.

JIM RYAN: Yeah, it's been my pleasure. 

SHARON HOSTLER: Our pleasure. Good night. 

JIM RYAN: Hope to see you in 3D before too long. 

SHARON HOSTLER: Yes, and hope to see you a year from today, in person. And surely before then, but a year from today, perhaps. 

JIM RYAN: It's a date. All right. Take care.

SHARON HOSTLER: Good morning. Good afternoon. It's sunshine-y and it's not snowing, and we're delighted to be here at the University of Virginia's Retired Faculty Association session for February. And it's my very dear pleasure to introduce our speaker today, the cannon professor of classics, Jenny Strauss Clay. 

Some of you in this audience I know have been following Jenny, for the last on Monday afternoons, for the last couple of months, as we've been reading The Iliad. And it seems that there's a lot to know about, what is a hero, how to make a hero, and do you want to be a hero. 

And Jenny is acknowledged scholar and has written many books about-- and many papers-- about how to be a hero. And Rowing for Athens, which is the one I liked, and The Justice of Zeus. Which leads us to our topic today, which is Zeus, the godfather. But before Jenny starts, I just want to remind everyone that you have closed captions that are available that you can use. 

This will be posted on the website in a couple of days, and many of you are concerned that you are missing it, but it will be up there. It won't be up there this afternoon, but it'll be up there within 48 hours. And once again, our treasurer, Bob Ribando, wants me to remind you that you all can make a donation. There are no dues during this pandemic, but we do accept, graciously, all donations to the Retired Faculty Association. 

And next month, we'll be having our president, James Ryan, talking with us about how a wide array of topics, and he will be taking Q&A. So now it's my final time to introduce our speaker, Professor Jenny Strauss Clay, talking about Zeus, the godfather. Jenny. 

JENNY CLAY: Thank you so much. And I do have to mention that the last six weeks some of us have met, and it's been-- for me, it's been such a treat and so much fun to read The Iliad with interesting people from various fields. And I hope that you also enjoyed it. And in a way, I decided to do this reading of The Iliad, because I think that what I have to say today will make a bit more sense, but I hope it makes sense, even for those who haven't read The Iliad recently. 

So let me begin. There's an immense interest and even profitability in what has become a veritable blizzard of books about effective leadership. We have titles like Jesus CEO, Leadership Secrets of Elizabeth I, Leadership Secrets of Attila the Hun, and my favorite, Leadership for Dummies. 

I guess we all want to be leaders, and we all believe that leadership can be taught, that there are certain rules for acquiring the qualities that make a good leader. And that if we study models, whether it's Bill Gates, Pope John XXIII, or Machiavelli's Prince, that's going to lead to success. Now, here in Virginia, we even have a school of leadership, so clearly, the idea is that it can be taught. 

Now, let me get to The Iliad. Whether we imagine the audience of Homer to have been an aristocratic elite or a mix of classes and groups or hoi polloi, now, the aristocrats may have been anxiously clinging to power in the wake of new political organizations and configurations that finally culminated in the emergence of the polis, the city-state. 

On the other hand, the commoners may have been interested in figuring out how they might become active participants and even play a leading role in the developing political institutions. All parties would, I think, be interested in observing leadership success-- successful leadership and its opposite, and learning from good and bad examples, as portrayed in the epics that they heard. 

Now, of course, there are many different kinds of leadership, and those different kinds depend on the kind of organization one is leading and its structure. Thus a corporation, University or religious organization. They have different constituencies and require different leadership skills. 

Now, in thinking about how Zeus is portrayed as a leader in The Iliad, I tried to find a proper model, and I did a little reading around in the literature, of which there is a great deal, and found the closest paradigm was, in fact, the mafia. And hence my title, Zeus the godfather. But first, a little background. 

Hesiod's theogony describes Zeus's ascent to power. It involves some rather good luck, that his mother and his grandmother, Rhea and Gaia, decide that they have had enough of Chronos's swallowing his own children, and they give him a swaddled stone rather than the baby-- baby Zeus, I'm sorry. But once the Olympian gods are vomited up and Zeus disposes of his father, Zeus emerges as a rather intelligent and clever tactician. 

He seems to recognize the virtues and possibilities of power sharing. For one thing, he announces that those who had no share in the previous regime, i.e. Chronos, will get a place in his new disposition. The goddess Styx is the first one to respond, and that response is fraught with significance. You see, Hesiod tells us about her children, even before Zeus makes his offer. 

Those children are Kratos, Bia, Nike, and Zelos. Strength, force, victory, and ambition. Zeus adopts them and makes them part of his entourage. And Hesiod tells us, I quote, they have no home apart from Zeus, nor any seat or journey wherever the god leads them. But always, they take their place next to Zeus. 

Ultimately, he also rewards their mother, Styx, by making her the oath of the gods. And here, again, I will quote from Hesiod, because he explains how that oath works. "So whenever strife and quarrels arise among the immortals and someone who inhabits Olympian home lies, Zeus sends Iris to bring the great oath of the gods in a golden decanter, the water of many names. And whoever pouring it--" excuse me, "--forswears himself of those who inhabit the peak of snowy Olympus rise without breathing for a whole year, nor approaches nectar and ambrosia. 

But he lies breathless and speechless in a bed, and an evil coma covers him. Nine years, he remains separate from the immortal gods, nor mingles in their councils or feasts, but after years he joins them again." 

So Zeus's mechanism of this kind of oath precludes any kind of conurbations, stirs, problems, quarrels, in the divine sphere. And we might also note something which shows, again, I think, Zeus's cleverness. He consigns Styx to the underworld. She will not be united with those children of hers, including force, might, and victory. That might be dangerous. 

Another powerful goddess is also disarmed, a goddess called Hecate. And in this case, unlike Styx, she has many honors, indeed, almost universal honors, under the old regime. A powerful goddess, she too is co-opted and given an important role in Zeus's regime, as mediator between the divine and human spheres. And she's the one who both fulfills and rejects human prayers and sacrifices as she wills, which explains why, sometimes, our prayers are successful and sometimes not. 

While Styx is consigned to the underworld, Hecate's functions and honors are confined to the world of human beings, and therefore, again, not a threat to Zeus's domination on Olympus. Each one has their place, which leaves Zeus to run the show. 

Finally, of course, Zeus swallows the goddess Métis, and her name means cunning, cunning intelligence, as she was about to bring forth a son greater than his father. And thereby, he ends the threat of succession and makes his regime unassailable, while at the same time, adding cunning to the force and might embodied in Styx's children. 

Now all this is necessary, but ancient history, and it forms a background to Zeus's role in The Iliad. He may have shown political savvy that made possible his rise to power in the theogony, but how is he going to manage that power once he has achieved it? But before-- and I hope you don't mind my digressing-- before we can talk about Zeus's political leadership in The Iliad, we have to define his political goals and the means at his disposal to accomplish them. 

In addition, we have to situate him within his political sphere, or environment, and characterize his relations with the members of his community. Imagine then, a community where each member has his or her own prerogatives and jealously guards them, guards his or her territory and sphere of influence. 

These gods can be quite unruly and are very, very touchy about any slights to their honor or status. As opposing parties in the war, in the Trojan War, the Family-- and I spelled that with a capital F-- of the Homeric gods in The Iliad are deeply divided in their objectives, with some supporting the Greeks and others the Trojans. 

In the past, an alliance of powerful gods could mount a serious threat to Zeus, to his supremacy, and we are told that Thetis, who's Achilles' mother, at one point, was able, alone among the gods, to ward off unseemly disaster when the rest of the Olympians wanted to bind him, Zeus, Hera, and Poseidon, and Pallas, Athena. But you, goddess, i.e. Thetis, came and loosed him from his bonds. Now, that refers to an incident, in the past, in days gone by, and now, in the time period of The Iliad, his supremacy is unassailable. 

So Zeus's power rests on three qualities. Physical strength, we saw strength, might. Primogenitor, i.e., his age. He's the oldest of the Olympians, because he never got swallowed. So the swallow-- when the other Olympians got vomited up, they were reborn. So Zeus is the eldest, and he also has intelligence. 

And he proclaims-- at a certain point, he proclaims himself to be far mightier in strength and older, a combination that makes him invincible. How rare such a combination can be can be demonstrated, by a glance, at The Iliad's chief characters. 

King Agamemnon, King of Mycenae, he has power and vast wealth, while Achilles has martial excellence. Nestor, old Nestor, has brains but no brawn. He's old. And Odysseus, from the rocky island of Ithaca, likewise, possesses intelligence, but he lacks political clout, and has only measly 12 ships to bring to the expedition. 

Now, in times of crisis, such fragmentation of leadership can lead to disaster, as Odysseus points out. He says, "too many chiefs, [NON-ENGLISH], is bad, especially in wartime, and it can become catastrophic." So The Iliad also offers many lessons in how to deal with poor leadership at the top, a subject to which I will return shortly. 

Leadership qualities can be engaged by the ability to set clear objectives and to implement the necessary steps for accomplishing those aims. But frequently, the desired goals are multiple. Some are short term, others may have a wider temporal horizon. Particularly challenging is the situation where the objectives go in different directions, even standing in contradiction to each other. 

For example, in World War II, the immediate goal of the United States and Britain was the defeat of the Axis powers. A longer range issue was the containment of the Soviet Union. The first was successful, the second not so much, and as we know, the Cold War was the immediate result. 

At the beginning of The Iliad, Zeus is faced with a similar dilemma, one that is, after all, not uncommon for someone in position of leadership. For Zeus, matters are rendered even more complicated since he has to deal with that fractious and unruly constituency, the gods, the Olympians, many of whom are staunchly opposed to his purposes. Both persuasion and compromise, as well as underhanded dealings and a bit of arm twisting, may be necessary to reach his desired objectives. 

So what are Zeus's objectives in The Iliad? And I use the plural advisedly. The meaning of the boule dios, that is the will, or better, the plan of Zeus, which is announced in line five of the poem, as being in the course of fulfillment, has been controversial since antiquity. 

Some scholars insist that it referred solely to the promise to Thetis to favor the Trojans, and thus to vindicate the honor of her son, Achilles. Other scholars maintain that its aim was the destruction of Troy, while yet others interpreted it as the Olympians plan to destroy and do away with the heroes. 

Now, I propose that US that the bully Diaz that this plan embraced all three objectives a short term one promise to status, a medium term, one the destruction of Troy and the long range goal of bringing it to an end. The age of heroes. So the boule dios, the plan of Zeus, is not single, but threefold. So how do you juggle those three different goals simultaneously? 

When in the first book of The Iliad, that is first approach to Zeus on behalf of her son, he doesn't respond right away, but he sat silent a long time. What was going on in his mind? For Zeus to give in to Thetis's request entails an inevitable delay in the destruction of Troy. On the other hand, if Zeus ultimately intends to exterminate the heroes, then that delay indirectly contributes to that final goal. 

For the wrath, or menis, in Greek, of Achilles will, as the first lines of the poem tells us, "precipitate not only countless sufferings on the Greeks, but it will also prematurely cast countless souls of heroes, both Greek and Trojan, into Hades before their time." Thetis has to entreat the Olympian Zeus a second time, and we know he's in her debt, because we've just heard how she rescued him when the other gods ganged up on him. 

Zeus remains silent. Zeus, silent and lengthy pondering, attests, I think, to the complexity of his plans and his majestic nod when he finally agrees, finally acquiescing to Thetis pleas indicate that he has discovered a way to harmonize both his intermediate and long-term goals. 

As might be expected, Zeus's plans meet with resistance on the part of his constituency, i.e. the other gods. First, the divinities who are aligned against the Trojans, most notoriously Hera, but also Athena and Poseidon, oppose the promise to Thetis to give honor to Achilles by precipitating a Greek defeat. 

The divine supporters of the Trojans are likewise alienated by Zeus's decision to destroy Troy, and all the gods who have offspring, Greek or Trojan, fighting on the Trojan plain, might well be unhappy about the destruction of their own children, the heroes, the demigods. 

There are hints here and there of a risk of a genuine rebellion in heaven. On an earlier occasion, as we saw, an alliance against Zeus was almost successful. Zeus has to chart a careful course amid the obstacles posed by the opposing parties. He must manipulate, cajole and appease, use what is called soft power, but be willing, when necessary, to resort to hard power, the threat of force against the warring factions on Olympus. 

Leadership, according to General Dwight Eisenhower, and I quote, "is the art of getting someone to do something you want done because he wants to do it." Zeus's ability to let someone else do his dirty work is highlighted in a scene at the opening of book 1. At this point, the victory of Menelaus in his duel with Paris has really brought the war to a complete standstill. 

The terms of the treaty have been agreed upon, but peace between the warring parties would not only precipitate the end of the poem, but abort all of Zeus's plans. Now, Zeus knows better than to get blood on his hands when he can get his wife, Hera, to do the ugly deed. We're explicitly told that he provokes her, which he does well, pointedly alluding to her hatred of Aphrodite, who has just rescued Paris. 

The gods were told, "gaze down a Troy from their Olympian perches." And here I'm quoting, "straightway, the son of Kronos," i.e. Zeus, "tried to needle Hera with words of provocation. Speaking obliquely, he says, "two goddesses are Menelaus's helpers, Argive and Hera, and Athena, but they sit and watch from afar, taking their ease. But smiling Aphrodite cares for him close and wards destruction from him. So even now, she's rescued him when he thought he would die." 

Here, Zeus alludes to a backstory of the so-called judgment of Paris, when the Trojan prince chose Aphrodite rather than Hera and Athena, got Helen, and precipitated the war. In our scene, in the presence of all the gods, Zeus lays out the alternatives, whether to start the war again or to allow peace to prevail and Troy to remain standing. 

Vexed, Athena restrains her anger, but Hera can scarcely contain her rage, and after a rather ugly exchange, where she cheerfully agrees to allow her husband to destroy three of her favorite cities in exchange for Troy, they reach an agreement. War will indeed recommence, and Troy will be destroyed. There's something a little bloodcurdling about the king and queen of the Olympians wheeling and dealing in human lives as if it were a game of cards. 

So the irony here is that Zeus gets Hera to do his dirty work, and the manner in which he accomplishes this through his manipulation of Hera allows him what has been called, in recent American political jargon, deniability. More subtly, and in our judgment, more distastefully, in book 22, Zeus prods his daughter Athena, who's already eager to orchestrate Hector's final moments. The war must continue until Troy's fall, yet Zeus's hands become and remain clean. 

There's another scene where Hera uses a phrase "not all the gods will praise your action," and it's instructive. This happens in book 16. Zeus ponders whether to save his son, Sarpedon, but in this case, the Olympian yields to his wife's argument that the gods will not approve of Zeus's decision if he tries to save him. And she says, "many sons of the immortals are fighting around Troy, and they will be furious if Zeus rescues Sarpedon. And they will surely insist on rescuing their own children too." 

Indeed, shortly before, in book 15, we have seen the reaction of Ares to the killing of one of his sons, Ascalaphus. And Ares get so furious that he starts putting on his armor and he prepares to avenge the death of his son. And Athena rather brutally restrains him. And she says, "you lunatic. Crazed in your mind, you've really lost it. I can't believe my ears. Your good sense and shame are gone. 

Don't you hear what Hera said, who just now came from Olympian Zeus? Or do you wish, first having had your fill of trouble yourself, to come back to Olympus aggrieved and under compulsion? And in turn, sow great evil on the rest of us. For he, Zeus, will right away leave the proud Greeks and Trojans and come to Olympus to throw us all in uproar. And one by one, he will lay his hands on the guilty and the innocent alike." 

So in book 16, Zeus, weeping tears of blood, acquiesces to his wife's argument, and it's easy to see why his most far-reaching and cosmic plan to destroy the heroes who are children and grandchildren of the gods, and to distance gods and men, requires the sacrifice of his own and his last son. 

To return to Zeus's skillful manipulation of his wife to bring about the solution that he himself desires, we can compare his successful strategy to a similar but failed attempt by Agamemnon, this is in book 2, where he calls a plenary session of his troops. In keeping with a deceptive dream sent by Zeus, which assures the king that he will take Troy immediately, the king decides, on his own, no, God inspires him, in case you're worried about Homer's character's ability to make decisions for themselves, this comes from himself. 

He decides to rouse the amry's fighting spirit by giving a speech urging flight, return home. But his strategy backfires. By miscalculating the army's mood and their demoralization, the demoralization of his generals, too, after Achilles withdrawal, Agamemnon almost causes a near disastrous route, as everyone runs to the ship to return home. 

At this critical moment, it's Odysseus who takes over the role of the king, and with the symbolic act of snatching up Agamemnon's royal scepter, he saves the day. Moreover, Odysseus demonstrates a very important key attribute of good leadership, knowing how to talk differently to different people. He cajoled the chieftains. He threatens the foot soldiers. And he whacks the incorrigible Thersites on the head with the scepter. 

It's interesting that Athena's instructions had only involved persuading the kings, but maybe the Olympians hadn't thought of the necessity of bringing the lower ranks into line. Agamemnon, on the other hand, shows himself unable to differentiate among his interlocutors. 

Not only do I mention the mistreatment of Achilles in book one, which, of course, is the beginning of The Iliad itself, but the king, while making the rounds of the chiefs before battle, even managers, in quick succession, to insult two of his most important warriors, Diomedes and Odysseus, in book 4. And in the case of Odysseus, he starts out by insulting him, and Anicius's blunt response forces him to back down. 

Otherwise, we could perhaps possibly have had a second wrath and destructive quarrel in The Iliad. Later, in the opening of book nine, in response to the Trojans unprecedented advance, which is in accord with Zeus's plan A, this time, Agamemnon, in all seriousness, and with some of the same words, again, suggests giving up the expedition. And he does so again in front of the full assembly of the army. 

The youthful warrior Diomedes strenuously voices his opposition until Nestor wisely intervenes, warning of civil war. He insists that Agamemnon call a council of elders to his tent, where they can speak more bluntly. A useful and always, but perhaps today more important than ever, a timely lesson here. When you're stuck with a bad ruler, try not to back him into a corner. Try to get him good advisors. And if possible, allow him to save face. 

But there are limits. When, in book 14, for the third time, Agamemnon urges flight, Odysseus openly and savagely rebukes him. "Agamemnon, your plan will endanger the army, cause a route, and lead to its destruction." Sometimes, it's imperative not to mince words. 

Returning to Zeus, he seems also aware of the Taoist maxim. "He rules best who rules least." For the most part, he allows the gods to intervene on behalf of their favorites, even if it means a delay in the fulfillment of his plans. Most immediately, for Trojan defeat. That is plan A, or more remotely, for Troy's destruction, plan B. 

Perhaps he realizes that their intervention on both sides create a continual shift in the tides of battle and increase the cost in human slaughter. And hence, the final solution to the problem of the heros, plan C. 

But Zeus is also aware of Ronald Reagan's doctrine, quote, "when you can't make them see the light, make them feel the heat." Zeus knows when to take charge and when to put his foot down, and when to resort to threats of force. In the opening of book 8, he orders all the gods to clear off the battlefield, and he has a sort of Stalinesque pro forma demand for their consent. 

He says, "but all of you praise my decision so I can make quick work of this situation." This is followed immediately by menacing the gods with beatings or hurling them into Tartarus. And to these threats, Zeus adds a vivid reminder of their inability to oppose him, in a wonderful description of a celestial tug of war, and he says, "come on now, Gods, give it a try, so you may all know by how much I am the strongest of the gods. 

First, hanging a golden rope from heaven, all of you goddesses and gods, and pulling, you could not pull Zeus, the highest of hosts, from the heaven to the ground. But if I put my mind to giving a pull, I could pull up the Earth itself, and the sea, and then I would tie a rope around the peak of Olympus, and everything would be hanging in mid-air. By so much do I surpass both gods and men." 

These are pretty strong words. But later in book eight, Hera and Athena attempt to counter his prohibitions by sneaking down to the battlefield, and he quickly sends them packing back to Olympus. In book 14, Hera's plot to incapacitate her husband by seductive ruse, seducing her own husband, gives us a distraction from the slaughter on the battlefield, but it's quickly countered by Zeus's awakening. 

In setting things aright, Zeus cleverly insists that his wife Hera return to the divine assembly on Olympus and convey his orders to undo the harm she has done, and hence to shame her publicly and make her lose face. In dealing with Poseidon, who'd also snuck behind Zeus's back during the time he was having his post-coital nap, with Poseidon, Zeus's brother, on the other hand, he acts more cautiously, avoiding direct confrontation. 

And wisely, he sends his messenger, Iris, to deliver his rebuke. But it's no less menacing. Let me quote. "Let him consider-- let him, Poseidon, consider in his heart and in his mind whether even though he is powerful, he will endure my approach. Since I declare I am much stronger than he and older by birth, he should hesitate to declare himself my equal, I, before whom the other gods tremble." 

Now when Iris conveys the Olympians orders to his brother to ceasefire and desist and ending with some potential threats, Poseidon first demurs. And then finally, Iris adds some blunt words of her own to reinforce Zeus's message. And she says, "is this the response, dark-haired Earth holder? So unrelenting and forceful that I should bring to Zeus. Or will you somehow bend the minds of the noble can be turned. You know that the furies always take the side of the older." After a bit of bluster, Poseidon wisely retreats. 

Once the Trojans have penned up the Greeks on the beach and Hector has managed to set fire to one of the ships, very dangerous moment, Achilles sending out of Patroclus and his death to make Achilles' return to battle inevitable. At this point, the promise to Thetis, that is to create a Greek defeat in order that the Greeks honor Achilles, has been fulfilled. And the fates of Hector and Achilles also have been rendered inevitable, and the fall of Troy is imminent. 

Just before Achilles reenters the battle, an odd scene demonstrates the changed circumstances. Hera, we are told, secretly sends Iris to Achilles so that he will show himself by the ditch and drive fear in the hearts of Trojans, show himself unarmed because he has no armor at this point. Hidden from Zeus and the other gods, for Hera had sent Iris forth, but despite Hera's devising and her secretiveness, we realize what the goddess herself doesn't comprehend. 

Things have changed. Secrecy is no longer necessary. She and Zeus are no longer opponents, but now find themselves on the same side, devoted to plan B. And a similar anomaly points to, in the same direction, when in book 20, Poseidon, up to now, an opponent of the Trojans, he intervenes to save the Trojan prince, Aeneas, from certain death at Achilles' hands. Once Troy's fall is imminent, the old enmities are set aside. 

Zeus again demonstrates his political acumen, when after having cooped up the gods so long and forbidden them to intervene while he pursues his plans, he finally allows them out to play. In books 20 and 21, where the opposing divine partisans of the Greeks and the Trojans face off in a parody of a theomachy staged for Zeus's amusement. "His heart laughed, we are told, with delight, when he saw the gods coming together in strife." 

Granted that Zeus's objectives have already required the sacrifice of his son, Sarpedon, as well as setting aside his affection for Hector. We have to acknowledge that politics is kind kinderspiel. The theatrical mock theomachy constitutes a comic reprise of those cosmic conflicts long past, and grants Zeus a little R&R after his intense concentration on the battlefield. 

In a very unusual scene that opens book 12, i.e. right halfway through the poem, it's proleptic, it looks toward the future, and it adumbrates the final restoration of divine harmony after the fulfillment of the promise to Iphitos and after the fall of Troy. 

Here's how it starts. "While Hector was alive and Achilles raged and the city of Palm was still unstacked, so long the great wall of the Achaeans stood firm. But when the best of the Trojans had died, and of the Argives, many perished, some survived, and the city of Priam was sacked in the 10th year, and the Argives embarked homeward on their ships, then it was that Poseidon and Apollo devised a plan.

A plan to blot out the wall, bringing on the force of the rivers and the race of the demigod heroes fell in the dust. Simultaneously, Apollo turned the mouths of the rivers together. For nine days, he sent their currents against the wall, and Zeus rained continually, so was quickly, quickly, to send the wall seaward. 

And the earth-shaker himself, Poseidon, holding the trident in his hand, led the way and consigned all the foundations to the waves. The foundations of stones and logs over which the Greeks had mightily toiled, and made all smooth by the swift flowing Hella's pond. And again, covered the great beach with sand, blotting out the wall. And then he turned the rivers back to their courses, as they had flowed before. 

Thus, thereafter, did Poseidon and Apollo set about." The accomplishment of Zeus's longest term objective is revealed. When the Olympian, along with Apollo and Poseidon, cooperate by redirecting all the rivers of the Troah, and thus obliterating the Achaean wall, the Greek wall, around which the battle in the next five books will rage. 

By annihilating the last traces of the Trojan War, the gods will seal the demise of the race of the demigods, and thus fulfill Zeus's cosmic plan to separate men from the gods. It's here, alone in the epic, on the verge of their annihilation, that Homer uses the term hemitheos, half-gods, demigods, the offspring of gods and mortals, now seen looking backwards, belonging to a bygone age. 

And we can speculate about Zeus's motives of for instigating such a separation. One reason might be the inevitable grief over their mortal offspring. Whether it is Thetis's grief and continual mourning over the imminent death of her son Achilles, or Ares, we've seen his outrage over the death of his son Ascalaphus, or Zeus's pained acceptance of his son's death. 

Even divine horses weep when exposed to mortality. But divine disengagement from mortals will also entail removing a constant source of friction and enmity among the gods. As Apollo says to Poseidon in book 21, he says-- this is in preparation for the theomachy-- "earth-shaker, Poseidon, you wouldn't call me sensible if I should fight with you over mortals. Wretched things who, like leaves, at one point they flourish brilliantly when eating the fruit of the Earth, but at other times they perish. Extinguished." 

In withdrawing from contact from mankind, Olympus will escape the pain of too great an intimacy with mortality. So to conclude in The Iliad, Zeus demonstrates, I think, what may be considered model statesmanship, combining power, force, brains, and brawn, and effectively threading his way between opposing parties and interests to successfully inaugurate a new world order. 

Homer's mortal princes lack such perfect combination of leadership qualities, but they nevertheless offer important lessons concerning the obstacles to effective leadership. Agamemnon, as we've said before, has wealth and power, but he lacks genuine leadership qualities. Achilles has invincible strength, but not the political stature or, actually, the smarts. 

Odysseus and Nestor both have brains, but the latter lacks strength because of his old age, and the former lacks political power. But as a mirror for princes, Zeus's statesmanship has no rival in the human sphere, but represents an ideal to which mortal rulers might aim. Thank you. 

SHARON HOSTLER: Thank you. Thank you. 

JENNY CLAY: Are there questions-- 

SHARON HOSTLER: So, Jenny, we have a few questions for you, thank you very much. One our class, from James Cleave. 

JENNY CLAY: Yes? 

SHARON HOSTLER: OK. It's a long one. I'll read it to you. "The God supporting the Greeks, Hera and Athena, seem more powerful, or at least more determined, than the gods supporting Troy, Aphrodite and Apollo. If this were switched, would Zeus have agreed to defeat the Greeks and save Troy? Could a coalition of lesser gods forced Zeus to do things against his will?" 

JENNY CLAY: Wonderful question. Trying to reverse the alliances that form the lineup, the divine lineup, in The Iliad. It's interesting that in the first book we have the mention of a previous rebellion, and it's Poseidon, Hera, and Athena that are named there. So we actually have the same alliance again. 

But in the case of The Iliad, at least with Hera and Athena, it has to do with Paris's judgment, and well, perhaps bad judgment, who favored Aphrodite, and therefore was able to have the most beautiful woman in the world. So that's what they resent. And Apollo is actually a very powerful God, and Ares, not so much, because he's kind of uncontrolled. He's just all over the place. He's actually the only god in The Iliad who kills somebody, which is quite odd. 

But Apollo is somewhat in the background, I agree with you. Although, he plays a very important role in a few, I think, very important scenes. When he drives back first Diomedes and then Patroclus, as they are charging, and they charged three times. And the Greek says, like a God, like a diamond. And he pushes them back and says, wait a minute. You forgot. You're not a God. Don't try this. 

So that kind of intervention, and his role in The Iliad is, I think, more seen as-- I mean, he does play certain roles in saving Aeneas, at one point. And at the end, creating the situation where Achilles has to run after Hector by letting all the Trojans back into the city. But I think his main role in The Iliad is to be the god of limits, and especially the limits between human beings and gods. And when he pushes back against those two heroes, that becomes very clear. 

So I don't know if-- I mean, the whole lineup is due to all of this backstory. So it's kind of hard to imagine, let's say, that Poseidon and Athena and Hera would be on the Trojan's side. It would be a complicated reconfiguration. But it's a good question, it's good to imagine what it would look like from the other side. So thank you. 

SHARON HOSTLER: So, Jenny, another question has come. Talking about The Odyssey being recently banned in Massachusetts, in the public school. And so the question is, what might the problem be? 

JENNY CLAY: Well. [LAUGHS] I think there are two possibilities that occur to me. First is a scandalous part of The Odyssey where one of the bards on the island of Phaeacia, he's entertaining the Phaeacians, and he sings a-- well, it's often called "The Lay of Ares and Aphrodite," where Aphrodite is married to Hephaestus, but she and-- Hephaestus goes off, but he knows this is going on, so he-- 

And Aphrodite is having an affair with Ares. So he puts an almost invisible, very fine golden net around the bed. And so the two of them, Aphrodite and Ares, are caught red-handed. And this causes-- well, it causes some consternation, but also a lot of laughter among the gods. And that troubled, even in antiquity, the idea of gods committing adultery. 

I think it's a little hard to integrate with, perhaps, certainly our idea of gods, but also, that gods should be good. They should be moral. They should be upright citizens. And what happens, of course, at the end of all of this, is that Ares-- they're released from the net, and Ares goes to his place and Aphrodite goes to her place, Cyprus, and she has a nice bath and then she's fresh as a daisy. 

Now that contrast, and I think the important thing about the role of this in the poem, is it contrasts with the story of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, where adultery leads to death and destruction, and the potential with Odysseus and Penelope, for some such an outcome that plays a role. So there we again see a distinction between human beings, where things are serious and have serious consequences, and the gods, where even adultery passes without much trouble. 

The other thing, I suppose, that one could find objectionable, is the double standard. There's no question that Odysseus sleeps around, and he has Calypso, he has Circe, and Penelope, of course, is the faithful wife who fights off the suitors very cleverly. But nothing happens, although she is aware. 

It's very interesting, at the very end of the poem, when they're reunited, she says, she was always afraid that someone would come along and seduce her. And she thinks of Helen at that moment, what happened with Helen. So she's aware of the danger, which makes her actually more interesting. But so, yeah, I think those are the two things that would that would strike me. But I think-- I can't imagine [LAUGHS] actually banning it. I think that's a gasp. 

SHARON HOSTLER: Right. I mean, that is the age of their development, that these are real questions that need to be parsed out and consequences, et cetera. So why wouldn't that be a good topic? Thank you, Jenny. Our time is up. Bravo, brava. And I hope that you'll have another reading group soon, because you have devoted followers. Thank you so much. 

JENNY CLAY: It's been fun. Thank you so much.

SHARON HOSTLER: Welcome to this month, January 2021 session for the University of Virginia Retired Faculty Association. A few things before we get started with our distinguished speaker for today, Dr. Craig Kent. I'd like to introduce someone that you know very well, and that is Craig Littlepage, who has just this morning agreed to serve on the board of directors for our organization. 

And so let's have a virtual applause for Craig and say how delighted we are that you're going to be with us on the board. You bring, for us, youth and great connections in the larger world. And it's just really fun to see you sitting there in front of an active, joyous stadium reflecting on the fact that we may play sports again, right? Craig you want to say something briefly? 

CRAIG LITTLEPAGE: It's good to be in front of a packed [AUDIO OUT]. It's good to be in front of a packed house. 

SHARON HOSTLER: Great. And we're delighted to have your youth as part of our board. I'd like to remind everyone that next month, on February 8, is Jenny Clay talking to us about Zeus, the godfather. She will be doing the presentation on Tuesday, February 8. And then the following month, we'll have our annual conversation with Jim Ryan. And just to say that registration will close early because that's always a very large turnout. 

So now it's my wonderful pleasure to introduce my boss and sort of boss as a medical school emerita, Dr. Craig Kent, who just couldn't have more beautifully checked off all the fabulous academic boxes. And so growing up in Nevada, going to undergraduate school at the University of Nevada, moving out to California to the making his West Coast visit at the University of California, San Francisco for, excuse me, medical school and residency and surgery. 

Then coming to Boston at Brigham and Women's to do vascular surgery. And I would just like to point out, working with two fabulous women mentors early on in his research career. Staying on at Harvard as faculty and then being a Division Chief at Cornell and Columbia in New York. And then going to be chair of surgery at the University of Wisconsin, Madison to work with two of our former colleagues, Chip Foley and Laurel Rice, two very, very good colleagues of ours. 

And then on to be Dean at Ohio State. I think mostly, I would say to you, Craig, that if you ever talked about what it means to be put in the mason jar and shaken in leadership, it would seem to me that coming here at the beginning of this pandemic, also at a time when within healthcare in general, that there are many crises. 

So we're delighted that you're here, and we really would like to hear from you about what this journey has been like. And of course, we all, in this audience, many of us being over that 75, want to know when and where we're going to get our vaccines, just to put a little pressure on you. So let us all welcome our speaker, Dr. Kent. 

CRAIG KENT: Thank you. That was a very kind introduction. And I would say I'm incredibly close to both Laurel and Chip. I worked with him for almost nine years. And just wonderful people. And actually to-- I've thought incredibly highly of UVA for many, many years, I would say through my entire career. And of course, that's one of the reasons I'm here now because I can't believe I've been given the opportunity to lead at UVA. 

But spending time with Chip and Laurel, I think, is emblematic of the quality of the people that this institution produces. I mean, it's just unbelievable how talented people here are and how loyal and dedicated they are to the institution. So couldn't be more excited to be here. 

I thought maybe I'd spend a few minutes just in conversation with some thoughts and ideas, experiences over the past few months, and some sense of where I hope we're headed in the future and then leave a lot of time for conversation and discussion. That's usually a lot more fun than listening to somebody speak. So I'll try to partition myself accordingly. 

So I showed up officially February 1. I actually showed up about mid-January to see if I could enroll my son in school. And what an exciting time. I think UVA Health had been in somewhat of a transition over the couple of years before that with a number of different issues and events. But new university president visionary leader Jim Ryan, who I've just grown to adore, new leadership team at the university and I think a lot of excitement about the future of UVA Health and what can be accomplished here. 

My assessment from a distance when I was looking at the job is great organization but has so much potential to grow and be stronger. And wouldn't it be fun to be in an organization where I might be able to at least be a catalyst to make that happen? 

So we did the usual high fives. Great new leader. Everybody was inviting me to different places. We were all cheering, and imagining, and planning. And then March 1 came and COVID came. And I just don't think any of us, in retrospect, could ever imagine something like this coming along. And what an interesting time to show up as a new leader in the health system. 

And so it is what it is. I'm happy, in retrospect, that I showed up before COVID. I'm glad I didn't show up in the middle of it. And I'm certainly glad I didn't show up after it. In a crisis like this, it's actually, in some ways, a wonderful time to come in as a leader because what might take you a year to get to know the leadership and really understand the organization I think I might have accomplished in two months because we had to. We had to figure it out. 

And so here's this new guy, and he's there, and he's supposed to be making the decisions and leading and bringing people together. But nobody knows who I am and I don't know who the leadership team is. And I would just say complimentary to both sides, we rolled up our sleeves and figured it out because we had to. And for me, it was-- I mean, if I had a magic wand that could make COVID go away, I'd start over again and just do the normal thing. Don't get me wrong. But since it was this way, it was a wonderful opportunity for us to come together to integrate into an organization. 

And I think, sometimes, the crisis allows you to think about things differently. It exposes your vulnerabilities. It allows you to understand, maybe even better, what the path forward should be than if you aren't in the midst of crisis. So I wouldn't want it to have happened. But there's been a lot of opportunity over the last few months. I wanted to brag a little bit. That's allowed, right? I can brag? OK. 

SHARON HOSTLER: You brag about The Pharmacist right away. 

CRAIG KENT: [CHUCKLES] Well, I'll just brag about UVA Health. And I get this much credit. I just showed up. But what the health system has accomplished over the last few months related to COVID, I think is just incredible. And that's not to diminish other health systems, many of you are probably part of other health systems, have had a lot of success. But we've done really well here. And just a few highlights that I think are really important. 

The first is we are in the process of building a new bed tower, 84 new beds. The bed tower wasn't supposed to open until July or August. And we needed ICU, negative-pressure rooms badly because if you ventilate a COVID patient, you need negative-pressure rooms. And we had a few, but not enough. And we had these COVID patients that were coming in. 

And so what we did is brought the engineering team, the facilities team, the doctors, the nurses together and we figured out how to open the bed tower about four or five months ahead of time. And you should have seen it. In an actually a medical students conference room, this jury rigged up a system of ducts that shouldn't have been-- they shouldn't have been in the conference room, but it made all 84 beds negative pressure. And somebody figured that out. Wasn't me, but somebody, one of our engineers figured out how to do that. 

And so suddenly, over a period of about three weeks, we had 84 new beds, and we needed beds to take care of all the patients, and they were all negative pressure. And I feel like only at UVA could we accomplish something like that. 

And then one of the great things the tower allowed us to do is to isolate the COVID patients. So in some ways, we almost had a COVID hospital in the new bed tower, and we were trying to figure out how to take care of the non-COVID patients at the same time, and we were able to partition. And that was an incredible value to keep people safe on both sides. So that was a wonderful win. 

Other things, I don't want to spend too much time on this, I could go on and on, but we were the first institution in the state of Virginia and one of the very first in the country to develop an internal COVID test. And so at a point of time when you were trying to work through Labcorp, one of the major organizations that does laboratory work, and it would take eight days to get a COVID test back, we were getting them back in four hours. 

And our infectious disease group, our lab people, they stole some PCR machines from another part of the university. A couple of professors got together and had dinner and then all of a sudden, we have one of the first COVID tests in the country that was internal. 

And at one point, because we were so far ahead of the pack, we were providing COVID testing for 32 hospitals around the state, some in the DC area, some in North Carolina because we had the tests, and we could turn them around m and nobody ever had access to it outside of UVA. So that was pretty cool. 

Maybe to stay on the testing side of things, we've kept our community safe. Our group goes out, we have this little van that goes out and it goes to different parts of our community. And we unload and we'll do testing. We'll test 100, 150, 200 people in a church someplace or whatever. And we've been doing that now for months. 

And I would say one of the things that we've learned about COVID is the more you can test, the more you can identify early people that have COVID, quarantine them, the safer you're going to be. And so we've literally done thousands of tests, bringing those tests out to our community. Volunteers, nurses, doctors out there every day doing this. I think we've kept our community much safer than it might otherwise be because of that. 

What are some other things? So we've not been as afflicted with COVID as other places. Part of it's that we're kind of a regional national referral center and so we don't live in a populous area. During the peak in March, we had only 30-35 COVID patients in the hospital at any given time. Now we're in the 60's to 70's. So it's a different picture and it's growing. 

But the COVID patients that we've cared for, and it's been a challenge, particularly in this era to take care of non-COVID and COVID patients at the same time, which we have to do. Because we learned the first time around when we shut off elective surgery, when we shut off all of our other functions that the non-COVID patients suffer as a consequence of it. So that was a lesson. 

I'm not sure I needed to be taught that lesson. But governor's orders, we had to shut down taking care of other people. And so that's what we did. We're not doing it this time. We're trying to take care of non-COVID patients and the COVID patients at the same time. So it is a challenge. And it's a juggling act on a daily basis to try to figure out how to best do that. 

But the care of our COVID patients, we received some numbers last week. And our mortality for COVID patients is in the top decile in the country, meaning that our outcomes, our mortality, we're better than 90% of places in the country. And I have to brag about that. We have some great infectious disease docs. We have some wonderful ICU docs. Our nurses have been dedicated. We just do a really good job of it. We just do a really wonderful job of taking care of these patients. And we should be very, very proud of that. 

So then I'll spend a moment on vaccine. One of the things that you learn when you're in this role is how to dodge questions. And I think I had a question about when are we going to get vaccinated. So I'm going to try to think of some crafty way to not answer that so I can make it through this call. But I will talk a little bit about vaccine. 

So we've started vaccinating people a few weeks ago, as soon as everyone else in the country had vaccine. We've now vaccinated almost 9,000 health system workers. And that's been over, I've forgotten, a three-three and a half week period of time. And we're ahead of the pack. We have a vaccine team. Costi Sifri, who some of you may remember or know, has been leading some really good people that are part of it, pharmacists, others that are part of it. 

And we can actually vaccinate now-- we have enough infrastructure to vaccinate 1,000 people a day. And we're trying to increase that to 1,500 people a day. And we just don't have enough vaccine to vaccinate 1,000 people a day because we're waiting for it. But all of this conversation that's out there about not being able to get the needles and the arms and people vaccinated, even though the vaccine is available, there's no vaccine that shows up at UVA Health that we don't get in people's shoulders. We've figured out how to do that. And we've done that very well. 

Of course, now the focus is in our healthcare workers. We have about 13,000 people that work for the health system. But if you look at our associates, like our rehab facility, our LTAC and others, there's about 19,000 people. And so that's where we're focused now, is trying to vaccinate these healthcare workers, people that are in the frontlines, and even people that are more in the background but are related to healthcare. 

Probably starting about next week in the Charlottesville area, Albemarle County, we'll start working with VDH, the Virginia Department of Health, and take our vaccination workforce and start concentrating on greater than 75-year-old individuals and some of the critical workers in the community. 

And so, anyway, the decisions about who gets vaccinated when, those aren't our decisions. They're the ones that are made nationally. And then there might be some variability within the state. So we don't feel that that's our role to make those decisions. 

But making sure that when those decisions are made and people are lined up, that they're getting the vaccine, we feel like UVA Health can do that. And we can do that exceedingly well. The Virginia Department of Health doesn't have the infrastructure to accomplish that. And so we're going to be a major factor in our region for vaccinating people. 

So just to sum, that's where we are, doing well. Our people are a little tired and worn out. Everybody's been working really, really hard. At one point back in April, we had to go through some financial mitigation. We were losing $85 million a month because we couldn't do elective surgery or take care of non-COVID patients. So we went through three months of financial mitigation. That was tough for this organization. It was tough for a new EVP to come in and have to work with others to make that decision. 

But we ended up OK financially as a result of it. And we would not have if we had not done that. And so that's kept us vibrant and moving forward. So it's been really tough. I will say that it feels a little better this past week. Maybe it's just temporary having the Christmas holidays and a few people got a break. So that was good. And then having vaccinations in people's arms has made people feel like maybe we're in the last chapter of this now. 

It's an unbelievably long chapter. But there is that almost done with the book. I see a little flicker of light at the end of the tunnel. And so I think that's making people feel better. How long that lasts? Whether we can keep that positivity? I don't know. But you all know this and you're in different places in the country, it's been a rough few months. 

And again, I just would finish this part by saying I am so proud of all 13,000 people that work here. Everyone stepped up. Everyone's worked really hard. A lot of the great outcomes that I articulated to you are from different parts of our organization. And we've done well because of our people. So I'll end there. 

What I wanted to do was spend now a moment just talking about the future of UVA Health, which I'm really excited about. I'm going to pretend now it's February and I don't know COVID's coming. And what do I see for this organization going forward? And of course, it's going to be paced in a different way because of COVID. But we're still going to accomplish everything that I think we had in mind. 

The first thing that we're going to do is start with strategic planning. Now, the health system has not had a unified strategic plan in 10 years. And you can't be a large, nationally recognized health system and not have a strategic plan. 

So I just recruited a chief strategy officer, a fellow by the name of Jason Lineen, 25 years of experience in healthcare strategy. And he's going to help us launch over the next couple of three months of our strategic planning process. We're not going to wait for COVID to finish. We're going to start moving forward. 

And I think that will be something that's very positive for people because it'll help them also see that there's another life beyond COVID. So we're really excited about that process. I want it to be inclusive of the 13,000 people in the work of the health system, but also the university that already has a strategic plan in our community that's so important to us. 

So that's some excitement for the future. We're recruiting a number of different people. We just recruited a new lead in marketing and communication. Her name is Lisa Badeau. She leads marketing for the Brigham now. So I went back to one of my old alma maters and stole one of their great talented people. She is a rock star and I can't wait for her to show up. I mentioned Jason Lineen, our new lead in strategy. 

We have three finalists for a new position that I created around diversity, equity, and community. And these are some really amazing people that I think can help us be transformational both within the health system and for our community. So that'll be a new role. 

And then, as many of you probably know, that David Wilkes is stepping down as dean and we're in the midst of a search for a new dean. And we're at a point now where we have seven finalists. And I can't imagine picking one because they're all so outstanding. And I really mean that. I'm supposed to say those things in this role, but the talent pool is extraordinary. 

That's something just as an aside that I've found about UVA, I think I knew the power of the name and the history of this organization. But every recruitment we've had, we've just had unbelievable talent be interested in the role. And the people that we've been able to choose have been extraordinary. And I'd like to say that I'm a pretty good recruiter, but I'm not that good. UVA's name is extraordinary, and that's allowed us to be very, very successful in recruitment. 

So I think back to the dean search, we'll probably be doing some Zoom interviews and then probably narrow the group down to four or so and bring them on site. And I would say within the next two or three months, we'll have our new dean. I think you'll be very proud of that person. 

Only to pause and recognize David Wilkes, who has been a rock star. He's grown the research funding some incredible amount. He's grown diversity in the School of Medicine. I can just go on and on about what he's accomplished. He's done a great job. And in the past few months, David's just been a wonderful partner. So I've enjoyed very much working with him. 

I've gone on longer than I thought I would and I'm looking at the chat thing. I'm not very good at chats, but I see the questions mounting. And so I wonder if at this point, it might make sense just to pause and just have some conversation about different things. 

I'd sum by saying that for the future, I think UVA is already a nationally recognized medical center. It's great health system. It's a wonderful university. I think we can be even stronger. And I think we can grow. And I'm excited about that. And as soon as we get to take a breath or two, we'll start all the activities that are necessary to continue to grow and be stronger. 

As to the university, I think the university can be stronger because of a growing health system and I think the health system can be stronger because of a university. That's absolutely fantastic and a great partner. So that synergy, to me, is one of the reasons I took this job that I think it's so important. In any event, I'll pause there and would love just to have conversation about anything that you would like. 

SHARON HOSTLER: Well, [CHUCKLES] thanks so much. It's refreshing to have an optimistic paragraph or two. We've gotten so used to the being in continual mourning that it's exciting to be able to look to the future. So thank you for that. I'm going to take the questions in the order that they popped up. And so the first question for you, Craig, is, was there something that you couldn't launch because of the pandemic? That you came in really feeling strongly that you were going to be a high priority and that you couldn't do. And I guess the question is, how do you feel about it now? 

CRAIG KENT: Yeah, no, great question. Just to go back, I have a genetic mutation in the optimism gene category, where it is pretty tough to get me down. I always know the sun's going to come up the next day. And if you get the right group of passionate people together, you're going to be successful. So it's a little bit of my style of leadership. 

I've actually enjoyed meeting and getting to know a lot of other leaders here at UVA Health that feel the same way. That's the only way we survived this COVID thing, is you just have to know it's going to turn out OK and move forward. 

Back to the ways forward, strategic planning and such, absolutely. I had already figured that out before I arrived that was probably within the first couple of months that's what we were going to do. And two things, one is obviously very preoccupied by navigating the challenges of COVID, but I also think that we weren't really in the mindset that we could really seriously think about strategic planning. 

So can we do that now? I think so. I feel like although every day seems to be a new day, we're in a bit of a rhythm. We're taking care of COVID patients, non-COVID patients. We're working our way through it. We're getting the vaccine done. I don't know that tomorrow is the day to start strategic planning. And so it'll take us a couple or three months to get this together. But I do believe, within the next couple of months or so, we can do all tasks. We can look forward and we can take care of the present at the same time. I feel confident of that. 

I have this breakfast with the EVP, where I just meet with faculty members and have breakfast with them, five to seven faculty members. It's so much fun because you get to know people and you really learn about the organization in those conversations. 

And so I've asked probably 30 different people, what do you think? And every one of them to the individual has said, let's move forward to strategic planning. We want to look at the future. We're excited about this. We want to see the light. So I would say, over the next couple of three months, we can begin to tackle this. 

SHARON HOSTLER: And I assume that that's about clinical care, and it's about clinical and basic science research, and all levels of medical education or are there other aspects of the strategic plan, development funding? I'm just trying to see what the scope-- I know that we had beginnings up there in Northern Virginia. We've had some other outreaches over the time. Is it too soon to say how you're going to structure your strategic thinking? 

CRAIG KENT: So we're still working on that. But I would say it certainly would encompass all of the four missions of an academic medical center. And those would be research, education, clinical care, and in my mind, community outreach is the fourth mission. So it will encompass all of those. 

But I do think that there's going to be some subsets of strategic planning that are important. So facilities for us, we have some new facilities and we have some that I believe Thomas Jefferson built and are not quite equipped for patients. And we have to figure that all out. So that'll be a carve out, what are we going to do about facilities over the next 10 years. 

I don't believe that we can be successful over the long term as an isolated regional medical center. Now with our new beds, we're about 700 beds, great, big hospital, a lot of tertiary-quaternary care. But most large academic centers now are systems. And we need to be a system. So without sharing any details, a lot of work behind the scenes being done by me and others on that now. And I think you'll see some things that are very positive come out of this over the next few months for us becoming a system. But that has to be a whole separate conversation. 

And so it'll go in a number of different areas. So I think the four missions, for sure, but having some subsets of conversations that help us around infrastructure and the things that we need going forward. So more comprehensive of a plan than something that's isolated. 

SHARON HOSTLER: This is a long question so I'm going to read it to you. So more people are being treated as outpatients with serious conditions that are complicated to manage. And the treatments are debilitating, radiation, chemotherapy. Referrals to home health nursing are few and far between. How can you encourage the development of protocols to include home healthcare to ensure appropriate care and monitoring? That's difficult in regular days, to anything about it during the time of COVID. 

CRAIG KENT: Yeah, it's a great question. Those types of care are even more difficult during COVID. So I don't know, today we had 68 patients in the hospital with COVID. We actually have another 40 patients in the hospital that had COVID that we can't discharge from the hospital. And we just had an outbreak in one of our rehab hospitals, which is happening everywhere. The nursing homes, the SNFs are not taking patients. 

And I would say, to start with, our home care efforts here at UVA Health weren't as strong as they need to be. I mentioned earlier, one of the great things about COVID is that it exposes your weaknesses so that maybe when we're beyond COVID you know what are some of the things that need to be fixed. And I think that our post-discharge care is an area that has to be a major focus of ours going forward. I think a little weakness going into COVID and a lot of work to be done when we come out. So I don't have a ready answer to that question. I think we're struggling. And we're trying to do the best we can. And we need to do better as we go into strategic planning and think about our way forward. 

SHARON HOSTLER: I'm switching a little bit to a question about our fourth-year medical-- our medical students in the time of COVID, our house staff and the time of COVID, it's just been amazing to think about back to me in the '60s choosing an internship without having visited or interviewed. And I mean, I think it's just an amazing task ahead. And I'm curious about how you have led that process and what you think might happen with this, doing everything on the screen and then having people walk into the OR that you didn't really expect? 

CRAIG KENT: Yeah, no, I think it's fascinating. We all will do things differently after COVID's done because we'll learn in the process. Some will still do the same because we'll have learned during COVID that's the right way to do it. Others that will do differently going forward. A couple of things that have happened around recruitment of medical students, and residents, and fellows is it's all virtual, right? And so the number of applications to the really strong programs and our residencies here-- well, our medical schools, unbelievable. But our residencies are very strong here, too. 

So I feel sorry for the residency directors and the admissions people in the medical school office because now that people are going to do the whole thing remotely, instead of applying to 10 places, they're applying to 30 places because you don't have to pay for the plane tickets to fly out and see the places. 

Now, the good news is that, I'm told by those people that are trying to navigate that, is that we're getting people from California applying, people from Washington State that are applying. I mean, some really, really talented people that are branching out further than they might otherwise because of the geography. The bad news is there's a lot of work on everybody's part, winnowing that group down to something that we think is good. 

I don't think we know when we bring some of these people in sight unseen and actually physically see them for the first time whether we're going to have surprises or not. I guess it all depends on how important that 24-hour visit was and that personal interaction versus our ability to do something similar to that via Zoom. 

And so my guess is if you had the people from the admissions office and the medical school or the residences on the phone with us today, they would say, well, ask us again next year. [CHUCKLES] I'm hoping it's good. I've gotten better on Zoom. How am I doing? 

SHARON HOSTLER: I think we're all better on Zoom. But it's just amazing. 

CRAIG KENT: I wasn't sure that I was speaking English the first time I was on Zoom. And I'm getting better at it. So I think it's an evolution. But a great question, and we'll see how it turns out. 

SHARON HOSTLER: Right. I think the same thing about your recruiting faculty and recruiting deans. I mean it's a very different process. 

CRAIG KENT: Yeah, it is. I will say, though, that for the major leadership roles, the chief strategy officer, for our diversity lead, for our marketing lead, and even for our dean candidates, we're still going to bring people here. It'll be a smaller group that we would bring here than we might have otherwise. But the finalists need to come. They need to see Charlottesville. They have their families. We need to see them and spend time with them. 

So we're not cutting corners for these major recruitments. And we're working very much with the candidates to do it in the safest way possible. And that has taken some creativity on our part and their part, even driving some distances and that. But we've been able to manage that. And I do think that's really important. 

SHARON HOSTLER: I hope you're doing well with the university plane, right? That's important, an important piece. So I have a question here about the future of artificial intelligence in medicine. 

CRAIG KENT: Yeah. So that's a great question. It's a big question. And maybe just to sum the answer, very excited, very hopeful. And some successes already, especially in the fields of pathology, radiology in some areas. 

I do think it's like everything else in medicine, I've been in the business so long, and I'm a researcher. I still have two R01 grants and love research and academics. It always seems better than it turns out to be or maybe another way of saying it, it always takes longer to get there than you initially thought. 

So I think when we were thinking about AI a few years ago, it was like, within the next three years, you can fire all your pathologists or fire all your radiologists. You're not going to need them any longer. And it's not quite that way yet. And it's going to take a while to get there. So I think unbelievably promising. Very exciting. 

Our penetration at UVA Health is not at the level that I'd like to see it be. So as we recruit our new dean, I think AI has to be something around recruitment and program development that's front and center. We do have our new school of data science and some good leadership there, and that's very cool. And that does tie into AI. And so I actually think that if we decide we're going to spend some time, resources, and effort on it with our School of Data Science, we could be very successful here. But very high on it. It's just going to take some time. 

SHARON HOSTLER: So you've said something about the surprise of how well the name attracts. But the question is what were your greatest surprises, positive and negative, on arriving at UVA? You can't count COVID. 

CRAIG KENT: Yes. Oh, OK. No double counting? OK. I was going to try. So this seems odd but my greatest surprise was the loyalty at the institution and the talent of the people here. And that doesn't sound very good to say I'm surprised about that. I wouldn't have come here if I didn't think that this was a great institution and people were very talented. But it's like I expected the 90th percentile and I got the 99th and 1/2 percentile. And so not bad. And so that's been positive. 

What's been my greatest worry, frustration, or maybe a more positive way, opportunity? I think that UVA Health particularly has worked as a very siloed organization over the years. It's been the medical school, the nursing school, the medical center, the Physician Organization and each is kind of in its own world. And that's not how health systems work now. 

There's a patient, and they show up, and they don't know what those four things mean. They just show up and want to get good care. And they expect the health system that all those pieces are part of to provide them really great care. 

So I think that's our challenge, is to take some of these barriers down, figure out how to work together as a health system. Just to think that there's a patient or even a research mission, a grant that we want to get or we just want to be great educators and not worry about all the silos but try to come together. And we're making progress. It's actually been good. I feel like we're different now than we were 11 months ago. And I think COVID has helped us a little bit there come together. But that's what our greatest challenge is. 

SHARON HOSTLER: Well, there's a good spinoff here because we're being asked two things about the role of the health system with athletics and both prevention and caring for our staff and our student athletes, but also the role and interactions with the larger academic institution, especially on our teaching teachers and our students. 

CRAIG KENT: So I would not be the person to provide expertise around our athletes. We've tested our athletes. And so the health system's been front and center there and very helpful. But I'd have to leave that to Jim Ryan or Liz Magill to comment about how athletics is going, other than the fact that my alma mater, Ohio State, is playing some Southern university tonight and it's going to be [INAUDIBLE]. But outside of that, I don't have a lot of expertise on it. 

SHARON HOSTLER: The rip tide. The tide is rising. 

CRAIG KENT: [LAUGHS] So there is that. I do think that on the education side, whether it be at the university or in the health system, we've done unbelievably well during COVID. Very rapidly figuring out how to teach through simulation, through Zoom, and then, when possible, to get people back in-person. And the health system, of course, I, with our deans, have been very involved in that. 

At the university, though, I'm part of the president's group. And I've been very involved in those decisions and the way forward at the university. And I will brag again and say, we brought the students back in the fall semester and it worked. It doesn't mean it's going to work in the spring, but it worked. And we figured out with good partnership between the health system and the university how to make it work. And so I'm very proud of that. So I think we've navigated education fairly well during COVID. And fingers crossed, we can continue to accomplish that. 

SHARON HOSTLER: What, as you think to the future and strategic planning, but as you think short and intermediate, what the impact has been on your nurses, and your aides, and your residents, fellows of COVID, of the stress of their own vulnerability and of their own exhaustion, and especially at the beginning of the unknown of what were the protocols, the correct protocols and procedures? What have you seen as impact on what-- I suspect you've seen waves of different responses. And how do we preserve these people going forward as healthy, committed folks? 

CRAIG KENT: So the impact has been unbelievable, unimaginable. I'm sure I could think of other words to describe it. And I feel that. I spend a lot of time wandering around, meeting people, and connecting throughout the health system. And so I see it. I feel it. You can sense it. 

Early on, it was fear. Just an unbelievable amount of fear. I guess all of us, everybody on the call, myself included, had a fear. We didn't know what this was going to be, how it was going to evolve, coupled with changes in the way that we had to practice. And I'll emphasize one that I thought was really important. 

If you're a nurse, actually, as a nurse, you like to touch people, you like to hug them, you communicate with patients that way. You like to connect with the patient's family and provide reassurance. And that was an unbelievable struggle for our nurses to know that, for a while, patients' families couldn't even come in and that connection was gone. 

And then you couldn't touch a patient. You wanted to hug somebody and say, we got you through this. You're going to go home today. But you can't do that. And for a group of people that cared deeply about patients, that's why they are nurses. And probably true of many of our physicians, too, to have that kind of disassociation was very frustrating for people. 

So then I think we got used to it. But then what happens is it just started wearing on and on and on and it just kept going on. And that's where we were before Christmas break. No light at the end of the tunnel and it was just going on. And that was probably the lowest I've seen the morale at our institution. Just people were worn out. 

And you have to realize that these are people that actually have home lives, too. And when they go home, it's just as hard because they're trying to figure out how-- their kid's at home on Zoom, and who's going to take care of the kid when I'm at work, and all of these stresses at home and you couple them together, and it was so difficult. 

I mentioned earlier that I think it's a little bit better now, but I'm worried. I'm looking at these numbers nationally and the stress on hospital systems around the country. And yes, we're vaccinating as quickly as possible, but I think there's going to be another low point. And that's my sense. 

How are we supporting people? I'll give you two dozen things that we've done to try to help. I don't know if they have helped. The part that I actually like, and I don't know if this is unique to UVA Health, but I think we're supporting each other. So that somebody is low and the other nurse on the ward says, yeah, I know it's bad, but this is what I did. 

Just having outward conversations about the frustrations we have and the issues we have. We're working our way through it. There isn't a magic bullet. There's no easy solution to this. But one way or another, we're working our way through. And I think we're not done yet. I think we're going to have another low coming forward. 

SHARON HOSTLER: How are we doing about recruiting nurses? [INAUDIBLE] opening those new beds was pretty fantastic when you did that at the beginning. So the concern is where are the future nurses?

CRAIG KENT: Yeah. So you have actually just come on to my number one priority, my number one as the EVP of the health system priority, and that's to staff those beds. Helps us economically because we're paying for the beds, even though they're not staffed now. But that's the least of the worries. 

We have all these people out there that want our care that we have to turn away because those beds aren't staffed. So I just finished a meeting right before this with HR at the University and recruitment of not just nurses, but all medical center people who would help staff a bed is my top priority. 

How are we doing? In the numbers I just looked at before coming on this call, are that we're up about 150-170 nurses because it's how many did you recruit and then how many left. And it's the balance between the two. We're up about 150-170 nurses for the last year, but not enough, not near enough. 

I guess the last thing I would say about that is that we're not the only ones out there that are trying to recruit nurses. Everybody is. But this means we have to do it better. We have to be smarter and better at doing it than other places because we have to staff those beds. We have to do that. But a really, really important issue and it's one that's at the top of my list right now. 

SHARON HOSTLER: So can we go back to the beginning, Craig, and you said we have 13,000 employees, and if you include our outlawing group, 19,000. And of that group, we've immunized how many did you say? 

CRAIG KENT: About 9,000. 

SHARON HOSTLER: About 9,000. OK. And you think that we can be up to about 1,500 a day in immunizations is what your goal is? 

CRAIG KENT: Yes. Today, if we had the vaccine, we could vaccinate I think it's 990 individuals. We have enough stations and time and people to vaccinate 990 people today, so 1,000 a day. I think as we get to our community and have more vaccine, we'd like that number to be 1,500 a day. I don't know how easy or difficult it is to get to that. Those are conversations that we're having internally right now. But that's our goal. 

We won't vaccinate 7,000 people next week because we need the vaccine. And we're getting shipments but we don't have enough vaccine to vaccinate 7,000 people next week. So it's interesting, there are a lot of places that have the vaccine, can't figure out how to get in people's arms. That's not us. We're putting it in people as quickly as we possibly can. We're just waiting on more vaccine to be able to move forward. 

SHARON HOSTLER: Because the county medical society on Wednesday night suggested that, in fact, we had vaccine but we didn't have takers. So help me understand that comment. That was from Bill Petri from our side and Gary Hall from Sentara. 

CRAIG KENT: Yeah, no, that's true. So a little surprising to us that the first of the 19,000, the first set were the frontline healthcare workers. Well, there's a lot of frontline healthcare workers that haven't been vaccinated. And we're still trying to figure that out. In fact, we had an hour conversation early this morning about this, is it that people don't want to be vaccinated or the logistics, of the holiday didn't allow it to happen, or is there some misinformation? Although, we've been pretty clear. 

So what we've done though, is said, well, OK, if there's some frontline healthcare workers who don't want it, then we'll go to the next level. And if there's people there that don't want it, then we'll go to the next level. And so that's the reason we vaccinated so many people is we didn't just pause for the first group and say, well, we're not going to give any vaccine until you-- we just said, OK, we've got a vaccine. Those chairs aren't filled. Let's go to the next level, the next level down. So that's the reason that we've been fairly effective. 

There is a conversation out there, which is the right one, at the state that just vaccinate people. And when you run out, we'll send you more. And the more you vaccinate, the more we'll send you. And so that's the approach that we're taking. We're just trying to get as many people vaccinated as possible, not get caught up in the politics and the complexities of it. And our hope is that the state will keep feeding us vaccine and we'll be able to keep moving forward. 

SHARON HOSTLER: And are you concerned about saving back the second dose? 

CRAIG KENT: No, but I might. I should probably be concerned, but I'm not. But we're not worrying about that at this point. And one of the reasons is that, and again, VDH and the state have said, if you can get these vaccines in, we're going to continue to give it to you. 

We're very committed, particularly for our frontline workers, to get that second dose in. We want that to happen. We're not going to do the England thing of just vaccinate everybody one time because the healthcare workers are so vital. But we're running on some trust that if we don't put a set of vaccine in the refrigerator for second line that we'll be able to continue to get access from the state. We're keeping our fingers crossed that turns out to be the case. 

SHARON HOSTLER: Well, I have many, many variations on the same question here about will retired UVA faculty have any priority in getting the COVID vaccine? How do the elderly retired faculty members at UVA, shall we rely on the medical center, shall we talk about our PCP, should be looking to CVS or Walmart? I mean, you've said you're going to have a unit that goes out. Where are the people in this audience going to, number one, find out, and show up, and get the vaccine administered if you're in this [INAUDIBLE] over 75 age group? 

CRAIG KENT: So it's a great question. I would say the answer to that question is still evolving. But I do think I have some direction. First of all, I think it could be as early as next week that we'll start vaccinating the greater than 75-year-old group. VDH is in charge, and so they'll make the decision as to when that is. Our most recent conversations with them suggest that they want to do the intake that you would work through VDH to sign up. 

SHARON HOSTLER: And so that's the online sign up for everybody who's listening, I guess? 

CRAIG KENT: Yeah. And then our role, at least at this point, is to just be there and help them get people vaccinated. And so that's the current plan that VDH is making the decisions about who and when, which I think is probably appropriate. It shouldn't be individual health systems making those decisions. It should be more of a uniform policy. So I think that's right. 

And some conversations at the VDH the end of last week about whether we should do the sign up or at this point, they want to do the sign up. And then we'll just mobilize our forces to show up and put the vaccine in. So I think that's where it's in. I think that maybe the advice to everybody on the call is get it where you can. If your doc's at Martha Jefferson, see if you can get it there. If your doc's at UVA-- My sense is it's all going to go through VDH and that's the direction that you should take. But if you find another track, [CHUCKLES] go that other track. 

SHARON HOSTLER: So you see yourself, when you say that health system is going to do an outreach and be helpful, it's going to be through VDH? 

CRAIG KENT: Correct. 

SHARON HOSTLER: It's going to be where they tell you to go, right? 

CRAIG KENT: No, absolutely. 

SHARON HOSTLER: People have been thinking that we were going to hear from our UVA PCP about, well, Northridge has got it now or you should come to JPA or Fontaine. So that is not what this audience should be thinking about? They should be registering with VDH and following those instructions? 

CRAIG KENT: That's correct. That's absolutely correct. Now whether it evolves over time in a different way, I don't know. But at this point, VDH wants to do the registration. And we're really just the purveyors of the vaccine. 

SHARON HOSTLER: And do you see yourself purveying through the tent out at Kmart or do you see yourself going to different sites? 

CRAIG KENT: Well, starting next week, we're going to put a bunch of our people in the tent. So we're helping there. My sense is that at some point, though, just to expand capacity, we'll probably go to a separate site. And we're looking at a number of different options right now as to where that would be. 

Right now, we're vaccinating our healthcare workers at the cancer center. But then there are stairs, parking is difficult, it's congested. And so we don't see that as probably very viable as we get into the community. So we're exploring other sites where we might put our people. Again, all well coordinated with VDH, which I think is really important. 

SHARON HOSTLER: Well, I think that the spokespersons for the health system have been fantastic. It's been fun to see Costi. It's been wonderful to see Bill Petri having, from pediatrics Leigh Grossman having, having our folks out front and center and being so capable and competent on the Zoom and in all the kinds of different places they're showing up. I forget what did Bill-- he played the trumpet or the trombone on the lawn. But I think that's one of the creative aspects of Zoom and our faculty during this particular time. 

CRAIG KENT: So if I can second that, we really have done this well and it's because of our expertise. And if you look at our infectious disease, our laboratory people, the specialists we have here, these are nationally known, recognized thought leaders here in Charlottesville. And what a blessing to have those people at hand and to help us make the decisions, help us create the strategies. 

So again, I think we're all blessed. I'm blessed. Because I'm a vascular surgeon. But we just have some very, very talented people here. And I think that's one of the reasons that we've accomplished so much over the last few months. 

SHARON HOSTLER: Well, we have three minutes, Craig. And so they're yours to sign off in any way, shape, give us the inspiration to go forward. 

CRAIG KENT: Yeah, no, absolutely. Well, first of all, thanks for inviting me. It's been fun. I love the questions. I wish we were actually together in a room and I could shake some hands afterwards and get to know you personally. And there'll be a time when that can happen. And I really look forward to that. 

I just sum by saying this is a great health system. It's a great university. Again, I'm unbelievably privileged to be given the opportunity to help lead here. And I'm really excited about the future. I'm proud of what we've accomplished over the last 11 months. But I'm really, really excited about the future. It's going to take us a little bit longer, to get to that future than maybe we initially anticipated. But we will get there. We will absolutely get there. 

I guess I'd finish by saying please stay connected in any way possible. I know many of you are well connected with all of our faculty. And I appreciate all of that. But if there's things that we ought to be thinking about, doing differently, you have thoughts and ideas or advice, feel free to reach out to me. Feel free to reach out to others. We want this to be a partnership going forward. And we really appreciate you being part of the UVA Health team. So thank you. 

SHARON HOSTLER: Thank you. Be careful. We will. You know that. 

[LAUGHTER] 

We don't have clinic. We don't have to go to the OR. We've got lots of ideas. 

CRAIG KENT: But you have a lot of years of experience and some pretty good smarts about this place. So yes, thank you, and it's welcome. 

SHARON HOSTLER: Before we sign, there are several questions again about where do we sign. So where you sign up, the best of my knowledge, is instead of the Thomas Jefferson Health district, we are the Blue Ridge Health District. And you need to go to the state and then to the Blue Ridge Health District and look for the 1B, that's us. And you need to check there are other groups in there, like postal workers and other essential workers, over 75, it's very short, online, and submit it. And they will acknowledge that they've received it almost immediately. 

And then you're not to contact them again, stay tuned, which is what I was just pestering Craig a little bit about, is stay tuned how are we going to find out. And he's clarified that we're going to hear from VDH is the way we're going to find out. 

So I'll ask Jessica to send that out to folks. I don't have it access in front of me right now. But it's a very quick form. It showed up, I think on Thursday morning was when it was first posted. And so I'm hoping that it'll be first come, first serve and we should get there next week. Thank you. 

CRAIG KENT: Yeah. Nice to meet you all. Look forward to doing it in-person. Thanks for inviting me. Appreciate it. 

SHARON HOSTLER: Another year. Bye-bye. 

CRAIG KENT: Bye-bye now. 

SHARON HOSTLER: Yep.

ANNOUNCER: All right, it's being recorded. So you guys can start when you're ready.

KATHRYN THORNTON: Okay, hello I'm Kathryn Thornton, Vice President of the UVA Retired Faculty Association. And I welcome you to this new academic year. Our president Dick Brownlee is happily enjoying the perks of retirement this week. So we'll do our best to carry on in his absence.

We have a wonderful lineup of speakers this year, and you can find them listed on our webpage, just Google, UVA RFA to find it. We'd all hoped to be back in person this year, but we reluctantly decided for everyone safety and for long range planning to continue Zoom throughout this academic year. We continue to hold out a small ray of hope, a sliver actually for an in-person garden party in the spring, but we don't have any definite plans at this point.

On a positive note, one advantage of having all of our presentations on Zoom is that we are able to record them. And we've archived all of last year's presentations. If you missed any, you can find links to those on the webpage, under schedule and past events. And we'll add this year's presentations to that repository.

Again, this year, the board decided to waive membership dues. If you would like to voluntarily contribute to the ongoing expense of presenting these wonderful speakers, there's a support link at the top of the webpage. There's one special series of presentations that I wanna draw your attention to. In January, Jim Childress will talk about, ethics in the time of COVID. Following this presentation, Jim will lead for subsequent seminars on COVID topics throughout January and February. If you're interested in engaging more personally, more in depth with these important and timely topics, watch for information coming out later this year, we appreciate Jim offering the series.

And another thank you, before we get started, I want to acknowledge and sincerely thank Leonard Sandridge and Phil Chase for their service on the board as they rotate off. And especially thank Phil for his service as president. They will be greatly missed, but we still have their email addresses. They can run, but they cannot hide. Thank you, Leonard and Phil.

And now to kick off our new year, we have an excellent speaker and a timely topic. Steve Cushman and Robert C. Taylor professor of English is very well known on grounds for his scholarship and many teaching awards. Steve will lead a panel discussing, teaching and learning during COVID. You will be joined by students Rambert Tyree, a third year law student, in Charlotte Paulussen, a fourth year student in the College of Arts and Sciences. As someone has been on the sidelines in this whole pandemic, I very much look forward to this discussion. As soon as I hand over to Steve, I'll disappear into the virtual audience. So before I go, I wanna personally thank Steve and Rambert and Charlotte, for being here with us today and for sharing their experiences and their insight. So over to you, Steve.

STEPHEN CUSHMAN: Thank you very much. Thanks for opportunity. Thanks Charlotte and Rambert. And thanks to everybody tuning in on a Monday afternoon. On or around December, 1910, human character changed. That's Virginia Wolf in a 1924 essay about modernism. And she has been intentionally provocative with a kind of tongue in cheek hyperbole, but it doesn't seem either tongue in cheek or hyperbolic to say, that on or around March 2020 higher education changed. The nature of those changes, whether it's good, whether for not so good, whether they're fleeting, whether they're abiding, these are all things that we wanna talk about this afternoon with you. We were joking a little bit, beforehand, the number of people I know, colleagues, I know who have retired, who begin by saying I got out just in time, right before COVID. If I could have a little cash back for every one of those, I might not be on this program at the moment. What we've decided to do is we're gonna go in alphabetical order by first name. So that will be Charlotte, and then it will be Rambert and then I'll follow up. And I've asked my two friends here to speak for roughly eight to 10 minutes about their experiences last year, I was collecting a little information before we started. Charlotte had one class fully in-person and parts of others. Rambert had no classes in person last year. And I taught in person the entire year with remote option. So I had people zooming into the classroom. So among the three of us, we cover all the possibilities. I think that there were last year. So with that in mind, Charlotte, go ahead then Robert, and then I'll come in and then we have a few questions people sent in and then we'll fill up any time with a conversation among the three of us. So thanks again to everybody and Charlotte, whenever you ready.

CHARLOTTE PAULUSSEN: Perfect. Thank you so much firstly for having me. Thank you for the introduction. It's great to join everybody, even though it's virtual. But as was mentioned, my name is Charlotte Paulussen and I am currently a fourth year in the College of Arts and Sciences, and also a first year master's student in the Batten School of Public Policy. And I was kind of the whole online virtual kind of the transition happened in the second semester of my second year. And then I spent all of third year kind of going between the in-person virtual format as was mentioned. And I think that there definitely were many positives.

There are definitely many negatives. And so I just kind of wanted to go into a couple of those. As was mentioned, I had one class that was fully in-person. And so this kind of consisted of us coming into the classroom, social distancing, and then usually we would have one large presentation screen at the front of the room in which people who weren't comfortable or were not actually in Charlottesville could join us from. So that was one of my classes. And then I had another class where it started off in person and then as numbers continue to rise, it got transitioned to a virtual format, but that consisted of everybody social distancing and pulling up the Zoom application on their own computer. And so I think that one, I'm just gonna go ahead and start with the kind of not so great and then end on like the positives that I think have really come from this experience. It was definitely really difficult to interact and actually feel engaged in the classroom just because when you are sitting either from your own desk, like I am right now and kind of joining over Zoom, or even when you're doing Zoom from the classroom, it's hard to make eye contact. It's hard to see the actual people that you're interacting with the professors, with the students. And so I really didn't feel like I knew any of my classmates very well, just because you didn't have the option interact outside of class when like kind of those normal interactions when you run into somebody, as you're leaving, you didn't really have that option with virtual. And so the whole classroom feeling and part of what makes college more than just online school and just like a job was eliminated. And with that, it was hard to stay engaged. So being at home and in the comfort of your own space is lovely. And you're able to take breaks and your boosts turn off your camera, but it is very difficult when you're surrounded by distractions continually just to kind of make sure that you're still paying attention and just with technical difficulties and stuff that offers a lot of complications that can arise kind of transitioning though to more of the positive sides. I find that the flexibility that was brought around with Zoom is incredible. And I really, really hope that a lot more of that stays. And I think in particular related to like not as focused on courses, but one of the things that I appreciate so much now is professors in their office hours.

Now that professors have online office hours, it honestly works better for students. Usually it works better for professors. They're able to take them when they want from wherever they want. And it really mimics those style in which students do group work, which is the log on. Usually it used to be like a FaceTime application, but they'll log on and they'll speak to each other from the comfort of their own home. And I think that this offers a lot of flexibility in the times and places that students can connect with their professors. And then additionally on Zoom, it was really nice to actually have, this is a smaller detail, but to have everybody's names, this was like one thing that was, and that I recognized after we went back in person was that, I didn't know everybody's name for the first couple of weeks and like still kind of getting the hang of it, but you don't have the option. Like right now I easily can see like Rambert's name. Like I automatically know that and I can call on them. And so now you'll have professors and it's kind of like, oh, like you, which is totally understandable, especially when we were wearing masks, but that was one thing that was really, really nice about Zoom. And then kind of the last thing, which I think going forward will be a really positive change is that, now that UVA has the experience and knows how to transition classes online, this can be used in so many other cases. One of the first ones I can think of is that my friend recently tore her ACL and therefore is stuck at home because she's a fall risk. She's also just recovering from surgery.

And so now, because UVA is adapt and they kind of equipped to transition all of these courses online, professors are fairly familiar with the process and how to do it. It makes it a lot more flexible for those who may not be able to come into class due to medical reasons or other concerns. So I think kind of overall statement while I definitely prefer in-person learning to virtual learning and have recognized that over the past four weeks, I do think that there are a lot of flexibility and there are a lot of options that have been opened up where we don't need to necessarily adopt all of the things that we've learned from a virtual format. But I think that such as like virtual office hours, the option for virtual class, I think that if some of the aspects stay, I think it would facilitate the learning experience for students and I would guess professors as well. And that's about all I have.

STEPHEN CUSHMAN: Wonderful that's great Charlotte. Thank you very much. And well you said several things, I think I'd like to ask questions about maybe Rambert will too, and maybe our questions will anticipate things. People out in the audience might have asked had they had the chance. Thank you so much. All right Rambert over to you.

RAMBERT TYREE: Hi everyone. So again, I'm Rambert Tyree. I'm currently at three L and my third and final year at the law school. I am a 2019 graduate from the McIntire School of Commerce. And before I start, I just wanna thank Steve for hosting this conversation. I wanna thank the panel for having me. I wanna thank Charlotte for her comments earlier. Kind of, as I've mentioned,

I've been fortunate to have a very robust set of experiences in my time here at UVA. In my four years in undergrad, I encountered many different professors with different teaching styles, different backgrounds, different subject areas. And I truly enjoyed the level of engagement I interacted with from my peers, and level engagement I experienced professors, faculty, and I found it to be a very inclusive and immersive time. So with that being said, going into my one year of law school, I anticipated the challenge, I anticipated the rigor, but I was soon met with difficult, it's a much higher, a much broader set of studies within the law.

And it was very difficult, but yet I found myself getting into a group around that spring break time and the second semester. And as we all remember, that was kind of when things, as Steve mentioned changed forever. With that being said, we all went home. We were all kind of subjected to the virtual remote learning. And that was an experience where I found myself in a reflective state. I noticed that some professors were able to adapt very quickly. I had professors where their class, the experiences that we had after, I guess the pandemic began were very similar to the experiences we had before. Very engaging, a lot of class participation, a lot of discussion between peers throughout the class with use of breakout room and other really innovative methods. But in a similar response, I've found some professors much less prepared, much more ill equipped to handle the technology and understandably so, it's drastically different for professors that may have been teaching under a particular style for 15, 20, 25 years to in a snap, you know, change everything. And especially with the level of confusion that methods like Zoom and other kinds of virtual learning mechanisms can have. I understand that it was difficult for them to make those changes.

With that being said, going into my second year, I found that I would have to be fully remote, fully virtual. And for me, this was definitely a difficult change. I'm the type of student that likes to ask a lot of questions. I raised my hand a lot, very engaging. I love to just further the conversation through maybe points that weren't fully clear, or maybe ask questions that may be tangential to what we're learning. And a lot of the Zoom methods didn't really offer that same sort of engagement. For example, I had one course that was not live and was fully recorded. So every course was a video lecture that we would watch after it was uploaded some 24 hours or within 24 hours to start a class. And for me, as someone that likes to ask questions and engage, it was very difficult to fully digest the material to fully become invested in class. I'm in a similar vein, some classes would allow or would even recommend that you not have your cameras on. And for me, being able to make those connections with the professor, whether that'd be, I'm just looking in their eyes as they speak, whether that being able to understand kind of the nuances in what they're saying through subtle inflections or through subtle comments within the material, that was much more difficult to achieve over Zoom.

With that being said, though, I also found a lot of, positivity from the change of pace. You know, for example, as Charlotte mentioned, being able to, be home in the comfort of your home while going through lectures and going through classes, it allowed for an ease of comfort, especially in a time where things were very uncertain and many of us were unsure. I'm a bit scared with the status of the pandemic at the time.

Another positive that I can take from the experience was just the way that to see that people were able to continue in very difficult times, to be able to continue our pursuit of education, our pursuit of academic excellence. It definitely gave us something to look forward to. Speaking a bit broader from the, in the class experience. Last year, I was a peer advisor and in the law school, the peer advisors work very closely with the one L class and the one L class had a very difficult time adjusting. I know my one L year UVA itself as a law school prides itself on collegiality, on involvement, on engagement and just a level of comradery in the class. And one L class struggled to, to build those bonds, to make those connections. And I think much of that was due to sort of a level of personality, that's kind of hindered through these virtual screens. With that being said, and looking at the current class, I'm currently the head peer advisor or the co-head of the program and seeing these one Ls I've noticed, and we've all noticed that there have been much more able to build those bonds, to build those connections, to become more acclimated into the culture, into the class.

And even for the last year one Ls when they're starting to make those connections. So as I reflect on kind of that virtual experience, I think that it made a lot of my faculty. It made a lot of us all be much more flexible, be much more kind of able to adapt, able to adjust, able to persevere, you know, work on building that grit. And if I were to make one kind of grand reflection on the experience as a whole, I definitely found myself really impressed, really grateful, really appreciative of the efforts that faculty and staff went to, to make the experience as seamless as possible for us. I had professors that would had really creative ways of doing office hours.

I've had a faculty that were really, the same faculty that I would go to lunch with maybe once a month, they were interested in doing virtual lunches and professors taking multiple students out to virtual lunches, virtual happy hours or virtual kind of office hours. I think that level of commitment is really impressive and really something that I don't wanna take for granted moving forward. Thank you all.

STEPHEN CUSHMAN: Wonderful thank you very much, Rambert. Thanks to you both. My contribution here will be, I guess, to represent the professors and then we'll see how it goes in more general conversation. In the summer of 2020, we were given the choice whether or not to teach online or to teach on Zoom. And I think like everyone else, I was anxious about health and what that would mean, but the more I listened to Mitch Rosner and the people who were showing us from the medical community, the more I trusted that UVA was doing everything it could to make the classroom very safe, relatively safe compared to other kinds of places. So I threw in my lot with teaching in person. I was through most of the Fall. I had the most of grounds to myself, especially on Friday mornings. I would come in and it was pretty much empty, but I noticed a few things and I'm gonna try to be fair in both directions, listening to Charlotte and to Rambert. The great pleasure for me, I think was the degree of courage and compliance and adaptability shown by students, both in person and on Zoom. And I was teaching in person with the remote options. I was doing both each class and I was masked with the people in the room who were usually the majority and then the people at home were on Zoom. And it by large particularly in the Fall, I was very, very impressed with everybody.

A lot of people were far away like you Rambert at home. And that everybody was trying to make it go. I also was very, very impressed. And I don't think these people have received quite enough commendation with the ITS staff. The IT staff. when I walked into the classroom on August 30th, there were a couple of first day glitches at with the technology and students and I looked at each other and said, well, the one thing we know is that in the entire history of the universe, no one has ever done this thing this way before. And so there was a wonderful sense of improvisation, really interesting strategies that students had for opening up several computers at once in the room. And so having several cameras going at once.

But what I did find out and what I did come away feeling, and I was talking with Kathy, Kathy Thornton, a little bit about this beforehand, if we're going to try to do, as Charlotte was saying more flexibility in the classroom, say for the friend with a torn ACL. We are gonna need more reliable technology. And I saw this when I was attending a meeting that was being conducted in person, but I was Zooming in and it really felt like a pretty second rate experience Zooming in. I was a little embarrassed. I thought back to some of my own classes, what the zoomers must have been going through. What I discovered, I taught four classes in person. And what I discovered is, the quality of the class for the people at home, varied wildly with the technology in our classroom, there were some classrooms that had wonderful setups, good cameras and so on.

There were some classrooms that had just acoustic, dead spots and a camera that didn't move and was always all lit only on me. And that really isn't gonna cut it. I don't think if we're gonna try to do this going forward. The other plus for Zoom that I was blind to, but now I see is that is the whole range of students who suffers from what she, they, or he would call social anxiety. And I had a number of students say to me, you know, on Zoom, I am more able to feel comfortable speaking. So these are people who are not Rambert Tyree or Charlotte Paulussen necessarily, but these are people who in a classroom in person don't feel comfortable speaking and somehow Zoom works for them. And I took seriously. And I'm mindful of that now, going forward when now that we're back in person teaching, I've tried to think about how to keep those people in the mix.

I would like to introduce a new piece of evidence though, counselor and ask you both something, 'cause you both use the word flexibility, which is interesting because I did a little research. I Googled benefits of Zoom instruction and what should come up first, but Zoom's own explanation of why you should be on Zoom, but I thought, well, this is interesting.

Let's go right to the source. And here are the four things, the four principles that Zoom says we should keep in mind. And I really would be interested to hear what each of you would say. Number one, access to increased educational resources. I'm just gonna give them neutrally and then we can talk about them. Two, flexibility for the learner. So you both have said that. Three, valuable global interchange. Four equal opportunities for students and teachers, regardless of location. Charlotte you wanna first crack at any of those?

CHARLOTTE PAULUSSEN: Yeah, no, I can definitely. I'm kind of still thinking about the first one, the access to increased educational resources. And I think that in some senses, I do think that's true. And one of the first examples that comes into my mind is the option to screen share. And while yes, sometimes that took quite a while to actually get the hang of, I do think that being able to screen share, say taking notes, that's like print in particular. I think that that's useful when you think about individuals who have trouble seeing sometimes and have visual impairments and sometimes sitting in like the back of a large lecture hall, or even a small classroom, it's difficult to see notes that are written on a chalkboard on a whiteboard, especially if the handwriting of a professor or somebody is a little difficult to understand. And so I think in that sense that like the option of screen share is definitely an educational resource that wasn't there in the past. But I think that kind of conversely Zoom, the just not being in person and not being able to see somebody work that out and kind of like the hand to mind connection. I think that that's largely eliminated over Zoom. So I think that, I don't know that there wasn't like a large point to that, but just that yes, it does have increased educational resources, but I think it's a trade-off with every benefit that comes, you can also point to things that are lacking with a Zoom and virtual platform.

STEPHEN CUSHMAN: Sure. Okay, good. And so you make an excellent point about screen-sharing also there's closed captioning, which is I've seen used. It's sometimes hilarious and the things that gets wrong, but at least it's there. Another thing that a student I was talking to this morning pointed out it, and one of you spoke about this breakout rooms. Breakout rooms some people find very useful. All right. So those are all, that sounds good. Rambert, you want to add anything here?

RAMBERT TYREE: Yeah, I think, you know, my initial impressions are that facially all four seem to be valid. I would just make note, I think I'd be remissed to admit that I do think regarding the last point, regarding equality or equity, or it's not quite sure but I don't remember how it was framed exactly, but I think we ought to not, we ought not ignore or assume that every student has equal access, equal opportunities. I know for myself, which I have forgotten that first semester of being a virtual, I really struggled with kind of participating in a lot of discussions because I had an old laptop that I'd had for five, six years, which had difficulties connecting to the internet, which I didn't have a very strong internet connection at home at the time. I also had trouble with my audio within the laptop.

So, growing up, I've always been a low income student. And for me, that was something that was not readily accessible or readily, you know, kind of fixable in the moment. So I think it's a bit problematic for us to assume that everyone is having or able to have the same experience. I do however, advocate for the flexibility that Zoom does provide. I know I'm currently in especially in a graduate school setting, many students have families, many students have other obligations that are just as important as their academic studies.

So I think providing, people to be able to be with their children while they're in class, or being able to possibly watch a lecture afterwards, because they have to take care of a family member. I think that's something that is very beneficial and something that Zoom provides that in-person instruction doesn't quite equate for.

STEPHEN CUSHMAN: Wonderful. And you make a very good point. The language of number four is equal opportunities for students and teachers, regardless of location. What's so interesting about what you say is I think the intent of that language by the Zoom people is equal opportunity for everybody to be anywhere around the globe. But in fact, you also point out it can cut the other way, depending on what kind of access you have to broadband, what kind of computer you're on all of that. Okay, here's the one I would like to introduce with a smile on my face and all Goodwill, but I think you will appreciate that there is room here for a little back and forth. And maybe some of my colleagues out there are wondering too. I'd like to go back to this word flexibility. And I'm gonna presume on many years of friendship with you, Rambert to just say what I think, and Charlotte, I've met you once before this. So I'm gonna presume that now you and I are friends too, and I can say this. Where does flexibility leave off and slacking begin? I'll leave it like that and then you can ask me what I mean, or we can come back. Charlotte you wanna start?

CHARLOTTE PAULUSSEN: Yeah, I can do. I think my first thought in relation to that is engagement and in particular, I'm kind of coming on the behalf of the student perspective of course. But when you do have the option to say, take a Zoom class from your room, from your bed, I know that that was like a very, very common thing, especially in undergraduate studies. I think that it definitely opens up the option for lack of engagement and also what could be termed slacking. That being said, though, I think it also is really important to recognize the impact of the COVID and pandemic on students' mental health. And so I think it's in that sense, really difficult to determine what is term "slacking", because what maybe before would be turned kind of like, oh, they're like not doing as much work. Maybe that's all that, that individual can kind of master up the attention and effort to do so. And so I think that with flexibility and with Zoom, it's kind of difficult to determine what is normal quote unquote normal. I know that we've always talked about like, oh, this new normal, but I think that Zoom in that sense really provided like, it really adjusted for students and what they needed at the time. And I would like to say what professors needed the time as well I know that it was a little more difficult on their behalf because professors actually had to figure out the technology. But I think that it's kind of difficult to determine what would be digital, like what would be termed slacking when so many people were under such mental duress because of the pandemic and health concerns and everything like that.

STEPHEN CUSHMAN: That's very well said. That's very well said. My question was the geographic one, is there a boundary? And where would it be? But I think you did very, very well to speak in ways that many of your peers would probably endorse. Rambert, how about you?

RAMBERT TYREE: Yeah, I really wanna second and reiterate Charlotte's point. I think that was really well said. Now you mentioned you intended for the question to be along geographical lines. Could you explain more?

STEPHEN CUSHMAN: Well, as in, I'm happy to elaborate on why I asked and all of that, but what I meant was not geographical on a map, but I'm asking, is there a boundary between, this is flexible, this is flexible. this is flexible. Now I'm taking advantage. Now I'm taking advantage. Now I'm taking advantage.

RAMBERT TYREE: Yeah, that's a very interesting question. I think that boundary has always presented itself, whether that be the level of that could be analyzed through the level of participation in a class. You know, some students may be much more quick to respond much more active, much more proactive, and a similar sense, some students may just come to class leave as soon as the time hits. So I think that's always presented itself. I think there's Zoom it does present itself in a bit more unique ways. However, I think the benefits of flexibility outweigh any potential kind fears of slacking.

I think for myself, I, for reasons external to the academic experience, all of my classes, I guess last year, last semester were virtual and they were all before 12:00 pm. So I had a class that met three days a week at 8:00 am, and I attended every single class and every single class that class was 90 to 95% fully occupied virtually. So I think that, that just goes to speak to the level of, we speak of the level of student and the level of kind of academic rigor that UVA prides itself on. And I think that a lot of that is demonstrated through students commitment even in virtual spaces. So I think fears of slacking and fears of students taking advantage of the system will always be present. But I think that the students that are committed to this academic pursuit in a virtual context are committed.

STEPHEN CUSHMAN: Okay, do we wanna talk any more about that? Should we let that topic go?

RAMNERT TYREE: If you'd like to elaborate as to kind of--

STEPHEN CUSHMAN: Well, I'll give you my surveillance camera observation, which is I started a class January of 2021, 25 students room in the nursing education school, not a great room, 'cause the camera only looked at me, but we did have a big screen with all the zoomers. So I had 25 students first day 21 people came in person. High. High percentage, of the four who were started out on Zoom, one I know it was a health issue. So no question, no question. We never fell below the majority coming to class, but it got awfully close, awfully close a couple of times. One was, and I thought this was interesting, on rainy days now I don't think I've got, I think I'll Zoom in.

All right, fine. Okay not everybody likes the rain, but then it got even worse on sunny days and I would leave to come to my classroom and I would walk across the lawn and I would see the lawn carpeted with students with their laptops up you're nodding Rambert you wanna see what I did, or anticipate what I'm saying?

RAMBERT TYREE: Yeah I can, I definitely understand that sentiment. And I, for myself, I spent the semester virtual at home in Newport News Virginia, but many days I saw classmates that were present virtually in class, but they were, out on the lawn, maybe at a restaurant something, somewhere sunny enjoying weather. And I do think that does get a bit tricky and that can get a bit muddy. I think that those fears can be alleviated if the class experience is the same. So I think if students are participating, if students are engaging with the material thoughtfully, reasonably, I would be interested to hear maybe your concerns, if you would still be concerned if students were depending on their location?

STEPHEN CUSHMAN: I think Charlotte, do you wanna say anything?

CHARLOTTE PAULUSSEN: Yeah, I think you definitely raise a really interesting point. Kind of the first thing that pops into my head is like, when I see students who are like doing errands during class, I think that like there isn't inherently an issue with say doing class outside. I know that for some people going back to what you said about social anxiety and so like that some people feel more comfortable in different environments.

And so I think that if they're still actively participating, as Rambert said, and still the class experiences is the same, then I don't think it's as much of an issue. But I do think that like it becomes when people stop participating, when people say are turned off their cameras are not answering polls, are not participating in the breakout rooms when it's just silent, I think then it becomes a little bit of like, we need to look into this, but to the extent, like if people have their cameras on and are still answering questions, then I think that, that's where flexibility. And that's where the flexibility offered by Zoom is really showing how well it works.

STEPHEN CUSHMAN: Okay. So that's good. I will introduce a notion for which I just thought of a term. Everybody watching this, except for the two of you is retired faculty. One of the thing, and my retired colleagues may not agree with this at all, but I'll put it out there anyway. One of the things that a teacher feeds on in a way that makes a teacher able to generate the kinds of experience a student might like to have is what I'll call the pedagogical ecology of response. You respond to me, I respond to you, you respond to me, I respond to you. And that's a loop that is energy producing. The problem with saying, I'm not trying to say, this is exactly what you said, but the problem was saying that flexibility for students is the paramount thing. Is it underestimates the degree to which I'm able to do a better job if I feel you are plugged in. And I don't mean plugged in with your machine. I mean, plugged in mentally.

And that's what started to, I started to feel towards the end of the last semester when I'd be looking at at more and more faces on the big Zoom screen at the back of the room, more and more of the faces elevated towards the sun, which is a fine thing. The sun is an important source of much that we need. And I just thought, okay, so how do I keep performing active engagement of my own? What would you say to that?

RAMBERT TYREE: I would say that I think that this is a bit risky. I think that most often that those fears can be alleviated. If there are kind of a few good men, a few good students that are willing to kind of lead the charge and lead that participation. You know, I myself, in my past experiences, I've been in classes where, there are about 15, 20 people and only maybe four or five people are willing to share, are willing to engage. And that's an in-person kind of experience that I've had, which, kind of going along with the prompt that that would undermine the level of engagement, the level of enthusiasm, the level of kind of energy that bubbles in the room.

I think it may be much more kind of intimidating to have an experience in which it seems as though the majority of the spaces for looking at you through the screen seem unengaged and disinterested. But I think that a few students prompting that conversation for the class, ideally that can lead to kind of a greater energy in the room and the Zoom room and the experience. But I do understand that that can be kind of concerning.

STEPHEN CUSHMAN: Okay, all right good. Charlotte any other thoughts? Or should we leave that one and go onto some questions people have?

CHARLOTTE PAULUSSEN: I would just quickly jump in really quickly. I think that you definitely raise a really good point. I remember in one of my classes, the preview is fully online and the professors said like, yeah, like I make jokes. Like, hopefully they're funny, but everybody was muted. And it was just silent afterwards, which was awful. I felt so bed, and I think it was truly like, that was kind of the bottom, but I think that's kind of going off of what Rambert had said, if there are a few, I know that I'm always a very intentional like nodding and kind of giving those cues.

I think if there are like some students who do that also who recognize the importance of that. And I think that that could kind of alleviate some of those fears, but the reality is that that doesn't always happen and it's a lot easier to kind of tune off and not be as conscious of your like body signals when you are over a screen. And so I think that I can definitely see where it's difficult for professors to, in a lot of cases, be speaking to just a panel of like a blank wall. So I understand where those concerns come from.

STEPHEN CUSHMAN: Well, I think that all of my colleagues listening in would agree that one wants to focus on the few people who are truly engaged, not on the many who might not be engaged. And I think they all probably agree if they had the two of you in class, they could count on at least two people being right there for them. We did have some questions from people. And so I thought I would turn to those and then we'll see how much time is left. Two, versions of this.

And if you feel that you've already spoken about it, we can just say, see above. What surprised you most about the COVID experience? What were the surprise positives? Those are two different questions, but they seem to me the overlap. What surprised you the most about the COVID experience? What were the surprise positives? Rambert, you wanna start this round?

RAMBERT TYREE: Yeah, I think just further reiterate, 'cause I know some people have joined on. Further reiterating. I just think that what most surprised me was the level of creativity. A lot of professors took, you know, I like to think of myself as pretty technologically savvy and pretty aware, but professors were utilizing tools that I'd never heard of, creating ways to engage virtually that I could've never imagined. And that ended up presenting an experience, an academic experience that was very different, but I've found to be very valuable.

I was able to take a lot from those classes, even though they were fully remote. I also just found professors to be in faculty as a whole to be just as I mentioned, again, very committed and you assume that the faculty care and you assume that, they want to help, but the level and the levels of the lengths that they were going to assist were above and beyond, for students that may have had difficulties kind of being able to meet, for example, there was a one L in my advisee section that due to some kind of travel restrictions was in South Africa the entire year. And right, this was during the kind of the height of the pandemic and that student wasn't able to have the traditional one L experience, but yet professors were able to meet with that student virtually go over the material office hours due to the time difference. And I think those sorts of kind of commitments really just surprise me above and beyond.

STEPHEN CUSHMAN: Great. Good, thank you, Charlotte.

CHARLOTTE PAULUSSEN: Yeah, I definitely am kind of agreeing with everything that Rambert said. I think what actually surprised me was just the faculty and professors and how firstly like accommodating they were. So like, even though I had one professor who completely rewrote his entire syllabus two weeks into online learning, because he realized that students weren't necessarily engaging. It was a little too much and too fast paced for everything that was going on and just seeing how willing he was to meet everybody where they were currently was just incredible to see. And I don't wanna say surprised because he's an incredible professor. And I think like I would hope that, that would be the case, but that was great to see. And then also my, so my family actually lives in the Netherlands. And so I was actually in Holland for a little bit and was stuck over there, but was able to join as Rambert gave an example was able to join from online.

And even though there was a time difference and everything, it was just nice that, that was one thing that I didn't have to stress about. I wasn't stressed about missing my classes because of this whole pandemic and everything, and that I was stuck in another country. I could just easily join class, explain the time difference to my professor. And that was really, really great experience.

STEPHEN CUSHMAN: My surprise is comparable. It was two consecutive weeks of a graduate seminar, which met Friday mornings during February, which you may remember had the winteriest weather of our winter last year. And on two successive Fridays, the university shut down. Well, I was sitting in my living room, looking out at a winter wonderland with 15 wonderful graduate students right in front of me, and I thought, this is where, this works, this is wonderful. I like this a lot. So that was a good, good moment. Another question. And this one, I think feeds back into things that particularly Charlotte started off talking about. Do you feel that you lost last year? If anything, do you feel that what you lost last year can be made up or do you think you're gonna go out of here with a hole in your UVA experience?

CHARLOTTE PAULUSSEN: Yeah, I can start off on this, I think firstly, in terms of education, I am a liberal arts major. A lot of my things are papers, so I don't really have any practical experience say as like nursing students or architecture students. So speaking from my experience, I don't think I lost anything in terms of education. I don't think there's a gap in my course load. I think that so I, you could quote unquote, say that I lost a year and a half of in-person during my undergraduate college career. I don't really think I lost anything just because I was able to make up say some like the more traditional college experiences in different ways.

So instead of large gatherings, it was getting coffee one-on-one social distance, which is just different. It's not necessarily per se good or bad. I do think though, that kind of more generally, we're at a very interesting point in the sense that I wanna say years one through three really are not familiar with UVA, with UVA Grounds.

I remember I had a third year, a couple of days ago, like ask me where the building was and like that's a total normal, like of course people get lost, but in like in a regular world, they would have been here for three days and familiar. And so a lot of the institutional knowledge, I think that UVA has had such as like lighting of the lawn, trigger treating.

So some of those more like quote unquote, like fun activities is gone in a lot of cases. And I'm seeing that with CIOs and organizations is that we don't really know how to do in person events and activities anymore. And so I think that that's one thing that has been lost and that I will be crucial to regain in the upcoming year, as much as we can with the risks that are still present with COVID and the variants. But in terms of education, I don't think anything's been lost. I just think it's gonna be more of making up what makes college kind of the college experience?

STEPHEN CUSHMAN: All right, okay. Rambert, how about you? Did you lose anything that you can or can't, or there's anything you can make up?

RAMBERT TYREE: I think many people would agree that in law school, the most formative year is the first year. I was fortunate enough to have had the institutional experience and kind of familiarity with Charlottesville and UVA from undergrad. And I was fortunate enough to also have had the majority of my one L year in-person. But I do feel for those that were the two Ls currently, those that were one Ls and had a hybrid or virtual experience last year, I think, as I mentioned earlier, a lot of them missed a lot of that formative kind of relationship building, and kind of the academic the foundation of your academic legal knowledge.

So for them, I feared that they may have missed that experience. I'm optimistic if you know anything about me now, I'm very optimistic person that they will have the time and capability to kind of regain those sort of relational foundations. But for myself, if I were to have lost anything, I think that second semester of my first year, which would have been after March 2020, I think so much of that semester was in flux and so much uncertainty. And, for example, our classes were passed. I think the entire university went pass fail. So there wasn't the same sort of academic rigor in that sense. So if anything, I would say that, that was in a sense loss, but overall, I don't think that I lost anything that was insurmountable or unforgivable, so I'm grateful for that.

STEPHEN CUSHMAN: Good, good. And I'll just throw in mine no matter what I said before about glitches and where's the line between flexibility and slacking. I have to say, this is my 40th year of teaching at UVA. And last year was a mountaintop moment for me. I thought it was some of the greatest experiences I've had in the classroom. And just because of, of so many things we've talked about that we overcame a lot and the UVA spirit, I think came through many, many times. We had a question about the med schools that we're gonna pass on because none of us can claim any kind of expertise there. And the question was, how will med students make up for lost opportunities for physical exam contact with patients? This seems to me a very real possibility.

Charlotte mentioned architects and people who do have that kind of in-person experience that has to happen. We just don't have anybody here who can speak to that. Our final question, and then we're coming down to the end here. This was one that I happily have lateraled to Rambert who volunteered to take a swing at it. Why is there so much resistance to COVID vaccination? Why is there so much resistance to COVID vaccination? How can we get to herd immunity?

RAMBERT TYREE: So I will preface this comment with my full acknowledgement. I do not have any medical or sociological expertise, but I do from my interactions with peers that have, and have not gotten the vaccine and family that haven't have not gotten the vaccine. I find that the reoccurring underlying sentiment is a level of just uncertainty and fear. And I think that's understandable, these are very uncertain times. These are very fearful times. It's scary to be in such a current time in our lives with so much in flux, so many different changes of guidelines and restrictions, and so many different, just heightened levels of fear of seeing, people pass away, at unprecedented rates at very trying times.

I think that so much of it is fear, grounded in fear. And I definitely think that's understandable, for certain communities that have had difficult relationships with kind of authorities and with histories of medical care. I think that it's understandable for them to be a bit fearful of just kind of uncertain developments. I can speak for certain comments that are in certain conversations I've had with people that they say they just don't know, it's so much of, "I want to, but I just don't know." And I think another compounding factor that builds is that fear so much misinformation in times where so many people presume to be experts or want to be experts or appear to, or desire to have expertise, knowledge. So much of us do not know. And so much of us don't know what we don't know.

So in those times it's so frightening to be kind of making such grand decisions. And so much of it, I think is just rooted in a lot of understandable self, kind of just I'll care for self, but I think so much of it is also just a fear. So I think with time, people have grown to become more accepting, to learn more. We're all learning so much more every day. I think we all know so much more about pathogens than we knew two years ago, but I think all of us were learning. So my biggest push is just for education, not for teaching people, the right between what's a fact, and what's not a fact, what's information, what's misinformation?

You know, so many rumors are flying around. You know, I was in an Uber a couple of weeks ago and I get in the car and the guy's sharing so many non-facts and so much misinformation. And I just think that these are things that are coming from everywhere and everyone's hearing so much and so much noise. It's difficult to really make a well-educated decision. So I think so much of it's just fear and misinformation.

STEPHEN CUSHMAN: Good. Thank you, Charlotte anything you wanna put on that?

CHARLOTTE PAULUSSEN: Honestly, no. That was wonderfully said.

STEPHEN CUSHMAN: Okay, well, I see 4:55 on the bottom of my screen, and I'm gonna, claim privilege of something like the last word, which is to say that one of the things I read regularly are stories about higher education around the country. This university has had to switched to online, and this university has had a switch to online and professors are walking out and they're quitting in the middle of the classes because students aren't masked and they aren't vaccinated, or they don't know if they're vaccinated or not. If you want to know what it means to teach at the University of Virginia, from my point of view, it's walking into a classroom right now with 100% mask compliance, cheerfully so, and from what we can tell 97% vaccination compliance. So I think that without ending on an embarrassingly chauvinistic moment or a tone, I would just say that this is a great surprise to me in many ways, but not also. It seems to me to make a lot of sense here at the university, particularly after what we saw last year.

And it is a great joy to be able to teach in a place in which people are willing to treat each other with care and respect and do the things they need to do to learn and go on together. So on that note, I'm very grateful to you, Charlotte. It's nice to see you without a mask. I think the last time we saw each other, you wore a mask and Rambert it's always a pleasure to see you. I think that I'm easily, right in assuming that the 33 something people who are attending have very much enjoyed hearing what you have to say and are very grateful to you as well.

So thanks to you both. Thanks to everybody who came in to watch us this afternoon and let us hope that we can take forward from here. That what we've learned from COVID without COVID itself. Thanks very much.

CHARLOTTE PAULUSSEN: Thank you.

RAMBERT TYREE: Thank you all.

SHARON: We're excited today to welcome you to the Retired Faculty Association's, if you would, our big holiday festive session with Jody Kielbasa. Jody is the Vice Provost for the Arts for the University of Virginia. And it came to us about 10 years ago with wonderful, wonderful experience and multiple degrees in theater and in acting, and came circuitously through acting himself as a director and producer in a theater and from Florida, both from the Sarasota Film Festival. 

Then coming after that was a smashing success, including, if you can imagine these days, a cruise to Cannes, which we won't even talk about that being a possibility here at the University of Virginia these days, and came to join us both to do the Film Festival, the Virginia Film Festival, but then to come officially into the academic side as a vice provost, and has been tremendously successful in bridging across the various disciplines of various schools and bringing us in many ways and bringing arts for the students, for the faculty, for our community, and for our alum. 

We've had an amazing integration of activities, especially around development in most recent past. I'm excited because we had drive in theater at the last Film Festival, but I'm going to let Jody take over from here. Just know that you've got closed caption. You know how to access that, and you can see this. The recording will be posted on the website. Mark your calendars for January 11 and we're going to get the latest dates, I hope, on vaccine from Dr. Craig Kent, who's the vice president of the health system. Jody, it's all yours. Thank you. 

JODY KIELBASA: Thank you, Sharon. I miss my former colleague in the provost's office, seeing Sharon on a more regular basis. So it's great to see you in this somewhat limited capacity today. And I'd like to thank all of you for inviting me today. It's a privilege to speak with you, and it's been a privilege for me. It's actually closer to 12 years now, Sharon, that I've been here at UVA, and I was brought in to recharge the Virginia Film Festival. And I will be speaking about that a little bit later on in my talk. But after about 3 and 1/2 years, I was fortunate enough to be appointed vice provost of the arts here at UVA. 

And it's been just an extraordinary time for me to be part of this here at the university and what I think is a real Renaissance for the arts at UVA. So I'm a very visual person being in the arts. Not a surprise. And I wanted to start off by sharing a video that our students made just a couple of years ago, about two years ago now, I think, and it's really quite extraordinary. This was completely filmed and edited by students, and it really gives you a sense of the breadth and the scope of the arts at the University of Virginia and perhaps most importantly, the student experience. So here we go. This is about two minutes long. 

[MUSIC PLAYING] 

So I thought that video really did a great job of highlighting the residential experience for our students here in the arts at the University of Virginia. And I perceive the arts as one of the four major bridges from the university into the community, along, of course, with UVA Health, the Curry, well, formerly the Curry School of Education, and K-12 education that they focus on. And of course, athletics. 

But the arts are just a remarkable bridge into our community. Of course, that allows our students to be able to perform and our faculty to perform before the general public for the general public to become on onto the grounds of the university itself. And very often our arts organizations are performing out in the community. A perfect example of that is the Virginia Film Festival, which I'm referring-- referred to as my day job, so to speak. I came here nearly 12 years ago to run the Virginia Film Festival. I think the university found itself at a crossroads with the festival. 

In fact, this year we just celebrated our 33rd annual Virginia Film Festival. But 12 years ago, the festival had been losing steam. In fact, the year before I came, the attendance had dropped to just about 11,000 people. And I'm very proud to say, for the last seven years, we've averaged over 30,000 in attendance until, of course, this year when we hit the pandemic and we were forced to pivot and be creative and do some very, very different things. 

So I just wanted to start off by giving an overview of the festival. In the past, most recently, we brought in Martin Luther King III. This was in partnership with the Center for Politics. One of the things I'm most proud about the festival is how it intersects across the grounds of the university with other departments and programs, and we've had a very dynamic and robust collaboration with both the Center for Politics and the Miller Center over the years. And Professor Sabato had produced a documentary about Charlottesville two years ago, coming off of the unfortunate tragic events of August 11 and 12th. And Martin Luther King III came in and offered a community address after the screening of that film. 

Kelli O'Hara, Broadway star. Oop, sorry. Here I've lost this. So I'm not sure if everybody's seeing this right now. I've lost this on my screen. So my apologies. Looking at Kelli O'Hara, who's a Broadway star, who's come in and won two Tony Awards, who's working actively. Here I'm back again. Thank you. Sorry for that. Who's working actively teaching a master class with our students. Kelli was in a film during the festival two years ago, and while she was here, offered a two-hour masterclass session with drama students as well. 

Christoph Waltz, one of my favorite actors of all time. Of course, I'm sure you recognize him. This is Mark Johnson, who's the longtime chair of our Advisory Board for the Virginia Film Festival and, of course, an alum of the University of Virginia. Moving on, one of our alums, Jason George, who currently stars in Grey's Anatomy, is seen here interviewing the director, Allen Hughes, best known for Menace II Society. 

We have a Festival Scholars Program during the Virginia Film Festival, and this is an intensive, week long program. 12 students are selected and they engage and interact with our festival guests, our artists. And that is led by NYU Professor Harry Shatner. And this is what the festivals looked like for the past seven or eight years. Now, an average of 30,000 attendees, approximately 3,600 on average student tickets distributed, and approximately over 2,500 UVA students attend the festival each and every year. 

Looking at the growth of the festival in these past 10 years, you can see when I first came in 2009, it was averaging about 15,000 people. The year before, actually, in 2008, it had been 11,000 at 10 day attendees. And you can see where it's topped out at 33,000. And it's been staying slightly over 30,000 for the last several years as well. Some of the past guests we've had, most recently in 2017, Spike Lee, who spoke in front of thousand people at the Paramount. Werner Herzog, the legendary documentarian who was really quite extraordinary. 

Colin Firth, the British actor, very popular when he was here. And of course, the legendary actress Shirley MacLaine, who gave this incredible discussion on her life and career during the festival at the Paramount Theater. And Danny McBride, who was born and raised in Virginia and is doing a lot of incredible work in television and film as well and spent a lot of time with our students when he was here. 

This past year, Sharon mentioned with the pandemic, we were forced to pivot pretty quickly. By June, it was increasingly clear we would not be able to do the festival as we traditionally did it in the Paramount, at the Violet Crown at Vinegar Hill, the Jefferson African-American Center in Culbreth, and in Newcomb theaters. And we need to be really creative. And so one of the things we did is we pivoted to an online format, and we still were able to screen over 70 feature films during the festival. We engaged 43 UVA faculty to participate in talkbacks with the artists that were virtually attending the festival. 

And then we really wanted to make sure that we could still engage the community in some safe, socially distanced manner. And we came up with two drive-in movie locations. This one my favorite, beautiful Morven Farms, of course, owned by the UVA Foundation. This is the setup at dusk before that lot became completely filled that you see-- full, that you can see that field. We were able to get in 120 cars there, and that's where we screened our opening night film, our closing night film, and our centerpiece films, which were one night in Miami, Ammonite, and Nomadland. 

It was just such a stunning and exceptional venue. This was an aerial drone photograph taken by Sanjay, our university photographer. And just as you can imagine, what a great place, a nostalgic way to go back and see drive-in movies. So it was a different year for us. We ended up having a little over 11,000 people who streamed movies virtually during the festival. We assume that means our attendance was somewhere around 20,000 because most of those streams were at least two people watching. 

So a little bit of a downturn, but that's to be expected. But we're really proud of the content and the fact that under tremendous stress during the pandemic, we were still able to present a very successful Virginia Film Festival and deliver that to our community, both the university community and the community of Charlottesville as well. And one program that I think is really, really important and distinguishes the University of Virginia from so many other university programs out there, is our students can attend all arts events here at the University of Virginia for free. 

They're right now averaging about $24 in student fees, and that goes towards their Arts Dollars. And that's a program that allows them to go see events at drama, music, the Film Festival, all for free during their time here at the University of Virginia. So it's really quite an extraordinary program, and that really is an enhancement for their residential experience. 

As I often tell students when I talk to them, when you go out into the real world, most of the tickets to events like these, whether it's a Film Festival where an entire pass could set you back hundreds of dollars, or it's going to the opera, or to a drama production, or a symphony that might cost $45, $75, $50. 

Here they have an opportunity to experience it for free. It's really, really an extraordinary program. And Terry and I, who I work very closely with in the arts, did some research and we found that we're actually one of the only universities that hosts a program like this where students do not have to pay anything into it. 

Just to take you to some of the things that we've done over the course of the years. We started an event every year called Arts Grounds Day. That happens at the very beginning of the year because we wanted to find a way to bring our first year students together and to give them an experience in the arts and show the opportunities that are available to them. So this is out on the arts grounds. We've been averaging about 1,000 students who attend. Of course, we feed them usually hamburgers and hot dogs and barbecue. 

And then we have a lot of entertainment with music that's happening from the various departments and programs and all the departments and programs table, and they give out tchotchkes. But better yet, and more important, students can sign up for activities, events to be able to volunteer. And it's the opportunity of our departments and programs in the arts right from the get go, within the first two weeks of the university calendar to introduce first years and the broader university community, but really focused on first years to the opportunities that are available to them in the arts. 

This was an incredible exhibition at the Fralin Museum of Art that focused on Georgia O'Keeffe, who was in residence here as a teacher very early on in her career at the very turn of the 20th century. And this is the Kluge-Ruhe. For those of you who are not familiar with the Kluge-Ruhe, it's located over on Pantops, and it is considered to be the most important collection of Aboriginal art in the United States and perhaps the world. And it is the only Aboriginal art museum outside of Australia as well. They're doing incredible work over there, and I'll circle back to them a little bit later. 

The Heritage Theater Festival. This is our professional summer theater program. It engages a lot of students, but it also engages professional actors. It's an outlet for UVA faculty to engage with other professionals that come in to design, direct produce and act in these shows. And they've been doing seasons now for over 40 years. For years, we didn't have a dance program. And Kim Brooks, who heads up our Dance Program now, again, a really great opportunity for our students to engage in dance. And this is the NO BS! Brass Band that came in from artists residency performing in Old Cabell Hall. 

And then we have the Arts Council here at the University of Virginia. And the Arts Council is a group of alumni that meet twice yearly to provide granting opportunities that they fund for students and faculty. They give out annually over $100,000. And two years ago, they launched a new program that recognizes a distinguished student artist that are voted on and selected by the department programs themselves. And this was the inaugural cohort. They all receive a gift, a prize essentially of $2,500. This gentleman over here, on the far left, used that money, that prize to purchase a bowstring for his cello, which I thought was just really awesome. 

For those of you who were at the Bicentennial Celebration, this is going back three years in time. This is one of my proudest moments at the University of Virginia, where I was asked to pull together a gigantic Olympic style opening ceremony to mark the 200th birthday of the University of Virginia and obviously mark the laying of the cornerstone by Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe. And here, you'll see we had 20,000 people on the lawn that evening for a nearly four hour presentation that highlighted over 850 student and faculty artists. 

Here we have our symphony playing an original composition that is about Jefferson founding the University of Virginia. This is the Martha Graham dance troupe that was in performing that evening. Really, really stunning projection mapping that happened on the rotunda during this event as well. I used to kid Terry Sullivan all the time that it took her nearly three years to refurbish and spruce up the rotunda, and I burned it down and brought it back up in about 60 seconds. 

Obviously, this is highlighting through projection mapping the incredible fire of 1895 that restored the rotunda. And it was amazing because this evening also involved live drama students who came out of that very entranceway that you see in the center, down at the bottom, through the scrim, carrying books as the students did, saving what was then the library, the rotunda. So it was really incredible evening to have such an interactive display of drama and music, highlighting the incredible architecture of the grounds of the University of Virginia and what was obviously UNESCO World Heritage site and celebrating the 200th anniversary. 

Special guests that evening was Leslie Odom Jr. who performed several numbers from Hamilton. And this is the closing finale, where we had the entire marching band playing the good old song on the stage in front of the rotunda, in front of the 20,000 alumni, students, and community members as well. Other things that we're doing around the University of Virginia. Two years ago, we partnered with National Geographic, and they have an event called National Geographic on campus. We were one of just two universities, along with the University of Miami, to host this, and along with my colleague Louis Nelson, produced this event. 

This is National Geographic photographer Jodi Cobb, who presented at the Paramount Theater. And this was a series of interactive events that we hosted both at the Paramount and in old Capitol that highlighted the work of our faculty and our students. This is Professor Matthew Burtner from the music department, who presented his ice opera, Auksalaq-- A Performance by the EcoSono Ensemble at the National Geographic on Campus. That was their title. I know it's grounds, but that's their ongoing production that they do in partnership with us. 

This is I-jen Fang from the music department, also, who's performing as part of that ensemble. And this is really incredible. This was water, the sound of water that she's doing along with ice in a bucket that was lit, as you can see, with the microphone right there, recreating the sound of herself essentially playing the water. Really, really stunning performance as well. This is art history Professor Giulia Paoletti on building cultural resistance during that event as well. And then the Virginia Film Festival sometimes does events during the course of the year. And this was a very special event. 

We screened the public with Emilio Estevez in partnership with the Virginia Festival of the Book and, of course, the Virginia Film Festival at the Paramount Theater. Emilio was a guest, and this is a film that takes place in a public library, which also serves to house a lot of the homeless people during cold weather. It's an incredible film. Emilio came in. We also partnered with the homeless coalition during this as well. And what was a really, really fascinating evening at the Paramount Theater. 

If you're interested, you can go ahead and you can watch the public. I'm not sure what platform it's available on now, but if you just Google it and it's a really, really great movie and a fun time as well. So I highly recommend it. And then this is MacArthur Genius Titus Kaphar, who was an artist in residence. And this is on the grounds talking to students in the School of Architecture during his residency here as well. 

In the past several years, we've focused a lot of money on fundraising to be able to grow and expand the arts programming that we do. The arts endowment is something along the lines of what the Jefferson Trust does here at the university that we hope to grow. We approximately have 800,000 in the endowment now, and we hope to one day get $10 million in there so that we can spin off money to fund additional programs each and every year. 

This was one of the first ones that we did. Bernstein's Mass that was directed by, I'm sorry, not directed, but produced by Michael Slon with the University Singers and a partnership with Bob Chappell, longtime drama professor and former head of the department, and Tom Bloom, the designer in drama as well. And it really was an exceptional performance that happened at the Paramount Theater utilizing students and faculty, and community members as well. Celebrating the 100th of Bernstein's Mass, 100th birthday of Bernstein, excuse me. 

And then about seven years ago, we started a President's Speaker for the Arts, and we launched that with Tina Fey in the Amphitheater. It was the first time she returned to the University of Virginia since she'd been there, and she gave a highly entertaining and incredibly inspirational talk in the Amphitheater in front of 6,000 students, faculty, and community members. And we've continued that most recently with Leslie Odom Jr. Tony Award winner for playing Aaron Burr in Hamilton. 

President Ryan moderated that conversation at the John Paul Jones arena in front of over 3,000 students, faculty, and community members. It was just a really wonderful afternoon. Here's just an excerpt from that. 

[VIDEO PLAYBACK] 

- My thesis, really is like it was really just the willingness to fail that got me to wherever I was trying to get to because if you're tight, you're scared of failure, you're scared of looking ridiculous, and you're scared of doing it too. You never get to see your real limits or you never get to find the person that's going to catch you when you fall. What I have found is the willingness to fail has very rarely, if ever, led to actual failure. 

It leads me to somewhere great, somewhere unexpected, and somewhere dangerous and exciting. Really it's just if you can just set aside your fear or really have the fear and do it anyway. You're going to learn. You're going to learn about-- you're going to win or you're going to learn. 

[APPLAUSE] 

[END PLAYBACK] 

So one of the things I wanted to share with you is that Leslie Odom Jr. wrote a book, that came out not long after he was here in 2017 in October performing at the Bicentennial. And I happened to pick up the book and was thumbing through it. And the very last chapter of the book talks about his time performing at the Bicentennial at the University of Virginia, and he gives a tremendous amount of praise to the university community and the broader community of Charlottesville for coming together after what happened during the summer of 2017. 

So if you have an opportunity, that book is called Failing Up. And one of the best lessons that we shared with our students is that art is about taking risks, and you need to take risks in your life, and it's OK. Sometimes you'll fall flat on your face, but you get up, you learn from that, and you move on. So that was a great, great talk that he shared with our students as well. Our university museums continue to grow and expand their programming. I talked to you about the Fralin-- Unexpected O'Keeffe exhibition. 

This is Professor Bill Wylie at studio art, who's a photographer, and this was his exhibition of photographs that he took on Pompeii. Special guest artist of Vanessa German. Sometimes we cannot be with our bodies was an exceptional artist that came in with a really entirely different kind of exhibition that I'd never seen in the Fralin before, and did some remarkable engagement in our community while she was here, of course, across the grounds of the university. 

And then the museums. Both the Fralin and the Kluge-Ruhe have been getting some extraordinary press, including New York Times articles, Forbes, Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the last couple of years on the exhibitions and the quality of the exhibitions that they've been doing. So we've been remarkably proud of that. And I'll visit this later. But this, again, highlights the need for the expansion of those museums because they are punching far above their weight here at the University of Virginia. And when you think about it, these are our museums for Central Virginia. So my hope is that we're able to expand those. And I'll talk a little bit more about that in the future. 

And this is one of the artists in residence, Kent Morris was with the Kluge-Ruhe recently. And they are continuously bringing in artists and particularly Aboriginal artists as well from Australia for artists and residents. They engage with our students in our faculty and, of course, the general public as well. And most recently, the Kluge-Ruhe just received a grant from the NEH for the implementation of a Traveling Exhibition Madayin-- Eight Decades of Aboriginal Australian Bark Painting. And this grant was for $300,000. It was the largest grant of its kind given out by the NEH this past year. So we're really proud of the work that they're doing as well. 

And I want to share this little exhibition. It was the last exhibition of partnership between the Fralin Museum of Art and the Kluge-Ruhe that was most recently up at the Fralin, and unfortunately, it was only up for about four weeks, and then had to shut down because of the pandemic. But we will circle back to all of you because there's a 30-minute incredible, National Geographic style video presentation of this that we can share with you so you can watch it on your own. Here's just a preview of it. 

[VIDEO PLAYBACK] 

- Hi there. My name is Henry Skerritt, and I'm the curator of Indigenous Arts of Australia at the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection of the University of Virginia. OK, so even though we're not meant to be traveling, today, we want to take you on a journey to one of the most spectacularly beautiful parts of the planet. We're going to head to Northern Australia, a place called Arnhem Land that occupies 37,000 square miles on the Northern tip of Australia. It's home to 10,000 Aboriginal people who speak around 20 different languages. 

So what we're going to do is we're going to go into the show and we're going to travel from West to East, and we're going to look at 112 works by 55 artists. Some of the leading artists in Australia, and they're all from this very special place. Are you ready? Let's go. 

[MUSIC PLAYING] 

[END PLAYBACK] 

So we will send a link to that so everybody can watch it. It's about 30 minutes long. And I got to tell you, it's just exceptional. When the pandemic hit this past year, again, we needed to be nimble. And we pivoted to digital arts on the Hill. This was an idea that Jim Ryan had in which he wanted to be able to host arts groups, faculty and students performances up at Carrs Hill and create an art salon on a regular basis. And we got in one of those in very early March. And then the pandemic hit. And Jim worked with Matt Weber and with myself and Emma Terry to then move it to the digital format. 

And so those are all on YouTube and available to be seen. We'll send you a link to those as well. But they were usually 15 to 20 minutes long. And it happened all last spring. Took a pause during the summer. And then we just did about another five or six of them during the fall, and they'll take another pause until the spring semester begins. But again, we'll share that with you as well. 

And then I wanted to talk a little bit about looking to the future for the arts. There's been a lot of, obviously, talk on the Ivy/Emmet Corridor, and the arts are included in the strategic plan for the building of a center for the Arts as well, which would likely go where you see that red outline up there. 

And just to orient yourselves, you'll see just to the right below that, you'll see the tennis courts there cross right over or basically on the site of the old Cavalier Inn. And then up against the current parking garage, we might potentially put a performing Arts Center, and we could also have a museums at the University of Virginia, which could include the Fralin Museum and the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection under one roof, two separate museums, but working in concert together, which is a really exciting concept. 

This is another view of that parcel of land over there. Obviously, as you know, hotel is going to be going up over there and the school for data science as well. And this pandemic has put a bit of a pause on capital projects at the moment. So again, we're looking to the future when we're beyond that. But this would be an expansion of the arts grounds in a very vital way just across on the Emmet Ivy Corridor and keep it continuous. This is another artist's rendering of what that could look like with a very stunning water feature down the center of it. 

This is the Green Looking East, as you can see, with buildings on either side. And then over here, if you look, the area that I was talking about. You can see the possibility of a Performing Arts Center, which is right on the corner there of 29, that water feature that we've talked about. And then next to it, a room for the University Art Museums. This is a very ambitious project, but one that I certainly have been putting a lot of energy and attention to the last several years. And it's all about fundraising, I think, ultimately in the future. 

But what's exciting about this is this would be something that I think the university needs and that Charlottesville needs a Performing Arts Center housed in a Center for the Arts that includes the museums and interdisciplinary art spaces, as well studio space for dance, more space for music, as well, both studio space and office space as well and would create a destination on the grounds of the University of Virginia. And I believe that this would be absolutely transformational, both for UVA and for the community of Charlottesville as well. 

And here's another look at it. And how they stack up. You can imagine what this would look like with a green and water space and students throwing frisbees, eating on blankets, being able to walk or bike over there and bringing students and faculty and just creating this incredible destination space with that green belt down the middle and the water feature. Imagine some art installations, public art installations outside as well, and essentially creating a mecca for people. And one of the first things you would see that would represent the University of Virginia coming down 29 or coming down Ivy. 

And now I'm going to turn this over to Sharon, who I understand might field some questions for all of you. Again, I can't thank you enough for this opportunity, and I look forward to answering any questions. And I wanted to say when this is all done, we're going to run a five-minute highlight reel of the Bicentennial. I hope you stick around for it. It's really quite exceptional. It's just the very best parts of the evening. But you'll see performances by Leslie Odom Jr. Andra Day, the Marching Band, Martha Graham Dance Program, and about 800 plus students and faculty. 

It's really was an extraordinary evening. And to me, it really was a culmination of what could be done here at the University of Virginia with the arts if they had that kind of platform. Which is why I look to the future over at [INAUDIBLE]. 

SHARON: So, Jody, thank you so much. It was fun to have a little tasting menu here as we came forward. We've got some questions, but I'm choosing the one that I'm most interested in first, which is back to that wonderful shot at Morven. I would like to know what were the logistics of that drive-in theater evening, and do we have a future with movie theaters after COVID and what, I mean, it's a multi-phase question. And what would it take to have drive-ins come back. I mean, let's start with what you did at Morven. 

JODY KIELBASA: OK, well, so first and foremost, this was a tough year for everyone in the arts as it is for everybody. I mean, the arts aren't exclusive in this, but what we do is we perform and we engage, and there's that visceral feeling of an audience in front of you. And that was really lost. I mean, even in the movies, which you might think of as being passive, the whole concept of a Film Festival is that shared space where you're in an auditorium or a movie theater and you're laughing and you're crying, and then you filter out and you're talking to people in the lobby and going out and having a cup of coffee or a drink on the Downtown mall to talk about what you just saw.

And the prospect of losing that was just devastating. And so the drive-in movie became, well, OK, we're going to be able to screen films online. And we actually did, I will say this, a pretty remarkable job of it. People didn't complain. It was a pretty seamless process for them to view movies online and to engage in the discussions that we had with the faculty afterwards. But everybody was a part. I hope they were at home watching with their significant other or their family, but they weren't in that more larger shared space. 

And so I wanted to do something that could engage an audience directly and bring people together and still maintain their safety and be socially distanced. And so the drive-in movies. I went to Goochland this summer with my family to see the drive-in movie there. I hadn't been to a drive-in movie since I was in high school, probably necking with a date and watching the drive-in movie. I perhaps was less interested in the movie at that time. And it's been a long time since I've been and my family. 

My three kids had never been to a drive-in movie, so we went to Goochland and they did a remarkable job of it out there. They had about 400 cars and managed to keep them parked apart and people socially distanced. And even at the concession stand line, everybody stayed apart. And I said, well, we ought to be able to do that. So the process was the first thing we had to do was I had to vet it through the university, who said yes, if the county and the city say yes. 

And the county out in Morven had to say yes. And they did. We were limited to the number of vehicles we could do. So it was capped at 125 vehicles. And we found out that space that we had really could take about 122 on that field and still see the screen well. We engaged Metrotech, which is a company, and that set up alone-- everything that went into that setup cost about $45,000. 

We sold about $10,000 in tickets. We were going to be upside down from the beginning. So I got that underwritten. And that was the only way to do it, to have it make sense. But on the flip side of this, this was one of the few times that the arts this year could present something close to their mission that wasn't online, that could actually bring an audience together. 

So it was worth it to me to do that. We had another screening location as well at the dairy market, and that was an urban setting, which was also cool. Being in the middle of town and parking your car and watching it projected up on a screen outside a brick building, essentially. But the more urban settings just stunning and very, very beautiful. 

And a lot of the films that we screened there, it was demanded by the studios, only that those films be screened at a drive-in movie. They would not share them online at all. So we had no choice in this circumstance if we wanted to open the festival with one night in Miami, which, by the way, starred Leslie Odom Jr. and we had a conversation with Leslie Odom Jr. during the festival, again, which was really cool. Then we needed to screen in an outdoor drive-in movie center setting. 

Moving forward, I do believe theaters are going to come back. I think people are going to miss congregating and being together so much that when that opportunity happens again, I think people are going to go back. It may take time. It may take another year. But I also think that the industry has been fundamentally changed. There are a lot of things going on. You may have seen that Universal now is releasing its big tentpole films like Wonder Woman on HBO Max as they're expanding them into live movie theaters, which has never happened before. 

So it has been a disruption in the film industry. And until we're back on line, so to speak, with live theaters, I'm not sure exactly what changes are going to take. But for me, I believe people are going to want to get together and they're going to want to see it on the big screen, and they're going to want to have that shared experience. 

SHARON: Well, we'll see. I'm curious about how we're going to clean those movie theaters and what we're going to do about changing the air handling because once we've been through this pandemic, we're going to be thinking about that air exchange. I think even after we get the vaccines, and Baltimore certainly is going ahead trying to design their new Symphony Hall to take in all those things going forward. 

JODY KIELBASA: Yes. 

SHARON: We have several questions about performance spaces based on what you just said. 

JODY KIELBASA: Sure. 

SHARON: And so one is what are the plans? Are there some for Old Cabell Hall, both for improving the flow of people in and the performance capabilities? But also something more detail about what's happening at the Arts Grounds at the Ivy Corridor. Well, is there going to be a new concert hall, recital hall, and teaching venue for the music department? So those are connected. What's going to happen at Old Capitol. What's going to happen in the Ivy grounds. 

JODY KIELBASA: Sure. Well, I don't know that there are any plans whatsoever to change anything in Old Cabell Hall. It's a historic building. They won't even allow us to bring a glass of water on the stage. There are very tight regulations over there. I agree that the traffic flow for patrons is not fabulous. In fact, I've been in there sometimes, and when it's a full house, it's a little nervous to see how narrow the thruways are and how tight the seating is there. It definitely was a stunning facility built for a different time and a different generation many years ago. 

There have been some improvements recently for both sound you're able to project in there now, which is a cool addition that happened just a couple of years ago as well. But I don't see changes happening inside in terms of seating or traffic flow as well because of the historical nature, which is one of the reasons why Old Cabell seats roughly 810 people and probably over hundreds of those seats are obstructed viewing because of the pillars or the nature of that horseshoe seating arrangement that you have. 

So it's one of the reasons why I feel that we do need a performing Arts Center embedded in a center for a larger center for the arts that would include these interdisciplinary spaces room for music and dance, office space, studio space. And that performing Arts Center, ideally would not be just a white palace that is sucking up air conditioning seven days a week and only being utilized five nights out of the week. 

It would be a vibrant destination center that has these studio spaces and classroom spaces, and the museums would be down there and, again, creating this destination all day long. Maybe not 24/7, but maybe 18 or 27. Pretty much with students there doing things, faculty teaching, and also studio space. So if you bring in a company like Martha Graham Dance Company, right there is the studio. So they can teach a master class for dance. Or if you're bringing in another artist, a similar circumstance for music. So that's really, in my view, vital. 

We've had consultants come in and pull together plans. It's been an unfortunate thing because this is nothing new. There have been plans for a performing arts center and an expansion of museums for over 30 years at the university, and I think that one of the unfortunate things is history has gotten in our way. In 2008, we had the Great Recession, and there were plans in motion to actually do this over there. And that just fell by the wayside because of funding opportunities. There was a lot of energy around this, and we got hit with the pandemic. 

I'm certainly committed to doing my best to keep this afloat, but I'm also aware that the university has a lot pandemic. This may not be the top priority. It certainly is embedded in the strategic plan, this idea for a performing arts center, and it's my hope that it goes through sooner rather than later. And I'm trying to do everything I can to continue to push it up the field. 

SHARON: So as you're thinking about the vaccines, maybe arriving in Charlottesville on December 15 with more demand than we possibly have vaccines for, can you begin to imagine what the Film Festival might look like in 2021. And to think about how it might be different based on our experiences this year. What have we learned that's going to impact the way we program for next year? 

JODY KIELBASA: So what I've learned more than anything is that I have an incredible group of people on my team that are very nimble and love the festival, and love the arts and are very quick to move and to be able to do different things. I think everybody is hoping that we're going to be back into a circumstance that would allow us to present a festival closer to the festival that we have done in past years, where people will be back in movie theaters, that we can fly in guest artists so that they can experience Charlottesville and experience our audiences and engage on a personal level. 

But if not, we've already proven that we can do a really, really well-programmed virtual festival. We can bring in remarkable guests as we did this year. I mean, conversations with Annette Bening and Linda Hamilton and Leslie Odom Jr. with our esteemed faculty hosting and moderating these conversations. We can do that really, really well. You can't fly guests in. They can't be here. They can't engage in a conversation on the stage and take the live questions that way. So that's a missing element for me that I hope we overcome. 

Fortunately for us, the festival's 10 and 1/2 months away. So a lot can happen in that time. If the vaccine is here and starts to through the various phases, be given out to people across all areas in the community, not just seniors and not just first responders, but students and people of all ages, and hopefully by the time October rolls around, we'll be in a much better circumstance. But what we've learned is that we don't have to make that decision on the festival really until July 1, where that flexible and nimble that we can make the decision then by then and we can go virtual with drive-in movies, or we can go back to the way that we presented it before. 

And there are things that we've learned. There are things that, in some cases, moving forward, we might Skype some special guests to join us if we are in person at the Paramount or at the Violet Crown. We're more comfortable in that format now as a result of that. And we're just better at it. And so we will take things away from what we did this past year. 

SHARON: Thank you. That seems to be the end of our questions. And so, again, I want to thank you very much, Jody. And let's look at the Bicentennial Extravaganza. Thank you. 

JODY KIELBASA: That's great, Sharon. Thank you. Thanks to all of you out there. I'm so appreciative of this opportunity. And again, as I wanted to say, it is just a privilege for me to be in this role and I love engaging with people on a day to day basis. To have worked with our faculty is such an honor. So it's great. Happy holidays to everyone. Thanks for being a part of this. And if this is about 5 and 1/2 minutes long, I hope you'll enjoy it. Take care. 

SHARON: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. 

[VIDEO PLAYBACK] 

[MUSIC PLAYING] 

- On behalf of the entire arts community at the University of Virginia, I'd like to welcome you to the Bicentennial launch celebration. 

[APPLAUSE] 

[VIDEO PLAYBACK] 

- Wahoowa, everybody. 

[MUSIC PLAYING] 

- (SINGING) Oh, I long to see 

I long to see 

The launch of our bicentennial is a celebration of UVA's past and an invitation to envision its future. 

- (SINGING) --hallelujah 

Glory 

- It is my deepest desire that the children of this university may lead our nation to fully realize the dream of America for all. 

- Ladies and gentlemen, the Martha Graham dance company. 

[MUSIC PLAYING] 

- Thomas Jefferson was a revolutionary, and you need to be one, too. I need you to be a revolutionary for justice, for inclusion, for bringing people together. 

[APPLAUSE] 

- Leslie Odom Jr. 

- (SINGING) I want to be in the room 

I want to be in 

I want to be in 

I've got to be 

I've got to be in that big old room 

The art of the compromise 

Hold your nose and close your eyes 

We want our leaders to save the day 

But we don't get a say in what they trade away 

[APPLAUSE] 

- I am not summoned, dismissed. I am the clock's keeper. I ring in their ears. 

- Ladies and gentlemen, we are honored tonight by the presence of these descendants of the enslaved. 

- The descendant community challenges each of you to think about where we were 200 years ago and where we will be in the next 200. 

- seek to advance democracy in this next century, to ensure that the progress of this country continues the dream of Martin Luther King Jr, to bend the arc of history towards justice and equality. 

- In the words of the old Negro spiritual, free at last, free at last. Thank God, Almighty. We are free at last. 

[APPLAUSE] 

- (SINGING) One day when the glory comes, it will be ours 

It will be ours 

It'll be yours 

One day 

When the war is won 

[MUSIC PLAYING] 

- Andra Day. 

- (SINGING) And we'll rise up 

Uh, like the waves we'll rise up 

In spite of the ache 

We're going to rise up 

And we'll do it a thousand times again 

For you 

For you 

[MUSIC PLAYING] 

[APPLAUSE] 

[VOCALIZATION] 

[MUSIC PLAYING] 

Now, looking back 200 years, you can see the success the school has had, not only academically but the history, and I'm proud to be a Wahoo! 

[APPLAUSE] 

- Whenever I'm asked where did you go to college, I'm always so proud to say I went to the University of Virginia. 

[APPLAUSE] 

- (SINGING) And over, and over, and over again 

Lost in the past and in what might have been 

You're healing 

Your mind started over 

And then take it over and over, over again 

Turn it up 

- To the illimitable future. 

[MUSIC PLAYING] 

[APPLAUSE] 

[END PLAYBACK]

SHARON HOSTLER: So today's speaker is a good colleague and friend, Kathryn Thornton. Kathryn did her undergraduate degree at Auburn University and her PhD in physics at the University of Virginia and received a NATO postdoc fellowship at the Max Planck in Heidelberg and then went on to an illustrious career not only as faculty here, but as an astronaut. 

And she managed to fly 6 million miles in space on the discovery, the endeavor, and the Columbia. She had many roles on those flights. The one that I like the best was commanded. I thought commander was just the right title to have for a woman in space. 

During those 6 million miles, I did 21 miles extravehicular that would be outside the vehicle. She may want to tell us where she was exactly when she did those 21 miles. So you know her as Professor Emerita of engineering. And we also know her as Dean Emerita of semester at sea, where she actually took the helm for many hundreds of miles and several oceans, which we never told the students about. 

And she has, in her first year of retirement-- only Kathryn Thornton, astronaut, would do this-- has hiked the Appalachian Trail, that would be the entire Appalachian Trail. So without further ado, I would like to introduce our colleague and good friend and board member, Kathryn Thornton, who's going to talk about old space, new space, and who are the players now. Kathryn, it's yours. 

KATHRYN THORNTON: OK, thank you, Sharon, very much for that kind introduction. When Sharon asked me to give a talk on space, I realized that it was a very, very large subject. And so I decided to limit it today to mostly human space flight because that's what I'm most familiar with. But there's a lot going on in the space domain. 

You can have a whole series of talks on it that I'm knowledgeable enough to give a whole series of talks. But if you just follow the news, you can see there are plenty of developments from the satellites that SpaceX is launching by the hundreds to navigation to national security, which we probably couldn't talk about, missions to Mars. 

They go every two years because of orbital mechanics and this is the year when they were launched, and several should be arriving in February. So there's plenty there to talk about, but I'm going to stick mostly to the human spaceflight side of it. 

So I thought I would organize these thoughts into old space versus new space. Old space, meaning the way we started out when it was strictly the domain of nation states, and in particular, two nation states, the United States and the Soviet Union. But that's evolved over time to include public private partnerships, commercial space, and what we refer to as entrepreneurial space. 

Unlike the birth of aviation when it was easy enough for two guys from a bicycle shop in Ohio to tinker around and build an airplane, it's just not possible in the space realm. But that's changed over time. It's not two tinkerers, but now billionaires can play in the game. 

The chat feature is open. If you want to ask questions-- and I'll come back to those probably when I'm finished, because I'm not sure I can deal with two things at once. If I can just change the slide. All right, so the space age began on October 4, in 1957 with the launch of Sputnik 1 by the Soviet Union. In fact, that was the starting gun for a space race between the United States and the Soviet Union, each of us trying to prove to the rest of the world that our system of government capitalist versus Communist was superior. 

The ability to launch a man-made orbit-- a man-made object into orbit, demonstrated a technological capability to perhaps deliver a nuclear weapon anywhere in the world on Intercontinental ballistic missiles. So that made the space domain great interest to the military and to national security. It was also a geopolitical tool where we were each trying to demonstrate to the rest of the world that we had superior technology. 

In the mid-1950s, the International Council of scientific unions organized the first international geophysical year with participation from scientific organizations from 70 countries. There are stories about how the idea for that became-- started at a cocktail party in Chicago, but I don't know any of that for a fact. But there's some interesting stories. 

The US National Committee convinced the Eisenhower administration that we should launch an Earth orbiting satellite for the international geophysical year. In 1955, the White House announced their intent to do that. During this time, the USSR was pretty quiet about their intentions and they didn't let on until 1957 right before they actually launched Sputnik and surprised the world with it. 

The US program had been under the auspices of the National Science Foundation, who had project Vanguard that was to be launched on a modified sounding rocket. After Sputnik launched in 1957, our answer to it came a couple of weeks later and unfortunately, that was a big explosion on the launch pad. 

Recognizing that this was a major PR disaster for the country that the Soviets had beaten us to space, the Eisenhower administration engaged the US Army missile agency and asked them to take the lead and gave them 90 days to build a satellite and get it launched. And in fact, they did that. They used a Redstone intermediate range ballistic missile as the launch vehicle to get a satellite into orbit. 

Explorer 1 was launched in January 1958. And even though that seems like a short time after Sputnik, only three months, it was still a PR disaster because by that time, the Soviets had already launched their second Sputnik with a dog on board. Some people likened it to technological Pearl Harbor where we came to the realization very suddenly that suddenly that we were not winners in the technology race. 

Sputnik 1 was followed by Sputnik 2, which carried a dog named Laika. Unfortunately, poor Laika didn't make it back because of a system failure on board the satellite. But everything that we did in those first years of the space race, we got skunked by the Soviets. They were first in a lot of things. 

They launched obviously the first Earth satellite, Sputnik. Their Sputnik three carried two dogs who did make it back, Belka and Strelka and lived a very posh life after that. They launched the first man into space and in fact, the first man to orbit one and the same, whereas our first man in space and second only did suborbital flights. We had to wait for the third flight of mercury to get a man in orbit. 

They launched the first woman in space. They did the first spacewalk, the first orbital rendezvous, the first remote-control rover on another celestial body, which was the moon. No matter what we did, they seemed to try to skunk us. 

In 1961, President Kennedy committed us to sending a man to the moon and bring him back within the decade. And when he said man at that time, he meant man. It was a stretch goal that his advisors thought that we could win, even though we were losing all these other shorter term goals. 

USSR was very secretive about their space program. So very little was known in the West until after the fall of the Soviet Union. But as it turns out, they were developing a human lunar capability at the same time we were along with robotic missions to the moon and to Venus and to Mars. 

As we were designing the giant Saturn V, the Soviets were building their giant N1 rocket, the highest thrust rocket ever built even to this day. Rather than design larger rocket engines for the task, they ganged a bunch of smaller engines together, but they all had to work perfectly. 

Their first stage depended on 30 engines, whereas the Saturn V had only five. The N1 was also fueled by kerosene, as opposed to liquid hydrogen, which has much less thrust per weight. There were four launches of the N1, all ending in failure. The second launch exploded on or near the launch pad, which took them 18 months to rebuild, and killed a number of their key engineers. 

The last gasp of their manned lunar program was a launch failure in February of 1969, just five months before the Apollo astronauts landed on the moon. They also suffered the first space fatality. Three months after our Apollo fire, the Russian cosmonaut, Komarov, became the first fatality when Soyuz 1. The first Soviet space vehicle intended to go to the moon, crashed into the Earth in April of '67 after its parachutes failed to deploy. 

He had another disaster, which we did not learn about at the time, which was Soyuz 11. Eager to outstrip, the US after the success of our moon landings, the Russians launched the world's first Space Station, Salyut-1 in 1971. Two months later, three cosmonauts on Soyuz 11 flew to their Space Station and spent a couple of weeks there conducting experiments and doing Earth observations. 

They earned a hero status back home. But on their return trip on June 30 of that year, 1971, the spacecraft made a normal re-entry and perfect landing. But when the ground team opened up the hatch, they found all three cosmonauts were dead. 

A faulty air vent had opened when the orbital and descent modules of the Soyuz 11 separated and the cabinet depressurized. So the cosmonauts, none of whom were wearing spacesuits, likely suffocated to death about half an hour before landing. As a legacy of this Apollo 11 disaster, the Soviet Space Program would pass requirements ensuring that their cosmonauts wear spacesuits during any phase of a mission where depressurization could occur. 

Without knowledge of Soyuz 11, we learned that same lesson 15 years later with the Challenger accident. In parallel with their human space program, the Soviets aggressively pursued robotic missions, in particular a sample return mission from the moon. 

In the race to reach the moon and return to Earth, there were parallel missions of the Soviet Luna 15 mission, and Apollo 11, which were the culmination of the moon race that had defined both of our programs through the 1960s. Luna 15 was launched only three days before Apollo 11 mission to the moon and was the second Soviet attempt to collect and bring lunar soil back to Earth. 

Luna 115 entered lunar orbit on July 17, 1969. Originally, plans were to carry out two orbital corrections on July 18 and 19 to put the vehicle on its landing track, but the ruggedness of the lunar terrain prompted a delay. So instead, controllers spent time studying the data to map out a plan of action how to account for the rough surface on the moon. 

The two delayed corrections were eventually carried out on July 19 and 20 putting Luna 15 into its planned orbit. Less than six hours after the second correction, Apollo 11 began its descent to the moon on July 20, 1969. The original plan for Luna 15 was to leave the moon less than two hours after Apollo 11, but that didn't happen. 

The controllers spent another 18 hours worried about the rough surface of the landing site. And during this critical period, this 18-hour delay, Apollo astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the moon. Finally, on July 21, a little more than two hours before Apollo 11 lifted off from the moon, Luna 15 began its descent to the surface. 

During that descent, transmissions from the vehicle abruptly and suddenly stopped. Later analysis indicated that Luna 15 had probably crashed into the side of a mountain going about 300 miles an hour as a result of incorrect attitude of the vehicle at the time of the descent burn. They finally got their lunar sample in September of 1970 with Luna 16. 

Meanwhile, the American lunar program continued through the Mercury program where we achieved orbit, studied human performance, recovered the crew and spacecraft. There were 20 unmanned flights, not all successful, and 6 crewed flights. 

The only astronaut of the Mercury Seven who did not fly in mercury was Deke Slayton, who was grounded by an irregular heart rate. And so there were only six crewed flights. He ultimately was cleared for flight and he flew on the Apollo--Soyuz test flights. 

After mercury went into the Apollo-- I mean, the Gemini program, which was another program to learn what we needed to know for the Apollo mission, for rendezvous and lunar orbit, all that-- so there were 10 missions in the Gemini program where we did a spacewalk, rendezvous and docking and long duration flights. 

And then the Apollo program was the culmination of all that to get us to the moon. There were 4 missions to test the command module, lunar module, and to orbit the moon before the first lunar landing. Apollo 11 was the first to land on the moon. Apollos 12, 14, 15, 17 also landed on the moon. Apollo 13 was a very famous in-flight abort. And then Apollos 18, 19, and 20 were canceled. 

There were budget cuts in the '60s to the Apollo program. And the NASA administrator, Tom Paine, decided to cancel those last three flights. The Saturn V rocket from one of those canceled flights launched the Skylab orbital laboratory in 1973, as part of the Apollo application program, which was a series of missions to use some of the hardware that was left over from Apollo primarily and to continue a space program after we had already been to the moon. 

So Skylab was our first US Space Station. And it actually experienced a problem on launch. I don't know if you can see my cursor. I guess you can. Part of the thermal cover came loose during launch. And so on the very first mission, the astronauts had to install this they called it a parasol to insulate that part of the Skylab otherwise it would have the temperatures were too hot for the humans to inhabit it for any length of time. So this was the beginning of in-space servicing. 

Three crews went to the Skylab for a period of one, two, and then three months. The hope when the plan was for the Space Shuttle to be able to service and reboost the Skylab. But the development and the first launch of the shuttle was delayed. And so Skylab made an uncontrolled re-entry in 1979 over the Indian Ocean with some pieces of it hitting Western Australia. 

The other piece of the Apollo application program was the Apollo--Soyuz test program, which was the first international human space flight. And it's interesting that we could pull something like this off at this time when we had ICBMs pointed at each other. But engineers from all over can work together as long as we keep the politics out of it. 

In July of 1975, the Apollo spacecraft launched with a crew of three and docked for two days with a Soyuz spacecraft and its crew of two. It was designed to test the compatibility of rendezvous and docking systems and also the possibility of an international space rescue should that ever be needed. 

It was a nine-day mission that brought the two former rivals together, the United States and the Soviet Union. And they conducted two days of joint activities with some experiments and primarily just exchanging commemorative items and reveling in the cooperation. 

And at least on the US side, these were military guys who were flying up there and probably on the Soviet side as well. But yet they cooperated and had a successful mission and paved the way for future international partnerships. In early 1969, President Nixon established a space task group to help determine what NASA's post-Apollo direction would be. 

In September of that year, the group delivered its report. This is right after the first lunar landing. And it recommended a Space Shuttle, space stations, manned moon trips, and finally a mission to Mars. This diagram, you can see from the serial number here is from 1970. It was an illustration of some of the things. So Space Station, a space tug that could be able to move spacecraft around in orbit. 

Space Shuttle, a nuclear shuttle that could stay in orbit for a long time, another Space Station out at geosync and also lunar operations to continue. Nixon was not at all pleased with this recommendation. He thought the plan was far too expensive for NASA's budget, which had been cut by 25% even before the first lunar landing. 

So he zeroed in on the single aspect of the plan that you could do without anything else ditching all the rest of them. So the one standalone thing that he could point to was the shuttle. So that's where they went. The decision marked a key shift in NASA's charter from space exploration to space utilization and routine access to space. And that's where we have been for the past 50 years. 

In announcing the Shuttle program in 1972, he stressed its practical benefits saying it could help the United States get to space frequently and relatively cheaply, and presumably further advances would follow on this ability. It's the only element of the space transportation system ever built. The Space Shuttle had to be its own destination before the ISS was completed. 

It was a rocket ship for 8.5 minutes. It was a laboratory, workshop and construction site for up to two weeks and a glider for the few minutes on its return to Earth. It was the first reusable spaceship ever. It was first to be flown for the first time with humans aboard, no unmanned flights, and possibly the only spacecraft ever flown without a crew escape system. 

We found out what a mistake that was with the challenger and also the Columbia. Between the first launch in April of 1981 and the final landing in July of 2011, the Space Shuttle fleet, which included Columbia, challenger, discovery, Atlantis and endeavor, flew 135 missions and helped construct the International Space Station. 

Shuttles carry people into orbit, repeatedly launched and recovered and repaired satellites, hosted research, built a larger structure in space. And the final mission, STS-135, ended in 2011 when Atlantis rolled to a stop at its home port in the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. And if you ever want to go see it, that's where it is right now, in the visitor center at the Kennedy Space Center. 

As with the remaining Saturn V rockets, three remaining Space Shuttle orbiters, which are relics of the past are grounded and they're on public display. These pictures I just pulled up pictures that I had from some of my missions. 

This was the Imetelstat recovery and redeploy mission where we captured this communication satellite and strapped a new booster motor on it, which is this little piece here. I'm assuming you can see my cursor set it off on its way. That was in May of 1992, and that communication satellite was recommissioned and carried the Summer Olympics from Barcelona that summer to the United States. 

I was heard a briefing a couple of days ago about a company that's or a subdivision of Northrop Grumman that is building satellite refueling and remote repair capabilities, all robotic without people. And it felt like a factory worker who's been displaced by automation. They should call us up for that. 

This picture down here is from the Hubble Space Telescope. This was the first service on the Hubble Space Telescope where we installed new instruments that corrected the optics and allowed it to achieve its planned capabilities. It's since been serviced four more times and is still up there for however long it lasts. There are no more service missions planned, but for however long it lasts, it's churning out great science. 

This is a Spacelab module that's in the cargo bay of the Space Shuttle. So in addition to being a construction site and repair site, the Space Shuttle was for its time a laboratory space station for up to two weeks, which was about the longest the Space Shuttle that could stay in orbit because of consumables. 

But first one to ever launch land on a runway. And it was an awesome machine, one of the most amazing machines ever built. And it's reached its limit, now retired. While the US was building space shuttles, the Soviet Union focused on space stations. 

So after seven successive Salyut space stations, they launched their final station, which was MIR. During the 15 years it was in orbit, the Mir station provided a home for more than 100 astronauts and cosmonauts from at least 12 different countries. It consisted of different modules that could be moved around to accommodate different mission needs. 

The first module was Mir's core, which included living quarters, life support, power sources, and research areas. Mir's equipped to dock with Soyuz, which carried people to orbit and back and with their progress vehicle, which carried cargo and disposed of trash. This picture was from the Shuttle-MIR program where it was actually docked to the Space Shuttle. 

In 1992, the US and the new Russian Federation after the fall of the Soviet Union renewed a space cooperation agreement that outlined the development of the NASA MIR program. By the time the first cosmonaut, Sergei Krikalev became the first Russian to fly aboard a Space Shuttle in 1994, plans for the cooperation had moved beyond just the shuttle Mir into the Space Station Cooperation. 

Shuttle-MIR program was filled with firsts. Krikalev first flight as a Russian aboard the Space Shuttle, Norm Thagard became the first American aboard the Mir Space Station, where he spent 115 days. And in 1995, STS-71 became the first shuttle mission to dock with Mir. 

In from February 1994 to June, '98, Shuttles made 11 flights to the Russian Space Station and American astronauts spent seven residences on board the Mir. The Space Shuttle also conducted crew exchanges and delivered supplies and equipment for MIR. The thing about MIR being serviced by Soyuz capsules is that they're relatively-- they're very not relative. They're very small capsules. 

And so the Russians could bring up significant cargo with their progress vehicles and that the Space Station needed, but they had very little capacity to bring down anything other than people. So equipment they no longer needed or results of experiments, samples, that thing, they had not much capability to bring it back. 

When we started the Shuttle-MIR program, we were able to bring things back for the Russians. For instance, when they launched a crew to Mir, they would all have their individual spacesuits-- and at the end of their mission-- for spacewalking. 

At the end of their mission, those would be stuffed into progress and they would burn up on reentry and be gone. And we were able to bring those back so that they could reuse them. We could bring back failed components so that they could study what went wrong with it and fix it for the next time. 

So we learned a lot from the Russians during that time period and I think they got big advantages from it as well. And then the next logical step, permanent presence in space for us was the International Space Station. So early in the 1980s, NASA had planned to build a modular Space Station called Freedom as a counterpart to the Soviet MIR Space Station. 

Over the next few years, European Space Agency and the Japanese Space Agency were invited to participate by bringing their laboratory modules to the Space Station. The Space Station was going to tie these emerging European and Japanese space programs closer to a US-led project and thereby preventing them from becoming major and independent competitors to us. 

In September of 1993, President, Vice President Gore and Russian prime minister Chernomyrdin announced plans for a new station, which would eventually become the International Space Station. It included a MIR-like core block. They had on Space Station MIR. And this is the first time in all of our cooperation with other countries we have allowed anyone to get in the critical path, meaning we can't do it without their piece. 

In all other collaborations that I can think of before that point, it's nice if the Europeans want to add their space module to our Space Station, but we can get along without it, but not so with the Russians. And the unstated goal of this historic collaboration was to engage missile engineers in the former Soviet Union so that they would not be peddling their expertise to other nations like Iran. So this was a political move to include the Russians in at that time. 

The International Space Station survived many close votes in Congress, as well as the loss of the Space Shuttle Columbia. And I believe that that's because of our commitments to international partners. They had spent millions and millions of dollars on their contributions to the Space Station and we just simply could not cancel it without looking like a jerk on the international stage. 

So we continued it to the end. It took 10 years and more than 30 missions to assemble it. It's a result of a scientific and engineering collaborations among five space agencies representing 15 countries. It's approximately the size of a football, four times as large as the Space Station MIR, and about five times as large as the US Skylab. It has now been continuously occupied for 20 years. I think that's amazing. 

And that brings us to the present day. So back on Earth, four astronauts are preparing to launch on Saturday to the station aboard SpaceX's Crew Dragon, spacecraft on a Falcon 9 launch vehicle. You might remember a few months ago, Bob and Doug became the first people to fly on a commercial spacecraft or commercial launch vehicle. They were a test crew. 

So there's four that are going to fly on Saturday are the first operational crew to fly on a commercial spacecraft. They headed down to Florida yesterday for the final mission preparations. They're in quarantine right now or what they call flight crew health stabilization, which was-- we did even before COVID, but I'm sure it is much more rigorous now with COVID. 

One thing they're going to do is dock with the Space Station on the day of launch. I don't know that I think the Russians have done that, but we have never done that. We've taken a day or two to do the ballet of a rendezvous that gets us to the Space Station. If all goes well, they will dock 8.5 hours after launch. 

NASA is committed to funding the ISS through 2025 although there's resistance in Congress, particularly from Florida and Texas to ending ISS funding before 2028 or 2030 because that puts the ISS in competition with return to the moon for funding. 

So we have the Space Station, which was built through all of its development and assembly as the next logical step a permanent presence in space. Well, in order for us to move on, we have to find a way to stop funding that permanent presence in space. 

So NASA has been trying to attract commercial interest in continuing the ISS with some success at least from companies interested in being a tenant on the ISS, but not necessarily from those who are interested in taking over operation of it. So on that list of space agencies and countries involved in the ISS, one space faring nation is notably absent and that's China. 

China has started its human space flight program in 2003 when it launched its first taikonaut, which is what we call astronauts. The Russians call cosmonauts their taikonauts on board the Shenzhou 5. And by 2010, they felt they were reasonably well developed in the space world and would like to join the International Space Station collaboration. 

But Congress passed a law or stuck it in a budget bill that says that NASA cannot collaborate with the Chinese, no Chinese will set foot on the International Space Station, and in fact, they're not even permitted to set foot on NASA facilities even here on Earth. You might ask why and I have the same question. 

Depending on who you ask, it's retaliation for human rights violations, it's a national security issue, it's about intellectual property. I don't know the answer to it, but I know that it exists that NASA cannot cooperate with the Chinese. And my opinion, I think we are building a competitor who's rather than a collaborator, but I'm not in Congress. 

So in 2011, they built a target vehicle for their first crewed rendezvous and docking, which then led into Tiangong-2, which is the first space laboratory which has now ceased operation. They have plans for a bigger modular Space Station of their own. They also have some other things going. They have a continually operating lunar rover since 2013. 

They also have a mission on the far side of the moon going right now, the only country who has been able to do that or has done that. It's in operation now. And there are reports about some mystery reusable space plane, perhaps something along the lines of our X-37B, which the Air Force operates and sends to space, which is also mysterious and reusable. 

So now it brings us then to the beginning of new space public private partnerships. NASA started in an attempt to offload transportation in low Earth orbit from NASA run to commercial where NASA then would become a customer in one of many customers. 

They started the commercial cargo program in 2006. And there were three companies who were given a contract to develop spacecraft that could provide cargo services to the International Space Station. SpaceX with its dragon capsule had the capability to both launch and reenter, bring things back, and splashes down in the ocean. 

But it's the-- other than the Space Shuttle, which was continued in 2011, it was our only way to bring things back from the International Space Station. Orbital sciences, which then became orbital ATK, which then became Northrop Grumman innovation systems, which then became Northrop Grumman space systems, operates the Cygnus that can launch cargo to the International Space Station, but it does not have a reentry capability. 

They can launch out of both Florida at the Kennedy Space Center and also out of Wallops Island in Virginia. The third company was Rocketplane Kistler, which was terminated. They weren't able to accomplish their goals, but that was the beginning of trying to offload low Earth orbit operations to commercial companies. 

And then commercial crew now-- so we were launching cargo and then they wanted to hand off commercial crew as well. As I'm sure you know, this SpaceX Crew Dragon-- I just talked about that-- is launching people to the International Space Station. They launched Bob and Doug a few months ago on a test flight, and they will launch again this Saturday with a crew of four to the International Space Station. 

The Boeing Starliner is a capsule only. These pictures, the top one is the SpaceX, but that's only the payload portion of it. It sits on the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, which they built from a clean sheet of paper, designed their own launch vehicle. 

Boeing has built this capsule. It is compatible with both the Falcon 9 and with the United launch alliance's Atlas, I believe. So they are only responsible for this front end capsule. They launched a test flight a while back. I don't remember the dates. It was last year, I think. And they had some serious software issues. 

So they now have to do a second orbital test flight, which is not earlier than June of next year. Their first crewed test flight will be not earlier than December of next year and that will have four Boeing astronauts on it. Not NASA, but Boeing astronauts. Turns out I think all four of them are former NASA astronauts, but they are now Boeing employees because it is a test flight of their system. 

NASA is now just a purchaser of seats. And so the first NASA mission, which will have four NASA astronauts will come sometime after that. So that's how we are now getting people to the International Space Station from this country. NASA is no longer buying seats on the Soyuz to send folks to orbit. We're now able to launch here. 

And one of the reasons for-- I'm running out of time on it. One of the reasons for having two companies working in parallel in the United States is one can always get grounded for whatever reason. And so you have to have a second way to get there. So it's prudent to have two folks being able to do that. 

So now the segment of the population or the ecosphere that is entrepreneurial, these companies have started up not necessarily as-- or more private, less of a public private partnership. And some of them are totally commercial. I'll go through these pretty fast. Axiom is one you might not have heard of. 

They are, in their first iteration, just going to organize flights of commercial astronauts on SpaceX's Crew Dragon to be launched next year to the International Space Station. NASA has agreed to host I think up to two flights a year for as much as 30 days from Axiom. 

Axiom is also building its own modules to be attached to the International Space Station and up to three of them, I think. And then when the Space Station is decommissioned, they will send their own Space Station up. So their goal is to become the first commercial Space Station in orbit and they'll move their modules in from ISS over into their own Space Station. 

Founder is Robert Bigelow, who's a real estate investor and owner of budget suites of America hotel chain. Has built an inflatable module called BEAM, Bigelow Expandable Activity Module. And it has been docked to the Space Station since 2012. It's scheduled to deorbit in 2021. 

I just read recently that he furloughed all of his employees in March because of COVID and hopes to bring them back when it's over. So this fabric that this inflatable thing uses is a Kevlar-like material. It's proprietary. So I don't actually know. 

But it's a soft material, which provides not only pressure, but also impact resistance and possibly more radiation protection than metal. So their plan initially was to get enough of these on orbit and build their own Space Station, but I'm not sure where that is right now. 

Sierra Nevada built the Dream Chaser, which looks like the X-37B. They have a contract for cargo delivery to the ISS. They can provide pressurized cargo delivery and return. So that's what SpaceX does, as well as disposal services. When you're living in a closed environment, you get a lot of trash that builds up and you have to get rid of it. And so they will also have a capsule going up at the same time that can be able to be loaded with trash and then deorbit burns up on reentry. 

It looks like a Space Shuttle, but it has folding wings so it'll fit inside the payload fairing of launch vehicles like the Ula Vulcan. They're going to build a crewed version to crew. It used to be called manned, but now with women, we couldn't-- anyway, crude is the word version to carry up to five astronauts. 

Blue Origin has the new Shepard. So all while SpaceX was showing off we can land our boosters and recover them, New Shepard was out in New Mexico I think doing the same thing with it's launch vehicle. So their plan is to sell commercial seats to get a revenue stream going with the New Shepard. 

Those will be just suborbital flights. They're also going to launch New Glenn. These are obviously named for Alan Shepard, who was the first American on a suborbital flight and Glenn, who was the first American to orbit. They will build an orbital vehicle. They were recently awarded a NASA contract for the lunar lander. 

And then Virgin Galactic is-- Blue Origin is Jeff Bezos company, by the way. And it's probably the only one that is totally and completely privately funded. He says that he was selling $1 billion a year in Amazon stock to keep this company running. So when he runs out of money, he just sells another billion. 

Virgin galactic is Richard Branson, another of the billionaire space barons, who has an airdropped rocket. So it flies up on this carrier and drops this rocket there. They are offering for people who want to pay suborbital flights and they can also do small satellite launches from that space. 

Virgin galactic has more than 600 reservations for flights at about $250,000 per ticket. So if you have a little bit of money around, be a good way to go. And then finally, NASA's program Artemis, which is a return to the moon by 2020, Artemis was a twin sister of Apollo. And one of the goals of this is to send the first woman to the moon along with another man to the moon. 

They have recently let contracts to Dynetics, SpaceX, and Blue Origin to develop the human lander. They also have a gateway vehicle, which will essentially be a small station in orbit around the moon that would serve as a gateway for humans and for logistics to the moon in the same way that Christchurch, New Zealand serves as a gateway to Antarctic logistics. 

This would be the same and would also be a pretty important piece for Mars missions to be able to have a place to assemble missions that can't be launched in a single launch. So that's part of that. 

I meant to leave a little more time for questions, but I don't see any yet. So, well, there's some. OK, I'll end here and just answer questions if that's OK. I don't see them. So am I going to see. I'm going to stop sharing. 

SHARON HOSTLER: Can you hear me, Kathryn? 

KATHRYN THORNTON: Yeah, I hear you. 

SHARON HOSTLER: From David Brennaman, "do you see any purpose in trying to get to Mars?" 

KATHRYN THORNTON: Absolutely, I do. And in fact, whenever we have a change of administration and a change of NASA administrator, we get a whole new restart. So in George Bush's administration, with Mike Griffin as the administrator, we had the constellation program. 

When Charlie Bolden came along as administrator, that got scrapped. And then we had the asteroid Mars and then this current administration that got scrapped. And now we have Artemis. My feeling is Artemis, it's intent is to establish a permanent base on the moon. 

Well, the Space Station was to establish a permanent occupation in space. And we're now trying really hard to hand that off so that we have the money to take the next step, which is the moon. So my feeling is if we set up a permanent base on the moon, we're going to be stuck there for two or three generations before we can afford to do anything else. 

So I was actually a fan of the asteroid mining to learn what we need to learn, visit asteroids-- not necessarily mining, but visit asteroids to learn what we need to learn about flying in deep space and going directly to Mars. I think there's a lot that can be learned there. I think most of-- I mean, it would be the Apollo moon landing times 10 if we should ever do that. 

SHARON HOSTLER: A follow-up to that is from Sherwood fry about the benefit cost ratio of manned missions to Mars, which you may have partly answered. 

KATHRYN THORNTON: Well, I think in general, if you're looking for return on investment, you're not going to see it. And that's why commercial companies are not going to do it, and that's why it needs to be the domain of the government. 

We explore because that's what we do. And I think that we will continue to do that. There's a lot of-- Kennedy had his very famous speech at Rice University where he announced we were going to go to the moon. And there was another quote in that I knew I was going to ask this question, by the way because I always am was about, why are we going to space in general? 

And part of what he said was space science has no conscience of its own whether it will become a force for good or evil depends on man. And only if the United States occupies a position of preeminence can we help decide whether this new ocean will be a sea of peace or a new, terrifying theater of war? 

So this is going to happen. And if we're not in the game, we can't put our mark on it like that. And so I think that it's going to happen because exploration happens. It just does. We don't want to do it. That's fine. Somebody else will and we will not be able to have any influence on where it goes and how we do it. So cost benefit, that ain't going to happen for a long time. It's barely happening in low-earth orbit right now, but it will. 

SHARON HOSTLER: So Kathryn, who keeps track of what's out there? I mean, you've listed an incredible number of things happening simultaneously. And so what-- who knows at any point in time who's out there and how things are going? I mean, is there a central monitor? And also, I mean, who's responsible for rescuing? Is it a cooperative agreement? How does this-- I'm worried about the rescue squad that's international. 

KATHRYN THORNTON: It's interesting if you watch the movies like gravity and the Martian, we call on the Chinese to help us. That's the Chinese. We won't even let set foot on our NASA facilities here, which is weird. I think nobody is in charge of rescue. I think your scramble can when if something were to happen. As far as who keeps track-- 

SHARON HOSTLER: Do you think there's somebody has a plan though about who they'd call first, second, and third, or no? 

KATHRYN THORNTON: No, I don't think so. I think it's every country for themselves at the moment. If something were to happen on the Space Station and we needed to evacuate people and had no way to do it. You can bet that any of our partners who were able to stand up at that moment probably would. But no, I don't think there's a plan as far as who's keeps track of stuff, if you're talking about space junk. For the most part-- 

SHARON HOSTLER: Good stuff and bad stuff. 

KATHRYN THORNTON: For the most part, it's the US Air Force that monitors that stuff. And then they will give alerts if they see the potential of a collision because a collision will produce thousands or even tens of thousands of more pieces of junk, all of which are lethal to spacecraft of all kinds. 

There are some private companies who would like to take that over because it's not really the Air Force's job to do that. They have other missions besides informing the world about space traffic. And so there are other companies. Leo lab is one that has maybe better capabilities than the air-- well, than what the Air Force lets us know they have. So I'll say they are privately funded. 

They have I think it's two giant antennas and operation and a third one about to come on that they have built. And so it's just folks like that keep track of where the junk is and try to notify people of potential collisions, particularly if it's possible for one part of that collision to move and get out of the way. 

So if there's a conjunction that says we have a near collision, hopefully, somebody is still able to move. But if they're both dead objects that are just orbiting, then no, you can't. It's just going to happen if it's going to happen. 

SHARON HOSTLER: So another question is, what's the likelihood that visitors to Mars will come back or was the intent be to establish a human colony on another planet? 

KATHRYN THORNTON: I don't think anybody-- well, I won't say that nobody in this country officially is planning to send people without a way to bring them back. So the intention is to send them and bring them back on relatively short missions and then eventually in the future sometime colonization. 

But probably even colonization with exchange of people as well. I know people who would take a one way trip. There's some people I'd like to send on a one way trip, but I don't know that anybody's actually planning that. 

SHARON HOSTLER: Well, I mean, this is another from William Deo. "I guess if someone volunteers for space travel to Mars, does he or she sign a waiver saying I realize I may not be rescued and if so, it may be at my expense?" 

KATHRYN THORNTON: Those of us who worked for the US government who flew in space never signed waivers, but we knew there was a chance we weren't coming back. It's just what you do. I don't know. I mean, the reason to sign a waiver is the legality of it all. So it's the lawyers. So I don't know. It doesn't improve your chances of coming back just because you signed a waiver. 

SHARON HOSTLER: Was it ever a question that you openly discussed? I mean, did you get advice? Will you make sure you get your wills and your trust-- 

KATHRYN THORNTON: Oh, yes, absolutely. 

SHARON HOSTLER: --in order and everybody get their kids and everybody set, yeah. 

KATHRYN THORNTON: Yeah, I think some of the astronauts out there, which one's on challenger did not have wills. And so yeah, there was a big push to make sure you got your affairs in order before you go. A lot of people would write letters to their children to be given to them only if things. Yeah, there's a absolute knowledge that of your mortality when you go and put your butt on a rocket. 

SHARON HOSTLER: And may I ask a personal question? 

KATHRYN THORNTON: Sure. 

SHARON HOSTLER: And that is when you were in space, how old were your kids? And were you able to communicate with them? And what did they understand of what was happening? 

KATHRYN THORNTON: Steve's in there watching. Well, the first time like snow, they were, I think seven and four. There were only two at the time. And I think the seven-year-old understood this was after challenger and my oldest daughter had been in preschool with Ron McNair's son. And Judy Resnick had been at our home for Thanksgiving dinner. 

And so Carol understood that Laura was only four. I think didn't really understand it, but she knew something bad was maybe going to happen because she would sometimes just curl up in a ball and not want to communicate. It was very hard on them. 

And then the second time like I saw there were three of them the youngest was about a year and a half. So she didn't understand anything. Except that when I came back it was really funny. I'd been away for I guess it was 11-day mission and seven days of quarantine. So close to three weeks. 

And I came back and on the runway and I met my family and she recognized my voice. It was really clear, but she didn't know who this person was and this big orange suit. She wasn't at all sure she wanted anything to do with me, but it's clear she recognized my voice. 

SHARON HOSTLER: And did you have any side effects after you came back that alerted them or frightened them in any way? I mean, did they ask you questions? 

KATHRYN THORNTON: I think I was pretty rough looking after the third flight. I wasn't feeling very well when I came back, and I can remember Laura looking at me and then looking at those people around me going, what did you do to my mother? 

SHARON HOSTLER: Wow. 

KATHRYN THORNTON: But it was pretty stuff wore off pretty quick. 

SHARON HOSTLER: But none of them have signed up to be astronauts? 

KATHRYN THORNTON: No, I think one or two of them might if they had the option, but I don't think it's an option. Although, if you make enough money and you can fly in space now. 150,000 you can fly suborbital. I don't know what the cost is for orbital flight will be. But it's not the billionaire class. It's the multi-millionaire class that will be able to do this. 

SHARON HOSTLER: And then I have one that you may have answered that says, what role will the US Space Force play in space use and exploration? 

KATHRYN THORNTON: I don't think the Space Force is connected with space exploration at all. They're more in defense of the space domain and all the parts of the Air Force and the Navy and the army that were being would be involved in getting assets to space, protecting our assets in space. And by space, I mean Earth orbit. Protecting our assets in space And all that has been consolidated now under one branch of the military instead of spread out. 

So I don't know that-- it's like when the Air Force was created from the Army Air Corps. I don't know that it created a lot more mission, a bigger mission, or whether it just consolidated pieces of the mission that were already around in the other services. But I don't think they're planning to go to Mars. 

SHARON HOSTLER: And so you have two more. What are the advantages or disadvantages of women participating in space travel exploration? And what did you find the most exciting about space? And there is always the question about, what do you want to tell us about the Appalachian Trail? So you've got a few minutes. 

KATHRYN THORNTON: [LAUGHS] I think to include women and minorities in any endeavor increases the diversity of thought that is a part of it. Not to mention that we generally weigh a lot less than the guys and at $10,000 per pound to orbit, I'm a bargain. I mean, why would they send a big guy and get send me? 

And some of my crewmates-- obviously, I've never been on an all-female mission because there hasn't been one. But some of my crewmates who had been on all-male missions said they appreciated the fact that it was a little more civilized on board because when it was all guys, it just became the guys locker room. And you could have this naked body floating 6 inches in front of your face while you're eating your breakfast. 

But with me on board, they didn't do that at least unless they sent me up to the flight deck. And it was more civilized on board is what one of my crewmates had mentioned. 

SHARON HOSTLER: And what about the Appalachian Trail? You have two minutes. 

KATHRYN THORNTON: It was an awesome experience. It's harder than it looks. You don't have to be particularly strong or athletic to do it. You just have to be persistent. 

SHARON HOSTLER: And did you see any bear, or snakes, or other, a bear? 

KATHRYN THORNTON: Bears and snakes, yeah. Several bears and snakes, yeah. 

SHARON HOSTLER: And you frightened them? 

KATHRYN THORNTON: Oh, yeah, I'm sure I did. Yeah, they don't really want to mess with you. But for the most part, unless they think they're going to get food at a campsite in general in the wild. They don't really want to mess with us. We're not in their food chain. 

SHARON HOSTLER: Kathryn, this has been fantastic, and I'd like to offer you the last one minute for any parting comments you have to make. 

KATHRYN THORNTON: I don't know what else to say. I'm interested to see what happens in this new administration because for the last three everybody knew coming in just craters what has been done before. And so it's always a restart, restart, restart. 

So it'll be interesting to see how much of-- what has been done in the last four years survives the next year. I'm a fan for going to Mars. So that got more emphasis. I'd be cool with that, but I don't think they're going to ask me. 

SHARON HOSTLER: Well, I think they should. 

KATHRYN THORNTON: I think they should too. 

SHARON HOSTLER: I do too. Thanks, everyone, for being with us today and we look forward to seeing you with Jody Cavassa on December 7 same time, same place. In the meantime, go to the website and send us a check. Thank you. Bye-bye.

SHARON HOSTLER: Welcome to the Retired Faculty Association's October session. We are so delighted, and the timing is so absolutely perfect, to welcome Bill Antholis, CEO and director of the Miller Center for Public Policy at the University of Virginia. 

Bill has served at the US State Department, the White House, and as director of the Hastings Institute. And I don't think the timing could be better. So let's move on to you, Bill. Thank you very much for being with us. 

WILLIAM ANTHOLIS: Well, thank you, Sharon. And it's great to be back with you all. I think my first meeting with Retired Faculty Association was shortly after I became the director of the Miller Center. And at the time, we were planning something called the First Year Project, which was probably in 2015 or 2016, as we were looking ahead at that time at the end of the Obama administration to who would be the next president. 

And we were drawing from the Miller Center's deep understanding, not just of the presidency as a functioning entity, but presidential history, given that we have conducted oral histories of presidencies going back to Gerald Ford-- 

Have been transcribing the secret Oval Office recordings that date all the way back to President Roosevelt's time, but particularly during the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations. And that we bring both in our own faculty and the faculty that we share with schools and departments across the university-- Just a huge bench of talent on understanding the presidency. 

So we did that work about four years ago. And I was delighted to be introduced to the Retired Faculty Association to get to lecture in front of all of you, including a few of my former professors from when I was an undergraduate back in the 1980s. 

And now boy, is the timing so right for the kind of work that my colleagues at the Miller Center do and that I'm so fortunate to get to be a partner in? Let me share my screen now and walk you through. I think I'll probably talk for about a half hour or a little bit more than that. And then we can have a conversation where you send me questions in the chat function, and I do my best to try to field them. 

So I'd go right to this here. I've called this 107 Days. It is 107 days from now until the next president, whoever wins the presidential election, gets sworn in, whether that's President Trump or Vice President Biden. 

And the reason that we call it 107 Days, it's both the 29 days until the election, but then also the 70-odd days between then, and I think it's 78 days between then and inauguration day on January 20. And this presentation will talk about both of those periods. 

And my catch-- the way that I phrase this, even as I was preparing this about a week ago, as I started pulling together the strands of the presentation-- there's a political scientist in Washington named Matt Glassman, who is not just really exceptional in understanding the current operation of the federal government-- his primary expertise is Congress, but he knows the presidency. And he knows presidential history. 

He framed it as looking ahead 37 days to the election, what is the most insane 37-day period in our history? And does the current 37 days count? And as you look at this list of seven options he presented, he presented the period of the Lincoln transition, the period when seven states secede and there's an assassination being plotted against the President-elect. 

The first 37 days of that presidency when another four states secede and the Civil War begins. April to May of 1865, when the Civil War ends and President Lincoln is then assassinated; December to January '41/'42, the onset of World War II;-- 

October 1962, the Cuban Missile Crisis; July to August 1974, in addition to the end of the Nixon administration, his resignation. There was also conflict in the world, the invasion of Cyprus, and people taking advantage of a weak American presidency and then any other contenders. 

And my response to Matt was I wouldn't count out the current moment, especially if we have a contested election. We've had previous economic, political, public health, and racial justice crises in America. We have never, in our over 225-odd year history, had all of these in the Constitution, have never had all four at the same time. 

The winter of 1860 to '61 probably surpasses this political crisis because seven states seceded, challenging the legitimacy of the Republic, although, just to restate the shockingly familiar of the moment that may have inured us to how crazy things are. 

No sitting president has ever challenged the veracity of his own re-election effort prior to election day. And meanwhile, we have deaths now occurring every three days. The same number of people are dying now as who died in 9/11. So if the current moment seems insane or at least discordant with peace and prosperity, it is. 

What I'm going to walk you through is a basic-- if you only remember four words from this presentation, it's that we actually have a stable electorate but an unstable system. Public attitudes remain consistent. And between now and election day, we could see small but significant changes on the margins that could impact the election. But the electorate has been remarkably stable for the last four years. 

Meanwhile, we have four unfolding crises that make the system feel unstable-- the pandemic, the self-induced induced economic coma, the racial justice reckoning, and the post-election legitimacy crisis that could happen that the president himself has been foretelling. 

The pandemic, the economy, and the racial justice reckoning, all affect the election. And they also all elect the post of legitimacy crisis, which then affects the ability of the next president to govern. That's all you have to remember. And I'll walk you through all of that. 

So let's start with the stable electorate. This is President Trump's popularity over essentially his whole presidency. What you see in red is his disapproval number, which has gotten as high as 58%. And his disapproval number's low point was at the outbreak of the pandemic, at 49%. 

His approval number has gotten as high as just under 48%-- genuinely thought of as high as about 46%-- and is currently just above 46% It's actually had a bit of a comeback in recent weeks. That purple line is the 50% number, obviously. But I'm flagging it because we're going to look at other presidencies in crisis. 

But let me just point out that in the president's popularity, the most important piece in the stability is this gap between his low point at 37% and his high point at, say, 46% or 47%. That 9% you might think of as Sometimes-Trumpers. 

We regularly hear about the Never-Trumpers. This 9% are the Sometimes-Trumpers. That's the small but significant group that could affect the outcome of the election. Similarly, the people who go between 58% and 50%, that's the same group. 

Now, the reason that I focus on that purple bar is the 50% line of approval has-- if you look at other presidents that have faced major crises-- this is the Jimmy Carter presidency-- you'll see he went above 70% approval. He ended up below 40% approval. 

President George HW Bush went as high as 89% approval. He fell to 29%. He came above 56% George W. Bush went as high as 90% on Mission Accomplished, or at least after 9/11, and then Mission Accomplished got him back to 75%. But he fell below 25% approval. So by comparison to those things, President Trump's numbers are stunningly consistent. 

And here's what's driving that? There's issue consistency for the president. But it has started to change and waver. His highest approval numbers-- his approvals are all in red here. His highest approval numbers have always been around the economy. Here, this was in April of this year, or early March of this year. He was at 54% approval. This is just before the real outbreak of the coronavirus was known in the country. 

He was at 54% approval on the economy. The cultural issues that make the president so polarizing-- immigration, his America First foreign policy, his efforts to end Obamacare-- those are very unpopular. And then his trade numbers are closer to his treatment of the economy. 

They're somewhere between the way he treats foreign policy, which is disruptive, and his efforts to address American economic growth, which are largely positively received in the country. Trade is in the middle. Impeachment is a funny number in this. This was after the process of impeachment, which broke even for the president. 

One month later, you could see by the time the coronavirus had kicked in, his economic approval numbers had come down. His health care numbers had come down just a little bit. His coronavirus numbers were-- handling coronavirus were at 44%. 

And in comparison-- and I've done these other approval numbers in different color because I don't want you to think that they are about the president or that they split Democrat or Republican-- people tended to approve in the first month their own governor's handling of the crisis. They approved the national public health agencies. They were more evenly spread on the media's handling. And they disapproved congressional handling of the crisis. 

A month after that, the president's economy numbers had come up. The first relief package had been passed. You see that reflected. I'm sorry, the president's health care numbers had come down. His coronavirus numbers had actually come down somewhat. 

Governor's numbers came down a little bit. The public health agencies also came down a little bit from 66% to 63%. The media came down just a bit, and Congress also came back down. So the president's numbers on the economy went up, but everybody else's numbers came down. 

Now let's flash forward to September. The president's economy numbers remained pretty consistent. They went up maybe a point. His coronavirus numbers have come down, from 44% in the spring, 46% initially, 44% later in the spring, to 40% now. And then the new issue came up with the killing of George Floyd. His race relations numbers have been very low. 

Notice the governor's numbers have come down dramatically, from having been in the 70s to now in around 50. Public health agencies numbers came down dramatically to about 46%. But this new emphasis started being pulled for, how did the public assess the public's handling of the coronavirus? Americans blame one another for their response to the virus, which is really quite striking. And local governments have not fared well either. 

And then we can look at the Trump versus Biden numbers. Trump's great strength in his popularity or his economy numbers, but Vice President Biden is polling about as well on how people think he would do in managing the economy. On health care, coronavirus, racial inequality, vice president is outpacing the president. 

On the military, he's actually even slightly ahead of the president. And on public safety, he's ahead. That is, having to do with riots, protests and things that are somewhat separate from racial inequality issues. But also, at least in the president's efforts, have been connected to it. 

Now, we look at all these issues. How do they rank? Now, the economy is still, and almost always is, the number one thing on voters' minds. But coronavirus and health care are not far behind. And this was all polling done prior to Ruth Bader Ginsburg's passing and of course, then prior to the president's own infection with the coronavirus disease. 

So what does this mean for the electorate? I'm going to show you three different maps. This is Larry Sabato's most recent rating. Larry still lists in this map tossups. And even with the tossups, if you count the states that lean Democratic or likely Democratic, or safely Democratic, Larry right now has Vice President Biden with enough electoral votes to be elected. 

He still has 80 electoral votes up for grabs. And those include some states where Vice President Biden recently has outpolled the president, like Arizona and Florida, and states that are much closer right now but are essentially drawing even-- Ohio, North Carolina, and Iowa. 

If you go to other people that are tracking this, this is up 538, no tossups. If you just take right now and had to go by the most recent polls, who is ahead, this shows Vice President Biden with 353 electoral votes, essentially winning all of those tossup states that Larry Sabato lists as a tossup. If he wins all of those states, Biden does, he wins at 353. 

This is my favorite new game. This is something that the Cook Political Report has created, which is called the swingometer. The way the swingometer works is it takes the demographics of the nation and it breaks it down into the most important groups that get polled. 

For white voters, which are still a great number of all voters-- I think plurality of voters are still white, or actually, it's just a bare majority for-- I'm sorry, it's nearly 70% of the country. 43% of white voters do not have college degrees. 

And what you do on the swingometer is you plug in a polling percentage for either candidate, but then you also have to assess the turnout for those candidates, because, of course, turnout drives the election, as much as whether any particular demographic chooses the president, or in this case, vice president, Biden. 

I have set the values on swingometer. And by the way, if you change the values, you then see the corresponding change in the prospects of voters in the various states, so you can see the states swing from one candidate to another. 

I have set the values on swingometer based on the last New York Time polls, breakouts for these various demographic groups, both for who they say they're going to vote for and how likely it is they're going to vote. So if somebody said they were highly likely to vote, I cast that as them turning out for the president-- or turning out to vote. 

Based on the last New York Times survey, Vice President Biden would win the election with 375 electoral votes and would win the popular vote by 14 million votes. Now, this is not saying that will happen. But in the current polling at least, let's just say-- it's fair to say that Vice President Biden would be the favorite to win if the election were held today. 

That tracks with history. Let me go back to through presidents elected since 1900. So what this map is going to show is what happened to them when they sought re-election. Now, a certain number of them died while in office, or, in the case of Richard Nixon, resigned while in office. 

And given the president's current health, let's just say that that's not a zero probability. The president is in serious enough condition to be in the hospital with the coronavirus. And given his own demographics, his age, his current health and weight. It is possible. But still, we're looking at the president's prospects for re-election. 

And the single most important thing that has corresponded with re-election, These are the presidents who were elected to a second term. Every single one of them benefited from a strong economy in their re-election year, or at least an improving economy. These presidents were not reelected. Every single one of them either had a week or an economy in decline. 

So essentially, we have a stable electorate but an unstable system. And let me play through how that unstable system plays out if we have a post-election legitimacy crisis. In the nation's history, in the 45 presidencies, we have had five elections where the winner of the election was not known in the weeks after the election, or where there was a significant challenge to the legitimacy of the election's outcome. And I'll walk through those quickly. 

In 1,800, Thomas Jefferson faced off against Aaron Burr, the person who was presumed to be his own vice presidential candidate. As you can see in the electoral map this year, Jefferson and Burr had the same number of electoral votes, but they were in the same party. 

And the contest that went to the House of Representatives was to break a tie, because the Electoral College had not been sorted out at that point to have the president and vice president on a common ticket, which was, of course, corrected in the 12th Amendment. 

John Adams lost that race, did not seek to challenge the outcome. But the Federalists also didn't help the cause here. They did not allow a tiebreaking vote to be cast until after 36 ballots in the House of Representatives were cast, and ultimately giving Jefferson the election. 

In 1824, there were four candidates. And the person who won, when it went to the House of Representatives, John Quincy Adams, neither won a plurality in the popular vote nor in the electoral college. He came in second, but he did a deal with the fourth-place vote winner, Henry Clay, who became his Secretary of State. 

It was the so-called corrupt bargain that allowed Henry Clay, or allowed John Quincy Adams to win the electoral college vote in the House of Representatives-- I'm sorry, win the vote in the House of Representatives because he couldn't be determined in the electoral college. 

In 1860, Lincoln won a majority of Electoral College votes, but he only won a plurality of the popular vote. And essentially, most of those blue states seceded in the months between the transition. A number of them did not, importantly. Maryland and Delaware did not secede. The two light blue states there that went with Stephen Douglas, Missouri and New Jersey, did not succeed. 

So it was only the seven deep Southern states and then a few others that followed in April that ended up seceding. But essentially, they challenged the legitimacy of the system that had elected Lincoln. 

And then in 1876, Rutherford B. Hayes beat Sam Tilden. Hayes won the electoral vote but lost the popular vote. The election did not go to the House of Representatives, but there were four contested states, three in the South and Oregon, and the three in the South that ended up being determined. 

Two of those, Louisiana and South Carolina, I believe, ended up casting their vote for Hayes after an electoral commission was established. That was a hybrid that included members of the Supreme Court and appointed members. And 15-member commission voted eight to seven to give the election to Hayes. 

Following the election, Hayes agreed not to pursue reconstruction, although that was something of a moot point because the House of Representatives already had been won by the Democrats, and they began to pass a series of laws that Hayes would then veto, reversing much of reconstruction. 

And then, of course, in 2000 that we all remember, George Bush won after the contested votes in Florida, where the vote counting was stopped by the Supreme Court on December 12, and the election was given to George Bush. 

So how do we define a political crisis in these terms, where there is public doubt about the legitimacy of the winner? And these five cases, in these past set of cases, at least five things have happened. One is there is no obvious winner on the day after the election. In four of the five cases, that was the case. Voter access was questioned. In 1876 and in 2000, there were questions about whether voters had full access to the polls. 

The House of Representatives decided two of these elections, 1800 and 1824, the losing side suggested that the election was rigged, corrupt, or stolen. Four of the five, that was the case. And then in the fifth, in 1860, the legitimacy of the entire system was questioned. 

And just to be short about this, that could happen this time around. We could have no obvious winner the day after the election. That's because absentee ballots or vote by mail ballots may still be counted for some time. We could have questions about voter access in a number of different states. 

The House of Representatives could decide the election if for one reason or another states dispute their ballots in a close election. The losing side, in either direction, could suggest that the outcome is rigged, corrupt, or stolen. The President of the United States is already saying that could be the case. And the legitimacy of the entire system could be questioned. 

And there, again, the President of the United States is currently right now questioning whether vote by mail is a legitimate form of voting. And there are a series of efforts on both sides preparing for the eventuality that one of the other four things that could happen. And therefore, the legitimacy of the entire system could be questioned. 

What are the consequences of this kind of political crisis? I have a two word consequence, which is there's no honeymoon. Someone will probably, hopefully, be sworn in on January 20. But the challenge is that the patent of legitimacy that usually comes with inauguration day could be taken away from the next president. 

And that would be bad for the country. It would be a challenge in confirming the cabinet officials for that president. It would be a challenge for that person to advance a winning agenda. Lawmaking could be constrained. And then you could see a return to emphasis to executive action over legislative action, which is the way our system was designed to work. 

So then let me work through what some of our lessons were from the First Year Project, which is where I first met you all over four years ago. The First Year Project broke down presidential action in the first year in five different categories-- personnel, process, priorities, politics, and the personal. 

In today's session, the personal part has to do with presidential popularity. I won't go through this because I want this to be forward-looking. So we don't know how it's going to affect the next president's popularity. But let me walk through how it could affect the top four. 

On the personnel side, the most important thing a president does in their first 100 days is not move forward a legislative agenda but is to get their cabinet and subcabinet officers passed and confirmed through Congress. And this gives you a sense of how the last set of presidents did in that regard. 

The white badges here are the five most important cabinet agencies and the cabinet secretaries in those agencies. And then the grid shows when they were confirmed. The blue badges are for their deputies. So as you will see for the Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush43, and Obama presidencies, they typically had three or four officials confirmed in January, in the first 10 days of their presidency, from January 20 until the end of the month. That's really good. 

It often took them because they had a failed confirmation to get the rest of the cabinet in place. Now, President Trump struggled a bit here because he had a discordant transition process, but he actually did quite well. By February, he had his entire cabinet confirmed. It was the deputy officials who weren't confirmed. 

And the challenge with not having the deputies confirmed is these are the people who really run the federal government. As Vice President Cheney once told us in one of his oral histories, when a crisis hit the first Bush administration in October of 1989-- he was recently sworn-in Defense Secretary-- 

He said, well, I was off giving a speech somewhere. Secretary Baker was someplace else. I don't know where Colin Powell was. We weren't well organized, and we didn't like it. And within a month, we got the process working well. And that was beneficial because then the Berlin Wall fell. And as a team, we were working better. These deputies are critical for that. 

You also can see cabinet in a first year if that process is not well done. And we saw that a great deal during the Trump administration. In their first year, they had two cabinet members turn over, which was the highest in any presidency in the five years before. 

And part of that was because they did not have a very good transition. So the transition is essential for building that cabinet well. That's why between now and day 107 from now, those 70 days of the transition, getting that team together is really, really critical. 

Then you need the team to work together, as I alluded to. And here's where the White House team is essential. What you see here is probably the best cooperation on national security affairs that we saw in the Trump administration's first term, where General Kelly was chief of staff, General McMaster was White House National Security Advisor, and General Mattis was Secretary of Defense. 

Now, we can get into whether it's a good thing or a bad thing to have so many civilian posts held by former generals. But these folks are used to running effective policy processes to manage decision-making. And this was the best that it's been. And even there, it was not a great process because one of the President's cabinet secretaries, Secretary Tillerson, did not have a strong relationship, not just with the president but with the rest of them. And you still had a disruptive process. 

That's even more difficult when you have White House turnover. This was President Trump's White House on inauguration day. And if you think about the current White House, there's only one person left operating. And that's Vice President Pence. His chief of staff is gone, Reince Priebus. His senior counselor, Steve Bannon, is gone. His spokesperson, Sean Spicer, is gone. And General Flynn, his first National Security Advisor, is gone. And they were all gone more or less within the first year. 

The White House turnover again has been remarkable, by the fourth year over 80%. Now, there is a lot of burnout and turnover in White Houses. It usually by the fourth year goes above 60%. What again is noteworthy in the Trump administration is the first and second year's turnover, nearly 40% turnover in the first year, whereas in most presidential White Houses, it's under 20%; by the second year, again, close to 40%. And generally, it's a little bit over 20% by the second year. 

So it's important in that first 100 days to focus on the White House staff and then the rest of the cabinet. And just to give you a sense of the depth and the current White House, they're now, in some cases, on the third, fourth, and fifth team of people in the White House. They've had extraordinary turnover. 

The more turnover you have, the less smoothly operating the president is, particularly in moments of crisis, as I think we've seen in the coronavirus crisis. That goes to managing your priorities. We've all become used, thanks to Franklin Roosevelt, the 100-day benchmark and moving forward on your priorities. Your ability to manage your priorities is a function of how well you put your White House team and your cabinet team in place. 

So looking forward in the next 100 days, what will the priorities be? I think it's safe to say that tackling the coronavirus, and particularly coming up with an effective vaccine for the virus, is going to be a priority. But also not to be underscored is managing the international dimensions of the crisis. 

I've chosen here to feature Chinese response to the virus. Managing the relationship with China is going to be critical for the next president. This is the most important relationship in the world right now, and it is at a historic low point, going back since the normalization of relations with China in the late 1970s. 

Then there's also managing our economy. As one of our recent webinars indicated, we have what I would call right now a self-induced coma on the economy. We're going to need to keep the economy alive through at least one more round of emergency assistance, which is being negotiated. 

But then we're going to have to be-- if in the best case scenario, a virus vaccine comes on in the first two quarters of the next year, we're going to have to start to see an economic revival with several sectors of the economy in real distress-- entertainment, tourism, travel, all of those are in distress, but even a few other industries are struggling. And we'll have to see what it takes to bring those back. 

And then there's the racial justice crisis that we're all facing with and trying to bring some sense of civility and common values and common course of study to that. And we have felt it as much as the rest of the country has here in Charlottesville. 

President Trump was quite clear in his priorities four years ago when he came into office. And I'll go through those quickly, only to give you a sense of the different ways a president can act on them. Remember, he made a big priority of addressing the economy. And on taxes and trade, he actually passed legislation. 

He at first renegotiated what used to be known as NAFTA and is now the US-Mexico-Canada Trade Agreement. And eventually, those were passed by legislation. He also really wanted to expand energy production. He didn't do those by legislation. He did those by executive action. 

He wanted to rescind, by legislation, the Affordable Care Act, repeal the Affordable Care Act. He failed to do that. He has tried to do that by a number of different means, including through the courts. On immigration, he said he wanted to build a wall. Instead, he had to do those by executive action. 

And with respect to China, he said he was going to declare China a currency manipulator. He did not do that. He reversed that promise. But he is certainly waged an economic war with China over the last four years. 

And then that speaks to what the next president will have to deal with in the politics of what he's done. Now, what I'm showing here is a grid that shows what presidents have done in their first 100 days-- I'm sorry, in their first year legislatively. 

The benchmark for success is not what one does in one's first 100 days, particularly by legislative action, which is very, very difficult to pass things, but really in your first year when you are at the height of your popularity, typically, but the low of your experience as a team and you have to work with a Congress. 

If you look back, President Carter, President Clinton, President Bush, and President Obama, and President Trump both had both houses of Congress controlled by the same party. Only President Reagan and President Bush41 did not control both houses of Congress. And still, there were relatively effective legislative years for all of those presidencies. 

Now, one might say that the three Trump accomplishments plus the various confirmations, two so far, and maybe a third, Supreme Court justice, and the federal vacancies that he has filled on the federal bench are his great legislative accomplishments. So one can actually count that as a fairly successful legislative agenda. But the basic bottom line here, a new president has to manage relations with Congress. So if in the next 107 days, we have a political crisis, that could also be challenged. 

And then, again, to summarize President Trump's legislative agenda, he really ended up doing a lot of things by executive action. Now, if you're a fan of this president, or a fan of the next president, and Congress isn't an option, we may see things done by legislative action. And this president or the next president will have rewarded his supporters. 

I think that actually is a trend well beyond President Trump. It's something that our faculty member said-- Milkis, who a number of you may know has referred to an executive-centered partisanship. That is, because of our partisanship and the polarization and the gridlock in Congress, we now have centered executive action, where the executive is expected to carry the weight of his party's agenda in Congress. 

That's a trend that has been growing and has increased. So if we see great gridlock in the next Congress, which itself reflects a political legitimacy crisis that we could have between now and inauguration day, you will see a further polarization of the presidency itself. And in our view, that's not good for the country. 

So with that, let me get out of sharing my screen, and we can go right to the questions from the audience. We'd ask that you put the questions into the Q&A button at the bottom of your screen. And I'll try to field them as they come in. 

So Larry Phillips asks, "What role do you think Trump's own COVID infection will play?" Well, thank you, Larry, for a great question. It's one that has been keeping a number of us busy over the weekend. I've had several conversations with people. I think it's netting out that it probably will not have much of an effect. There has only been a little bit of polling since the president's COVID diagnosis. 

But most of the people who follow these things find the electorate to be, as I said, very stable. And the immediate reaction among the president's supporters is to say that the president could have done very little to stop the crisis, the pandemic, from coming to the United States. He's actually done a very good job. It may have humanized him a bit. 

And he might say, now that-- he has really two choices. He can say, now that I have the virus, I'm taking it that much more seriously, or I have the virus and I feel for your concerns, but we're going to keep doing what we're doing because we're handling it well. 

For the president's supporters, they might buy that. For the president's opponents, they're likely to have one of two answers. If he says, I now get it, they're going to say, which many of the president's opponents are quite explicitly saying right now, it is a sign of your self-centeredness that only after 200,000 people have died, only when you yourself get it, that you take it seriously. 

I think the president's line in his video message was, I have the real life learning that comes from this, not book-level learning. And his critics have already started to say-- and I think you'll see Senator Harris in the vice presidential debate say-- the people who have been studying this crisis have been telling you exactly this for six or seven months. And only now that you get it as a sign of your own self-centeredness. And it appears to be the case that people that already are not likely to vote for the president will continue to do so as a result of this. 

Richard Brownlee asks, "What difference will the vice presidential candidate make?" Again, I happen to think that the electorate is quite locked in right now. There are significant differences on the margins. So even in the best-case scenario, where the president's numbers come back to 47%, 48%, that would come from a really strong performance from Vice President Pence and a really weak performance from Kamala Harris. 

Early this summer, I asked an advisor close to vice presidential candidate Biden, before he had named a vice president candidate of his own, what were the things they were worried about on a list of four things? The number four thing was that the vice presidential candidate didn't respond well to challenges about their own background. 

So the four things that this person listed were a bad performance by Vice President Biden, a bad response by Vice President Biden and whoever his own vice presidential nominee would be to the racial justice reckonings, a badly chosen vice presidential candidate where there's something in the background that doesn't come out well, and a bad response by that person. 

And so far, none of those four things have happened. Those were the things that most worried the Biden campaign in early August of this year. So again, it could make a difference. Now, God forbid that it should happen. It really would be obviously a terrible thing if the President of the United States dies, and a terrible thing for the country, given the uncertainty. 

But if the president dies between now and the election, the uncertainty around whether it is legitimate for current Vice President Pence to be on the ticket, particularly because so many people have voted, myself included, on a ballot that doesn't list him as the presidential candidate, that then makes the vice presidential debate super important, because essentially, would be seeing for the first time the Republicans nominee. 

And just to restate what happens between now and the election if the president is to pass is the Republican national committee needs to meet. They have to nominate Vice President Pence. Then each of the states needs to determine if they are going to reprint their ballots or if they're going to treat the current ballot and any vote for President Trump as a vote for Vice President Pence. So anyhow, that's all a long-winded way of answering the question, what difference does the VP candidate make? 

"Will climate change issues play any role in this election?" I think they play a small role. I could list as Vice President Biden did, the climate crisis is one of the crises going on today certainly from a policy standpoint. I would personally say that's the case. It's an issue that I've worked on for over 20 years. I was actually at Kyoto as a White House official. And the wildfires in California, it's hard to say that that's not a crisis of the climate. 

Unfortunately, I don't think that it is a major role. If you go back to my slides, climate change was only added by 4% of-- it was not listed as one of the options in the poll for how important an issue is it. And only 4% of the public listed as an issue. 

And my guess is that most of those 4% were likely to vote for Vice President Biden anyway. The polling on climate change is so polarized by party that unfortunately, for somebody who cares about climate, I don't think it's a major voting issue. 

"What might be the impact of canceling the next two presidential debates?" It's a great question. I, again, think, not a lot, precisely because Vice President Biden has been the one who has been most likely to pull out of the debates. And usually, if you're ahead in the polls, you have less of an interest in debating. 

Right after the last debate, it was asked if he would go through with it because the debate itself was such a spectacle. And almost immediately, the Vice President's team put down any rumor that he would leave the debate. And the reason for that is they thought they won. And they think that the president's disruptive approach to the last debate, if he brings it on into these next debates, will only help Vice President Biden. 

If the debates don't happen because of the president's health, the sense in the Biden team, at least, or among most political prognosticators, is, any day that the campaign is dominated by discussion of coronavirus is a good day for Vice President Biden. And that simply goes back to the polls that I showed you before of how they assess the two candidates on how well they would do in handling coronavirus. 

Vice President Biden is above 50%. Vice President Trump is down at around 40%. So every day that they're talking about coronavirus between now and the election is a good day for Biden and a bad day for the President. And if they're not having debates because of the President's health because of coronavirus, that just reinforces that message. 

Robert Hodge asks, "What might be the new rules for the upcoming debates?" There has been some discussion. Well, first of all, there's been one change in the vice presidential debate so far. And that's Vice President Pence and Senator Harris will now not be sitting 7 feet apart from one another but will be standing over 12 feet apart from one another. 

This is a true sign of how much more the President's team wants the debates than Vice President Biden's team wanting the debates, as well as the commission on debates. Vice President Biden's team, Senator Harris, has argued that the podium should be 12 feet apart. 

Because given that Vice President Pence attended the White House superspreader event last week and that he might still a day or two from now be carrying an undiagnosed case of coronavirus, they insisted on that spacing because he might be contagious. And they were willing to walk away from the debate if that spacing was not given. 

And the commission on debates ultimately controls the rules around the debates. And they have a vested interest in having the debate go on. And they changed the rule. And Vice President Pence is going to stick with the rule, I think, because ultimately, they want the debates to happen more than Vice President Biden's team do, and because they also want to be seen as following the best guidance on coronavirus. 

My friend and foundation board member Gordon Burris asks, "How do polls differ this coming November from November four years from now?" I think you mean the pre-election public polling as opposed to election voting as well. 

It's a great question, Gordon, in a number of different ways and ways that make people feel better about the polling, but also other ways that make the pollsters themselves reinforce the fact that these are snapshots and not the real story itself. 

The things making them feel better are that there are more polls with higher numbers of people being polled in the key swing states. The number of poles being done in battleground states like Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Florida, Arizona, North Carolina, Iowa, Ohio are much greater than they were four years ago. So the averages of those polls tend to be more reliable than when you only took three or four polls. There have now been dozens of polls in each of those states. 

The second thing that makes those polls more reliable is, people are at home more and they're answering phone calls in a way they were not four years ago. And that's because we're all at home, and we tend to answer the phone more. It is just a quirk of the current system. 

There is still uncertainty around the poles, particularly on people's political identification. Do you register as a Democrat or a Republican? So a recent poll came out in the last week that had an overrepresentation of Democrats in the poll. And what the pollsters can't figure out is, do more people self-identify as Democrats, or did they poll too many Democrats? 

That's one of the things that makes the poll still somewhat suspect, and why Democrats are not resting on the laurels of these polls, and while they're still really encouraging people to vote. And then going back to the thing that I mentioned in the swingometer, the one thing the polls are not great at is, will you actually vote? Will you turn out? 

As important as what you say about who you're going to vote for is whether or not you're going to actually vote. So that remains a question mark in a lot of these polls and something that's worth reading down into. 

My friend David Brennaman asks a great question. "Do you give any credence to The Atlantic article that played out a scenario in which Republican state legislatures alter the electors and throw the election to Trump?" David, I'm worried about it, and I pay attention to it, as are a great number of people, including people in the Biden transition, and even some Republicans. 

| guess I'm not deeply worried that they will overturn not close elections in those states. That is, if a state margin is outside 1% that triggers a recount, it is hard for me to see state legislatures overturning the outcome of an election if it is certified by the electoral board in that state. 

However, if it is in a state of recount and the recount starts getting close to the reporting date at which the electors are to vote, then I do think there is some risk in state legislatures getting involved. And the Trump campaign has been explicit in reaching out to state legislatures to prepare them for that outcome. 

I was really reassured last Thursday in a webinar that we did that included five former White House Chiefs of Staff, two of whom were former Republican Chiefs of staff-- Josh Bolten and Andy Card. And in that event, all five of the Chiefs of Staff made the point that one should not play politics with the transition, with the electoral college, with the counting of votes. 

And I think that a lot of reasoned Republicans, including elected officials and senators who will have to affirm the vote of the electoral college, are sending similar messages. But it is a dangerous period. And if we have very close recounts in a number of these states and it becomes politically popular on either side to challenge the state legislatures to do that within their own party, then we could see very dangerous, contested outcomes. 

Jeffrey Weiss asks "What legal recourse or precedent exists for one party or the other contesting the outcome of the election?" Jeffrey, there is a very complicated flow chart that looks like the reverse of a Sweet 16 bracket for the different places that legal recourse or precedent exists for parties to contest the outcome of the election. 

In each of those five cases, well, in four of those five cases-- actually, in each of those five cases, the losing party sought some recourse. And it could be called a legal recourse in that they went through one of the constitutionally available outcomes, either within the state's laws where the election-- remember, our elections are still conducted by our states. 

The original constitutional provision here is the state legislatures shall select electors. And that only became something that the public did because state legislatures in the early 1800s started giving over that privilege to voters directly. So it's only by that election of 1824 where all of the states chose their electors by public voting. 

So that opens up legal venues at each of the states. Then the states bring those electors to Washington. That process has a number of legal steps. The electoral college meets. It votes. Those votes are then transmitted to a joint session of Congress where both the newly elected Speaker of the House and the newly elected Senate Majority Leader has to affirm the vote of the electoral college in order for the president to be duly picked. 

So, for instance, to give you one of the nightmare scenarios that's playing around, what if there's a contested slate of electors in one state? That state still casts their votes through the electoral college because the Secretary of State in that state certifies that one candidate or another has won those electoral votes. 

That action by the Secretary of State is being challenged and taken to the Supreme Court. If it's on its way to the Supreme Court, the Speaker of the House or the head of the Majority Leader in the Senate might choose to challenge that finding until they hear from the Supreme Court. 

This is one of the reasons why it was so important when President Trump said that he thought that this Supreme Court nomination should go through to have one more vote for him if that eventuality happened. 

So Democrats, in thinking through the Supreme Court fight, are thinking whether one question they should ask the new nominee, if there are hearings held, is, will you recuse yourself because the president has said he wants you on the court to deliver a vote for him in case there is a contested outcome? So there are a number of different legal challenges. 

This has raises the question that Robert Hodge asked, which is, what is my prediction for the fate of the electoral college? The electoral college can only be changed by a constitutional amendment. I think whether there is either a Constitutional amendment or a Constitutional convention will be a function of whether we have an electoral college meltdown this year. 

If the electoral college operates as it has over every election going back to 1824, I don't think that we will see any overturning. It is only if there is a crisis that people will try to fix it in the same way that in 1,800, there was an electoral college crisis that led Jefferson to move to a new amendment that made sure that the president and the vice president were on the same ticket. 

We're at 12:15-- we're at 1 o'clock, so I think this has to be the last question. "What do you think the consequences would be if DC and/or Puerto Rico are brought forth for statehood?" Well, it really depends on who controls the Congress. I think if Democrats-- it's been speculated that Democrats win both houses of Congress-- this might come forward as one of the issues that's raised. 

I think the timing of that is-- and the idea being that, at least with respect to Washington and maybe with DC and maybe with respect to Puerto Rico, that that could add additional Democrats to the Senate, which is already closely divided, and also extra electoral college votes. 

Importantly, in a closely divided country, that would presumably be another three electoral votes for each of those states, so another six electoral votes that might swing typically more Democratic than Republican. 

I think that's really a function-- that's going to be a function of what if-- it would only happen, I think, if there's a President-elect Biden and a Democratic-controlled House and Senate. And my own sense, which I argued in an op ed last week in the USA Today, and in a much longer essay, going back on the 10 recent crises, five economic crises and the five political crises that I've discussed today-- 

The most successful presidents coming out of those crises have figured out a way to steer back toward some kind of bipartisan governance, or at least try to figure out a way how to bring the country back together. 

I could imagine a President-elect Biden and a Democratic-controlled Congress doing that but only if Republicans were perceived as having shared in some legislative victories in the first year of that government. 

A number of Republicans supported the New Deal. President Clinton came in after an economic crisis. And at the end of his first year, he passed NAFTA and accession to the WTO with Republican support. Ronald Reagan inherited a bad economy, and he worked with Democrats to cut taxes and increase military spending, which was what he wanted, but also to not cut Social Security and other social welfare benefits, which is what Tip O'Neill and Democrats wanted. 

So in a number of those elections that followed either economic recessions or crises and the political crises that I mentioned before, the most effective presidents have figured out a way of giving the opposing party wins and the kind of scenario that you've sketched there with new DC and new Washington statehood, as well as things like adding new members to the Supreme Court, those would largely be seen as Democratic wins. 

And I think we would have to imagine what the Republican wins would be to counterbalance that, because I do think that that's the instinct of what President-elect Biden would try to do. 

So with that, I am pretty sure that, Sharon, unless you want to come in and close the event, that is the end of our hour. So I want to thank you all for joining me. I know a number of you already attend Miller Center events. We're all greatly appreciative of that. I want to thank the Miller Center team that helped put together this webinar. 

And please feel free to write me. I am so grateful to be a part of the university for the benefit of the education that I got at the university. I'm now a UVA dad and so grateful to have my daughter attend our great beloved UVA. So thank you all.

SHARON: Our first speaker, who just has joined us, is Dean Ian Baucom, who is going to be talking about the Democracy Initiative at the University of Virginia. Ian, as most of you know, has been the Buckner W. Clay Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences since his appointment in April of 2014. Ian received his undergraduate education at Wake Forrest in Political Science, and then received a Masters in African Studies and PhD in English at Yale. 

He spent his early academic period very productively at Duke University, where he was a major player and a leader of interdisciplinary initiatives. I would like to say that on our voyage for semester at sea in 2015, sailing the Middle Passage, we used the Zong Study Massacre from Ian's book, Specters of the Atlantic. And as a Dean pediatrician, I was particularly grateful for our new Dean being so generous with his coaching and with his resource materials at that time. 

So Ian's latest book just published is History 4 degrees Celsius, which talks about Black studies and climate change. But today, it's the Democracy Initiative. And so I thank you, Ian, for being with us and for setting us off. And I think the floor is yours, or the screen is yours, or the stage is yours, whatever it may be. Welcome, and thank you for being here. 

IAN BAUCOM: Sharon, thanks so much, and thanks everyone for being here and taking the time. Thanks, Gordon. I'm assuming Gordon is on the call for inviting me. When Gordon invited me about a year ago-- I'm sorry it has taken this long to get my act together. But I've been-- but I've been looking forward to it. 

When he first invited me, the idea was to talk about a couple of the college's major new initiatives, the Democracy Initiative, and then maybe also touch on the new curriculum that we've just launched. And there are some intimate connections between those two things, broadly, in the sense that they're both driven by a sense that it's the purpose of all universities. But something very specific to the purpose of the University of Virginia to think about the relationship between the work of the University and the possibility of Democratic life, the long, ongoing, unfinished work of democracy. 

We launched about two years ago this major new enterprise called the Democracy Initiative. It's a project that-- it's a teaching project. It's a research project. It's a policy project. It draws on faculty from across the college, but ideally from across the University, and we gather faculty members, graduate students, undergraduates, outside guests in a series of what we're calling democracy labs. And there are a number of these. At the heart of the enterprise is a project on the history and principles and philosophy of democracy. 

We just received an incredibly generous gift from John now with University matching support amounts to about $45 million to get that part of the Enterprise going. John's gift endows 14 professorships, which is just absolutely phenomenal, and we're in the process of searching for those. That's the heart of the enterprise. It's to really get to and think through what fundamental questions about the nature of Democratic possibility, Democratic governance and society have been and will be. 

And then around that philosophical project, at the core, there are a series of labs that draw together faculty members, again, from multiple departments and disciplines to look at some more topical issues, sort of pressing challenges in front of democracies or aspiring democracies around the world. There are four labs that we've launched thus far-- one that is focused on democracy, race, and religion, one that is looking at Democratic statecraft. We think about foreign policy issues and how democracies think about foreign policy, specifically in relationship to authoritarian power. 

There's one that is focused on new media and the crisis of the absence of deliberative thought in much of the new media realm. And there's one that's focused on corruption and the rule of law. And then a range of activities beyond that will be sponsoring major biannual summits of world leaders to think about democracy. The first of those was this past May, and its focus was on the American presidency and the role of the American presidency in the work of democracy, and there'll be another next fall. 

That was the broad sense of things that I wanted to talk about, but as I emailed Gordon quite belatedly yesterday afternoon, while wanting to say a few words upfront about that and invite questions about it during the question and answer period, I actually wanted to shift focus a little bit and to talk about some of the things that are on my mind and that have been very much on my mind over the course of the past year and particularly as we move into the starting point of a new academic year-- one that for many reasons has been harder to arrive at certainly than any academic year that I've been part of and I suspect any academic year that any of us have been part of. 

I had the good fortune of having a leave during my deanship last fall. I finished a first term as dean and was about to begin a second and asked for a little bit of time off to spend some time thinking, and writing, and being with my family-- we have five kids-- and to start work on a new book that is broadly thinking about the relationship between the University and democratic life. 

And I thought what I might do is to spend a little bit of time sharing some thoughts about that book. Maybe less about the book. More in terms of the questions that are underneath it, and some questions that I wanted to spend some time reflecting on with colleagues here, as we try to pull back a bit from the day to day of relaunching the University in the midst of a global pandemic and to ask ourselves again what our purpose is. What guides us? What animating questions we can and might want to consider with one another for the long project, the enduring project at the University. 

So Sharon and Gordon and all of you, with your permission, I've got about a 10 or 15 minute short series of comments to-- actually have them written out. So I'll be reading from something to take about 10 or 15 minutes. Some of you might have heard a little bit of this. I made some comments along these lines to first year advisors a couple of weeks ago and also shared some thoughts with our faculty and staff. 

If you've heard it already, please feel free to check your email while I'm talking. But seriously, I'd welcome your thoughts and responses and then loop back. And there are some strong connections between this, I hope, and the work of the Democracy Initiative. So that's what I'll do. It should take about 10 or 15 minutes and then we'll open things up. 

So as I mentioned, I've been working on a new book with two friends-- Ranjit Khanna and Ashil Mbembe-- over the course of the past year or so. My part of the book is on the work of the University in a state of urgency. We chose that word urgency deliberately in contrast to another word-- emergency. And because it's our sense that one of the very challenging questions before us in these complex times is getting a sense of the difference between a state of urgency and a state of emergency. 

There are certainly abundant reasons to say that we are in a state of emergency or multiple overlapping states of emergency-- states of medical emergency, financial emergency, climate emergency, democratic emergency, a long emergency of systemic racism. But there's a problem with the idea of emergency because emergency times often end with a call for emergency powers, which are at once profoundly undemocratic and antithetical to the idea of the university. 

They are powers of command and not powers of reason, dissent, discovery, critique, creation, or persuasion-- the powers on which the University lives. What difference, then, does it make to say that the University isn't in a state of emergency but in a state of urgency as we begin a new academic year? One is obvious. 

Emergency is something that happens to us. It surrounds us, constrains us, deprives us of our freedom to act. Urgency, oppositely, holds an invitation to act, to change our situation, to bring others along with us, to urge others to take on our sense of urgency, and to act together on it. So what is urgent now? How do we act on it? 

As a University, as a community of scholars and teachers, as a community of faculty and students and staff, what is urgent, and who decides? My guess is that if we had the full chance to ask one another-- and I hope in the question and answer period, we might. There would be a lot of commonality and a lot of differences in our response. 

What is urgent? Pursuing the excellence of our teaching and research mission in the midst of a global pandemic. Advancing the struggle for racial justice against gender violence and exclusion for LGBTQ and disability and immigrant rights. Imagining a future for a planet on the brink of climate catastrophe. Ensuring that the dream of social mobility is not a dream but a reality, which the University can and must help any student realize, no matter how constrained the economic environment that surrounds us. 

My sense is that we largely agree on these things but not always, and that we'd also name others that are urgent. That we'd agree and disagree on which among them is most urgent. Whether one is more urgent than others, whether we can or can't act on all of them at once, whether some need to wait while we attend to the most urgent of all. What is urgent, and who decides? 

More pointedly, how as a University, do we address these multiple overlapping states of urgency? What do we say to our students about their role in addressing those questions, and a multitude of others over the long course of their lives? I don't have any conclusive answers, but here are a few suggestions. 

First, what's urgent is a matter of interpretation. I don't mean to be Coy by that. My point, instead, is to affirm the fundamental importance of the work of interpretation on which University life depends. One of the things about emergency power, antidemocratic power, is that it hates interpretation. 

It wants to reduce the complexity of human life to a single set of facts, good or bad, citizen or immigrant, friend or enemy and then decide. Power of interpretation refuses that. It says that we need to look from multiple angles at once. That we need data. That we need value propositions. That we need an ethical framework. That we need to measure the truth-- that we need to measure the truth of something objectively and effectively. 

That we need to understand what's calculable and what's of incalculable value at the heart of life. It says that we need to understand the brutal reality of racist violence by measuring and quantifying its systemic range, by knowing it objectively, and in searing works of art, by situating its hatred, its lie, and its desire for purity in the long and mixed histories of difference that compose the true reality of who we are. 

And by articulating an ethical claim against its wrongness and its lie in a statement as simple, true, and ethically indisputable as Black Lives Matter. That, to me, is part of the urgent work of history's scientists, artists, scholars, researchers, activists and interpreters. That, to me, is part of the urgent work of the University. And that, at its most basic level, is what I understand to be the work of our new curriculum. 

In its call to our students to think and act in the world through empirical truth claims, through difference, through ethics, and through the arts. There's a second thing the work of interpretation demands of us as we live in a state of urgency. Sometimes you have to act before all the information is in-- while matters are still subject to interpretation because there are things whose urgency cannot wait, and the time comes when you simply need to act. 

That's what I've heard from so many colleagues when we announced the next steps we must take as part of our share of the great national and global reckoning on race, justice, and equity surrounding us. That's what I heard we must do before, for example, knowing with exact certainty the effect the pandemic would have on our long term finances. 

Because some things exceed finances in their significance. Because their value and their ethical claim is incalculable and cannot wait. That's also something I hope we find a way to help our students understand. The liberal art of investigation and interpretation is not an art of paralysis. But at its core, liberal education includes the invitation to act as best we can on our most ethical interpretation of what's in front of us and what we must do. 

How do we do so? How do we invite our students to think about doing so? How as a University do we do that? Let me close these comments with a few last thoughts on that question. If we're going to act ethically as best we can in a moment of urgency based on our interpretation of the situation, I think we need to find a way to link the urgent moment to our enduring commitments. 

In the case of the University, by the words of the South African historian, Premesh Lalu, that means being able to say what the University is for, what it is for now, and what it is for enduringly. What are we for? Many things. The advance of knowledge and the transformation of life key among them. 

Here are a few more. We are for the constant expansion of inclusion, for being ever more diverse in who we are across exclusions of race, and gender, and sexuality, and nationality, and disability and income. We are for equipping our students with the habits of mind, archives of knowledge, and skills of thought needed to navigate a social world changing at an incredible pace, a world as we've seen over these pandemic months becoming ever more local and global, ever more in-person and virtual, ever more grounded in enduring institutions like universities and remade by emerging phenomena, like the Zoom room that we're in and socially distanced space. 

But we are for more than skills. Too often universities wrest their purpose on that alone. We are for more. We are for asking deep value questions. What is a democracy? What are the sources of hatred and violence? What does it mean to share one planetary future together? How do we encounter, understand, and change the histories that have made, inspired, damaged and shaped us? 

As a public University, we are for something else. We are for the idea of a public good. We are for the proposition that a healthy democratic society must have public goods, not only private goods. We are for the conviction that knowledge, the advance of knowledge, and access to knowledge are among the greatest of all public goods. 

As this public University, we are urgently for the proposition that democracies need universities if they are to survive-- for the conviction that is the truth we have embodied from our beginning. And we are also for the recognition that the University failed to live that truth at our beginning, by who the universe excluded, by who the universe refused to acknowledge as human, and that we have a special responsibility to confront that failure and by our actions, repair it. 

Speaking as the Dean of a school of Arts and Sciences, grounded in the liberal arts, I believe we are for the proposition that it is not the purpose of education to turn our students simply into maximized economic actors, or to ask them to consider their education merely an early investment on their ultimate financial worth, but instead to invite them to consider themselves as actors in the unfinished work of democracy. 

As agents in the work of human dignity, equality, and liberty, at the heart of the liber of the Liberal arts. And as a community dedicated to the radical freedom of thought, we are for the conviction that these commitments cannot be enforced by command. That the power of the University can never be the power of dictate. That it must spring from the power of reason, poetry, evidence and argument. 

The power of persuading and being persuaded, of reckoning with, and disagreeing with, and recognizing one another within a public sphere of free, and open, and equitable thought we inhabit, and where it does not exist that we must help create. We are for the conviction that is key to the living, democratic power of the University. That we will not command, but we will urge. And we will allow ourselves to be urged, persuaded, challenged and changed by one another. These are, in part, what I believe we are for currently and enduringly. 

As a new academic year begins, as we refresh our critical, and scholarly, and creative work, in this most difficult and urgent of times, it has been important to me and will continue to be important to me to thank all our faculty for their unbroken dedication to that purpose. And today, in particular, as an emeritus faculty, I want to thank you for your lifetime of work and to ask your ongoing counsel and insight as we continue to reimagine our lives together as sharers and shapers of this most astonishing democratic thing-- a public University. 

Thank you for listening. Thank you deeply and sincerely for everything you have done to build this place, to make my work and the work of all my colleagues possible, for what you have taught me, for the generations of students you've educated, for the research you've advanced, and for that gift to our common lives of the advance and the opening of knowledge. Thanks. So welcome-- opening things up for any response or feedback on this. Questions you might have, or more conversation about the Democracy Initiative or other things that are going on. Thanks. Thank you. Sharon, I'll turn things over to you. 

SHARON: You can either leave your chats in written form in the chat, or you can raise your hand as an attendee, and I can unmute you. Ian, may I open by asking about how we respond in urgency to all the parameters you've just outlined and maintain the day to dayness of expectations for credits, for accreditation. How do we respond to the urgency and still maintain the container somehow? 

IAN BAUCOM: That's a great question. A couple of things I'd say and then maybe just an anecdote in response. I think one of the questions certainly that I've been thinking about and thinking about with my co-authors is, A, have no sense at all that the issues that I've named are the urgent issues. They're certainly urgent for me, but there's a plurality of thought on this. 

| so one thing I'd say is that-- the last thing I want to say is so important. The notion of urgency comes from "suadere." It's Latin root-- there are hopefully some classes in the room who can correct me if I'm getting this wrong. "Suadare" comes from persuasion. And as I've been thinking about the book, I've been going back and reading, among other things, the work of Hannah Arendt, writing about Plato, Plato writing about the relationship between philosophy and the good of the polis, the good of the Republic. 

And this is just such an important part that whatever power University has has to come from this ability to understand that we're not going to agree with each other. That we're going to have to persuade each other. That we have to be open to being persuaded. And that we'll have very different perspectives on what is urgent. And even if we have shared agreement on whether you can take them all on at once-- I think that's an important part, just as a frame. 

Then in terms of the day to day-- why do I want to think about this? A couple of weeks ago, when our first year students finally moved in, the weekend that they moved in over the fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, I wanted to come to grounds over that move in weekend and just to spend a little bit of time seeing the students and their families moving into their dorms, seeing how excited they were-- really tough. 

Everyone is masked. It's going to be difficult semester for our students. But in some ways, concerning this, it gets back to the day to day remembering that at the heart of everything we're doing, how we balance credits, how we think about the allocation of resources, how we make decisions about hiring lines and hiring possibilities, as we think about curricular reform-- that at the heart of all of that are these young students and then the work that faculty members do in creating knowledge and drawing them into the work of knowledge and the graduate students who are part of that. 

In part to remember that the day to day, which is so important but so hard to get your head out of-- you all know this from the work you've done. Certainly it's a huge part of my life. My day tends to be cut into 15 minute segments-- 15 minutes for this, 15 minutes for that. There's something just deeply purposive behind it. So some of the balance is just for me at least that work of recollection. 

That policies about credits are more than internal bureaucratic politics that ultimately thinking about credits and the credits that go to a major reflect the deep wisdom and thought of a company of faculty, who over decades or hundreds of years have thought about what constitutes the knowledge that needs to be conveyed and the new knowledge that needs to be created to help in the formation of young life-- something that can seem as bureaucratized as credit organization. That there are value propositions behind all that. 

That's how I want to every now and then pull back and call-- that's what we do. And then to see that reflected in-- it's not all about first year students, but there's something always just to me remarkable about that moment when they arrive and when they begin their time with us. 

SHARON: And there is a question in the chat. 

IAN BAUCOM: In the chat, yes. Let me take a look and see. Yeah. So thank you. So the question is-- and I don't know if the audience can see, so let me just read it. Thanks for the thoughts. Would you give some examples of how the curriculum would get students to move to action? So the new curriculum-- let me just say a word about how it's organized. There are three major components to it. 

But behind the three components is a long body of thoughtful work by a faculty committee that we pulled together. Here, I arrived-- this was 2014, 2015, and picking up on some important work that Meredith Wu had already done. And when they began to build the curriculum or ideas for new curriculum, spent a lot of time first saying, what are the purposes and principles that drive liberal arts education? 

And they came up with four broad answers. That liberal arts education is education for citizenship. And that includes not only national citizenship, but local citizenship, community citizenship, citizenship in your profession-- that it's for vocation. Not as vocational training but vocation from [INAUDIBLE], work that places a call on you and maybe this gets to the move to action part work that lends dignity to your life. 

That's part of what we want to help to understand. That liberal arts education is to enable young people to flourish individually but also to contribute to the flourishing of a Commonwealth. That then led to a series of components. And the first component is a brand new experience for all of our first year students. 

We've drawn a group of faculty from across departments. They actually come out of their departments for up to two years. They work as a cohort. Called them college Fellows. These tenure track faculty. --to co-design a set of classes in four areas. Ethics, arts-- courses that sort of driven by thinking about the differences in our history, experience, background, philosophy, and then courses on advanced empirical understanding. 

And the goal of those is to say that any really complicated question in front of us-- let me take climate change just because it's been something that I've been working on. If you'd understand it and then think about what it means to engage with it and to seek to act on it-- that you need to approach it at least these four ways. You need to actually understand what the empirical dimensions of the problem -- what is objectively and scientifically provable and true. You've got to understand that. 

You need to understand that there are certain kinds of ethical claims that scientific knowledge might make on you in terms of how you choose to wish to live, or how you want to think about the formation of public policy. That's the ethical piece. You understand that not everyone's going to agree with you. That your ethical disposition might not be the same as someone else's. That you might share the same ethical disposition but have a very different sense of what the policy outcome should be-- what actions you should take. And that's the engaging difference part. 

And then the fourth is to say that anything-- and maybe this is because I'm a humanist in my training. I'm an English professor. --that I really believe is that any really important question is something that we also experience and are moved and changed through works of art. They make a claim on us. The hope of the new curriculum, and particularly that first year experience, is to invite students to think about matters in front of these urgent problems I'm talking about in that dimension. 

It is not our business to tell students what they need to do-- what position to take. That is not our role. But it's to say, if you think in these terms, that will call you to seek to understand more deeply but also to understand that your understanding is going to lead you to want to act in the world and to invite them to act in this way. That's the major part of the curriculum. 

And the other two areas are-- one, domain that we're calling literacies, where we've doubled down on writing. We think everyone needs to write really, really well. We've expanded the writing requirement and also including rhetoric, again, speaking to make sure that students engage the world through multiple languages, understand that it's not a univocal world, and also to ensure that all students have a background in quantitative computational data-based reasoning. 

And I think that's true, again, if you think about urgent questions. If you care about them, you need to be able to communicate why you care and how you care. You need to be able to write well and speak well. You need to understand that, in part, particularly in the world our students live in, that some of that work is actually being able to communicate in a language that is not your native language. 

And again, you really have to understand that there are-- they're data driven modes of understanding that complement the aesthetic and the ethical ones. And so the hope is that we will effectively urge them to think about how to act in the world based on the kinds of understanding we give them but not to tell them which actions to take. 

So there's a great for those of you who are interested, for whom some of the climate issues are important, even if it hasn't been foremost. But I want to take a look at a series of courses that Deborah Lawrence has been teaching on climate change. She's an environmental scientist, but she's been trying to think about how to draw students to this and to arts projects, curation work, working in libraries, looking actually at how to think about the distribution of small plastics and water supplies, which have a negative impact on ocean waters-- species damage in the water. 

Other questions. Let me just throw something out for you to think about, and there were some prior questions that came in about the Democracy Initiative that I can turn to if I want, but this is a real-- this is not a rhetorical gambit. If you were just even provisionally to work with the framework that I've been trying to think through, what's urgent, or if you were to want to say in response to that question that my friend and colleague, Premesh Lalu, put out-- what is the University for? 

What would you put on that list? What would be the things that you would want to affirm at the heart of University purpose? Ask that for two reasons. One, because I'm actually really interested in what you have to say. You have more wisdom and more experience than I do. You dedicated yourself to life at the University for longer than I have. I'm getting there. But you've done it for longer. And what would you say we're for? 

But also because I think it's really important the critical work that is part and central to the life University has to, I feel, be accompanied by a set of affirmative propositions-- those things that-- we need to know those things of which we are critical, and we need to know those things that we seek to advance and that criticism seeks to advance. And so I'm very curious if anyone wants to just to offer some things on that regard. I'm trying to both look at the chat and to see if there are hands that are up. 

Follow up on how the questions can be evaluated and then there were some questions on the remarks that I've tried-- and so Robert, thanks. We have a independent from the faculty, who are teaching these first year courses in all faculty in one way or another involved in the curriculum because it spans all departments and how students navigate their disciplinary requirements and their division requirements. 

We have a separate faculty body that is evaluating it, and they did a two-year intensive study. We piloted for two years, and it was looking at all sorts of things from the extent to which can quantify students-- students know X about why. Would they begin a course and how they know Z about Y at the end of that too? Can students actually navigate the new curriculum while pursuing a double major, say, in astrophysics and in studio art? That would be particularly challenging one. 

Can we be sure that students can do that? How can we actually assess the differences in their writing abilities? What are the financial costs? To what extent is their faculty buy in? Is it possible for faculty from all departments to actually participate in the college Fellows program? So they produced a report-- about 110-page document that we shared with the faculty last spring and last fall-- the spring of '19 and fall of '19. Had a bunch of meetings on that for the faculty to deliberate on, debate, share before voting on whether to implement. And then we'll have an ongoing parallel process for that. 

So some of the questions I've got-- let me just read them. Actually, let me-- here's the first one that came in based on this. So I understand the first one. I've got two-- one on what I just said and then one [INAUDIBLE]. Understand the concern about UVA not becoming a training ground as opposed to an educational enterprise with the financial cost of students as high as they become. Is that a tension hard to overcome? Great question. 

So higher ed, high cost to students. Don't we actually have to be thinking about their employability and their future financial well-being? Yes, we absolutely have to. I don't have any question about that whatsoever. Maybe two things to say, one of which is in part just to salute the commitment of the University to financial aid and to ensuring that students across economic backgrounds can attend. 

This was a really, really big decision that I think probably hasn't gotten enough attention that has come-- President Ryan and his senior team reaffirmed over these past several months that the incredible financial stresses that are on the University would have no impact on our commitment to financial aid. That we would ensure that students-- the university is affordable. And I feel very good to say that I believe that we are remarkably affordable. 

One of the things that we've been seeing over the last couple of years, in particular, is that the socioeconomic diversity of our student body has really been increasing. It's actually significantly increased the cost of financial aid that the University takes on, but you just have to do it. And so I think for the vast, vast, vast majority of our students, we are a highly affordable place. But you still need to think about what does it mean for them to be able to go on and to flourish in what they do. 

I do think that it is reasonable to say that the cost of higher education at the family and student at the individual level should result in a student being able to actually pursue the work they want to pursue and to pursue it in a way in which they can flourish. They can flourish not intellectually, but they can flourish just in the way their lives work. So that is the intention if you disaggregated them. 

I think good news for us is that we actually see that our students do that. Our students actually do enter the workforce incredibly successfully across a range of careers. The main point is just to say it's not-- the purpose of education isn't financial net worth at the end. And I think that there are some pressures out there to say that's the purpose of higher ed. I think that's something that we should enable our students to accomplish, but it shouldn't be that what drives us. 

The second question back to the Democracy Initiative. Would you consider the US for the last few years a model democracy, and how do you address the current state of affairs with such a polarized audience of students? It's very important to me, and I will hold on to the fact that in my role as Dean, it's really important that my office is resolutely-- my role is to ensure that students and faculty can express and pursue their convictions. 

And they can only do that if the dean's office supportive of that diversity of their convictions. So I want to be a little cautious about making any overall comments about the state of US politics. But broadly speaking, I don't think that there's-- I don't think there's a citizen or subject of any democracy in the world over the last few years that would point to their own policies as having been ideal models of what democratic life could be over recent years. 

And I think that is going to the point about polarization because I think we are so radically polarized. That kind of commitment to persuading and being persuaded to debating and listening to debate, the perspectives of others, I just think is-- I'm not saying anything. I think it's radically fissured. 

And as a part of, I think, our responsibility to students is to try to invite them to re-engage or engage that work-- that really, really hard work that you've got to build arguments. You've got to actually see to persuade other people. You need to be open to being persuaded. And that's why, among other things, I think actually having a general ed curriculum-- and a general ed curriculum that has some principles behind it. And that's-- one of the principles behind it is really important is to get that out to students and to say that's part of the work that you'll be doing with one another and with your faculty and your courses. 

You've got to have these empirical arguments. You need to be able to identify what the ethical claims and frameworks are from which you're arguing. You need to listen to one another. I do believe that universities change lives. I don't know that we always do that in a single course, but I think that over the course of their time as students together, that's something that we could do. 

Maybe a little bit of background. I grew up in South Africa. I grew up during the apartheid years. Democracy seemed like an impossibility, and it came. But I'm a dual citizen, so maybe I'll talk about my South African citizenship. South Africa is far from being an ideal democracy, even with that astonishing change that came at the end of apartheid. 

And it's my sense that any healthy democracy needs citizens who are never content, who are never satisfied with the-- never at a point realizing that the democratic experiment has come to its full promise. That promise is there-- there are always those who it abandons. I think that's true in South Africa. I think it's true here. 

I mean, I think we know how broken we are with one another. I think it's true across virtually any polity of which I'm aware. Q&A question-- what are some of the reaction responses from students who've experienced the initiatives thus far? And I think-- and please feel free to send a clarifying question if you want. I'm not sure if that's a Democracy Initiative or the undergraduate curriculum. 

Broadly, very, very positive. That was part of the assessment work that we did. We had a unanimous endorsement from the student council, from all the representatives of the student council. They voted unanimously for the faculty to adopt the new curriculum. I think finding particular students really like-- they come out of high school, and it's really important for them to get into their introductory courses in their disciplines. That still happens. 

They still take a number of those courses their first year. But to enter college and have that chance to have a set of broad questions put in front of them and a question like-- we want to offer some ideas to you about what is we hope you get out of your college experience. That you'll ask-- that you'll be inclined to ask questions in these three or four grounding ways. 

Think about ethics. Think about the importance of the empirical and so on. A lot of small classes, discussion based classes. It's a competitive process for faculty to become these college Fellows. So they're getting in their first year access in small settings to faculty members, who often they wouldn't be able to really have the same kind of time with until their third or fourth years. So it's been body positive. 

Not everyone to be honest, and I mean, all of us know-- I'll just say from my own teaching experience sometimes my courses go well, and sometimes they don't go well. And so there have been students who've had some concerns, but the response on the whole has been enormously positive. And also because we're getting the students together. We ask them to do something similar to what's a little bit in the background of some of my thoughts. 

We ask them to pick some questions-- to be thinking about to work on collaborative teams, and over the course of a year to bring these frameworks of understanding. I think they really like that. So it's been really positive so far. Other things. Here's an interesting question. How has COVID revealed the strengths and weaknesses of democracy versus authoritarian governments? What has it revealed about the weakness in our democracy, and how can those weaknesses be addressed? 

I'm all in. I'm all in on democratic governance, and I'm all in on that is fiercely resistant to the possibility of authoritarian power. And then we see then in moments like this in which we do continue to price and prioritize the liberty of choice-- freedom of people to make decisions about their own life. Then coming into really interesting relationship with how you think about the good of the collective, the good of society as a whole. 

I mean, that's kind of at the philosophical heart. Some of the questions, I think, that COVID has raised about that balance is individual freedoms and collective decision making. What's good and healthy? And I think what you see is that a democracy can actually manage to address both of those at once. That we actually do have health policy. That we do have policies that are designed to protect collective health, common health-- masking social distancing rules, quarantine rules, and that those are ultimately designed actually to enable the further realization of the good of each individual life because the health of Public Health but also individual health is the first predicate condition, then being able to live, to live, and to live, and to continue to realize individually who you wish to be. 

So I actually think democracies-- there is this temptation to say it's kind of one or the other. But I mean, I think that what we're seeing, broadly speaking, is that balance is one that democratic system of governance is one where elected authorities can work to establish health policies that are beneficial to everyone. Is fundamental to the possibility of the long-term well-being of society. 

If there's something that I would say that has been revealed-- just one stab at this-- is that there are some things you can do to solve a crisis in the midst of a crisis, but there are a lot of things you can't do if you haven't been planning for and organizing structures of care, including healthcare before the crisis comes. And so I would hope that one thing that we would learn about this is you can't wait. 

There's an anthropologist whose work I'm really interested in. Her name is Janet Roitman, and she writes about the difference between crisis conditions and chronic conditions. And I think that some of what we are seeing certainly in relationship to really major questions about the disparities of impact of the virus and disparities of impact that are quite measurable and quite quantifiable across racial and ethnic lines. 

One of the things that that reveals is that there are some chronic problems-- some deep, profound chronic problems in the underserving, the undersupply and the under access of health care to minority populations. And that's where, again, there's nothing new in my thoughts here, but the reckoning with race and the long inequalities of race that surround us intersect with what we're learning about susceptibility to the spread of a virus, and where those two things just absolutely have to come together. 

The urgency of looking at the systemic history of racial exclusion and racism, and the urgency of looking at the need to ensure that we have a health system that actually can allow us to move through a pandemic have to be brought together. All right. Let's see if there's anything else. Then I should probably begin to wrap things up. Maybe a quick question. These are all great questions. I'm just seeing them as I come to them. 

Universities are dismissed by many these days as bastions of elitism. How can our University address this viewpoint in a way that restores the faith of the general public in our access and legitimacy? Thanks for that. One of the things that I think-- so I'll say one thing en route to this. I actually believe powerfully that we need to be as superb as we can possibly be. That we need to provide an elite level education. 

One of the dilemmas is that-- and it goes to the question about public goods. There are public goods that remain in our society and in others. One of the problems with public goods is their quality is often really, really low. The quality of the public good is lower than the quality of the private good that you can secure on the market. 

And there's a matter of injustice in that. The quality of the public good isn't as high as the quality of the private good. So one of the things I do believe is that a public university needs to ensure that the quality of education that we provide is as strong and in that sense as elite or as excellent as the quality of education that students could get at a private. So that's one. I mean, one way I think to answer that is to ensure that what our students learn, what they get here, is just superb. 

And that depends ultimately and fundamentally on the quality of the faculty. That means that we have to be in a position to hire, and compensate, and reward, and recognize superb faculty. And it means that we need to be able to continue to do with the new generation of faculty we're hiring. What you did over the time that you were here in building this place and making it one of the greatest universities in the country. That's part of it. 

But I think the second piece is to help people understand maybe two things. One, that the good of the university extends beyond the good that it provides to the individual students who happen to be students at any given period of time. That the good of the university is in the knowledge and the research that it generates that is a public good for everyone-- advance of clinical care for those who are working in the medical profession's, advance of understanding of the law for those who are working in legal professions, advance in the possibility of having first class teachers for those who are working in education, advance really sophisticated policy formation for those who are in the policy sciences. 

That we serve that. We provide that public good. That our research enterprise is part of our contribution to the possibility of commonwealth or common life or democratic life together. I think that we have to be able to do that. And then I think the last thing maybe-- and I'll move toward wrapping up on this-- is to reaffirm that universities not only provide the skills that students need in order to succeed in their professional lives and their vocations, but that universities actually are places where-- 

One of the fundamental places where cultures get to debate their value propositions. And there are places for thinking about value-- normative value questions. And I do worry sometimes that universities pull back on that a little bit and talk too much about the skills. And I think part of what we have to do is to model that a bit. I think we all know how broken democratic society and democratic life is when we don't have common languages for debating value questions. 

And I think that's one of the ways that we demonstrate that. OK. There's about a minute left, and at last I've got to get on to another meeting. Sharon, maybe, I'll turn it back to you, but with thanks. Really sincere thanks for inviting me and just re-echo thanks. I know many of you-- I don't see all of your names, just the way that this is set up. 

But I've met many of you. Some of you I haven't met. Those of you who I have met and those who you have had a huge impact on me-- just inspiring impact on the faculty who are here, the faculty who are coming, and the students who have come. And I know many of you from the alumni. I know who you taught and whose lives you changed, so thanks enormously. Grateful to you. Sharon, back to you. 

SHARON: Thank you. Thank you, Ian. And I think that many of us in the audience today would like to be back in class with you and part of the new curriculum. At least I know I would like to sign up. It just seems like an exciting time and a critical time for us to be having this new experiment about the way we're going to learn and teach. So thank you very much for getting us off to a great start, and everyone will see you next month, October 21.